Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Over the last four years, those of us who try to make sense of current events have struggled with a difficult set of questions: Is Donald Trump the symptom or the disease? The cause or the catalyst? Did he drag the Republican Party down, or is he just the natural end point of its moral decline? Did he debase our politics, or did our debased politics produce him?
All of it is true. Trump was simultaneously unique and inevitable. So it’s fitting that his last year in office would be one of the most horrific years any of us has lived through. And while he will leave the White House in 2021, we’ll continue to live not only with Trump himself (what, you thought he’d just disappear?) and the party he left behind, but with all the terrible things about us that he cast into relief.
In our national annus horribilis, chance met vulnerability with terrible results. Let’s consider some of what we learned, or were simply reminded of, about our country:
Our political system is dreadfully undemocratic, which makes it unresponsive. We have a Senate that gives disproportionate power to small rural states and an Electoral College that allows candidates with a minority of votes to become president, which among other things has produced a 6-3 conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
Though the Democratic Party’s positions on issues are far more popular than those of Republicans, they find it nearly impossible to amass the power necessary to enact those policies on the national level. The result is a paralysis that is just fine with Republicans, but which makes voters more and more cynical. Negative partisanship becomes almost inevitable when your party can’t deliver for you even when it wins, so the only reason to be motivated to action is that you despise the other party.
Accountability is a cruel joke. Donald Trump did lose the election. But he got 47 percent of the vote, despite being the most dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent president in living memory—and he was those things before he committed what will certainly rank as the worst presidential failure in American history, ignoring and denying a pandemic that by the time it ends will probably have killed half a million Americans.
And what of his party? In an accountable system, they would have been ruthlessly punished for their ongoing support for Trump, yet they prospered in the 2020 election, picking up seats in the House and limiting their losses elsewhere. For years, people have thought that the GOP had to change to survive as demographic evolution narrows the number of Americans who will respond to their appeals to white resentment. But right now, they clearly believe that there’s no reason at all for them to change, and it’s hard to argue they’re wrong.
Our individualism is deadly. In no other country were the simple public-health measures necessary to contain the coronavirus so quickly and easily politicized. Trump bears much of the blame, but it didn’t take much for him to convince people that wearing masks is a terrible imposition on their freedom, and that it could be a worthwhile emblem of political identity. So many of us have spent our lives steeping in the ideology of “rugged individualism,” learning that any government edict is inherently repressive and making a personal sacrifice for the good of your neighbors, even a tiny one, makes you weak. No quantity of dead Americans has managed to dissuade so many of us from believing this.
There are no depths to which the Republican Party will not sink. That they so enthusiastically embraced Trump’s corruption should have been no surprise, but in 2020 they showed us the depths of their moral depravity. For weeks, almost the entire party (thankfully, except for the elections officials, judges, and state legislators in the states that mattered) acquiesced in an outright war against American democracy, out of a combination of delusion, cowardice, and outright hostility to the legitimacy of a system that includes the possibility that they might lose.
This will not be a one-off. From this point forward, any Republican who doesn’t claim that an election they lost was the result of fraud will be considered a traitor to their cause. And if you thought the Tea Party was scary, just wait until you see the right-wing backlash that grows up in response to the Biden presidency. It will be more radical, more consumed with conspiracy theories, and more violent.
But didn’t the system work? After all, the Supreme Court didn’t hand Trump re-election as he had hoped. Republican state lawmakers didn’t take over the electoral machinery and send their own Trump-supporting slates of electors to Washington. Perhaps not, but we shouldn’t take much reassurance from what happened. The Republican legal challenges failed because they were so preposterous even the ideologue judges appointed by Trump couldn’t bring themselves to sign off on them. They were based on ludicrous legal theories, riddled with errors no first-year law student would make, and supported by an embarrassing lack of evidence. It isn’t hard to imagine that a more competently executed attempt to steal an election, in an election that was closer, could conceivably succeed.
If you thought the Tea Party was scary, just wait until you see the right-wing backlash that grows up in response to the Biden presidency.
Those are hardly all the forces working against us. Many of the smartest people in America have devoted their lives to constructing social media that take every repugnant and dangerous human impulse and weaponize them to drive our society mad. Economic inequality is at absurd levels. Climate change threatens our future in ways we still haven’t grappled with.
So it isn’t hard to imagine how, even when the pandemic is behind us, we will see more chaos, more street-level violence (not to mention the possibility of organized right-wing terrorism), more gridlock, more instability, and more political revanchism.
Faced with all this, can we find some light? Let me suggest one more grim metaphor, one fitting for the times. When Donald Trump came along, America was like a patient with a panoply of comorbidities—heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, allergies—who then got COVID-19 on top of everything else.
Even if the effects will linger and the underlying conditions remain, the virus was beaten back and the patient survived. And none of those conditions need be eternal. The system can be reformed, parties can change, and we can be just as creative in finding ways to create good policy as some have been in finding ways to thwart it.
And for all the villains 2020 showed us—Trump himself, his cynical enablers, the white supremacists starting fights in the streets—there were heroes who showed us the best of what our country can be, like the poll workers doggedly doing their jobs in the face of abuse, the low-paid “essential” workers who kept the country running, and the incredible medical personnel spending day after awful day fighting COVID-19. This year was about them, too.
Our annus horribilis will probably not be followed by an annus mirabilis; 2021 will be a long slog, filled with setbacks, disappointment, and grieving. But it may also see the return of hope, if we can find our way toward it.
