“When the virus came here, it
found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them
ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a
heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for
years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the
scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans
with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
“The crisis
demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States
reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy
infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders
were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration
squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness,
scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle
cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the
coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn
the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the
message.
“Every morning in
the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a
failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices
were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits,
masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply,
governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on
private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into
bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their
sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and
their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian
aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
“Donald Trump saw
the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his
reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime
president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the
French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of
French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump
collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged
disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a
collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader.
“Some future
autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the
fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual
courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question
that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one
another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still
capable of self-government? …” (We are living in a Failed State by
George Packer, The Atlantic).
For the complete
article, click here.
George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author
of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American
Century and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
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