America is an exceptional country, exceptional not in the sense of excellence, but in the sense of being unusual.
With Covid-19, America is again exceptional, with the worst performance among wealthy nations. Some might quibble with that claim and point to higher death rates in other countries. The real measure of our distinctiveness, however, is what has happened since the pandemic’s initial devastation. From February to April, many other countries acted in the dark even when they acted forcefully. By May, they had learned a lot, had gotten control, and were “flattening the curve.” Not the United States (beyond New York). America’s death rate declined slowly and then rose again, now, in late August, 2020, up to far higher levels than in comparable countries.
The exceptional disaster that is Covid-19 in America is, in part, the exceptional disaster that is Trump in the White House. But even a competent and honest administration would have had a struggle, and a Biden administration, should it take over, will, too.
Voluntary Community
The New York Time’s excellent David Leonhardt recently offered an explanation of our Covid-19 exceptionalism, focusing a lot on American individualism. As I have argued before, America’s exceptionalism is not about individualism, but about a voluntarism that joins autonomy and community in freely-chosen groups: “Individuals forge their distinct fates with like-minded people in groups that they have individually, freely chosen to join and are individually free to leave. People attain their personal ends through … voluntary community.”
This voluntarism is evident in how Americans have been getting sick: at church services, choir practices, funerals, weddings, family reunions, boys’ nights out, backyard barbecues, parties, sororities, break rooms in workplaces, and popular bars. People get together in groups that they have chosen. Each group has its own mini-culture with expectations about masks and distancing. Some cultures press members to be careful, but many, probably most, press members to not be standoffish. After all, warm fellowship is central to group life, be it a church, family, or fraternity.
Real, asocial individualism would have led people to hide, protecting themselves and their immediate families from the threatening world, a sort of survivalism. That seems to have been rare. Similarly, for every angry insistence on the individual right to be maskless caught on a store video camera, there are probably a hundred genial folks who just want to be with their friends or grandchildren or neighbors in a relaxed way. Their loyalties lie there, not in the abstract, larger community of the county and its health officials.
Anti-Statism
The force of voluntarism is multiplied by another perennial and related American theme: suspicion of government, especially the federal government. Ronald Reagan’s quip that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help” still resonates, even as most Americans depend on government every day and certainly in emergencies. State support of individuals has grown greatly over our history, but often either in ways that don’t visibly challenge the anti-government ideology–e.g., tax credits–or that can be rationalized as exceptions–e.g., Medicare. So, the public sector–services such as health monitoring–is chronically underfunded. And, while we have a government safety net, it is one with large holes and weak strands.
For years now, the United States has, despite its wealth and scientific prominence, seriously underperformed in health, safety, and personal well-being. In a recent calculation, the U.S. ranks eighth in national wealth per capita, but is not even in the top 20 countries, often not even in the top 30 countries, in meeting “basic human needs” and “well-being.”
Public health preparedness, deference to expertise, and nationally-coordinated procedures–routine in most modern countries–are weak in the United States. Certainly, a competent and honest administration would have saved tens of thousands of lives from Covid-19, but we probably would still have suffered a great deal.
Laws and Norms
The progress of the pandemic, now that its biology is better understood, largely depends on individual behavior, the extent to which people practice distancing, hygiene, and mask-wearing. And that behavior depends in turn on the norms of our groups, whatever the government regulations are. Indeed, most law depends on local norms to be effective. Do you cheat on taxes, glide through stop signs, bike without a helmet, build an addition to your house without a license, or open an “underground” gym? Well, what do your friends do? Public behavior around Covid-19 has followed norms more than law, as this graph from The New York Times shows:
Americans started sheltering and distancing mainly because of the early scare, prior to public policies, and they started congregating again as they gained the impression–true or false–that things were safer even as regulations stayed in place. (More detailed analyses tell the same story: see here, here, here, and most recently here). Though state directives, such as those closing schools, affected behavior, Americans’ reactions were more about norms more than about laws. One public health expert confessed in July that “ The mistake we made … was that we did not foresee human behavior. We assumed people would be more responsible ….” But responsibility is a group product, as illustrated by a just-released study of how much Mexicans have been social distancing: Researchers found “larger declines in mobility”–i.e., more sheltering at home–“in Mexican regions whose emigrants live in U.S. locations with stronger social distancing practices.” The best explanation for this correlation is that information about Covid-19, and norms about responding, spread from migrants in the U.S. to their family and neighbors in Mexico; where distancing norms were stronger–or weaker– they shaped stronger–or weaker–reactions south of the border.
So, even Joe Biden’s caring, science-driven, Covid-19 policies (assuming he wins) will probably face resistance to its directives, mainly tacit resistance. Some anti-vaxxers may make a stir against Covid-19 vaccinations, but the greater problem will be convincing Americans to suspend the consensus in their personal communities, many of which will be skeptical or cautious, and defer to a distant government directive.
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Update (September 8, 2020).
This economics paper presents evidence that the residents of counties that had been long-time frontier counties generations ago are today more resistant to Covid control measures because, the authors argue, their communities have a lasting culture of “rugged individualism.” I have only skimmed the report and would make only one comment, consistent with the post I worte: America’s frontier communities were also marked by voluntary, cooperative joint ventures. So, I would rephrase it as intense voluntarism and anti-statism.
Samuel Bazzi, Martin Fiszbein, Mesay Gebresilasse, Rugged Individualism and Collective (In)action During the COVID-19 Pandemic, NBER Working Paper No. 27776 — https://www.nber.org/papers/w27776 (September 2020).
Rugged individualism—the combination of individualism and anti-statism—is a prominent feature of American culture with deep roots in the country’s history of frontier settlement. Today, rugged individualism is more prevalent in counties with greater total frontier experience (TFE) during the era of westward expansion. While individualism may be conducive to innovation, it can also undermine collective action, with potentially adverse social consequences. We show that America’s frontier culture hampered the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across U.S. counties, greater TFE is associated with less social distancing and mask use as well as weaker local government effort to control the virus. We argue that frontier culture lies at the root of several more proximate explanations for the weak collective response to public health risks, including a lack of civic duty, partisanship, and distrust in science.
