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There came a point, in the days and weeks after Pearl Harbor, that the America Firsters and the Communists and the Father Coughlin fans and all the rest of cranks who had dominated the American political scene throughout the 1930 virtually vanished from the national conversation.
They just weren't interesting any more. We had a bona fide national crisis to rise to, and nobody had time for that kind of dissent. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. And most of all: just shut UP with your whinging, because the time we have to spend dealing with you is time we're not using to ensure our collective survival.
I'm already seeing signs that we may be in a similar moment now, at least among those who've made the psychological leap to a genuine crisis footing. I've got a rant up on Facebook that's basically making this same point -- those who are promoting denial of the crisis are actively hurting people, and need to be quiet now. It's been shared over 500 times since I posted it on Sunday evening, so I think it hit a nerve.
It seems possible that this crisis could be the moment at which both radical leftism and radical rightism are finally blown out of the conversation, and a true American mainstream is rejoined and fused. (That's certainly how it happened after Pearl Harbor: the American Consensus was forged in those weeks, and it stood for the next 40 years.) People get damned collectivist at times like this, and will become very aggressive about shutting down anyone who isn't seen as supporting the program of altruistic group survival. There's something about the mindset that sees dissent as a threat, and doesn't brook it very well.
You can read this as authoritarianism -- and it certainly can take that turn, but it doesn't have to. In benevolent hands, it's simply the mass recognition that the larger common good is more important than your petty personal needs right now, and you either need to step up and contribute to the effort or else step aside.
I think we're already seeing some of this in the unification of Dems behind Biden. Enough futzing around; the fate of our nation is on the line now, so let's pick someone marginally acceptable to everyone, and get to work ousting Trump. But it seems likely that the virus is going to do this at an even more primal level, bringing forward feelings of contamination and visceral physical danger and loss of control, for which concerted, informed action is the only cure. In that moment, I don't think that people who are promoting ideas that are seen as selfish or insular or exclusionary -- which both the far left and far right have built power by appealing to -- are going to fare well. The individualism of the past 50 years is giving way to a more collectivist drive for unity and coherence.
I'm hearing a different kind of language over the past week or so, language that suggests that this epidemic is bringing forward an acute awareness of the things we share, and the systems we all rely on for our common survival. It's starting to talk again of our collective Americanness, and what we owe each other, and what we deserve to expect from our government. It's early signals now; but if it lasts, the shift in our own sense of who we are as a nation may become profound.
If I'm right about this, a lot of things are about to become politically possible over the next few years that haven't been possible since Reagan was elected.
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