(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The U.S. has surpassed 28,000 dead from Covid-19, which is almost certainly an undercount, and is bracing for more. President Donald Trump’s partisan and incoherent response — the sum of his positions is that he has both total authority and zero responsibility — has made the crisis more political than it might have been. Multiple governors have shown a better way.
Yet mass death, whether from disease or war, inevitably causes political tremors. And when the landscape resettles, it doesn’t always look the same.
In her gripping history of death in the Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust recounts American efforts to cope with death on an unprecedented and unimaginable scale, leading to behaviors and strategies that would have been unthinkable in the hours before the conflict began. Civilian relatives searched battlefield gore in pursuit of identifiable parts. Businessmen developed a lucrative trade in private body retrieval and shipment. Decorum was sometimes abandoned altogether, and at other times desperately observed amid devastation and madness.
And everywhere, the living sought to make sense of their loss. “Southerners and Northerners alike elaborated narratives of patriotic sacrifice that imbued war deaths with transcendent meaning,” she writes. “Soldiers suffered and died so that a nation — be it the Union or the Confederacy — might live; Christian and nationalist imperatives merged in a redemptive vision of political morality.”
A cataclysmic war lends itself to such efforts. Personal loss was rendered ordinary by constant repetition, by death as omnipresent and unyielding to human design as weather.
Yet unlike the weather, the killing was entirely man-made, a product of political will and deliberation. All those deaths were, in a very real sense, planned. Knowing that must have required extra helpings of rationalization to process the bitter losses.
Mass death via pandemic is different. But the scale of it raises uncomfortable questions similar to those faced by a nation at war. The principal one faces America now: How much death is society willing to accept? Because the topic is discomfiting, the question is subsumed in other discussions; the current talk is about “reopening the economy.”
The public tolerates different amounts of death at different times. No one can know what the limits are or how they will evolve. In Vietnam, the limit was eventually exceeded and the public demanded an end. In the Civil War, resistance to the war ebbed and flowed with the course of battles. Yet despite the astonishing toll, it never broke the killing machine.
After mere weeks of this pandemic, America has already reached half the death toll from nearly two decades of war in Vietnam. At the same time, millions are suffering from job loss and insecurity in the wake of precipitous economic decline. What bargains are Americans willing to make, and on whose behalf? Could anyone in this White House be trusted with such delicate, complex decisions?
Even thoughtful people get death wrong. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross taught a generation how to die. Her 1969 book “On Death and Dying,” was a landmark. The five stages of death she described — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – became embedded in popular culture. Her own death, however, was fraught with bitterness and regret.
There is no comparable figure today telling us how to manage — what the price of death should be or who should bear it. There is just an insidious virus, a morally bankrupt president, struggling governors, valiant health-care workers, mounting pressure.
I saw a stunned friend on the street last week who told me he’d just lost his best friend to the coronavirus. Even in normal times such a death ripples across a wider community. Now, every death seems communal. Brooklynites cringe at the sound of ambulance sirens without knowing who, exactly, is gasping for air en route to the hospital.
Only the body public can properly resolve weighty decisions about death on such a scale. Without national leadership, others are filling the void. Governors are striking out on their own. Philanthropists are setting agendas. Cities are improvising. Public health experts and economists are modeling. Duties and expectations shift. Not everything bounces back to where it was. It is by now a cliche to say that America will be a different nation when this is over. Sometimes cliches are right.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.