An Amanda Marcotte tweet yesterday primed me for thinking about racial euphemisms. “Real Americans,” she notes, was always code for “white people.” Rural white people, especially.
No matter that the subtitle for Geoffrey Nunberg’s 2006 book, “Talking Right,” is: “How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.” Real Americans see themselves standing apart from elite city-dwellers not only because of their strange (effete), urban ways, but because skin tones there run darker as well. Urban is often code for non-white. Specifically: black. Never mind that across the Deep South runs a coastal “black belt” left over from slave plantation days.
Nicholas Kristof brought up another code phrase this morning, “personal responsibility,” in the context of mask-wearing during the coronavirus pandemic. Or not wearing them, as it works out.
Resistance among Real Americans to wearing face coverings to protect one’s neighbors from the virus is now legend. The acting president believes people wear masks not to slow the coronavirus spread but to express disapproval of him. His cultish followersl spout shibboleths like freedom as reasons for refusing to wear masks. Except this one: wearing a mask is a public confession of weak faith in their leader. They’ll risk death first. Theirs and yours.
“Representative Liz Cheney tweeted a photo of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, wearing one, with the hashtag #realmenwearmasks. Good for them!” Kristof writes. (Dick Cheney is from “real” Wyoming!) Even Vice President Mike Pence is slowly coming around.
Kristof continues:
But Trump has resisted. Republicans talk a good game about “personal responsibility,” so it’s time for Trump to display some — and to call on his supporters to wear masks as well. As we celebrate our independence, this is how they can show patriotism, protect the economy and save the lives of their neighbors.
The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, deflects questions about Trump and masks by insisting that mask-wearing is simply a “personal choice.”
No, it’s not. Refusing to wear a mask is no more a “personal choice” than is drinking all evening and then stumbling into your car and heading down the road. In a time of plague, shunning a face mask is like driving drunk, putting everyone in your path in danger.
Given the trajectory of the coronavirus in the United States compared to most other countries on Earth, global neighbors must believe there is a drunk behind the wheel of the country. There were more new COVID-19 cases in Arizona Wednesday than in the entire European Union.
Personal responsibility, like “real” Americans, has always been white racial code for “black people” in discussing social programs. Personal responsibility is forever the explanation for why the richest country in the world cannot confront its legacy of systemic racism or for why it fails to match other nations in how it treats the least among us.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1968, “The problem is that we all to often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.” Personal freedom for me. Personal responsibility for thee.
David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez of the New York Times examine how this attitude makes the U.S. “exceptional.” Americans work longer hours, make less income, pay more for services, and live shorter lives than citizens in Europe:
The United States is different. In nearly every other high-income country, people have both become richer over the last three decades and been able to enjoy substantially longer lifespans.
But not in the United States. Even as average incomes have risen, much of the economic gains have gone to the affluent — and life expectancy has risen only three years since 1990. There is no other developed country that has suffered such a stark slowdown in lifespans.
This is not just about abstractions like “freedom.” The problem is despite the red-white-and-blue rhetoric you will hear this coming weekend, equality remains an abstraction, especially when it comes to distribution of political power. The bulk of Americans have little. Those who have it are not interested in sharing it.
The most common way to think about inequality is as an economic story. And it is that. But it is also a story about political power, quality of life and even the amount of time that members of different classes can expect to live.
That makes the U.S. exceptional in many of the wrong ways.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.