The forever emergency

The generally (though not always) unspoken proposition was that if the country were freed from the moral burden of having Donald Trump in the White House, then the epidemic would subside. But the viruses that cause respiratory infections are not, as it turns out, morally sensitive. Rather than succeeding in his promise to “shut down the virus,” President Biden had to endure waves of new infections and new variants, and stood by helplessly as the body count ticked upward and upward until the number of deaths on his watch exceeded those on Trump’s. Of course that is a dumb metric from a rationalistic point of view, but what matters in politics is not epidemiology but mythology. We live by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

The most powerful force in American life today is not the Covid-19 epidemic. It is neither populism nor globalization nor white supremacy nor capitalism nor critical race theory nor technology nor any of the other forces we point to as explanations for our unhappiness. The most powerful force in American life today is the ravenous, unsatisfied hunger for community. The frustrated desire for community is what has made social media and other related technologies such a titanic and baleful force in our public life, what drives identity politics and neo-racism, what causes people to seek personal meaning in cults, conspiracy theories, and mobs. Black masks vs. red caps, this chant vs. that chant, this meaningless jargon vs. that meaningless jargon — the fight for community is often vicious.