America’s most deadly superspreader is the cult of individualism

The predicted “third wave” of COVID-19 is surging nationwide. With a president unwilling to promote safety measures, infections and fatalities skyrocket. Propelling the virus’s spread, too, is what scientists call “pandemic fatigue.”

That means exhaustion with following WHO/CDC guidelines, and above all impatience with restrictions on personal freedom. Millions say “enough” and resume normal activities.

But the phrase is a euphemism, at best incomplete, at worst inaccurate.

Journalists’ usage does not usually refer to front-line hospital workers running on empty, depressed, going home with tears in their eyes, depleted. Then gearing up to fight again. That’s combat fatigue.

The phrase cannot apply to the millions who have resisted mask wearing and social distancing, or those who crowded together at Trump rallies without masks. How can they be described as “fatigued” by limits on their behavior they defy and do not accept?

Millions have behaved as if COVID-19 was ravaging some other planet. In North and South Dakota virus cases have broken records and overloaded hospitals while the non-fatigued filled restaurants and bars and carried on normal activities.

New York City in contrast enacted restrictions that most New Yorkers observed. Yet on weekends police in the city and Long Island routinely have shut down parties of hundreds of people partying like there’s no tomorrow. Can such reckless behavior be coming from suddenly “fatigued” people?

The bereaved, who have lost family members, friends, or neighbors to the virus, are not fatigued but in mourning. Some of them have expressed anger at those they see continuing normal activities inured to the death around them.

The term can apply to those suffering a mental health crisis brought on by isolation from family and friends, while witnessing rising sickness, hospitalizations, and death.

It’s time to drop the euphemism as applied to the disregard of safety measures and call it what it is: “me-ism,” an anti-social rejection of collective responsibility.

Trump’s politicization of safety measures has contributed to resistance to protecting oneself and others. But long-term changes in society prepared an audience disposed to disregard the common good.

Since the 1960s Americans have engaged in what historian Mark Lilla calls a “libertarian eruption,” pursuing the Sixties credo of private autonomy (“do your own thing”) and the Eighties message of economic autonomy (Gordon Gekko “greed is good”). These impulses have sacralized freedom of individual choice. Like Greta Garbo millions insist, “I want to be left alone.”

Lilla’s point needs qualification, because the mantra “don’t tread on me” disguises what I call libertarianism with benefits. Witness the acceptance among the mask less of millions of dollars in benefits from government programs, especially in western and small states, and of the amount of federal money going into less populous Red states dwarfing taxes paid going out.

Of the fifteen states still without a mask mandate 13 voted for Trump,

Libertarianism with benefits means, “I want to be left alone selectively.”

The retreat from what the Founders called “public virtue,” willingness to submerge individual interest to community welfare, was overdetermined by multiple economic, cultural, and political causes. In the 1970s most of corporate America began to concentrate on maximizing profit and shareholder value, shedding all sense of responsibility to workers, customers, or society at large.

Ayn Rand-Milton Friedman cutthroat capitalism launched rampant inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. at a rate faster than other developed nations, and created here one of the largest, low-wage labor forces. Enormous wealth along with political power has concentrated among a few hundred billionaires.

Trust in government “to do the right thing” declined steadily overall and cynicism grew among ordinary Americans that their voice in politics mattered.

Culture wars, identity politics, systemic racism and social media created politically polarized tribes regarding their opponents as loathsome enemies.

These and other trends led to a fracturing of the nation’s “imagined community” and widely shared disregard for the common good.

Joining several books describing this development is “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again,” by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett. Their history of the last 125 years describes an “I-We-I” curve of transitions from the First Gilded Age of “I” to “We” starting in the early 20th century Progressive Era and peaking in the 60s, to our New Gilded Age of “I.”

Its graphs dramatically portray the rise and decline of civic responsibility, social trust, bipartisanship, and relative socio-economic equality.

They argue that the nation came together before and can do it again. But meanwhile, “I’ is perhaps America’s most deadly super spreader.

Ron Formisano is the author of books on economic inequality and political corruption and a recent novel “Thorne’s Hazards.”