On Wednesday, writing for the Washington Post, conservative columnist Max Boot laid bare how decades of Republican anti-government ideology has set up America for leadership failure.
"Ever since John Winthrop boasted in 1630 that the Massachusetts Bay Colony would be 'a city upon a hill,' Americans have believed that we have a mission to lead the world, whether by the power of example or by sheer power," wrote Boot. "That self-confidence has been bolstered by a century of achievements: We saved Western civilization from German and Soviet militarism, built the most prosperous society in history, and landed a man on the moon."
"Our self-confidence, verging on hubris, should be shaken by the coronavirus," wrote Boot. "The United States has been a laggard, not a world leader, in confronting the pandemic. As The Post reported, a German company shipped more than 1.4 million diagnostic tests for the World Health Organization by the end of February. During that same time, U.S. efforts to produce our own test misfired. By Feb. 28, only 4,000 tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been used. U.S. testing is now ramping up, but as of Tuesday we had only tested roughly 56,000 people, or 1 in 5,800 Americans. South Korea has tested 274,000 people, or 1 in 187 South Koreans."
"We should not be especially surprised by our failure at pandemic-fighting, because if we are being honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that the United States has long been failing," Boot added. "We remain one of the richest countries in the world, but by international standards we look more like a Third World nation."
"As Quartz pointed out in 2017, we lag in almost every measure of societal well-being among the wealthy nations (now 36) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)," wrote Boot. "As of 2016, we had the second-highest poverty rate, the highest level of income inequality and the highest level of obesity. We spent the most on education but produced less-than-average results. We were also below average on renewable energy, infrastructure investment and voter turnout. We are the only OECD nation that doesn’t mandate paid family leave. One area where we do lead is gun violence. Our homicide rate is nearly 50 percent above the OECD average."
Many might put the blame solely on President Donald Trump — but Boot argued the problem predates him.
"President Trump has exacerbated the problem, but he didn’t start it," wrote Boot. "He is himself the product of decades of right-wing revolt against government and increasingly against reason itself. America is unusual in having a major party — and a major television network — devoted to climate denialism and protecting the “right” of everyone to own an assault rifle. The GOP and the right-wing media have long been a hotbed of nutty conspiracy theories, and their reluctance to face the reality of the new coronavirus set back efforts to save lives."
"The Republicans’ decades-long demonization of government has consequences," continued Boot. "As Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith noted, the federal civilian workforce has fallen as a percentage of total nonfarm employment from 18 percent in 1980 to 15 percent today, and their salaries top out at just under $200,000 — “only slightly more than an entry-level engineer makes at Google.” There are still plenty of high-quality civil servants, but their ranks are too thin, and they are too much at the mercy of political yahoos."
"The coronavirus failure should be a wake-up call that Trump has not made America great again," concluded Boot. "Quite the opposite: He has accelerated our decline. We must not only beat this pandemic; we must also address a host of other ills that have been festering for decades. In recent years, America has been 'exceptional' mainly in the scale of our governmental failures compared with those of other industrialized democracies."
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