A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 1 of 2, . . . or 3, maybe.
No one can doubt that 2020 has been an awful year for humanity. And 2021 is going to start off that way too. Just rolling over from December 31 to January 1 doesn't make things suddenly better.
March, they say, comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. . .but this year. . .
Which is not to say that years don't have their own characters or that 2021 will not turn out better than 2020. It almost certainly will. By this time next year COVID 19 should largely be beaten and, it if isn't, it'll be something that we will start receiving annual vaccinations for, or at least a lot of us will.
Back to 2020.
2020 has been the year in which the entire world was put to a stress test and the United States and its citizens particularly were. There's been a lot of personal tragedy and disappointment, with some disappointment measuring towards tragedy.
By and large the United States hasn't come out of this looking good. But then a lot of the Western world hasn't come out of it looking very good either.
2020 was always going to be a stressful year for Americans as something has gone wrong with the American body politic, and moreover American culture, that really started to fester within the last twelve years. In future years historians are going to debate about the point at which what we just went through became inevitable, just as they debate the point at which the Civil War, the last somewhat analogous American event became inevitable. I have my own theories about this, but suffice it to say, something really went off the rails in our culture and its politics during this time frame.
It had been going off the rails, in all honesty, for some time well before that, like a lot of things, it can be tracked back to the mid 20th Century. Whatever else we surmise the culture started to experience some serious decay following the Second World War and pretty quickly at that. A cynic might say that the culture went from hypocrisy, on some things, to libertinism, and we could debate which is worse, and they'd be at least partially correct. But at any rate cracks in the culture formed during the Second World War and began to widen considerably in the 1950s. They really started to split in the 1960s when the Baby Boom generation came into their own.
That generation is still "in its own" and its fighting out a lot of its fights right now, even as its members increasingly reach advanced old age. Be that as it may, in the 1980s a shift started to occur that was a reaction to much of what had occurred in the 1960s.
As that occurred, the cultural left in the country moved increasingly far to the left and following them, but some time behind them in terms of the trend, the cultural right did as well, with reaction to the left being a strong part of the latter, and a sense of inevitable triumph and superiority being a feature of the former. At the same time, the long post war economic dominance of American industry faded and ultimately industry, to a large degree, simply left the United States. Economic globalism and cultural globalism came in, fueling a sense of abandonment in a large middle demographic in the country whose cultural, political and religious values had been celebrated as defining those of the nation and who were now told that none of that was true. Reactions from the right to this became increasingly strident as did the policies of the left, with none of it really helping that large American class that tended to define in the past who Americans were supposed to be. To make it worse, some of the reaction on the right made erosions into advancements that had served that American middle demographic, particularly in education. Science education and solid history education took a pounding in the late 1980s and the level of science education that was common prior to those years has never returned to average Americans.
By the time of Barack Obama's election in 2008 there were a lot of Americans who were prepared to accept arguments that Obama, who was a centrist candidate if ever there was one, was a radical leftist, with accusations of "Socialist" and even "Marxist" being leveled against him. As we've noted before here, up until the last two years of his term about the most Obama could be accused of was being largely ineffectual, a reflection of his policy making style, but perhaps simply despairing of acceptance he took a diversion to the left at that point.
In 2016 the Democrats made the bizarre choice of running Hillary Clinton for the Oval Office when she was one of the most despised individual politicians in the United States. That year the middle revolved in the form of support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, with the Democrats essentially fixing their primary system so that Sanders couldn't possibly win. That left Trump the natural candidate for the dispossessed middle.
Not really appreciated at the time, the choice of that demographic to back Trump also meant that traditional Republican conservatives were either pushed aside or even out of the GOP. The GOP rapidly became Trump's party, with a rearguard of the traditional GOP backing him but for their own purposes. Trump embraced the concerns and radicalized beliefs of his "base", which included a long festering view that the left was the cultural enemy of the country. The Democrats managed to feed this feeling through ineptness, choosing to oppose Trump at ever turn. When that failed, they chose to attempt to impeach him, an effort that was doomed before it started. All of this fueled an increasingly radicalized Trump base in the belief that Trump was a hero standing against what has been practically portrayed as a Marxist tide, when in reality it was the old Boomer left trying to retain its gains, including significant gains made in the last two years of the Obama Presidency.
None of which is to say that the middle doesn't have a set of legitimate complaints. And not just in the US, but seemingly all over the world. Politics over the globe have increasingly come to resemble the United States's recent politics to a much greater degree than the American press might imagine. Parties based on populism and traditionalism, some of which are highly radical, have made progress all over Europe, and not just there. The trend has been global.
And then came COVID 19.
COVID 19 entered the world in a way that no plague has, ever. The Spanish Flu may have entered during a World War, but the Germans didn't blame it on the Allies and the Allies didn't blame it on the Central Powers. It just was. Prior pandemics haven't been attributed to political actors. But in the heated political scene of 2020, views on the virus and what it meant rapidly took on a bizarre political atmosphere and a "with us or against us" type of character. Donald Trump took action fairly quickly, but then he cast doubt on the danger of the disease, which took off to the point that by mid 2020 there were those who were arguing the entire matter was a Chinese conspiracy. Support for or against measures to counter the disease came to signal political points of view. This carried on to views about the vaccine, with people making medical decisions based upon their politics or even worse based upon wild rumors that were developed by the most extreme members of the camps and given life by an anti scientific movement symbolized best by the prostilzatons for it by Jenny McCarty, a boob model twit who came to fame by prostituting her mammary glands for cash and who would not be taken seriously on anything else in any other era of humanity.
That McCarthy would be taken seriously enough, before the pandemic, to give rise to a line of thought prevalent mid crisis, says a lot about the decline of American education in some fields and its politicization. But that's only one stick thrown on a fire that's gone from smoldering in the last twelve years to raging.
Coming out of World War Two the United States was not only an industrial titan, but no nation rivaled it. Together with Canada, Australian and New Zealand, the US possessed the world's only major economies that didn't feature largescale firsthand devastation of its infrastructure during the war. America's position in the global economy had less to do with American genius, although that was certainly an aspect of it, than it did with being the only giant economy which was not bombed during the war. That fortunate positioning was sufficient to keep us going for thirty years before other industrial nations began to catch back up, and catching back up was what they were doing. Naively secure in our new position, we not only failed to guard against what was occurring, we actively encouraged it, such that by the 1970s up and coming Asian economies began to seriously erode the American economic position. Nothing has been done since then to address it, with one single exception.
That erosion meant that while the United States came out of the gigantic post Vietnam War recession of the 1970s, it did so as a nation that was shipping its industry overseas wholescale and which was creating no new jobs to replace those being lost. At the same time it became apparent that a country which had been a petroleum exporter, in the Oil Age, was now an oil importer, and had been for some time. The first blue collar losses helped bring Ronald Reagan to power, to make a course correction, but it was already clear at that point that the nation was dividing sharply into two sections and people realigning accordingly. New England liberals whose liberalism had been based on the views of Episcopal and Methodist preachers going back to colonial times began to base their views instead on those like Chomsky and his fellow travelers. Mid state blue collar Democrats who had backed politicians like Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy now saw their fates aligned with prewar radical right wing Republicans who had opposed FDR. Southern Democrats abandoned the GOP wholescale, brining with them a set of views that were formed in the 18th and 19th Centuries and which had never changed, driving out the first batch of Republicans who were fiscal conservatives but more moderate elsewhere, and whose Republicanism was based on a conservative economic model more than anything else. With the drive still invested from the fall out of the Vietnam War, in spite of the success of eight years of Ronald Reagan, "progressives" in the Democratic Party, who shared nothing in common with the Progressives of the Republican Party from early in the 20th Century, began to seriously imagine remaking the United States from a solidly centered (small d) democratic nation based on a Protestant world view combined with a radical democratic impulse into one that had its religious and cultural origins expelled and instead based on a court enforced cultural secularization and collectivisation which was generally alien to American culture. In this they were aided not only by the fallout of the Vietnam War but also by the pornification of the culture by the Sexual Revolution and the destruction of the industrial economy.
Already by the 1990s these divides were becoming sharp, if not fully obvious to all. The rise of a new right lead by individuals like Newt Gingrich foreshadowed what was coming even as the last of the old left found new voice in the GOP through the Neo Conservatives. The election of solidly middle ground Bill Clinton sparked a massive radicalized and fairly anti democratic effort in the GOP to expel the President through an impeachment, an effort that never ever should have been attempted. The second George Bush and his first rival Al Gore were throwbacks to earlier calmer times, but in Barack Obama those on the left read in hope for a radical change even if Obama himself did not hold such radical views. This in turn took the lid off of the rust belt centered populism that was mistaken for conservatism in that branch of the GOP.
Barack Obama's Presidency drug up a lot in both parties, much of which hampered his Presidency and made it fairly ineffectual. By the last two years of his time in office he'd accommodated himself to being the presumed head of the liberal wing of the party and began to accordingly give some voice to that wing, although it was really the court, in the form of the Obergefell decision, that sparked a revived radical left in the Democratic Party. That same decision helped ignite the already shouldering populism in the GOP as individuals who, as noted above, had defined Americanism culturally were informed that htey not longer did, and that their views were no longer really wanted.
During the same time, as already noted, the industrial base of the country did not recover at all. On the fringes of the Midwest, that being the West, times were good in that the high prices of fossil fuels sparked economic booms that made the rugged region a success. As that occurred, however, some areas began a population influx of those from the coasts, such as Colorado, that changed their cultural and political natures permanently. The collapse of the fossil fuels in the 2010s, however, brought the economic grief of the Rust Belt to the Far West, which was already conservative in its views. The impact, however, of a large influx of migrants for economic reasons from other areas of the country had begun to change the region's political views from radical libertarianism to math the insurgent populism that was already at work in the GOP elsewhere.
And that brought us to the election of Donald Trump.
Whatever Trump himself may stand for, for his supporters he has come to symbolize the stand of a "real" America against an insurgent "foreign' one. Democrats have reciprocated in a way by urging their supporters to "resist" Trump, recalling the "resistance" of World War Two, something which is unfortunate in a way as the resistance itself of that era was heavily left wing and which is moreover unfortunate in that it suggests that those engaging in the "resistance" are "resisting" an illegitimate power.
It was that view that took us in a little over three years from heated polarization to outright intellectual battle lines. Populists in the GOP already regarded the Clintons as criminal and Obama as a socialist. Democrats seemingly confirmed that by immediately resorting to words recalling the struggle against fascism of the 1940s and informing the Republicans that they basically would not work with the elected President. They then confirmed that through a dedicated effort to remove him. That effort in turn convinced the GOP populist that the Democrats were in fact an enemy, something made very easy by a section of the Democratic Party already having declared itself to be just that.
With that view, the politicization of everything became easy, just as it tends to in times of real extreme tension. And then that extreme tension arrived in the form of SARS-CoV-2, or as it is commonly called, COVID 19.
All through the election there were those who called for extremism. Old symbols of radicalism came out and were demonstrated. Then George Floyd was killed by police in Minnesota and that in turn was used by various groups as a basis to demonstrate against the government and the times. In far off areas which saw themselves as removed from the Minnesota event, this seemed like a thinly veiled excuse to attack the nation. And the pandemic became worse and worse.
All of which leads us to where we now are.
And where we are at is not good.
The middle of the nation in ever sense has voted for Joe Biden in what can truly be regarded as a vote to return to normalcy. This means that most of the electorate has not bought off on the arguments of the populist and it doesn't seem the country as engaged in a war against a foreign alien radical ideology. They have also indicated, through their vote, that they don't want to radically remake the American nation and they basically share a lot more in common with the cultural ideal of the populist than they do with the radical democrats. They've basically decided to elect an old, JFK style, middle of the road imperfect Catholic, rather than a fire breathing radial of any stripe. That probably tells us where we need to go, and how we want to get there, but it also tells us that there's an element of the nation that wants none of it.
On the right, right now, there's a very strong populist element that has become anti democratic, but doesn't recognize itself as such. It's defining whose vote is legitimate to an extent by their politics, and its also given way to conspiracy theories that demonize their opponents to the point where it can be believed, in spite of all evidence, that they lost the election due to fraud. Inherent in that belief is the belief that real Americans would have voted only one way.
At the same time, there are those who are already discontented with the new Democratic President as he shows no signs of equally extreme radicalism, but in the other direction. This body, accustomed to rule through the courts, would have the new President pack the Courts with jurists who would disregard the Constitution, even though those very jurists are the ones who saved the election from being overturned. Following that, they'd force the remaking of society in their progressive image, a world devoid of gender, faith and connection with reality.
This is a road that we started on somewhere during the last seventy years, or at least the last fifty. We're going to have to get off of it, or the nation won't survive. Finding the off ramp wont' be easy, but it also means that if we don't do it, we're headed for disaster.
One thing already noted here is that, demographically, the country, and indeed the entire Western world, is headed towards a more conservative, and more educated, future. The character of the up and coming demographics doesn't resemble those in control and those in the streets very closely. So maybe we'll be saved from ourselves by our future selves.
Anyway you look at it, the fall out of things that rose up since 1945 are plaguing us in the extreme right now, with a genuine failure to really deal with a plague as part of that. Lincoln called on the better angels of our mercy in the 1860s, we don't seem to be calling upon them in 2020 very much.
All of which is helping to make 2020 not only an an annus horribilius, but probably a watershed as well. The question of whether its a good one, or we're just going off a cliff, isn't evident yet.
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