COVID-19 has laid bare the failings of U.S. democracy and capitalism. Now, we have a chance to remake our world.

Lee Drutman

Chances are, this isn’t the first essay you’ve read about how COVID-19 will fundamentally change our world. But the disparate range of predictions, many of them contradictory, show that we have no actual idea what will happen next. We are navigating a time of overwhelming uncertainty and contingency, and the future depends very much on who acts—and where, how, and when. In short, this is a rare moment when we can truly shape our future.

The lessons of history suggest that moments of crisis force a reckoning and rethinking. When things go terribly wrong, we collectively ask whether there isn’t perhaps a better way. New ideas and structures can only rise up when old ones are cleared away.

And this is precisely what’s happening. The old shibboleths of U.S. democracy as the global model and unfettered global markets as gateways to shared prosperity have steadily rotted away over the last two decades. And the pandemic has, in one fell swoop, utterly demolished them.

So, what political and economic frameworks will we establish in their place?

The chance to reconsider the grand economic bargains of our market economy and the social safety net hasn’t been this high since the 1970s, when stagflation cleared away older economic doctrines and propelled economic policy in a more market-oriented direction. Today, the crisis is revealing the limits of that over-marketized economy. The consequences of a patchwork, market-driven healthcare system with high costs and a large uninsured population have never been clearer. The interconnectedness of the global economy, with its fragile “just-in-time” supply chains, has prompted a fundamental reconsideration of an industrial model that has long put efficiency and profits ahead of resiliency and stability. And in a major crisis, of course, there are no small-government libertarians; everyone is a Keynsian. What comes next depends whose ideas win the day.

Which takes us to politics. Political scientists have long considered high levels of economic inequality to be a fundamental threat to democracy: Support for democracy depends on faith that everyone is benefiting from the system. This faith has been breaking down for a long time, but the United States has thus far staved off a class war—largely because our hyper-polarized two-party system generated a culture war instead. This hyper-partisan culture war, of course, has engendered tremendous political dysfunction, gridlock, and a breakdown of long-standing agreements around procedural fairness and electoral legitimacy.

These conflicts are only getting worse, and 2020 is set to be yet another year of bitter, dangerous politics. The question of how we vote (by mail or in person) has become a deeply partisan issue, with Trump publicly going to war against the idea of expanding vote by mail. The basic rules of elections have become much more contested, especially this year, and almost every aspect of the COVID-19 response is being politicized, complicating and undermining our ability to unite as a nation against a common enemy (the virus).

As with our broken economy, the impetus to reconsider the fundamentals of our political system has never been greater. The pathologies of our zero-sum, winner-takes-all electoral incentives are on full display this year, with deadly consequences. It’s time to ask hard questions about why other major democracies were able to more successfully respond to the coronavirus outbreak, while it devolved into another binary, hyper-partisan battle in the United States.

It will take a different kind of politics not just to manage COVID-19, but to address the destabilizing inequalities it has exposed and exacerbated. And if this serves as a trial run for the disruptions and sacrifices the climate crisis will force on us, political reform demands extra urgency.

In moments like this one, our instinct is to focus first on immediate needs. This is natural and necessary—but we also can’t lose sight of the future. Uncertainty creates opportunity for a wider range of long-term outcomes—some with institutions and structures that help us be our best selves, and others that provoke our worst instincts, laying the groundwork for mass devastation.

In the wake of COVID-19, both extremes are conceivable. Our ultimate path hinges on the long- and short-term resources we invest, the conversations we have, and the political and economic choices we make. We can’t predict the future—but if we act now, and with reason and compassion, we can shape it into one that promotes collective thriving.

The pandemic is magnifying a decade-long power struggle between conservative states and progressive cities.

Maresa Strano

Since COVID-19 arrived on the United States' shores, many red-state mayors—Republicans and Democrats alike—have struggled to coordinate their responses with their state officials. We’ve watched mayors and local health authorities beg grudging governors to impose strict statewide social distancing mandates—only to be dismissed, overruled, or burdened with contradictory orders that make it difficult for localities with some of the most vulnerable citizens to enforce life-saving measures.

In Georgia, for instance, Tybee Island’s beach closures were overturned two weeks later by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s much-delayed statewide shelter-in-place order, which superseded local ordinances and allowed beaches to reopen. Tybee Island Mayor Shirley Sessions was one of many coastal city mayors to oppose the order and associated resumption of certain activities, noting that the island—which has two nursing homes and no hospitals—can’t afford any relaxation of social distancing.

Shocking as these disputes may be for Americans in general, longtime observers of state-local relations will be the first to say, “Yeah, that checks out.” The intergovernmental conflicts we see today mark a predictable extension of a decade-long, woefully underreported power struggle between conservative states and progressive-leaning cities—one which has significantly limited cities’ ability to solve problems for their residents.

While the need to correct this imbalance has been evident for a long time, the coronavirus pandemic has magnified both the health-related challenges cities face and the unique political obstacles they must often confront to address these challenges. U.S. cities are the primary engines of their respective state economies and, to a large extent, the world economy. According to a 2018 report from the United States Conference of Mayors, metro economies provided 99.5 percent of the United States' real GDP growth in 2017. Their combined output surpassed every non-U.S. nation except China, and the economic value generated by the 10 most productive metro economies exceeded that of 37 states.

Yet, as Fordham Law Professor Nestor Davidson notes, wealth alone doesn’t confer governing power. Whether cities are able translate economic success into policies equal to today’s most pressing issues depends on “the basic structure of their legal authority,” or “home rule”—which has unfortunately been collecting dust since 1953.

So, what is “home rule”? To understand, we need to go back to the U.S. Constitution. As Trump recently discovered, state powers derive from the 10th Amendment of the Constitution; meanwhile, there’s no mention of local governments, leaving local authority entirely in states’ hands. Home rule—a Progressive-Era innovation created to protect localities from excessive and counterproductive state interference—denotes a variety of state constitutional and statutory provisions that give local governments the authority to govern matters of local concern. But home rule provisions vary, reserving significant affirmative power to certain municipalities while requiring specific authorization from the state in others. Either way, “power is limited to specific fields, and subject to constant judicial interpretation."

Local authority has always been legally and politically vulnerable to the whims of the state. But as the gap between GOP- and rural-controlled state governments and Democratic-leaning city governments has widened over the last decade, the old home rule model no longer passes muster. One reason is the well-documented rise and spread of state “ceiling preemption”—where the state government sets a statewide maximum standard that its subdivisions cannot exceed—and “punitive preemption,” when preemption laws expose local officials or governments to penalties (such as fines, removal from office, or withholding of state funds) for noncompliance. These preemption laws often pass in reaction to the emergence of progressive city policies aimed at improving public health in denser, more diverse populations.

For example, 23 states have preempted local paid sick time ordinances (22 of them within the last decade). Forty-four states have banned local regulations of ride-sharing networks; eight states bar local control over nutrition, such as portion sizes and promotional games and toys; 10 states bar local regulation of e-cigarettes; 20 states preempt municipal broadband networks; 43 states currently outlaw local regulation of firearms; and 31 states prohibit local rent-control. As Kim Haddow, executive director of the Local Solutions Support Center, told CityLab, many of the most popular preemption laws—such as those barring local rent control, paid sick days, and broadband—are “the policies that are most needed right now.”

In this time of peak partisanship, and without modern home rule provisions, it’s common for state preemption laws (and the local laws that inspired them) to end up in the courts—a trend that reinforces Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 observation that “scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.” Preemption-related legal battles frequently drag on for months or years, leaving localities paralyzed by confusion over the laws’ validity and enforceability. State lawmakers and their special interest benefactors profit from this confusion.

Recently, the pandemic has presented new opportunities for Republican state governments to deploy preemption, intentionally or not, as an instrument of confusion. With so many red state mayors taking action in advance of their governors, late-arriving statewide orders have sent local authorities scrambling.

On top of general confusion, local governments fear the possibility of legal action if they maintain measures stricter than the state’s. On April 2, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, reversed his position and mandated a 30-day statewide shutdown to combat the coronavirus. But the relief felt by city officials who had spent weeks urging him to take more aggressive action was short-lived. That same evening, DeSantis signed a second order that preempted any conflicting local measures—perhaps by accident. While the language of the second order typifies ceiling preemption, the governor claimed the order merely “set a floor” that mayors could choose to go beyond.

Orders from some of DeSantis’s peers posed similar issues, but with the addition of specific caveats and exemptions that governors claim in the sole interest of tackling the coronavirus. Critics point out that red state governors (including Ohio’s much-praised Mike DeWine) are using the crisis as a pretext to impose partisan or ideological preferences. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, for instance, issued an executive order on March 24 preempting local governments’ social distancing measures and redefining "essential business or operation” to cover gun stores, houses of worship, department stores, bars, Uber, car dealerships, construction services, and more.

Reeves’s order has drawn sharp criticism from local leaders, including Mayor Mario King of Moss Point. “I definitely think that he is 100 percent putting economic interests before people’s health,” King said of the governor.

Cities can attempt to fight back against ceiling and punitive preemption laws, which limit their ability to effectively address today’s most pressing economic and cultural issues. But obstacles abound. In addition to the confusion these laws leave in their wake, obsolete home rule protections give cities few reliable options.

Affirming de Toqueville’s insight about political issues inevitably becoming legal ones, the National League of Cities determined last year that the political problem of modern preemption called for an update to its 1953 “Model Constitutional Provisions for Municipal Home Rule.” This round, the legal question was how to best reframe the state-local relationship for the modern era. The resulting report, “Principles of Home Rule for the 21st Century,” presents four principles of constitutional home rule reform that can stand up to the contemporary needs of local government, and which merit serious consideration from the democracy reform community writ large.

First, the Local Authority Principle reaffirms localities’ initiative power (i.e., the power to enact local policy without prior state authorization). This gives local governments more freedom and agility as policy innovators.

Second, the Local Fiscal Authority Principle recognizes local governments’ power to tax and manage spending in ways that make sense for their communities (for instance, taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, plastic bags, and e-cigarettes).

Third, the Presumption Against State Preemption Principle asserts that states seeking to preempt local authority should have a solid, general reason to do so, rather than targeting certain jurisdictions because a city law clashes with the state’s political or ideological preferences.

Lastly, the Local Democratic Self-Governance Principle defends a local government’s right to manage its own property and personnel. This principle addresses “punitive preemption,” whereby local officials can be held personally liable or removed from office because of a state-local conflict. It also extends state “speech or debate” immunity, currently guaranteed to state lawmakers, to local officials.

Today, partisan differences over social distancing underscore several familiar flaws in our political system, from gerrymandering to the rural-urban divide. But for those who have spent the last decade or more tracking the rise and spread of state preemption, the above failures of federalism also reveal the urgent need for a home rule makeover. City governments aren’t just America’s frontline defense against public health disasters; as the most trusted level of government, they also represent the most effective offensive force for positive change. In short, our cities can do better, and their residents—especially the marginalized communities of color most impacted by crises—deserve better.

Three ways America could emerge from COVID-19 with a stronger democracy.

Hollie Russon Gilman

As a test for democracy, Wisconsin’s recent pandemic-time primary election failed. Within 24 chaotic hours before polls opened, Governor Tony Evers cancelled the election, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned his decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to grant an extension for mail-in ballots. Poll workers dropped out, and poll locations closed down over concerns about COVID-19.

Consequently, the election itself was, to say the least, messy. Voters waited in line for hours, some in rain and hail, putting themselves at risk for contracting COVID-19. Thousands of others stayed home and never received their absentee ballots.

These problems were particularly apparent in Milwaukee, where only five of 180 polling sites were open on election day. Milwaukee is also the site of half the state’s fatal COVID-19 cases—and, as it so happens, 40 percent of Milwaukee residents are Black.

As Wisconsin demonstrated, COVID-19, like all crises, disproportionately affects communities that have long been marginalized in America. And in this way, it’s a reminder that our democracy’s political inequalities mirror, derive from, and exacerbate other societal inequalities.

As the federal government continues to fumble its response to the pandemic, community leaders, mayors, and governors have become ever-more important political actors. And their work to address COVID-19 could be the first step toward building a more inclusive, participatory democracy.

First, at the state level, leaders are expanding democratic access during the pandemic by allowing vote-by-mail. States like California, New Hampshire, and Texas are implementing new voting measures to prevent the kind of public health threats and participation challenges seen in Wisconsin. In the long run, these electoral reforms may expand access to voters who face obstacles participating in traditional, in-person elections.

Of course, such a dramatic procedural change comes with its own challenges, especially when implemented on an expedited timeline. Advocacy groups and experts cite concerns about voter education, outreach, and logistical challenges that could prevent citizens from voting or result in discarded ballots: Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, noted to NPR that Black voters’ absentee ballots are more likely to be rejected than white voters’, who vote absentee at higher rates. Filling out ballots at home also means voters can’t be assisted by poll workers if they’re confused or have questions. States now expanding vote-by-mail during the pandemic must ensure their efforts actually improve democratic access, rather than inadvertently accomplishing the opposite.

Second, local public officials are experimenting with technology to facilitate civic participation in the midst of social distancing. In March, Miami held its first virtual commission meeting and introduced three new methods of public participation via online platforms. Similar efforts took place this month in Brentwood, Tennessee and the Baltimore Planning Commission, among others. Flint, Michigan has launched a website identifying community resources available to residents during the pandemic, and the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative and Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Coronavirus Local Response Initiative are holding virtual gatherings with local leaders to help them navigate COVID-19 challenges. Such efforts are crucial during a crisis, and they could also succeed in finally making online engagement an integral part of civic life, promoting access for residents excluded from in-person engagement.

However, as digital life continues to move online, we’ll also need a public reckoning around digital access, accessibility, and literacy. Recent Microsoft research suggests that "162.8 million people are not using the internet at broadband speeds,” and according to Pew Research, “racial minorities, older adults, rural residents, and those with lower levels of education and income are less likely to have broadband service at home.” As officials shift public engagement online, they risk deepening these divides. Thus, it’s critical that digital engagement augment rather than replace in-person engagement.

Finally, new community leaders and groups are springing up in cities around the country. Organizations are sewing masks for healthcare workers, connecting individuals to vulnerable neighbors, and raising funds to cover essential bills and other costs for lower-income residents or residents who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic. Similarly, frontline workers are pushing back against the corporations putting their lives at risk. From Whole Foods, Amazon, and Instacart to Perdue and McDonald’s, workers are striking for hazard pay, better health protections, and sick leave and benefits for part-time workers. Workers in other sectors are also organizing for better conditions: A group of nursing home aides have reportedly bargained for hazard pay, and Coworker.org, a platform for organizing non-union workers, is scaling up dramatically as workers across the globe mobilize around coronavirus.

In neighborhoods and workplaces, these efforts have reinforced existing community networks and, in many cases, established new civic infrastructures—ones that include Americans who are underrepresented in traditional democratic processes. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, for instance, is organizing a Coronavirus Care Fund and providing resources and webinars to domestic workers—most of whom are women of color and/or immigrants, and 65 percent of whom lack health insurance. Maintaining this civic infrastructure even after the pandemic slows could be a powerful tool for future civic organizing and democratic engagement.

COVID-19 has made raw and visible injustices that have existed in our country for decades, and there’s no silver bullet. Building a more resilient, equitable democracy will require us to open policy domains to the public—especially the most marginalized, at-risk members of society—and find sustainable solutions to long-standing challenges and inequalities. This requires a thorough examination of how we got here, and collaboration across government, civil society, and philanthropy to imagine a different type of society: one that protects and empowers the most vulnerable among us.

Rather than militarizing our response, we need to orient our post-COVID grand strategy around improving global health and opportunity.

Alexandra Stark

Some moments are seared into memory. My parents can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King. My grandparents vividly recall hearing the news about Pearl Harbor and V Day. For my generation, that defining event was 9/11.

Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues that surprise attacks, from the burning of the White House during the War of 1812 to Pearl Harbor, have upended Americans’ assumptions about national security. Each attack prompted policymakers to reconsider the country’s existing security strategy, and revise it to extend its global and domestic reach.

Such was the impact of 9/11, which fundamentally reshaped our conceptions of security and politics, launching still-ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and a host of invasive domestic surveillance programs.

The post-9/11 period saw a sweeping reorganization and rapid expansion of the U.S. intelligence community; a 2010 Washington Post investigative series revealed that “no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work." We’ve also seen expanded funding for military tools to fight terrorism: Congress has created an “Overseas Contingency Operations” account (described by critics, including then-Congressman Mick Mulvaney, as the Pentagon’s “slush fund”) to fund our wars and circumvent caps on Pentagon spending. Altogether, the United States has spent $6.4 trillion on the war on terror since 2001, averaging out to about $320 billion per year.

This bloated counter-terrorism bureaucracy has scored some victories—the United States hasn’t experienced another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 since then—but they come at a significant price. The invasion of Iraq spawned a brutal sectarian civil war, producing the conditions that allowed ISIS to metastasize; al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates have now sprung up around the world. U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan almost two decades after 9/11, and we’ve gone on to create humanitarian disasters in places like Yemen and Libya. Proxy wars are being fought across the MENA region by actors supported by the United States and its regional security partners.

And in our fixation with waging wars abroad, we’ve neglected to address existing gaps and tensions within the United States—with devastating consequences. According to New America’s International Security Program, homegrown terrorist attacks inspired by trans-national jihadist and far-right ideologies have killed more than 200 people since 9/11. Mass shootings have killed more than 1,300 people since 2009.

In short, we’re reaping the logical consequences of unchecked militarism and imperialism. Rather than creating sustainable job opportunities and expanding access to healthcare and education—all of which could increase communities’ resilience to terrorist recruitment—we have chosen to invest in drones and a special forces presence around the world. Instead of encouraging responsive governance in our military partners, we’ve supported autocrats who claimed to be our partners in counter-terrorism. And we have under-resourced conflict prevention efforts abroad, focusing instead on funding never-ending military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

COVID-19 is likely to become another 9/11 moment, one that again reshapes Americans’ conceptions of what security means. Far more Americans have been personally affected by the virus over just the past couple of months than by terrorist attacks over the last two decades. Indeed, analysts from different ideological traditions have already begun speculating on what a post-coronavirus transformation in U.S. grand strategy might look like.

But COVID-19 can’t be another 9/11 moment, if that means the securitization and militarization of disease response. Like terrorism, the spread of infectious disease is not best fought by military means; there’s no weapons system capable of defeating COVID-19.

Nevertheless, this administration or a future one may be tempted to “repackage and rebrand certain counterterrorism activities and programs merely to suit the global challenge du jour,” as notes Dan Mahanty, director of the U.S. Program for the Center for Civilians in Conflict. COVID-19 has already led to calls for the mobilization of military assets and comparisons to warfighting; moreover, calls to hold China accountable for the virus—and Sinophobic rhetoric from politicians and pundits—parallel xenophobia and racism toward Muslims and Arabs in the wake of 9/11. Much like the State Department and USAID frequently found themselves justifying their programming in terms of counter-terrorism benefits, a securitized COVID-19 response could see resources directed toward the Department of Defense at the expense of diplomacy and aid programs.

This military-centric approach to security is both short-sighted and dangerous, as demonstrated by COVID-19’s rapid spread around the world. Rather than taking a securitized approach to COVID-19, a new grand strategy must be fundamentally oriented around human well-being.

What would this look like? To start, it would take a diplomacy-first approach to foreign policy, with increased State Department and USAID funding for programs aimed at predicting and preventing outbreaks of violence in the immediate term. This would require us to rebuild the State Department and reverse years of damage inflicted by the Trump administration. In the longer term, it would feature peacebuilding efforts that bolster societies’ resilience to violence by building institutions, supporting targeted communities, and shaping norms. Rather than arming proxies and sending our special forces to partner with often unsavory partner governments on counter-terrorism operations, a diplomacy-first approach would promote stability through conflict prevention.

It would also prioritize an expansion in international aid to combat the climate crisis, criminal trafficking networks, nuclear proliferation, the small arms trade, and, of course, disease. Most of this international aid should not be subsumed into the national security bureaucracy or budget; Instead, aid efforts should be coordinated at the international level to ensure that resources strengthen existing institutions and are distributed equitably. The G-20’s temporary halt to debt payments from the poorest countries should also be extended to debt forgiveness and assistance that enhances the economic and health recovery of vulnerable countries.

A strategy oriented around human well-being would also require the national security bureaucracy to revamp its hiring and personnel practices. According to a 2019 report from New America’s Political Reform program, the presence of women decision-making improved processes and innovation in the nuclear security community. A post-COVID grand strategy would benefit immensely from a diversity of practitioners and communities.

Finally, a human-centric approach to security would largely collapse the distinctions between the foreign and domestic policy arenas. The 9/11 moment fundamentally reshaped our domestic politics by heightening fear and prioritizing prevention of terrorist attacks, often at the expense of civil liberties. Our post-pandemic grand strategy would increase well-being abroad, which would have positive reverberations at home (infectious diseases, as we’ve found, don’t respect borders). Domestically, this new approach would center on building democratic institutions; creating secure, well-paying jobs; and transitioning to an equitable, low-carbon economy. This would be a stark contrast to the Trump administration’s beggar-thy-neighbor approach, with its emphasis on negotiating bilateral trade deals that are better for “us” than for “them,” and which stokes xenophobic nationalism while essentially hijacking protective gear intended for our international partners.

In his farewell speech, in which he coined the term “military-industrial complex,” President Eisnehower reminded the nation that “America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.” Like 9/11, COVID-19 will unquestionably transform our approach to security and politics. Unlike 9/11, it should spur us to reorient U.S. strategy around improving human health, prosperity, and opportunity—both at home and around the world.

The pandemic is ravaging the United States—and so is our escalating culture of fear.

Heather Hurlburt

While we see every crisis in American life as shocking and unprecedented—and, of course, Y2K, 9/11, the 2008 economic crisis, Ebola, ISIS, and COVID-19 are all unique in important ways—patterns persist in how the public reacts, and whether the space for policy innovation closes or opens. Despite our rugged national self-image, Americans often tend toward fear: Something—whether it’s American exceptionalism, child-rearing habits, continental isolation, or Internet-shortened memories—leads us to believe over and over, against all evidence, that human history has never seen anything like what our country is experiencing right now.

And Americans, like people everywhere, usually reward their leaders in a time of crisis. Social scientists have proposed a range of explanations for this: an intense need to believe that those in power are successfully keeping us safe, a psychological need to see aggression acted out against the source of crisis, or simply a reduction in political strife that normally signals voters to oppose a given leader. Those trends have manifested repeatedly over the last two decades—so how do they play out against the polarized, anti-globalized politics of 2020?

First, Americans tend to believe that social calm, and a lack of violent threats at home or abroad, are the norm. In fact, such periods are the exception rather than the rule. The last twenty years have been eventful—and that’s without including government shutdowns, catastrophic weather events, surges in domestic extremist violence, and epidemic-level gun violence.

At a casual glance, the period stretching from the late 1970s to 9/11, or from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, might sound like nirvana. But ask someone who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, or who grew up with duck-and-cover drills and nuclear winter nightmares, how serene those years were. And for some Americans, social peace was always illusory: The Roaring Twenties, the subject of so much nostalgia, saw the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, Tulsa’s Black Wall Street Massacre, and numerous other instances of large-scale racial violence.

Seeing Washington, D.C. shut down is less strange when you’ve grown up on tales of your pregnant mother walking through it in the aftermath of the 1968 riots, with machine-gunners on the White House lawn. Contemplating the loss of family is normal when your grandparents lived minutes from Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska—central to every Cold War dramatization of a nuclear exchange. Plenty of older Americans remember when polio shut down summer trips to pools and movie theaters. And again, whether it was African Americans losing voting rights or Japanese Americans being herded into internment camps, few non-white Americans were ever under the illusion that what they had couldn’t be ripped away tomorrow.

In short, our collective faith in the permanence and immutability of U.S. institutions is misplaced—but it may be particularly American. It may also leave us open to swings of overreaction.

In the wake of 9/11, historian Peter Stearns argues in his book American Fear, Americans “have come, as a nation, to fear excessively.” Through interviews, personal recollections, and other data, Stearns compared public responses in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks—when Americans saw likely attackers everywhere—to responses in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Americans, he concluded, “were over three times as likely to be afraid” after 9/11, and “the level of fear, when expressed, ran much deeper.”

Our disproportionate response to 9/11 has held true for subsequent crises. In 2014, a majority of respondents told pollsters they were concerned about ISIS attacks (90 percent) and a widespread Ebola epidemic (65 percent) within the United States. In reality, only 11 cases of Ebola were ever treated on U.S. soil, resulting in just two deaths. And, according to New America’s International Security Program, in all the years since 9/11, “individuals motivated by jihadist ideology have killed 104 people inside the United States.”

After each of these crises, public opinion and voters rewarded leaders and candidates who promised decisive, militarized action, and who acknowledged the intense levels of public concern. That support continued for some time even as criticism of these responses mounted: President George W. Bush’s approval rating skyrocketed after 9/11, remaining above 50 percent until the summer of 2005. 2014 candidates who called for stronger responses to ISIS and Ebola (and, in some notorious cases, conflating the two) had very high rates of success in the midterm elections that year. President Obama famously complained in an Atlantic interview about the difficulty of convincing Americans that terrorism poses a limited threat at home—and one could argue that he won a decisive electoral edge in 2008 through his willingness to directly address Americans’ concerns about the economic crisis, while his opponent, Sen. John McCain, seemed to equivocate.

These days, COVID-19 is claiming a 9/11’s worth of U.S. victims every two days—a death rate that will likely continue into May. In Europe, leaders are seeing the exact kind of elevated public support one might expect in the United States—regardless of whether their countries are global leaders or laggards in flattening the curve of infections. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, is enjoying his first majority support in two years, while Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte—who presided over a deeply problematic response—saw a 27 percent increase and now sits at 71 percent approval.

Some U.S. reactions to COVID-19 mirror past responses to crises: a strong, cross-partisan spike in concern; bursts in support for state, local, and health leadership. And, in a striking parallel to 2014, the virus isn’t the only thing Americans are worried about: Perceptions of China as a threat are spiking, as are hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans.

There is, however, one marked departure from the norm. While Trump initially enjoyed a bump in his approval ratings, it wore off much more quickly than has been typical in past crises. Just days after the president applauded protests against shelter-in-place restrictions, polling found him trailing well behind Michigan Governor Whitmer—whose restrictions were being protested—in approval. After a rough first year in office, Whitmer is now seeing a bump, while Trump’s approval ratings are back to their levels before the virus reached the United States. As Michigan pollster Richard Czuba said, “This is very much a rally-around-the-flag moment, and voters typically would be rallying around the leadership of the president, and they clearly are not.”

Still, it’s been possible for decades in U.S. politics to cobble together pluralities of voters by offering them new bogeymen. Before ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and China, election seasons sensationalized crime, Japanese imports, and communists. Indeed, political scientists Steven Teles and David Dagan argue that terrorism was largely swapped in for crime in the public imagination—and in political campaigns—after 9/11. The United States’ history of prejudice, combined with its diversity and the demonstrated electoral success of fear-driven approaches, has led again and again to campaigns that demonize and target not just pandemics and ideologies, but people and communities.

Such rhetoric has been responsible for spikes of violence against minority groups in the past. Now, with anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, and anti-immigrant hate crimes on the rise, how we direct our fear has major implications for our social fabric. We can’t always control economic conditions or pandemics (both of which are significant risk factors for social unrest and violence). However, we can do more to step out of cycles of hate speech and incitement—and that means first acknowledging how deeply ingrained these elements are in American life.

Fear, it seems, is as American as apple pie. We have to ask ourselves whether fear-based politics might be, too.

People lose trust in government when it fails. Government fails when people distrust it. Here's how to break that cycle.

Mark Schmitt

Several years ago, I was involved in the attempted launch of an organization intended to restore public faith in government. This was during President Obama’s second term, when pervasive lack of trust in government was prolonging the pain of the Great Recession, and Obama’s ambitious vision had descended into a grinding squabble about budget deficits. Despite best efforts and great leadership, the idea didn’t quite catch on. Funders lost interest, and by 2017, even the organization’s carefully chosen name, Indivisible, had been claimed by one of the country’s earliest and most successful anti-Trump resistance groups.

One critique we often heard while trying to launch Indivisible was that we shouldn’t treat skepticism in government as a public relations problem. Americans distrust government for good reasons: Some people we talked to observed that long lines at the DMV, the only physical space most of us encounter a government agency, made them assume the worst about every other arm of government. Others noted that for many low-income people and people of color, interaction with government often entails the routine brutalities of the criminal justice system or the paternalism and complexity of welfare and Medicaid.

With the current pandemic and recession, we’re witnessing the most tangible and consequential failure of government in recent U.S. history. Few of us will forget the ongoing tangle of errors, deceptions, and corruption that’s led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, along with a shutdown of the economy and communal life. While we may be confident that a different president could have done better, historical counterfactuals are cold comfort in a crisis. Our attitudes about government will be indelibly shaped by these first several months of 2020, much as older generations were shaped for decades by the success of competent government during the New Deal and the postwar era.

But it’s also distrust in government that’s led to this situation. For four decades, denigrating the public sector has been the primary note in our national politics. Due in part to a polarized government’s inability to respond sufficiently to the 2008 recession and its long aftermath, Americans elected a president in 2016 who promised, “I alone can fix it”—launching an accelerating attack on “the administrative state” and leaving key agencies in the hands of unqualified, indifferent leaders or acting directors.

Thus, lack of trust in government can be a circular, self-reinforcing phenomenon: Poor performance leads to deeper distrust, in turn leaving government in the hands of those with the least respect for it.

Yet, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted, “Government matters today in a way that it hasn’t mattered in decades. People need confidence in government.” The question is, how do we break the cycle of distrust and neglect?

One lesson we learned while developing Indivisible was that treating citizens like customers doesn’t deepen their attachment to public institutions. The “Reinventing Government” effort led by Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s distributed cards to federal agencies with its mission statement—which started with, “Putting customers (the American taxpayers) first.” That project, as well as comparable efforts to improve public-facing services at the state and local levels, brightened the experience of interacting with government (at the DMV, Social Security and the IRS). However, general public trust in government, and particularly in the federal government, continued to slide, along with faith in most other institutions.

A flaw in the customer-centered model is that it assumes people draw a sharp distinction between the side of government that delivers services and benefits (i.e., the bureaucrats and civil servants) and the political realm of politicians, elections, and legislation. People don’t, and there’s no reason why they should. Research shows that when asked about government, people don’t see the DMV; instead, respondents talk about a rigged political system dominated by the ultra-wealthy. A friendly, efficient counter clerk won’t erase the image of an entire system designed to perpetuate the advantages of the very privileged. As political scientist Jamila Michener wrote in her book Fragmented Democracy, lower-income people’s experiences with dehumanizing government processes, such as applying for Medicaid, shapes their experience as participants in democracy.

But this is also a healthy sign. The fact that citizens have broader expectations for society, rather than simply viewing themselves as customers, means they’ve already absorbed a basic principle on which democratic self-government rests. It also means that restoring trust in government requires addressing campaign finance, lobbying, the unquestioned assumptions underlying policy (such as the need to reduce the federal deficit), and the many ways in which the wealthy reinforce their advantages in the political process.

A second problem with the customer-service model of trust in government is that it omits the dimension of power. It assumes performance and trust have a natural, almost mechanical relationship: If government performs better, people will have more trust in it, and vice versa. But as we’ve seen in the Trump era, many economic actors benefit from mistrust in government. It gives them cover for deregulation, tax cuts, or simple corruption. Familiar political rhetoric about the failures of government helps this cause, but poor performance itself gives them an added advantage.

As if to prove this point, as I was writing this article, Trump expressed his support for anti-lockdown protesters, implicitly attacking the judgment of state leaders. By fostering distrust in government, Trump is seeking, not for the first time, to strengthen his own political power.

For the same reason the public doesn’t draw a distinction between politicians and public employees, politicians have a rich opportunity—and obligation—in this moment to demystify government and remind people of its importance. Many candidates in the current cycle have pivoted, at least temporarily, to COVID-19 relief efforts—including fundraising for charities and donating food. Rep. Katie Porter of California is one of several members of the class of 2018 who has worked to circulate information about COVID-19 and recently enacted government programs through livestreams and other means. In Oklahoma, a Democratic member of Congress joined with a Republican mayor to hold a virtual town hall on the pandemic, drawing almost 8,000 participants. In times of anxiety and confusion, politicians and elected officials can play an essential role in reconnecting citizens to their own collective voice and power.

Government also engenders distrust through its complexity and inaccessibility. The endless forms, reviews, and personal information required for programs intended to serve—such as a subsidized health plan under the Affordable Care Act or benefits delivered in the form of tax credits—create a barrier of uncertainty and confusion. That complexity, often the product of political compromise, deepens mistrust, even if those who need benefits ultimately get them.

Promisingly, the federal government’s frantic COVID-19 response led to an improvisational experiment with near-seamless benefits: a $1200 relief payment to many households, which will arrive without any forms or procedures. While Trump’s request to add his name to the checks will add days of unnecessary delay, the move at least signifies his recognition of the political value of uncomplicated benefits during a time of crisis.

There’s also a lack of clarity about the unique responsibilities of federal, state, and local governments. When government fails or succeeds, citizens don’t know whom to hold accountable, or whom to credit. The pandemic response has dramatically revealed the absence of clear lines between federal and state responsibilities, but in some ways, the last decade has revolved around conflicts between states and the federal government, such as the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As Marquette political scientist Philip Rocco wrote earlier this month, the debacle is “less the product of any ‘American Federalist System’ than of the absence of a system—or of an arrangement whose elements simply cannot be coordinated with one another.”

After Trump’s election, there were calls for “progressive federalism” as a response, in which states would find their own ways to achieve goals like protecting workers’ rights or reducing carbon emissions. The crisis has shown the limits of that naive hope, as states scramble and compete to purchase necessary supplies and implement their own decisions about safety—even while knowing their efforts could be undermined by other states or the federal government.

The crisis has scrambled many economic and social priorities, but the need to restore trust in government remains urgent. We need to acknowledge where government has failed, understand why, and commit to building democratic institutions that are worthy of trust—institutions that reflect our collective values and that are capable of effectively responding to present and future challenges.