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Social Distortion

On the fourth anniversary of the pandemic, a look at how America pulled
apart as the rest of the world pulled together

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."

[link removed]

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."

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.

[link removed]

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.

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.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

Follow Rick Perlstein on Twitter ,
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