Not Even the Coronavirus Will Unite America
History suggests that rallying Americans requires a powerful human enemy, not a faceless danger.
In recent decades, the glue binding America has come undone, as political polarization has reached record levels and trust in national institutions has crumbled. Could the fight against the coronavirus forge America, once more, into a unified nation, or will the terrifying global trauma become just another front in the partisan war? The latter seems far more likely.
People across the United States face a common enemy, which doesn’t distinguish between red America and blue America. The pandemic has inspired and courage, not least from health-care workers who persevere in the face of danger and exhaustion. In the last line of his novel , Albert Camus wrote that the titular disease arose “for the
