Somehow, 2020 seems to have just barely begun, and also to have been 10,000 years long. Does anyone remember the United States squaring off with Iran in an abortive war that involved American missiles blowing up a Iranian general and Iran mistakenly blowing a Ukrainian airliner out of the sky? Yeah, believe it or not, that was this year. Adam Schiff’s impassioned speech to the Senate, leaving everything on the field as he begged for a single witness before Republicans handed Donald Trump a free pass? Also 2020. Trump getting the president of South Korea to ferry a birthday card to Kim Jong-un? Nancy Pelosi demonstrating how she felt about Trump’s state of the disunion? Both 2020. Things actually happened before we descended into virus-Confederate statue-murder hornet stew.
But the year that was is definitely not the year that is … and it’s a long, long way from what’s coming next. It’s hard to exaggerate just how terrible 2020 has already been. It’s also hard to exaggerate how transformative it’s becoming. The pandemic is still raging. The protests against racist actions by police that reignited in the wake of the murder of George Floyd are far from over, and those protests are being met with resistance from an all-new, all-stasi federal force. Trump and Republicans are still trying to forge racism, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories into a campaign strategy.
Only this time, it doesn’t seem to be working. Because Trump is aiming his message at a world that no longer exists.
For many Americans of every race, Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 was devastating not because it signaled a shift of the nation’s policies to the right, but because Trump specifically ran on the uglier demons of our nature. He didn’t bother with dog whistles about racism, he was explicitly racist. He didn’t disguise his fascistic mix of xenophobia and nationalism, he wore it proudly—on his head, if not his sleeve. And he won. In what was a shock only to a subset of white Americans, it turned out the nation really hadn’t come very far at all. Americans of color … already knew this.
But 2020 feels different. That doesn’t mean we’ve “solved racism” or anything like it. Of course we haven’t. We’re a lot closer to curing COVID-19 than we are to taking the first step toward genuine equity. However, back in June, Dr. Darien Sutton-Ramsey wrote an article giving four stages of learning about racism starting with the stage where white people both don’t understand racism and weren’t really trying to understand it, through the point where white people are both aware and actively using their privilege to challenge that privilege. It’s too much to suggest that the nation as a whole has moved even one notch on this scale—and it’s way off base for me to even attempt to make that measure—but the crowds that have come out in the fight against racist police violence in every city, the marches that have happened in even the most conservative rural areas, the baseball players kneeling at the start of this season’s games all suggest that something has changed. There is movement.
Except maybe in Boston. I’m looking at you, Red Sox.
That’s far from the only thing that seems to have finally tipped over in the last few months. When President Obama looked for a stimulus package following the Great Recession in 2009, it took months of negotiation to gain a $831 billion program that covered a decade up to and including the first two years that Donald Trump was in office. In 2020, the CARES Act alone authorized expenditures of $2.2 trillion after a debate of two weeks, and it was just the first round of dealing with the pandemic. Not only have there been additional rounds of legislation, more will come. And when the disease itself is in the rear view, there will be still legislation to address the lasting economic impact.
Somewhere back about April, the entire Chicago School of Economics that had dominated not just Republican thinking, but American policy, for decades … was quietly flushed. No one seems to have noticed, and Senate Republicans are still pounding their chest over the refusal of minimum wage workers to get out there an make ‘em a sam’ich no matter what the cost, but that argument appears to be done. It’s a dead certainty that once Trump is enjoying golf in some non-extradition country, Republicans will attempt to wave the “but the budget” flags once more. It’s just as certain that no one will listen to them. That ship has sailed, sunk, rusted, been made into a movie by James Cameron, and become home to a billion barnacles. It is over.
The Republican stance on the environment? Dead. Objections to national healthcare? Dead. The whole rugged individualism means never having to give a damn about anyone else? Gravely wounded.
It’s far too much to suggest that America is going to emerge from this crisis as a progressive paradise. The sheet music to Kumbaya can definitely stay in the drawer (please). Heck, it’s not even certain that anything will change. After all, we did just emerge from a record national recession caused by deregulation of banks and a massive imbalance of wealth, and the almost immediate response was to make the imbalance greater, strip away more regulations, and grease a pipeline to take tax dollars straight into the pockets of billionaires. America has an astounding ability to absorb any blow … and then pretend that it didn’t happen so we can avoid learning a damn thing. See Trump, racism.
But right now it certainly feels different. This isn’t the Black Death (thank God), and it’s not going to spur a new Renaissance. This isn’t the Great Recession (yet), and it’s unlikely to usher in a complete rethink of the nation. Still, it is big—the most consequential year of this century, and likely for many decades of the previous century.
Right now, 2020 America is still wearing 2019 America’s clothes, but it’s not that country. 2021 America is going to shed that disguise … and what we’ll find is likely to be something very different than what we expect.