The Coronavirus Has Exposed the Dark Side of Communities The deadly virus reminds us that communities need at all times to both attend to the well-being of their members but also not step on their rights, a delicate and complex balance. by Amitai Etzioni

If you think the communities are places where people help each other, volunteer, and raise a barn, then you will find that the pandemic reveals a much more complex, and sometimes darker, side of communities. These communities sometimes harass people who violate the prevailing norms or challenge their rules. They also face great difficulties in balancing the rights of their members, especially their privacy rights, with their concerns for the wellbeing of the community, these days, in particular, preventing the spread of the coronavirus. There are few places this phenomenon is more evident than in the homeowner associations (HOA) in which some fifty-five million Americans live. These associations love to make all kinds of regulations, above and beyond those set by the laws of the land, some of them quite capricious, while others are truly vital.
One of the big “scandals,” which ripped through the HOA in recent weeks, is that members had the audacity to ask for refunds after their golf courses were shut and their communal swimming pools were emptied! “This isn’t a Marriott or Ritz Carlton where you can ask for a room night refund if you have a bad experience,” said a community manager in Florida. “Homeowner Associations are businesses. The business doesn’t stop incurring expenses, having to pay for upkeep and maintenance, paying for electricity, security and trash collection just because a virus is killing thousands. The fact that people who own homes in a community are asking for discounts or refunds shows just how disconnected some in the area truly are.” The Puerto Rico Department of Consumer Affairs issued a new set of rules to protect condominium residents from “extreme measures” adopted by condominium boards. In several cases, these boards prohibited access to common areas such as the laundry area, even going so far as to completely prevent nonresidents from entering the condominiums. One HOA banned the entrance to delivery men as well as to people who rented units from owners. When challenged, the board stated quite officially that “our Governor has declared a state of emergency throughout the State of Florida, Section 718.1265, Florida Statutes can be exercised by the board. This statute governs a condominium association’s emergency powers during an event for which a state of emergency is declared. Among other emergency powers authorized under the statute . . . the board, determine any portion of the condominium property unavailable for entry or occupancy by unit owners, family members, tenants, guests, agents, or invitees to protect the health, safety, or welfare of such persons.” In Spokane, Washington, a nurse wanted to self-isolate in a trailer so she parked in her family driveway to protect her children while being able to see them through the glass. She acknowledged that she knew such parking for more than forty-eight hours violated her HOA regulations, “however she thought if there was ever a time for an immediate exception, this would be it. But she says the HOA told her doing this could result in a daily fine.” The Naperville Post Office informed the residents of Mill Crossing and Mill Orchard in Naperville, Illinois that they would have to retrieve their mail at the post office. No explanation was provided for the change in delivery. The requirement seems to have occurred after one person was infected with the virus. Residents complained that instead, the postal staff should have determined which building was affected, rather than depriving the entire condo complex and neighboring Mill Orchard. Moreover, tenants point out that the CDC has stated, “in general, because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks at ambient temperatures.”
The balance between privacy and public safety turns out to be a sticky wicket. A conflict found in many HOA is highlighted by one in Kansas. The members of the Forest View HOA in Olathe, Kansas were notified that “In the unfortunate event that you or a member of your household tests positive for COVID-19,” the message said, “please report it to the HOA’s property manager”. The property manager would then alert every homeowner. “I was shocked that they were asking for that kind of information,” Jennifer Robinson told The Kansas City Star on Wednesday. “Why in the world would I want to share my family’s private health information with my HOA?” “It’s causing quite a furor,” said Steven Hall, of Olathe, who lives in another Olathe neighborhood. “It pretty much lit up on Facebook. People were like, ‘Dear God, what is happening?’ My first thought was maybe the city has granted the HOAs some kind of strange power.”
The Johnson County Department of Health and Environment was fielding complaints as well, said spokeswoman Barbara Mitchell. “There is no public health recommendation for this action,” the department said in an email. “JCDHE does not condone any private or public entity asking individuals for private health information, including results of COVID-19 testing.” A board member tried to explain: “I think if there were a case in the community, most people would like to be made aware so they took extra precautions at the community mailbox, on walking trails and sidewalks, etc.”
I joined this give and take when the same issue arose in my own HOA. Before I proceed, I should note that the board members and chairs of HOA are doing their work pro bono, often spending many hours sorting out conflicts among tenants and dealing with floods of complaints while only rarely receiving any kudos. I hence tread lightly when I wrote to my intrepid association head:
First much thanks for your continued effective leadership of our community; it is now needed more than ever and we are fortunate to have you at the helm. I am writing regarding your note that laws prevent you from notifying us if one of us gets the virus. I wrote two books on privacy and worked with the White House on drafting some of the laws. You are, of course, completely correct that you could not disclose the identity of such a person. However, if you are told that it is a violation of the law to inform us that someone has become ill, without disclosing any identity, I would like to know which law and which section of the law they are referring to. As far as ethics are concerned, disclosing would do no harm to the person and help much the rest of us.
I got a quick response: I am not a lawyer but my common sense said the same thing to me. Our legal counsel advised us not to disclose it. If and when management knows something like that, then I promise I will raise the question again with counsel. To me, the real need was to make sure everyone behaves with an assumption that some people may have already been infected and not be complacent because we have not been told by management that someone had been tested positive.

This required a response: Thank you very much for your constructive response. I am much looking forward to hearing what law the lawyers are talking about. As to how we should already behave, etc., is an idea studied in the gay community on the suggestion that there is no need to tell someone that one is HIV positive before being intimate on the ground that one should always behave as if . . . etc. It turns out that knowing explicitly adds much to safe behavior.

I received a call by a board member that the real issue is that the board fears that one of the “crazy” residents will sue our HOA if “God forbid” someone becomes ill and they feel their privacy has been violated.

I spent the last forty years extolling the virtues of communities. I cited Edmund Burke about the merits of the small brigades, referred to De Tocqueville’s writings about the great role volunteerism plays in what makes American society virtuous, and I pointed to the reams of psychological studies that show that we are social creatures and need communities for our well-being. However, having lived a year in a Kibbutz (the Israeli communal settlements), and studied at Berkeley when the hippies communed—I was not unaware of the darker side of communities. The coronavirus reminds us that communities need at all times to both attend to the well-being of their members but also not step on their rights, a delicate and complex balance.

Who Has the Right to Shelter in a Small Town? People are fleeing big cities for rural areas in an attempt to outrun COVID-19. In Marfa, Texas, that has divided the community. by Rachel Monroe

Spring break typically marks the start of tourist season in Marfa, Texas, when the streets fill with families from Dallas and handsome Los Angeles couples. College kids host late-night parties in Airbnbs. Influencers pose in front of crumbling adobe ruins. And every few weeks, we get a celebrity sighting: Guy Fieri riding a bike down the potholed streets, or Matthew McConaughey hunkering down to complete his book of poetry. A few years ago, a friendly street cat brushed up against Heidi Klum’s ankles at dinner, and a few days later, it was on her private plane, heading to its new home in Hollywood.

Until a month ago, complaining about the tourists was a low-stakes bonding activity around town. We grumbled about how they stood in the middle of the road taking pictures and how they wore bathrobes in public, as if they saw the whole town as an all-inclusive resort. (Maybe that cat really wasn’t a stray after all.) Even the tourists resented the tourists. “I was here during spring break two years ago and it was kind of disgusting,” a visitor from Los Angeles told me last year. “I just didn’t want there to be too many people like us here,” his friend added.

Now the streets are empty, as they are everywhere. But when the tourists disappeared, so did most of the service-industry jobs, which has been financially disastrous for some locals. Still, not everyone is unhappy with the situation: “I was out in town yesterday and noticed how quiet and calm it was, and couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief to feel that old feeling of what Marfa used to feel like before all the tourists and craziness of random people walking around,” one local posted on Facebook.

I moved to Marfa eight years ago. In the finicky taxonomy of tourist towns, that makes me a transplant—not a native or a local, but not a visitor either. I did what I could to immerse myself in the community, joining the volunteer fire department, delivering lunches for Meals on Wheels. Still, I’m aware that my roots here are shallow. I may live here, but I’m not of here. That tension was mostly tolerable until the coronavirus—and the fear of the coronavirus—amplified these fraught insider-outsider dynamics. Now I sit in my house and wonder: What does it mean to belong somewhere? And how much pressure can you put on a community before it starts to fracture?

Small towns are hotbeds for gossip. Now that we can’t gather at the bars, we exchange what snippets we can at the post office, on Facebook, and on socially distant walks by the railroad tracks. Our friends who work in the grocery stores are the best sources. They know who bought 18 rolls of toilet paper. They keep tabs on the unfamiliar faces that are still showing up. “There are definitely people hiding out here,” a cashier told me last week.

In Marfa, as elsewhere, the crisis has inspired grassroots mutual aid, but also a creeping mistrust. The other day, from across the fence, my neighbor told me that he was busy filling shotgun shells with salt—he doesn’t want to maim anyone, but he figures he might need them to intimidate. Last week, the county sheriff announced on Facebook that three people would be flying into our tiny municipal airport from New Jersey on a private plane. The post didn’t make this clear, but one was a full-time resident who’s lived here for decades; the other passengers were long-standing second-home owners. The group had been trying to get to Marfa from New York City for more than a week, but no cars were available to rent, and all the commercial flights had been canceled.

The information was not received well among Marfa’s permanent residents: “This could wipe out the entire population of Marfa.” “Why were they in NJ if they are ‘from Marfa’?” “How long have they been in NJ?” The original post listed the three people’s home addresses. One commenter threatened to keep watch with a shotgun to make sure they stayed inside.

At a city-council meeting, the mayor suggested putting limits on what nonlocals could buy to prevent resources from dwindling. But how can we define who counts as local, a council member asked? “You know, local,” someone else said. “It’s a small enough town. I think we all know.” I felt a twinge of unease; my driver’s license may identify me as a resident, but did that really count?

The resolution didn’t pass, but it pointed to the darkening mood around town. When a case of COVID-19 was confirmed across the border, in Ojinaga, Mexico, some people began to argue that the border should be shut down completely. A local property owner posted an advertisement for his rentals, encouraging people to “escape to Marfa during COVID-19”; in response, the city council banned rentals—short- or long-term—to nonresidents. The stores were for the most part fully stocked, and there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the entire Big Bend region, but the feeling of imminent scarcity persisted. Never mind the local developer whose construction crews were still working in close proximity to one another, or the pointed lack of social distancing at the hardware store, or the governor’s slowness in issuing a stay-at-home order—the threat came from outside, and you could spot it by its out-of-state license plates.

The pandemic brought these bad vibes to the surface, but their roots predate the current crisis. Highly touristed rural areas are often treated as not quite real by the vacationers and second-home owners who flock to them, as Anne Helen Petersen wrote for BuzzFeed News. Marfa is described by visitors as an escape, an oasis, a retreat. Seen through a vacationer’s eyes, it’s a place without politics and problems—it’s also a place without ventilators. There’s no hospital in the entire county, which is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. You wouldn’t know it from the travel-magazine write-ups, but Marfa’s population is older, poorer, and in worse health than most Americans; it’s also a majority-Latino community.

In 2012, when I moved here, Marfa had one coffee shop, one liquor store, one gym, and two bars. Although income inequality was a persistent issue, we at least had a shared context. In the past several years, though, galloping gentrification has spawned a parallel set of businesses catering to tourists and transplants: first a fancy coffee shop, then a fancy gym, a wine bar, another fancy coffee shop. Slowly, these businesses have begun to crowd out those catering to locals. Marfa has transformed into a town where you can purchase a $15 cocktail but not spark plugs. The second-home and short-term-rental market drove real-estate prices up so high that it is practically impossible to buy a Marfa house if you make Marfa wages. These are the preexisting conditions, as it were, that underlie the current atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Maybe it doesn’t feel as though we’re all in this together because it hasn’t felt like that for a while. Waiting out the pandemic 2,000 miles from where I was born, I feel a heightened awareness of the overlapping, contradictory roles I play in my adopted community: gentrifier, taxpayer, transplant, neighbor, friend, stranger.

Last week, I spoke with a woman who lives full-time on Block Island, a popular vacation spot off the coast of Rhode Island. When the second-home owners started flocking in, things got tense on the island, she said—someone threatened to blow up a transformer to keep nonlocals away. She knew things were really bad when her friends stopped waving to passing cars, a tried-and-true small-town tradition. Her story gave me some hope; in Marfa, at least, we’re still waving.

When I don’t spend time on Facebook, things feel less dire. Like everyone else, my pandemic fantasies are mundane. I think about July, when everyone’s peach trees will explode with fruit all at once, and I think about the box filled with surplus fruit in city hall. In my daydream Marfa, there are some tourists, but not too many, and when I go to pay my utility bill in person, I fill up my bag with peaches and leave some zucchini behind. The room is full of people, some who’ve lived here a year, some who’ve lived here their whole life. We smile at one another. We’ve been through something—if not together, then at least in proximity to one another. That’s not enough, perhaps, but it’s not nothing.

The Secret of Scooby-Doo’s Enduring Appeal Why on earth has the formulaic series, which debuted half a century ago, outlasted just about everything else on television? by CHRISTOPHER ORR

I grew up watching Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! every Saturday morning. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon had launched in 1969, two years after my birth, so it was precisely in my little-kid sweet spot. Much as I loved it, though, the feeble animation and repetitive plots were apparent even to the young me. Whereas characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny seemed eternal, extending far into the past and future, Scooby-Doo felt like a show just for that particular moment, for my specific childhood.
Fast-forward 35 years or so, and to my astonishment, my children loved it just as much as I had. I probably wound up watching more Scooby-Doo episodes with my kids than I had watched as a kid. Evidence suggests that my experience is not unique. Scooby-Doo, believe it or not, has over the years been the subject of at least 19 TV series (on CBS, ABC, the WB, Cartoon Network, and Boomerang); more than 40 animated films; and two live-action movies in the early 2000s, the first of which grossed $275 million worldwide. A new series featuring celebrity-guest voices, Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, premiered last year. And a new animated movie, Scoob!, starring Zac Efron, Amanda Seyfried, and Tracy Morgan, is scheduled to be released in mid-May.

Which raises the obvious question: What on earth is going on? Why has Scooby-Doo—described by the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott in 2002 as “one of the cheapest, least original products of modern American juvenile culture”—outlasted not only such Hanna-Barbera brethren as The Flintstones and Yogi Bear, but also pretty much everything else on television? The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever once summed up the cartoon’s message as “Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront it.” But that hardly seems enough for half a century of on-air appeal.

The essential premise, for those not weaned on the show, is straightforward. A group of four teenagers—some of whom seem considerably older (more on this in a moment)—and a Great Dane, Scooby-Doo, drive around in a van called the Mystery Machine in search of, yes, mysteries. (The gang, like its later Hanna-Barbera cousin, Josie and the Pussycats, was originally conceived as a band that would play a musical number each episode.)

The mystery they find almost always appears at first to be paranormal—a vindictive ghost or ghoul, a rampaging dinosaur—but is ultimately revealed as an elaborate hoax involving disguises, holograms, hidden wires, phosphorescent paint, or some combination thereof. Each time the gang unmasks the genuine villain, typically male and on the older side, he utters some variation of “And I would’ve gotten away with it if not for you meddling kids.”

The Mystery Inc. members are Fred, the blond, broad-shouldered presumptive leader of the group (who wears, implausibly, an ascot); Daphne, the fashion-conscious redhead and semi-comical damsel in distress (a stereotype that the show subverted in its later iterations); Velma, the frumpishly sweatered and bespectacled brainiac; and Shaggy, the ever-famished slacker-coward defined by his prominent slouch and chin grizzle. Scooby himself—his name was inspired by Frank Sinatra’s “dooby dooby doo” scat in “Strangers in the Night”—is inseparable from Shaggy and in many ways indistinguishable: same appetite, same poltroonery, same plot functions. Essentially split aspects of the same character, the two are not id and superego, but something closer to id and more id. A typical story line involves Daphne getting kidnapped or otherwise endangered; Fred devising a Rube Goldberg–esque, and spectacularly unsuccessful, trap to ensnare the villain; and the case being wrapped up by a blend of Velma’s smarts and Shaggy/Scooby’s bumbling good luck.

The show owed its launch in part to complaints that Saturday-morning cartoons—including Hanna-Barbera’s Space Ghost—were becoming too violent. So the producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (along with the story writers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, and the animator Iwao Takamoto) decided that their new show wouldn’t merely solve mysteries; it would demystify them altogether. As any parent knows, the surest way to comfort kids is to offer them an alternative explanation for the horrors that go bump in the night: It was the cat, or the wind, or the uncle who forgot where the guest room was. In the premiere of Scooby-Doo, “What a Night for a Knight,” the ambulatory suit of armor freaking everyone out is discovered to be Mr. Wickles, the seemingly hapless museum curator who is also (gasp!) a secret art smuggler. Case closed. Sleep tight.

No less an arbiter of reality than Carl Sagan hailed the show as a “public service … in which paranormal claims are systematically investigated and every case is found to be explicable in prosaic terms.” Later variations of the show tried tweaking the formula. Some featured real monsters (including a 1985 miniseries titled The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, starring Vincent Price as the warlock Vincent Van Ghoul). One, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, recast the gang as elementary-school-aged. And characters were regularly subtracted or added—notably Scrappy-Doo, Scooby’s pint-size and pugnacious nephew. But the show consistently returned to its core premise.

Given that Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys had long since established the template of liberated teens outsmarting adult crooks, surely the show’s enduring success rests on more than that. Having a friendly dog involved has helped, certainly, though placing a Great Dane front and center is no guarantee of universal popularity, as Marmaduke fans will sadly inform you. A more telling clue, I think, can be found in the show’s timing. It debuted during a period of acute generational conflict and anxiety: the Vietnam/Nixon years, the “Never trust anyone over 30” years. Whether by accident or design, the makeup of the Mystery Inc. gang played perfectly into that moment.

A fundamental division has always prevailed within the group, occasionally hinted at but rarely made explicit, between Fred and Daphne on the one hand and Velma and Shaggy/Scooby on the other. The former looked and sounded older; the idea that Fred and Daphne were a couple (or an ex-couple) has been frequently suggested. And how else to account for that deepest mystery of the Scoobyverse—Fred’s fondness for his orange ascot? On some level, viewers are intended to see him as a grown-up. Daphne is a slightly more complicated case. But her maybe-relationship with Fred, her overt sexualization (her outfits, unlike Velma’s, are aggressively formfitting), and the eventual revelation that her family wealth supports Mystery Inc. clearly position her as the second quasi-adult in the group. She even has a scarf that mirrors Fred’s ascot—neckwear as a signifier of maturity.

By contrast, Velma, who is cited as the youngest of the gang, stands out as the quintessential TV representation of the smart, awkward teenager, right down to the glasses without which she is virtually blind. She has also been rumored for decades among fans to be gay, or at least bisexual. James Gunn, who wrote the screenplay for the 2002 live-action film, said he was “pretty sure” Velma is gay; Linda Cardellini, who played the character, described her sexuality as “a little ambiguous.” A kiss—relatively chaste—between Velma and Daphne was even shot for the film as a kind of inside joke, though it didn’t make the final cut.

Shaggy, meanwhile, has consistently been reputed to be a stoner, thanks to his slovenly look, his persistent case of the munchies, and his addiction, shared by Scooby, to a treat called “Scooby Snacks.” (The 2002 movie has fun with the stoner myth, too.) Throw in the fact that Shaggy was voiced for the better part of four decades by Casey Kasem, the DJ responsible for American Top 40, and the character was a walking bundle of youth-culture signifiers.

What better way to toy, below the surface, with the cultural tensions of the late ’60s and early ’70s? Juxtapose two borderline misfits in Velma and Shaggy—who are perhaps experimenting a little with sexuality and drugs—with two grown-up stand-ins for the more conventional sort in Fred and Daphne, and then let the offbeat characters consistently (yet all in good fun) one-up the establishment types. Even the show’s signature line, “And I would’ve gotten away with it if not for you meddling kids,” sounds like it could have been uttered by Richard Nixon.

But the genius of the young mystery hunters is that they were not prisoners of their era. (In fact, they were based explicitly on characters from an earlier show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis—one of the first TV series to make teenagers leading characters—in which a pre-Gilligan Bob Denver played Maynard G. Krebs, a kind of proto-Shaggy, right down to the chin scruff.) You don’t have to envision the group’s internal dialectic as the counterculture versus the establishment. The show’s longevity demonstrates that the metaphor works equally well as outsiders versus popular kids. Or, most primally, as children versus parents.

Indeed, over the past 50 years the Scooby-Doo characters have become almost archetypal, Joseph Campbell–worthy portraits of teenagerdom. Watch just about any ensemble teen show or movie, and you’ll find your Freds and Daphnes (often as foils or outright villains) and your Velmas and Shaggys. Perhaps no one applied this paradigm more self-consciously than the writer-director Joss Whedon in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which winked at its predecessor by imagining a group of teen monster-fighters led by a superhero version of Daphne. Buffy and her pals even referred to themselves as the “Scoobies.” Whedon later claimed, tongue only partly in cheek, “All great fiction is Scooby-Doo-like.”

So we watch—and our kids watch, and eventually their kids will watch—four so-called teenagers and their Great Dane roam the countryside, pulling the mask off some fraudulent phantom or counterfeit creeper. They’ll be headed for your local multiplex soon enough. And fear not: They won’t ever really leave.

Don’t Spit! Pandemic Posters Through the Years Before technology allowed us to alarm ourselves with up-to-the-minute information, public-health messages were communicated using a fundamental graphic medium: the poster. by ALICIA YIN CHENG

During these anxious times, we constantly check our hand computers for the latest updates, which make us still more anxious. Before technology allowed us to alarm ourselves with up-to-the-minute information, public-health messages were communicated using a fundamental graphic medium: the poster. Produced and displayed on a massive scale, these posters used a variety of cultural, political, and psychological strategies to steer public behavior with eye-catching and sometimes shocking visuals. And while today’s medium provides options via Instagram that you can print yourself, the message for fighting disease remains uncomfortably the same: Cover your mouth when coughing, stay home when you’re sick, avoid crowds, and don’t poop in the communal stream. Timeless advice, indeed.

When influenza hit Chicago in September 1918, the city was just beginning to implement containment measures. Police officers were instructed to stop individuals who did not cover their face when coughing. (Courtesy National Library of Medicine)

This 1918 bulletin from New York City’s department of health encourages citizens to use handkerchiefs and avoid crowds. (Weekly Bulletin of the Department of Health, October 19, 1918 / NYC Municipal Library / Courtesy NYC Department of Records) Right: Public-health organizations raced to educate the populace on ways to prevent the spread of germs in 1918. (Virginia State Board of Health / Courtesy Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries)

Left: A dapper young man from the 1920s demonstrates the proper alternative to “careless spitting.” (Reprinted with permission © 2003. American Lung Association) Right: This poster uses public shaming to warn against public expectorating. (Fulton County Historian)

These cartoon-like scenes from 1940 illustrate sarcastic tips for catching the flu: Wear short skirts in winter, eat unhealthy foods, sneeze in someone’s face, sleep with the windows open, and avoid doctors. (Courtesy Wellcome Collection)

These English posters from 1950 share the same message using typographically dynamic layouts. (Courtesy Wellcome Collection)

In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art invited a group of artists to create public-health posters to combat polio. This submission was by designer Herbert Matter. (Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries)

Left: In 1955, the Chinese government created a series of posters to promote hygiene awareness in rural areas during a cholera outbreak. A farmer squats over a latrine trench vomiting while simultaneously defecating. Right: This poster from India in the 1960s shows a man spraying insecticide on a kite-size mosquito carrying malaria. (Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine)

Before water fountains used a more sanitary spigot, public fountains used a common drinking cup for distribution. (Provincial Archives of Alberta, 1959)

Left: Contemporary Venn diagram of COVID-19 (Courtesy of M.Azlif) Right: A clever take on toilet-paper hoarding (Courtesy @typechap)

Stay Sane, Stay Safe is an open platform that allows designers to contribute their own COVID-19 posters. (Courtesy of Sarolta Agnes Erdélyi and Claudia Pazzaglia)

A print-on-demand public-service announcement (Courtesy Tamara Shopsin)

New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style, focused on empathy, isn’t just resonating with her people; it’s putting the country on track for success against the coronavirus. by URI FRIEDMAN

The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest test of political leadership the world has ever witnessed. Every leader on the planet is facing the same potential threat. Every leader is reacting differently, in his or her own style. And every leader will be judged by the results.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel embraces science. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro rejects it. U.S. President Donald Trump’s daily briefings are a circuslike spectacle, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds no regular briefings at all, even as he locks down 1.3 billion people.

Jacinda Ardern, the 39-year-old prime minister of New Zealand, is forging a path of her own. Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.

People feel that Ardern “doesn’t preach at them; she’s standing with them,” Helen Clark, New Zealand’s prime minister from 1999 to 2008, told me. (Ardern, a fellow member of the Labour Party, got her start in politics working for Clark during her premiership.) “They may even think, Well, I don’t quite understand why [the government] did that, but I know she’s got our back. There’s a high level of trust and confidence in her because of that empathy.”

She is “a communicator,” Clark added, noting that Ardern earned a degree in communications. “This is the kind of crisis which will make or break leaders. And this will make Jacinda.”

One of Ardern’s innovations has been frequent Facebook Live chats that manage to be both informal and informative. During a session conducted in late March, just as New Zealand prepared to go on lockdown, she appeared in a well-worn sweatshirt at her home (she had just put her toddler daughter to bed, she explained) to offer guidance “as we all prepare to hunker down.”

She sympathized with how alarming it must have been to hear the “loud honk” that had preceded the emergency alert message all New Zealanders had just received essentially informing them that life as they knew it was temporarily over. She introduced helpful concepts, such as thinking of “the people [who] will be in your life consistently over this period of time” as your “bubble” and “acting as though you already have COVID-19” toward those outside of your bubble. She justified severe policies with practical examples: People needed to stay local, because what if they drove off to some remote destination and their car broke down? She said she knows as a parent that it’s really hard to avoid playgrounds, but the virus can live on surfaces for 72 hours.

She expected the lockdown to last for several weeks, Ardern said, and for cases to rise steeply even as New Zealanders began holing up in their homes. Because of how the coronavirus behaves, “we won’t see the positive benefits of all of the effort you are about to put in for self-isolation … for at least 10 days. So don’t be disheartened,” she said.

In a more recent Facebook Live, one of Ardern’s staffers walked into her office just as she was launching into a detailed explanation of what life would look like once the government began easing its lockdown. “Oh look, it’s Leroy!” she exclaimed, assuring viewers that he was in her “work bubble.” A children’s toy was visible just behind her desk. The scene seemed apt for an era in which work and life are constantly colliding.

While Ardern conducts more formal and conventional daily briefings with other top officials and journalists, she puts her personal touch on these as well. “Trump does his briefings, but that’s a different kind of show,” Clark said. “On no occasion has Jacinda ever spun out and attacked a journalist who’s asked a question,” she noted, in reference to the American president’s repeated tirades against journalists. (When a reporter forgot his question upon being called on during a recent briefing, Ardern jokingly told him that she was concerned he wasn’t getting enough sleep.)

“She doesn’t peddle in misinformation; she doesn’t blame-shift; she tries to manage everyone’s expectations at the same time [as] she offers reassuring notes,” Van Jackson, an international-relations scholar at Victoria University of Wellington and a former Defense Department official during the Obama administration, wrote to me in an email. “She uses the bully pulpit to cue society toward our better angels—‘Be kind to each other’ and that kind of thing. I think that’s more important than people realize and does trickle down into local attitudes.”

Ardern’s style would be interesting—a world leader in comfy clothes just casually chatting with millions of people!—and nothing more, if it wasn’t for the fact that her approach has been paired with policies that have produced real, world-leading results.

Since March, New Zealand has been unique in staking out a national goal of not just flattening the curve of coronavirus cases, as most other countries have aimed to do, but eliminating the virus altogether. And it is on track to do it. COVID-19 testing is widespread. The health system has not been overloaded. New cases peaked in early April. Twelve people have died as of this writing, out of a population of nearly 5 million.

As a collection of relatively isolated islands at the bottom of the South Pacific, New Zealand was in a favorable position to snuff out the virus. “Because we had very few cases wash up here, we could actually” work toward an elimination strategy, Clark said. “It is undoubtedly an advantage to be sitting down on the periphery [of the world], because you have a chance to see what’s circulating from abroad.”

But Ardern’s government also took decisive action right away. New Zealand imposed a national lockdown much earlier in its outbreak than other countries did in theirs, and banned travelers from China in early February, before New Zealand had registered a single case of the virus. It closed its borders to all nonresidents in mid-March, when it had only a handful of cases.

Michael Baker and Nick Wilson, two of New Zealand’s top public-health experts, wrote last week that while the country’s ambitious strategy may yet fail, early intervention bought officials time to develop measures that could end the transmission of the coronavirus, such as rigorously quarantining at the country’s borders and expanding COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.

Jackson, the international-relations scholar, said that the decision by Ardern’s government to unveil its four-level alert system (it moved to Level 4 in late March) at the outset of the crisis “was great at getting us ready psychologically for a step-up in seriousness,” a model that “couldn’t be more different from Trump’s ‘What will I do today?’ approach.”

The success, of course, isn’t all Ardern’s doing; it’s also the product of an impressive collective effort by public-health institutions, opposition politicians, and New Zealanders as a whole, who have largely abided by social-distancing restrictions.

And that collective may be fraying. Although the government has unveiled many economic-stimulus measures, some opposition politicians and public-health experts are now demanding that the lockdown, which may be eased this week, be rolled back even further. They accuse the government of overreacting and argue that Australia has managed to reduce new coronavirus cases without the severe lockdown that New Zealand has endured.

Ardern is similar to Barack Obama in that she’s “polarizing at home [while] popular abroad,” Jackson said. “But her favorables are never higher than when she’s pulling the country through a crisis.”

Indeed, one poll by the market-research firm Colmar Brunton in early April found that 88 percent of New Zealanders trusted the government to make the right decisions about addressing COVID-19, and 84 percent approved of the government’s response to the pandemic, in each case higher than what the company found in the world’s seven largest advanced economies, including the United States. New Zealand citizens had come to support the government’s policies even though many were feeling economic pain, at least in the short term, as a result of them.

Jackson cautioned that while Ardern and many young European leaders have expertly navigated the coronavirus crisis, he still worries about how this new generation of leaders will handle what comes after it.

“Strategic decision making and crisis decision making are very different,” he noted. “The world is going to be changed, largely for the worse, in the coming years. A great depression seems all but inevitable. China’s strategic opportunism knows no bounds. Dictators everywhere are using the pandemic to solidify control of societies. Multilateral institutions aren’t delivering as promised. Getting through this crisis intact is just one step in a longer process toward a brave new world.”

Photos of the Week: by ALAN TAYLOR

A red panda is pictured among cherry blossoms at Manor Wildlife Park in St. Florence, Wales, on April 15, 2020. The park is crowdfunding for food to feed its endangered animals as the spread of the coronavirus continues

Luna watches from a tulip field on a sunny day in Grevenbroich, Germany, on April 15, 2020

Giulio Giovannini, 12, studies with a tablet, a small camping table, and a chair on top of a hill, where he is able to access the internet to participate in online lessons while schools remain closed in Scansano, Italy, on April 15, 2020.

A Palestinian mother entertains her children with makeshift masks made of cabbage as she cooks in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on April 16, 2020

Cheerleaders wearing face masks are seen at the first professional-baseball-league game of the season, at Taoyuan International Baseball Stadium in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, on April 11, 2020

Cardboard cutouts of fans are seen prior to the Chinese Professional Baseball League season-opening game between the Rakuten Monkeys and the CTBC Brothers at Taoyuan International Baseball Stadium in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, on April 11, 2020. The game was set to be played behind closed doors, without fans, due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

People observe social-distancing measures as they stand among hospital cubicles, while a giant screen displays an image of British Health Secretary Matt Hancock, speaking via video link during the official opening of the NHS Nightingale Hospital Birmingham on April 16, 2020. The hospital was set up inside the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England, to help Britain's National Health Service cope with an expected influx of patients during the coronavirus pandemic.

President Donald Trump departs after speaking about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 14, 2020.

A woman walks through the Square Mile at sunrise in London, England, on April 10, 2020

The Oculus transit hub sits empty of commuters on Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020, in New York City. 

A view of an empty street in Moscow, Russia, on April 15, 2020. Special digital passes were introduced in Russia for trips on personal and public transport, to work, medical facilities, or the grocery store. The pass is mandatory for travel around the city and can be obtained online or through a call or SMS. 

A view of Tower Bridge at sunrise in London, England, on April 16, 2020

A girl wears a mask while walking as the sun sets over the Mediterranean Sea coastline in Beirut, Lebanon, on April 14, 2020

A worker cleans a tunnel in the center of Budapest, Hungary, with a high-pressure washer on April 14, 2020

The bishop of Mallorca, Sebastià Taltavull, offers the traditional Easter Sunday Mass in a deserted cathedral in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, during the coronavirus outbreak on April 12, 2020

The sun begins to rise through trees standing among bluebells, also known as wild hyacinth, in the Hallerbos forest in Halle, Belgium, on April 16, 2020.

The Italian tenor and opera singer Andrea Bocelli rehearses outside the Duomo cathedral on a deserted Piazza del Duomo in central Milan on April 12, 2020, prior to an evening performance, without a live audience, for a world wounded by the pandemic.

Izabela Pitcher, the owner of Prior Attire, and her husband, Lucas, take their daily evening walk around their Buckinghamshire village near Milton Keynes, England, dressed in historical attire on April 13, 2020

Members of the artistic group Cirk La Putyka perform for residents stuck at home in Prague, Czech Republic, on April 14, 2020

People ride motorcycles during a sandstorm in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on April 15, 2020

An aerial view of a boat on Die Hu (Butterfly Lake) in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, on April 15, 2020

A shepherd leads a flock of sheep across the ancient Palu Bridge over the Murat River, a major source of the Euphrates as nomads make their way to the highlands with warmer temperatures in Elazig, Turkey, on April 13, 2020

A roll of toilet paper is towed by a drone as a stunt on the south bank of the River Thames in London on April 14, 2020

A statue of the Mexican actor and singer Pedro Infante in Mérida, Yucatán state, Mexico, is seen with a face mask on the 63rd anniversary of his death, April 15, 2020

A view of the world-famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Easter, April 12, 2020, with a doctor's uniform projected on it in honor of all the medical staff fighting the coronavirus worldwide.

Health workers gesture as citizens show their support from their balconies and windows in Barcelona, Spain, on April 15, 2020

Residents applaud across France to show their support to health-care employees in Paris on April 14, 2020, the 29th day of a lockdown aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus.

Emma Pritchett, 78, holds up a broken glass from her kitchen sink in Chatsworth, Georgia, on April 13, 2020, the day after a tornado hit. Severe weather swept across the South, killing multiple people and damaging hundreds of homes from Louisiana into the Appalachian Mountains

Construction workers walk at the site of the Grand Egyptian Museum, in front of the Giza pyramids, on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, on April 13, 2020, after the museum's opening was postponed this year amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Police officers on horses ride on Fifth Avenue near Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020, in New York City.

A large number of parked buses sit idle at a depot in the Brazilian city of Curitiba where only half of the fleet is circulating due to the drop in passengers caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

People pose for photos in a tulip field as the sun shines in Grevenbroich, Germany, on April 14, 2020

Lauren Dufrat wears gloves as a coronavirus precaution as she puts out Easter eggs for her neighbors' children to find on Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C

Catholic priests ride on a truck with a statue of Jesus on the cross, to bless residents quarantined in their homes as part of Good Friday commemorations, amid a government lockdown on April 10, 2020, in Mandaluyong, Manila, Philippines

A policeman wearing a coronavirus helmet distributes pamphlets to raise awareness about the virus in a residential area of Chennai, India, on April 12, 2020