Effervescent Christmas

This ad appeared in the Boston Globe during the Christmas shopping season of 1919. Note the enticement to become consumers rather than producers of music.

The assembly hall at Phillips Exeter Academy is usually the site of serious, sometimes grim, subjects: global warming, war, poverty, the Supreme Court.

Last Friday, one of our music teachers, Eric Sinclair, got up on stage and sang Christmas carols.

This assembly used to be an annual event, but it hadn’t happened for long enough that the current students had never experienced it. I never heard an explanation for why it was stopped, but I’ve assumed that, in the spirit of diversity and inclusion, we had decided that the “harm” it might do to people who don’t celebrate Christmas was more important than the “collective effervescence” it inspires among those who know the words to the songs.

Was this experience of joining together with others in song more common before Netflix and doom scrolling? Before we traded in our pianos for record-players? Before we all had our own Spotify playlists and air-buds? Did we know the words to more of the same songs and sit around the fire or the piano and sing together?

Christmas and Christmas songs seem to be one of the few things that still permeate our national culture down through the generations. After the assembly, Eric said he wasn’t sure this youngest generation would know the words. They did.

They belted out “Deck the Halls,” and “”Jingle Bells,” and when Eric sang “had a very shiny nose,” they even knew to shout back: “like a light bulb!”

Adam Grant guessed that the numbers of depressed Americans quadruped during COVID quarantine because we were being denied “a special kind of joy.”

“Peak happiness,” he said, “lies mostly in collective activity.”

Grant’s NYT op-ed is where I learned the term collective effervescence. “We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence,” he wrote.

According to my AI friend, Gemini, the term was coined by Emile Durkheim in 1912 and describes the feeling of energy and harmony that people experience when they come together in a group with a shared purpose. It is a joie de vivre that manifests when we share moments with others, such as being in a stadium that erupts in simultaneous applause when a musician returns for an encore performance.

Grant described the feeling more broadly to include “creating together and solving problems together.” He chided Americans for thinking that the pursuit of happiness is a solitary endeavor and called for a “Declaration of Interdependence.”

Unfortunately, the end of pandemic lock-downs didn’t end what the surgeon general calls our loneliness epidemic. And there’s no end in sight.

It seems like every new invention and every social trend has the effect of pushing us away from each other. My parents’ first home was just around the corner from both of my grandparents. Then we moved to the suburbs. By the end of the day on Christmas, nine people will have spent a combined 60 hours driving to our holiday celebrations over the last few days in search of an effervescent Christmas.

I hope we were wrong about the harm these songs might cause.  I can't recall a single religious theme in the lyrics Eric sang. They were all about decking the halls and dashing through snow.  And one song at the end had an inclusive message, about German and British soldiers playing soccer during a Christmas truce in 1914.  The assembly ended with these words: On each end of the rifle we're the same.

Solidarity Now?

Even the celebrated Afro-pessimist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has found cause for hope in the current protests over the police killing of George Floyd. In an interview with Ezra Klein,  he pointed out a stark and promising difference between the rebellions in American cities in the 1960s and these ones: the participation of white people.

Have we finally solved one of the great problems of American history—the disunity of the working class? Many historians, especially on the left, are obsessed with this question. During my Ph.D. oral exams, one of my tormentors asked: who wrote “Why is There No Socialism in the United States?” (Answer: Werner Sombart). Another author posed the question this way:

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society.

Those of us who think it would be good if you could hang on to your health insurance when you get laid off in a pandemic, or who wish they could join a union at work (almost five times as many as now belong to one, according to this article) think that these are important questions, and some of us suspect they are connected to another oft-asked question about our history: where does American racism come from?

One such person was Martin Luther King, Jr. who outlined a theory that simultaneously addressed both questions in a speech at one of the important milestones of the Civil Rights Movement. Here is an extended excerpt from that speech, delivered in Montgomery Alabama, on March 25, 1965 at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March.  (Audience reactions are in parentheses) 

The confrontation of good and evil compressed in the tiny community of Selma (Speak, speak) generated the massive power (Yes, sir. Yes, sir) to turn the whole nation to a new course. A president born in the South (Well) had the sensitivity to feel the will of the country, (Speak, sir) and in an address that will live in history as one of the most passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a president of our nation, he pledged the might of the federal government to cast off the centuries-old blight. President Johnson rightly praised the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation. (Yes, sir)

On our part we must pay our profound respects to the white Americans who cherish their democratic traditions over the ugly customs and privileges of generations and come forth boldly to join hands with us. (Yes, sir) From Montgomery to Birmingham, (Yes, sir) from Birmingham to Selma, (Yes, sir) from Selma back to Montgomery, (Yes) a trail wound in a circle long and often bloody, yet it has become a highway up from darkness. (Yes, sir) Alabama has tried to nurture and defend evil, but evil is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this state. (Yes, sir. Speak, sir) So I stand before you this afternoon (Speak, sir. Well) with the conviction that segregation is on its deathbed in Alabama, and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral. (Go ahead. Yes, sir) [Applause]

Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland. Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. (Listen to him) That is what was known as the Populist Movement. (Speak, sir) The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses (Yeah) into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. (Right) I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, (Yes) thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. (Yes, sir) And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir)

Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike (Uh huh) resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; (Yes, sir) they segregated southern churches from Christianity (Yes, sir); they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; (Yes, sir) and they segregated the Negro from everything. (Yes, sir) That’s what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality. (Yes, sir)

We’ve come a long way since that travesty of justice was perpetrated upon the American mind….

King was hopeful that finally, the American working class might unite. You can understand his optimism in this moment, before George Wallace ran one of the most successful third-party presidential campaigns in American history, stoking a mostly working class (mostly white) backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the anti-war movement, college students, rising crime rates, urban disorders, and Black Nationalism.  That was 1968. As of March, 1965, when King spoke in Montgomery, white people had participated significantly in the freedom rides and the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and a president from a former slave state had put his full support behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965, saying in a televised address to the nation: “it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

For those of us who believe in democracy, it was one of the most hopeful moments in American history, alongside Congress's endorsement in 1776 of the phrase “All men are created Equal,” and the 1863 delivery of a presidential proclamation abolishing slavery as an “act of justice.”

After Selma, King began to shift his focus from legal rights for African Americans to economic progress for all of America’s poor people. In 1968, his Southern Christian Leadership Conference launched a national “Poor People’s Campaign,” which “demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds.” And King died while organizing a union for garbage collectors in Memphis. (The union was AFSCME, which my white father belonged to at the time.) 

King’s hopeful moment in 1965 evaporated in the upheavals of the late 60s—in Vietnam, violent urban uprisings, assassinations, and a conservative political wave. 

There is reason to think that the current moment of hope on the left will be more resistant to a “white backlash” that divides the working class. A poll taken June 10-12 found that 64 percent of Americans support the protests of the George Floyd killing.  By contrast, 60 percent of Americans said they had an unfavorable view of the totally peaceful 1963 March on Washington at the time,  which featured King’s “I have a Dream” speech, perhaps the most inspiring oration in human history. (Link: more polling data on public opinion of Civil Rights Movement.)

We would do well, however, to never underestimate the power of race to divide the American working class. 

In a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, Cornel West expressed his hope for positive outcomes out of the current protests, but concluded with the caution of someone who has been down this road before:

We’ve got hope in the form of motion, but we have to get ready for the backlash. We have to get ready for the neo-fascist clamp down, because it’s coming. It is coming.

In his book, Future-Focused History Teaching, Mike Maxwell argues that the purpose of studying history is to reveal principles that will guide us in the present as we try to shape the future. It’s not that history repeats itself, but we can find patterns that tend to recur. Awareness of those tendencies is one of the great sources of wisdom about human affairs and effective citizenship.

West understands one of the recurring patterns in American history, that the class of people King referred to as “Bourbon interests” have often been successful at driving a wedge between different groups of working class people—especially black and white—to prevent them from forming a solid block that might pass legislation to make America more equitable, and redistribute power and prosperity downward.  And of course, the  working class does have divergent interests, so solidarity is always fragile.

The question for the marchers and the organizers, for the leaders of BLM and other organizations in the struggle, is how to organize a wedge-resistant movement.  So far so good. After an initial burst of anger led to a round of arson and looting, the protests have become generally peaceful and orderly—a contrast to the overreaction of law enforcement—the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the bullying of the press—and public support has increased.

I would like to suggest that an even more powerful way of solidifying white support would be to emphasize the ways in which the aims of the movement are good for white Americans too.

For example, although America’s obsession with law and order has led to a disproportionate impact on black people, it has also harmed white people significantly. According to the Washington Post, in 2019, police shot 10 unarmed black people and 20 unarmed white people. Statistics on total killings of unarmed people at the hands of police are harder to come by, but one database that includes statistics on shootings and deaths like George Floyd’s estimates that 28 black people and 51 whites were killed by police that year.

Of course, African Americans make up only 13 percent of the population and they accounted for 35 percent of those deaths. But are the 51 white people who were killed inconsequential? Would be we happy if those numbers were proportional to population? If 10 unarmed black people—13 percent of the total—were killed in 2019 and 69 whites? Or is the total number—79—just too big no matter the color of the victims?

Conservatives would have us believe that these rates are perfectly acceptable given the relative rates  of violent crime in black and white communities. 

But according to statistics I found on Wikipedia—at “killings by law enforcement officers by country”—the US ranked 21st out of 60 countries with 46.6 killings per 10 million people. If you look at only the nations with advanced industrial economies, the US is in a class by itself. Canada was the closest, with 9.7 killings per 10 million. Germany had 1.3; France 3.8; the UK .5. These discrepancies are similar to what we see with incarceration rates.

Though African Americans also make up a disproportionate number America’s incarcerated, the rate for just whites—306 per 100,000—is anywhere from 15 times (Germany) to twice (England and Wales) the incarceration rate in comparable countries. (According to my very rough calculations based on numbers from Pew and Wikipedia.) And some studies suggest that class may be a more significant factor in who is jailed than race—or at least that it is not irrelevant.  

I recently posted this cartoon on my facebook page:

Perhaps, though, the answer to “All Lives Matter” should be more along the lines of: good point; white people are also victims of our national obsession with law and order: let’s address the problems of mass incarceration and aggressive policing in a way that benefits all Americans. The BLM movement might even post a few pictures of white people killed by police on its site.

It seems likely that my fellow human beings are, on average, at least as good and decent as I am, in which case, they take the rights of their fellow citizens and what they perceive to be the common good into consideration when casting their votes and acting as citizens. But self-interest also comes into the equation.

King understood this, as did his rivals in the Black Power movements of the late 1960s, who said: “No group should go into an alliance or a coalition relying on the ‘good will’ of the ally…. All parties to the coalition must perceive a mutually beneficial goal based on the conception of each party of his own self-interest.”

My daughter, Lindsey Jordan, recently wrote a long piece on Instagram addressing the question of why George Floyd’s death has inspired so many white people to come out on the streets—more than after previous killings of black people by police.

I think the biggest reason white people care more right now, is because for the first time white people feel a general sense of fear, unrest, and confinement themselves. They too feel fear when walking out of their houses, or unease at the anger of others and how strangers might perceive them and their choices. Inequality in the US at the moment is on full display and it’s harder to not acknowledge how little power we have and how little we are looked after when our government is so slow to take action and the public suffers financially while the biggest corporations and the richest people benefit. Now everyone in the US can more so sympathize with (or are at least more so forced to confront) what black and brown people feel all the time— and I think without completely realizing it, the distress and frustration and anger and confusion and helplessness white people feel as a result of this pandemic is causing us to empathize more, and understand more how distressing and immediate the problem of racism is. A country that is willing to kill and beat its citizens, one that lets the people that commit these atrocities go unpunished, is also a country willing to let its people down— and not take care of them— during a global pandemic.

Lindsey’s analysis is backed up by this comment from a listener of the NPR podcast Code Switch:

During COVID I've also felt a physical vulnerability in the face of the virus that's made me more empathetic and shifted my priorities to some degree…. In some ways I think that increased vulnerability has also re-sensitized me toward images of violence against black bodies, which my privilege had allowed me to tune out to some degree before.

The Code Switch hosts and their guest, Nicole Fisher, ended the podcast on a pessimistic note—they wished white people were acting out of a nobler set of motives than self-interest, or the irrational feelings that Fisher says arise during quarantines and have stimulated rioting and protests in many quarantines past. I guess I’m more cynical than them about human motivation, because I don't tend to trust coalitions built on selflessness or piety.

Past interracial coalitions and movements like the Populist Party of the 1890s that King spoke of have fallen apart when white people came to see their self-interests as in conflict with the interests of black folk. The concept of “loss aversion” helps us see why. According to one definition,  it’s “a cognitive bias that suggests that for individuals the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.” This is why revolutions generally arise from groups of relatively well-off people—people who have something to lose. The American rebels of 1776 were some of the most prosperous people on the planet at the time.

And sometimes perceptions matter more than reality. Black and white sharecroppers in the 1890s unified because they shared common economic interests—they were both victims of a system of agricultural labor that was not that much better than slavery. But propagandists managed to convince them that what W.E.B. Du Bois called the psychological wage of racism—the feeling of being superior to all black people and some concrete benefits that came with it—was more valuable than escaping the sharecropping system. It’s hard to imagine that such propaganda could be as successful today. We live in very different times. But you never know.

Enough blue collar union democrats drifted away from the Democratic Party and the New Deal coalition in the 1970s to make the rise of Reagan conservatism possible. The causes of that drift are complicated and it’s impossible to separate them, but most historians (though not all ) think race played some role—that the so-called “Southern Strategy” was parallel to the Bourbon appeal to white sharecroppers in the 1890s.

So, as always, we are left with questions. Will this moment of apparent interracial unity be more long-lasting than similar moments in the past? Will the black and white protesters form the core of a political coalition that holds together long enough to elect a government that will support policies that address the unease of both white and black protesters? And among the white majority of American voters, what combination of rational and irrational, self-interested and altruistic motives will somehow come together in the weeks and months and years ahead. It’s good to feel hopeful, but better to have a plan that is informed by reality, how people behave, how things really work in a democracy and what the lessons of history suggest.

---

Some related readings

Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

Mike Maxwell, Future-Focused History Teaching.

Lawrence Goodwyn The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America.

WEB Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.  (Michael McCord sees parallels between Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Trump’s habit of stoking of grievances. “The Southern Strategy wasn’t solely about race. It was about a new way of politics. Nixon’s cynical poison would infect every cultural wedge issue imaginable in the following decades.”)

Ross Douthat, "The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders," New York Times, June 23, 2020.  This came out after I posted here and offers a less hopeful vision of the protests.  See also, this comment on the article, which predicts that the BLM protests will morph into a Sanders-style movement. 

Hope, history, politics, and the pandemic

Hope Essay #1 (Others: #2; #3; #4; #5; #6; #7)

Throughout the Coronavirus crisis, President Trump has been peddling something like hope. As recently as early March he said he was “not concerned at all” about the virus. “Just stay calm. It will go away,” he said. I hoped that he was right. Who wouldn’t?

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been thinking and trying to write about the role of hope in history and politics. My brother, Tommy, and I have been grappling together with the question of whether hope is a helpful or a harmful state of being that should be encouraged and cultivated in ourselves and others, or discouraged. Does it lead to mental health or mental illness? Does it encourage action or passivity? Does it facilitate or prevent progress? Is it a necessary tool of valuable reform, or is it something like an opiate of the masses, preventing political action and involvement? (The comments on Hope Essay #4 reflect our conversation about hope, where we disagree and, I hope, agree.)

I tend to think it’s an essential prerequisite for both mental health and political action. Tommy—the psychologist—worries that it encourages complacency, especially in our personal lives. But he can’t dispute the results of the Google search I just did, which says:

Hopelessness is listed as a symptom of many behavioral and mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, bipolar, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress, substance dependency, and suicidal ideation.

In terms of politics, the absence of hope should also be listed as a symptom of many political behavior issues, including cynicism and apathy. Hopeless voters don’t vote. Hopeless workers accept pay cuts passively, they don’t join unions and they don’t go on strike. They might even cross picket lines. Striking workers hope the workers can win; scabs have no hope for working class victory. Their hopelessness helps another class of people realize their hopes.

If there’s one thing the Kochs and their comrades have, it’s hope. Everything they do begins with hope. They hoped that the federal judiciary would be taken over by conservative judges, so they gave money to the Federalist Society, among other things, and now, somehow, the federal judiciary is overrun with conservative, originalist judges. They hoped that state legislatures would enact conservative policies like “right-to-work,” so they threw money at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and voila, dozens of states have put model legislation, written by ALEC, into law—things like “stand your ground,” corporate tax cuts, and voter ID. Read the history of conservatism going back to Barry Goldwater’s humiliating defeat in 1964. It is, depending on your perspective, either an inspiring story about the power of hope, or an ominous tale of what happens when the worst people have the strongest and most realistic hopes. One of their most significant hopes was to destroy the power of labor unions.

(I concede that if brother Tom was a historian, he could write a parallel history of how the left of the 1960s was led astray by false hope and utopian dreams.)

Donald Trump may have been the most hopeful person in America since at least the 1980s. He just keeps hoping and hoping. Every smart person I know thought his hope to become president was delusional. That’s the thing about hope. You never know. Today’s pie in the sky sometimes becomes tomorrow’s reality. As The Donald likes to say: “What have you got to lose?” It’s important to note that Trump’s hopes were often dashed, as in Trump Airlines and Trump Steaks.

Trump ran on a platform of hope in 2016, like every presidential candidate does. He won, I guess, because many of our fellow citizens—distributed among the states in a way that satisfied the Electoral College—found his hopes more appealing, and perhaps more realistic than Ms. Clinton’s, who gave the impression of not hoping for very much when she insisted that “America is already great.”

In the early stages of the pandemic, Trump articulated what turned out to be false hope, that the coronavirus would be less deadly than the flu and that there would be uninterrupted prosperity and rising stock prices. He continues to search for reasons to hope, for cures—hydroxychloroquine—and a V-shaped economic recovery. We’ll see.

I don’t blame the president for promoting hope. It’s his job. Another president, during an equivalent national crisis said that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and he is remembered by many as our greatest modern president.

So what, if anything, is the difference between the hope of Trump and the hope of Roosevelt? When is hope counter-productive and when is it essential? How should citizens in a democracy hope? How do leaders use hope to motivate the people?

Tommy and I usually arrive at a place where we can appreciate each other’s point of view. I have to agree that unrealistic, false hopes can lead us astray. It seems likely that Trump’s false hopes led him to ignore good advice to enact social distancing measures sooner and that people are dying because of that. Tommy agrees that something like hope can be put to good use in both the personal and the political spheres—there is an undeniable connection between depression and hopelessness. Maybe, we both come to think, the problem is semantic, and we need to find a better word—or two different words. One describing false hopes, another for the good kind. So maybe it all just comes down to: how do you hope and what should we call it?

Postscript: A dictionary defines hope as "a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen" and "grounds for believing that something good may happen." In reading this over it strikes me that there is an important difference between having a hope and using hope to motivate or manipulate other people.  Parents do it all the time: "if you do your chores I'll give you $20"; "if you study hard you'll be a success"; "If you are good, Santa will bring you presents." Sometimes we lie to motivate good behavior.  Sometimes we express confidence about future outcomes that are far from certain (the connection between  study and  success).  It may well be that president Trump didn't have a genuine expectation that the coronavirus would just disappear like a miracle, but he wanted stock market traders to expect that, so they would do more buying than selling and the Dow Jones Average would keep going up.  


Hope Essay #2

Coronavirus, democracy, sacrifice

Rarely has there been a national emergency with the potential to unite the country in universal sacrifice like this one. In my sixtieth year, this is the first time I’ve been required to make any significant personal sacrifice as a citizen. I was too young for the Vietnam draft and our many wars since then have been fought by volunteers. We were told that our only patriotic duty after 911 was to keep shopping. Now we are all being asked to stay at home and sacrifice our plans, our normal routines, social gatherings, and even to drastically curtail shopping. And if we fail at it, if we can’t get ourselves to keep a six-foot social distance—the hospitals will be overwhelmed and hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens will die.

Not all of us are being asked to sacrifice equally. Some are managing to keep our jobs and won’t have to worry about paying the monthly rent. Others are losing their livelihoods. Health care workers risk being infected every day at work.

And not everyone is going along with the plan—those spring break revelers, for example, or the toilet paper hoarders. In a past war, they might have been called “slackers.”

There were quite a few slackers in the First World War, which happened to coincide with the last major flu pandemic, when the accompanying photograph was taken. That’s why the federal government felt the need to run a major propaganda campaign with posters like the one in the background of the photograph. Some outspoken opponents of the war, like Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, were thrown in jail; “slackers” faced community censure, and in at least one extreme case, death by mob violence for failing to purchase a “liberty bond.”

In World War II the American people got closer to unanimously embracing sacrifice in the national interest than they ever have, before or since. Beating Nazis was something we could pretty much all get behind.

You might think that beating the deadly coronavirus could inspire a similar degree of national unity and willing sacrifice. But instead the nation is divided and ambivalent about what should be done and who should sacrifice what. Only recently has the President himself gotten fully behind the drastic social distancing measures that professional health experts are calling for, but he could do more to define it as a patriotic duty and call out those who don’t do their part as something like slackers. It’s Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, after all, who are putting up the most resistance to social distancing, egged on by the pro-Trump media.

Part of the problem is uncertainty. Instead of an enemy shooting at us with bullets and bombs, we are fighting invisible germs, and our response is based on statistical modeling by health experts, which most of us can only take on faith—at a time when many of us have lost faith in expertise.

And that uncertainty leads to questions about the validity of the sacrifices we are making. The president himself can’t seem to decide whether it’s all really worth it. He said just a short while ago, “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” Or as Glen Beck put it, “I would rather die than kill the country.”

And I confess to having had my own doubts. How do we weigh the suffering caused by over-burdened health care workers and a perhaps massive rise in virus deaths against the cost of shutting down the economy? The latter leads to real suffering too, and it has already begun, with 10 million losing their jobs (and health care coverage?) in the past two weeks, students struggling to adjust to online learning (a struggle I’ve witnessed; it’s not pretty), rents and mortgage payments coming due, small businesses ordered to close, victims of mental illness cut off from needed therapy.

This suffering is reflected in the headlines: “Some cities see jumps in domestic violence during the pandemic,” one CNN headline proclaims. And I have seen it in person: the store clerk who said his cancer treatment has been postponed, the 20-somethings in my orbit whose launch has been interrupted, the small businesses in my neighborhood that have had to shut down. Meanwhile people I know personally who have the virus have so far had only mild cases and been told by doctors not to come in for treatment or even testing.* Are such cases being factored into the experts’ models, I wonder?

But then the other day I listened to a Throughline podcast about the 1918 pandemic, which mentioned the photograph of the nurses making masks. The Red Cross poster on the wall behind them defines virus transmission-mitigation measures—like making masks—as a patriotic duty. More Americans died in that pandemic than in either of the World Wars. I got to thinking that instead of feeling put upon about the sacrifices we are enduring now, what if we could manage to feel patriotic and ever so slightly heroic about doing our part in preventing that from happening again?

That sense of shared sacrifice for a worthy goal is something we have not experienced as a nation in a long time. Since Vietnam, the burdens of war have fallen on an ever shrinking number of citizens. And there have been very good reasons to oppose wars like the one in Vietnam.  For once, defeat of the enemy we face today—certainly a just cause—requires something of all of us. We may not be suffering equally, but we are pretty much all suffering to some extent.

In her great meditation on democracy, Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen shows how sacrifice is key to the survival of a system where the people vote. It is the willingness of the losers to abide by the results of elections that allows the system to survive. Allen writes:

An honest account of collective democratic action must begin by acknowledging that communal decisions inevitably benefit some citizens at the expense of others, even when the whole community generally benefits. Since democracy claims to secure the good of all citizens, those people who benefit less than others from particular political decisions, but nonetheless accede to those decisions, preserve the stability of political institutions. Their sacrifice makes collective democratic action possible…. The hard truth of democracy is that some citizens are always giving things up for others. (28-29)

Allen shows how some Americans have been asked to sacrifice more than others.  Since the 1970s, for example, rust belt workers lost livelihoods in manufacturing jobs when the majority embraced free trade and globalization.  When such unequal sacrifice is not acknowledged by those who benefit from it, she argues, trust among citizens is eroded and the survival of democracy is at risk.

I would imagine she might see moments in our national life when we all have to sacrifice something for the greater good as an opportunity to build trust and solidarity and strengthen democracy. 

It is unfortunate that we are all still so far from unanimously embracing as patriotic the sacrifices currently being asked of us. But a corner may have been turned on the last day of March, when the president seemed to abandon his ambivalence about what needs to be done and to ask us all to make sacrifices for the greater good. Here are his opening remarks in that day’s Coronavirus Task Force Press Briefing:

Our country is in the midst of a great national trial, unlike any we have ever faced before. You all see it… We’re at war with a deadly virus. Success in this fight will require the full, absolute measure of our collective strength, love, and devotion. Very important. Each of us has the power, through our own choices and actions, to save American lives and rescue the most vulnerable among us. That’s why we really have to do what we all know is right. Every citizen is being called upon to make sacrifices. Every business is being asked to fulfill its patriotic duty. Every community is making fundamental changes to how we live, work, and interact each and every day.

Those good words—including “sacrifice”—are a start, but need to be followed up with many more words and actions—and really a wholly different approach to presidential leadership. Since Trump has shared their skepticism about drastic measures to slow the spread of coronavirus he may be the only person who could get the opponents of those measures on board with the program. And then maybe the collective experience of sheltering in place will help us see the way that sacrifices are not equally borne by all, and that could do something to restore trust among citizens, in their government, and in democracy. Hope springs eternal!

More food for thought:

Danielle Allen has a column in the Washington Post. She has written four essays on the pandemic starting on March 13. And her book is worth reading. I haven't done it justice here at all. In fact I think I need to read it again: Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (2006)

This Atlantic essay by McCay Coppins offers a sobering look at how our pre-existing political divisions are reflected in our reactions to the pandemic. 

"The Daily," (podcast of the NY Times) ran a segment on the leadership of governors, many of whom spoke about the role of sacrifice in managing the pandemic.

On the point that the sacrifices are not equally shared, listen to Bob Garfield’s hilarious send-up of celebrities and how they are coping with social distancing.

This recent Ezra Klein podcast featured sociologist Eric Klinenberg discussing the real suffering and sacrifice involved in social isolation. They also discuss the ways that some of those who are being asked to make the most sacrifices for others happen also to be people that society was treating pretty shabbily up to now.

Someone asked if by saying "some of us" when referring to rising mistrust of experts meant that I shared that mistrust. The answer is yes, to a point, though, as in the present crisis, we nonetheless often have no choice but to rely heavily on expert advice.   Just one example of the problem with expertise—the financial experts who were largely to blame for the last great recession.  See, for example, this PBS Newshour segment.

*Postscript: On April 11 (last night), I learned of the first death of a person close to me. Since I wrote the blog post, above, the predicted acceleration of coronavirus has arrived. A friend, also yesterday, posted this graphic representation that drives the point home. Click on the image and watch the daily death toll rise over time.

 

Update. On his release from the hospital after surviving the coronavirus, Boris Johnson delivered this video address to the nation on April 12. I think it is a model of democratic leadership in the way that it acknowledges sacrifice. It's hard for me to to imagine citizens listening to this and then refusing to cooperate with social distancing measures being asked of them.