When a baboon, monkey, or ape of any age gets sick or injured, its group won’t stop and seek shelter where they can nurture him back to health. That’s a decidedly human behavior, and it may help explain the depth of feeling we often have for our homes, that place where we can be weak, cared for, and feel safe.
If there’s one thing we’ve all had enough of as we’ve sheltered-in-place over the past month, it’s our homes. Not surprisingly, an international tracking poll released last week found that the one behavior respondents most planned to change when this pandemic subsides is to be outside more.
But while many people are clearly feeling pent up, I think our attitude toward–and even definition of–home will be one of the more lasting cultural changes this pandemic will have on America.
The same tracking poll, conducted by international communication firm Kekst CNC, found that many Americans think they’ll likely not travel as much–internationally or domestically–after the pandemic is over. Even more say they’re likely to stop going to concerts and sporting events. What that suggests is that as sick as we are of sitting on our couches, we don’t envision straying far from them in the years to come.
Like for so many others, the shelter in place order in California forced me to stay at home more than I have at anytime since I was a child. I’m the opposite of a homebody. Left to my own devices, I’ll eat out every night. And over the past decade, I’ve spent up to 20 weeks a year away from the address where I’m registered to vote. You’d think that this downtime would have driven me crazy.
But what happened as I plunked myself down to read and listen to music each day over the past month is that I began to notice my surroundings more than I ever had. During breaks, I looked out the window, and began to recognize the patterns in the movements of the ground squirrels, quails, lizards, and cottontail bunnies that live around my house. I started to pay more attention to the plaintive calls of Road Runners, which at first I thought was the cry of a hurt dog. One early morning last week, I watched a tag team of coyotes chasing a hapless Jack Rabbit in the backyard. The upshot of all this is that I became more in tune with the sounds and the rhythms of the little world off the dirt road I live on in the desert. All the time I’ve spent looking around me has made me feel more at home here now than at any other place or time in my life.
I’ve also found comfort in being a Californian. While I’ve always been proud of my home state, this is the first time I’ve ever thought it could save my life. News from Washington is as nasty and nonsensical as it ever was. But there’s nothing like a pandemic to reveal how confusing America’s federalist system is, and how little journalists and the public at large seem to understand it. The question of who’s in charge has never seemed so critical. I could safely ignore the President’s disturbing daily press conferences knowing that at least when it came to this pandemic, his words didn’t influence my fate as much as those of Gavin Newsom, who, by the way, starting referring to California as a nation-state. I felt safer knowing that we were placed under a shelter-in-place order earlier than any other state in country.
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One of America’s least acknowledged weaknesses it its size. Our connection to our country is generally more ideological than visceral, more a matter of faith than lived experience. (More than half of Americans have visited fewer than 10 states of the Union.) In 1857, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to a friend that it was the English who taught him what a “true and warm love of country is.” The United States, he wrote, were “too various and extended to form really one country. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.” He wrote that when there were only 34 states. It’s still true that the vastness of our nation can sometimes leave us wondering what it is that keeps us all together. It explains why American national cohesion has been so heavily dependent on war and the creation of external and internal enemies.
Our federalist governing system was designed to allow for multiple political loyalties. Indeed, the first states would not have signed on to the Constitution had it not protected their political interests. Two years before the Constitutional Convention and almost a decade after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson referred to Virginia as “his country.”
More than two centuries later, it’s hard to imagine Americans identifying primarily with their states. But the politics of this pandemic is likely to change that, at least in the states that, in the end, are seen as having done a better job protecting their residents than other states or the federal government.
Putting aside issues of shared history or ethnic affinity, people generally support and identify with the level of government that satisfies their fundamental needs. Protection from a potentially lethal virus would seem to fit that category. According to the late Czech political scientist Ivo Duchacek, “Gratitude for benefits received and expectation of more to come constitute the foundations of political loyalty.”
Not surprisingly, given its slow and chaotic response to the pandemic, the Kekst CNC poll found that 35% of Americans have decreased their confidence in the U.S. federal government. Conversely, 40% of Americans say their confidence in local government has grown. Similarly, the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index survey found that only 45% of respondents said they trusted the federal government “to look out for people’s best interests,” a figure twenty percent lower than that for state government.
Sure, you can assume that partisan affiliation predetermines at least some of these answers. But there’s something different going on here than in a routine political poll. During a pandemic, the question of whether you trust government becomes, “do you trust government with your life,” and that will likely have deeper and longer lasting consequences than mere partisanship.
While I was writing this, I received a text message from an old researcher of mine who now lives in rural Georgia. There was no salutation or preamble. I hadn’t heard from her since my birthday last July. Her message simply said, “I feel like we’re watching the buildup to another civil war.”
I don’t know about civil war, but the fact that blue and red states have not found common cause even while facing down a global pandemic does call into question the nation’s integrity. At the very least, the pandemic will likely leave us with stronger state and regional identities, which will change not only how we think about the federal government but about the country itself. Already, three groups of states have created alliances to plan how they will emerge from their pandemic stances. We shouldn’t expect this centrifugal trend to end with the coronavirus.
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By mid-April, it had became clear that America’s slow and disorganized response to the pandemic would lead to more deaths in the U.S. than in any country that had previously been hit. This shameful fact made the usual bluster and blame seeking at the White House all the more pathetic. The wild-eyed Trump had become a dangerous Norma Desmond.
But blaming presidents for the country’s failures isn’t all that unlike Trump blaming anyone and everyone for the coronavirus. It’s a deflection from a bigger problem, which is that we’ve turned the idea of American Exceptionalism into mere triumphalism. The desperate attempt to restore some sort of national glory leads us to deny our national failings. And to deny one’s failings means that they’ll never be fixed, which leads to yet more failure.
Pulling away from the imperial center—the proverbial swamp—could encourage Americans to find a new sense of rootedness and love of country more powerful than the empty pride in being citizens of the strongest or richest nation in the world. A healthier balance between state and federal identities might also reorient the nation more toward satisfying our domestic needs than competing internationally.
Of the many things the coronavirus has already taught us is that our national arrogance is misplaced and unearned. We need a new sense of mission. We should start by remembering what a home—and homeland–is good for. If we don’t, we’re no better off than baboons.
