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Again, this is mostly a category mistake. The problem is our political institutions, not American individualism. Supermajorities of Americans favor the economic & public health policies we need to crush COVID. But our electoral & legislative institutions empower the other third. https://twitter.com/aslavitt/status/1289648094712233984
It’s not that extremist views don’t exist in other countries. See Berlin today: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1289629736201838595?s=21. It’s that the supermajority favoring sensible policies actually gets to govern the country, b/c there isn’t egregious malapportionment, gerrymandering, & voter suppression. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1289629736201838595
Again, only a few data points, but here is cross-national polling data on COVID policies. US public is not an outlier, but our awful, tragically disastrous policies are.
Wisconsin, once again, is the clearest illustration of this. The completely undemocratic state legislature has literally <not met> since mid-April as a pandemic rages. It sued to strike down the Democratic Governor's stay-at-home order in May & may do so again re: a mask mandate.
All of this happened <in spite> of public opinion, not because of it. Supermajorities of the public overwhelmingly favored the Governor and his policies:
https://www.wpr.org/latest-marquette-poll-finds-majority-still-favors-wisconsins-stay-home-restrictions
https://www.wpr.org/latest-marquette-poll-finds-majority-still-favors-wisconsins-stay-home-restrictions
So @ASlavitt is spot on about what we need to do to crush the pandemic, fix the economy, open schools, etc. But we need to be honest about what the barriers really are. We'll get better public policies - on every issue - when we fix our electoral & legislative institutions.
