The “A Nation of First Responders” Edition
We need a country that values people as citizens, not as economic inputs. That starts with national service
The Big Idea
Imagine this: you’re passing through San Francisco Airport on your way home from a business trip (I know this is hard to visualize right now, but do you remember “business trips?” You were expected to wear pants). Your carry-on bag is pulled aside by TSA for an extra search. The TSA officer opening your bag is Mark Zuckerberg. You exchange routine pleasantries, because it’s gauche to call out celebrities when performing their National Service duties. The experience is a good reminder to you to take your uniforms to the dry cleaners: you’ve got ambulance duty in two weeks.
I’ve talked about how we can’t restore a proper definition of “citizenship” as the Framers understood it without some concept of militia-type service by citizens to the state. We don’t need a militia in the way the Framers had one—our professional and semi-pro military forces are more than sufficient to our defense needs—but service isn’t just about what the polity needs from us, it’s something important we need from the polity if we are to live most fully as free citizens.
Redefining What Our Country Can Do For Us, and What We Can Do For Our Country
The coronavirus should force us to have a reckoning with how we value people in society. Turns out we can do just fine with the well-off at home, working at half-capacity while also schooling their kids. Meanwhile, minimum- and low-wage workers turn out to be what keep us all going. I would like to think this experience will make us think better about how our social safety net serves people who are more valuable to our society than the free market is ever likely to recognize, but that would be a victory of hope over experience.
However, if every American was expected to provide long-term national service, we would have to provide a better safety net. Everyone would have to have the educational opportunities to be able to train and serve successfully; everyone would need access to a health care system that kept them fit for service and cared for them if injured on duty.
Whatever an individual’s perceived economic value to the free market, we could ensure the state recognized everyone’s value as a citizen, which would be demonstrated through their service. In this way, we flip the highly-racialized conservative script on “makers vs takers” and the “undeserving poor.”
How am I defining “service?” A lot of people talk about the idea of broader “national service,” but they’re often quite vague about what they mean. My definition of “service” covers several things:
· It’s governmental: I commend and thank you for any volunteering you do with non-governmental or civil society organizations, but my service has to be based on a governmental function;
· It’s lifelong: I’m always annoyed by middle-aged and elderly people who talk about “service” as a good experience for “the youth.” If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing across one’s working life, as military reserve service is in Israel, Singapore, or the Nordic states;
· It’s local: many advocates of service talk about national programs—as if people from Billings and Brooklyn should spend time together. Sure, they should, but as I’ve noted, most Americans aren’t even that well tied into their own communities, much less another. This is why I’d have Zuckerberg working at San Francisco’s airport, not another one;
· It’s paid, with benefits: this isn’t volunteerism, it’s a personal contract between citizen and state; finally
· It’s uniform: it doesn’t have to be military—a lot of people probably should wear scrubs and be in health care—but like Zuckerberg at TSA, everyone doing their “Reserve” duty should look like their peers, whether they were dropped off by their chauffeur or took the bus. In putting on the uniform, each Reservist is making a temporary physical transformation from whatever they are in their normal day into the manifestation of their service to community and country.
Every Citizen a First Responder
So, if every citizen at 18 starts some path of national service, what exactly does that involve? As I noted, the military wouldn’t know what to do with the influx of people if it got it. I think instead of the advice Mr. Rogers got from his mother: “look for the people who are helping.” We never can have enough helpers.
I’d like to see a system where, between high school, college, and summer camps, every 18-year-old get the opportunity to train in one of the following areas, which would help them wherever they go in life:
· Security/Policing;
· Firefighting/Search and Rescue; and
· Emergency Medical Tech/Health Aide.
Graduates would be assigned first to their local first response organizations as reserve support, but could be made available to state or federal agencies (like TSA at the airport) if appropriate. Every community would have a national service coordinator in charge of making sure everyone in the area was slotted into an appropriate reserve role, where in ordinary (non-emergency) times they would serve 30 days per year.
Obviously, there will be people who won’t be physically able to take this sort of training, and over time a good number of people will get out of shape as they age. We can find reserve work for them—for us—in civil service-type jobs across any community, from hospital back-office work to the DMV.
In real emergencies—say, a mass pandemic that forces the shutdown of many otherwise-essential businesses—we could even mobilize reservists to duty just to keep them doing their day jobs (or stay home!) while still getting paid, thus better acknowledging the importance of their work.
I think current events highlight the value of such a National Reserve Service system for areas like health care and logistics. In some later editions, I’ll talk a bit more about the value of a national service system in policing, where our security sector faces a number of connected challenges demanding reform if we are to be more stable.
This Week—Trump Declares Bankruptcy on Covid-19
President Trump appears to have proven Winston Churchill correct in his generalization about the United States: he is doing the right thing on the pandemic, after having exhausted all the alternatives. We now know Trump knew about the outbreak in China and its risk to us in early January. He ignored it in January, minimized it in February, and vacillated over the response in March. We may just get April and May right, and that may just be enough to get us through. But we can never forget that the first American died of Covid-19 on the same day the first South Korean died. South Korea has had 158 deaths to date, and Trump now tells us we’ll be lucky to have “only” 100-200,000—that would be a range of two or four Vietnams, or our losses in World War One. Even the best execution of a response now cannot ignore or forgive the egregious three months lost.
Trump may be a failed businessman (though he was an excellent fake businessman), but one thing he clearly learned was how to cut his losses. I think this week he decided to declare “virus bankruptcy.” He’s accepted there is no way for him to minimize the virus’s impact or to make his leadership look good. Instead, he’s washing his hands of it—as should you, regularly, 20 seconds at a time!
He’ll minimize the federal role and responsibility, put as much on governors (Democrat or Republican, he doesn’t care) as he can, and let Mike Pence take the rest of the hit for the federal response, while he congratulates himself for “only” a few hundred thousand dead, which is a lot less than the original projections. FOX News and conservative media already have made this pivot shamelessly, from the-virus-is-a-hoax to social-distancing-is-worse to listen-to-what-the-experts-say. They’ll pivot again if and when Trump changes his mind.
This may all look like a good strategy (for him) while the virus is mostly attacking “blue” areas of the country, but it will remain to be seen if it can work once “red” areas start suffering—which, given that many Red State governors don’t appear to be taking this very seriously, seems inevitable. I’m not saying it will work, but it certainly might.
On a side note, I noticed twice in two days Trump has attributed hospital equipment shortages to hospital employees possibly stealing them. As someone who grew up in health care, this enrages me. But it’s a great reminder that, as a narcissist, Trump is incapable of really putting himself in someone else’s shoes; all he can do is project himself onto them. So when he says “nurses might be stealing medical supplies,” what he’s really saying is, “If I worked in a hospital, I would steal medical supplies.”
Good Reads
There’s so much worth reading about Covid-19 and its effects, but less writing on stabilization implications this week.
Richard Hasen has a good summary of the election risks Covid-19 poses, particularly if election complications lead to one side refusing to accept the results. Remember, you heard it here first!
Viktor Orban has made Covid-19 his Reichstag Fire. The real democratic rot isn’t whatever happens in Hungary, it’s how NATO and the EU almost certainly will let this disgusting repudiation of our values and mission stand without expelling Hungary.
Anne Applebaum is an optimist that the shock of our inadequacy in the face of Covid-19 will be like the shock Japan experienced in meeting Matthew Perry’s fleet in 1853: a galvanizing moment for massive reform a la the Meiji Restoration. I’d love for that to be true, but as I see China airlifting humanitarian medical supplies to us, I think the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian “Sick Man” might be the better historical analogy. I guess a middle course would be a slow winding-down of our power as the UK did, but we’re not handling pandemic as well as they handled the Blitz.
Trump can’t help saying the quiet part out loud on voter suppression.
Finally, a successful strategic leader needs to be able to look beyond the immediate crisis—and certainly the immediate news cycle—to imagine what future post-crisis conditions might look like. Otherwise, you might weather the storm, but when it’s over you’re still adrift in the ocean. I was really impressed by this well-considered piece by Joe Biden.
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