The Lessons of the Great Depression In the 1930s, Americans responded to economic calamity by creating a richer and more equitable society. We can do it again. by Lizabeth Cohen

Americans are out of work. More than 20 million lost their jobs in April alone. Lines at food banks stretch for miles. Businesses across the country are foundering. Headlines scream that the coronavirus has brought about the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The economic collapse of the 1930s, one of the defining traumas of the 20th century, is still the benchmark against which recessions are measured. And, for many Americans, the New Deal, launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, remains the standard for how the federal government should respond to a major national emergency. By the late 1940s, the United States had exited economic calamity and entered into an unparalleled period of national prosperity—with measurably greater income equality. America did not merely endure the Great Depression; its response transformed it into a richer and more equitable society.

Many hope to replicate that achievement today. But the success of the New Deal was built on more than all the agencies it spawned, or the specific programs it established—it rested on the spirit of those who brought it into being. The New Dealers learned to embrace experimentation, accepting failures along the path to success. They turned aside the ferocious opposition their bold proposals provoked. They organized supporters, and learned not just to lead, but to listen. And, perhaps above all, they pushed for unity and cultivated empathy.

The New Deal offers us more than a simple guide for returning to some semblance of normalcy. The larger lesson it offers is that recovery is a complex and painful process that requires the participation of many, not directives from a few. And that, ultimately, we’re all in this together.

During the great depression, as today, the nation’s initial response to disaster was crippled by the negative view of government held by then-president Herbert Hoover and his Republican Party. At the beginning of the century, the Progressive Era had led to greater government oversight of interstate commerce and the processing of food and drugs. But as secretary of commerce in the 1920s, Hoover had promoted an alternative ideal of voluntary regulation, whereby professional organizations and American businesses monitored their own affairs instead of being regulated by the federal government. That arrangement, which the historian Ellis W. Hawley dubbed the “associative state,” offered a sharp contrast to the progressivism that had preceded it.

Hoover was sworn in as president in March 1929, just months before the stock market crashed. But try as he might, he couldn’t get his associative state to master the challenge of the Great Depression. His miserable failure paved the way for Roosevelt’s landslide victory in November 1932.

Faced with a crisis of enormous proportion, Roosevelt reinvented how the nation did much of its business, most notably by involving the federal government in areas of American life that previously had belonged to cities, counties, or states—if to any governing authority at all. The New Deal succeeded in implementing policies at the federal level that had been percolating for years in reform circles, or that had been partly implemented by the most progressive states.

To ameliorate the immediate crisis, the federal government funded relief, jobs, and infrastructure. In the longer term, it established a new normal that included a national retirement system, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, minimum wages and maximum hours, public housing, mortgage protection, electrification of rural America, and the right of industrial labor to bargain collectively through unions.

These programs were rife with limitations. Social Security and unemployment insurance were tied to jobs, rather than citizenship; federal backing for mortgages redlined neighborhoods considered too nonwhite or immigrant; whole categories of workers were exempted from Social Security and fair-labor standards, such as those doing domestic and agricultural labor; and many necessities for a decent life, such as paid sick days and health coverage, were left to the discretion of employers or the bargaining brawn of unions. Yet flaws and all, the New Deal constructed a social safety net that undergirded a long period of growth and prosperity.

But if we want to use the New Deal as a model for creating opportunity out of catastrophe, we will need to understand more than just its policies and programs. Building a new and improved United States, post-coronavirus, will require understanding how Roosevelt and his associates, labor leaders and activists, and ordinary Americans combined their efforts during the bleakness of crisis to build a better future. We need to know not just what they did, but how they pulled it off.

President Roosevelt in Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1936 (Arthur Rothstein / Library of Congress)

The new deal was experimental and incremental—not ideological. Roosevelt and his advisers were far from the clairvoyant visionaries of legend. They never had a master plan. Rather, in the administration’s first 100 days, they implemented a flurry of laws and regulations. If those programs worked, they remained. If they didn’t, they were dropped, to be replaced by others.

The National Industrial Recovery Act, for example, with its voluntary codes of fair competition for prices and wages and limited encouragement of collective bargaining, proved inadequate, and then was ruled unconstitutional. The administration quickly developed alternatives, including the National Labor Relations Act (known as the Wagner Act), which offered a clearer path to unionization.

Not until after 1935 did the New Deal’s welfare state of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and public housing emerge. And many of its initiatives failed, such as when a premature rollback of federal programs precipitated the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937, boosting unemployment back to frighteningly high levels. Even the Harvard professor Alvin Hansen, FDR’s trusted economic adviser, admitted, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”

Indeed, disagreements rent the Roosevelt White House. For example, some economic planners wanted a recovery that revived the old Progressive-era crusade against monopoly, while others favored regulating businesses regardless of size, or taking a Keynesian approach of using the state’s fiscal powers to increase consumption. By the late 1930s, the Keynesians had won out. John Kenneth Galbraith, then a young professor, recalled that, as late as 1936, the acceptance of the rules of classical economics was “a litmus by which the reputable economist was separated from the crackpot.” A year later, “Keynes had reached Harvard with tidal force.” The point is that no well-prepared road map set the New Deal’s course.

Roosevelt was also remarkable for the manner in which he successfully disarmed most of his political opponents. It may be tempting today—with our stalemated politics, deeply divided electorate, and inflammatory media—to imagine that FDR, who won by landslides in 1932 and 1936 and by a comfortable margin even when seeking an unprecedented third term in 1940, enjoyed the luxury of a national consensus. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Roosevelt administration was attacked from the right by disapproving Republicans, business leaders who vowed to destroy the “socialist” New Deal, wary Southern Democratic members of Congress, and the hugely popular Roman Catholic radio host Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin’s Golden Hour of the Little Flower program regularly drew an audience of more than 30 million into his anti-Roosevelt, anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, isolationist, and conspiratorial miasma.

On the left, Roosevelt faced small but effectively organized communist and socialist groups, as well as miscellaneous third parties like John Dewey and Paul H. Douglas’s League for Independent Political Action. Much more threatening was Huey Long of Louisiana. The populist—and wildly popular—governor and then senator quickly abandoned Roosevelt as too cautious, mounting his more redistributive “Share Our Wealth” program. Long reached millions through a national network of clubs and his own radio broadcasts. Roosevelt feared Long as a dangerous demagogue until his assassination in September 1935, but Long’s indisputable popularity likely pushed FDR leftward.

Roosevelt responded to these challenges from the right and the left by justifying the New Deal in uncontroversial, almost nonpartisan terms. Although his message could fluctuate depending on which enemies he aimed to vanquish—for example, denouncing capitalist elites as “economic royalists” in his 1936 speech to the Democratic National Convention so as not to be outflanked on the left—FDR typically justified the New Deal as the pursuit of “security against the hazards and vicissitudes of life” or the  protection of the “four freedoms” of speech, worship, want, and fear. And not to be outdone by Father Coughlin or Long, Roosevelt became a master himself of the radio, brilliantly using his many fireside chats to establish an intimate relationship with the American people.

Left: A union sign in San Diego, California, 1940 (Russell Lee / Library of Congress). Right: Waiting for relief checks in Calipatria, California, 1937 (Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress).

Roosevelt also learned that to lead, he needed to listen. The social and political changes of the New Deal were built by mobilizing ordinary Americans as Democratic Party voters and rank-and-file union members. The New Deal was no top-down revolution. Democratic politicians as well as union organizers quickly discovered that they needed to focus on the real problems people faced, and to respond to their preferences.

Before the New Deal, many working people lived political lives circumscribed by their local party, whether Democrat or Republican. First- or second-generation immigrants were loyal partisans, if they even voted at all. Few African Americans in the Jim Crow South could vote. Those who traveled north in the Great Migration of the 1910s and ’20s spurned the Democratic Party as the instrument of their southern oppressors and the enemy of the party of Lincoln, which many of them now eagerly supported.

Within industrial workplaces, unions—to the extent they existed in the 1920s—were made up of elite craft workers, mostly white and native-born, who sought to limit the opportunity and mobility of the more numerous, and more vulnerable, nonunion workers. Labor organizers suffered a series of stinging defeats in 1919, after which unions seemed to hold little promise for the less skilled workers who powered the mass-production plants that were making the U.S. the 20th century’s “workshop of the world.”

Fearing reprises of the unionization drives that had followed World War I, some employers mounted paternalistic welfare programs in the 1920s, touting benefits such as paid sick leave and vacations, pensions, stock ownership, group life insurance, and employee representation plans. But companies rarely backed those promises with the level of financial investment required to deliver those benefits to more than a fraction of their workforce. Workers relied instead on inadequate safety nets provided by their ethnic, racial, and religious communities, which quickly failed under the strain of the Great Depression.

By the time Roosevelt won a second presidential term, in 1936, the world had transformed. Many of those in need were taking full advantage of federal relief and jobs programs sponsored by the array of New Deal agencies, including the FERA, CWA, PWA, WPA, NYA, and CCC. By addressing the needs of Americans, Roosevelt earned their support. Faced with the enormity of the Great Depression, working-class Americans were voting in record numbers—and they voted for the Democratic president. Black voters were even replacing the motto “Stick to Republicans because Lincoln freed you” with “Let Jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed you.”

Working people also drove a massive effort to unionize industrial laborers across many sectors, coordinated by the newly founded Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), whose success was facilitated by the Wagner Act. By 1940, in the manufacturing stronghold of Chicago, one in three industrial workers belonged to a union, whereas 10 years earlier hardly any had. The story was much the same in Detroit and Flint in Michigan, Cleveland and Akron in Ohio, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. Workers who only a few years before had felt little connection to Washington, D.C., and excluded from national unions now identified with the federal government and nationwide political and labor movements.

Through their participation in the Democratic Party and unions, workers helped to ideologically reorient both of these new centers of political gravity. Although from local precincts to the Democratic Party headquarters and from shop floors to the CIO’s inner circle, leaders mattered, those with power had to contend with a rank and file that knew its own mind.

This was particularly evident in the labor movement. Left-wing activists were crucial organizers of Communist Unemployed Councils, socialist Workers’ Committees on Unemployment, hunger marches, demonstrations outside relief offices, and emerging unions. But in the end, despite all the hardships of the Great Depression, few workers bought into the anti-capitalist message.

The Communist organizer Steve Nelson recalled how he and his comrades had begun by “agitating against capitalism and talking about the need for socialism.” Quickly, however, they figured out that working-class people were more concerned with their daily struggles. “We learned to shift … to what might be called a grievance approach to the organizing,” he said. “We began to raise demands for … immediate federal assistance to the unemployed, and a moratorium on mortgages, and finally we began to talk about the need for national employment insurance.” In fact, partly inspired by the empty promises of their employer’s welfare-capitalist schemes of the 1920s, working-class Americans came to embrace what I have elsewhere labeled “moral capitalism.” While workers benefited from the organizing experience of radical leaders, they more often opted for liberal goals than for radicalism, preferring a more just capitalist order over any alternative.

Left: The wife of a day laborer in a kitchen near Webbers Falls, Oklahoma. Right: Inside an agricultural day laborer’s home in Muskogee County, Oklahoma. (Russell Lee / Library of Congress)

The new deal’s success had one final, and crucial, ingredient: the cultivation of empathy.

For labor leaders, it was a practical necessity. Herbert March, a Communist organizer in Chicago, was typical in worrying that “it would not be possible to achieve unionism because you had the split of black and white and too many nationalities … that they [employers] would play against each other.” These sorts of ethnic and racial divisions had helped doom the 1919 organizing drives. Unless unions could inculcate an ideal of racial inclusion and class solidarity, white working people might well retreat to their segmented ethnic and racial worlds and push their African American co-workers back into the arms of employers as strikebreakers.

To avoid that danger, the leftist leaders of the CIO worked hard to cultivate what I have called an inclusive “culture of unity” within the evolving union movement. A black packinghouse worker named Jim Cole told an interviewer in 1939 that the CIO had “done the greatest thing in the world” by bringing workers together, and dispelling the “hate and bad feelings that used to be held against the Negro.” Enlightened activists helped working people transcend their prejudices at a crucial moment.

The New Deal, too, made this work central to its project. Alongside their many new and unfamiliar agencies, the New Dealers set out to document how Americans were weathering the Great Depression. These undertakings were spurred by multiple motives, including generating publicity for New Deal programs and employment for out-of-work artists and actors. But most fundamentally, these projects educated people about their countrymen and -women and bred empathy. “We introduced America to Americans” is how Roy Stryker, the head of the Farm Security Administration, put it many years later.

The FSA images taken by such legendary photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, and Ben Shahn are probably the best-known such initiative, but almost every New Deal agency mounted its own photography project to document its impact on the American people. The WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project sponsored life and oral histories, ethnographies, and portraits of diverse cultural communities, including recent immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans. And the Federal Theater Project produced documentary plays in its “Living Newspaper” performances.

A homeless family walking along the highway from Phoenix, Arizona, where they picked cotton. They are bound for San Diego, where the father hopes to get relief because he once lived there. (Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress)

If these lessons of the New Deal apply to our own moment, then so does one more: There will be no easy return to normalcy. Despite all of the New Deal’s interventions, unemployment was still disturbingly high on the eve of World War II. The massive stimulus of global war was what finally lifted the United States out of depression, although that war brought with it additional years of deprivation and sacrifice. Moreover, many Americans would never overcome the trauma of the Depression, and would have to be prodded into a postwar era that depended more than ever on consumer spending to deliver widespread prosperity.

What form the economic recovery from COVID-19 shutdowns will take remains difficult to predict. The strategies and programs of the 2020s won’t be the same as those of the 1930s. The enormous growth of consumption as a percentage of GDP, from a low of 49.5 percent in 1944 to roughly 70 percent today, has led policy makers to prioritize a ramping-up of consumption—often prematurely—over job creation. National leaders seem to prefer sending checks to the jobless over providing them with jobs. Brick-and-mortar stores, restaurants, and other vendors of personal services, which were already struggling with the shift to online shopping, have been particularly hard hit. Their slow recovery will not only remain a drag on the larger economy, but will also affect the vitality of public life, which often revolves around commercial districts.

Moreover, there is a real risk that the downturn will exacerbate the inequalities already present in the American economy—in jobs, income, health care, housing, and education. Consumption could continue to shift toward the largest sellers, like Amazon, squeezing out smaller businesses. The nation’s workforce might then become even more unequal, with small numbers of salaried executives at the top and armies of low-skilled, hourly warehouse employees and package deliverers with limited benefits at the bottom. Already, the COVID-19 crisis has made apparent shameful racial disparities that are taking an extraordinary toll on communities of color.

And the current disaster could also deepen our divisions. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to solving our social ills has been the intense partisanship and vicious scapegoating that has paralyzed the polity. We are fractured along many lines. What once were civil disagreements over the size of government, the reach of the safety net, or the relative benefits of taxing versus incentivizing business entrepreneurship have become insurmountable divides.

But if we cannot simply copy the New Deal’s programs and apply them to our contemporary challenges, we can still take inspiration from the spirit that animated them. We can set aside ideology in favor of experimentation, fend off partisan attacks with appeals to higher principles, focus on the needs of ordinary workers, and deliberately cultivate the unity and empathy required to forge an effective coalition to do battle with the coronavirus and economic devastation.

This last point is perhaps the most important, and it may be the most difficult. Empathy, after all, has been badly missing in the United States in recent decades.

Perhaps we’ve made a start. The iconic images of this pandemic are of nurses, doctors, and EMTs caring for the sick. Nightly displays of thanks echo in many parts of the country. Grocery-store clerks are recognized as heroes. The coronavirus’s harsh lesson in our shared vulnerability to disease—that we are all safe only when everyone is healthy—could become the basis for a broader recognition of our shared fate as Americans. Learning that lesson may help us rebuild our society into one that treats everyone as essential.

Why I’ve Never Believed in ‘Believe Women’ The Biden allegations reveal the weakness of the #MeToo movement’s rallying cry. by HELEN LEWIS

Imagine that a friend tells you they have been sexually assaulted. What do you do? Your first reaction would, I hope, be sympathy. You would not pepper them with questions: what were they wearing, what were they drinking, what were they thinking? You’d believe them.

Now imagine being a human-resources manager. In front of you is an employee making a claim of sexual harassment against a colleague. Your duty is to ensure the employee’s well-being—but also to decide whether to conduct a formal investigation. You might point them toward counseling resources, but also ask if there is evidence to back up their version of events.

Now you’re a journalist. A woman has just come to you alleging that she was sexually assaulted by a public figure. Your response here is the opposite of a friend’s reaction. You ask about corroboration: letters, answering-machine messages, witnesses, emails, photographs, dates, times. You look for the weaknesses in the story, the omissions, the contradictions. You remember the journalist’s maxim If your mother says she loves you, make her prove it. You do not simply “believe women.”

That’s because “Believe women” isn’t just a terrible slogan for the #MeToo movement; it is a trap. The mantra began as an attempt to redress the poor treatment of those who come forward over abuse, and the feminists who adopted it had good intentions, but its catchiness disguised its weakness: The phrase is too reductive, too essentialist, too open to misinterpretation. Defending its precise meaning has taken up energy better spent talking about the structural changes that would make it obsolete, and it has become a stick with which to beat activists and politicians who care about the subject. The case of Tara Reade, who has accused the presidential candidate Joe Biden of sexual assault, demonstrates the problem.

In the two and a half years since the first wave of #MeToo allegations, scores of famous and non-famous women (and fewer men) have come forward with experiences of sexual harassment, assault, and rape. There have been “cancellations,” job losses, and convictions. There have also been edge cases, uncomfortable gray areas, and men who have said their lives were ruined by nebulous allegations. “Believe women” was intended to capture an undeniable truth: Sexual harassment and sexual assault are so endemic in society that they make the coronavirus look like a rare tropical disease. False allegations do exist, but they are extremely uncommon. (Men are more likely to be raped than falsely accused of rape.) When thousands of women tell us that there is a problem with sexual aggression in our society, we should believe them.

That broad truth, however, tells us nothing about the merits of any individual case. And as my colleague Megan Garber has written, “Believe women” has evolved into “Believe all women,” or “Automatically believe women.” This absolutism is wrong, unhelpful, and impossible to defend. The slogan should have been “Don’t dismiss women,” “Give women a fair hearing,” or even “Due process is great.” (Or, you know, something good. Sloganeering is not my forte.) Why did “Believe women” catch on? Possibly because it is almost precision-engineered to generate endless arguments about its meaning, and endless arguments are the fuel of the attention economy otherwise known as internet, newspaper, and television commentary.

As a rallying cry, “Believe women” groups cases together in a deeply unhelpful way. In a court of law, there are grades of offense, and sliding penalties. In the court of public opinion, we talk about rape and a hand on the knee in the same breath. A man who becomes “#MeToo accused”—but whose case is never publicly aired in full—carries a miasma of unspecified wrongdoing. And if there is no possibility of “serving your time,” all the incentives point toward denial rather than confession.

Each new case tends to be read through other, typically unilluminating, reference points. It is hard to find an opinion about Reade that is not also one about Christine Blasey Ford, who publicly accused Brett Kavanaugh of attempted rape when he was nominated by Donald Trump to the United States Supreme Court. (Kavanaugh denied the offense, and he was confirmed.) “Believe women” lumps Reade and Blasey Ford together, demanding that politicians, the media, and observers treat their stories exactly the same. After all, they’re both women, aren’t they?

But the cases are not the same, neither in their details nor how they came to light. Laura McGann at Vox writes that she was one of several mainstream journalists approached by Reade in April last year, and tried hard to corroborate her original allegation—that Biden touched her on the neck and shoulders in a way that made her uncomfortable—but failed. Others did too. Those journalists did not “believe” or “disbelieve” Reade; they didn’t find enough evidence to publish anything close to a definitive account. “If I were an old friend of Reade’s and she told me this same story privately over the course of a year, I doubt I would question her account,” McGann notes. “But I’m not an old friend. I’m a journalist.” The New York Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, made a similar point in a spiky interview with his paper’s own media columnist. (Reade later found a hearing among journalists and outlets that have been critical of Biden, and broadened her allegations to include sexual assault. These claims have now been conscripted into the case for ditching Biden as the Democratic nominee in favor of Bernie Sanders.)

One of the hardest #MeToo arguments to make is that sometimes the role of journalists is not to publish, out of fairness to accused men as well as their accusers. It is cruel to expose complainants to the searchlight of publicity when their allegations are flimsy, or to write stories in which inconsistencies are not confronted. Doing so is asking for the accuser to be disbelieved, and that experience can be re-traumatizing.

“Believe women” therefore makes the job of journalists more difficult. It has made necessary skepticism look like hostility. Sources should know that reporters are only asking hard questions because everyone else will. Many interviewees, on any type of story, will offer a version of the past buffed up in numerous tiny ways to make them look better, unaware that they have done so. Being drunk or high doesn’t mean your allegation is not credible, for example, but if those facts are excluded from the initial story, only to be revealed later, your whole narrative will be considered “debunked.” The damage of publishing a story that unravels is huge, not just to the individuals involved, but to the issue of sexual assault as a whole. For instance, gang rape is a real and horrifying phenomenon, but for many people, the sole story they will have heard about it is Rolling Stone’s now-retracted report “A Rape on Campus.”

By and large, it is the liberal left that has adopted the “Believe women” mantra; and, like a gun kept in the house, a weapon of such power is most liable to injure its owner. It provides feminists with no way to rebut or question any particular story without being accused of hypocrisy, turning every marginal case into a “gotcha.” Female politicians get burned both ways: They face angry demands to disassociate themselves from accused men, and equally angry accusations of knee-jerk man-hating if they do. (The case of Senator Al Franken is a sorry tale of well-meaning people feeling the need to decry instantly rather than investigate fully.) As Moira Donegan has noted, female Democrats “have been tasked with cleaning up the mess” from Reade’s allegations. Biden has pledged to pick a woman as his running mate: Expect her to take as much heat on the subject as he does, if not more.

Why has #MeToo become fixated on questions of belief? Because in too many cases, belief is all we have. The worldwide outpouring of traumatic experiences has not led to the structural changes needed to arbitrate claims in anything close to an objective fashion. Instead, in the U.S. and elsewhere, cases are decided along partisan lines. It was painful to read the section of She Said, the book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, which deals with the Blasey Ford allegations. Here was a woman who tried to do everything right. And then, faced with a Republican artillery barrage, she took refuge in the only place she could, relying on Democrats to champion her cause in the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. There was never a neutral forum in which her story could be heard.

This is the final failure of “Believe women,” and demonstrates why it was a mistake to let the slogan take hold. In its needless, provocative overstatement, it derails the #MeToo conversation, and prevents it from moving to the question of how to change structures. If belief is fairy dust, we can simply sprinkle that on women and not worry about the institutions that are letting them down. HR departments too commonly exist to protect companies, not their employees. Serial predators go uncaught because untested rape kits lie piled up in warehouses. Complainants are subjected to a “digital strip search,” and cases are dropped if they won’t allow police to rifle through their data. It is impossible for women to expect justice from a system such as this.

In Britain, an outside lawyer was asked to produce a report on Parliament’s failure to deal with bullying and harassment by powerful politicians. Her recommendations included a confidential helpline, and an independent complaints procedure. This is a promising start: From famous actors to cleaners on short-term contracts, from political staffers to delivery drivers managed by an app, the world of work is more and more fragmented and casual, and new channels for complaints must be created. For criminal allegations to be pursued thoroughly, police forces need to look like the communities they represent, and they need to prosecute sexual offences with sensitivity and rigor. Rape cases are often mentally filed in the “too difficult” box: The attrition rate as they move through the police, prosecution, and the courts is high.

Yes, believe that sexual harassment and assault are far more widespread than we have ever been willing to acknowledge. Believe that “nice guys,” even self-identified feminists, are capable of treating the people around them like dirt. Believe your friends when they are asking for nothing more than your support.

But do not confuse any of that with an injunction to believe any single woman’s public allegation, without caveats, without questions. “Believe women” is a bad slogan, and it should be retired. We should not be expected to believe women. We should instead be able to believe in the system.

The Pandemic’s Geopolitical Aftershocks Are Coming Western capitals aren’t just worried about the risk of a resurgence in coronavirus cases. by TOM MCTAGUE

With most European countries confident that they are past the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, their attention is turning to the chance of its resurgence once society returns to some semblance of normal. But beyond the epidemiological challenges lies a slowly amassing threat that is not pathological in nature, but economic, political, and military. This is the geopolitical second wave, and its power is already starting to concern Western leaders.

Imagine a scenario: Just as Europe and the United States begin to feel as if they have the coronavirus under control, it takes hold in the developing world. Exhausted, indebted, and desperate for their own economies to get back up to speed, richer countries are too slow to help. Panic ensues. Migrants mass in southern Europe, which is still struggling to pull itself out of a coronavirus-induced depression. Somewhere, a state defaults on debt held largely by Western financial institutions. In the chaos, an autocrat eyes an opportunity for a land grab. A United States already unwilling to take the lead leaves China to step into the void.

This is just one (invented) scenario of a number that are raising concerns in Western capitals and that were laid out to me in conversations with more than half a dozen leading security experts, academics, and government advisers in recent weeks. Of those I spoke with, few doubted that a second wave was coming. The real concern was where it would land.

History, as Barack Obama said of American progress, zigs and zags. Great changes set off chain reactions: The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ushered in the New Deal era; Allied victory in 1945 created the conditions for the Cold War. Each event creates political aftershocks and trends that we can see clearly only afterward. The decade that followed the 2008 financial crisis saw the euro zone teeter on the brink of collapse, Britain vote to leave the European Union, and Donald Trump elected president. Today, the global economy has suffered another sudden seizure, shifting geopolitics as U.S.-China tensions have risen, trade has slowed markedly, and structural divisions between northern and southern Europe have widened. The question, then, is what might happen in the decade after this crisis?

“Historians love chapter breaks,” said Robert Kaplan, an American foreign-policy expert and former member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, who this month briefed officials at 10 Downing Street on the potential second-order effects of the coronavirus crisis. “COVID-19 will come to be seen as a chapter break.”

Among Kaplan’s concerns is how Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, will act, a fear echoed by some of the most influential voices in British foreign policy, who worry that the geopolitical second wave of COVID-19 will hit Europe the hardest. Michael Clarke, a defense-studies professor at King’s College London and former special adviser to Britain’s national committee on security strategy, who remains plugged in to the country’s foreign-policy establishment, told me that an economically weakened Russia, hit by the recent collapse in oil prices, poses a greater danger to Western security interests. “Putin’s aggressive opportunism will probably get worse,” Clarke said. “The nature of Putin’s leadership is that he can’t stand still; he has to keep pushing forward. This makes him more volatile.” What happens if the Russian leader, spooked by the country’s collapsing economy, eyes an opportunity to test NATO’s resolve? Others, such as Bruno Maçães, Portugal’s former Europe minister, told me that the crisis might not embolden Russia, but cripple it, leaving it more dependent on China and bringing Beijing’s sphere of influence to the borders of continental Europe. “Crises,” Kaplan noted, “put history on fast-forward.”

The array of possible second-wave consequences is dizzying: the prospect of the disease taking hold in a developing G20 country—think India—which could see the virus quickly doubling back to Europe and the U.S.; the uncertain impact of technological advances in fields such as artificial intelligence as they are used to help combat the disease’s spread; a recession pulling at the ties between the European Union’s poor south and wealthy north. Clarke is particularly concerned about an arc of instability from West Africa through the Middle East to Asia, where conflict and instability have in recent years forced people to flee. Karin von Hippel, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute, an influential British defense and international-affairs think tank, told me that “some kind of reckoning with China” is likely as well. “Some countries will emerge from this trying to cling to China … but most others are likely to try to decouple,” she said. For Britain, Germany, France, and other major European economies reliant on the American security umbrella but wanting to maintain strong economic ties with China, the difficulty of managing the fallout from the Trump administration’s anti-China rhetoric may now only increase.

This is the world in which countries such as Britain are having to think about their strategic vision. Some of the challenges might be entirely new but many others are likely to be ones already at play that have been accelerated by the pandemic, such as worsening relations between Washington and Beijing.

More than anything, though, for Western governments there is a simple underlying reality to the geopolitical second wave: cash, or a lack of it. “You’ve got more problems but less money to deal with them,” one senior adviser to the British government, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly about internal deliberations, told me.

After more than a decade of public-spending cuts, for example, Britain’s military—capable of helping the United States invade both Iraq and Afghanistan less than 20 years ago—has morphed into a “one shot” force that is unable to sustain itself for longer than six months outside Europe, according to Clarke. What will its capacity look like after another set of cuts? Britain and France required American support to intervene in Libya in 2011. Could a joint European force do so again anywhere along its exposed underbelly on the North African shore? Could it even be used in a purely medical capacity, as it was during the Ebola outbreak in 2014?

A major British government review of the country’s foreign-affairs, defense, and intelligence strategy was due to be published this year, but it has since been pushed back indefinitely because of the pandemic.The immediate consequence is that the review, when it happens, will be less strategic and more tactical—driven by financial considerations rather than any grand vision the government wanted to set out for post-Brexit Britain. Officials in London will have to focus more on “What can we afford?” and less on “What do we want to do?,” an approach that is short-term, ad hoc, and defensive.

Inside Downing Street, concern about COVID-19’s geopolitical second wave is real, with work under way to understand the potential threats and prepare for them. The British government expects protectionism to increase, supply chains to be brought back under national control, nation-states to be strengthened, and the U.S.-China relationship to become more antagonistic—changes that could be seen as simply the “firming up of some fundamentals,” in the words of the government adviser I spoke with.

Whether the pandemic brings about revolutionary change or simply accelerates the currents already working under the surface, the fact is that the epidemiological second wave isn’t the only one we need to worry about.

COVID-19 is Eroding Scientific Field Work We asked two scholars to explain the long-term effects of a missed or downscaled field research season. by Casey Setash and Richard B. Primack

Summer is prime time across much of North America for scientists to do field research outdoors. But this year the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing many researchers to cancel or scale back their plans. We asked two scholars to explain the long-term effects of a missed or downscaled field research season. 

Richard B. Primack, Boston University

Holes in the data

For the first time in 50 years, ornithologists at the Manomet nature observatory in Plymouth, Massachusetts are not opening their mist nets every weekday at dawn to catch, measure and band migrating songbirds. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the center has essentially canceled its spring field season and will be doing only very limited sampling. Going forward, its long-term banding data will contain only a fraction of the usual information on songbird migrations during the spring of 2020.

Across the world, field stations, nature centers and universities have shut down long-term research to protect scientists, staff, students and volunteers from COVID-19. There’s good reason for this step, but it comes at a cost.

Collecting data over many years allows scientists to detect gradual trends and short-term anomalies in the health of forests, bays and other ecosystems and biological communities. Long-term research has been crucial in detecting how climate change is affecting the abundance and distribution of species and the timing of spring events, such as bird migrations and plant flowering.

Multi-year data has been vital to understanding how ecosystems bounce back after major disturbances like hurricanes and wildfires. Long-term research has informed policies addressing air and water pollution and wildlife conservation in ways that would have been impossible through short-term studies alone.

Since 1980, the U.S. National Science Foundation has supported a network of Long Term Ecological Research sites that now spans 28 locations, from northern Alaska to Antarctica and across North America. These sites are leaders in detecting effects of air pollution, land use and urbanization on ecosystems. The data they produce is available to the public and the scientific community.

Many long-term studies also take place in national parks, where researchers track subjects like water quality, wetland health and endangered species. In a normal year, armies of researchers and students would be at work in national parks and Long-Term Ecological Research sites. Now, however, just small groups are collecting data, aided by automated equipment.

Working solo

Some small-scale projects are managing to continue. Over the past 18 years, my students and I have recorded wildflower flowering and the first appearance of spring leaves in Concord, Massachusetts, repeating observations made by Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s.

We’re doing this to study the ecological effects of climate change. Our studies have shown that plants are flowering about 10 days earlier in the spring than they did in Thoreau’s time. We have also found that cold-loving northern wildflower species are becoming less abundant, and nonnative species are increasing.

Now I wear a mask, go out early in the mornings when few people are on the trails and work without students. None of this is how we typically work, but it allows me to continue this research and capture anomalies that might occur this year.

But maintaining a few long-term studies won’t make up for irreplaceable losses to science that will occur this year, especially for two-year experimental studies that were supposed to start or end this year. My colleagues and I hope that this pandemic ends soon, so that scientists can get back to analyzing the long-term workings of ecosystems – and the ecological impacts of coronavirus.

Casey Setash, Colorado State University

Abundant uncertainty

Ecologists like me often measure a field season by the numbers: 40 birds captured, 85 nest plots searched, three times when the truck got stuck. This year we’re thinking about Colorado’s coronavirus case count.

My field site sits at an elevation of about 8,500 feet in northern Colorado’s Jackson County. The landscape and lifestyles here have remained largely unchanged over the last century. Jackson is also one of the few counties in Colorado without a positive case of COVID-19.

I’m conducting field work that will inform my dissertation on waterfowl breeding in flood-irrigated agricultural systems, as well as a long-term waterfowl monitoring project run by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Answering my proposed questions requires capturing 40 female mallards and gadwall, two common duck species. We mark them with GPS transmitters, conduct biweekly samples in the flooded fields for invertebrates – small crustaceans that ducks eat – and carry out daily nest searches within a 250-square-mile area.

The 2020 field season is the second of three field seasons that I will conduct for my Ph.D., and I had plans to hit the ground running. Instead, we have whittled our six-person crew down to three and are living in trailers without running water, rather than in U.S. Forest Service housing that normally would be available.

Our daily routine of cold mornings counting ducks, checking traps and searching for nests feels familiar and comforting. But every task is tinged with worry and guilt. What if we introduce COVID-19 to Jackson County? How are we going to attach GPS transmitters to ducks – a process that usually takes at least two people – while maintaining proper social distancing measures? Scientists are used to estimating uncertainty, but almost everything this year is a question mark.

Waterfowl ecologists were among the first scientists to initiate long-term ecological monitoring in the 1950s. Today, states still base decisions about hunting limits on annual surveys of ducks breeding throughout the Prairie Pothole Region of the northern Great Plains, also known as the duck factory of North America.

Long-term projects like these often are replacement data sources when studies like mine go awry. But this year, for the first time since 1955, neither the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service nor the Canadian Wildlife Service will carry out their Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey.

While safety precautions are changing everything, from the amount of data we can collect to the social structure of our field crew, I am one of the lucky few who get to keep working. My field site lies in a sweet spot, between “too far from a hospital” and “too many people.” And it is comforting to be outside with some semblance of normalcy, rather than sitting indoors wondering what the ducks are up to.