If you have ever done some hiking or camping in rural Utah, you have experienced a vast emptiness, filled with the soul-stirring quiet of the sounds of nature. In such an environment, it is easy to embrace our frontier myth of the rugged loner like Jeremiah Johnson, who lives by his individual wits and efforts and doesn’t ask for help from anyone — especially not from any government. In such an environment, it can be difficult to recognize that this great world we live on is actually really small.
It is so ironic that Donald Trump campaigned on a slogan of “Make America Great Again,” but having no clue as to what it was that actually made America great, he has moved the nation in the exact opposite direction, making America smaller and more trivial on the World scene. Our own Sen. Mike Lee has spoken about “starving the beast,” and has received high marks from Grover Norquist who said, “I just want to shrink [the government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Back in the Great Depression, when 25% of Americans, 15 million people at the time, were out of work, it took a great nation to be able to right the ship and get America back to prosperity. Small states, no matter how well intentioned, were not up to the task. In 1941, when America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and when both Germany and Japan were swallowing up small states, it took a great nation, the United States with its allies, to defeat them.
In 1939, when Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning that the Germans were researching the development of a super weapon, it took a great nation like the United States to put the Manhattan Project into motion. No private company would have been up to the task.
Throughout our history, America has been at its best when public institutions, academic and governmental, have worked together with private companies, whether it was the development of nuclear energy, or modern medicine, or the internet — you name it. Government cannot do it all. The concentration of power is too tempting for corruption and lack of competition leads to ineptitude. And private companies cannot do it all. Their existential model of only looking at quarterly profits, prevents the attainment of long-term goals. No. It takes the cooperation of strong governments and strong companies working together.
Trump is incapable of seeing this. Thus, a scientifically minded state like South Korea, has tested 290,000 people for coronavirus with the result that new cases there are already falling off, while in the same time period, the United States with six times the population, has only tested 60,000 people, with the infection rate rising across the country.
Doctors, researchers and epidemiologists have for years been writing letters similar to the letter Einstein wrote to Roosevelt warning of the emergence of super-bugs, viruses and bacteria that could develop into massively destructive plagues. And has there been a Manhattan Project type response? No, of course not. How could there be, when the national agenda is one of “starve the beast,” which means prevent the national public institutions from performing their jobs?
Now, I would never expect Trump to understand this. But what about American voters? Why is this such a hard sell? Regretfully, the answer is that many Americans have been indoctrinated into believing the myth of the individualist frontiersman, into believing that national government is inherently bad — corrupt and incompetent.
Such beliefs once acquired, can be very difficult to let go of. How many years have white Americans believed that black Americans were inherently inferior? How many years have male Americans believed that female Americans could not do the jobs of males — including in the military and the sciences? How much evidence has accumulated proving these beliefs wrong, only to still have many Americans hold on to them?
That is why this remains such a hard sell. My only hope is that Joe Biden will make this the center of his campaign – to help people see the genuine history of what has made this country truly great in the past, and why that greatness is necessary now more than it has ever been.
Michael A. Kalm, M.D
Michael A. Kalm, M.D., is a psychiatrist who has spent his career helping patients give up destructive “old tapes.”