As coronavirus cases soared this week in a number of states—not a few of them red—a handful of GOP leaders and right-wing pundits had a desperate message for conservatives: Wear a mask, please. Mike Pence now wears a mask; Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who had previously blocked local governments from requiring masks, now calls them “your best defense against this virus”; Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy, whom Donald Trump once ranked a 12 out of 10 in terms of loyalty, said recently, “I think that if the president wore one, it would just set a good example.” Even Trump himself, who has irresponsibly stoked anti-mask messaging for months, is now saying vaguely pro-mask things. The right’s about-face comes when the national coronavirus death toll is approaching 130,000. In such circumstances, wearing masks seems like literally the least anyone can do.
It was a unique kind of American idiocy that produced the ongoing conflict over wearing masks in public, a culture war now captured forever in the dozens of videos of unmasked, aggrieved individuals trying to enter stores or protesting to reopen states. But if anti-mask tantrums of conspiracists or wing nuts attract the most attention, they’re ultimately just a symptom of something much more dangerous: the long-running erosion of public programs in the United States, which set the stage for a type of extreme individualism that extends to almost every aspect of American life today. Conservatives have spent decades shrinking the scope and efficacy of social welfare initiatives. Now the near-total abdication of the government during the pandemic has shifted even more responsibility for weathering the outbreak onto individuals, and the result is a vicious clash between pro- and anti-mask culture warriors. But that conflict over personal choices just underscores how our government has been designed to fail.
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