The writer is a history professor at Texas A&M University and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution
Nothing highlights local peculiarities like a global pandemic. The US has 4 per cent of the global population and 25 per cent of infections from a virus that began half a world away.
This anomaly comes as no surprise to students of American history. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner could have predicted the nation’s confused response to Covid-19 more than a century ago. His landmark 1893 essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History has long been criticised for promoting a self-aggrandising view of US exceptionalism. But critics miss the fact that Turner believed Americans could be exceptionally stupid.
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