Canada Got Better. The United States Got Trump

Even as numerous studies have shown that there is more possibility of upward social mobility in Europe than America, the American dream remains alive - just north of the border in Canada.  How did this come to be?  Simple, actually.  Years of failed Republican policies and an active reverse Robin Hood effort combined with a desire to create a new Gilded Age has taken a severe toll on average Americans.  Canada has avoided such policies and also has a far better medical system.  It also has had far more responsible political leadership as has been highlighted by the manner in which Canada has handled the Covid-19 pandemic.  Canada is far closer to arriving back at normalcy while in America, matters are nothing less than a catastrophe in a number of states, especially states with Republican governors. As a piece in The Atlantic by former Republican David Frum lays out, the biggest difference is that Canada is not burdened with the malignancy America has in the White House.  Here are article highlights:

I reached the Canadian border on the Fourth of July. Usually, the Thousand Islands crossing station between New York and Ontario is busy on summer weekends. Not this time. Eight of the nine lanes were closed, and only one car waited ahead of me in the single open queue.

Despite the light traffic, I waited a while for my inspection—and when it was my turn, the car behind me waited a while too. In mask and gloves, an official inspected my Canadian birth certificate, asked whether I was transporting any weapons, then probed my plans for the 14 days of self-isolation required after entering Canada.

What would I do for groceries? How would I walk my two dogs on the trip? Did I understand Ontario’s masking rules? At what phone number could I be reached during my self-isolation?

Over the next two weeks, that number would receive texts, robocalls, and a live call from Canadian health services. The robocalls delivered motivational messages.

Outside of Toronto, businesses are reopening in Ontario. My wife and I celebrated the end of quarantine by going out to dinner at a local restaurant. The tables were spaced more widely than before. Paper menus had vanished, probably never to return. Servers were masked. Otherwise, though, things seemed … almost normal. We asked the chef—an old friend—how things had gone for him and his family during the lockdown. Not too bad, he answered. Aid from the government had supported the business and kept him on the payroll. He was optimistic that school would reopen in September.

The next morning, I had a meeting at the local hotel. A checkpoint had been placed in the parking lot. My temperature was taken before I could enter the building. After my meeting, I ran some of the errands that had accumulated during our 14 days in quarantine. People wore masks in all interior spaces, and often outdoors, too. I asked a clerk at the town supermarket whether the requirement had caused any trouble. She seemed surprised by the question: “It says so right on the door.”

North of the border, the disease is abating. Canada has steadily gained ground against the virus, even as the United States has surrendered to it.

In the first months of the year, the trajectory of the disease in Canada approximately tracked the trajectory in the United States. Then, in early summer, the two countries’ experiences began to radically diverge.

At the end of April, the United States was reporting new cases at a rate—relative to population—approximately double Canada’s. That was only 12 weeks ago. On July 22, the United States reported new cases at a rate 14 times Canada’s.

In raw terms: On July 22, the 37.5 million people of Canada recorded 543 new coronavirus cases and eight fatalities. That same day, the 328 million people of the United States reported a staggering 69,730 new cases and 1,136 deaths.

When you arrive in Canada, you instantly understand the basic cause of the disparity. It’s not the health-care system, exactly—although that has coped better, too.  . . . . my two Canadian nephews took the precaution of a COVID-19 test before coming to visit us in the country. They got the test on a walk-in basis. The results arrived a few hours later: all clear.

Outside the hospitals and clinics, people in every walk of life are taking the disease seriously. They wear masks. They stand outside of stores. They don’t complain all the time about trivial inconveniences.

[N]obody has thought to make a political issue out of the science of fighting pandemics. Back in April, the Conservative premier of Ontario denounced people protesting social-distancing rules as “irresponsible, reckless, and selfish.” The Conservative premier of Alberta has distributed 40 million free masks in his 4.4-million-person province. Left, right, and center, Canadians wear coats when it gets cold. Left, right, and center, they wear masks during a pandemic spread by airborne droplets. It’s just not something to argue over.

On July 22, Quebec reported zero deaths from COVID-19. That same day, the state of Arizona, home to 1 million fewer people than the province of Quebec, reported 89 deaths.

Canada is not a star of the COVID-19 class. Per capita, it has suffered three times as many deaths from the disease as Australia and Germany. What the Canadian example does show, however, is what the United States could have looked like if the U.S. effort had not been led by malicious, self-seeking incompetents. Some Americans would still be getting sick; some would be dying. The disease would remain very much a problem to reckon with. But the worst would be over. Reopening schools would be feasible. Transit systems would not threaten the lives of their users. Economic recovery would have begun.

Instead, the Trump administration and Trump-swayed governors have turned a crisis into a catastrophe—a catastrophe that continues to get uniquely worse in the United States even as it ebbs almost everywhere else in the developed world. In retrospect, the most humiliating fact about the coronavirus pandemic was that under responsible leadership and with some moderate amount of social cohesion, it was a highly manageable threat. Within less than six months of the first cases, it became apparent what to do. Almost everybody else in the developed world then did it. Almost everybody else in the developed world is now collecting the benefits of having done it.

Donald Trump, following the imperatives of his own ego, refused to do it. He then imposed that refusal on the federal government, and encouraged it in Republican-led states, as Fox News hosts and Facebook posters applauded.

It could have been otherwise. It still could be. But in July as in January, the biggest difference between the United States and the rest of the developed world is that the U.S. has the misfortune of having Donald Trump in charge.

America is exceptional alright, but not in good way.

Why America Failed to Beat Covid-19 in One Word: Trump

The myth of American exceptionalism drives me to distraction.  Almost every nation sees itself as exceptional in some ways and history is littered with former empires and so-called great powers that disappeared or seen their glory days fade away.  Now, in the age of a worldwide pandemic, America has shown itself to be exceptional in the worse way possible: the pandemic is out of control in many states and Americans are banned from traveling to most parts of the world. Europe, Canada, Mexico, most of the Caribbean region, including the Bahamas, will not allow Americans to visit.  America finds itself somewhere between a laughing stock and an object of pity.  How did this happen?  One word - actually, one name - explains it all: Trump.  A column in the New York Times compares the US response to that of Italy, a country often viewed by many as dysfunctional, especially its bureaucracy, and the comparison is damning.   Of course, besides Trump, America has another huge negative working against it: the fake news outlets of the far right and "conservatives" who reject science and knowledge and blindly support the con-artist in the White House.  Here are column highlights:

A few days ago The Times published a long, damning article about how the Trump administration managed to fail so completely in responding to the coronavirus. Much of the content confirmed what anyone following the debacle suspected. One thing I didn’t see coming, however, was the apparently central role played by Italy’s experience.

Italy, you see, was the first Western nation to experience a major wave of infections. Hospitals were overwhelmed; partly as a result, the initial death toll was terrible. Yet cases peaked after a few weeks and began a steep decline. And White House officials were seemingly confident that America would follow a similar track.

We didn’t. U.S. cases plateaued for a couple of months, then began rising rapidly. Death rates followed with a lag. At this point we can only look longingly at Italy’s success in containing the coronavirus: Restaurants and cafes are open, albeit with restrictions, much of normal life has resumed, yet Italy’s current death rate is less than a 10th of America’s.

Donald Trump keeps boasting that we’ve had the best coronavirus response in the world, and some credulous supporters may actually believe him, my guess is that many people are aware that our handling of the virus has fallen tragically short compared with, say, that of Germany. It may not seem surprising, however, that German discipline and competence have paid off (although we used to think that we were better prepared than anyone else to deal with a pandemic). But how can America be doing so much worse than Italy?

For all its problems, Italy is a serious and sophisticated country, not a comic-opera stage set. Still, Italy entered this pandemic with major disadvantages compared with the United States.

Unfavorable demography and economic troubles are also major Italian disadvantages. The ratio of seniors to working-age adults is the highest in the Western world. Italy’s growth record is deeply disappointing: Per capita G.D.P. has stagnated for two decades.

When it came to dealing with Covid-19, however, all these Italian disadvantages were outweighed by one huge advantage: Italy wasn’t burdened with America’s disastrous leadership.

Italy quickly moved to do what was necessary to deal with the coronavirus. It instituted a very severe lockdown, and kept to it. Government aid helped sustain workers and businesses through the lockdown. The safety net had holes in it, but top officials tried to make it work; in a supreme case of non-Trumpism, the prime minister even apologized for delays in aid.

And, crucially, Italy crushed the curve: It kept the lockdown in place until cases were relatively few, and it was cautious about reopening.

America could have followed the same path. . . . But the Trump administration and its allies pushed for rapid reopening, ignoring warnings from epidemiologists. Because we didn’t do what Italy did, we didn’t crush the curve; quite the opposite. Matters were made worse by pathological opposition to things like wearing masks, the way even obvious precautions became battlegrounds in the culture wars.

So cases and then deaths surged. Even the promised economic payoff from rapid, what-me-worry reopening was a mirage

Incredibly, Trump and his allies seem to have given no thought at all about what to do if the overwhelming view of experts was right, and their gamble on ignoring the coronavirus didn’t pan out. A miraculous boom was Plan A; there was no Plan B.

[T]ens of millions of workers are about to lose crucial unemployment benefits, and Republicans haven’t even settled on a bad response. On Wednesday Senate Republicans floated the idea of reducing supplemental benefits from $600 a week to just $100, which would spell disaster for many families.

For someone like Trump, all this must be humiliating — or would be if anyone dared tell him about it. After three and a half years of Making America Great Again, we’ve become a pathetic figure on the world stage, a cautionary tale about pride going before a fall.

These days Americans can only envy Italy’s success in weathering the coronavirus, its rapid return to a kind of normalcy that is a distant dream in a nation that used to congratulate itself for its can-do culture. Italy is often referred to as “the sick man of Europe”; what does that make us?

Do Americans Understand How Badly They’re Doing?

The 4th of July holiday is just past us and many Americans remain  lost in the myth of American exceptionalism as the much of the nation remains in the grip of a pandemic that other nations appear to have brought under control.  Yes, America is exceptional alright, but not in a good way.  Meanwhile I see some Facebook friends struggle to continue close their eyes to the reality that the occupant of the White House has failed them miserably - as have boot-licking Republican governors.  These individuals seemingly refuse to believe that their leaders are not acting in the interests of citizens, but rather out of narcissism in the case of Trump, and fear in the case of self-prostituting Republicans.  One friend posted recently about how great powers have fallen over the centuries and then wondered if the United States was following this path. My response back would be, yes it is and that Trump, rather than "making America great again" has accelerated the nation's decline.  One has to wonder when the majority of Americans will open their eyes to this unpleasant reality.  A piece in The Atlantic by an American living in France looks at this question.  Here are article excerpts:

I returned to Paris with my family three months after President Emmanuel Macron had ordered one of the world’s most aggressive national quarantines, and one month after France had begun to ease itself out of it. When we exited the Gare Montparnasse into the late-spring glare, after a season tucked away in a rural village with more cows than people as neighbors, it was jarring to be thrust back into the world as we’d previously known it, to see those café terraces overflowing again with smiling faces.

The city had been culled of its tourists, though it was bustling with inhabitants basking in their reclaimed freedom. Half at most wore masks; the other half evinced indifference. We were in the midst of a crisis, I complained to my wife. Why were so many people unable to maintain even minimal discipline?

Glued as I am to the news from the U.S.—where I was born and grew up and travel frequently— I couldn’t shake the feeling that France was also opening up recklessly early. But I was wrong to worry. As Donald Trump’s America continues to shatter records for daily infections, France, like most other developed nations and even some undeveloped ones, seems to have beat back the virus.

The numbers are not ambiguous. From a peak of 7,581 new cases across the country on March 31, and with a death toll now just below 30,000—at one point the world’s fourth highest—there were just 526 new cases on June 13, the day we masked ourselves and took the train back to Paris. The caseload continues to be small and manageable.

America, however, is an utter disaster. Texas, Florida, and Arizona are the newest hubs of contagion, having apparently learned nothing from the other countries and states that previously experienced surges in cases. I stared at my phone in disbelief when the musician Rosanne Cash wrote on Twitter that her daughter had been called a “liberal pussy!” in Nashville for wearing a mask to buy groceries.

That insult succinctly conveys the crux of the problem. American leadership has politicized the pandemic instead of trying to fight it. I see no preparedness, no coordinated top-down leadership of the sort we’ve enjoyed in Europe. I see only empty posturing, the sad spectacle of the president refusing to wear a mask, just to own the libs. What an astonishing self-inflicted wound.

On June 26, a day when the U.S. notched some 45,000 new cases—how’s that for “American carnage”?—the European Union announced that it would loosen some travel restrictions but extend its ban on visitors from the United States and other hot-spot nations. On Tuesday, it confirmed that remarkable and deeply humiliating decision, a clear message that in pandemic management, the EU believes that the United States is no better than Russia and Brazil—autocrat-run public-health disasters—and that American tourists would pose a dire threat to the hard-won stability our lockdown has earned us. So much for the myth that the American political system and way of life are a model for the world.

We didn’t stay long in the city. Although the chance of contagion in Paris is minimal, the thought of unnecessary risk unnerved me, and so we left again for another round of self-imposed confinement. But this was a choice. I think of my mother and father trapped in New Jersey, in their 70s and 80s, respectively, and at the mercy of a society that is failing extravagantly to protect them. And it is failing to protect them not from some omnipotent enemy—as we believed in March and perhaps even as late as April—but from a tough and dangerous foe that many other societies have wrestled into submission.

I am infuriated. I am also reminded once again of the degree to which so many other countries deliver what is, in real terms, a palpably higher quality of life by any number of self-evident measures.

America is my home, and I have not emigrated. I have always found the truest expression of my situation in James Baldwin’s label of “transatlantic commuter.” I have lived in France off and on since the early 2000s, and it has been instructive over the decades to glimpse America’s stature reflected back to me through the eyes of a quasi-foreigner. If the country sparked fear and intense resentment under George W. Bush and mild resentment mixed with vicarious pride under Barack Obama, what it provokes under Trump has been something entirely new: pity and indifference. We are the pariah state now, but do we even see it?

The Decline of the American World

If one surveys the so-called great powers over the course of history, all eventually fade and give way to successor powers - e.g, the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, Spain. France, the British Empire,  Some have fallen due to military might of other nations, yet most have also declined due to internal problems and a failure/refusal to address the problems.  Of course, there is also the issue of failed leadership that has served to exacerbate internal and external threats and problems. A very long piece The Atlantic looks at America as it seemingly finds itself a such a cross roads with a totally unfit occupant in the White House who serves only to worsen external and internal threats. Compounding the situation is America's long history of refusing to be honest about its history and its moral failings that are all too often swept under the myth of American exceptionalism.  Another four more years of Trump in the White House would only serve to further accelerate America;s decline.  Already, the damage done has been incalculable.  Here are article highlights:

“He hated America very deeply,” John le Carré wrote of his fictional Soviet mole, Bill Haydon, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Haydon had just been unmasked as a double agent at the heart of Britain’s secret service, one whose treachery was motivated by animus, not so much to England but to America. “It’s an aesthetic judgment as much as anything,” Haydon explained, before hastily adding: “Partly a moral one, of course.”

I thought of this as I watched the scenes of protest and violence over the killing of George Floyd spread across the United States and then here in Europe and beyond. . . . . The beauty of America seemed to have gone, the optimism and charm and easy informality that entrances so many of us from abroad.

At one level, the ugliness of the moment seems a trite observation to make. And yet it gets to the core of the complicated relationship the rest of the world has with America.

Le Carré’s reflection on the motivations of anti-Americanism—bound up, as they are, with his own ambivalent feelings about the United States—are as relevant today as they were in 1974, when the novel was first published. Where there was then Richard Nixon, there is now Donald Trump, a caricature of what the Haydons of this world already despise: brash, grasping, rich, and in charge. In the president and first lady, the burning cities and race divides, the police brutality and poverty, an image of America is beamed out, confirming the prejudices that much of the world already have—while also serving as a useful device to obscure its own injustices, hypocrisies, racism, and ugliness.

It is hard to escape the feeling that this is a uniquely humiliating moment for America. As citizens of the world the United States created, we are accustomed to listening to those who loathe America, admire America, and fear America (sometimes all at the same time). But feeling pity for America? That one is new, even if the schadenfreude is painfully myopic. If it’s the aesthetic that matters, the U.S. today simply doesn’t look like the country that the rest of us should aspire to, envy, or replicate.

Even in previous moments of American vulnerability, Washington reigned supreme. Whatever moral or strategic challenge it faced, there was a sense that its political vibrancy matched its economic and military might, that its system and democratic culture were so deeply rooted that it could always regenerate itself. It was as if the very idea of America mattered . . . Now, something appears to be changing. America seems mired, its very ability to rebound in question. A new power has emerged on the world stage to challenge American supremacy—China—with a weapon the Soviet Union never possessed: mutually assured economic destruction.

For the United States, this cultural dominance is both an enormous strength and a subtle weakness. It draws in talented outsiders to study, build businesses, and rejuvenate itself, molding and dragging the world with it as it does, influencing and distorting those unable to escape its pull. Yet this dominance comes with a cost: The world can see into America, but America cannot look back. And today, the ugliness that is on display is amplified, not calmed, by the American president.

America’s closest allies are looking on with a kind of stunned incomprehension, unsure of what will happen, what it means, and what they should do, largely bound together with angst and a shared sense, as one influential adviser told me, that America and the West are approaching something of a fin de siècle.

[T]he confluence of recent events and modern forces has made the present challenge particularly dangerous. The street protests, violence, and racism of the past few weeks have erupted at the very moment the country’s institutional failings have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforced by its apparently unbridgeable partisan divide, which is now even infecting parts of the American machine that have so far been untouched: its federal agencies, diplomatic service, and the long-standing norms underpinning the relationship between civilians and the military. All of this is happening in the final year of the first term of the most chaotic, loathed, and disrespected president in modern American history.

Most of those I spoke to were, however, clear that Trump’s leadership has brought these currents—in tandem with the pressure of relative economic decline, the rise of China, the reemergence of great-power politics, and the decline of the West as a spiritual union—to a head in a manner and speed previously unimaginable.

[T]he nadir of American prestige has, until now, been the revelations of torture and abuse inside the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in 2004. “Today, it is much worse,” he said. What makes things different now, according to Duclos, is the extent of division within the United States and the lack of leadership in the White House. “We live with the idea that the U.S. has an ability to rebound that is almost unlimited,” Duclos said. “For the first time, I’m starting to have some doubts.”

Put bluntly, Trump is unique. At the most basic level, Bush never recoiled from the core idea that there was a Western song, and that the lyrics should be composed in Washington. Trump today hears no unifying music—only the dull beat of self-interest.

One senior adviser to a European leader, who did not want to be named relating private deliberations, told me that Continental snobbery at the notion of American leadership of the free world, of the “American Dream” and other clichés dismissed until now as hopelessly naive, has suddenly been exposed by Trump’s cynicism.

Those that I spoke to divided their concerns, implicitly or explicitly, into those caused by Trump and those exacerbated by him—between the specific problems of his presidency that, in their view, can be rectified, and those that are structural and much more difficult to solve. Almost everyone I spoke to agreed that the Trump presidency has been a watershed not just for the U.S. but for the world itself: It is something that cannot be undone. Words once said cannot be unsaid; images that are seen are unable to be unseen.

The immediate concern for many of those I interviewed was the apparent hollowing out of American capacity. Lawrence Freedman, a professor of war studies at King’s College London, told me the institutions of American power themselves have been “battered.” The health system is struggling, the municipalities are financially broke, and, beyond the police and the military, little attention is being paid to the health of the state itself. Worst of all, he said, “they don’t know how to fix it.”

A European ambassador told me Trump himself is an expression of American decline. “Choosing Trump is a way of not very successfully adapting to the globalized world,” the diplomat, who asked for anonymity, said. It is a sign of the United States following other great powers downward, . . . . “The Netherlands were the dominant global power in the 18th century. Today they are a successful country, but they have simply lost their power. To some extent the U.K. and France are on the journey to become the Netherlands, and the U.S. is on the journey to be Britain and France.” . . . “The collapse of the American Empire is a given; we are just trying to figure out what will replace it.”

America’s problem is that the rest of the world can see when it has fallen below its achievements. In moments such as the current one, it is hard to dispute some of the criticisms leveled by the country’s most vociferous critics from abroad: that it is irredeemably racist or overly ambivalent to poverty and violence, police brutality and guns. The rights and wrongs don’t appear particularly complicated in this dilemma, even if the country itself is.

Americans Are Recognizing The U.S. is Falling Behind its Peers

I have been a long time critic of the concept of American exceptionalism - something that is far more myth than reality.  In fact, when America is measured by its peers across the rest of the developed, industrialized world, it comes up short.  If America is exceptional, it is a negative way.  America has some of the highest levels of childhood poverty, a crumbling infrastructure, insane levels of gun violence, millions who lack access to quality health care, a declining life expectancy, declining opportunities for upward social mobility - a number of European nations have better options for upward mobility - and a pathetic social safety net.  As a column in the Washington Post notes, one positive aspect of the Covid - 19 pandemic is that Americans are increasingly willing to open their eyes and face the fact that America is falling behind much of the rest of the developed world. The piece also suggest part of the problem: the obstruction of the Republican Party which remains focused on benefiting the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.  Possibilities for change and improvement exist, but they begin with the need for political change.  Here are excerpts:

Americans’ belief in American exceptionalism is declining — and that could be a good thing. National narcissism has rendered us complacent, even impotent, in the face of multiple crises.

On our biggest societal problems, the United States seems to have given up. Not because we can’t do better — but because many political leaders, particularly Republicans, apparently don’t think we need to. Their faith that America is already Living Its Best Life means there’s no need to learn from peer countries, or even gauge our relative performance. Consider:

Most of the rest of the developed world has managed to get covid-19′s spread under control. New cases across the European Union have plummeted; in New Zealand, the virus has been virtually wiped out. These and other places that have successfully mitigated the spread have enabled more citizens to safely return to their pre-covid-19 lifestyles, including even attending athletic events with packed crowds.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, the bodies pile up. New confirmed cases are again surging, especially across Sun Belt states. And political leaders seem to have no plan, nor even a plan to make a plan, for beating back the pandemic. Instead, they simply declare the virus vanquished, even as it claims more lives.

How did a country once known for our get-up-and-go come to shrug off mass death, particularly when other countries’ records suggest many U.S. covid-19 deaths were preventable?

Faith in American exceptionalism has curdled into resigned acceptance. We got so accustomed to resting on our laurels that we fell asleep.

This is of a piece with our supine responses to other national challenges that are unusually (sometimes uniquely) American. Much as they gave up on coronavirus containment, U.S. political leaders previously gave up on solving our epidemic of gun violence. And on our high numbers of police-perpetrated killings. Also our high rates of child poverty, uninsurance and carbon emissions.

On these and other metrics, the United States fares worse than most if not all other industrialized countries. Yet U.S. officials — from one party in particular — treat these crises as imaginary or unsolvable.

On the occasions political leaders do acknowledge that we’re not measuring up to peers, they excuse the failing as a trade-off necessary to pursue some other, supposedly superior American ideal. America can’t protect schoolchildren as other countries do, because we must prioritize unfettered access to firearms. America can’t save its grandparents from covid-19, because the Dow takes precedence. America can’t guarantee everyone health care, because [something something] liberty.

But there may be a ray of hope: Recent crises — involving health, the economy and police brutality — seem to have caused more Americans to question their country’s track record.

So suggests the COVID-19 Social Change Survey, a daily, nationally representative survey about the pandemic run by Northwestern University social scientists since mid-March. Some survey questions asked whether the United States is better, worse or about the same as other nations across about a dozen topics (economy, health care, criminal justice system, military, education, etc.).

On nearly every metric, the share of Americans rating the United States as “better” than other countries has declined since the pandemic began.

Other questions, from this survey and longer-term polling by Gallup, show declines in broader measures of national pride and confidence in U.S. institutions.

Normally, of course, reduced patriotism or institutional trust would not be positive developments. These declines can be constructive only if they spur the public — and elected officials — to create conditions that would inspire more patriotism and trust.

Maybe a more realistic assessment of our flaws — a crack in the national narcissism — will motivate change, at least if politicians ever catch up with their constituents.

Why America Resists Learning From Other Countries

One of the aspects of the United States that I find most annoying and arrogant and at times down right dangerous is the myth of American exceptionalism and a refusal to learn from the experiences of other countries, many of which have existed for centuries longer than America (e.g., the Romanov family ruled Russia for 60 years longer than America has existed; the Byzantine Empire lasted over 1000 years).  Sadly, both political parties cite this myth, but it is most popular on the right where Europe - which now has more upward social mobility than in America - is derided and the mindset is that American do everything better and has nothing to learn from others.  Time and time again, factual reality proves this myth wrong and now, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, if anything, America is showing that it is exceptional in its bungling of its response to the pandemic.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at America's continued refusal to learn from other countries, often to its own detriment.  Here are article highlights:

Americans have long considered their nation a shining “city upon a hill,” with the “eyes of all people … upon us,” as the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop put it almost 400 years ago. Now those eyes are riveted on the United States for all the wrong reasons. The country is consumed by the worst COVID-19 outbreak on the planet, and the beacons of light are popping up elsewhere in the world.

R. Daniel Kelemen, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has studied what the United States could learn from European public policies, told me that those who subscribe to the ideology of American exceptionalism, or as he described it, “the notion that the United States is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations,” have traditionally resisted seeking out lessons from other countries’ experiences. At the very least, “this view leads many to think that the U.S. is simply so different that policies that might work in other countries could simply never work here,” he wrote in an email.

American exceptionalism has been pronounced dead numerous times, from the Vietnam War through the global War on Terror, and nevertheless managed to stick around through those difficult periods. But the coronavirus crisis may pose the greatest threat yet to the belief that America has little to learn from the rest of the world.

American politicians typically resist engaging with ideas from abroad. Most U.S. public-policy debates, on matters including education reform and social mobility, occur in a bizarre vacuum, as if the encounters (good and bad) of the large majority of humankind with these same challenges yield no useful insights for the United States. On the rare occasions that politicians do invoke the policies of other governments, they often wield them as political props during highly polarized debates over issues such as health care and gun control.

And many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.

This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College (and a former contributing editor at The Atlantic), told me by email.

Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.

“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.

Instead, the United States squandered that advantage on many fronts. The Obama administration had developed a playbook for pandemic response that drew in part on lessons from other countries’ experiences, but the Trump administration disregarded it. When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March. “We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.” By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.

Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country, despite Donald Trump’s assertions since March that anybody who wants a test can get one. It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.

Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. . . . . He has stated, referring to America’s coronavirus response, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and “so many” other world leaders, “almost all of them—I would say all of them; not everybody would want to admit it—but they all view us as the world leader, and they're following us.” Even after he has asked the South Korean government to send tests and medical equipment to the United States to help combat the coronavirus, Trump is insisting that the country cough up much more money for the privilege of stationing U.S. troops there. It’s a measure of traditional American hard power that seems obsolete these days, relative to South Korea’s newfound clout as a world leader in addressing COVID-19. My colleague Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump’s proposal in April that people inject themselves with disinfectant, to the horror of scientists and laughter of people at home and abroad, marked an “acceleration point” for a “post-American, post-coronavirus world … in which American opinions will count less.”

A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.

In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton critiqued Bernie Sanders’s proclivity to look to other countries for policy insights and innovations (“We are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America,” Clinton said), but many of Sanders’s fellow candidates during the 2020 Democratic primary echoed his admiration for other countries’ achievements. “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.

The United States, of course, still has tremendous capacity to teach. But it also may need to emerge from this crisis recognizing that it has equal capacity to learn. To learn is to admit room for improvement, and thus to improve, especially in dealing with modern-day threats such as pandemics, which America doesn’t have much experience contending with as a superpower. The United States could, for example, easily seize on the momentum among many of its allies to pool lessons learned and coordinate policies to combat the virus and reopen economies.

I will not hold my breath waiting for Americans - especially those who support the GOP and its growing embrace of ignorance and white nationalism to learn from others anytime soon.  Meanwhile, people will literally dies because of the belief in American exceptionalism. 

Are You Rich Enough to Survive the Pandemic?

In a past post, the case was made that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed that America is a failed state when the measurement is serving the vast majority of its citizens.  Unlike western European nations, America has a very poor social safety net and how well one survives the pandemic crisis could ultimately come down to how much money one has if not working in an industry deemed essential and still providing an income.  Before the pandemic, upward social mobility in America had fallen precipitously and now one has been chances of upward mobility in "Old Europe" - a Republicans term of derision.  Blinding too many is the continued myth of American exceptionalism - a term bandied about by politicians of both political parties - that ignores and seeks to gloss over America's many systemic economic and social problems. As the pandemic grinds on, the wealthy know they will survive while the least fortunate wonder where their next meal will come from.  A long piece in New York Magazine looks at this reality and makes one wonder if Americans will ever demand the system be improved.  Here are highlights:

There was the pandemic, then there was the storm. Of all the natural disasters, tornadoes lend themselves the most to being read as Providence. Like hurricanes and wildfires, they can level everything in their path, but those paths can also be narrow enough, forgiving enough, to grind one house into debris while leaving the neighboring structure untouched. Metaphors become redundant in the face of such calamity; the thing to which you’d otherwise be comparing it is, too often, what it already is.

But when disaster looms, we grasp for deeper meaning. When the disaster is unfamiliar, our imaginations retreat to more familiar terms, even primordial ones, as with the notion that celestial forces control our fate. The need to ascribe our misfortunes to some grand plan makes it hard not to look for cosmic significance in the tornadoes that ripped through the American South on Easter Sunday, months after the novel coronavirus made itself known on U.S. shores and several weeks after any of us had left the house.

But if recent months have proved anything, it’s that most disasters we otherwise understand as “natural” have an uncanny way of reflecting human design. Randomness isn’t justice, even a perverse form, distributed equitably. It is a test of vulnerability — of your wherewithal to prepare, escape, recover.

The wrong lesson, of impartial vulnerability, will always be there, tempting. As, understandably, will be metaphysical rationales for physical phenomena — faith, myth. These have been instrumental in helping people navigate the otherwise unspeakable. But alongside them an insidious form of self-deception can take root: the lies we tell to reconcile our behavior, good and bad, with our idealized conceptions of who we are as individuals and as Americans. Faced with horrors so vast they make us feel impotent, we tell ourselves that crises invariably bring out our best; there’s no shortage of heroic anecdotes to reinforce this narrative, encompassing emergency response, provision of health care, neighborliness. But more often, these displays are too diffuse, too renegade, to overcome the scale of the disaster itself. The long list of crises that have taken America’s most brutal inequalities and enhanced them suggests the opposite conclusion, that a motivating shame should be our main takeaway from hurricanes Katrina and Maria, the 2008 economic crisis, the forever wars in which we’re now ensnared. For elected officials, in particular, pressure is high to sell a more flattering vision of U.S. culture — one defined by an unshakable belief that America, as a project, is singularly good, noble, and ripe with opportunity even in the toughest of times.

This vision regularly finds itself at odds with reality. Governor Cuomo knows as well as any that the coronavirus isn’t really “the great equalizer,” that generations of inequality cannot be erased simply by giving two people of differing economic backgrounds the same disease. You’d have to bury your head in the sand to ignore the obvious: By almost every metric, those getting the sickest and dying most frequently and being plunged into dire financial straits at disproportionate rates are the same people who were vulnerable and marginalized before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic.

A brief accounting: Hungry people have been stuck in traffic jams at the Forum in Inglewood, California, as thousands of motorists wend their way through the parking lot to pick up free groceries. Twenty-six million Americans have filed for unemployment since the middle of March, and a nationwide strain on food-bank capacity has resulted, with demand increasing by an average of 40 percent. “Lower-income workers, minority communities, communities of color, folks working in service jobs, folks living in public housing, folks with kids who are on the free, reduced lunch programs” . . . . “those are the folks who are really feeling the pain on this. And they were already in pain before.”

One could drive just off the Las Vegas Strip and see dozens of homeless people asleep in a taped-off parking lot while empty but still gaudily lit luxury hotels loomed above them. County officials have been unable to reach a deal with casino owners to house the houseless in their unused hotel rooms, where they might enjoy a modicum of safety and hygiene. Recent actions by the Vegas city council had already criminalized resting on sidewalks for even brief stretches of time; pressed for lodging options, many people were forced into cramped shelters that have since become hotbeds of infection.

Older people have been especially imperiled: for instance, the outbreak at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, which killed 43 people and vivified COVID’s lopsided threat to the elderly. In nursing homes across the country, 11,000 have already died.

But the suffering is larger still than the dying. Recent polls indicate that as many as two-thirds of Latino adults have lost their jobs or seen their incomes reduced as a result of the economic downturn. Much of this is attributable to Latino workers’ high representation among wage laborers in service and hospitality industries, which have been decimated. Even as American life retreats indoors, ICE raids continue, bringing armed agents into people’s homes and risking the spread of infection, then transporting those they capture to detention facilities known for incubating diseases. In a cruel twist of irony, many undocumented agricultural workers, demonized for years by nativists, have been deemed “essential” for their role in maintaining the food-supply chain. Grocery employees, home health aides, social workers — the essential economy under the coronavirus is rife with traditionally undercompensated professions staffed largely by people of color, especially women . . .

Preliminary data points to some of the bleakest outcomes for black Americans, as anyone might have predicted even before that data began rolling in. Homeless, imprisoned, and impoverished people in the U.S. have and continue to be disproportionately black, with the accompanying health risks: higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, all reliable indicators of whether an otherwise manageable case of COVID could turn fatal. Black victims compose 40 percent of Michigan’s infected dead but 14 percent of the state’s population, for instance. They’re 70 percent of the dead in Louisiana, one of the country’s biggest epicenters outside New York, but just 33 percent of the population.

These are the people whose suffering is neglected when terms like equalizer are reduced to platitudes. But neglecting it in practice, as many officials have, also shapes our expectations of what returning to normal looks like. Social conditions that seemed intolerable six months ago have since acquired the sheen of an idyllic recovery. Getting back to work, earning wages again — these are broad improvements over what we have now that, nevertheless, won’t repair the long-standing circumstances of millions whose bigger problems were always structural. That many of us can’t even begin to expect or even conceptualize this — in a moment so desperate, so damning to the notion that America’s best feature is its ability to manufacture prosperity, a reopening where black doesn’t mean sicker, Latino doesn’t mean lower wages, and poor doesn’t mean unreliable food or housing — reaffirms that for millions, normality is cruel enough.

This is where the history that produced America’s undercastes is hardest to escape, where the flattering delusions that neglect suffering look less like personal coping mechanisms than a national inheritance. When Trump’s surrogates urge people to sacrifice their lives to resuscitate the economy, they aren’t just protecting his reelection prospects; they’re advancing a culture war fueled by resentment toward people who’ve long been understood as unworthy. It’s why Trumpist protesters brandishing the Confederate flag can storm the Michigan capitol calling on the governor to rescind her stay-at-home orders and have the emblem not seem incongruous.

Deception that obscures inequality isn’t just expedient. It infuses tragedy with a tacit moral dimension, where the worst suffering is presumed to be reserved for those who deserve it — whether by being too poor, too black, too proximate to either.

What happens when this magnitude of crisis befalls the entire country? There’s a liberal impulse to treat these disasters as emancipatory, freeing us from the illusion of an equitable status quo, the better to pursue the real thing with our vision unclouded. This might be true for some, though whether their awakening produces the requisite policy response is less clear. I’d say, in fact, it’s doubtful. The reality thus far, rather than solidarity, has overwhelmingly been individuals left to manage the fallout alone, in many cases owing to the absence of infrastructure whereby they might help one another. Dairy farmers in Wisconsin dump thousands of gallons of milk a day, citing less need from schools and restaurants, while food-pantry lines in San Antonio and Dallas stretch for blocks, and there’s no public entity to connect the two.

How societies mitigate the pain they cause at the margins is far more revealing — how much we invest, as Americans, in catching the vulnerable when the floor is ripped from beneath them. We may tell ourselves the pandemic is asking this question of us, but if we had the courage to look clearly, the answer was evident long before this crisis: in how our society distributes suffering, the stories we tell to make it compatible with our national self-regard; how aggressively so many insist on overlooking the foreseeable. The depth of havoc that the coronavirus wreaks on its inevitable victims was, and is, within America’s capacity to determine. We have few insights into the path it’s cutting today that we haven’t had for years and that we weren’t already ignoring.

America is Failing at Child Care

It has been a long time since most American families could afford to have one spouse work and the other be the full time child care provider. Now, both spouses must work full time simply in order to make ends meet financially.  The losers in this are the vast majority of America's children, those not born to wealth who find themselves shuffled from various child care scenarios as their parents work. And this doesn't even factor in America's abysmal record on maternity leave compared to every other advanced nation - and even some not considered advanced. Why does America spend relatively lavishly on senior citizens yet begrudge spending on children.  Sadly, part of the reason is racial - a false perception that "those people" receive childcare benefits whereas "real Americans" (meaning whites) do not. Republican propaganda has fueled this lie for decades.  This belief is a fallacy, of course, as countless white working mothers struggle to work and provide child care for their children.  With two working daughters I see it daily in their juggling act.  A column in the New York Times looks at America's failed treatment of children which is literally harming the nation's future.   Here are highlights:

The other day a correspondent asked me a good question: What important issue aren’t we talking about? My answer, after some reflection, is the state of America’s children.

But policy toward children has attracted far less media attention than the debate over “Medicare for all,” which won’t become reality anytime soon — let alone the so-called Warren-Sanders “spat.” And my guess is that even well-informed voters have little sense of the grim exceptionalism of America’s child-oriented policies, which are Dickensian compared with those of every other advanced country.

A few numbers may be in order here.

Every advanced country mandates some form of paid leave for new mothers, typically three or four months — every country, that is, except America, which offers no maternity leave at all.

Most advanced countries devote substantial sums to benefits for families with children; in Europe these benefits average between 2 and 3 percent of G.D.P. The corresponding number for the United States is 0.6 percent of G.D.P.

Even where the United States does help children, the quality of that help tends to be poor. There have been many comparisons between French and American school lunches: French schoolchildren are taught to eat healthy meals; American children are basically treated as a disposal site for farm surpluses.

What’s especially striking is the contrast between the way we treat our children and the way we treat our senior citizens. Social Security isn’t all that generous — there’s a good case for expanding it — but it doesn’t compare too badly with other countries’ retirement systems. Medicare actually spends lavishly compared with single-payer systems elsewhere.

So America’s refusal to help children isn’t part of a broad opposition to government programs; we single out children for especially harsh treatment. Why?

The answer, I’d suggest, goes beyond the fact that children can’t vote, while seniors can and do. There has also been a poisonous interaction between racial antagonism and bad social analysis.

These days, political support for programs that aid children is surely hurt by the fact that less than half the population under 15 is non-Hispanic white. But even before immigration transformed America’s ethnic landscape, there was a widespread perception that programs like Aid to Families With Dependent Children basically helped Those People — you know, the bums on welfare, the welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

This perception undermined support for spending on children. And it went along with a widespread belief that aid to poor families was creating a culture of dependency, which in turn was the culprit behind social collapse in America’s inner cities.

The result was a decline in assistance for the poor children who needed it most.

At this point, however, we know that cultural explanations of social collapse were all wrong. The sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that social dysfunction in big cities was caused, not by culture, but by the disappearance of good jobs. And he has been vindicated by what happened to much of the American heartland, which suffered a similar disappearance of good jobs and a similar surge in social dysfunction.

[W]e’ve established a basically vicious system under which children can’t get the help they need unless their parents find jobs that don’t exist. And a growing body of evidence says that this system is destructive as well as cruel.

Multiple studies have found that safety-net programs for children have big long-term consequences. Children who receive adequate nutrition and health care grow up to become healthier, more productive adults. And in addition to the humanitarian side of these benefits, there’s a monetary payoff: Healthier adults are less likely to need public aid and are likely to pay more in taxes.

It’s probably too much to claim that helping children pays for itself. But it surely comes a lot closer to doing so than tax cuts for the rich.

So we should be talking a lot more about helping America’s children. Why aren’t we?

At least part of the blame rests with Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare for All both a progressive purity test and a bright shiny object chased by the news media at the expense of other policies that could greatly improve American lives, and are far more likely to become law. But it’s not too late to refocus.

Whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, I hope he or she will give our nation’s shameful treatment of children the attention it deserves.

Afghan War Plagued by "Mendacity" and "Lies"

With the Trump/Pence regimes relying on lies to try to take America to war with Iran, it is perhaps timely that the truth about the Afghan War is finally coming out and that truth is ugly: Americans have been repeatedly and deliberately lied to both senior members of the military and by politicians. Meanwhile, Americans died and were grievously wounded, some bearing the physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives.  Afghanistan has been called the "graveyard of empires" and with good reason to anyone with a knowledge of history.  It turns out that America, despite its hubris and misguided (and false) sense of exceptionalism has done no better that would be conquerors of the past. Belatedly recognizing this will not bring back the dead, heal the forever wounded or restore the squanders taxpayer dollars. It should, however, educate the American public to refuse to be played for fools again by the military and/or hawkish politicians.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the trail of lies and wasted taxpayer money.  The takeaway, in my view, is that if Afghanistan was unwinnable, Iran would be an even larger disaster.  Here are excerpts:

The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction told Congress Wednesday that U.S. officials have routinely lied to the public during the 18-year war by exaggerating progress reports and inflating statistics to create a false appearance of success.

“There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue . . . mendacity and hubris,” John F. Sopko said in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The problem is there is a disincentive, really, to tell the truth. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.”

As an example, Sopko said U.S. officials have lied in the past about the number of Afghan children enrolled in schools — a key marker of progress touted by the Obama administration — even though they “knew the data was bad.” He also said U.S. officials falsely claimed major gains in Afghan life expectancy that were statistically impossible to achieve.

In addition, Sopko criticized the Trump administration for classifying information that shows the war is going badly, including data on Afghan troop casualties and assessments of the Taliban’s strength. . . . . “It turns out that everything that is bad news has been classified for the last few years.”

Since 2001, the United States has spent more than $132 billion to modernize the country — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to rebuild Europe after World War II.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee summoned Sopko to testify in response to a series of articles published last month in The Washington Post that revealed how senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the conflict had become unwinnable.

The inspector general had drawn on the interviews to publish seven reports — called “Lessons Learned” — about policy failures in Afghanistan. But the reports left out the harshest and most frank criticisms and omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project.

The Post obtained about 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from the interviews under the Freedom of Information Act, but had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to force it to release the records.

Several lawmakers said they were shocked by revelations in The Afghanistan Papers, including blunt admissions from generals, ambassadors and White House officials that they didn’t know what they were doing in Afghanistan and that the war strategy was fundamentally flawed.

Sopko defended his agency’s attempts to withhold the documents, saying he had an obligation to protect the identities of people who criticized the war and wanted to remain anonymous.

“These people who spoke to us risked a lot,” he said. “You know what this town is like, you know what it’s like if somebody bad-mouths their old boss or ­whatever.”

Everyone seeking to cover their own asses and keeping their own jobs while Americans needlessly died and billions of dollars might just have well been set on fire and burned.   We must not be tricked by lies again when it comes to the Middle East.

The Mis-education of the American Boy

Growing up gay (even in the closet) one often doesn't fall into the toxic masculinity category although one is well aware of all that term encompasses.  Indeed, if one is gay or rightly or wrongly targeted as gay, suddenly you become a preferred target of the toxic masculinity of your peers and classmates.  The result can become that you strive ever so hard to "pass" and be one of the guys. The emotional cost can be extreme and the effort difficult if you do not excel in team sports. I did not and was saved by the fact that I was lucky enough to have a family that owned a summer home and was vested in snow skiing which gave me the opportunity to excel at water skiing, sailing, snow skiing and other things that compensated for my other team sports deficiency. Despite my "lucky breaks," high school was one of the most horrible periods of my life. Most boys are not as lucky as I was and, as lengthy piece in The Atlantic lays out, America is suffering a crisis in the way boys are socialized and too often emotionally stunted and not allowed to be fully human.  The "jock culture" in particular leads to misogyny all to often.  With two young grandsons, I do not want to see their personalities stifled and warped by America's cult of toxic masculinity.  How this problem can be fixed is difficult to answer, particularly since so many fathers are victims of the same forces.  Here are article highlights: 

I’ve spent two years talking with boys across America—more than 100 of them between the ages of 16 and 21—about masculinity, sex, and love: about the forces, seen and unseen, that shape them as men. Though I spoke with boys of all races and ethnicities, I stuck to those who were in college or college-bound, because like it or not, they’re the ones most likely to set cultural norms. Nearly every guy I interviewed held relatively egalitarian views about girls, at least their role in the public sphere. They considered their female classmates to be smart and competent, entitled to their place on the athletic field and in school leadership, deserving of their admission to college and of professional opportunities. They all had female friends; most had gay male friends as well. That was a huge shift from what you might have seen 50, 40, maybe even 20 years ago. They could also easily reel off the excesses of masculinity. They’d seen the headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape, presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. A Big Ten football player I interviewed bandied about the term toxic masculinity. “Everyone knows what that is,” he said, when I seemed surprised.

Yet when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day). It’s not that all of these qualities, properly channeled, are bad. But while a 2018 national survey of more than 1,000 10-to-19-year-olds commissioned by Plan International USA and conducted by the polling firm PerryUndem found that young women believed there were many ways to be a girl—they could shine in math, sports, music, leadership (the big caveat being that they still felt valued primarily for their appearance)—young men described just one narrow route to successful masculinity.* One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when they were angry, society expected them to be combative. In another survey, which compared young men from the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico, Americans reported more social pressure to be ever-ready for sex and to get with as many women as possible; they also acknowledged more stigma against homosexuality, and they received more messages that they should control their female partners, as in: Men “deserve to know” the whereabouts of their girlfriends or wives at all times.

Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but there have been no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: The definition of masculinity seems to be in some respects contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male respondents in the PerryUndem survey said honesty and morality, and only 8 percent said leadership skills—traits that are, of course, admirable in anyone but have traditionally been considered masculine. When I asked my subjects, as I always did, what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank. “Huh,” mused Josh, a college sophomore at Washington State. (All the teenagers I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.) “That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide.

It wasn’t always thus. According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedly more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.

Then, during the second half of the 20th century, traditional paths to manhood—early marriage, breadwinning—began to close, along with the positive traits associated with them. Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence, which fuses hyperrationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence, fills the void.

For Cole, as for many boys, this stunted masculinity is a yardstick against which all choices, even those seemingly irrelevant to male identity, are measured. When he had a choice, he would team up with girls on school projects, to avoid the possibility of appearing subordinate to another guy. “With a girl, it feels safer to talk and ask questions, to work together or to admit that I did something wrong and want help,”

There is no difference between the sexes’ need for connection in infancy, nor between their capacity for empathy—there’s actually some evidence that male infants are more expressive than females. Yet, from the get-go, boys are relegated to an impoverished emotional landscape. . . . Despite that, according to Judy Y. Chu, a human-biology lecturer at Stanford who conducted a study of boys from pre-K through first grade, little boys have a keen understanding of emotions and a desire for close relationships. But by age 5 or 6, they’ve learned to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings of weakness, reject friendships with girls (or take them underground, outside of school), and become more hierarchical in their behavior.

By adolescence, says the Harvard psychologist William Pollack, boys become “shame-phobic,” convinced that peers will lose respect for them if they discuss their personal problems. My conversations bore this out. Boys routinely confided that they felt denied—by male peers, girlfriends, the media, teachers, coaches, and especially their fathers—the full spectrum of human expression. . . . . Cole spoke of his mom with unbridled love and respect. His father was another matter. “He’s a nice guy,” Cole said—caring and involved, even after the divorce—“but I can’t be myself around him. I feel like I need to keep everything that’s in here”—Cole tapped his chest again—“behind a wall, where he can’t see it. It’s a taboo—like, not as bad as incest, but …”

Other boys also pointed to their fathers as the chief of the gender police, though in a less obvious way. . . . “there’s a block there. There’s a hesitation, even though I don’t like to admit that. A hesitation to talk about … anything, really. We learn to confide in nobody. You sort of train yourself not to feel.”

Only after multiple interviews did I realize that when boys confided in me about crying—or, even more so, when they teared up right in front of me—they were taking a risk, trusting me with something private and precious: evidence of vulnerability, or a desire for it. Or, as with Rob, an inability to acknowledge any human frailty that was so poignant, it made me want to, well, cry.

I was struck by how many had dropped athletics they’d enjoyed because they couldn’t stand the Lord of the Flies mentality of teammates or coaches. Perhaps the most extreme example was Ethan, a kid from the Bay Area who had been recruited by a small liberal-arts college in New England to play lacrosse. He said he’d expected to encounter the East Coast “ ‘lax bro’ culture,” but he’d underestimated its intensity. “It was all about sex” and bragging about hooking up, and even the coaches endorsed victim-blaming, Ethan told me. “They weren’t like that in class or around other people; it was a super-liberal school. But once you got them in the locker room …” He shook his head. “It was one of the most jarring experiences of my life.” . . . So he quit the team; not only that, he transferred. “If I’d stayed, there would’ve been a lot of pressure on me to play, a lot of resentment, and I would’ve run into those guys all the time. This way I didn’t really have to explain anything.” At his new school, Ethan didn’t play lacrosse, or anything else.

What the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture” (or what the boys I talked with more often referred to as “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all-boys’ schools, fraternity houses, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as such groups promote bonding, even as they preach honor, pride, and integrity, they tend to condition young men to treat anyone who is not “on the team” as the enemy (the only women who ordinarily make the cut are blood relatives— bros before hos!), justifying any hostility toward them. Loyalty is paramount, and masculinity is habitually established through misogynist language and homophobia.

Just because some young men now draw the line at referring to someone who is openly gay as a fag doesn’t mean, by the way, that gay men (or men with traits that read as gay) are suddenly safe. If anything, the gay guys I met were more conscious of the rules of manhood than their straight peers were. They had to be—and because of that, they were like spies in the house of hypermasculinity.

Guys who identify as straight but aren’t athletic, or are involved in the arts, or have a lot of female friends, all risk having their masculinity impugned. What has changed for this generation, though, is that some young men, particularly if they grew up around LGBTQ people, don’t rise to the bait. “I don’t mind when people mistake me for being gay,” said Luke, a high-school senior from New York City. “It’s more of an annoyance than anything, because I want people to believe me when I say I’m straight.” The way he described himself did, indeed, tick every stereotypical box. “I’m a very thin person,” he said. “I like clothing. I care about my appearance in maybe a more delicate way. I’m very in touch with my sensitive side. So when people think I’m gay?” He shrugged. “It can feel like more of a compliment. Like, ‘Oh, you like the way I dress? Thank you! ’ ”

Sexual conquest—or perhaps more specifically, bragging about your experiences to other boys—is, arguably, the most crucial aspect of toxic masculinity. . . . there’s this “race for experience,” because if you get behind, by the time you do hook up with a girl “she’ll have hit it with, like, five guys already. Then she’s going to know how to do things” you don’t—and that’s a problem, if she tells people “you’ve got floppy lips” or “don’t know how to get her bra off.”

No matter how often I heard it, the brutal language that even a conscientious young man like Nate used to describe sexual contact—you hit that!—always unnerved me. In mixed-sex groups, teenagers may talk about hooking up (already impersonal), but when guys are on their own, they nail, they pound, they bang, they smash, they hammer. They tap that ass, they tear her up. It can be hard to tell whether they have engaged in an intimate act or just returned from a construction site.

It’s not like I imagined boys would gush about making sweet, sweet love to the ladies, but why was their language so weaponized ? The answer, I came to believe, was that locker-room talk isn’t about sex at all, which is why guys were ashamed to discuss it openly with me. The (often clearly exaggerated) stories boys tell are really about power: using aggression toward women to connect and to validate one another as heterosexual, or to claim top spots in the adolescent sexual hierarchy. Dismissing that as “banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize—abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity in sexual encounters.

Boys may know when something is wrong; they may even know that true manhood—or maybe just common decency—compels them to speak up. Yet, too often, they fear that if they do, they’ll be marginalized or, worse, themselves become the target of derision from other boys. Masculinity, then, becomes not only about what boys do say, but about what they don’t—or won’t, or can’t—say, even when they wish they could. The psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, the authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how too many boys become men.

[I]t’s time to rethink assumptions about how we raise boys. That will require models of manhood that are neither ashamed nor regressive, and that emphasize emotional flexibility—a hallmark of mental health. Stoicism is valuable sometimes, as is free expression; toughness and tenderness can coexist in one human. In the right context, physical aggression is fun, satisfying, even thrilling. If your response to all of this is Obviously, I’d say: Sure, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the strength and durability of the cultural machinery at work on adolescent boys. Real change will require a sustained, collective effort on the part of fathers, mothers, teachers, coaches.

Personally, I am not optimistic.  Too many fathers and coaches are a major part of the problem. Yet, if things do not change, we can expect more Donald Trumps and misogynists and the dangers they pose to society and the world.