Herd Immunity and the Distrust Doom Loop
With red states falling behind blue states in vaccination rates, our tattered local civic fabric is exposed in plain relief. Will Biden's massive investments in infrastructure rebuild social cohesion?
Is this a map of social cohesion in America?
Last week, David Brooks wrote an important column on “our pathetic herd immunity failure,” comparing the degree of social cohesion America had in fighting World War II to the current battle against the pandemic. As is often the case with Brooks, he sugar-coated the past, suggesting a level of solidarity from the so-called Greatest Generation that only existed for people who weren’t of Japanese descent (remember the internment camps?), of Jewish descent (remember the refusal to take in meaningful numbers of Jewish refugees from Europe) or Black (remember the segregated military, not integrated til the Korean War).
But Brooks’ main point was that with 30% of Americans still reluctant or flat out refusing to get vaccinated, we are in a “distrust doom loop.” He argues, “A lot of Americans have seceded from the cultural, political and social institutions of national life. As a result, the nation finds it hard to perform collective action. Our pathetic Covid response may not be the last or worst consequence of this condition.” Brooks argues that the only way to rebuild trust is pour trillions of dollars into “precisely those populations who have been left out and are most distrustful,” which for a small-government conservative like him leads to support President Biden’s massive infrastructure agenda.
Will trillions in government spending really shift the hearts and minds of vaccine doubters and other alienated Americans if one of our two major political parties keeps zealously pursuing power by embracing Big Lies about the 2020 election and other issues? I truly doubt it. In addition to all the state legislation aimed at suppressing the vote, Republicans are now in a rising frenzy to bar schools from teaching about racial justice, with anti-transgender laws blocking gender-affirming care for trans youth and banning transgender people from participating in sports also proliferating. Distrust isn’t just something that happens, it’s something that’s created and organized for political purposes.
The slowdown in daily vaccinations is much greater in states that voted for Trump in 2020, as this chart from Axios shows:
To what extent are these places more susceptible to disinformation, because of a lack of local news or other civic resources that bind people to each other? Hopefully some social scientists are working on this question. But here are some indicators worth considering:
-In 2016, young whites were far more likely to vote for Trump if they lived in what Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and Felicia Sullivan call “civic deserts,” places with “a dearth of opportunities for civic and political learning and engagement, and without institutions that typically provide opportunities like youth programming, culture and arts organizations and religious congregations.” These are primarily rural areas, they found.
-Counties that are news deserts—meaning they have only one or no local newspapers—appear to overlap in some cases with counties that are high on vaccine hesitancy. Look, for example at southern Missouri, which has seventeen counties with only one newspaper, according to USNewsDeserts.com, and a pretty low rate of vaccinations, according to data collected from the Centers for Disease Control.
Or look at Florida, where several of the least vaccinated counties in the northern and western panhandle part of the state are also news deserts.
Obviously, my eyeballing these different maps doesn’t remotely equal finding a correlation, let alone causation. But places without robust local news sources may also be places that are more vulnerable to the nationalization of news represented by the rise of ideological cable media, along with rightwing broadcast conglomerates like Sinclair and Christian radio, which is often one of the only thing available to local news consumers as they drive in their cars. So people living in news deserts aren’t bereft of information, it’s just that the information they are getting may be of much lower quality.
The New York Times’ analysis of CDC data also shows that despite the Biden Administration’s efforts to speed vaccines to the most vulnerable populations, counties that score worse on the Social Vulnerability Index, are doing worse on vaccinations (see above). The index looks at 15 social factors, including socioeconomic status (below poverty, unemployed, income, no high school diploma); household composition & disability (aged 65 or older, aged 17 or younger, older than age 5 with a disability, single-parent households); minority status & language (minority, speak English “less than well”) and housing type & transportation (multi-unit structures, mobile homes, crowding, no vehicle, group quarters). Below is the 2018 SVI national map, with the darker blue counties representing places deemed more vulnerable to disasters and other crises.
Of course, what that probably means is that these causes and effects are all intertwingled. Places with lower investments in public education, health, housing and transportation may be having a harder time supporting local news businesses or community organizations; places with weaker local community institutions have less clout to get state or federal help. So big new investments in updating local infrastructure so more people can get clean water or drive on safer roads, or get home health care, if they are also targeted to the most vulnerable places, this won’t hurt. But as long as one major political party, with a supportive media ecosystem, continues to choose the Big Lie, I don’t think we’re going to escape the trap we’re in. We need to also rebuild the local civic fabric, and time’s a-wasting.
Odds and Ends
-Speaking of maps, here’s a county-by-county map of where America’s broadband deserts are the worst, courtesy of The Verge’s Russell Brandom and William Joel, and a lot of open-source data they scraped from Microsoft. Those counties in Missouri and Florida that I flagged above for their low vaccination rates and news deserts? They’re also doing pretty poorly in terms of broadband access.
-Finally, some concrete data breaking down the 2020 election is out from Catalist’s Yair Ghitza and Jonathan Robinson. The most interesting findings: Biden won the election with a slightly larger margin of white voters and a slightly smaller margin of Black voters than voted for Democrats in 2016 and 2012. White college educated and white suburban voters in particular swung to Biden. And while turnout was up among all groups, the biggest increase was among Latino and AAPI voters.
-“Since January 6, only a relatively small number of arrests have been made of individuals who are members of groups—as opposed to individuals with no formal affiliation.” That one sentence from the Combating Terrorism Center’s April/May report on the Capitol insurrection, written by Brian Hughes and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, really jumped out at me. They add, “This is noteworthy, as it suggests that groups are becoming less important on the extremist fringe than the ideological positions they represent.”
-Fun reading: Danny O’Brien has started a great series for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the “public interest internet,” digging up some little-known or forgotten examples of how open source participation online built some great public resources.
-If you’re looking for an online meeting alternative that won’t censor its users (as Zoom has done) or if you want your online meetings to support the transition to a zero carbon economy, check out Meet.coop, a project of the Online Meeting Cooperative.
-End times: Spark Capital is “excited” to be investing $15 million in Co—Star, an astrology start-up.