It's bizzare to me that it hasn't in other places. When you issue a mandate, it's automatically politicized. In a parallel universe this could have gone so much differently if, trump say, said "I'm not going to force you to wear masks, but please wear them".

To me it feels a bit like "I'm not going to do this thing because you've told me to. If you hadn't have told me then I might have done it but I'm damned if I'm going to now".

Which is fine when the public demonstration of a point of principle isn't as important as the thing itself. Otherwise it's a collective act of cutting of one's nose to spite one's face.

But maybe this is the part that is somewhat US specific. The relationship of the people to the government seems to have an almost mythic role in political identity - rather than a somewhat more pragmatic one that I recognize in the UK.

For obvious reasons US does have more of a 'uh we bootstrapped from from first principles' approach to political theory, the UK explicitly does not. I would argue that there are good and robust ways to do things in the former sort of a system, possibly ways that are even better than the latter, but I think the US polity has basically been a 250 year struggle to figure that out. I dunno, the US is not doing terribly, there have been some horrible mistakes, but that's to be expected, there are no sinless governments and societies as far as I can tell.