it's sort of an easy answer, but also a very complex one involving a lot of history over the last 80 years.
the TLDR version is: america is fucking stupid, culturally. americans are even more stupid, culturally and intellectually. shit like the US response to COVID is what happens when you have a country full of idiots who have elected a King Idiot to rule them.
everything else can be nit-picked over and parsed out and blame assigned to various people and places, but at the end of the day what happened is pure brute stupidity.
the long version would require me to write out a thesis paper, but the basic points are these:
* after WW2 the US was basically the only wholly functioning superpower left in the world, which was one of several factors leading to a huge economic boom alongside a massive increase in US global political power.
* this lead very quickly to the US thinking it was King Shit of the world and that it has both the right and the duty to impose its perception of the world on everyone else.
* when russia recovered in the mid 40s and started experimenting with communism moving into the late 40s, the US lost its absolute god damn mind over the concept of an economic system that didn't mirror predatory capitalism, leading to the decades long anal fingerbang that was the Cold War.
* during the Cold War, some dipshit decided that since Communism tended to lean towards non-theism, the correct response would be to amp up US cultural religious fervor, reversing what had been up to that point the general trend in the US of going the way of Britain: ie, that religion was a thing that you kept to yourself and didn't bother other people with, and it wasn't brought up in polite conversation.
* as the Cold War was coming to a close in the 80s, a new generation of religious zealots at least partially empowered by attitudes fostered by the government during the Cold War starting coming into local power and influence and decided to try to extend that to a national platform.
*a necessary aspect of marrying religious zealotry with politics is the suppression of all thought or expression that contradicts the notion of divine authority, and religious leaders being the only people who have it.
* the way you do this is to demonize and vilify anyone who says anything contradicting strict adherence to your religiously themed brand.
* thus in the early 80s began a decades long propaganda war against being smart, against knowing things, against being an expert - to be educated was to be untrustworthy, to to be pig-fucking-stupid was a virtue.
* this lead directly to a trend in the US of a vast swath of the population disbelieving anything a scientist says, and in fact actively denying anything said by anyone who isn't holding a bible and screaming.
* this reached the peak of its current incarnation in 2000 when people thought a drunk coke addict would be a better president than an elder statesmen, on the basis that they'd "like to have a beer with him"
so basically the US has shat itself into intellectual decay, and now (thankfully) moderate scale population death due to preventable illness just for the sake of protecting the sanctity of vulture capitalism and religious fundamentalism.
everything else we're seeing right now is nothing more than the inevitable result of the cultural zeitgeist of a massive country being bent towards self destructive idiocy.
