It isn’t that simple. Days before the Berlin Wall came down, leaders in East Germany held a conference in which they celebrated something or other, only to turn round and say the wall will stand for another hundred years.
The collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the USSR was partly because the parties were willing to reform. Gorbachev didn’t send the tanks in like he predecessors did in Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Very few people anticipated the “end” even when things started to unravel. Chernobyl only demonstrated the need for reform. It showed the rot was there but it was far from automatic that it would lead to a collapse.
The path to an actual social and political revolution in the United States as the equivalent of what happened in the USSR is far from obvious. The easiest way would be for Bernie Sanders to win the democratic nomination by a series of landslides in the primaries or in a contested convention, then win the Presidency and be America’s Gorbachev, dismantling the evil empire from the inside.
Only, like Gorbachev, the reforms fail, the economy collapses, a military coup is attempted and fails and the American people radicalise to the point where the government is overthrown and replaced.
I would urge caution before saying the system is going to collapse. That is far from a fore gone conclusion. But America’s response to the pandemic does show how deep the rot has gone and that it the U.S. government is a danger to its own citizens.
The Marxist in me says, the pandemic won’t cause anything new, but will accelerate pre-existing processes and aggregate antagonisms. But the human factor- the choices we make- remains. If we step up, things will get interesting.
I tend to agree with you here and I think few will be expecting the USA to swing to the left all of a sudden although they might be expecting some changes, such as to the health system as it appears to be unable to cope with the scale of this crisis. And it probably makes it unlikely for Trump to be re-elected. They might even get back to having reasonably normal politicians - this experiment having failed.