The worship of money above all has made it impossible for us to get a handle on the pandemic. A close friend of mine in Washington, D.C. recently told me he won’t be following any health experts’ continued warnings still to steer clear of retail stores or indoor restaurants, even as Covid-19 fatalities in the United States creep up again.
It’s the economy, stupid, he said: America just isn’t America without maximally vibrant consumer activity. The longer we shy away from going to our crowded offices or shopping malls, he remarked portentously, “the more imperiled our descendants will become.”
Yet when I mentioned that $15,000 worth of my fees for freelance work have been delayed indefinitely — not due to lockdowns or public-health advisories but because several New York-based colleagues got sick — he offered that, difficult as it was, he thought declaring personal bankruptcy might “build my character.”
A significant number of Americans insist that any act that curtails economic activity is essentially un-American, and these people are influential.
There are so many reasons why the United States has become the firm epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. It receives nearly 80 million international tourists a year. It has the largest domestic-travel market on Earth. Its testing capacity and medical-supply chains were wildly underprepared. President Donald Trump’s leadership has been abysmal. But one under-discussed reason is a peculiar postwar American attitude towards wealth and money.
A significant number of Americans insist that any act that curtails economic activity is essentially un-American, and these people are influential. The spread of this view has prompted governors around the nation to reopen before containing the epidemics in their states.
I hate the phrase “OK Boomer,” in general. But there is at work in these acts a distinctive mindset forged in the Baby Boom years: A conviction that the precise economic conditions that reigned in the decades just after the Second World War are the only conditions that call forth the best in the American character — combined with a misty-eyed romanticization of a kind of pre-World War II, Great-Depression-era bootstrapping. On the one hand, many Americans believe their country is uniquely able to shoulder blows. If any country can take a hit — like, let’s say, the loss of hundreds of thousands of citizens to a novel disease — it’s America. On the other hand, these same Americans live in terror of any blow at all to the economy, as if we’re so fragile, as a country, that a strong breeze will fell us forever like a rotted tree.
The American novelist and political commentator Lionel Shriver wrote an op-ed making this case that was sent to me by several friends. These friends described it as a dose of fact-based realism. Shriver warned of a civilization so fragile that lockdowns could transform it — not individual lives but the country itself “for years to come, and not in an improving direction.” She warns that an economically insecure society “is a violent society.” If official stay-at-home orders remained in place, she imagined, rich people wouldn’t even “be able to go to the gym” lest poor people, dehumanized by their empty wallets, literally “knife” them “in the street.” (That’s not what happened: Crime, in fact, plummeted during the lockdowns.)
Oddly, just a few years before the pandemic, Shriver was extolling the way poverty and crisis strengthen people. “Having a childhood in which I was permanently” short of money made her “hard-working,” she told interviewers. “Sometimes, being a little desperate can push you to be resourceful in a way that pays off.”
By midlife, though, Shriver’s 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin had become a film that grossed nearly $10 million worldwide.
But she acknowledged an odd emotional downside to her financial success: “It pains me that I can no longer feel sorry for myself.” She wasn’t a bootstrapper anymore, in other words. Today she has to appear concerned about very high-stakes macroeconomic problems, lest she come off as a mere whiner upset by a decline of a fat stock portfolio.
I was born two decades after Shriver. It always felt to me as if Americans 20 to 30 years older than me harbored a great deal of shame about their wealth and security, which made such a contrast with the lives of their parents. Sometimes, acquaintances of my parents sought to diminish the feats of the so-called “Greatest Generation.” They joked about how crude or embarrassing it was that some of their parents pocketed all the sugar packets from the table at the Olive Garden, or laughed that their fathers had earned Purple Hearts for afflictions as mild as athlete’s foot.
Behind those jokes, though, lay painful envy, and the wealthy child’s haunting fear that he wouldn’t have done as well as his parents if he’d been tested in similar circumstances. I remember taking family vacations to France and England when I was little. In Normandy, an elderly restaurant owner thanked us, as Americans, for liberating France, while our bed-and-breakfast in Wales flew an American flag in our honor. My parents loved the respect afforded to America. But I think they worried they didn’t really deserve it.
When he was 36, my father joined a young team of intellectuals who worked with Ronald Reagan on his vision of an America refreshed. A speech the group helped draft asserted that “the American people have something to give the world more than sophisticated technology and consumer society.” That thing was personal freedom — an attitude Shriver later summarized as “You’re on your own. … You can say that’s a kind of barbarism, but there’s something appealing about that.” It was a matter of principle that liberty was more important than economic security. They curled a lip at countries like China and its assertion that people need state support.
In truth, though, that contempt was born out of self-recognition. There never was a generation of Americans — principally white Americans — that benefited so broadly from the blessings of government. Friends of mine lived in houses bought, often without anybody saying so, with money accumulated by their grandparents during the postwar military-spending-driven boom, and went to college because their grandparents had gone to college on the G.I. Bill.
Even while Reagan argued that our “consumer society” — America’s ever-soaring visible wealth — was not what we were proudest of, it seemed to me that by the ’90s, it obviously was. I was taught in public school that America’s first-in-the-world GDP was the irrefutable proof of its greatness. Rich countries are good; America’s the world’s richest country. Ipso facto: America is the best.
That, and the claim that “America has never lost a war.” My teachers liked to repeat that sentence. One rationalized the Vietnam War as a “kind of a draw.” I guess the line was supposed to make American kids proud.
In fact, it made me terrified. I realized that future generations might have to throw infinite men and money at all of our wars, forever, to keep the sentence true — or else we would have to pretend, cruelly, that any war we were involved in, no matter how much evidence built up to the contrary, had not been “lost.”
There’s a deep magical thinking at work in America’s response to Covid-19 that bleeds out of this same deep vein. Many believe that we still have the right to choose how much to let Covid-19 affect us. And that by choosing not to take it seriously — by not wearing masks, by not avoiding unnecessary outings to bend the curve — we can still “win.” That if we’re brave enough — if we open all the stores and the schools back up, if we risk a wild and “barbarian” period — even a virus somehow will be intimidated. We can keep being winners if we continually redefine what losing means. And then we’ll go back to our world’s-greatest economy and to our status of never having failed.
But by refusing to fold on a bad hand, you can lose the whole game, as any gambler knows. We lionize gamblers in America for their bravado. The Adam Sandler character in last year’s movie Uncut Gems alienates his wife, imperils his kids, and ends up dead. But he still comes off as the hero — as sympathetic, relatable, and admirable anyway, for all of the risks that he takes.
He takes all those risks for money, which isn’t a coincidence. Americans fetishize risk-taking except when it comes to the macroeconomy, to the stock market. It’s the last great thing we have to show in the game of history as we understood it, the ultimate trump card in our deck: our macroeconomic indicators.