Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Are we destined to be forever so self-destructively exceptional?
On its 244th birthday, the United States is still exceptional. And it’s killing us.
Though just 4 percent of the planet’s people are Americans, our nation, by the most meaningful metric of a country’s power, still dominates the world. At 24 percent, America’s share of the world economy is still far greater than that of any other nation.
On the other hand, while we tally just that 4 percent of earthlings, we constitute a mind-boggling 25 percent of the earthlings who’ve come down with COVID-19 and a further 25 percent of those who’ve died from it. Several countries in Europe have higher per capita death rates—Sweden, France, Italy, and the U.K. among them—but none have the kind of out-of-control outbreak right now that will extend American misery for months.
We are, in short, the wealthiest, most powerful, and most deathly ill people in the world.
It’s not because we don’t spend enough on medicine. On the contrary, the share of our economy devoted to health care—to pharmaceutical companies, the insurance industry, hospital chains, and so on—far exceeds that of any other nation.
When a nation this rich and powerful is also this vulnerable and weak, the causes of its dysfunctions must run very deep. The most proximate cause, of course, is a national government that, since Donald Trump took power, has arrayed its power against fictitious threats it has manufactured itself, like dangerous immigrants or fraudulent voters. This makes it all the easier for conservatives to stoke fear and anger within their political base. At the same time, the Trump administration has ignored the very real threats to its citizens posed by mutating diseases and a worsening climate—not just ignored them, but consistently downplayed them, and diminished our capacity to counter them by defunding public-health agencies and driving scientists from the government, lest their empiricism dispel the imagined enemies and fake cures that Republicans parade before us.
In hyping nonexistent crises and denying actual ones, Trump has been abetted by the right-wing media. They have joined him in ridiculing those who’ve taken the pandemic seriously, depicting such precautions as social distancing, mask-wearing, and sheltering in place as unmanly liberal authoritarianism, a worthy object of attack by real Americans. Thus the death threats to directors of municipal health agencies who’d dared to suggest the prudence of donning a mask or not opening a restaurant. Thus the appearance of lumpen loonies with assault weapons at statehouses with Democratic governors. (Now that Republican governors are closing down red states, those loonies are nowhere to be seen.)
This, too, is American exceptionalism. Public-health officials in other nations aren’t resigning because they fear for their lives.
At first glance, the hostility to COVID-19 precautions may seem just another example of American individualism run amok, the truculence of Don’t Tread on Me guys when confronted with the Don’t Breathe on Me demands that the coronavirus imposes. But as the disparate reactions to shutdowns ordered by Democratic and Republican governors make clear, this is a highly politicized, and indeed a groupthink individualism, an individualism gone tribal. Don’t Tread on Me really means Don’t Tread on Us—Trump’s whipped-up legions, for whom the face mask, like so much else, has been transformed into an attack on white manhood.
Whether this sensibility is individualistic or tribal or both, it certainly bespeaks another element of American exceptionalism: our radical lack of national solidarity, which could never be more harmful than during a time of infectious plague. Rooted in the white racism that was a necessary corollary to the institution of slavery, that lack of solidarity, that lack of a cross-racial sense of nationhood, has doomed, throughout our history, the prospects for a unified working-class movement and, absent such a movement, for universal social reforms. So we have gone into the coronavirus crisis as the only advanced-economy nation without paid sick leave, without universal health care, with the highest level of social, economic, environmental, and health inequality. We have gone into the coronavirus crisis as the only advanced-economy nation that rations health care in accord with the profit-seeking demands of private corporations.
That’s why Americans are getting sick and dying at such an exceptional rate.
Are we destined to be forever so self-destructively exceptional?
The solution may lie in the multiracial masses of young Americans now in the streets. They appear to understand how cruel and debilitating the nation’s persistent racism has made us, and how our unregulated capitalism has come to reward a wealthy few at the expense of everyone else. If they stay in the streets and flock to the polls (even if by mail), and if their engagement endures beyond elections and well into the hard work of governing, they may yet create a more solidaristic country, and transform this unhappy, exceptional land into a normal, healthy nation.
