JF

I think the familiar culture-war/racial veneer kind of obscures that the insistence on the name "Chinese virus" is primarily intended to lay the blame at the feet of the PRC.

Not that I'm offering original analysis here, but the minute the "democracies are better at handling pandemics" victory lap became untenable, they shifted gears and we started hear about how China was to blame for/was going to take advantage of the virus.

blaming/having fits about china seems so absolutely old-fashioned since it was the big neocon "justify our ideology" totem pre-9/11. it seems now that the fear-mongering about islam fails to move anyone outside of the chud demographic they're going back to the greatest hits

Well there are two big reasons afaict: 1) China and Russia make far more plausible adversaries to justify unlimited military spending than ragtag militias 2) China's economic growth actually does threaten US hegemonic status and they won't consent to be junior partners

The TPP and "pivot to Asia" were the liberal aesthetic answers to the same question really

There's already a wing of the GOP that is ready to call it Chinesium Sneezium or whatever the fuck, as both evidence and reason to put boots on the ground in Asia. They want a shooting war because we blinked first on the trade war and it's made them extremely grumpy

Nobody wants war with China. China has a billion people and a formidable military. It would be more suicidal than invading Iran by an order of magnitude.

neocons and their ideological progeny infect every american institution and all of them have spent essentially every waking moment since the end of the cold war trying to find a way to justify keeping the cold war going and maintain a dynamic that favors their political milieu