Mark Lennihan/AP Photo
A man crosses the street in a nearly empty Times Square, which is usually very crowded on a weekday morning in New York, Monday, March 23, 2020.
The great sociologist and public intellectual Eric Klinenberg, author of books on subjects as diverse as the horrors wrought by media concentration, the increasing number of Americans happily living alone, and the importance of great public spaces, has a new one called 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, on the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. It covers an extraordinarily rich range of issues and insights, some of them familiar, others utterly fresh. Interviewing him last week at Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore, I drilled down on the two I found most important. In the course of our conversation, we wended our way to a third, in developments that took shape after the book went to press. I found his insight one of the most striking expressions of America’s political brokenness that I’ve yet encountered. So in this essay, we will wend our way there, too.
The book starts on the day the Earth stood still, four years ago this week. For Klinenberg, that came while on the road in Cleveland, Ohio, for a big speech marking a major civic occasion. The organizers decided to go forward with it, despite fear of this dread new disease; the theater ended up being only half full. Klinenberg returned home to a frightened family worried about his 13-year-old’s fever and wondering just what they should do: “Isolate our child in a room of his own or hug and hold him? Establish distance or deepen the connection? How were we to care for each other? Would our instinct to keep each other close make the situation worse?”
From public-health experts and officials, the answer had already begun to arrive: “social distancing.” To the sociologist, this was practically an emotional trigger.
In Chicago, Klinenberg recalled how he immediately thought back to the book for which Chicagoans know him best: his classic “social autopsy” of a stretch of 100-degree-plus days in 1995 that saw 45,000 households lose electricity, homes losing water pressure from all the opened fire hydrants, and 739 deaths, most of them old and economically vulnerable people without anyone to look in on them. “Social distancing, back then, literally meant death,” he reflected in Chicago. He felt compelled, contemplating his own family’s peril, to argue it still might: As he summarized the argument he made in a New York Times op-ed published on March 14, 2020, “The WHO is wrong, and instead of saying we need social distancing, we need physical distancing—and social solidarity.”
That’s this book’s first great theme. He writes, “‘Social distancing’ turned out to be the very opposite of what people needed to maintain health and vitality. The concept conveyed a strong message: Sever ties and limit contact with friends and neighbors. Seal your domestic space. Create a bubble for the members of your nuclear family. Stay inside of it until the emergency ends. In a crisis, however, social closeness protects people. Social solidarity, the bonds of mutual obligation and linked fate between people who share a neighborhood, city, or nation, can be a crucial resource … The call for social distancing was rooted in good epidemiological science. Sociologically, though, it was destined to fail.”
The book’s second great theme is what happened because of this in a certain society all too lacking in social solidarity: our own.
The book’s title—2020—is a numeric pun. It refers to not just the year he writes about, but also the way in which chaos unveils social norms and structures that are occluded in normal times. As “lenses,” we like to say. What we see afresh with this lens, in example after example, is how in America, those norms and structures favor individualism over mutual obligation, and in 2020, caused massive unnecessary death and social decay.
I write “in America” advisedly—very advisedly. Klinenberg was intrigued to watch a journalistic discourse emerge claiming the imprimatur of sociological theory, even quoting the field’s founding hero Emile Durkheim. “We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us,” as a writer named Olga Khazan wrote in The Atlantic, looking back from the vantage point of 2022 in a piece called “Why People Are Acting So Weird.” “In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral.”
Sounds unobjectionable enough, except that it’s a terrible distortion. “People” weren’t acting “so weird.” Americans were.
“I don’t think Americans appreciate the extent to which our experience of COVID was an outlier,” Klinenberg said in Chicago. Every nation experienced a similar change in social life. He wrote, “In most of Europe and Asia the lockdowns and distancing mandates were far more severe.” Measures of stress and anxiety increased everywhere. “Yet no European or Asian society saw rates of destructive behavior anywhere near the American level. In fact, the reverse happened: most of them witnessed a remarkable decline in violent crime.”
“The call for social distancing was rooted in good epidemiological science. Sociologically, though, it was destined to fail.”
Same contrast when it came to public health. Klinenberg notes a metric experts devised, pre-COVID, to address nations’ vulnerability to damage from infectious disease outbreaks. Under it, America was rated the best-prepared nation on Earth. The nation of Australia was far behind us. Except, came the pandemic, and “if the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, 900,000 lives would have been saved.”
Like the U.S., Australia was then governed by a global warming–denying president, at a time of widespread national concern about increasing social distrust and ideological polarization. But the country was functional enough to enact normal good-government responses. President Scott Morrison brought together the heads of each state and territory and their respective health ministers, formed a task force that set forth a federal plan and charged the states to come up with their own ways to effectuate it, subsidized the public production and distribution of masks, initiated lockdowns far more encompassing than ours, and initiated contact-tracing protocols.
Afterward, surveyors found trust in government, trust in science, and trust in other citizens went way up among Australians—as happened in many countries. Here, all these measures plummeted.
In my own writing on the sociology and politics of COVID, I’ve noted the psychologist William James’s lament that the only thing that seems ever to spur nations to truly heroic levels of sacrifice—paradoxically, to a higher morality—is war. A pacifist and a socialist, James longed for a “moral equivalent of war”: all the heightened sense of mutual obligation, none of the slaughter.
Klinenberg gives plenty of examples of how Donald Trump’s particular narcissism, stupidity, and lunacy played an outsized role in rendering that state of being impossible when it came to our COVID war—though he stresses it’s important not to overdo his part in the causality. We get the leaders we deserve.
Indeed, by my lights, the best exemplification of the unique and deep-seated cultural manias that rendered America’s response to the pandemic the moral equivalent of a war of all against all was the mayor of Las Vegas—a former Democrat, now an independent—who insisted casinos should reopen as soon as possible and let the market sort out the rest: “competition will destroy” the resorts where “it becomes evident that they have a disease.”
But, yes: Let us not forget Donald Trump.
Klinenberg tells a tale of two cruise ships. The Diamond Princess, sailing from Japan, gets permission to dock, and a team of epidemiologists gets to work testing and quarantining passengers, armed with state-provided phones and tablets and Wi-Fi so scientists can track the disease course. That let them study how those contracting the disease related to the physical layout of the ship, and to conclude, very early, that the pathogen circulates through air and can be spread by those without symptoms. They then unfolded a slow and deliberate re-entry program of these citizen research subjects. Leaders, meanwhile, educated the public in a crucial, basic reality of fast-moving emergencies: that experts would get things wrong. That, in exercising the precautionary principle, there might be overreach, toward which people proved largely forgiving, not casting about for blame: that trust thing, again.
Then, here.
The Grand Princess, sailing from San Francisco, did not get permission to dock, because, the president of the United States said, “I like the numbers where they are.” When it did, it was commanded to dock not in San Francisco, but Oakland—hiding the embarrassment at an unglamorous industrial port in a majority-Black city. Passengers chose whether to stay or leave, under the principle that mandatory testing was a violation of individual rights. The American way, right down to the denouement: “And the whole thing ends with lawsuits.”
Meanwhile, our leader primed his followers to think like he does, to only see the world through a friend-enemy distinction, always casting around for others to blame. Which became a sort of contagion as well: a social one. For “our” side cast around for someone to blame, too, with ever-heightening bitterness.
You see it in a fascinating New York Post article from two months ago. Anthony Fauci made the ex post facto observation that the six-foot social distancing recommendation “just sort of appeared … likely without data.” President Biden’s current COVID adviser ungraciously seemed to complain this proves “dissenting opinions were often not considered or suppressed completely,” and that in future pandemics “America’s response must be guided by scientific facts and conclusive data”—as if careful data-sifting under sluggish peer review was desirable or even possible amid the fog of pathogenic war.
Rupert Murdoch’s Post, meanwhile, weaponizes the entire “dispute” as proof of Trump’s critique of government as teeming with deep-state monsters, dedicated day after day to smothering us all within their totalitarian maw.
What we see afresh is how in America, those norms and structures favor individualism over mutual obligation, and in 2020, caused massive unnecessary death and social decay.
Which is where we are now, in the midst of a presidential campaign that somehow finds us—“I don’t know if you’re reading the news,” Klinenberg remarked to a bookstore’s worth of guffaws—with the same candidates as in 2020.
A campaign, he concluded with genuine anguish, in which the previous pandemic, where competent leadership could have saved 900,000 lives, and the next pandemic, which in all likelihood will be both epidemiologically and sociologically more catastrophic yet, is hardly even an issue.
On “both sides,” as the pundits like to say.
The former guy opened an Orwellian memory hole within the architecture of his campaign speeches, with his customary feral brilliance. He now asks listeners if they were better off five years ago.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Klinenberg stresses. “He’s said it on several occasions. It’s a strategy. And the idea behind it turns out to be quite a popular idea in America: 2020 shouldn’t count. It wasn’t fair. Nobody could have seen this thing coming; everything was fine before that; don’t count this against him. If it wasn’t for 2020, the country would be fantastic, and I was obviously unlucky, it’s not fair. I’m a victim. I’m a victim.”
And then there’s the current guy.
Our interview was the night of the State of the Union address. We weren’t able to watch, but Klinenberg pretty much predicted it based on what Biden had been saying to this point. It was about 8,000 words long. Little over 1 percent of those words concerned the preventable loss of 900,000 American lives. Effectively less than that, if you don’t count the parts about the attendant economic crisis, which seemed the main reason he brought it up. Both were over and done with, was the point: just one more component of “the American people … writing the greatest comeback story never told.”
Maybe the White House divined from focus groups that “the American people” just don’t want to hear about it. Maybe it would “step on his message” that the American people can accomplish anything they set their minds to.
On both sides, it’s all of a piece. 2020, and 2020, are the lenses that let us see this. “Something gets whipped up, and intensified, and locked in during that year. And because we’ve all been so eager to just get 2020 behind us and get on with our lives, and because we allowed the previous president to say 2020 doesn’t count, let’s not worry about, this has not really surfaced as a topic in our current politics.”
What Klinenberg said next needs exclamation points: “a list of some of the things the next president will be dealing with: Russia and Ukraine! Israel and Gaza! Nuclear Iran! China! Taiwan! AI! Climate change! And maybe a new pathogen! It occurs to me that one would want to know how adept a leader is at managing a crisis. That this is something that you might want to select for.”
Your Infernal Triangle columnist adds: Agenda-setting elite political journalists might want to cover this as an issue—maybe, if it’s not too much to ask, with one-eighth or so the careful devotion to how Biden’s supporters are reacting to him using an antiquated word to refer to undocumented immigrants.
It’s like that New York Times front page on May 24, 2020, listing names, names, names, names: “U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS.” Ten times those deaths, however, nine-tenths of them entirely preventable, is now, apparently, calculable. Or at least, not the obvious center of discussion about who next will lead the free world. There is something truly broken about that. Hardly less insane than going at the problem with bleach or bright lights or horse tranquilizers.
