by Covid numbers recently rose again. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention once again reported monthly death tolls in thousands. Mask commands are back in New York City’s public medical facilities and nursing homes. The presidential race is underway and, just like in 2020, the stakes seem existential. All of this makes me feel like I’m revisiting a past that I never really left behind.
I’m not the only one who struggles with that feeling. In other ways, 2020 seems like another lifetime. The pandemic is over; We continue with our lives. However, by considerable margins, people still say they feel alienated, vulnerable and insecure. Only now is it becoming clear how little we understood what America experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it marked us.
I have come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social illness that has intensified a variety of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we have been taught to trust are not worthy of our trust. The result is a lasting crisis in American civic life. Just look at the election cycle we are about to fall into: it seems like the world has been turned upside down several times, and yet here we are faced with the prospect of another contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as if the country would not have advanced. one inch. Everything changed and yet almost nothing changed.
In 2020, I met Daniel Presti, a friendly and energetic 33-year-old man who was trying to build a new business called Mac’s Public House, just a few miles from his childhood home on Staten Island.
Thanks, he said, to the New York State Liquor Authority’s inexplicably slow pace, it took nearly a year to open, but he and his business partner, Keith McAlarney, took advantage of the time to make the bar the best it could be. The idea was to make Mac a local commons. No political talk. There is no news on television. “Keith and I are about as far from politics as you can get,” Presti later told me. “We’re not going to get into that.”
In March, when Covid-19 hit New York City, the same state government that took years to issue a liquor license needed just days to demand that the newly opened Mac cease operations. Presti understood the threat and accepted the decision. What he didn’t expect was that the pub would have to remain closed or restricted, on and off, for more than a year. Or that, because his business was new, the government would offer him so little financial support.
Presti spent the year in a state of anxiety and stress. No one in a position of power listened to her pleas for help, and the rules for bars and restaurants kept changing.
His frustration was all too common. Across a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations. Distrust, division, and disorganized leadership contributed to the magnitude of our negative health outcomes. As for our continued angst, the standard explanation is a uniquely American loneliness. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it a epidemic in its own right.
The truth, however, is that there is no hard evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever. Our social patterns changed, of course. However, a major recent survey showed that older Americans said they were significantly less lonely that three years ago; a recent peer reviewed study reported that middle-aged Americans described themselves as less lonely than they were 20 years ago. Loneliness is most widespread among younger Americans, but rates have increased there as well. plummeted since 2020. Logically, we should feel better. Why can’t we get rid of this?
Because loneliness was never the central problem. It was, rather, the feeling among so many different people that they had been left to navigate the crisis on their own. How do you balance all the competing demands of health, money, and sanity? Where do you get tests, masks, medications? How do you go to work (or even work from home) when your kids can’t go to school?
The answer was always the same: find out. Stimulus checks and small business loans helped. But while other countries built trust and solidarity, the United States (both during and after 2020) left millions of people to fend for themselves.
Now the Biden administration is baffled that Americans aren’t feeling more optimistic despite all the good economic news, and some conservative groups are frustrated that Republican voters remain loyal to a candidate who has been accused of 91 felony counts. Voters refuse to behave as some tell them would be rational. But the inequalities that the pandemic exposed have only deepened over time. For millions of Americans, distrust It feels like the most rational state.
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Over the past four years, I have met New Yorkers from every borough who felt abandoned by our central institutions when they needed a firm hand: a Bronx political aide who didn’t trust the vaccines she was promoting, an elementary school teacher in Chinatown of Manhattan, whose students were viewed with suspicion by people fearful of the Asian flu, and Mr. Presti, who spent months searching for help or answers as his work life and dreams for the future fell apart. In November, he and his partner kept their bar open past the city’s 10 p.m. curfew. Shortly after, they declared their business an “autonomous zone.” He went on Fox News to express his frustration that little people are being beaten down by big government and forced to sacrifice their livelihood. Fed up with institutions that did not help him, he began to distrust scientific authorities and became impatient with his fellow citizens who seemed too weak to question those in power. At some point, Mr. Presti began calling himself freedom fighter.
The very different people I spoke to that year had one thing in common: a sense that, in the wake of Covid, all the larger institutions they had been taught to trust had failed them. In the most precarious moments of their lives, they discovered that there was no system in place to help.
Almost four years later, the situation is, if anything, worse.
Nursing homes across the country, where bad working conditions were linked to higher levels of mortality from Covid, remain understaffedleaving elderly and frail residents more vulnerable than they should be. Hunger and food insecurity They remain heartbreaking emergencies. Students I haven’t fully returned to school.. Congress passed the Child Poverty Reduction Act of 2021, one of the most effective anti-poverty measures in decades. Then, a year later, Congress ended it, pushing for some Five million young people once again find themselves in extreme financial need.
When everything was uncertain and everyone’s future was at stake, we walked to the precipice of moral advancement and then backed away.
Look at the way we all became accustomed to the term “essential worker,” an ostensible term of respect that instead condemned people to work in manifestly dangerous conditions. The adoption of that term made visible something we now can’t help but see: in America, the people we depend on most to keep our world running are the people we depend on. treated as disposable.
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If social isolation weren’t the central problem (most people I interviewed that year said it would be I felt connected to friends and family, no matter how far away they were; We might call the problem greater structural isolation: abandoned by employers, deprived of a shared purpose, denied attention. The combined effect sent a strong message that individual lives were no longer worth as much. (Elected officials go out to the waves and suggest that older people sacrifice themselves to save the economy? Yes, that really happened.)
People treated each other accordingly. We all remember the viral videos of people shouting at each other in supermarkets and on public transport. Violent crimes increased. Reckless driving even increased, but it occurred only in the United States.
The reasons for that American exceptionalism become more pressing in an election year, when, as in a public health crisis, presidents may try to unite people or try to turn them against each other. And they can convey a powerful message about whose lives matter.
By 2021, Mr. Presti had been arrested twice for defying the city’s laws and had become something of a celebrity. When we spoke earlier that year, he told me that he and his partner were not “far-right guys.” But he soon appeared on social media telling his followers: “Don’t give up your weapons. Ever” and advising “ALL EYES ON THE ARIZONA AUDIT.” That October, when New York’s mayor announced new vaccination mandates for city employees, wrote: “We are currently in a cold war and we are the soldiers and our way of life is under attack. Don’t wait for anyone to come save you. We are the first line. We are the defenders of freedom.”
Early in our conversations, he friended me on Facebook. Then I unfriended him and he stopped responding to my messages and calls. His Last activity on Twitter was in December 2022, when he reposted an article shared by right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza alleging that Michelle Obama helped get Trump kicked off the platform.
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A few weeks ago, I decided to contact Mr. Presti again. He wanted to know how he sees things today and how he has rebuilt his life. We are both New Yorkers; perhaps now, with the bitter fights over bar closures and vaccination demands many years ago, we can find common ground again.
I sent a couple of messages to Mr. Presti but got no response. I called, with the same result. I tracked down his former business partner, who said he would pass on my message to her. I thanked him and wished him luck.
I don’t know why Mr. Presti decided not to respond to me. Perhaps he has more pressing matters to attend to. But the lack of resolution seems appropriate, in some ways, for a relationship that taught me a lot about how this country failed people in 2020 and how those problems continue. I hope he and I reconnect someday; For now, the silence is a disheartening reminder that in America and even in my own great city, social divisions have deepened. Today, as we approach the 2024 elections, the wounds of 2020 remain raw and our conflicts unresolved. And the cold war Presti warned about could soon come to a head.
