American individualism is a suicide pact

The Week

Damon Linker

May 6, 2020

"The United States is about to undertake a remarkably risky epidemiological experiment on itself.

With at least 72,000 Americans dead of COVID-19 over the past seven weeks and no sign of overall decline in rates of infection, the White House and numerous state governments have decided it's time to begin lifting stay-at-home orders that were imposed to slow the spread of the disease.

There are several reasons why the country has decided to risk precipitating a sharp increase in the number of infections and fatalities. For one thing, there's genuine fear among elected officials that damage to the economy from the lockdowns is too great for them to be allowed to continue any longer. (This is usually combined with an unproven and most likely dubious assumption that people will return to normal patterns of behavior and spending as soon as legal restrictions on economic activity are lifted.)

Then there's the restive faction of the Republican Party that uses its media perches and headline-grabbing protests at state houses and city halls to express displeasure with stay-at-home orders. And well-publicized anecdotes of people becoming less willing in warm spring weather to continue sheltering-in-place (despite numerous polls showing strong broad-based support at both the national and local level for maintaining such restrictions).

But underlying all of these sources of opposition to public-health measures is a deeper cause that intertwines with and underlies all of them, at least in part — and that is the old-fashioned, pig-headed individualism of the American people. We hear it every day from politicians, protesters, and media personalities — and on Tuesday it was also expressed by Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley. Judge Bradley and her colleagues were presiding over a lawsuit filed in protest of the Wisconsin governor's stay-at-home order when she volunteered that she considered it "the very definition of tyranny.""

https://news.yahoo.com/american-individualism-suicide-pact-094502474.html

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