Offline with Jon Favreau - Is Trump Benefiting from Our 2020 Amnesia?

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

Eric Klinenberg, sociologist at New York University, joins Offline to discuss why our failure to process 2020 may lead to another disastrous Trump term. His newest book, 2020, breaks down the year that reshaped our politics, unveiled cracks in our society, and transformed the ways we live, work, and interact with each other. Eric and Jon unpack how Trump’s Covid-era leadership politicized public health and left Americans to fend for themselves. They discuss how to best address widespread resentment and institutional distrust, and consider how to grapple with the lasting effects of a year we’d rather forget. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

We were really shaken up by what we experienced in 2020. But for the most part, what we've done is just repress that, and we don't want to go back to it. I'll tell you, it's actually been hard to spark conversations about this book. It's weird. I've written a lot of books in my career. I think this is the best book I've ever written. And also, a lot of people just don't want to have a conversation about it

because it's like, I don't want to go back there. But the reality is once you start having the conversation, it's like all of these things flood back. And it's really cathartic and useful. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. You just heard from today's guest, writer and NYU sociologist Eric Kleinenberg. Max is out this week. He's taking the offline challenge seriously and is spending some time

unplugged somewhere deep in the woods. He'll be back next week. Today, though, we're talking about 2020, the year everything changed. Some of you may be thinking, no, thank you on reliving 2020. That's what therapy is for. I hear you. 2020 was the year my first child was born and Donald Trump lost the election, and I still look back on it with absolute misery. But one of the reasons I started this show is because I think what we all went through in 2020, stuck at home on our screens, angry, afraid, and exhausted, actually explains so much of what we're going through today. 2020 reshaped our politics, unveiled cracks in our society, and transformed the ways we live, work, and interact with each other.

But we've never really reckoned with those changes. And now as we head into a Biden-Trump rematch, I've been worrying that our unwillingness to examine that year and its consequences has left us with a sort of collective amnesia that's making a second Trump term more likely. Our guest today worries about that too. Eric Kleinenberg just released a wonderful book aptly titled 2020 that unpacks the ways that terrible year revealed what we value and changed how we interact. In it, he makes the case that Trump's COVID era leadership told Americans they must fend for themselves and that there's no one there to help them. And that that response has fueled our current politics

of resentment and institutional distrust. He says that these feelings are a form of societal long COVID and that if we want to overcome them, we have to grapple with them. It's a beautiful book and one that, despite my initial anxieties, I'm really thankful to have read. I invited Eric

on to talk about the book, why he believes COVID didn't actually make us lonelier, and what the Biden campaign will need to do to rewrite the story of 2020 and ensure the president's re-election. I promise, even if you don't want to relive that year, you will deeply appreciate the lessons that Eric has to share. Here's my conversation with Eric Kleinenberg. Eric Kleinenberg, welcome to Offline. Great to be here. Thanks. So I've been really looking forward to this conversation because I have had this gut feeling for the last few years that we are underestimating the collective trauma from the pandemic as an explanation for our current political and social malaise.

That comes from a lot of conversations we've had on this show, which is really about connection or lack thereof. I was also a big sociology nerd in college, so I look at these issues through a similar lens as you do. Let's go. And you have written this wonderful book called 2020 about what that terrible year revealed about who we are, what we value, and what larger societal fissures we'd been neglecting. So I'd love to know what made you write the book and then how you went about it. Are you asking like a therapist would ask me that question? Honestly, however you feel. Well, can we start with the therapy part of it?

Yeah. Because, I mean, despite some rumors to the contrary, those of us who work in universities, we are human beings also. And we are feeling sentient. I'm a parent. I'm a child. I'm mortal. And so I live in New York City. And when COVID came, it was terrifying. I mean,

it was really scary here. I happen to have worked in this world of people who study crises and health emergencies for decades. So I know a lot of people who had a lot of information. I was one of those people who was telling people, go out to Costco and Trader Joe's and stock up on the important stuff in February. So I saw this thing coming. And what happened initially, actually, is that my son, who was 13 years old at the time, came down with this fever. And he's this incredibly energetic kid, soccer player, just going all the time, never gets tired, could not get off the couch,

was having night sweats, coughing, headache. And it was early March, and this being the United States of America, there was no way to know whether he had COVID because there are no tests. So we just had our anxiety to marinate in. And this is a time when you didn't know if it was really going to affect kids or how. And remember the guidelines were if someone in your home has COVID or maybe has COVID, put them in a room and close the door and slide food under there. Yeah.

And if anyone listening has ever been a parent, this is an impossible thing to do, right? So, of course, my wife and I ignored those guidelines, and we were there, and then she's coughing, and my daughter, who's younger, was a little sick. And it was frightening. It was a frightening time. So I would say to answer your question, I was personally traumatized by this thing because it went on for months. And we lost a relative to COVID. We had older relatives who got isolated for months.

We worried about our economic security. and we worried about the country. I mean, by the way, as this was happening, the Trump impeachment trial, we're gearing up for the 2020 primaries. It was a lot to process. So some people can relate to this, I hope. When there's all this stuff swirling around and you can't close your eyes at night without having your brain spin, I sometimes find that if I can kind of step outside of it and say, I'm going to write a book about this, I'm going to study this, it just provides some coherency. So the first very human response to that is I knew something of incredible significance was happening and I wanted to

understand it and I couldn't do it just as a human being. I had to do it as a social scientist. So I like objectified it. Yeah. And I totally understand what you're saying. I went through something similar and the challenge is here we are 2024. People don't want to even talk about it. They don't want to look back on it. When I, even if I see headlines that there's like another mini surge, I'm just like, I can't, I just can't do it, you know? And yet I do think, and you illustrate this quite well in your book, I do think that some of the, some of what that year exposed about America and who we are,

we are still grappling with. And the fact that we haven't fully grappled with it, I wonder if that is preventing us from sort of getting out of this funk that we're in right now. Yeah. So that is 100% the thesis of my book. I think that, I think the things we saw about ourselves, you know, individually and more importantly, collectively, politically, that we can't unsee. And to be honest, I think that's one of the reasons why so many Americans feel off and disaffected these days. Like, there's this weird thing going on in the political conversation, which is like, if you look at Joe Biden's record on jobs, on taming inflation,

on just kind of, you know, getting us to deal with the climate crisis, on stabilizing all kinds of things that were so chaotic and dysfunctional before he took office. America should be feeling great. And my books just come out in Europe, and so I get these calls from European news media. And from their perspective, like, well, things seem to be so much better in the United States than they are here. Like, you must be feeling terrific. And objectively, like, if you look at the numbers, Americans should be fired up right now. What an amazing moment this is. Like, granted, there's an immigration crisis. Granted, you know, inflation is not, you know, gone. There's still,

you know, some significant issues, but like but we are in such better shape. But we feel off. Kids aren't going to school. Truancy levels are through the roof. Teachers aren't going to school. Our offices are empty. We're still terrified about violence, even though the numbers are down. There's just something off.

And it's my view that what's happened is 2020, it exposed things. That's what makes it so interesting as a subject for a book. If we look closely at what happened in 2020, we could see all these things about ourselves in this country that maybe we kind of know, but we don't want to see. And one of those, I think, is that so many people felt not exactly lonely, but like they were on their own. Like there weren't grownups in the room. Our core institutions, you know, politically, in terms of health, in terms of work, they were not coming through for us. They did not have our back. And I think a lot of us

felt that spiraling sense that like the bottom had dropped out. And it's hard to not see that anymore. I was going to ask you about that because we've had the Surgeon General on a few times to talk about what he's declared a loneliness epidemic. You're not sold on this as an explanation for what's ailing us. You've written that there's no good evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever. So what do you think is going on? Because I guess intuitively for me, I'm like, you know what? We were all locked up in our homes for a couple of years

and we sort of lost the sense of connection with each other. So to me, that explains not just loneliness, but a lot of the other issues. But what did you find? Okay, so first of all, I hear you that we were locked up for a while and we did transform our lives. But I think it's so important in this conversation for us to remember that we did not actually get locked up in our homes. Like I have relatives in France. I have friends in China.

I have friends who are in Melbourne in Australia. They were actually locked up. Yeah, that's right. Italy. People all over the world were literally locked up. And they were disconnected. They couldn't leave their apartments. Like they could come out for 30 minutes if they had a pass to go in this neighborhood. Like that did not happen in America. It's so important to note that like our, our version of shutting things down was pretty mild. And it's so interesting because all these other countries had far more severe disruptions to regular social life and social interaction.

But they did not have the outrageous spike in violence, right? Not just gun crimes. Like, you know, they clearly didn't have people brawling in the aisles of supermarkets over masks. But we had this, like, spike in reckless driving. All these kind of strange ways in which we acted out on each other that just don't work with the idea that there was something especially severe here in the US. So in my book, I interviewed lots of people who were living alone

in New York at the peak of the crisis. And it was so interesting, John, what they kept saying to me is, it's not like I felt lonely in the regular sense of the word. You know, I was living through this thing with all kinds of other people who are living through it too. Like we were in sync in a weird way. And they were saying also like, and I don't know if you did this, but like they were on the phone talking to their friends and their relatives like never before.

You know, like I was having Zoom conversations with people I went to high school with. It was like, let's all just talk to each other. And there was something kind of cool about that. But so it wasn't like we were lonely in a conventional sense. People, we missed the physicality of life. Like we missed intimacy, I think, with other people. We clearly missed like the casual interactions

we have with strangers, you know, people in an urban setting, like the people who work urban setting, like the people who work in the bar or the coffee shop, like there's something about social life that we, that we miss. But I think the thing that, that, that really shows up for me, for my research, is this common thread of people feeling like, I don't know, they'd somehow been abandoned. And that was especially true in the early months, like before the CARES Act, before the Child Pover because the previous president, he said a lot of wild things. And when there's a crisis and you've got a new pathogen and it could kill you or people you love, you really want reliable information.

You just want to know what to do. It's just basic stuff. And most leaders, regardless of their political perspective and ideology, they were able to provide the basic information. And we got magical thinking, right? Like, it's going to be gone by Easter. All kinds of stuff that just was confusing. And so I think we got a little bit lost and distrustful. And so my take on this situation is, like, what's so off with us now, it's not that we're lonelier than ever. Loneliness is serious, but we are not. It's that

all these bad things in America that were happening before 2020, the distrust, the division, the sense that the other side is our enemy, that stuff just got wildly accelerated and intensified. It locked in, and it's like in our blood today. And we haven't recovered because we haven't been able to talk about it, and we need to. I have been, because, you know, you point out how other countries, similar to ours, other wealthier countries, like they all fared better than we did. And as you just pointed out, some of them went through like much more stringent lockdowns. How much do you think is a result of leadership in America, Trump, and the political divisions of the moment, which, you know, did not start with Trump by any means. We didn't have a

great political environment before Trump came to power. But how much of it had to do with Trump? And how much was baked into our cultural DNA as a country that's always been big on individual rights and freedoms and self-interest? Okay, so it's a very good point that we're not necessarily set up to be massively successful in a coordinated campaign that relied on social cohesion. Fair point, the sociologist acknowledges. But that said, here's a couple of things that are worth thinking about. First of all, there are independent agencies and health experts from places like Johns Hopkins that assess which countries on earth were best prepared for a pandemic based on their infrastructure, based on their planning,

based on their resources. The number one best prepared nation on earth for a pandemic in late 2019, according to these researchers from the Johns Hopkins and around the world, is the United States of America. Wow. So we have massive built-in advantages. And that is a study that's been cited all over the place. It's not breaking news. Massive built-in advantages. And that is a study that's been cited all over the place. It's not breaking news.

Massive built-in advantage. Okay, second thing. The United States is not the only country on Earth that has a strong tradition of individualism. Some might even say hyper-individualism. Those polarized where distrust is an issue or, for that matter, that has a very conservative leader who seems hell-bent on kind of denying scientific information as 2020 begins. So in my book, I write a lot about Australia. Australia, early 2020. Scott Morrison's the prime minister, right-winger. There's these historic bushfires just destroying the country.

And every scientist on earth is like, climate change, climate change. And Morrison's like, I don't know about this climate change theory. You know, I'm yet to be persuaded. And I'd rather not have you talk about that. It seems like they're heading for the same disaster America is. But Australia, you know, and this is like, right, Australia, like the country built on this, you know, people kicked out of England, right? So, like, individual this is like Australia, the country built on this. People kicked out of England, right? So individualism is strong.

Morrison does what I think any sane, reasonable leader would do. He's like, let's have a bipartisan commission. I'm going to get the leaders of every state and territory in Australia. I'm going to get the health leaders from every state and territory. We're going to come together. We're going to develop a federal plan and give space for every state to have its own local plan. They had really studied what happened in the SARS epidemic in 2003. They knew that masks could be really helpful with the coronavirus. So let's subsidize production and distribution. They knew

that testing and tracing were going to be really important. So they did that. They knew that, you know, shutdowns of some kind were going to be necessary. They closed the border that, you know, they did all these things. And what's amazing to me about Australia is like, it has the same preconditions that America has sociologically, but by the end of the pandemic, if the US and Australia had the same death rates, 900,000 Americans would be alive today, which I think is like a stunning, I don't even know how to think about in science, and in other people, at the end of 2020 in Australia, they had gone significantly up. In the United States, they had plummeted, and we've stayed down. So, yes, we were preconditioned for what was likely to be a, you know, what could have been a bad situation. But, boy, the case of Australia, I think, basically, it didn't have to go down that way. And also, it clearly, despite the preconditions, could have been so much better here in the U.S.

We were uniquely misled, and I think Trump's dysregulated mind and dysfunctional approach to government made a massive impact, one that's much greater than I think most Americans appreciate. that way, there are choices we can make to create an internet that makes a better future for all of us. Technologists and policymakers have real solutions to the problems facing our online world today. Surveillance, capitalism, AI, and machine learning, and digital privacy. We can build an internet that has all the good things we want from tech with none of the creepy stuff. In each episode, Cindy and Jason invite someone with a vision on how to fix the internet, someone with real solutions on how to move the needle toward a better online world. This show will make you feel better about our digital future, be more knowledgeable about what needs fixing, and be more engaged to demand change.

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Episodes are available anywhere you listen to podcasts and at eff.org slash podcast. So Trump has now been asking, you know, are you better off than you were four years ago? The answer for most of us should be, of course we are. Four years ago, the world shut down. We were trapped in our homes. There's no toilet paper. Trying to avoid it. And he's, you know, he's telling us that maybe bleach injections could solve the issue.

But of course, that's not everyone's answer. It's not even most people's answer right now. And Trump's term, you know, according to most polls, is now remembered more positively than Biden's. Why do you think people are having a hard time remembering how chaotic Trump's leadership was in those, the entire year he was in office in 2020. Well, first of all, I want to say, he actually started this thing by saying,

are you better off now than you were five years ago? I know, I know. Which is amazing. Like, wait a minute, that's not how the line goes. You know, you were in charge four years ago. So I think first he tried to just get us to forget, but it turned out he didn't really need to. And part of that is because I think so many of us were traumatized by what happened in 2020. And let's remember, it wasn't just COVID. It was also that there was an economic freefall.

Millions of us lost our jobs. And a lot of people who had savings saw them dwindle. If you were retired and you were planning on living on your savings, it was terrifying. There was George Floyd's murder and the Black Lives Matter protests. There was the spike in violence that was fairly unique to the United States. There was the kind of abandonment of cities. All the stuff leading up to January 6th, we were traumatized on many different levels. Right. And, and then we all had our personal challenges, like my son getting sick or all the working families, you know, people I

interviewed where it's like, and I experienced, you've got these two kids at home and they've got zoom school and they're three and that, but you also have a job that you have to do. And in addition to your, your paid job, you know, paid job, you're cooking and you're cleaning and you're trying to keep everybody sane. There's too much. And so I think what we all did as human beings to get through 2020 is we compartmentalized as much as possible. We put all of that stress into these black boxes and we put them in the closet and lock the door. And look, anyone who's met a teenager in America these last several years knows that like that doesn't work because we have a serious mental health crisis, you know, in this country right now. It's not really

loneliness. It's like stress and anxiety. I mean, we were really shaken up by what we experienced in 2020. But for the most part, what we've done is just repress that, and we don't want to go back to it. I'll tell you, it's actually been hard to spark conversations about this book, which I'm so happy to be talking to you about it. I feel like it's weird. I've written a lot of books in my career. I think this is the best book I've ever written.

And also, a lot of people just don't want to have a conversation about it because it's like, I don't want to go back there. But the reality is once you start having the conversation, it's like all of these things flood back. And it's really cathartic and useful, but I think it's like, I've talked to enough people in enough cities on the book tour to know that like, it it feels important to do it but i think we do have to spend some time just like focusing in on the specific things that went wrong politically like some of the specific features of the american policy response to this crisis to really get a sense of how you know how much worse things were than they needed to be and we better do that during the 2024 election because otherwise i think people are going to be. And we better do that during the 2024 election, because otherwise, I think people are going to be stuck in this position that things were better then. They

weren't, and I think we can show it. But Biden can't be afraid to talk about it either. No. And well, that brings me to my next question. I mean, I thought about this a lot from a political perspective, especially in terms of, you know, how Biden's been struggling with his approval ratings. And in my mind, like, Biden wins in November of 2020. Then we get into the insurrection. And then he's finally inaugurated. And there is this sort of this feeling of relief, right, that we have, like, closed the door on this chapter, right? And then the vaccines are coming, right? That we have like closed the door on this chapter, right? And then the vaccines are coming, right? And then everyone starts getting vaccinated. Everyone's so excited to get vaccinated.

We all get vaccinated. And there's that moment I can remember like where I was taking a walk with my wife in our neighborhood when the CDC said, masks are off, the vaccination, you can't get it if you're vaccinated, no transmission. And it was like, and then I remember exactly where I was. I was in an airport in June when I saw the first reports of like the Delta variant and that this is now going to, it's, it's going, you know, it doesn't matter if you're vaccinated, you can still get it. And then we go from that to Omicron. And I just, I started wondering, I remember thinking at that point, not only was I like concerned for health and other reasons, but American way, excessively optimistic about how great things were going to be. Look, we were dealing with this new pathogen, like a virus we hadn't really encountered before and a disease we didn't understand. And it was naive and wrong to tell Americans, throw away your masks. This

thing is over. It's not coming back. And Democrats participated in that too. And so I think one of the things that Biden suffers from is having raised expectations that he couldn't fulfill. And of course, there's analogs to this, right? Like the expectation from young people, like my student debt will be canceled, the expectation from climate advocates, like we're going to shift to renewable energy from people who want to rebuild,

have a new, new deal, right? The Green New Deal, like we're going to do it. And oh my God, we were one vote away from having this historic legislation, but it didn't happen. And so I do think that a lot of Americans feel let down because as much as things have improved since 2020, and they really have on so many measures, it's not utopia here yet. And in fact, we're still dealing with a lot of this stuff from 2020. And so I think that makes it complicated. I'm not a political strategist. I'm a social scientist.

But I would say also, the Republican theory of the case has been 2020 is an anomaly. The COVID crisis is an anomaly. It shouldn't really count that's why trump has been saying are you better off now than you were five years ago too because they wanted to not count right it's like had it had it not been for that year but the thing is the next president the person we elect in 2024 they're inheriting a world with Russia and Ukraine, with Israel and Gaza, with nuclear Iran, with global warming, with artificial intelligence, with a pretty frothy market. And who knows when the next pathogen is going to arrive? So it feels to me like every American who's invested, every American period, voting or not, you should be asking, who's going to be better at managing the next crisis? And instead of thinking about 2020 as an anomaly, I think of 2020 as a sign of the kind of year that's coming as the world transforms.

We live in a state of extremes. One of the challenges, I think maybe the biggest challenge I see here is Trump's story is pretty simple, right? It is, uh, the Trump economy was great before and up until 2020. Then, uh, China unleashed the pandemic on the rest of the world. And then Joe Biden stole the election from me. And now he screwed everything up and everything's his fault. And I'm the, I'm the strong man. I'm the guy who can fix everything, bring, you know, elect me and we'll go back to what it was like before the COVID, right. You know, make America great again, back to 2019, 2018. So that's his story. It's easy. It's a classic strong man story. I think Biden's story is much tougher, uh, in any democratic presidents would be, because it relies on

something that you write a whole chapter about in the book, which is trust. And it is about believing that democratic government is the best way forward with all of its messiness and how it can be sclerotic and slow and frustrating and all that kind of stuff. And believing in that requires this level of trust that I don't know, that we clearly don't have in this country. And I wonder, like, what do you think has caused the decline in social trust in America more so than, you know, we've fallen further than a lot of other countries, other similarly wealthy countries?

Why is it so much worse here? What's contributing to that? Well, could we start by going back to the Trump claim? Yeah, for sure. Like the Trump, the simple thing. If it weren't for China, I had things under control. And that's going to get us to the trust thing too. But I think here's the first point Americans need to

know about what happened in 2020. Trump wants to blame China. Well, first of all, because of Trump and the nature of this America first, forget about the rest of the world form of governance, we pulled epidemiological surveillance teams out of China. We reduced our capacity to monitor infectious diseases from other parts of the world. We stopped cooperating with international health agencies in the ways that we did in the Obama administration, right? Because that stuff didn't matter. America first, right? Build a wall. Walls don't stop viruses. But it wasn't just that. So a big problem with COVID is that we relied on China's own reporting to know when this new disease was emerging, spreading, and China is not an honest broker, and China is not transparent. And Trump reduced our capacity to monitor the situation on our own. But go back and look at

Trump's early statements from when China reported that this new virus was there. Because what Trump is saying, and it's amazing to see the words, is like January 24th, he tweets, China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American people, I want to thank President Xi. That is literally his quote from January 24th.

It's tough on China. You know, it's their fault. I don't know what's informing this, like what's going on behind the scenes. But in the moment when this guy has a chance to exercise his muscle and do the China war stuff that he's salivating for, he gets soft and weak. And it's a fascinating thing. There's so many occasions where you would think, like, Trump could have greeted the coronavirus as, like, here's the legitimacy I need to be a strongman leader. You know, I'm going to declare a national unification effort where we're going to work together to fight against this new combatant in our midst.

You know, an authoritarian could seize a moment like this to do it, right? He could have had masks with Trump on them. He could have called the two vaccines, Ivana and Ivanka. There's all this stuff he could have done to solidify his power. And in so many important ways, he sowed chaos. And so to your question about trust, it's obviously to believe in. I mean, if we go back to how we responded as a nation after 9-11, we were pretty credulous. Our leaders told us, we're being attacked. We need to kind of have this big military response. And we were all in on it. The Democratic Party, with the exception of Barbara Lee, we're in on that. And here we were looking for information.

And to be honest, the kind of falsehoods, fantasies that came from the White House in this moment were really disturbing. There's a cruise ship with lots of Americans. Some had COVID that was out at sea. There's a cruise ship with lots of people from Japan out at sea at the same time, the two princess ships. When Japan found out, they welcomed the cruise ship back into port in Tokyo. They monitored the situation. They treated people. They brought them into hospitals. When the American, the ship that left the U.S. was out, you might remember this, Trump said, like, I'm not letting those people back on land, right? I like the numbers where they are. Oh, yeah. Right? That's how, that's, and, like, and so, like, Americans are stranded at sea. They're not allowed back into their own country. And then Trump is saying, you know, it's the thing is going to be gone by Easter. And then, you know, it was like one promise after the

next about how his government had things under control. And I think at that time, any trust that Americans had that the White House was full of competent people, that the CDC, that the health agencies of this country were really there, it kind of collapsed because we could see just how fragile it all was. And that was a moment where other countries built trust, and we went in the opposite direction. Not the whole story, but I think that that's one of the ways in which 2020 really did set us up to be as distrustful as we are today. Yeah, that's interesting because I sometimes do a thought experiment where I wonder if Joe Biden had been president or another Democratic president or even a normal Republican president, right? Would they still have had the

challenges of public health institutions making all kinds of mistakes? And, you know, there was evolving guidance on masks and there was evolving guidance on whether the vaccine prevents transmission. There was a patchwork of regulations and restrictions that differed from state to state, city to city. And I guess I wonder if there was any way around sort of communicating in a way that made people trust authority in a country with 300 million plus people. And we're always a little skeptical of authority anyway here. Yeah. Again, I think we have to think about what happened in Australia. And there are other countries that are divided too. And I actually think literally just about anybody else on earth could have led the country more effectively during this time.

Clearly any other Republican. I mean, the level of chaos from the administration and the confusion confusion expressed in its own policies i think made americans feel despondent like there's obviously the stuff of like spread you know shooting up clorox or you know what all that which is just like total madness right and the undermining of officials for just reporting basic information you know all the stuff about trying to hide data or like but or or trump trump getting COVID, lying about it, hiding it, almost killing Joe Biden during the debate, almost killing Chris Christie. I even forget that part. That was wild. No, I mean, total madness. But like, for me, this gets crystallized. It's most kind of like dramatically expressed. There's a chapter in my book about this,

in this whole thing about masks. And it's like so important to remember this story because no other country has this thing happen. So it's true. The World Health Organization, all the national agencies in the Western world are not requiring masks until late March and early April. That might be the influence of China. It might be that the WHO was worried about a run on masks and not having enough in the global supply for healthcare workers. But they wanted specific evidence to this coronavirus that the mask would help reduce transmission. And it was a new virus, so it took a while. But finally, by late March, it was clear that if you wear a good mask, you're at the right way, you can really dramatically

reduce the spread of the disease. If you still don't believe that, ask anybody who worked in a hospital during the COVID years. If masks didn't work, there'd be a ton more COVID in hospitals, right? And people were able to work in hospitals for years and not catch it because they wore the masks. Anyway, the guidance changes. April 3rd, the CDC changes its policy. April 3rd, 2020, CDC changes the policy. Now we should be wearing masks. Trump announces the policy change at a press conference where he says, like, today the CDC shifted its guidelines.

All Americans should be wearing masks in public settings where they could expose one another. Then he does this incredible thing. He says, personally, I'm not going to do it and it's like what yeah like he's just he this guy's literally delivering the new policy guidelines from the cdc which is one of the most amazing scientific you know epidemiological agencies in the world right and he's said it and then he's undermined. But then the plot thickens because it becomes clear to everyone in the Trump administration, it's not just that he's not going to do it. He also thinks anybody in his world who wears a mask is cowardly, is weak, is feminine,

and so nobody's going to wear a mask. Mike Pence, I don't know if people remember Mike Pence. He was the vice president, but he was also, he was the head of the coronavirus task force from the White House, right? Like other countries had health experts. We had Mike Pence. So Mike Pence goes to the Mayo Clinic. Why do you go to the Mayo Clinic?

Because you're so sick that no doctor where you live can figure out what's going on with you and solve your problem. So in desperation, you go to the Mayo Clinic. There's so many sick people there. He's the only person in the zip code to not wear a mask. And he's on TV. And so it becomes clear to everybody in the Republican establishment that bearing your face is the way that you show solidarity and support to the president. And so what happens in our world is that we're like, no, no, no, we're going to do the opposite.

Like, you know, Jon Favreau changes his, you know, Facebook photo to like Jon's in a mask, you know? And then it's like Eric hashtag wears a mask Kleineberg on Twitter, right? And then now all the political candidates have their ads with, they're wearing masks in the advertisements, right? And so think about what this means in the United States is unlike any other country on earth, including places where people didn't like to wear the mask, like England, it gets politicized. So this little piece of fabric suddenly is carrying all the weight of our political ideology. And the next thing we know, we're in the aisles of Walmart, in Starbucks, on airplanes, beating each other up, murdering each other. And there's viral videos of Americans

just destroying each other in public about masks. And then it's like, it's not masks. There's a Republican medication for COVID and a Democratic medication. And then Democrats Democrats like the vaccine, Republicans don't like the vaccine. Democrats think the election was legitimate. Republicans think the election wasn't legitimate. It's like that all that ideological stuff spilled over. And I think that's like a Trump effect that literally, no, there's not many other Republicans I can think of who would have led us in that way. Yeah, it's a Trump effect. And it is, as you've pointed out, it's something that built over time, right? Like it's, it's probably, you know, birtherism, Tea Party, right? Like up until up through Trump, because we have, and look,

I know the, I know you talked about Australia, Australia has a Murdoch empire there in terms of media, but there is something different about our right-wing media ecosystem here, I think as well, that sort of just kind of just poured gas on the fire. For sure, that's true. And in one of the chapters in the book, the chapter on trust, I look at the way in which like Facebook groups in the United States, I mean, they're global, but we really went to them in the U.S. And they became these great organizing grounds where Facebook and Meta now, they're always talking about community and we can have our community on social media. And I guess in some ways that's true.

We do build communities there. And I guess we could say even like, thank goodness we had social media during the pandemic because we could talk to each other and we had Zoom school. And, you know, technology obviously played a big role in the pandemic. But the way we build community is by finding insiders who believed what we did and developing our own story. I tracked the stories people were telling about the pandemic on, you know, like Facebook groups like riding with Biden, you know, or like whatever the Trump Facebook groups were, which I'm still scarred from having read for. I felt very dirty when that was all over. But but but but basically you could read through these Facebook exchanges and tens of thousands of messages. And what you learn is people were living inside of completely different realities. And that solidified in some sense.

So it's like, it's the hyper-individualism, yes. And there's the kind of, I don't know, this is just what I consider to be really infantile way that Americans are like, everybody should be free. You're free to wear a mask. I should be free not to wear a mask. That kind of doesn't make sense for public health. Literally, that thinking undermines all public health. You can't actually do public health if it's legitimate for everyone to do what they want to do. You have to be able to have some set of collective goals and some cooperation, right? Otherwise, public health breaks down.

If I'm like, I'm running for president, so I'm going to go to the debate and cough all over my opponent, even if I have COVID, you're not going to have public health, right? And so we have this individualistic strain in us, but also Americans love community. We love participation. And what's happened here, though, is that we've kind of just organized these communities with people who agree with us and share this version of reality. And so like things that we're talking about in this conversation, I'm sure it will be like completely nonsensical to people who are on Team Red. And we're stuck in there. Can you tell the story of the Staten Island bar owner that you wrote about? Because I think he's such a perfect example of everything we've been talking about

and what living in this kind of social and political environment can actually do to people. Yeah, so the book, to be clear, it's got the stories of seven ordinary people. I tracked through the year 2020. There's someone from every borough, plus there's an MTA worker who died early on and a Black Lives Matter activist. So you have these kind of seven portraits. And the story of a guy named Danny Presti, who is from Staten Island, is a really important one for me. Presti started the year trying to open up a bar. Actually, in 2019, he and a buddy wanted to have a community bar, like a Cheers kind of social place. Very clear for Danny that he kept saying, like, I'm not a political guy.

I don't want to have cable news. I just you know, I just want to have people getting together, like, after their softball games. It's like, really wanted a community hub. And I love that, by the way. It's like, one of the reasons social distancing was so hard for us is because, like, we're social creatures. Like, people need each other's company, right? Social distancing was hard. But it took nine months for the state liquor authority to get back to these guys with the license. And they kept being like, why? Why do you need nine months to give me the license? But when they tried to reach out to the state bureaucrats, they got a cold shoulder. Finally, they get the license. It's just before COVID. They open for a few months.

Then they're closed down. There's no COVID in Staten Island in the beginning, by the way, but they're closed down anyway because everybody's closed. So that doesn't make sense to them, but they accept it. It's a pandemic. Well, over the course of the year, it's a rollercoaster ride. They're open and they're closed. They're open and they're closed. They can't make the business work and they're getting really frustrated. And it feels to Presti like the government's really overreaching here. They're not really thinking about what it's like to be a small business owner. And he's struggling to feed his family. He's struggling to keep things together. So he starts listening to these guys on the right-wing media world, and he likes them. And he says, I got to do something to deal with

this situation. We're going to go out of business. I'm going to lose all my money, my investment in this place. If we stay closed, we're going out of business. Let's take a stand here. So he works with this local right-wing agitator. They decide they are going to Home Depot, and they're going to get masking tape and duct tape and poster board, and they turn their bar, Max Public House, into what they call an autonomous zone. And they say like the posters, they're in the book, like the laws of New York do not apply here. We're staying open despite the lockdowns. Well, of course, the sheriffs come to arrest him and to lock the place down and that keeps happening. But also the Proud Boys come and, and then more than a thousand far-right agitators come to Staten Island, and they turn this bar into the staging ground for these pro-Trump, anti-Cuomo and de Blasio rallies. Over the course of this year, Presti is just getting more and more radicalized so that by the time this thing ends, he is against mask mandates.

He is on social media and going to protests to challenge vaccines. He thinks there's a conspiracy from the state to try to get control of our lives. He calls himself a freedom fighter. He dumps trash on the mayor's lawn. He's completely transformed over the course of 2020. And his story is so important. And first of all, I want to say, he's a very relatable guy. Like, he's very human.

And I try to tell his story sympathetically because I think it's important for everybody on Team Blue to understand why so many people feel the way that he does. Not to be quite so judgy, but to understand that reality. Actually, other countries did a much better job protecting small business owners and making sure that they felt like, oh, they're going to be economically okay

even if the country breaks down. And we were pretty inconsistent about that here in the United States, to be honest. And so I want him to be sympathetic, and I obviously don't agree with his conclusion. But it's just important for us to know that a big thing that happened in America in 2020 is millions of people found themselves getting increasingly sympathetic to this right-wing fantasy of a libertarian world where the government just lets it rip. Well, it's so fascinating because this political divide, it's a divide of people experiencing different realities, but because of the coalitions of the different parties now in this country, demographically, it divides along very interesting

lines, right? And so you have on Team Blue or Biden supporters, Democrats, right? You have a lot of college educated folks who work in jobs that allowed them to work remotely from home. And I'm not saying things were easy for all of us. People had people in their lives die. They got sick. They were stuck home with their children a lot, doing the Zoom school, all that kind of stuff. So it was bad. But then there were a lot of people who, working class people, not just white, black, Latino, Asian American, and just really, really struggling kids who were struggling in high school, in college, they couldn't figure things out. And this idea that people who pushed against public health restrictions were bad to us because we couldn't understand why they would do that. But for a lot of folks, they were like, well, I couldn't make a living otherwise. And I was struggling and no one was there to help me.

And then I always wondered if then inflation hits. And of course, inflation hits everywhere all over the world. And we're actually now doing better than most countries with inflation. But I started wondering if that sort of hang divides also mirror some of the social divides and cultural divides that have been around in this country for a while. I think that's a great insight. And it's a theme I try to hit in the book. I think a lot of professional people and more affluent people could afford to make the kinds of sacrifices that this public health emergency called for and were able to protect themselves, were able to sustain a level of comfort

that other people in America were not. I think a lot of professionals were callous about what the reality of keeping schools closed were for American families. I'm not going to take a position on whether we'd close for too long or blow it. But I just think a lot of kind of democratic voters didn't think about what the changes meant for rank and file workers. And there's another thing that happened in this country, which is, I think, so revelatory for me that when everything was falling apart and we didn't know how to protect each other at the very beginning, we came out and said there's a bunch of people who are essential workers.

They're so valuable and important to the country. We're going to call them essential workers. And I live in New York City, so of course it's a surprise to me to find out that they were not the finance guys and the white shoe law firms and the Knicks. I thought I knew who was essential. find out that they were not the finance guys and the white shoe law firms and the Knicks, right? I thought I knew who was essential, but it turns out like the essential workers is obviously the healthcare workers, but it's like the clerks. It's the people who are working in the transit system. It's people who are repairing infrastructure. It's the people who are doing meat packing. It's the people who are working in poultry plants. It's the working

class America. And it's disproportionately black and it's disproportionately Latino. And it wasn't like when we called them essential, we said, oh, because you're essential, we are going to honor you and we're giving you masks and you get the best access to healthcare in the world. And also here's a bonus from all of us and our forever gratitude. What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable. And it wasn't just you because you got exposed to the virus and then you were more likely to go back home to your family who also got exposed to the virus, right? So you've got these like neighborhoods throughout the country where there's a lot of working class people who are getting

exposed and they have a higher mortality. You could really see it in New York and like these maps that the New York Times was making where you could see all this death in Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx and Manhattan. It was like nobody was there. There was nobody in the maps. So I do think that we express something in that moment. We express something about valuing these people. And it's like we got to the edge of this moral precipice where we're going to have a recognition of what we asked some people in society to take on so that we could all continue to watch Netflix specials. And then we walked away from it like it was never there, like it never happened. And I do think there is some strong class-based resentment in this country that lingers from 2020. And it doesn't

cut in a Democrats, the party of the working people and Republicans or not way. It cuts across and it's a complicated legacy. And so I want to be clear, like, I think Trump completely bungled this, you know, this situation, but I hope it's clear also in my book that I don't think this is a story where like, if only the, you know, righteous liberals had had their way, everything would have been fine. What's powerful about 2020 and why we need to learn from it and go back to look again is because we expressed a lot of things about who we are that we tuck away and turn away from in ordinary times. And actually, if we look and learn about ourselves, there are some political lessons about how we can all be doing better.

And that's true for the candidates in 2024, but I think it's also true for each of us as voters, as citizens, you know, as people who I think often want to do the right thing but get a little afraid when push comes to shove. And that happened in America in 2020. Yeah, so last question to you. What does that look like actually dealing with that? You know, you wrote in the New York Times that we're sort of still living with a societal long COVID. And, you know, as I said, I've been thinking about sort of if Biden was to deal with this in the campaign, which I agree, I think he should, I think it'd be part of the story because it's certainly going to be part of Trump's story. But not just Biden,

Biden, other leaders, all of us, like what is sort of dealing with this and trying to move beyond it look like? Well, I think first we need a record of the decisions we made politically at the time. I think we really need to understand how America's response to the crises set us up for the kinds of failures that we experienced. And it's a public health failure, first and foremost. Far more Americans died and got sick than should have. But it's also a failure to maintain a decent society. I mean, it was a crisis of trust that we're stuck inside of, a crisis of division that we're stuck inside of. That feeling of anger that so many of us felt, like you remember, like you're wearing a mask and you went to the grocery store and you saw

someone who wasn't wearing a mask and you're like, what are you doing? I'm vulnerable. What are you going to do to me and my family? Like that, that feeling of anger. I think we still have that when we go out into the world and we encounter people who are different from us. And we, I think we need to just remember that and just like shine a light on it and, and, and see that, that we could have done this better. And that actually it's in these moments like wars and pandemics you know crises when societies have a chance to like to rebuild to unify to to achieve solidarity like to get some positive momentum for a collective project and i think covid i think 2020 was a lost opportunity

to do that in 2020 like we we didn't tell the story about how we can all come together and we've suffered from that. So that leads me to the second thing, which is I think we need to come up with a story of what we experienced and a story of where we might go and how we might do it better. And that's the kind of thing I think that we could see in a presidential campaign. Like in the way that Obama talked about inheriting an economy that was in a ditch, right? And bringing it back up. Like, I think, I don't understand why Biden hasn't made more of the fact that like when he took over as president, this country, we were in a deeper ditch in so many ways. It's like remarkable where we are now. Well, it's funny. I thought where you were going to go to is, because I've been thinking about this a lot. I was on the reelect in 2012, and the story that we told in the reelect was financial crisis hit, but the financial crisis exposed sort of a weakness in our economy that we had been grappling

with for years, which is this just skyrocketing inequality where rich people get more and then they get away with anything and they don't have to follow the rules and neither does Wall Street and everyone else gets screwed. And so we have to rebuild even stronger than before. And I do wonder if there's that piece of it around COVID too, is that like this pandemic exposed a lot about what this country was lacking and it didn't happen with my, just start with my predecessor or me or the president before that. It's something that we all have to do together and democracy requires this trust and this solidarity. And like, that's what we need right now. Like, to me, that seems like the best way to counter the typical strongman message. Look, I mean, that's essentially the

argument I make in the book. This is the argument from the New York Times essay. If you happen to know any, you know, political strategists, people helping with the campaign. I think that's a pretty important story to tell. In 2020, what a society needed to get through things, to keep people safe, to rebound, was trust. What it needed is solidarity. And in America, instead of solidarity, we got culture wars. We got political violence. We had a splintering that was even more profound than we anticipated going into 2020 when we knew it was going to the last tough year we're going to have, it's so important for us to figure out how to build that solidarity for the next time. And again, it's very easy for me to say this from my sociology department office at New York University. I'm not in the political trenches.

But I can make the diagnosis, right? I can diagnose the problem. at New York University. I'm not in the political trenches. But I can make the diagnosis, right? I can diagnose the problem, I think. And what I've done is I've spent years poring over the data and really taking a careful look at things that I think most of us have turned away from because 2020 is a tough topic.

And the diagnosis is clear. We need to find a way to rebuild some semblance of solidarity, some capacity to be cohesive and to act collaboratively and collectively when we're faced with a common threat. Any society needs to do that. And at the moment, we're very far off the course. Yeah. Well said. Eric Kleinenberg, thank you so much. The book is fantastic. It's called 2020, One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed. Everyone go check it out. And thank you for this conversation. It was wonderful. I appreciate it. Thank you. Before we go, some quick housekeeping. A new episode of Crooked's subscriber-exclusive show, Polar Coaster, dropped last week.

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