STRANGE DEFEAT
The year 2020 began with an impeachment trial, the third in American history. The president had used his official powers to extort a political favor from a foreign leader in order to help his own reelection. His guilt was clear—only the tribal loyalty of his party kept him in office. But before long hardly anyone remembered the impeachment.
The year ended with the president’s attempt to overturn the results of an election in which 158 million Americans voted, the most ever, and rejected him by a margin of 7 million votes. Holed up in his palace, surrounded by sycophants, he broadcast frantic claims of fraud and victory, while his allies manipulated the levers of government and media to keep him in power, or else maintained a prudent silence, and his deluded followers poured into the streets and websites. If he could have provoked a military coup on his own behalf, he wouldn’t have hesitated. If he’d then abolished future elections, millions of Americans would have cheered him. The last day of 2020 came on January 6, 2021, the day that the president sent 20,000 maddened Americans to overthrow self-government.
Up to the very end, what kept Donald Trump from reaching the exalted status of dictator—feared by his bitterest critics, desired by his most fanatic supporters—was his own ineptitude, along with our creaky institutions and the remaining democratic faith of the American people. There was always a perverse comfort in imagining Trump as a fascist, a Mussolini. It would mean that we were up against something clear-cut, both familiar and foreign, as if half the country had come under an alien spell that the other half had somehow resisted. Trump himself encouraged the analogy—the cocked chin, the jutting lower lip, the dramatic way he climbed the floodlit White House balcony steps after being released from Walter Reed Hospital and removed his mask and saluted. The superman restored to full strength.
These images made him seem artificial, more like a European ruler than an American president. But Trump was a native son, an all-American flimflam man and demagogue, a traditional character of our way of life. Twain would have immediately recognized him. He was spawned in a gold-plated sewer with other creatures of our celebrity trash culture: investment gurus, talk-show hosts, evangels of the Prosperity Gospel, surgery-altered TV housewives, bling-worshiping rappers. His supporters are part of us, too. Yes, I’m aware that we’ve become two countries—but each one continually makes the other. A failure the size of Trump took the whole of America.
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The year 2020 saw the most flagrant attempt to subvert democracy since Fort Sumter. It began with attempted blackmail and ended with attempted sedition. Between them was everything else.
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
In certain ways the United States was favorably positioned to come through without heavy losses. We had two months to learn from the horrors of China, Iran, and Italy. We are among world leaders in biotechnology, sophisticated hospital equipment, intensive-care capacity, and medical specialists. We live spread out across a vast and rich country, where many people live in single-family houses with grassy yards and commute alone in cars rather than in crowded trains and buses. Our cities are less dense than those of Europe and Asia. And Americans pride themselves on being independent and resourceful in a crisis. The same spirit that drove Clara Barton, a government clerk with no training in health care, to bring medical supplies and comforting words to wounded Union soldiers in Washington at the start of the Civil War would carry Americans through the plague of COVID-19.
Here finally was a crisis that could pull Americans together as hadn’t happened in the two decades since September 11, 2001. The biology of a pandemic is designed to show the limits of individualism and affirm a truth that’s too hard to keep in mind—our common humanity. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone’s health depends on the health and behavior of others. No one is safe unless everyone takes responsibility for everyone else. No community or region can withstand the plague without an active national government. No country can end it alone.
Generosity and courage broke out everywhere. A planeload of medical workers flew from Atlanta to New York to help in overwhelmed hospitals. General Electric aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanded that their factory be converted to producing ventilators. A hospital television show donated protective equipment that real hospitals lacked. Volunteers ran shopping errands for the sick and elderly or took out their sewing machines to stitch masks. The dedication of New York’s nurses and doctors inspired residents across the city to come to their windows at the nightly seven o’clock shift change and bang pots and cheer and sing to the nearly empty streets. Just staying home and making yourself tolerable to your family was a patriotic act.
And yet, despite all this, the United States quickly became the world leader in infections and deaths, far beyond its share of the global population—a position it held throughout the year. Technological prowess and individual sacrifice were no match for national incoherence. The virus exploited every fault line, every division of class, race, geography, and politics, every declining social and economic indicator, every institutional weakness, every blind spot and bias. The failure began at the top, where it was least forgivable and most devastating, but it extended to the whole society.
Just after the fall of France in the summer of 1940, the French historian, soldier, and future Resistance fighter Marc Bloch wrote a short book called Strange Defeat. He described how years of declining national solidarity and cultural decay had preceded the French collapse before the German invaders. The failure belonged to every sector—the military, the bourgeoisie, political parties, trade unions, schools, and universities. Bloch didn’t spare his own profession. “The staffs worked with tools which were put into their hands by the nation at large,” he wrote of the military high command. “They could be only what the totality of the social fact, as it existed in France, permitted them to be.”
Like France in 1940, America in 2020 stunned itself with a collapse that was larger and deeper than one leader. Under invasion and occupation, few of our institutions held up. So we have to ask: What is the totality of the social fact as it exists in America?
Start with the landscape that lay open to the virus. In the prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious service workers. In the countryside, decaying communities in reaction against the modern world. On media, endless vituperation among different camps. In the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor. In Washington, a hollow government led by a con man and his morally bankrupt party. Around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.
A crisis as massive and new as a pandemic brings an almost inevitable failure of imagination. It was hard at first to believe that the pictures of deserted streets and chaotic hospitals in other countries had anything to do with us. The solidity of everyday life was comforting, and dangerous. When the virus began to spread here, no one knew what to do. The authorities gave confused instructions or none at all. Families and organizations were left to make their decisions alone: go on riding the train, keep the office open, send the kids to school, visit friends? Or cancel everything, buy the last rolls of toilet paper, and take shelter? Americans woke up every morning to a feeling that was for many of us—though not all—radically new: our government didn’t care if we died. It felt as if we were living in a failed state.
Those early days reminded me of experiences I’ve had in other countries, like Iraq or Sierra Leone, where the state is too weak or indifferent to take care of its citizens, where the leaders are too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. People unlucky enough to live in such places don’t expect the government to place any value on their lives. They have to look after themselves, so they ignore official statements, share the latest rumors, barricade their streets, and pool money to keep teachers in schools and doctors in clinics. Here, of course, government continued to perform its basic functions. Police answered 911 calls, social security checks came in the mail. But the sense that we were on our own never went away all year. There was no national plan for dealing with the greatest threat of our lives. Every time Trump spoke in public, the knot in the stomach tightened.
On March 6, Trump toured the laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outside Atlanta. Wearing a golf jacket and a red “Keep America Great” campaign hat, flanked by doctors and political allies, the president paused for forty-five minutes with the press and played an epidemiologist who’s pleased with his lab results. He kept returning to the low American numbers—240 confirmed cases, 11 deaths—as if they would stay put if we just stopped testing and kept sick passengers from leaving an offshore cruise ship. Trump was in a jocular mood. “I like this stuff, I really get it,” he said. “People are really surprised I understand this stuff. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC with the white Amish beard, stood next to Trump, hands behind his back, mouth half-open, nervously eyeing the president sideways as if he might suddenly do something unpredictable. Redfield remained silent when Trump declared, among other lies, “Anybody that wants a test can get a test.”
Heidi Klum, the model and reality-TV host, got a test after complaining to her 7 million Instagram followers that she couldn’t. The entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets got tests. Trump’s family, friends, donors, and allies got tests after being exposed at a birthday party and a political conference. Celebrities, athletes, the wealthy and well-connected—some of them with no symptoms—could always get tests. An Internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face. But nurses, police officers, and thousands of ordinary Americans with fevers and dry coughs could not get tests. In New York and Seattle and California they waited in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away if they weren’t actually suffocating. Because there were nowhere near enough tests.
Grotesque inequality—that was an essential piece of the social fact of America in 2020. Before the pandemic it had become completely natural for privileged people to be allowed to cut to the front of the line. That these stories managed to spark outrage showed that the crisis was deep enough to force Americans out of thoughtless acceptance and into a state of awareness that can be a condition of change.
It’s shocking now to look at the video of Trump’s March 6 visit to the CDC. The president struts his mastery, the government doctors flatter him, and the politicians smile, smug and clueless. Redfield talks about a strategy of “containment,” but it’s too late. The virus was already infiltrating New York City’s apartment buildings and office towers and subways. The next day, Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency; within two weeks, New York and California would shut down; by the end of the month, New York City would have its thousandth COVID death. Everyone standing with Trump amid the machines and wires in the white fluorescent light of the lab was complicit in a grand deception. They were denying Americans a chance to protect themselves while they had time.
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The country’s political class responded to the crisis incoherently, and in some cases treacherously. The behavior of leaders charged with the general welfare was so destructive that it revealed more than ordinary incompetence. The pressure of the pandemic showed how little was left of public service and national unity even as ideals. In their place grew malignancy.
At best, politicians who took the plague seriously waited too long to act or made initial mistakes that caused thousands of deaths. Until the middle of March, the mayor of New York City told people to go on with their lives and keep sending their children by bus and subway to schools where they sneezed, coughed, and touched noses, mouths, doorknobs, and one another. The governor of New York State ordered hospitalized elderly patients back into their nursing homes, which quickly formed the worst clusters of infection, and then he concealed the extent of the tragedy.
At worst, leaders used their positions to benefit themselves while leaving the public to its fate. In January and February, while the president was telling Americans that the virus was under control and would soon disappear, a handful of donors, investors, and U.S. senators—among them Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, the newest and richest member of the Senate—received alarming private briefings from the administration: the virus was highly aggressive, nothing like the flu, and not under control. They quickly traded stocks on the information while publicly saying nothing about the danger they knew was coming, or even giving false assurances that would be certain to get people killed. In the White House, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, took over the pandemic response and advocated playing down the threat out of concern for the stock market and his father-in-law’s re-election. He interfered in the work of more competent officials, compromised security protocols, dabbled in conflicts of interest, flirted with violations of federal law, and then promised nationwide testing through his business connections, which never materialized.
None of this cost anyone’s position, or was even all that surprising. The American people have grown used to parasites attaching themselves at the top of our democracy and sucking its lifeblood. Sexting with a staffer does more harm to a politician than profiteering in a national crisis.
Kushner and Loeffler: mirror images, elongated, slim-suited, self-seeking dilettantes who entered politics at the highest level because of wealth they never had to earn. Kushner gained admission to Harvard and New York University through his father’s multimillion-dollar donations, married into another fortune, became a slumlord, failed in both newspaper publishing and real estate, then was made a senior White House advisor with expertise in nothing. Loeffler married her financier boss, became a major donor to the Republican Party, was paid back by the governor of Georgia with an empty Senate seat, and joined the president’s smiling entourage at the CDC. By then she had remade herself from a suburban moderate into a liberal-baiting, gun-playing extremist. Kushner and Loeffler were fraudulent meritocrats who became fake populists when it served their interests. Their biographies tell the story of an entire era’s decline.
Tocqueville found that the most striking thing about American democracy, the central fact from which all his other observations sprang, was “the equality of conditions.” He didn’t mean equal results, which, given the diversity of human talents and pursuits, could only be imposed by a state that made some more equal than others. He meant equal status in society—the desire to be no one’s inferior. This “passion for equality” (even as it excluded the enslaved, indigenous, and female inhabitants of America, a parenthesis almost as big as the country) was stronger than the love of freedom. “Freedom,” Tocqueville wrote, “is not the chief and continual object of their desires; it is equality for which they feel an eternal love.” Americans would rather give up their political liberty than their feeling of being equals. “They will put up with poverty, servitude, and barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy.”
Trump reached the White House on the strength of this insight. He offered his supporters a deal: they would give him unprecedented powers, even the power to decide for them what was true; in exchange, he would drag the elites down and elevate his supporters as “the people.” He would give them equality in servitude to him. Trump’s inherited wealth and garish lifestyle didn’t invalidate him as a populist tribune in their eyes, as progressives thought it should. Money alone doesn’t violate the American idea of equality—what offends ordinary people is being looked down on by those with unwarranted power and privilege. Trump got a pass because he articulated the essence of his people’s condition, which was resentment. Its taste was in his mouth, too.
Populism is the politics of “the people” turned against “the elites.” It’s inherent in democracies, always lurking, and it grows out of control when citizens feel that their needs are going unmet or their voices unheard. Then they will revolt against the class above them that claims to rule by right of superior knowledge and seems to do so for its own benefit. The experts—civil servants, trade negotiators, think tank analysts, scientists, professors, journalists—have a tenuous hold on their status, if not their jobs. No one elected them. They’re unaccountable to the mass public. The same credentials and special language that make them recognizable and admirable to one another render them suspect in the eyes of the noncredentialed.
At the start of the pandemic, the experts made crucial mistakes that haunted them for the rest of the year. The entire purpose of the CDC, with its eleven thousand highly educated employees and $7 billion budget, was to track and contain the spread of such a virus, but the agency lost months failing to develop a test on a scale large enough to do it. Technical glitches contributed to this failure, but so did bureaucratic rigidity and a cautious mindset, made worse by layers of rules imposed by Congress in the years after 9/11.
In the past two decades the permanent government has suffered from the general inflammation of politics. The morale of civil servants plummeted as their budgets were used as political weapons, freezes and furloughs became routine, and demagogic politicians set them up as targets for their own failures with terms of abuse such as “unelected bureaucrats.” The public came to associate civil servants with the rampant corruption of the federal government—in Trump’s language, “the swamp”—when in reality most are lifers working toward a pension, with no revolving doors to spin through and no way to cash in, a squeezed class of workers in wildly prosperous and expensive Washington.
Civil servants have lost their status, and with it their willingness to take initiative. They’ve come to be treated like well-educated clerks whose main concern is to avoid controversy with their political masters while doing their jobs. They are knowledgeable in a specialized area, conscientious, risk-averse, snowed in paperwork, and increasingly underpaid compared with their peers in the private sector. Trump saw the federal government as property he’d acquired by winning the election, and civil servants as his personal employees. Any other commitment on their part—to the country, the Constitution, or the facts—was rank disloyalty. He imagined scheming conspirators in drab D.C. office wear, coup plotters hidden in plain sight at desks, in lunchrooms, and on jogging paths around the federal capital: the “deep state.” He set about bending it to his will and purging the “traitors.”
Meanwhile, out in the country, the public health system that treats widespread illnesses such as diabetes, venereal disease, and addiction has been hollowed out for years. In the decade after the Great Recession, spending on local and state departments was cut by 15 percent, eliminating 55,000 jobs, a quarter of the national workforce. Public and private spending on advanced medical research remained high, while the country’s front-line defenses were abandoned—one more casualty of the iron law of inequality. All of this helps to explain why a country that would go on to produce a miraculous vaccine in less than a year had such a hard time testing, tracing, and caring for its people.
Copyright © 2021 by George Packer
