COVID-19 and the missing call to sacrifice

This call to communal sacrifice has been on the wane in our politics for a while now. The rich and connected—and even most of the middle-class—were inured from sacrifices following 9/11, unless they volunteered to serve. After the last financial crisis, our leaders asked the national credit card bill to carry us through. The grievance-laden politics of ensuring that one’s own tribe gets theirs is present in both of our political parties. (Though it is perhaps ascendent in only one of them.)

With Donald Trump, this trend away from communal interest and towards self-interest reached its apotheosis in the form of a man who is fundamentally incapable of demonstrating any empathy, at all. It’s possible (likely, even!) that past presidents shared Trump’s narcissism. But he stands alone in being unable to summon even the slightest simulacrum of concern for anyone other than himself.

So we find ourselves in a crisis where in order to protect the greater good, we require self-sacrifice from people for whom the threat is very minor, with a leader who is congenitally incapable of understanding such a thing, let alone making a compelling call for it.