Why Are We Doing It So Badly?

Why Are We Doing It So Badly?

July 1, 2020

The United States of America is doing by far the worst job of any supposedly advanced country in dealing with the current coronavirus pandemic. We’re doing it so badly that the European Union has recently banned travelers from the United States from entering its member countries. We represent only about four percent of the world’s population, but we account for more than twenty percent of the world’s confirmed coronavirus cases and around twenty-five percent of the world’s confirmed coronavirus deaths. Why are we doing so badly in our response to the coronavirus pandemic? I can think of four factors that play a role in producing these appalling results. They are the total failure of our political leadership, our mad dash to reopen the economy too soon, American’s extreme individualism, and Americans’ extreme anti-intellectualism. I’ll take a look at each of these factors here.

The first is the total abdication of leadership by the president. He won't even wear a mask. There is no coordinated national policy for dealing with this crisis. The president's dereliction of duty could hardly be worse. I don't know how many deaths we can lay directly at his feet, but even if it is only ten percent of the country’s coronavirus deaths the president would be responsible for over 12,500 deaths. No American president has been responsible for that many American deaths since the Vietnam War.

The president finds the coronavirus pandemic unpleasant, but not for the reasons the rest of us do. It bothers him mostly because it hurts his chance of reelection. We’re told that he believed that he would be reelected because the US economy was (supposedly) so strong. The pandemic has caused the economy to go into recession with tens of millions of people out of work. President Trump understands the devastating effect those figures will have on his chances of reelection. So how does he respond? By exercising true presidential leadership in the national response to the pandemic? Hardly. He responds first by lying about it, making up absurd claims that it would just go away on its own. More recently he has simply ignored it. He exercises no leadership all. Indeed he refuses to take the measures all of the experts say we all must take if we are going to stop or even slow down the spread of the coronavirus. He will not wear a mask in public. At one point he talked publicly about how he didn’t think it was right for him to wear a mask in the oval office. What? Does he think the virus won’t be transmitted there because the space is sacred or some such nonsense?

The easiest thing for any president to do when faced with what we’re facing is to demonstrate the public health measures all the experts say we all must adopt. He could so easily appear in public in a mask. Millions of Americans would start wearing one just because they saw the president wearing one. But no. He’s so vain, so concerned about this looks, that he won’t do it. Never mind that he apparently uses some kind of coloring makeup on his face all the time. We recently saw a picture of him getting off Marine One, his personal helicopter, after his disastrous campaign trip to Oklahoma with some of that makeup rubbed off on his shirt. But wear a mask? No way. If he did that we wouldn’t see the face about which he is so vain. It is hard to imagine a worse presidential response to the coronavirus pandemic that the one we’ve gotten from Donald Trump. His response to this public health crisis is a major reason why we are responding to it so badly.

Second, much of the American public and many state governors, essentially all of them Republicans, have pushed so hard for the country to reopen, for the states to end any public health measures they have put in place, that much of the country started to go back to normal far too early. The impression is unavoidable that Republican governors in places like Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona value money more than human lives. It is more important to them that money start circulating again than that human lives be saved. I don’t mean to downplay the economic effects of the pandemic. They are severe. They may become catastrophic. But withdrawing directives for people to avoid contact with other people and to take other precautions like wearing masks and washing hands well and often only prolongs the problem. The way Republican governors have rushed to reopen their state’s economy has caused the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths to increase dramatically in their states. Given that Americans move about the country frequently and often means that the increase of cases in those states puts the rest of us at increased risk.

Of course people didn’t have to stop doing what is right just because some governor stopped telling them to. Yet it was perfectly predictable that a great many people, especially young people frustrated by the closing of schools and the lack of opportunity for public recreation, would immediately start to act irresponsibly as soon as their governor stopped telling them to do what is right. That’s exactly what happened. Republican governors carry a large part of the responsibility for our pathetic national response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Third, American culture is the most individualistic one the world has ever known. We believe that each one of us can do whatever we want and that we need to look out only for ourselves and maybe our immediate family. Not all of us believe that of course, but far too many Americans do for this to be a healthy society or for us to react to the pandemic in appropriate ways. Far too many Americans say "Ain't nobody gonna tell me I gotta stay home or wear some damned mask!" That attitude is more widespread in the US than is it in any other country.

When we combine a strong individualism with the constitutional guarantees of civil liberties that we enjoy we get some most unfortunate results. We take the truth that everyone is entitled to their own opinion to mean that every opinion anyone holds is equally valuable and defensible simply because someone holds it. Far too many Americans will say “I got my rights! I know what I think! I can act on what I think, and no one has any right to tell me that my opinion is wrong or that it is harmful to others. I make my own decisions. I’m just exercising my constitutional rights. So to hell with you telling me something different.”

We take the truth that everyone has the right to their opinion to mean that everyone is entitled to hold their own version of the facts of any situation. Our radical individualism tells us that each person’s version of the facts is equally valid and entitled to respect just because someone thinks those facts are true and has the right to think those facts are true. Many Americans think it is a fact that the news of a pandemic is, to use President Trump’s phrase, “fake news.” They think it’s some sort of liberal conspiracy being foisted on us to prevent Trump from being reelected. Because people have the right to believe such nonsense they will cling to their version of the facts and all evidence to the contrary be damned. Public health measures are hard enough to enforce in any situation. When a great many people deny the facts on which those measures are based controlling the public health hazard the measures are designed to abate becomes almost impossible in many places. Until more Americans get over the unwarranted conclusions they draw from our strong individualism we will have a harder time than most countries in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

Fourth, the dominant American culture has long had a strong element of anti-intellectualism in it. People say "Those pointy-headed intellectuals don't know more than I do! I don't have to listen to them. They can't tell me anything I don't know better than they do." As someone said about me once: “He’s got book learnin’, but he don’t know shit.” Does someone have fancy degrees and hold a position of responsibility in public health? It doesn’t matter. Many Americans will say “She’s just some intellectual who don’t know nothin’ about real life. She don’t know about my life. She don’t know more than I do. Her education and experience don’t mean nothin’. She can’t tell me what to do!” Of course I’m one of those pointy headed intellectuals on whom so many Americans love to heap scorn. I’ve got more postgraduate degrees than almost anyone, although not in public health. So I find Americans’ anti-intellectualism simply incomprehensible. Yet I cannot deny that it is real. It is, and it is contributing in destructive ways to our national response to the coronavirus pandemic. Again, not every American thinks this way, but far too many of us do.

Put these four things together and we get the world's worst national reaction to the coronavirus pandemic (although Brazil seems to be as bad or nearly so). This pandemic is laying bare all of the shortcomings both of our current political non-leadership and of our dominant white culture. We are getting the response we deserve, and it's hard to see how it could be worse. We bring our pathetic response to this public health crisis upon ourselves. How we overcome our cultural and political shortcomings and eventually defeat this nasty virus I am sorry to say escapes me. I just hope and pray that somehow, someday we will.