2020 was undoubtedly one of the most consequential years in history. The ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with other cascading crises, can still be felt in almost every facet of our lives. Our guest this week points out that in order to heal, we must take time to reckon with what we lived through. Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science at NYU and the author of “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.” Klinenberg is also the director at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. He joins WITHpod to discuss stories of people he profiled in the book, the importance of grappling with what we experienced, the increasing pressures of daily life and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Eric Klinenberg: I think what the real feeling that Americans had in that year and continue to have, it’s not loneliness. And there’s a lot of conversation these days about the epidemic of loneliness and the crisis of connection. And as you probably know, I’m a little bit of a skeptic of the big problem in America today is that we’re lonelier than ever. I don’t think there’s good evidence that we are.
But what we are and what happened in 2020 is we felt that we were on our own. Here is this moment where we most needed a hand, we were at our most vulnerable, our most susceptible. Everything was up for grabs. And it really did feel like that, like we’re falling into a vortex. I kept thinking about that opening scene of “Mad Men,” the TV show, right? We’re just like spinning. What is happening? And I think the message for Americans was, go manage the situation on your own.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
Well, we just had the Super Bowl featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, which was the exact same matchup that happened in 2020, right before the world kind of ended, shut down. I mean, it didn’t end. We’re still here, but it did shut down. And as many people have noted, the matchup between those two teams in 2024 is the same as 2020. The matchup between the two people that appear to be likely the nominees of each respective party, Joe Biden for the Democrats, current president, Donald Trump for the Republicans, former president. We’ve got the same matchup in 2024.
And one of the things that’s weird about that Super Bowl matchup and the fact that it recalls 2020 is that like 2020 is an absolute memory hole. It’s a memory vortex. I think that year was so intense and traumatic that many people blocked it out. I think that blocking out has actually been a great benefit to Donald Trump who is trying to run on basically his record up until 2019. In fact, he was even going around at one point saying like, are you better off now than you were five years ago? And I was like, wait a second, that’s not the way it goes. The slogan is, are you better off now than you were four years ago?
But if you said, are you better off now than you were four years ago, then you had to like remember the freezer trucks that were parked outside New York City hospitals that were taking bodies out by the dozen, and the months everyone sat inside, not able to do anything in normal life and the once in a generation civil rights protests and disruption across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and then the build up to the insurrection.
So, like yeah, if you’re Donald Trump, the Republicans, let’s just cut it off at 2019. We’ll call 2020 just some alien and, you know, we’ll stand on our record there. But my strong belief, and it’s been a guiding theme of this podcast, is that 2020, the trauma of 2020 and the aftermath of it explains so much of our lives now. And because it was so traumatic and because so much of that has been suppressed, there’s all kinds of things that happen now that we look around and we’re like, why is that happening? Why are road deaths so elevated? You know, what’s going on there? That’s weird. It’s like, that’s an after effect of 2020.
You know, why are social bonds so frayed? Why are people’s moods so dour? Why is there this gap between what the economic metrics say about the performance of the macro economy and people’s personal assessment? There are all kinds of ways in which I think the 2020 represented a kind of rending of the fabric, like a tear in the space-time continuum that we’re sort of stitching together, but isn’t ever going to be the same as it was before. And we haven’t really acknowledged.
And I’ve also been like, it’s been notable to me how little that gets talked about in the discourse. Partly because everyone I think is also traumatized and suppressing. To me the Occam’s razor answer to almost any question about what’s going on in American society is like, well, there was a once in a century trauma that happened. More than a million people died. Everyone was stuck in their homes for months and society was disrupted at a level that hadn’t happened since arguably World War II, maybe earlier. I think that’s probably it.
So, like, why is crime up? Well, I think that’s probably it. Why are road deaths up? Well, I think that’s it. Depression, you know, education, you know, school attainment. Like whatever you want to do, I think there’s an Occam’s razor monocausal theory that you can offer. But that has been totally absent in the discourse until now. There is an incredible new piece of work that is out now that is I think really the first sort of like both scholarly and popular comprehensive attempt to wrestle with what happened in that year and what its social meaning and effects are.
And I think there’s a reason we haven’t seen this before precisely because I do think that people are repressed and traumatized about it. But it’s like, it’s 2024, and if we are to heal, and if we are to understand where we are now, like it’s never been more important to understand the meaning of that year. The book is called, “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.”
It’s by the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science at NYU, Eric Klinenberg. He’s also the director at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. Eric has been a guest on this podcast before. He wrote a book about social infrastructure. He’s written a whole bunch of great books. This may be his capstone. It’s an incredibly masterful piece of rigorous journalism, rigorous sociology and incredible storytelling. Eric, welcome to the podcast.
Eric Klinenberg: It’s so good to be here, Chris. Thank you for that great introduction.
Chris Hayes: I want to talk about this sort of idea of trauma and repression, but before we get to that, I want to talk about crisis because one of the through lines of your life’s work has been studying society through the lens of crisis. Your first book, which was about Chicago heat wave that killed 700, 800 people in Chicago, you called it a social autopsy. It’s an incredible book. And the sort of theory there is that you learn a lot about society in moments of crisis. And that has been a through line for now, an entire career of work. Why are you drawn to thinking about society through the prism of crisis?
Eric Klinenberg: You know, as a sociologist, I think of crises as doing for me what a particle accelerator does for a physicist. It’s like it speeds up things that are always happening and makes you able to perceive conditions that you otherwise can’t see. It’s an amazing thing. And you know, for physicists, that involves spending enormous amounts of money to generate this technology that can speed things up. You can’t do that as a sociologist.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, you sure as hell can’t go out there and create crises.
Eric Klinenberg: I mean, some people have accused me of trying, but what you can do is take advantage of these moments to try to learn something. And you know, there is this idea that is now a big part of the cultural conversation, let no crisis go to waste. Of course, we associate it with political officials or with businesses that try to exploit a moment for their agenda. And in a way, the sociological version of that is to get out into the world and see as much as you can.
And so, when 2020 started, I will admit my first instinct was the same as everyone else’s. Like I just wanted to protect myself. I wanted to protect my family, right? We were all advised that we need to socially distance ourselves from each other, hunker down at home. And I thought that’s the way to get through this thing. In some ways that was right from a health perspective, but I also realized I have to find some way to track all of the social drama because what we’re about to go through is going to be profound.
And of course, I didn’t anticipate the economic collapse and the scale of it. I did not anticipate the murder of George Floyd or the civil rights protests that followed. I didn’t anticipate the hollowing out of cities, the spike of violence, this massive fight over the election of 2020. It turned out it wasn’t just one crisis. It was a series of cascading crises. And I guess in so far as the theory that’s driven my career is crises allow us to see things, right, who we are and what we value, whose lives matter. Too many crises does the opposite. It makes us unable to absorb it. In order to get through it, we have to kind of block things out.
And so, I think what happened in 2020 is we repressed on a massive scale. We turned down instead of looking out. And so, it took me several years to make sense of all the things that I was looking at. And I have to tell you, Chris, this has not been an easy project to do.
Chris Hayes: No. And, you know, it’s just from a first-person perspective. I remember writing, staying up late at night a few days after like the world shut down. I forget what that date in March was, but Tom Hanks tested positive, Rudy Gobert tested positive, they canceled an NBA game, and then next thing you know, like everything was --
Eric Klinenberg: By the way, that was the big one. So many people I talked to were like, I knew it was serious when they canceled the NBA game.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. No, that was. Like the game started late and they came out and the game was canceled. And I remember early, staying up late, writing a memo to my staff about just my thoughts about how we’re going to cover this and kind of a little bit of like a battlefield speech about how important it was. And I also remember this period of time early there where there’s this mix of adrenaline and also a real sense that I was like operating at my capacity in a good way.
Like I was going to have to like feed my brain an insane amount of information to process across a whole variety of spheres from infectious diseases to international trade and economics to institutional design of various countries. Like what’s South Korea’s democracy function like? Like how does, what does the South Korean CDC look like? What relationship does it have to their political leadership or is it insulated from political, like all these different questions. And I found that invigorating as scary as it all was because of everything you’re saying that it was making all these things that were invisible legible.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And now I can’t reclaim that because the trauma response is so intense that I really have just like, put it in a box, put a bunch of packing tape on it and like shoved it somewhere in my mental attic.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah, I think we all have and I think this point about, you know, compare yourself to five years ago. And, you know, if we think about the president’s record, except for the year, it’s so important. In some ways it’s preposterous, right? It’s like, judge me as a pilot, except for the part with the landing, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Eric Klinenberg: All the other stuff is fine.
Chris Hayes: That’s exactly right. I nailed the flight.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There was just the last 3%, 1% really, when you think about it.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah. Okay. So that went wrong. But what else? Yeah. So, there’s something preposterous about that. Like it’s manifestly absurd, except in a way that is what we all have done psychologically with this period of time.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: And I don’t mean this in a judgmental way.
Chris Hayes: No.
Eric Klinenberg: I think just to be human and to experience all of the things that we experienced requires some kind of survival strategy. Like we needed to find some way to psychologically organize ourselves and socially organize ourselves. And I’ll tell you, so many people I know felt in those early months of 2020 like this is the first time in my life where I don’t know if it’s going to get me and I’m going to survive this thing.
I don’t know if my parents are going to survive. You know, the story for me began when my son who was at the time, you know, 13-years-old, came down with a fever that wouldn’t break and started having night sweats and was exhausted. And it was clear that he had COVID except for no one knew if he had COVID because you couldn’t get a test in the United States in those days. And I’ll tell you, Chris, it was terrifying to be a father. And you didn’t know if kids could get really sick at the time.
There were stories that some kids were having this inflammation reaction. It was just a terrifying moment. And then we went from that, once the health got resolved to like, well, what’s going to happen with the economy? I remember thinking, you know, it’s spring in New York. High school students are deciding what college to go to. How many students are going to decide to come to NYU where I teach next year, or in the midst of this pandemic that’s epicenter here? Am I going to be out of a job? Is there going to be research left?
Then the murder of George Floyd. It was like one thing after the next. So, there’s some fundamental level at which our human response is to just shut it out. And unfortunately, I think the problem is we have collectively shut out what happened that year. We’re reminded occasionally about a million deaths. I don’t even know what that means to people these days. Thousands of people were dying every day. It was overwhelming. Of course, we know about the election of 2020. We know about George Floyd’s murder and the protests, but we have not been able to take ourselves back into that moment.
And, you know, I guess fortunately for me, while all that was happening, I was just determined that I, along with this team of researchers from NYU graduate students, we were going to record as much of the social drama as we could. We were gonna track as much as we could in real time and then like spend years afterwards making sense of it. And I finally finished that, my God.
Chris Hayes: So, let’s talk about, you wrote a piece for “The New York Times” a few weeks ago about what you diagnosed as like a societal version of long COVID. And I think it lines up with my kind of oft articulated here monocausal theory of all social disruption against COVID, which is --
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- you know, look at a phenomenon and like, why is it happening? And a big chunk of the reason is our whole world came apart for a long period of time and a lot of people died and a lot of people experienced trauma. How do you understand the sort of society we live in today as a result of what happened that year and this kind of what you call kind of this sort of societal version of long COVID?
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah, so the argument is that COVID, this idea of long COVID, you know, we think of it medically, as a medical, physiological condition and it is for sure. And probably all of us know people who are suffering from it. It is a real and incredibly devastating and complicated condition. But there’s also another side of it, which is kind of long COVID as a social disease. And it’s one that we still are affected by. It’s in our bones. I think we experienced it in a lot of ways. Like our blood is a little quicker to boil than it was before.
And I don’t know if you had this experience, but I just remember like walking through the streets of New York in March, April, 2020, and you would see someone without a mask. You know, if you were a mask wearer, and you would feel the sense of anger, like, how can you be in public without wearing a mask? You’re putting me and my family at risk and people who weren’t wearing masks would see someone with a mask. How could you be so cowardly and afraid?
Chris Hayes: Ironic, yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: Why are you acting as if this is a big, right? So, we started to judge each other and, boy, the thing with masks really went wild because for too long, there were these viral videos of Americans attacking each other in grocery stores and gas stations and public parks, in some cases actually killing each other in conflicts that started around someone wearing a mask, right?
So, there’s this kind of intensification of daily life, this sense that we’re embattled in something that I think a lot of us still feel in our blood. But there was also in that year kind of a need for solidarity for coming together, for having a collective project to deal with this threat. And I think to some great extent because of our political leadership, but also just because of what’s happened in American social life generally. Instead, we grew more divisive than we were before. We grew more distrustful. I think millions of us felt discarded by key institutions. And we carry the legacy of that to this day.
And I think different groups do for different reasons. Like, I’ve written a lot about the incredible thing that happened in 2020, the emergence of this category essential workers, right? Like when we were in an economic free fall and it seemed like things were just about to end, the government said like certain people need to work and they’re people we really rely on. And they weren’t the bankers and the lawyers, you know, who are making big money. Not even the basketball players, right? We canceled the NBA, but the essential workers were, for the most part, you know, medical or low wage workers, you know, clerks, bus drivers, transit workers, people who worked in agriculture industry, meat packing, poultry farms.
And when they got called essential, you know what, essentially said is you’re expendable. You keep going to work even though we don’t have protection for you. And you would think that this concept of essential worker means we are going to honor you. We are going to compensate you. We are going to thank you at minimum, right? And it was like this thing happened like, we went up to this moral precipice, you know. We’re about to have this breakthrough. Listen, these are the people whose labor really matters, whose time really matters, who we depend on. And we got there and they were like, nah, yeah, forget it. Let’s just act like that didn’t happen.
And we’ve done nothing for them, like literally nothing for the essential workers. And so, I think millions of Americans know this and we’ve now seen something, like we’ve seen this horror show. We felt it in our bones. And today it makes sense that more Americans feel distrustful and feel like not that they’re lonely, but they’re on their own. So, I think we’re carrying that sentiment and that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: -- kind of emotional baggage with us to this day.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I want to talk about trust because you have a great chapter on it. I should just note on the sort of method here. The book tells the story of individuals in New York and in the different boroughs as they sort of navigate this and everyone from someone who’s a sort of political liaison for a local elected in the Bronx to a principal of a school in Chinatown to a guy who owns a pub in Staten Island is a particularly interesting case that we’ll get to as well as others. That’s just a few of them. And then it also tells you sort of macro stories. And there’s a chapter about trust that I want to talk about.
But before we get to that, I want to talk about a comparative lens that you also use in the book that I think is really important. So, one of the things that will happen is this happened around crime. Okay. So, it’s very clear that violence in the country spiked in 2020. Now, some people say it’s spiked after the George Floyd protest. That was the precipitating incident. Some people say it’s spiked in the aftermath of the most acute phase of COVID. But that was an inciting incident because they’re close enough together. It’s a very difficult. thing to disentangle.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But when I would say, well, when I would advance the notion that COVID was the real causal driver of that spike, people would say rightly, well, the whole world had COVID and it basically didn’t spike homicides anywhere else. And when you say like road deaths, it was COVID. Someone says, well, yeah, but the whole world had cars and COVID and it didn’t spike it anywhere else.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Now, when you say like inflation, it’s like, okay, yeah, that one clearly like it screwed up the supply chains and inflation. But there’s a bunch of things or even vaccine skepticism, which has clearly spiked. The whole world had COVID, vaccine skepticism, as far as I can tell from international polling data has not spiked in the aftermath of it. So, things happened here distinctly that didn’t happen any other place as a fact. And how do you, I mean, this is a very top line question, but like, how do you understand that, the effects that are distinct to America, even though COVID was quite universal across the world?
Eric Klinenberg: It’s a really important question. And, you know, it speaks to this concept that you introduced earlier, the social autopsy idea, right, which is like typically when we try to explain why a person dies or why there’s been a trauma in some place, you know, we focus on the medical side of it. So why does someone die of COVID? Well like manifestly because they’ve caught the virus and then they get the COVID disease and there’s something in their body that breaks down.
But then if we kind of scale up a little bit, like why do some cities have higher death rates than others? Why do some neighborhoods have higher death rates? Why did some nations do so well? I mean, clearly the virus does not explain it, right? So, when you say it’s because of COVID, yes, it’s because of COVID, but it’s like COVID through the filter of what? And I think we’ve of largely failed to ask ourselves those kinds of questions, even though we have the sense that the U.S. fared pretty badly.
You know, the U.S. fared worse than comparable nations on many counts, not just the deaths and the disease, but also just the trust and the violence and the state of our civil society. So, the way I think about this is it is incredibly puzzling and fascinating that it’s like road death, this vehicular manslaughter, reckless driving spike is an amazing social science puzzle. Like homicide, why does homicide go up in the U.S. more than other places? Well, we always have guns as the explanation. We’re just a massively armed country and we know that story.
Chris Hayes: And a lot of people bought guns as the pandemic drove a huge amount of gun purchases.
Eric Klinenberg: Two things, there’s the pandemic. And then of course there was the 2020 election, which is happening during this, right? So, I say cascading crises. I mean, gun shops were mobbed in the run-up to the 2020 election because there were a lot of conservatives who were very worried about Joe Biden becoming president and making all kinds of threats. And of course, we remember January 6th. I mean, the book ends on January 6th, really. I think the story kind of takes us to 2021. It didn’t occur to me while I was working on the book that 2024 was also going to be the 49ers and the Chiefs and Biden and Trump. I didn’t know it would literally happen again.
Chris Hayes: No. Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: So, this, I think, is fascinating. Clearly, America’s armed, but Americans aren’t armed with cars in a way that they aren’t in other countries. So, what’s going on there? And I think what happened in the United States is our approach, our response to COVID invited chaos. And there are different ways you could tell the story of chaos. I mean, there was the chaos in Trump’s mind and in the federal policy, which was all over the place. Trump was the one who announced that the CDC was recommending that Americans wear masks in public on April 3rd. You know, and they changed their policy.
Trump made the announcement of the new policy. In the next breath, he also said, personally, I’m not going to do it. And so, what was he telling Americans? Like, should we wear masks or not wear masks? It was chaos. Trump’s government funded the vaccine, but then also he seemed to come out against the vaccine. It was hard to track. So, there was chaos at so many different levels. People didn’t really know. I think people could confidently say that the government didn’t know what it was doing and didn’t really have a plan and maybe couldn’t care about them.
And I think what the real feeling that Americans had in that year and continue to have, it’s not loneliness. And there’s a lot of conversation these days about the epidemic of loneliness and the crisis of connection. And as you probably know, I’m a little bit of a skeptic that the big problem in America today is that we’re lonelier than ever. I don’t think there’s good evidence that we are. But what we are and what happened in 2020 is we felt that we were on our own. Here was this moment where we most needed a hand. We were at our most vulnerable, our most susceptible. Like everything was up for grabs. And it really did feel like that. Like we’re falling into a vortex.
I kept thinking about that opening scene of “Mad Men,” the TV show, right? We’re just like spinning. What is happening? And I think the message for Americans was, go manage the situation on your own, you know? You got this, Chris. How am I gonna do my TV show and have my wife, you know, working as a legal scholar while all three of my kids are homeschooling and I have no domestic help, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: Like, well, Chris, figure it out. You’re on your own. There was no sense of that someone had our back. And I think what happened to so many people is we just said like, okay, we are on our own. I’m gonna take care of myself. I’m gonna be less concerned about the well-being of the people around me, right? I just kind of act out. And so, it was a time of some combination of defensiveness, self-protection and nihilism. And I think extraordinarily that got expressed in our public life in no place more than on the roads.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I think one of the things that you talked about in the trust chapter, which I think is really, to me, that’s the framework I use for all this, is that, you know, the U.S. is a relatively low trust place. There’s sociologists and pollsters have ways of measuring this. And like one of the ways, you could describe American exceptionalism is that for a rich democracy, we’re probably the lowest trust society of rich democracies.
So usually, all these things go together. Being a fairly wealthy democracy and high trust tend to all be sort of correlated. And there’s good reasons for that. You know, there’s a sort of virtuous circle that can come into play with high trust societies. You have lower levels of corruption, lower levels of crime. The transaction costs for all kinds of social interaction go down when you have high trust.
They go up when you have low trust, right? You got to put metal detectors into a venue and you got to like make sure that people don’t rip you off and you got to do extra monitoring of government agents to make sure they’re not taking bribes, right? So, we’re in a weird spot. We were a low trust society going in, even though we’re rich and probably came out lower trust still from the experience.
Eric Klinenberg: So, I think that’s right. And it’s a good point. And we should also say, it’s not like, you know, distrust and division, discord were new to the country in 2020. I mean, right?
Chris Hayes: Absolutely.
Eric Klinenberg: Before 2020, there was 2016. And before that, there was 2012 and the birthers. We’ve been heading in this direction in this country, right? So, it’s not that 2020 created these things anew. It’s that it intensified, it accelerated, it locked in these trends. And I think here again, what’s important to note is it didn’t have to go that way.
So, there’s a comparison and a counterfactual we could use for this. The comparison I love to make on this point about trust is another society that has struggled with an ideological polarization with profound social division, with issues of distrust, and that’s Australia, right? Because remember when 2020 starts, Australia is reeling from these historic bushfires, right? We call wildfires. The country is up in flames. It’s a crisis, a major ecological crisis. And the prime minister, who’s a conservative, Scott Morrison, insists that this has nothing to do with climate change, right? Climate change is not a thing that Australians need to worry about.
And the guy, he’s not just a right-wing leader. He’s also a science denier in a fundamental in an important way. And the society is polarized. It’s divisive, right? All these things that are happening in the United States are happening in some way in Australia. But when COVID comes around, Morrison takes a really different tact than Donald Trump. First of all, it needs to be said that Australia and Canada, you know, South Korea, China, Singapore, they’re a bunch of countries that had a profound and horrifying experience in 2003 with SARS. And their exposure to SARS sensitized them to the threat of a coronavirus. Like SARS, it turns out was much, much more deadly than COVID. It just didn’t transmit as easily so.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, less communicable and more deadly.
Eric Klinenberg: Yes, and thank goodness, because if a disease like that is highly transmissible, you have an enormous death rate, but it wasn’t. But a number of nations, including Australia, didn’t know, and they had some cases. And the response was to think really seriously about how to deal with a highly infectious pathogen that could be lethal. And so, Morrison, you know, what does he do? He closes the borders. He subsidizes government production of masks, distribution channels. He subsidizes the production of testing equipment, right?
So, Australia equips itself with all of these kind of basic public health tools that used to be uncontroversial in this country that have suddenly become flashpoints. And more importantly, he assembles a committee led by the leaders of every state in Australia, kind of bipartisan group, health ministers from every state, and they establish a task force that’s got a combination of geographic diversity, a balance of different political parties, and the nation’s leading health experts. They come up with a really serious COVID plan. The measures they took were pretty extensive.
The state of Victoria in particular had lockdowns that many people found extremely difficult to deal with. It’s not that everybody loved the policies they made, but as it happens, Australia completely, you know, pushed down the curve, right? So, Australia actually has fewer deaths in the year 2020 than it does in a typical year, which is an amazing thing. And not just that it has this public health success, trust in other people and trust in government in Australia soars during 2020. A society that in many ways looks very much like the U.S., right? It is fair to compare these two places.
But the United States goes in a very different direction, right? And here in the U.S., we did the reverse. We did not take the coronavirus seriously. Obviously, some major significant institutions and actors did, including some who were in the Trump administration. But the person who headed up the task force from the White House on COVID was Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence who refused to wear a mask when he visited the Mayo Clinic in the peak of the pandemic.
We had the promotion of you know, alternative science and alternative medicine at a moment when we really needed to have some kind of consensus and agreement to do what was best given our knowledge at the time. You know, we let things fall apart. I made the comparison, counterfactual, imagine if in the beginning of 2020, Trump had said, it’s time for America to bond together in something like we’re at war right now, you know. We could have been at war against the virus. He could have said, this is a virus that comes from China and we all have to band together to protect ourselves.
He could have said, you know, the medicine is the best medicine that we can get from American science. He could have said the vaccine is the Trump vaccine. I think he actually could have rallied the country in a way that’s very consistent with what a strong man might do.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eric Klinenberg: I mean, he could have seized this moment to accomplish these authoritarian objectives. I’m not saying this would be a good thing. I think lots of horrible things would have happened, but we might have gone through the year 2020 and the rest of the pandemic in very different ways than we did.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, one of the things I think is really useful about your book is that I think people have blocked out just how bad the Trump response is, and partly because for a few reasons. It was so deranged that you can’t even begin to remember it. Like he would just flagrantly be lying about stuff. He was like trying to manipulate the numbers by like keeping cruise ships off the land of the country so that their cases didn’t end up in some tally early on.
Eric Klinenberg: I like the numbers where they are.
Chris Hayes: I like the numbers where they are.
Eric Klinenberg: I like the numbers where they are. Yeah. So, Americans can’t come back here to get medical treatment. I like the numbers where they are.
Chris Hayes: He’s got a press conference in the Rose Garden where he’s got a who’s who of CEOs and he says that Google’s setting up some site where you can test. It’s utterly fabricated in the moment. It rallies the stock market and then he signs the stock market rally for like a Fox Business host as like, hey, put that in your pipe and smoke. Everyone just blocked out just how crazy it was. But I want to give you two things before we talk a little bit about some of the individual stories.
But one is there is a story that conservatives tell about COVID. So first of all, that sort of ideological valence is true. It was the right that was more concerned with COVID in the beginning. I remember the hilariously hackish right wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, who is just like just a perfect partisan weathervane who just moves in whatever direction is most useful for whatever partisan objective he needs to. It was like during impeachment, he’s like, I’m not talking about impeachment, I’m talking about this new virus from China. And it’s like he was right, I mean, for the wrong reasons. He didn’t want to pitch into impeachment.
And then it was like, as soon as things started to get shut down, then all of a sudden, the valence of it shifted. So, like, there’s that weird thing, right? Like in the beginning, like this idea of like, close the borders and keep the foreign virus out is kind of a right-wing instinct. And there was liberal politicians being like, go to Chinese restaurants, don’t worry, these right-wing nuts want you to fear your neighbors, blah, blah. But the story that the right has told about COVID, which I think has penetrated consciousness enough to almost become de facto is, the public health people screwed up, we overreacted, and the public health people told a bunch of stuff that turned out not to be true.
They told them it was not airborne transmission and it was. They told people to wear masks outside in public, and that doesn’t actually matter. They closed down things like parks, which are open air and relatively safe, and the only kinds of places that should be open. They closed schools for too long. They told you that if you got the vaccine, you wouldn’t get COVID again, when in fact, it just massively reduced hospitalizations. They can go through all this stuff and basically what they say is, they got it completely wrong. They closed down everything for nothing. It was all a waste. Nothing mattered. We would have lost a million people anyway, and they screwed up your life. What do you say to that story?
Eric Klinenberg: Well, first of all, I think we should acknowledge that there are a lot of things that the medical science community got wrong —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Eric Klinenberg: -- in the beginning, that the epidemiology community got wrong, that global health institutions got wrong. That is, by the way, almost always the case when there’s a new pathogen and a new disease and the world is scrambling to figure it out. And there are various approaches that we can use in situations like this. I would say that the South Koreas and Japans and Australias and New Zealands of the world use what I call the precautionary principle.
Like let’s be exceedingly careful about this and use the measures that we know can be effective until we figure it out. So that’s why they did distancing and quarantines and lockdowns, masks, testing, tracing, you know, all those things.
Chris Hayes: I should say, let me just interject real quickly there because —
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- I think that’s an important point that there is a kind of inoculating effect of SARS, and you talk about this. I mean, if you look at the countries that did well, Taiwan, Australia, South Korea, places that had the experience of SARS. And obviously I use inoculating intentionally here, right? The notion of immunization is you have an attenuated version of the pathogen you introduce. It creates antibodies and those antibodies kick in when it gets the actual pathogen. In this case, SARS is the sort of inoculating exposure. It creates social, political, and institutional policy antibodies that when COVID gets exposed, kick in, and actually those countries end up doing much better.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah, and we should note also, you know, it includes Canada, you know, Australia and New Zealand, right? It’s not just Asian countries.
Chris Hayes: Totally, yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: And I think that’s important.
Chris Hayes: But I interrupted you there. So, one is novel pathogens are gonna bring with them uncertainty and that’s just our lot as humans. Like it’s a new pathogen.
Eric Klinenberg: It is and. I mean, it raises really serious problems for experts and for government leaders, which is how do you communicate with the public in an evolving situation and also maintain trust. If you overstate your knowledge about what people need to do you will look really bad because you will get things wrong. So, you know, so how do you establish trust so that you can communicate your way through one of these situations? By the way, you can’t do that only after the thing starts.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eric Klinenberg: You can’t build trust, you know, only in the moment, that you actually have to do work in advance.
The Australia comparison tells us there are a lot of things that you can do in the moment from the beginning. And I will say Australia did a lot of those things. The Australia case isn’t perfect either, because it turns out Morrison was kind of secretly grabbing power during this whole time and wound up losing office because of it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eric Klinenberg: But the U.S. did not do it. We did not have a wellspring of trust to draw from. And our leaders did not do an effective job of communicating to the public just how much we should expect knowledge to evolve and policies to change. I think there’s a cynicism about the conservative response to this, which is it is true that we got a lot of things wrong, as everyone got a lot of things wrong. It’s also true that we got a lot of things right. And thank goodness we got a lot of things right because it could have been significantly worse. It’s hard to believe it.
But also, you can’t deal with a COVID crisis or you can’t deal with a pandemic and a deadly pathogen by kind of masking half of the time or quarantining some of the time. Some of these measures, like you either do it, you either test and trace or you don’t test and trace, right? Like you either quarantine or you don’t.
Chris Hayes: We had so many half measures in this country that ended up with the worst of both worlds, the inconvenience and the kind of burden without the universality necessary to actually stop the pathogen.
Eric Klinenberg: One point for this that I think is so fascinating is like this whole controversy about masks where you still have people who will say like, masks don’t work. You know, masks just don’t work, it’s clear. And look, we actually do know that there are ways in which masks don’t work as well for this particular coronavirus as they have for other kinds of viruses. That said, if you think the masks didn’t work, find a medical care provider who worked in a hospital, a doctor or nurse or a custodian even who had access to the right kind of mask and who used it all the time, you know, religiously and properly. It’s true and tragic that a lot of, you know, hospital workers got sick and died in the pandemic, but so many fewer than I thought would have happened.
I mean, it’s extraordinary how much masks protected them. When do masks not work? If you’re wearing a handkerchief because there’s no mask available and you’re wearing it some of the time and you’re wearing it over your mouth but also under your nose, or if you’ve got the, you know, like the kind of, you know, standard issue, you know, cheap old blue masks that we see, surgical masks that aren’t designed for this, those things are not gonna work, especially if you wear them only some of the time and wrong. So, do masks work? Like, if you have the right mask and you wear it correctly, absolutely the masks work a lot better than the other alternatives.
But one big problem here is we didn’t invest in mask production, right? We didn’t have that set up. We didn’t invest in all of these things that other nations could have. And this is another moment where I think the country was so badly served by the Trump administration, you know, to put Jared Kushner in charge of procurement for all these essential things to have. I don’t know if you remember the moment where the states were bidding against each other for vital medical supplies. I mean, this is just horrific leadership. And again, to go back to this issue of, you know, the plane ride was great except for the landing part, this was a, you know, catastrophic murder by public policy.
And I think Trump has benefited from our collective will not to know about what happened in 2020 because he’s been telling us to compare ourselves to how we were before that, but we’ve largely gone along with it. You know, we have not wanted to revisit what happened in that year.
Chris Hayes: Well, and also I think that the other aspect of that is that, you know, the highest death rate for COVID happened under Joe Biden in the Omicron wave in that winter, the end of ‘21 into 2022. And the thing I always say to people who say, oh, we did too much as look at what happened in Omicron when society was functioning the way conservatives wanted it to. Basically, everything was open. We didn’t close any bars or restaurants really. Schools were open, everything was open. At that point, people were vaccinated. Okay --
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: -- so you’re dealing with something that has one-tenth for vaccinated folks, about one-tenth the infection fatality rate, right? So, a literal order of magnitude reduction in your risk of serious illness or death. And it still killed tons of people, hospitalized tons more. And that’s at the one-tenth scale.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So, 10 X that, go back in time, run society like that, times 10 is what you would have been looking at. And everyone like was so sick of like the masks and the stress and all this that they just like put that out of their minds.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah. And, look, it was overwhelming. I mean, it was a hugely stressful time in a lot of people’s lives. And I want to be clear, like for people who are interested in the book, I try really hard to be honest to not go too deep into the blow by blow of like what Trump did, the here and there. Like --
Chris Hayes: No, that doesn’t --
Eric Klinenberg: -- I needed to explain all the ways in which the U.S. got derailed. And I thought the Trump administration made this thing, you know, more deadly and chaotic than it needed to be. But also, every time I was writing and I found myself turning to kind of like what the White House was doing, I was like, okay --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: -- this is not what people need to know right now. In fact, the way to process all of the things I think we need to deal with turned out not to be, you know, political analysis. All the stuff we were talking about, no offense, Chris, on cable TV most nights --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: -- the thing we needed to do was to be invited into these very intimate experiences of ordinary people. And what I found for myself when I was organizing these research projects is like when I got to know someone really well, if I started to hear the really intimate details of their lives, the struggles they went through to work to take care of their family, to take care of themselves, to manage life in their neighborhood, I started to have that reaction you have like when you’re reading a good novel or seeing a movie, like you’re watching a movie that’s about you know, Oppenheimer, but actually you’re thinking about your own family and what you would do when you’re a kid, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eric Klinenberg: Like you start to have those relationships. And I said, the way I really want to tell this story is not just sociological, you know, kind of analysis, but I want to go really deep and profile, you know. I wanted to profile someone from every borough of New York City, you know. At first, I wanted to go around the world and then like you couldn’t get on a plane because everything was closed.
Chris Hayes: That was not going to work yet, right? Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: But like, if I had to be stuck in one place, what an amazing place to be in New York, right? Because in a way the diversity of the world is here.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: And so, I committed myself to doing a really deep profile, tracking the experience of one person from each borough through the year. And I looked for someone who I thought had a story that really expressed something fundamental about the experience of their borough. And it’s obviously like more of an artistic than a scientific process to pick someone who represents —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Eric Klinenberg: -- you know, Manhattan or the Bronx.
But I had a set of criteria for each borough based collective experiences. And then when I finished those five characters, or when I found them, I thought like, what have I missed here? And I realized by tracking people through these conversations, one thing I was missing was the experience of someone who died very early in the pandemic. And I found through the help of the MTA, a custodian in the subway system, the Indian man who lived here for 30 years, actually trained as a physicist and a mathematician, and he died in the first few weeks of the pandemic and his son actually was able to really share with me his story and his family story.
And then I realized that by focusing on the boroughs, I’d missed someone for whom 2020 was about the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests. And I found a political photographer, a guy named Brandon English, actually it’s his image on the cover of the book, you know, who really delved into the protests and told his story. So, in the end, there are seven people. And I think that’s really the soul of this book is, you know, to experience the pandemic through them, also to experience that year of crises through them, for me it’s like my way of urging you to process your experience too.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Yeah, the stories, the individuals are incredible and just the sort of, you know, the kind of texture of their lives, that sense of sort of grounds eye view, particularly, I mean, I want to talk about Daniel Presti, who’s sort of a special case that you write about in your op-ed, but tell a little bit of the story. Will you just go through who these people are, just because each of them has a sort of fascinating backstory.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then maybe you can talk about the Daniel Presti arc, which I think brings us in some ways to 2024 and where we are as a country.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah. So, one from each borough. The first chapter is about a woman named May Lee. Actually, every time I say the name, it’s like, I want to tell you something. Each person has such an extraordinary story. May is the principal of an elementary school in Chinatown in Lower East Side. It’s an amazing story because she actually went to the school where she’s the principal now.
Chris Hayes: And then she went to Hunter High School. Holler.
Eric Klinenberg: I knew you were gonna say it. I knew you were gonna catch that, Chris. You’re the biggest proponent of Hunter High out there. And Hunter School, not just high, but so she was part of the first cohort of women who went there. And she is a woman who could have done anything. And she decided to be a teacher and then a principal. Her story is amazing because she lives in Chinatown. Her kids went to this school, her husband went to this school. It’s her community. And in January of 2020, and then early February, she had all these families that were pulling their kids from school because 80 some percent of her student body is Chinese-American.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and they’re like, what’s happening with family members? And it’s like, you, this is --
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah. WeChat.
Chris Hayes: Shut it down. Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: WeChat. They were all in WeChat getting these messages and they had masks and then people were like, don’t send your kid to school. This thing’s crazy. And so, she’s amazing telling the stories. Like what happened is all of like the white gentrifier families in school came to her like, what’s going on? Like, what do they know that we don’t know? But also, she started walking through the streets of Chinatown in New York City. And people were yelling all these racist epithets at her. And so, the anti-Asian hate, you know, that really came, you know, got supported by the president, but was kind of out there in the culture generally got directed at her.
And then she had to figure out a way to keep this community intact.
There’s a woman named Sophia Zayas. She is the Bronx representative for Governor Cuomo. And she lived in the Bronx, lived in the place where she grew up.
Chris Hayes: I just loved her. She’s like Puerto Rican, like Puerto Rican self-made, absolute hustler, beauty queen pageant, just an amazing character --
Eric Klinenberg: Just Bronx.
Chris Hayes: -- just complete Bronx, like perfect Bronx.
Eric Klinenberg: See, you laughed at me when I said I was trying to find someone who was representative of these boroughs, but like --
Chris Hayes: No. I’m chuckling with delight at how perfectly, yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: No, she is an amazing person. And the chapter about her is called 24 Hours a Day. And you know, her job as the governor’s representative in the Bronx was to make sure that, you know, all of the businesses and healthcare institutions and communities had what they needed to deal with the pandemic. Now, what does that mean? Like ventilators, PPE, right? All kinds of things. And she was the liaison for all of these important community actors.
But also, she lived in a building where people were getting sick and dying. Her next-door neighbor, dear friend died. She lived with her grandmother. Her grandfather lived close by. Grandfather lived in a senior building a couple blocks away, and they had a massive outbreak, like seven or eight of his closest friends died. He got terrified. Her sister had COVID. She was terrified of getting COVID. And so, her story, I mean, it’s amazing because of the extent to which she was taxed by the situation and stressed.
There’s another story of a person in Brooklyn who works in a school, Enuma Menkiti, who’s a man who was a corrections officer in Rikers Island. Their story is incredible. It’s a black couple, very committed to social justice issues. They had their oldest child in a family-run daycare, and they had this kind of beautiful community that was committed to, you know, racial justice and social justice, and you know, talked about that a lot, and really provided this kind of core collective experience.
When the pandemic started, they closed the daycare like everything else closed down.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: Her husband was still going to Rikers. Her husband contracted COVID. Then Enuma contracted COVID. And Enuma almost died and, you know, went to the hospital and has harrowing experience. But the thing that was really amazing about their story is that after they recovered and as things started to open up again, they just were kind of eagerly anticipating their daycare reopening. It didn’t.
And one day they were out in the park and they bumped into another family from the daycare. And Enuma said something like, oh, we just can’t wait for us to be able to get back to childcare. And the person said like, oh, well, the childcare has been open for months now or weeks now. And it turned out that basically this childcare provider and the community had decided not to let Enuma and Persol, her husband, back in because they were essential workers. Basically, because he worked at Rikers, the community didn’t want him there because they thought he was a higher disease risk.
Chris Hayes: A Typhoid Mary kind of situation. Yeah, exactly.
Eric Klinenberg: Yeah. And so then --
Chris Hayes: Jesus Christ.
Eric Klinenberg: And so there, you know, I thought that was so profound because it really spoke to the problem of our essential workers, right? Like this couple’s doing the work that the city needed to get by. And here’s this community that knows that and is committed to these ideals, but couldn’t live up to its own ideals because the pandemic tested us and I think a lot of us felt that.
You know, there’s a story of a woman named Nuala O’Doherty, who was a retired district attorney in Queens, married to an Ecuadorian. You know, runs an auto body shop and is a mechanic. And Nuala wound up starting one of the most amazing mutual aid societies in the city.
And her story is incredible because she kind of stands in for the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in mutual aid projects, maybe probably tens of thousands over the course of the pandemic. And I think it’s so important to tell that story.
Chris Hayes: That chapter is really inspiring, really important.
Eric Klinenberg: She’s inspiring, Chris. And for me, it’s this amazing story because there’s a lot of hard things about the year 2020, but it’s also, you know, my belief that it kind of reset the civic infrastructure in the city. We have a new civic infrastructure in New York because of all the amazing things that happened —
Chris Hayes: yes.
Eric Klinenberg: -- at the neighborhood level. And I think we forget that. And it’s useful to ask, like imagine what would be happening in this migration surge in New York right now if we didn’t have all the mutual aid networks that are still providing support.
So, this is not just the story of, you know, civic collapse. There’s something else going on as well.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: And then there’s the story of Thankachan Mathai, the subway custodian and the story of his death and his family’s attempt to deal with death without the capacity to grieve in ordinary ways, right, there are no funerals. All the collective mourning rituals were off the table and that was a really tough experience. And that’s partly the story of the MTA also trying to honor its workers. The chapter raises this question about how we memorialize or how we remember that year.
There’s the story of Brandon English, the photographer and that’s really the story of Black Lives Matter. And then there’s the story I think he really wanted to zoom in on, which is the story of Danny Presti, who was a bar manager in Staten Island. And his story I think is one of the most important stories we could tell about what happened in the pandemic. It’s the story of someone getting radicalized on the right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, basically, he’s a non-political guy. He deals with the inconsequential city bureaucracy to get a liquor license, which takes forever. And he experiences how slow that bureaucracy moves. And then when the pandemic happens, it feels like they move very quickly to shut things down. So, he’s --
Eric Klinenberg: It took nine months.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: It took nine months to get a liquor license from the state of New York. And that when the pandemic shutdown starts, the government hires huge numbers of people to fan out across the city and give tickets to people who are operating their businesses.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So, he just feels like, wait a second. Really --
Eric Klinenberg: What’s government for?
Chris Hayes: Yeah, you’re slow in kind of helping me get my business up. You’re very fast to shut it down. And he starts getting pretty radicalized against COVID measures. He ends up declaring this kind of autonomous zone, it made Fox News, like they sort of put these like cones out, you know. They opened their bar at one point in defiance of local legislation, became a kind of like clarion call for all the people on the right who are sort of protesting COVID measures.
Eric Klinenberg: I was on Twitter one night, you know, doom scrolling as we all did during that time. And I came across a story like the Proud Boys have made it to New York City, right? And it was like the story and video of hundreds or maybe thousands of far-right protesters who had rallied in Staten Island in support of this bar that had declared itself an autonomous zone. And the bar manager and owner had decided, you know, screw the policies, we can’t take this anymore. We’re gonna let it rip and open up. And all these people came to their defense.
And I saw it and I had that reaction like, oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening in this city. What horrible people these must be, right? And I was really disgusted by it. I hope I didn’t tweet something about it. I think I refrained, but I felt, you know, that feeling that you felt seeing somebody who wasn’t wearing a mask when you’re in the grocery store and it was the peak of the pandemic and you had this like moral outrage. I had a little feeling of that. And then I kind of checked myself and I said, well, wait a minute, there must be something else going on here. I’m curious about it.
And then I saw there’s another story. He got arrested because two sheriffs tried to get him after he closed the bar. And there was this video that you could find where he runs to his car, he jumps in his car. This is all like available on, you know, street level video, runs into his car. This guy, you know, tries to stop him, goes in front of the car. He basically pulls out, the guy goes up onto the hood, right? And then falls off and he pulls his car away. So, then the story was he got arrested for fleeing an arrest and resisting arrest. And then also for, you know, a violent act against an officer, right? And it’s his big news story.
I’ve reached out to him a little bit later. And what I discovered is that, you know, first of all, I was surprised by how kind of affable and decent he seemed. And second of all, what I learned is like, he had this very sympathetic story about how hard it was to open a business and sustain the business during this time when the regulations from the city kept changing. He would open, then he could close. There was a lot of public money for people in some businesses. He and his partner couldn’t get money for the most part. They got only a little because it was a new business.
He couldn’t make ends meet. They were about to go bankrupt. He couldn’t get a meeting with the mayor or the governor. No one would listen to his appeal. And he acted out of kind of economic desperation. It turns out that when he got chased by these officers, they were plain clothes. They were sheriffs. He claims they never revealed themselves, they never identified themselves. He thought he was getting attacked. And it turns out he was never charged —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Eric Klinenberg: -- despite all the news about him. He was arrested, but he was never charged. I don’t in any way endorse his decision to declare his bar an autonomous zone and to defy the regulations.
But I told his story because I think it’s so important for people to understand where Danny and so many people in his position are coming from, when they express their sense of being abandoned by government. He did not feel like he got the assistance and support that he needed. It seemed to him like the world wanted to shut him down. And I tell his story, you know, again, not to advocate for him, but sympathetically, because one of the big things that happened in the United States in 2020 is an enormous number of people got radicalized on the right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Eric Klinenberg: And they bought into the story that the right was gonna support them and the Democrats weren’t. And I think that’s part of the predicament that we’re in 2024.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and in fact, the chapter ends with him tweeting about, you know, the election being rigged, I mean, and sort of cutting off ties with you. And it being clear that he’s sort of, in a way that is very familiar to a lot of people, sort of fallen into a certain part of the internet, very, very right-wing, very sort of conspiratorial minded. And in some ways, I think the question before us now, you know, is the sort of his trajectory versus the sort of civic infrastructure and mutual aid trajectory, which are both legacies of this, right?
Eric Klinenberg: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: They’re both from the book. They’re both the question now. I mean, one of the things that’s perverse in America is that, you know, in other countries where SARS was the experience that inoculated them and made them better the next time. Our experience of COVID has along almost every metric, people’s belief in vaccines lower, trust in public health experts lower, actual funding for things like infectious disease surveillance and things like that are getting cut.
Like, we are coming out of it in some ways worse off, more exposed to the next one. In other ways, there is the civic infrastructure mutual aid that got built up as represented by the woman that you write about in Queens. And like the big question now really is like, sort of like which way, America, about these two twin legacies and visions for coming out of this period.
Eric Klinenberg: That’s what ‘24 is gonna be about for us, Chris. I mean, I think that’s exactly right. And I think those are the two key characters, Nuala and Danny, are the two competing themes. I think their separate agendas are on the ballot in 2024. And, you know, what I fear, Chris, is that the burn it all down, government bungled this, there’s no way we can get it right narrative and the Democrats got it wrong. I fear that that has got its grip on the country in a way that’s threatening and destructive and that could jeopardize democracy itself.
I think it’s why it’s so important for us to reckon with 2020 and also to tell the stories of the Nuala O’Dohertys, of the May Lees to, you know, to remember all of the extraordinary mutual aid that made this crisis so much better than it might have been. It’s not all a horror show, but recovering our memory of those experiences is going to take some real work, too.
Chris Hayes: Eric Klinenberg’s new book is called “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.” He’s the Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Social Science at NYU, Director of NYU’s excellent Institute for Public Knowledge, which is a great institution and just a mensch in every way, a scholar and a gentleman, Eric Klinenberg. Thank you so much.
Eric Klinenberg: Thanks, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Eric Klinenberg, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Sciences at NYU. The book is called, “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.” You should definitely check it out. We’d love to hear your feedback on this episode, your thoughts about COVID and its aftermath, particularly send them to WITHpod@gmail.com. You can get a touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod on a bunch of different platforms like Threads where I’m @chrislhayes, and Bluesky, where I’m the same and on Twitter, currently called X. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And you can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?