In this edition of the newsletter, I’m writing about the particular loss of shared solidarity as we begin to unevenly emerge from a year that offered opportunities for profound solidarity. (I promise that I will return to the disinformation stuff that I promised to deliver. Now that the semester is over, I’m taking a second to catch my breath, but I plan on writing here more frequently.) Before I jump in to today’s theme, here are some items to note.
First, I helped research and write a new Brookings report on Philadelphia’s labor market. We find that there are racial disparities in wages at every level of education, with white workers with a bachelor’s degree out-earning Black workers with a bachelors by an average of $25,000 a year. Black college-educated workers are also underrepresented in managerial roles throughout the metro area.
Second, this tweet is dedicated to every political theory student ever:
Third, I never grow tired of the “weird things happen on zoom during standard political process” tweets, and this one is a good one:
Post Pandemic Sadness
I’ve been feeling exhausted and depressed lately, and I have a theory about why.
I think I’m feeling depressed because our nation is beginning to emerge from the pandemic back into some sense of normalcy. And for a lot of people, the status quo is a perceived good, and so a return to pre-covid times is like a breath of fresh air. But for the rest of us, normalcy means losing the solidarity the pandemic briefly invited, and a return to a pre-covid world is a return to everything that’s “fucked up and bullshit” to quote the Malcolm Harris book.
Remember the very beginning of America’s nationwide lockdown in response to the pandemic? Like, a week in, all those celebrities made that god awful rendition of Imagine. It was this weird solidarity. Every one of us, even the Hollywood weirdos, was miserable. Every single one of us was responding to a life-altering, world-altering, global catastrophe. And the bulk of us had this inescapable sense of our own fragility, our mortality, or if not a sense of our own, at least a sense of our loved ones.
It didn’t take long for that solidarity to show some cracks. First, the rich people writing op-eds lamenting being stranded on island resorts they had fled to from NYC in the earliest days of the pandemic. Second, the realization that not every schoolkid has broadband access, even as my own friends were getting married on zoom. Third, the growing realization that not only were many workers not experiencing the cushy work-from-home gigs that characterized my friend group, me and my friends were largely in a bubble where almost nobody we knew was experiencing food instability, housing instability, and unemployment, and nobody we knew was dying from covid.
But even still, the world was on fire, and we were all experiencing that, were forced to be cognizant of that, were relying on each other to sustain ourselves through it all. We had phone calls and zoom calls and all the rest, newly desperate for communion and grateful for even a taste of it. We were thinking, individually and communally, about vulnerability, thinking about caretaking, thinking about wellbeing.
The George Floyd stuff offered solidarity too. Because there were no social distractions, no in-person workplace banter, no casual nights at the bar to take our attention away from nine minutes of kneeling on a man’s neck, murdering him. A lot of people suddenly got woke. A lot of people started thinking about the prevalence of racial injustice and the history, the recent history that so directly informs it. There was a lot of emotion here, and we processed these horrors together.
Now we’re emerging from this weird season, back into ordinary time. But it’s so unequal, so fragmented. The emergence is not spontaneous and universal, unlike how entering into the lockdown and social distancing protocols were. Considered at the aggregate level, the nation is starting to do ok, but there are still whole communities being ravaged. And long after the US has achieved its vaccination goals and the economy reopens fully, countries like India and Iran will still be ravaged by the virus. And this fragmentation in emerge is just another painful reminder that solidarity is the exception and not the norm.
But normalcy. What does that mean? Does that mean we pretend that the world is a-ok after all? Does that mean that we do the “self-care” routine of buying stuff and streaming shows and using therapeutic language to paper over the deep social ills that predated covid, were exacerbated by covid, and will persist long after the year of lockdowns is a distant memory?
Remember at the beginning of the pandemic, when a post was going viral on social media about how those of us with anxiety were suddenly feeling calmer because for the first time, the external world matched the one inside our brains. I think that gets it wrong. I think the calm came from the sense of solidarity and communion. I think the calm came from realizing that everyone, maybe for the first time, was forced to sit with the world as it actually is - tragic, broken, and unfair. We were forced to sit with ourselves too as we actually are - vulnerable, mortal, and interdependent. And there was no papering over it, no buying our way of it.
I think with this calm there came a hope that maybe this could be a turning point in our collective experience and in our broader cultures, a shift in which together we reimagine a world that is oriented toward the needs of the least of these, that embodies a politics of love and mutual support.
But no, we should have known better than to feel so optimistic. Mammon and Moloch and all the other gods of this world will not be satisfied to relinquish their battle for dominion. And moments of shared vulnerability throughout human history have never been enough to stave off greed, bloodlust, and all the rest. The world, the flesh, and the devil, man, they never let up.
Anyway, I don’t really have any “solutions” to provide here. I do wanna say though that I think the institutions (thinking especially of churches, colleges, potentially even businesses) that understand what I’ve just written and adapt their practices in response (particularly in ways that provide space for profound solidarity) are going to find a lot of people who cling to them. And the institutions that try to pretend like we didn’t just experience this collective trauma are gonna witness a lot of people walking away. We survived/are surviving an ordeal, some of us with greater suffering than others, and if our institutions fail us now, we’ll likely never go back.
The last thing I’ll say is that if the pandemic taught us anything, hopefully it was that we desperately need each other. So consider this a shared cry for help, not in the dramatic movie version, but rather in the desperate recognition that we gotta lean on each other.
This isn’t sentimentality. It’s authenticity,
This year was hard. Life is hard. I am grateful for each of you.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere
In The Atlantic, Ana Marie Cox reviews Hunter Biden’s new book on addiction, and writes about identity, humility, and connection.
Writing for Strong Towns, Steve Wright argues: Want to build a strong town? Make it work for people with disabilities.
This is a little into the weeds, but urbanist Scott Beyer has a stellar proposal for zoning reform in TAC’s New Urbanism column. Beyer argues that rather than restrictive land-use policy that creates barriers to development, localities should allow any kind of building for any purpose, but focus on mechanisms for internalizing externalities + user fees to deal with impact.
And since I’m talking about zoning…Bonnie Kristian has a great column in The Week looking at how local zoning ordinances often senselessly prohibit the kind of corner grocery store that could otherwise be a staple of a local economy.
In Boston Review, Lily Hu considers race and policing as a case study in thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of social science which, despite the wishes of the positivists, can never actually be value-neutral or devoid of judgment: “in the tides of latest findings, what we should believe—and what we should give up believing—can never be decided simply by brute appeals to data, cordoned off from judgments of reliability and significance."
Scholars at Brookings Metro have a great case study that looks at how Indianapolis uses a scorecard for tax-incentive driven development organized around growing the economy, assisting distressed geographies, and improving access to jobs through training, transit, and child care.
The Niskanen Center (a right-of-center think tank) has launched a new criminal justice program: “The Niskanen Center believes public safety, social order, and the fair and efficient administration of justice are mutually reinforcing ends necessary to maintain a free and open society. Governments have a duty to protect people from violence and secure property from theft and destruction. In fulfilling this duty, governments have a corresponding duty to affirm the rule of law, respect constitutional rights and due process, impose just and effective punishments, eliminate inequities, and promote the common good across communities.”