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Foresight Isn't Bad Either
Dec. 31st, 2020 02:02 pm2020 is coming to an end for real, and I'm too exhausted to really gather my thoughts.
What a hellish year, despite my relative "can't complain". I suppose there was some good stuff in those first few months, but that doesn't even seem like it was in the same era. The Trump administration is coming to an end at least, the political era which it represents is, well, no longer at the beginning.
Polarization is still at an all-time high. The integrity of even the Nixon-era GOP, such as it were, is long dead. The idea that the US might pull together in the face of an exogenous emergency is dead. The stuff this administration did to undermine our preparedness for the exact crisis we're in now is mind-boggling. And even without this crisis the Trump administration would have been a historical stand-out in divisive governance, cruel policy, diplomatic chaos, and rampant and overt corruption.
Despite this, 47% of the country still voted for Trump, more still voted for what is now fully the Party of Trump. The incumbent President is still desperately scrambling for some way, any way, to just throw out the election in however many states, and he largely has the support of his party at a national level. It seems that half the country has completely lost sight of basic things, like "it's bad when hundreds of thousands of Americans die of infectious disease in a year and many more are hospitalized". They would not have lost sight of the badness of this outcome under a Clinton or Obama administration! And that's when they don't take the next step to outright denial that any of this ever happened, like there's some sort of global conspiracy to take COVID-19 seriously when in fact it's a non-issue. It's nuts.
2021 is going to be bad, I think. Still, some things are pretty clearly good news. The President of the United States won't literally be an internet troll. COVID-19 isn't coming as a surprise. COVID-19 vaccines already exist and are being deployed.
What a hellish year, despite my relative "can't complain". I suppose there was some good stuff in those first few months, but that doesn't even seem like it was in the same era. The Trump administration is coming to an end at least, the political era which it represents is, well, no longer at the beginning.
Polarization is still at an all-time high. The integrity of even the Nixon-era GOP, such as it were, is long dead. The idea that the US might pull together in the face of an exogenous emergency is dead. The stuff this administration did to undermine our preparedness for the exact crisis we're in now is mind-boggling. And even without this crisis the Trump administration would have been a historical stand-out in divisive governance, cruel policy, diplomatic chaos, and rampant and overt corruption.
Despite this, 47% of the country still voted for Trump, more still voted for what is now fully the Party of Trump. The incumbent President is still desperately scrambling for some way, any way, to just throw out the election in however many states, and he largely has the support of his party at a national level. It seems that half the country has completely lost sight of basic things, like "it's bad when hundreds of thousands of Americans die of infectious disease in a year and many more are hospitalized". They would not have lost sight of the badness of this outcome under a Clinton or Obama administration! And that's when they don't take the next step to outright denial that any of this ever happened, like there's some sort of global conspiracy to take COVID-19 seriously when in fact it's a non-issue. It's nuts.
2021 is going to be bad, I think. Still, some things are pretty clearly good news. The President of the United States won't literally be an internet troll. COVID-19 isn't coming as a surprise. COVID-19 vaccines already exist and are being deployed.
