Historian: China’s Fatal Flaw

The coronavirus outbreak will have more than “profound economic consequences,” says Zeynep Tufekci at The Atlantic: It has “revealed authoritarianism’s fatal flaw,” showing how China’s “use of surveillance and censorship makes it harder for Xi Jinping to know what’s going on.” To understand why, look to Xi’s idol, Mao Zedong. In 1958, “buoyed by reports pouring in from around the country of record grain, rice and peanut production,” the Great Helmsman “wondered how to get rid of the excess.” But “months later, perhaps the greatest famine in recorded history began, in which tens of millions would die, because, in fact, there was no such surplus.” Provincial apparats had been afraid to report “bad news” to the party central. Today, Xi’s “suffocating system of surveillance, propaganda and repression” similarly limits public conversations — and the spread of knowledge needed to combat epidemics.

Foreign desk: Chinese Decoupling’s Risks

While “a gradual decoupling of global economies” from China “has been ­under way for a few years,” The Financial Times’ Rana Foroohar predicts that coronavirus will accelerate it. The ramifications could be grave, such as an ­“increased risk of violence in Taiwan,” as a desperate Beijing seeks to grab the island’s lucrative semiconductor industry because it’s now incapable of building its own. Meanwhile, Europe’s decision to let Huawei develop its 5G network may leave it unable to “defend its own liberal values over privacy and data rights.” Ultimately, we could see “cross-border banking, online shopping and data sharing” split between a US system and a Chinese one — a development with “unpredictable and exponential” dangers.

Legal beat: Writing the Next ‘Collusion’ Sequel

“The Roger Stone sentencing farce is as fitting an end to the Russia Collusion saga as one could conjure up,” snarks National Review’s Andrew McCarthy. “Democrats, their media note-takers and progressive lawyers” claimed Attorney General William Barr had been “doing Trump’s bidding” when he lowered Stone’s sentencing recommendation. That’s pure “slander”: While the president “wants Stone’s case to disappear,” Barr has always “held firm” to the legitimacy of the prosecution. He recommended a sentence “between three and four years,” and Judge Amy Berman Jackson came to the same conclusion, though she “couldn’t ­resist” claiming that Barr had been “covering up for the president” — which Trump’s opponents will use to say “there really was Trump-Russia collusion.” Thus, McCarthy sighs, Democrats have already begun the next campaign to undo the outcome of 2016.

From the left: The Real Third Way

After Bernie Sanders’ “decisive victory” in Nevada, “the panic commenced almost immediately,” notes The Week’s Damon Linker. Some “Never-Trump conservatives,” in particular, so fear Sanders that they’re vowing to “vote for Trump after all” — which is “ridiculous,” since there’s “always a third way”: “Refuse to vote for either candidate.” That’s even better than voting for a third-party candidate, as “America’s electoral system nearly always turns third-party candidates into spoilers.” Worse, if that spoiler actually carries any states, “none of the three candidates” may reach “the 270 electoral votes required to prevail” — leading to “chaos.” The bottom line: With “two bad options in an election,” a voter’s best choice “may well be to sit out the contest altogether.”

Urbanist: California’s Leadership Duds

At The Orange County Register, Joel Kotkin wonders: Why can California no longer lead the nation with “outsized public figures” like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Jerry Brown? The answer: competition, which “in politics, as in business, . . . does wonders to hone messages.” Back in the day, “to win in California, you had to be good at extending your message to the other party and independents” and promote aspirational lives and competent government. No more: Today’s oligarchic California Democrats veer far to the left and “reflect a growing divergence between our state and the rest of the country,” and the Golden State “no longer stands as a reasonable aspiration for most Americans outside of the very rich, their heirs and the occasional extraordinary genius.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board