I suppose that's in large part because there is a fundamental difference between the ten things listed in that post and COVID-19. For those ten, they are a part of my world at least tangentially, but they don't have clear impact on me day to day. The pandemic, however, has fundamentally shifted how all of us live, and has had an undeniable impact on all of our day to day existence. In a sense, I think that I listed out the ten things in the post so easily because they stuck out to me, but they also demonstrate the disconnect between our representative government in Washington D.C. and "real life." I'm sure that speaks to something about our politics, although I'm not going to go down that rabbit trail today. Instead, I'm going to reflect on the pandemic a bit as we pass a year since it was first reported on in China, and rapidly approach a year since it made the way to the US.
Lawrence Wright is an author that I've read on and off again through the years. Most notably, his book "The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to The Islamic State" was an exceptional read on the "war on terror" and the limitations and failures therein. Wright also works for The New Yorker, and he published a piece entitled "The Plague Year" on December 28, 2020. As is typical for Wright, the piece is well written, well researched, and I'd encourage you to read it on your own.
It is not often that we realize vividly that we are living through history. Of course, we intuitively know that something happening in the world will later be written about in history texts. Yet, all too often, those things are much like the list of things about the Trump Presidency I published 1/18/21; close enough we are aware of them, far enough away they don't impact us directly. 2020 was different, however, and that was in large part due to the global pandemic that ground things to a halt, all the while altering our day to day life in ways that were previously unimaginable to most.
In my lifetime there have now been two distinct moments that I can recall knowing I was living in history. The first was September 11, 2001. It's hard to believe that day is nearing two decades old; I so vividly remember aspects of that day, and the realization in that moment of living in history. The second happened much more recently: January 6, 2021 will also live on, and for similar reasons: our nation was attacked by terrorist forces. While the 2001 attacked was international terrorism versus the 2021 attack being domestic terrorism, both shared the target of the seat of our Democracy. Moments like these, much like December 7, 1941, will hold on because they were a direct attack on our very way of life.
The coronavirus pandemic will live on, but differently. Unlike the dates in the prior paragraph, there wasn't a "moment" that you could point to. We saw the pandemic coming, but for many it didn't seem real. In the time between the pandemic becoming a regular news topic in January 2020 and the seemingly sudden suspension of life as we knew it in March 2020, I read quite a bit about the influenza pandemic of 1918. I sought to understand ways in which life might change, while also seeking to understand how the differences in how we live in 2020 might impact the progression of the coronavirus pandemic.
Fundamentally, it seemed to me that the outcome of the 2020 pandemic would come down to a question of technological advancement. The prior record for a new, successful vaccine was about four years; could we beat that? We have improved ability to communicate with every citizen in the country; could we leverage that? We have technology to help keep people alive with the worst of symptoms; could we maximize that? Questions like this hinted at the potential for us to deal with this pandemic far more successfully than we, as a nation and as a world dealt with the 1918 pandemic.
Unfortunately, on the other side were modern factors that could (and would) hold us back. We live in a globalized world, with travel easy and everywhere, with interstate travel extremely easy, coast to coast travel the norm, and international travel a breeze. Would we reign that in? We live in an environment that has demolished trust in the news, in science, and in fact. Would we put that on pause and rally people around indisputable fact? Our politics had continued their evolution to a zero sum game, and 2020 was a Presidential election year. Would we rise towards our better angles for the common good?
The answer, sadly, was that we would not willingly reduce our interstate and international travel; the economy depended on it. Furthermore, we wouldn't really even limit much of our local travel and day to day living; our "freedom" depended on it. Quite the opposite of putting the assault on truth on pause, the pandemic and reporting on it led to a continued blurring of fact and fiction. Our national discourse further became one where opinion is fact if you scream it loud enough, and any fact is merely opinion, no matter how well researched. And as for politics, not only did we not rise towards our better angles, we instead watched as the very core of our democracy came under the most vibrant, sustained assault since the Civil War.
What Wright called "The Plague Year" provides context to everything. We became further isolated, and many of us double or tripled down on Social Media as a viable way to "stay in touch" rather than seeing it as the dangerous medium for disinformation that it is. As we journeyed further down that rabbit hole we further entered echo chambers that fed to our worst fears, our most outrageous impulses. Conspiracy theories (always an American pass time) took hold. Qanon gained strength. Bill Gates was going to track us through the vaccine. The types of fanatical theories that used to be good for an eye roll and a laugh became dangerously close to the mainstream opinion in some circles; they gained audience with the President and became a part not only of his inaction towards the virus, but later of his attempt to stage a coup to stay in power.
The pandemic provided cover to avoid discussions about race which came to the forefront in 2020. It served as a two way weapon; Black Lives Matter protesters could simultaneously be called hypocrites for protesting during a pandemic while also be used as the excuse for an armed siege of Michigan's State House. Everything occurred within the context of the pandemic; the Plague Year encompassed all.
How did the pandemic impact the Presidential Election? It shut down the Democratic Primary earlier than it would have in its absence. It damaged what, at least superficially, appeared to be a strong economy. In the context of those two points, it likely damaged President Trump's re-election chances. At the same time, it provided an "enemy" that was safe to rally everyone around, and to unify the country towards. Had President Trump taken that route, and sought to unify the country against the coronavirus, it is likely that he would have had approval ratings above 50%, something he never once achieved in his Presidency*. Simply put, the pandemic provided President Trump an opportunity to rise above and become something greater than what he was on track to be. With a semi-competent response it is likely he would have sailed to re-election. It also provided him an opportunity to bury his presidency, and to ensure he joined Jimmy Carter as the only single term President in the modern era whose term did not extend his party's control (i.e. George H.W. Bush extended the party control from two terms of Reagan**).
The reality of the Trump Presidency can best be understood in the context of the pandemic, because it distilled him down to being more of what he truly was. He was a divider, who sought to push others against one another and to align himself with whoever won in his mind. He was a master at creating conflict out of nothing. He was a disruptor to the system, bent on undoing everything his predecessor(s) did, even if he didn't have a plan to replace it, even if his plan to replace it was basically the same thing, only worse. Up until the end, President Trump was a man who knew how to run on a cult of personality, but the emperor repeatedly was found to have no clothes. Nowhere was this more evident than his pandemic response: promising it would go away, claiming it wasn't bad, hypothesizing about injecting bleach or sunlight to cure it, pushing half-baked cures that the FDA couldn't and wouldn't dream of approving. If you want to know how he ran anything (foreign policy, domestic policy, his businesses) all you need to is look at the disjointed, haphazard response he oversaw to the pandemic. He was who he was and, much like all of us, he became more of it in a high pressure situation.
Make no mistake, it could have been better. Testing in Canada is far more efficient and effective than it is in the US. Other nations are already lapping us in their vaccination regimes. We decided to take the road less traveled, the road that wasn't based in science and research, but was instead based on a lack of responsibility by the federal government, and the impulses of a man who understood marketing a persona, but not governing. We will never know how much better things might have been had we put together a coherent plan at the federal level to manage and respond to this pandemic. All we can know for sure is that 2020 became The Plague Year, and history will likely judge our nation's response as inadequate to the moment. For all his failures in things like foreign policy, President Trump will likely be most remembered for his administration's response to COVID-19. Or, more accurately, his failure to respond in an effective manner.
*President Trump will leave office the only President in the history of Gallup's polling to not achieve an approval rating of at least 50%; his average approval rating will be 41% which is a record low.
**Single Term Presidents who ran for re-election include Bush (following Reagan), Carter, Ford (followed Nixon), Hoover (followed Harding and Coolidge), Taft (followed McKinley and T. Roosevelt), Benjamin Harrison, Van Buren (followed Jackson), John Quincy Adams (followed Monroe) and John Adams (followed Washington). So, basically, Trump becomes the third President ever to represent a change from the prior President's party, serve a single term, and lose re-election, along with Benjamin Harrison and Jimmy Carter. That, coupled with being only the third President to be impeached (along with Clinton and Andrew Johnson), the only President to be impeached twice, and the President with the most bi-partisan impeachment, all indicate that his Presidency was quite consequential historically, even if he is likely to be ranked among the worst Presidents by historians.
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