Let's do a thread on my Sunday column, which provoked some understandably strong reactions:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/opinion/sunday/covid-19-trump.html …
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Now you can come up with structural reasons why we should be way, way better than average. But there are also structural factors that point the other way. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1303676020994854914 …
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And American goverment under non-Trump presidents has not been distinguished by old-fashioned exceptionalist Manhattan Project-style can-do for some time.
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Again, I believe we could have been exceptional, and failed the test. And while there's plenty of blame to go around, Trump is the president, his bumbling has been flagrant, so a substantial responsibility for that failure belongs to him.
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But the case that his failures have made our situation vastly worse than peer countries governed by non-populists is not something that current data proves.
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We'll know more by December, and at the end of 2021, and I promise to revisit then.
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Coda, in response to
@davidfrum and others: Yes, I should have included a mention of Canada's success, which was in a first draft and I wrongly cut for space.Show this thread -
I don't think Canada alone is a great comp for the US, and averaging the bigs of Western Europe and the bigs of Latin American gets closer to Who We Are (for better or worse). But Canada belongs in a peer-country average and including it makes our response look somewhat worse.
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End of conversation
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What's the metrics on social breakdown and rioting in USA as against peer nations?
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America: We are just a bit behind Bulgaria but we are better off than Latvia! BOOM
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Now... how many folks in all the other countries on that list combined are going hungry? being evicted? lost health coverage? going into medical bankruptcy? GDP doesn't measure that.
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