How can we ignore gun violence and COVID deaths? Self-interest rules America

Over the past few weeks, the American public has been exposed to any number of measures of the nation’s well-being. Inflation, we are told, is down to 5 percent; job opportunities are growing; our gross domestic product (GDP) will be whatever those imaginary numbers say. As New America has pointed out, “[O]ur dominant reporting on GDP, unemployment, and inflation fails to capture an integral view of well-being, one that might consider factors like access to care or the impacts of climate change. … When policymaking is based on the wrong metrics, we ignore vital factors that influence well-being.”    

There are, of course, many ways to assess well-being. In my view, however, any assessment of well-being in America cannot ignore two uniquely American phenomena: the deaths of our children by gun violence and the deaths of our elderly from COVID. Why?   

It’s not a new idea that the well-being of a society is seen most clearly in the care it shows or doesn’t show for its most vulnerable members. As Hubert Humphrey put it years ago, “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children, those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly, those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”    

In leaving the most vulnerable among us unprotected against gunfire and the pandemic, our politics is laid bare for what it has become: the expression in politics of a larger culture of extravagant self-absorption.  

The recent shooting deaths of three children in a school in Nashville, Tenn., and four (with over 20 wounded) at a “sweet 16” birthday party in Alabama, underscore a grim reality that exists only in America among comparably developed nations: the leading cause of death for children under 20 is not disease, or malnutrition, or accidents; it is gunshot wounds.   

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, firearms take the lives of 5.6 out of every 100,000 American children between ages 3 and 18. No other developed nation is even close. Canada comes closest, with 0.8 children lost to gunfire out of 100,000 children. American children accounted for 97 percent of the gunfire deaths in Kaiser’s multinational study. 

Our record on COVID response is similarly dismal. Ranked first among 177 nations in our capacity to respond to a pandemic in November 2019, on the eve of the pandemic, the United States ranks last among wealthy nations and close to last among all nations in our infection and fatality rates.   

Why have we fared so much worse than other seemingly less-well-prepared nations? One is tempted to point to factors such as our failure to test comprehensively as the cause of our nation’s great failure. When it became apparent in the early months of COVID that the virus was being spread by people exhibiting no symptoms, the only way to protect the most vulnerable among us was — and remains — to test regularly and universally, so that we could chart the progress of the pandemic, isolate the infections, and slow if not stop their spread. Instead, we have chosen from the earliest days to fly blind. Universal testing was never adopted, and the administration’s decision in early 2022 to track only hospitalizations ensured that we will never know the extent of the virus’s spread through the population. 

Universal testing? Really? Honestly, who are we kidding? Any effort to institute universal testing would have engendered ideological outrage that would have made the anti-masking, anti-distancing, anti-vaxxing messaging seem tame by comparison. The government would have been likened to “Communist China”; any effort to track the virus in real time to control its spread would have been taken as a pretext for unprecedented surveillance on average Americans. The government’s true agenda, we would have been told, is not controlling COVID but controlling “We, the people.” 

So, we haven’t tested. Nor have we committed as a nation to masking or distancing or, for that matter, to vaccination. After half-hearted efforts in these directions, we instead have chosen essentially to pretend the virus no longer threatens us — and for 84 percent of us we are largely right. The 250-300 people more than expected from the pre-COVID years who still die every day from COVID are drawn largely from the other 16 percent of our population: our elderly. Their passing is dismissed because, well, they were going to die of something eventually anyway.  They comprise 90 percent of our globally high death rate at this point. Only in America.   

We have failed to protect our children from gunfire and our elderly from the pandemic because our responses to both have been grounded not in an exploration of the most effective, practical measures to protect our most vulnerable populations but in an ideology of self-absorption. What matters is “what I want,” not “what you, my neighbor, may need.” Our core first principle — leave me alone to do what I want — insulates our views from any interrogation by the realities of gunfire or disease. It is individualism in its most decadent form. It is freedom deformed by relentless and myopic self-interest.                    

It is also — emerging Supreme Court dogma notwithstanding — contrary to the attitude of the Framers of our Constitution and to the structure and spirit of the documents and amendments they adopted. Our Constitution is structured to require compromise; in its absence, the structure, with its various checks and balances, is a prescription for paralysis. Without pragmatism, our system is structured to fail. The touchstone of our Bill of Rights, moreover, is not the assertion of absolute rights against the feared slippery slope of their erosion but reasonableness, which requires a calibration of the extent of governmental interference against the severity of the threats we face. Yet that weighing of the reasonableness of government action against the threats to the public is precisely what the ideological response to mass shootings and COVID — and, for that matter, every issue — forecloses.   

Our problem, in other words, is cultural, the product of years of relentless commercial speech as our dominant cultural influence. And the only antidote with a chance to work is awareness that in hardening our attitudes into ideologies, our commercial culture has polluted our politics and caused us to lose our way.    

John Farmer Jr. is director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. He is a former assistant U.S. attorney, counsel to the governor of New Jersey, New Jersey attorney general, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, dean of Rutgers Law School, and executive vice president and general counsel of Rutgers University.