[D66] The Unraveling of America | rollingstone.com

[R.O.]

  The Unraveling of America

By
Wade Davis
rollingstone.com
19 min
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The COVID crisis has reduced to tatters the idea of American 
exceptionalism. Gary Hershorn/Getty Images The COVID crisis has reduced 
to tatters the idea of American exceptionalism. Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

/Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at 
Risk at the University of British Columbia. His award-winning books 
include “Into the Silence” and “The Wayfinders.” His new book, 
“Magdalena: River of Dreams, <https://amzn.to/3kfgh2q>” is published by 
Knopf./

*Never in our lives* have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For 
the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by 
the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, 
focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and 
uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, 
promises of medical science.

In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic 
parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 
<https://www.rollingstone.com/t/covid-19/> attacks our physical bodies, 
but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community 
and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to 
the tiger.

Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of 
spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at 
hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest 
vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 
killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that 
natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how 
effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must 
be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal 
complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of 
millions.

Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and 
not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th 
Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A 
scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated 
in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the 
beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval 
Europe for a thousand years.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a 
seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the 
crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke 
Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf 
Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers 
of greater and more consequential outcomes.

COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily 
lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. 
All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new 
possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central 
offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls 
shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the 
home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, 
people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a 
capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As 
history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of 
social, moral, or environmental degradation.

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over 
the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all 
the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough 
to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, 
with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic 
and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a 
complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in 
history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that 
the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the 
United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the 
illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with 
more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a 
failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government 
largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to 
America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send 
disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the 
/Irish Times/, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of 
feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy 
and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never 
been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and 
nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, 
the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every 
kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 
16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain 
the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British 
maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire 
reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course, the torch 
had long passed into the hands of America.

In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller 
army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million men 
and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double 
shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt 
promised, the arsenal of democracy.

When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 
percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit 
to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from 
scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll 
over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a 
B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards in Long 
Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for 
four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 
minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built 
more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.

In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United 
States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half 
of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all 
automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a 
trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited 
education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids 
to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence 
allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of 
opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, 
marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only 
beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.

But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, 
virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, 
never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops 
are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone 
to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter 
recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 
years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the 
history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion 
on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in 
the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring 
more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 
6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun 
violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of 
April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had 
caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first 
month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era 
lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was 
the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in 
terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common 
purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost 
its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in 
divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living 
beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to 
retirement homes.

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the 
workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only 
reinforced their isolation from their families. The average American 
father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with 
his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent 
fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, 
contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a 
national security crisis.

Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio on April 3rd, 1944. When the 
Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of 
the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to 
protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a 
synthetic-rubber industry.

AP

Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio on April 3rd, 1944. When the 
Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of 
the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to 
protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a 
synthetic-rubber industry. Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio on 
April 3rd, 1944. When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took 
control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the 
speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, 
invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social 
interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the 
world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the 
working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis 
that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for 
Americans under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening 
chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing. 
Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can 
be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust. In any number of 
settings, however, the negative forces tearing apart a society are 
mitigated or even muted if there are other elements that reinforce 
social solidarity — religious faith, the strength and comfort of family, 
the pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of place.

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise 
of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and 
corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the 
social contract is irrevocably broken. For two generations, America has 
celebrated globalization with iconic intensity, when, as any working man 
or woman can see, it’s nothing more than capital on the prowl in search 
of ever cheaper sources of labor.

For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States 
have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was, 
but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of 
loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments and 
lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time of new 
aspirations for women, gays, and people of color. In truth, at least in 
economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as 
the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 
percent. The salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of 
their mid-management employees.

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of 
their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in 
stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 
trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. 
The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million 
of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or 
negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black 
families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of 
whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are 
two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that 
celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a 
high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 
million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned 
enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in 
federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are 
suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at 
nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of 
American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the 
blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a 
pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been 
forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every 
minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by 
the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs 
essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox 
and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and 
discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president 
advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a 
disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the 
United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less 
than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for 
more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of 
the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the 
world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but 
only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious 
as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.

As the United States responded to the crisis like a corrupt tin pot 
dictatorship, the actual tin pot dictators of the world took the 
opportunity to seize the high ground, relishing a rare sense of moral 
superiority, especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 
Minneapolis. The autocratic leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, 
chastised America for “maliciously violating ordinary citizens’ rights.” 
North Korean newspapers objected to “police brutality” in America. 
Quoted in the Iranian press, Ayatollah Khamenei gloated, “America has 
begun the process of its own destruction.”

Trump’s performance and America’s crisis deflected attention from 
China’s own mishandling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, not to mention 
its move to crush democracy in Hong Kong. When an American official 
raised the issue of human rights on Twitter, China’s Foreign Ministry 
spokesperson, invoking the killing of George Floyd, responded with one 
short phrase, “I can’t breathe.”

These politically motivated remarks may be easy to dismiss. But 
Americans have not done themselves any favors. Their political process 
made possible the ascendancy to the highest office in the land a 
national disgrace, a demagogue as morally and ethically compromised as a 
person can be. As a British writer quipped, “there have always been 
stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely 
has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid”.

The American president lives to cultivate resentments, demonize his 
opponents, validate hatred. His main tool of governance is the lie; as 
of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false 
statements numbered 20,055. If America’s first president, George 
Washington, famously could not tell a lie, the current one can’t 
recognize the truth. Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham 
Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and charity 
for none.

Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a 
product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only 
the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely 
incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The 
republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of 
democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press 
freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, 
more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than 
supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and 
children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment 
of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s 
inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural 
entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade 
alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the 
very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be 
prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical 
care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be 
fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality 
public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and 
infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many 
signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — 
climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no 
longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even 
within its own national community? Flag-wrapped patriotism is no 
substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those 
who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow 
citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as 
one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the 
stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading 
their charge is Donald Trump 
<https://www.rollingstone.com/t/donald-trump/>, a bone spur warrior, a 
liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the 
backbone of a bully.

Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting 
that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth 
lab. Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis 
well, notably in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is just three 
hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began. Half of 
Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of flights arrive 
each day from China and East Asia. Logically, it should have been hit 
very hard, but the health care system performed exceedingly well. 
Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have been 
consistently five times that of the U.S. On a per capita basis, Canada 
has suffered half the morbidity and mortality. For every person who has 
died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in Massachusetts, a state 
with a comparable population that has reported more COVID cases than all 
of Canada. As of July 30th, even as rates of COVID infection and death 
soared across much of the United States, with 59,629 new cases reported 
on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of 
just five COVID patients.

When American friends ask for an explanation, I encourage them to 
reflect on the last time they bought groceries at their neighborhood 
Safeway. In the U.S. there is almost always a racial, economic, 
cultural, and educational chasm between the consumer and the check-out 
staff that is difficult if not impossible to bridge. In Canada, the 
experience is quite different. One interacts if not as peers, certainly 
as members of a wider community. The reason for this is very simple. The 
checkout person may not share your level of affluence, but they know 
that you know that they are getting a living wage because of the unions. 
And they know that you know that their kids and yours most probably go 
to the same neighborhood public school. Third, and most essential, they 
know that you know that if their children get sick, they will get 
exactly the same level of medical care not only of your children but of 
those of the prime minister. These three strands woven together become 
the fabric of Canadian social democracy.

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously 
replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem 
cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from 
the perspective of any modern social democracy. Canada performed well 
during the COVID crisis because of our social contract, the bonds of 
community, the trust for each other and our institutions, our health 
care system in particular, with hospitals that cater to the medical 
needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the 
private investor who views every hospital bed as if a rental property. 
The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency 
accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of 
social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in 
common purpose.

This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do 
with the quality of life. Finns live longer and are less likely to die 
in childhood or in giving birth than Americans. Danes earn roughly the 
same after-tax income as Americans, while working 20 percent less. They 
pay in taxes an extra 19 cents for every dollar earned. But in return 
they get free health care, free education from pre-school through 
university, and the opportunity to prosper in a thriving free-market 
economy with dramatically lower levels of poverty, homelessness, crime, 
and inequality. The average worker is paid better, treated more 
respectfully, and rewarded with life insurance, pension plans, maternity 
leave, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. All of these benefits only 
inspire Danes to work harder, with fully 80 percent of men and women 
aged 16 to 64 engaged in the labor force, a figure far higher than that 
of the United States.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping 
socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United 
States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because 
they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit 
every tier of society. That social democracy will never take hold in the 
United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, 
and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United 
States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without 
passing through civilization.

Evidence of such terminal decadence is the choice that so many Americans 
made in 2016 to prioritize their personal indignations, placing their 
own resentments above any concerns for the fate of the country and the 
world, as they rushed to elect a man whose only credential for the job 
was his willingness to give voice to their hatreds, validate their 
anger, and target their enemies, real or imagined. One shudders to think 
of what it will mean to the world if Americans in November, knowing all 
that they do, elect to keep such a man in political power. But even 
should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a 
profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For 
better or for worse, America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no 
occasion for celebration, no time to gloat. In a moment of international 
peril, when humanity might well have entered a dark age beyond all 
conceivable horrors, the industrial might of the United States, together 
with the blood of ordinary Russian soldiers, literally saved the world. 
American ideals, as celebrated by Madison and Monroe, Lincoln, 
Roosevelt, and Kennedy, at one time inspired and gave hope to millions.

If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps 
for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million 
surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we 
will surely long for the best years of the American century. For the 
moment, we have only the kleptocracy of Donald Trump. Between praising 
the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs, describing their 
internment and torture as “exactly the right thing to do,” and his 
dispensing of medical advice concerning the therapeutic use of chemical 
disinfectants, Trump blithely remarked, “One day, it’s like a miracle, 
it will disappear.” He had in mind, of course, the coronavirus 
<https://www.rollingstone.com/t/coronavirus/>, but, as others have said, 
he might just as well have been referring to the American dream.

In This Article: coronavirus 
<https://www.rollingstone.com/t/coronavirus/>, covid-19 
<https://www.rollingstone.com/t/covid-19/>, Donald Trump 
<https://www.rollingstone.com/t/donald-trump/>

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