It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union combined.
During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called “the sick man of Europe.” The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness — and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response.
Our
former peer nations are now operating in a political context Americans
would find unfathomable. Every other wealthy nation in the world has
successfully beaten back the disease, at least significantly, and at
least for now. New Zealand’s health minister was forced to resign
after allowing two people who had tested positive for COVID-19 to
attend a funeral. The Italian Parliament heckled Prime Minister Giuseppe
Conte when he briefly attempted to remove his mask to deliver a speech.
In May — around the time Trump cheered demonstrators
into the streets to protest stay-at-home orders — Boris Johnson’s top
adviser set off a massive national scandal, complete with multiple calls
for his resignation, because he’d been caught driving to visit his
parents during lockdown. If a Trump official had done the same, would
any newspaper even have bothered to publish the story?
It
is difficult for us Americans to imagine living in a country where
violations so trivial (by our standards) provoke such an uproar. And if
you’re tempted to see for yourself what it looks like, too bad — the
E.U. has banned U.S. travelers for health reasons.
The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem
uniquely contemporary — a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of
online misinformation. But the president and his party are the products
of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a
collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of
magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal
out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican
administration be destroyed by incompetent management — it happened to
the last one, after all — the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling
and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of
thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of
the president himself. Like Stalin’s purge of 30,000 Red Army members
right before World War II, the central government has perversely chosen
to disable the very asset that was intended to carry it through the
crisis. Only this failure of leadership and management took place in a
supposedly advanced democracy whose leadership succumbed to a
debilitating and ultimately deadly ideological pathology.
The Republican Revolt Against COVID Science and Common Sense
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