The 19th century French political thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that in America, motivation almost universally came from self-interest understood in a new way, rather than from virtue, which was often the case in European aristocracies. Jeffrey K. Tulis writes that the COVID-19 pandemic has seen deviations from this tendency, with a rise in both brute selfish and virtuous behavior. He attributes this mutation of American “self-interest rightly understood” to the decay of democracy, and the rise of white supremacy and anti-democratic sentiments.