Civil Society and the Pandemic
Only when the viral tide comes in do you discover who's been swimming naked.
Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting early America, commented on the American propensity towards founding clubs and associations to address their communities’ needs. “Americans,” he said, “combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way….At the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.” The robustness of American civil society has been central to its self-concept: a land of town hall meetings and churches for every faith. It is also foundational to its Jeffersonian political ideals: a small government, with a free citizenry organizing private charity and neighborhood organizations to take care of one another.
Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s striking how absent these civic organizations have been from the national response. In the face of failures of central institutions, churches and local organizations have neither led local pandemic responses nor spearheaded local economic relief. Attention has therefore focused on the actions of government agencies or large hospital networks to fight the pandemic. In the initial shock of small business shutdowns and layoffs, it’s also remarkable that the nation was fixated on a $600 stimulus check from the federal government, and not on the efforts of local business organizations or charities to preserve local economies and aid the newly unemployed.
True, early in the pandemic, some organizations delivered groceries for the elderly and sewed cloth masks for local hospitals, and received due praise for their contributions. But it’s notable how absent they have been from the conversation since then. In the public imagination, the most important thing that organizations did during the pandemic was simply to shut down their gatherings.
Worst of all, in a time of social distancing, few organizations have found ways to connect people, at a time when isolation is at an all-time high. This is nowhere more evident than in houses of worship, which have had to adapt their operations around closures and headcount limitations for traditional weekly worship. Some churches have flourished by emphasizing small-group worship and spinning up online discussion groups and ministries. But most have simply tried to carry on as usual, with predictable difficulties, or merely hook up a camera to stream services online like a lecture, forfeiting many of the benefits of person-to-person interactions. We have not witnessed a creative proliferation of small-group and online religious life, despite the manifest interest churches have, doctrinally and institutionally, in encouraging deep engagement. Although the Supreme Court ruling in favor of New York churches and synagogues protesting restrictions on headcount at worship services may have been a victory for religious liberty, it was also an implicit admission that these religious institutions have failed to find any better way to serve their congregants than in-person, whole-church corporate worship.
We can look to the 1918 pandemic to see what a flourishing civil society might make of a deadly pandemic. Then, as now, organizations had to contend with medical needs, economic damage, and the inability to hold traditional mass gatherings. Then, as now, pandemic control was a national matter, no small-town Lion’s Club, however adept, was able to protect their town entirely from the ravages of disease. But these organizations found important roles supplementing, or in some cases leading, the local response, providing much-needed capabilities as the nation struggled with a pandemic in the midst of a world war.
In St. Louis, the local Red Cross chapter worked closely with the city health commissioner to organize nurses, supplies, food, and transportation. Their motor pool provided five private ambulances transporting as many as 101 patients a day, around the clock – a remarkable private fleet so early in the age of the automobile. They directly registered nurses, aides, and volunteers and assigned them to work at the city health department, as well as sending 103 nurses and nursing aides to treat army men at nearby Jefferson Barracks. They opened an influenza mask workshop to produce masks for local hospitals and military camps.
Religious groups, too, displayed adaptability. In addition to publishing sermons in local newspapers – an early harbinger of today’s Zoom services – they developed canteens to prepare food for healthcare providers and the convalescent, cared for children whose parents were sick or deceased, and engaged with local healthcare initiatives such as those through the Red Cross. Many, such as Grace Episcopal Church in New Bedford, went further and repurposed their buildings to serve as temporary quarantine facilities. An excerpt from a local church bulletin illustrates the agency and foresight that made this possible:
The parish of Grace Church had been most forehanded. A few months ago, just after the Halifax disaster, a committee was formed whose business it was to formulate detailed plans for the use of the parish house in case of any disaster, which could be carried into speedy effect. The committee at once got into action with the result that they had the building ready in astonishingly short time, putting in seventy beds with all the other necessary equipment.
What would an America that maintained that level of civil society look like? In the acute crisis in March 2019, a greater mobilization of volunteers – coupled with cooperation from hospitals – could mitigate the critical staffing shortages in New York City and surrounding areas. Local organizations could also help engage those in the relatively unaffected Zoom class to support struggling local businesses and aid the recently unemployed. Perhaps most strikingly, America’s response to COVID has been crippled by the lack of centralized quarantine facilities adopted by successful countries from Australia to Japan. In America, patients diagnosed with COVID but who didn’t require inpatient care were frequently sent home and asked to quarantine, setting the stage for household transmission, which has been a major vector of the disease. Organizations that owned their own facilities could have provided an invaluable service by converting their facilities to housing for convalescent patients, protecting their family members from household transmission. America could, on a purely voluntary basis, have obtained a critical capability that competent governments provided, precisely the sort of supplement to state capacity that Tocqueville envisioned.
What changed in the century between these two pandemics? If community organizations were founded to fulfill needs that the early American government was unable to provide to its extensive frontier, the increasing capabilities of central government over the 20th century may have reduced the need for such groups to produce crucial social infrastructure. Further, as Tanner Greer argues, long experience growing up in bureaucratic institutions has led to an elite whose institution-building skills have atrophied. In a world of large universities, companies, and government agencies, it’s more effective to capture even a fraction of the resources of massive institutions and apply them towards one’s own ends than to start one’s own local-scale organization. The ambitious are thus naturally drawn away from traditional civil society. Centralized institutions may also wish to discourage the messiness and inefficiency of individual initiative, as when New York levied harsh penalties on any clinics who vaccinated anyone not in the highest-risk categories, even at risk of letting vaccines expire. With less incentive to organize locally, and greater risks for taking independent action, it’s not surprising that organizations have turned away from displaying agency.
For a country that prides itself on limited government and civic engagement, the lesson of 2020 is a sobering one. The telling absence of community organizations from the fight against the pandemic is an indicator that our civil society is no longer the productive ferment that Tocqueville described.
This has implications for our political ideals. As much as we might aspire to a world in which local organizations and charities play major roles in local governance, it turns out that we do not currently have the grassroots civil society that makes it feasible.
But a pandemic response which our central institutions have repeatedly fumbled is also a reminder of how valuable a role local institutions can play. A world in which the organizations of 1918 were here to fight the pandemic of 2020 would be one in which more of the sick would be comforted and more of the jobless would be retrained. And the social fabric would have been strengthened for the experience.
Having lived through this pandemic might spur ambitious people to engage with and renew local churches and clubs, building out institutions that can accept greater responsibility, better serve their people, and strengthen America’s resiliency for future crises. Those who were ahead of the curve on Covid, and who had competently managed their households through this crisis, can serve their community on a grander scale by joining existing organizations and galvanizing them towards the flexible, active culture that was on display in the 1918 pandemic.
The internet, too, is a new space in which civic organization can be founded, and a few of the bright spots in grassroots organizing this year have come out of online collaborations. For instance, VaccinateCA created a crowdsourced site announcing locations where Californians can be vaccinated – information that the state has been unable to coordinate. These projects serve a worthy goal today, but if they could be built to last as an organization after this crisis, building on the social capital they accumulated, they may become an integral part of the civil society of tomorrow.
The next crisis may not be a pandemic, but it will still require the strongest civil society, as well as the soundest central governance, that America can manage. The best time to have built these institutions was thirty years ago, the second best time is now.