At the end of 2020, on New Year’s Eve, in fact, I put out an essay for this blog called “Buh-Bye, Annus Horribilis.” In it, I recalled how crappy the previous twelve months had been, from a global pandemic, to the murder of George Floyd, to Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the presidential election before the fact:
I’ve rarely been so happy to turn the page on a calendar.
I’m aware that our measurement of time is an artificial construct. I know that, in reality (or is it Reality?) the sun that sets on the evening of December 31, 2020 and rises on the morning of January 1, 2021 is the same star. I am also aware that even the idea of a sun “rising” and “setting” is an anti-Copernican illusion. In other words, the line dividing 2020 from 2021 is a purely imaginary one.
But as long as we are maintaining arbitrary allegiance to Gregorian calendar, this New Year’s Day merits an assessment of the past 366 rotations of the planet.
They sucked.
How little I knew. Not being part of the John Eastman-Rudy Giuliani-Steve Bannon planning cell at the Willard Hotel, I had no idea that an even more mind-blowing event—an attempted coup d’état by an ousted president—loomed just on the far side of the Times Square ball drop and yet another godawful version of “Imagine” on live TV. As it turned out, imagination paled in comparison to the reality that awaited.
THE GLASS IS HALF EMPTY (BECAUSE I DRANK IT)
Looking back, I went into that new year with a surprising amount of cheeriness, by my standards:
So good riddance, 2020. Your successor promises to bring pain and suffering of its own, but also the promise of rehabilitation, and therefore cause for optimism. Here in America, we will soon be under new management, with adult supervision for the first time in four years. The rollout of the vaccine brings the end of this ordeal within sight, and our return to competent leadership makes me believe that recovery is possible. But we will have to fight for it.
But my optimism was not entirely misplaced. As I noted at the time, there were some good things in 2020, some of which were directly related to those aforementioned tragedies. COVID gave the lie to the “paranoid style” anti-governmentalism that is prevalent on the right, showing that there are some crises so big that only communal efforts in the public sphere can address them. George Floyd’s murder prompted a long overdue (re-)awakening about the ongoing scourge of racial injustice in America. And Joe Biden’s victory provided evidence that some semblance of sanity still prevailed in the United States, for the moment.
I have since written of my fears that the Biden administration will prove only a brief respite from the madness, if we are not diligent. Three years on from my Bronx cheer for 2020, that decisive moment is now barreling down upon us, as 2024 promises to be a year unlike any other in the lifetime of any living American.
In the next twelve months we will witness something that has never before happened in American history: the multiple criminal and civil trials of a former President of the United States, who is under indictment for 91 separate felonies (but who’s counting?). Fueled by the furor surrounding those trials, we can also look forward to what will surely be the ugliest presidential race in modern times. We must also brace for a possible victory in that race by an openly fascist candidate, one who has made no secret of his desire to install a right wing autocracy, where the top priority will be using all the levers of power to punish his enemies.
Contrary to the self-defeating wave of pessimism currently prevalent on the left, and even the center, beating Trump in November is very much within our power. But even if we do, he will no doubt double down on his false claims that he wuz robbed, meaning we will still have to deal with a Big Lie movement embraced by tens of millions of our countrymen, a subset of which will be aggrieved, apoplectic white nationalists who feel entitled to use violence to overturn the will of the people.
So we have that to look forward to. Which is nice.
In other words, buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, PART V
Apropos of the looming election, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last put things in perspective quite neatly this week:
Republicans are super excited to renominate a guy who:
· Lost the popular vote twice;
· Left office with the economy in a very bad place;
· Attempted a violent coup;
· Was twice impeached;
· Is currently facing 91 criminal indictments; and
· Was just removed from the ballot in one state because his candidacy has been ruled a violation of the 14th Amendment.
Looking at all of this, both Republican voters and Republican elites are pumped to get Trumped.
Meanwhile, Democrats have an incumbent president who:
· Got more votes than anyone in American history;
· Beat COVID;
· Achieved a nearly-unprecedented economic soft landing;
· Has kept unemployment under 4 percent and seen median household wealth increase by 37 percent; and
· Is generally regarded has having handled geopolitical crises as well as any president in the modern era.
Yet Democratic elites and voters are desperate to get this guy off the ticket and replace him with some unspecified, unknown quantity.
It’s just interesting. Republicans have a manifestly unfit candidate and they continue to drive past all of the off-ramps offered to them. Democrats have a successful incumbent president and all they want to do is find an off-ramp.
(When I posted that on Facebook last week, I faced some pushback on the “beat COVID” piece. Fair point. Yes, saying that Biden beat Covid is an exaggeration. But to give credit for the vaccine to the guy who kept saying that the virus would disappear, who refused to tell people to wear masks, who suggested they inject bleach, is even more off base. Operation Warp Speed succeeded in spite of Trump, not because of him.)
The point is, we absolutely can beat Trump and turn back this wave of incipient American authoritarianism. But it will require all hands on deck, every shoulder to the wheel, and every other cliché in the book.
Americans are tired of hearing that “this is the most important election of our lifetimes.” But for the fifth election cycle in a row (2016, 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2024), it’s arguably so. It will also be the first US presidential election conducted with the added complication of one of the two candidates on trial for some of the worst crimes imaginable for a former head of state, and tens of millions of his followers—our fellow Americans—who either think he did nothing wrong, or don’t care, or are glad he did. Therefore, per above, even if we win, the struggle to reclaim and defend American democracy will only be beginning.
I can’t really even fathom just how intense the next twelve months are going to be.
So Happy New Year, everybody; I hope y’all had a good and restful holiday. We may drink a cup of kindness yet, but first, grave business lies ahead.