Take the events of recent months. In almost all of the world’s democracies, the immediate reaction to the Covid pandemic was an uptick in public trust in, and support for, their governments. Countries like Britain — said to be hugely divided over recent years — suddenly turned out to have significant secret wells of public trust in the authorities. A consensus grew around what was the best way to deal with the outbreak, based on the advice of the country’s leading scientists.

The Government (and a Conservative one at that) ordered everyone to stay in their homes and the public followed its orders. The Government told all young people not in a committed relationship or living with their partner to engage in months of chastity. And they did. If you had suggested this time last year that a Conservative Prime Minister — and Boris Johnson of all prime ministers — could have successfully ordered the youth of Britain to take up celibacy for the summer you would have been adjudged mad. And yet they did it; as did the public in democracies all around the world. Except for one.

The consensus and unanimity we saw in the spring may be splitting apart now, but it is worth recalling how impressive it was while it lasted.

Only America was exceptional, a land where even the arrival of a deadly global pandemic could not unify the nation even for a moment. Indeed, from the outset of the crisis American society polarised along the same political grooves that it has been stuck in over recent years, and it got worse.

People who supported the President broadly went along with his strategy, if he had one. Those who opposed him — not least a near totality of the American media — continued to find new arguments and justifications for saying that he did not deserve to govern, or to blame him for every aspect of the disaster.

Of course, this is an election year in the US, so perhaps it was inevitable that the pandemic and politicians’ reactions to it would be judged in this light. It is conceivable that if Britain were on the cusp of a General Election, or another vote on our membership of the EU, the spirit of co-operation between front benches might have lasted less time than it did. Perhaps Ms Sturgeon would have been even more on manoeuvres than she was, had she spied another independence referendum in under two months’ time.

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Hollywood's hapless diversity bid

By Douglas Murray

But while it’s certainly arguable that Trump has aggravated America’s problems and divisions, he certainly didn’t create them. The divide long pre-dates him and has grown and grown in recent years, to the point where the different parties look increasingly irreconcilable. That is because these divisions go right to the core of what it means to be American.

When Eric Kaufmann recently carried out opinion polls on self-described “liberals” in the US, the results were startling but not surprising. For instance, around 80% of respondents said that they would approve of the writing of a new American constitution “that better reflects our diversity as a people”. A similar number said that they would approve of a new national anthem and flag, for the same reason.

And over the last few months, some of the more activist section of the American “liberal” tribe have taken matters into their own hands, with statues pulled down across the country, not just of Confederate generals or people associated with the divisive elements of American history, but men who once united the American public. Who once represented and defined their shared history as a great nation.

When statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are pulled down, this no longer looks like a critique of certain aspects of American culture: it looks like an attack on the American Founding story. When senior Democrats like Tammy Duckworth — who has served in her country’s military — refuse to condemn attacks on statues of the Founding Fathers it becomes clear that this attitude is not confined to some street-protest fringes.

Nor is it limited to the fringes of the American media. Last year’s 1619 Project aimed to move the founding of the America nation back from the moment when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, or when the Pilgrim Fathers left England in 1620: instead, the true founding date of America would be when slaves from Africa were first brought into the continent.

The goal is obvious and stated: to make slavery the defining, foundational issue of the republic. It would force America to be forever mired in the subject, a wound picked open on a daily basis. The 1619 Project is a deeply radical — and not very rigorous — historical project whose founders have encouraged the pulling down of statues and other direct action against the founding images of the republic.

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Yet 1619 is not some fringe obsession on some obscure anti-American blog, but a prestigious rolling project started by the New York Times. Although the Times spends a great deal of time obsessively attacking Britain — the latest piece bemoaning the state of bridges in the London area — its real target is closer to home, its aim being to unweave the fabric of America.

There was a time when American anti-Americanism of this kind (analysed by Jean-François Revel, among others) was the preserve of a relatively small group of people, largely products of a few liberal universities.

But the events of recent months have revealed to even the most complacent observer that once-fringe ideas have spread out across the nation. And unrest like that which occurs nightly in Portland, Oregon, is concerning not because it is pointless but because it has a point. It has an aim. The protestors who have managed to get away with criminal acts night after night justify their violence not just by claiming that they are hunting down the apparently vast number of Nazis who inhabit their ultra-liberal state. They justify it by claiming that the republic itself is irredeemable: irredeemable because it is racist and irredeemable because it is founded in slavery and oppression.

Time and again in recent months it has become clear that the aim of many of the protestors is not to upgrade America — but to completely change it. Such people appear to labour under the misapprehension that if only they could get rid of everything to do with the country that they inhabit then they would live in a state of equality, liberty and bliss.

It is tempting to compare this error of thought with the misapprehension enjoyed by Kant’s dove, but if the protestors in Portland were offered the comparison, they would doubtless shoot it down by identifying it as yet another example of white supremacy.

It is becoming harder to communicate across the gulf, as, increasingly, the two Americas cannot consort or discuss with each other. And if there is one reason above all why that should be the case it is because they no longer have a shared story.

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

A portion of the American people still revere their history, the Founding Fathers, the constitution, flag, anthem and much more. They see it as symbols of a glorious past, a country which has fought for its own and others’ liberty, and the once-admired idea of American exceptionalism.

Another portion believe that America is exceptional only in being exceptionally bad. Rather than thinking well of their country or their forebears they see the whole American experiment as unusually unfair and uncommonly unequal. When a poll came out earlier this week suggesting that a majority of Americans had very little idea of what the Holocaust was, many people highlighted it as an example of American ignorance. In reality, most populations are ignorant of what has occurred in other countries (and indeed the poll was largely misreported).

Nor is it unusual for a population to be ignorant about large chunks of its own history. What is unusual, and odd and unhealthy, is for a large portion of a country to only have one set of ideas about their country’s past, and for all of those ideas to be negative.

Between these two positions, it is exceptionally hard to see how any consensus can be achieved. People like to pretend that if their candidate wins the election in November, the divisions in American society will stop. But they will not, because the divide now lies at the most fundamental, tectonic levels of the republic, about who the country is.

Historically speaking, such a divide will inevitably escalate into increasing violence and even civil war, unless stopped by some great unifying force that goes beyond party politics or identity. But there is no sign of such a thing on the horizon.

To some extent, anyway: history provides numerous examples of people living in isolation. From lighthouse keepers maintaining a watchful eye over stormy seas to anchorites in the desert, not only did these people cope, but many saw the experience as contributing to their spiritual betterment.

Meanwhile there has been a utopian strain in the writing about the Covid-19 crisis, with some commentators expressing the hope that we shall emerge on the other side transformed, convinced of the value of communitarianism/socialism/universal basic income/insert pet solution to world’s ills here. Could this period of lockdown lead us to the promised land? Or will we all just end up hating each other?

Here in the United States, the vast landscape practically invites you to disappear, self-isolate and start afresh — and many have done just that. Famously, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is an account of the two years and two months the author spent living in a hut in the woods, getting back to nature, seeking self-betterment, etc. He got a book out of it that high school kids are still made to read today — a pretty good result, all in all.

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Well, perhaps not. Thoreau isn’t actually a good example of life under lockdown. He complained of having more visitors than when he lived in town; the record was “twenty–five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof.” In Covid-19 conditions, he’d be a super spreader. A more recent American hermit, Ted Kaczynski, was more committed to avoiding people, and also got a book out of it. But he did wind up sending letter bombs to scientists and was sent to prison for a very long time for murder. So maybe not a good example, then.

No man is an island, as they say. Perhaps isolation brings better results if you do it with a select group of like-minded people? Certainly, many have tried to find perfection this way, forming self-contained communities dedicated to this or that vision of utopia throughout the nation’s history.

Take, for instance, the Rajneeshpuram community in Wasco County, Oregon, subject of Netflix’s fascinating documentary Wild, Wild Country. Rajneeshpuram was founded in 1981 by an Indian guru who went by the name of Rajneesh, after his foundation got into a spot of bother with the Indian authorities over millions of dollars in unpaid tax. Moving to the US, he hoped to be able to lead his followers to enlightenment unhampered by such petty, worldly concerns.

Alas, it didn’t turn out so well. One minute it was all peace vibes, maroon clothing and hippies rutting in public “like baboons”; the next it was all stockpiling guns, poisoning 751 people in the neighboring town, attempting to murder a US Attorney, prison sentences and deportation for the guru.

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OK, so maybe that’s also not a good example. The good news is, there are lots of other American utopian communities to learn from. In fact, more than 100 were established in the century prior to the Civil War alone. Surely one or two of them worked out, right?

Well, some certainly managed to exist for a while. One group was founded in the early nineteenth century by a certain George Rapp, who was convinced that the return of Christ was imminent and that it was necessary to prepare for the moment. To that end, he established three communities: Harmony, Pennsylvania in 1804; followed by Harmony, Indiana in 1815; and then Economy, Pennsylvania in 1824.

Celibacy was part of the deal, until a cove styling himself as the “Count de Leon” arrived from Germany in 1831 and persuaded about 200 people to seek the pleasures of the flesh and demand their share of the community’s funds. Rapp wound up embroiled in lawsuits but lived on until 1847; the remaining celibate Rappites dwindled during the second half of the century, before finally disbanding in 1906.

The Shakers were another famous utopian community, founded by Ann Lee, the illiterate daughter of a Manchester blacksmith who had emigrated to the American colonies in 1774. “Mother” Ann declared that she was the ‘divine female principle’ completing Christ’s male principle, ushering in the millennium. Like Rapp, she imposed celibacy on her followers. In the 18 Shaker villages that popped up, the sexes were housed in separate barracks; it was forbidden to touch at communal dances; and men and women were seated at separate tables during meals. To compensate, they leaped up and down and writhed in ecstasy during services.

The Shakers, nonetheless, made a good run of it for a community forbidden to procreate; the community existed for almost 200 years before dying out, and along the way opposed slavery and pioneered equality for women. To compensate, they performed ecstatic dances during their services, and the collective trembling which ensued led to their name. The Shakers made a good run of it for a community forbidden to procreate; the community existed for almost 200 years before dying out, and along the way opposed slavery and pioneered equality for women. Today their lemon pie lives on at Martha Stewart.com.

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By Ben Gummer

Bad news for unbelievers staring down lockdown: secular utopian communities were markedly less successful.

I dimly recall learning, back in my Scottish schooldays, about the model village of New Lanark, where the Welsh manufacturer and reformer Robert Owen conducted experiments in education, communal living and the amelioration of poverty. What my teachers didn’t tell me was that Owen then travelled to the US where he went full utopian socialist.

To get a head start, he purchased the already extant utopia of Harmony, Pennsylvania from the Rappites in 1825, renamed it “New Harmony”, and then burned80% of his fortune over the next two years as disagreements erupted over details as small as the correct form of government and the role of religion (Owen didn’t have any). A flurry of Owenite communities — 12 in all — suffered a series of similarly rapid rises and falls, starting with great hope before voting to abolish themselves.

A swift demise awaited many other utopias, whether they were established on the principle of free love (like the hopefully named community of Free Lovers at Davis House, Ohio, 1854-1858), vegetarianism (like Octagon City, Kansas, 1854-1858) Fourierism (like Brook Farm in Massachusetts, 1841-1847) or anarchy (like Fruit Hills, Ohio, 1845 – 1852).

The Icarians were more successful, perhaps because their founder — Etienne Cabet, a friend of Robert Owen — had written a novel, Voyage en Icarie, which at least illustrated what his followers should aim for (a primitive economy without private property or selfishness). The Icarians got off to a shaky start in Texas in 1848 but eventually its members founded settlements in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and California where they enjoyed four decades’ worth of splits, schisms and factionalism before eventually admitting defeat in 1898.

Perhaps the most ambitious utopians, however, lived at the Oneida Community, established by John Humphrey Noyes in New York state in 1848. Noyes, a relative of the US president Rutherford Hayes, extolled the virtues of “complex marriage”, by which he meant that everybody in the community was married to everybody else. This led to a complicated system of regulated polyamory.

The Oneida Community also dabbled in eugenics and held vigorous mutual self-criticism sessions. In 1879, however, Noyes fled to Canada to escape charges of statutory rape; there God blessed him with the revelation that conventional marriage was complex enough. The community disbanded the following year, only to promptly reinvent itself as a silverware manufacturer. By the 1980s Oneida, Ltd. made half the cutlery in the United States.

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By James Kirkup

So, will we all emerge from this period of confinement — be it with our loved ones or locked in the airless virtual communities of the like-minded on social media — improved and enlightened? Almost certainly not: there is a reason why monks take a vow of silence, and why prisoners don’t hang out in the yard all day. Even so, the American utopian experience contains a couple of lessons that might help you deal with this lockdown, should it drag on.

Firstly, you stand a better chance of overcoming squabbles, factionalism and dissent — and generally holding out for a long time — if you hold Millenarian beliefs. The Shaker’s Mother Ann, for instance, persuaded her followers that she was the feminine incarnation of the Godhead, in regular communication with the angels and all that. So if you can channel a little of that sweet End Times action and convince yourself that the Coronavirus is actually a prelude to Christ’s imminent return and that now is the time to prepare — have at it. You might even find the whole lockdown experience strangely fulfilling.

On the other hand, the whole Millenarian thing can go down the pan very quickly if the wrong type of charismatic leader turns up. Take Rajneesh, for instance. So if anyone in your house (or on your Twitter feed / a Facebook group chat) is talking excitedly about the new world that will emerge post-Covid while growing a very long beard — watch out.

Finally, utopia does not await us on the other end of this, but you might still come up with some good ideas or develop some helpful new skills. The Owenites, for instance, opened a free library in New Harmony; the Shakers invented the clothespin. You can still buy Oneida cutlery; I use it to eat every day.

Maybe, that’s the solution. Forget utopia — if you want to get something valuable out of this lockdown experience, do something good for others or learn a craft. In particular, knowing how to make things with your hands might come in handy in the, er, “changed economic conditions” that await us once this is over.

By the year 1348, the city’s Italians had been well-established for half a century, having been admitted by Edward I as representatives of the great banking houses of Florence. French and English kings relied on loans from the Bardi and Peruzzi to fund their extravagant wars and these ‘Lombards’, as they were referred to, gave their name to London’s main financial thoroughfare.

As the year went on, dark stories of contagion grew more common and more terrifying: it was heard that Marseilles and then Paris were overrun by the deadly disease. There was no doubt that London’s time would come, and so on June 23, Saint John’s Eve — a traditional midsummer festival where young women might flirt and dance with men before settling down to a backbreaking life of repeated, dangerous pregnancies — a ship turned up in Melcombe in Dorset, most likely from Bordeaux or possibly Calais. On board were rats infected with Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague-carrying bacterium. By the time the illness had burned out, between a third and half of England’s people were dead.

There had never been a terror like it, and the “Great Mortality” as it was known — and much later, the “Black Death” — has seared itself in the European imagination. It changed the culture and tested the institutions of the time, and as we anxiously await the arrival of another — thankfully far less deadly — contagion from Italy its legacy and impact are worth remembering.

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Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

Epidemics have been around as long as civilization. Plaga — from the Greek for ‘strike’ or ‘hit’ — devastated classical Athens in the 5^th century BC, when the historian Thucydides nursed sufferers; the Antonine Plague — probably smallpox or measles — killed as many as five million Romans at the empire’s peak. Far more deadly was the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century, which had a toll of 25 million and emptied whole regions of the eastern (Byzantine) Empire. Only in the 21^st century did researchers confirm that this was the same illness that would appear eight centuries later — the Bubonic Plague.

Empires were particularly affected by these horrific epidemics, because empires are a form of globalisation — bringing different people into contact with each other and, more dangerously, into contact with other mammals, who act as disease vectors.

Another danger is climate change, which might turn a mild virus into a deadly one, or cause disease-carrying animals to migrate. This is what happened during the 14^th century when the northern hemisphere became considerably cooler, soon after the Mongols had created the largest contiguous empire in history.

Genghis Khan’s people have generally received a historical bad press — people are more likely to recall the pyramid of skulls and the Tigris flowing black and red — yet their rule had opened up trade routes, allowing goods and people to cross Asia. Whether brought at the point of a sword or a trade deal, globalisation always brings the new: new cultures, new ideas, new languages and new pathogens.

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Yersinia pestis had been living on gerbils and other rodents in central Asia, but unstable climate conditions in 1330s caused the disease to jump onto the rat flea. It was killing people by 1339, and in the mid-1340s Christians first heard of a disease raging in the Islamic world, which some at least took as divine punishment for the crusades.

After two centuries of Holy War this was understandable, yet hatred was not universal and during these conflicts Italian merchants had continually done business with Muslims, much to the Church’s fury. Now this trade, once the source of prosperity and peace, proved deadly: plague reached Europe via the Genovese colony of Caffa on the Black Sea (now Feodosiya, in the Ukraine). In October 1347, four ships escaping the diseased city had turned up in Sicily, condemning Italy to its fate.

The first sign of the dreaded illness was bad breath. Sufferers would then feel lightheaded and nauseous, before experiencing pain in the groin and the terrifying appearance of the bubos, a lump the size of an apple, either on the neck, groin or armpit. By this stage, the victim would be vomiting blood; six in ten of those infected died.

Everywhere corpses were dumped in mass graves, where some of the bodies were seen to wriggle as victims struggled for their last breaths. There was no one left to help them; if they had living family, they had probably fled.

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Britain's divisions go way, way back

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As the disease spread across Italy, each city tried to prevent their neighbours from approaching, but it seemed impossible to stop. Some became fatalistic, and Orvieto’s Council of Seven decided to ignore the coming plague in case it scared people. Six of them died of the disease. In Ragusa the city government concluded that all they could do was order everyone to make a will.

Now in late 1348 the illness spread across England, averaging a mile a day, and the death rates were apocalyptic in parts: 80% were killed in Jarrow in County Durham. At one point, 200 a day were dying in London, a toll proportionately equivalent to 20,000 a day today. The city was described as a “Nomanneslond”, the sort of 28 Days Later ghost town scenario we associated with plague.

Almost everywhere in Europe suffered death rates of between one-third and a half, although pockets of Bohemia and Poland escaped; Italy perhaps suffered the worst, with up to 60% dead. Venice lost as many as three-quarters.

In contrast, Milan perhaps had higher survival rates, because its rulers, the ruthless Visconti family, ordered that any house where the plague was identified be boarded up and its inhabitants left to starve. In a later outbreak the city of Dubrovnik, now in Croatia, initiated the rule that all ships stay anchored for 40 days — quaranta — a sensible measure that appreciated the potential length of incubation periods.

Yet no one really knew much else. In October 1348, the King of France asked the leading thinkers at the University of Paris for their theories about what was causing the disease. Their best guess was that it was due to “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius”.

In other words, no one had a clue; inevitably, though, many blamed the disaster on loose morals, and such abominations as people dressing in sexually provocative clothes. Many countries introduced strict laws against gambling, prostitution and cohabiting, while Philip VI of France ordered for blasphemers to have their upper lip cut off. More tragically, many looked for scapegoats — firstly lepers, and then, more violently, Jews, with pogroms spreading across France and Germany.

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A second outbreak of the Plague struck Europe in 1361, known as the Mortality of Children as it especially killed the young, who had acquired no immunity from the first outbreak. Plague returned from time to time but eventually died out in Europe, the Marseilles outbreak of 1722 being the last. Most likely the pestilence-carrying black rat was driven out by its cousin the brown rat.

There have been other pandemics, the worst of all being smallpox, which has killed hundreds of millions. Even in the 20^th century, it cost far more lives than all wars combined. There is also influenza — first named in the 14^th century but only really a problem since the 16^th — which has produced various deadly strains. The 1889 pandemic, which originated in Russia, killed a huge number of notable individuals, including the second in line to the throne, Prince Albert Victor.

Most recently the Spanish Flu of 1919 killed as many as 100 million. Yet like the previous strain, it barely made any impact on the public consciousness, perhaps because it followed such a traumatic war.

Only the Black Death seared itself into the public consciousness, partly because of the social impact it had. In Paris a chronicler recorded that “those who were left drank, fornicated or skulked in the cellars according to their inclinations”. In Florence people were terrorised by the becchini, grave diggers whose motto was “Those who live in fear die” and drank and stole with abandon. In Venice criminals roamed the street because their jailors were all dead; everywhere crime increased, as did pregnancies.

The outbreak also led to growing anger at the authorities, especially the Church, which was already attracting criticism because of its great wealth. Clergymen were disproportionately hit by the disease, because they had to administer the Last Rites to the sick; those that survived tended to be the least diligent. Afterwards, totally unsuitable candidates were rushed in to replace them — often widowed men, teenagers or even petty criminals.

Anarchic new religious groups sprang up, the most notorious being the Brethren of the Cross, or Flagellants — fanatics who went from village to village where they would form a circle, confess their sins, then ritually beat themselves with a scourge made of iron spikes and needles. Soon they turned on Jews, priests and other figures of authority. There was also the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed to be in a state of grace and so it was fine for them to have guilt-free sex and even steal stuff.

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The disease had broken down normal restraints and barriers, and had even led to a breakdown in authority where the aristocracy had fled. By being able to leave cities, aristocrats had much lower death rates, one-quarter dying compared to half of peasants. And so an English ploughman’s wage went up from 2 shillings to 10 shillings by 1350, when craftsmen’s real incomes were three times what they were in 1300.

Authorities brought in various laws setting a maximum wage but they were widely ignored, and by the 1370s, 70% of legal business in English courts involved labour legislation. Authorities in Gloucestershire even built stocks to imprison those who took higher wages — but they had to pay the carpenter who built it 5 1/2d a day, twice the legal limit.

Lords were forced by labour shortages to ease the various onerous labour demands they made of their peasants, and so serfdom eventually disappeared. Before that happened, though, increasingly oppressive measures by the crown to put uppity peasants back in their place provoked an uprising in Essex and Kent. Somewhat less directly, chronic lack of manpower also spurred technological innovation, and may even have led to the invention of movable type by Johann Gutenberg the following century.

Without tempting fate, coronavirus isn’t going to be 28 Days Later, but neither is it just the regular flu, and it is bound to have a social impact. Perhaps it will increase pressure for reform in China and Iran, for example, or speed up the decoupling of the global economy. In the US universal healthcare may become a more urgent issue, especially if the country is badly affected and the prohibitive cost of testing is implicated.

More generally, it may spark more irritation with the sort of complacent, high-status, FT-reading brahmins who comprise our modern clergy, the sort of people who like to explain how the world is divided into open vs. closed —because they’re the least vulnerable to open systems.

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Their complacency on this issue arguably echoes their complacency about globalism generally, and an inability to see what really matters. From the time the virus first emerged, we’ve heard the same sort of platitudes we’re told about everything else: how the biggest danger facing us is ‘prejudice’ — not the actual fatal disease — and that the coronavirus “knows no borders”.

By contrast, those on the outside Right have noted how open societies seem especially vulnerable to a disease of globalisation, and the political alignment of a worldwide pandemic becomes obvious.

Contagious diseases historically raised fear of the outgroup, and already we have seen low-level violence against east Asians in Italy. We’re not going to get pogroms now, partly because children are largely unaffected — the fatality rate for the 0-9s in China still 0 per cent of the 416 confirmed cases —and that’s what really drives terror, but plagues do draw out our most atavistic fears. There is a theory that xenophobia is an evolutionary response to pathogens, since strangers are more likely to carry diseases that the in-group has no immunity to, and that’s why conservatives respond more strongly to disgust and value purity and cleanliness.

If the disease spreads, due to a failure to take measures quickly enough, then it will only increase people’s problem with globalisation. Alternatively, the lesson might be, as with aircraft safety, that well-co-ordinated international groups of experts are pretty effective at dealing with major problems, and should therefore be given more power. Although a pessimistic Tory, I’m certainly hoping for a Pinkerite Whiggish outcome.

One important change might be the way we see the least valued members of society. Our economy is especially vulnerable because, with three-quarters of children having two working parents, once the schools are shut then a huge chunk of the workforce needs to become “economically inactive”, as the government describes childcare. With communal clubs not an option, people my age would normally recruit their parents into babysitting duties, but for an illness that kills maybe one in six old people, that’s too much of a risk.

Perhaps, just as the Black Death perversely raised the value of the peasantry, so coronavirus will do the same for the elderly. Already people up and down the country are checking up on parents to make sure they’ve got alcohol spray, masks and gloves, and protect themselves from the virus. Already the illness has brought about a small cultural change.