The US is living in a bubble of denialism regarding our status in the world, the coronavirus pandemic and climate change among other things. While the pandemic threatens our economy and climate change our way of life, denialism itself is what may prove our ultimate undoing.
Take the many commentators who wonder why the nation with "the greatest health care system on earth" cannot seem to get its arms around the pandemic. That's easy; we don't have the greatest health system. By any metric you care to measure we do worse than most if not all first world nations. This is not because we don't have dedicated health care professionals. I would match them against anyone in the world. No, it's because we don't have enough doctors and nurses and we don't serve a significant slice of the population. Without access to good care, deaths from easily preventable diseases go way up.
As Paul Krugman has said many times, today's republican party is responsible for much of the denialism in this country mainly because it serves the purposes of the party's paymasters. The pseudo science and outright lies being peddled by the right wing intelligentsia lull a large part of the population into a false sense of security. We need someone with the moral authority to call out the BS. As the crisis unfolds, we are seeing people as varied as Andrew Cuomo and Jay Inslee and Gretchen Whitmer step up to lead. This phenomenon gives me some hope in this dark time.
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