Financial times: Americans want to be free to be stupid
Americans want to be free to be stupid
(Elizabeth Cobbs he writer is a history professor at Texas A&M University and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution
Nothing highlights local peculiarities like a global pandemic. The US has 4 per cent of the global population and 25 per cent of infections from a virus that began half a world away.
This anomaly comes as no surprise to students of American history. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner could have predicted the nation’s confused response to Covid-19 more than a century ago. His landmark 1893 essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History has long been criticised for promoting a self-aggrandising view of US exceptionalism. But critics miss the fact that
Turner believed Americans could be exceptionally stupid
... Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant-governor who opposes laws requiring the wearing of face masks, claimed last week that Dr Fauci “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and Texans “don’t need his advice any more”. Bare-faced citizens are busting their way into Walmart and picking fights at mini-marts.
Meanwhile, Texas and Florida are reporting record daily increases in new coronavirus cases and have reversed plans for reopening the economy.
https://www.ft.com/content/95b9ee10-11be-4530-beb3-42b3ea7b5db0
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