In 2021, every silver lining for the United States came with a dark cloud

WASHINGTON—Pretty much everyone in the United States agreed that 2020 was a terrible year.

A pandemic claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. There was mass civil unrest in the streets. Donald Trump began the year being impeached and finished it rejecting the results of the election he lost.

But at the start of 2021, there was optimism about moving on: a new president elected, COVID-19 vaccines starting to be deployed. It felt like some stability wasn’t too much to hope for. Maybe the kind of life — and politics — people still thought of as “normal” might be on its way back.

I started 2021 with a trip to a rally at an airfield in rural Georgia, where the crowd chanted, “Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!” as the defeated president insisted to those gathered that he had actually won the election, and that victory was being stolen from him.

“We have to go all the way, and that’s what’s happening,” Trump told them. “You watch what happens over the next couple of weeks.”

No one had to wait weeks, of course. Less than 48 hours later, his supporters mounted an insurrectionist riot at the Capitol, threatening to hang vice-president Mike Pence and trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. This was before 2021 was a week old.

So much for returning to normal.

If 2020 was a like long and terrible bender, on which the U.S. staggered from one sickening crisis to another, 2021 turned out to be the hangover that just would not go away. Again and again, the promise of a new start gave way to the same old nightmare.

Take the Republican Party. Its leaders went from distancing themselves from Trump’s false election claims in the aftermath of the insurrection to refusing to convict him in his impeachment for it. From there, they rejected congressional inquiries into the actions of that day, then embraced Trump’s election-fraud lies and set to work in earnest on changing laws and electing officials to make sure future election results could be fixed or overturned.

President Joe Biden’s victory, alongside his party’s majorities in both houses of Congress, promised an ambitious fresh start — one he said would restore democracy in the U.S. — but wound up often stumbling in its efforts to clean up old messes. A couple of giant spending bills — one for pandemic relief, the other for infrastructure package got passed, and even drew some bipartisan support. But Biden’s signature big-government bill, the Build Back Better plan, got dragged out through a year of Democratic Party infighting made necessary by the persistence of the Senate filibuster. Those same ingredients also stalled out his attempts to pass new voting rights and election integrity laws to address the democratic crises Trump had brought on.

Every silver lining revealed a dark cloud. An economy recovering from COVID-19 faster than anyone might have predicted, with sky-high job gains and rising wages, brought soaring inflation and persistent supply-chain problems. An end to the fruitless and painful 20-year war in Afghanistan came with a chaotic and painful withdrawal. Some executive orders on race relations and a guilty verdict in the George Floyd trial — fruits of what was thought to be a “racial reckoning” in 2020 — came alongside the emergence of an “anti-woke” backlash that saw fights at school board meetings and angry racial resentment come to the fore in a manufactured panic against a hazily defined doctrine of “critical race theory.”

And the pandemic. People were allowed to hope that the virus’s rampage might subside when vaccines were made widely available in April, when New York City reopened for indoor dining and entertainment in May, and again when Biden declared that “independence” from the virus was imminent on July 4. But then came the Delta variant, and then Omicron, and the U.S. ends 2021 in barely a better position — in terms of case spread and hospitalizations — than it began the year.

The failure to prevent hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths might sting the worst, because it revealed a strain of belligerent stupidity in a country that rejects even fairly simple solutions to fairly complex problems. The spread of the virus could be contained by the use of barely inconvenient masks, yet large swaths of the population refused to wear them. Protection from serious illness and death came in the miraculously rapid development of vaccines that were quickly manufactured and freely distributed, yet 40 per cent of the population failed — and in many cases, outright refused — to get the shots.

That failure is most troubling for another reason: if citizens of the world’s richest and most powerful country won’t take the simplest steps to protect themselves and their loved ones from a deadly virus, what hope is there that they will ask their politicians to head off the looming existential threat of climate change? The changing environment bared its teeth in the U.S. this year, with record numbers of forest fires, floods and tornadoes taking a deadly toll, but objections to environmental measures proved a major obstacle to Biden’s economic legislation.

It turns out that the storylines that defined the annus horribilis of 2020 — the pandemic, the Trump-led threat to democracy, racial conflict, climate disaster — have also defined 2021. They will carry over into 2022, still ugly, still unresolved. There have been changes, but many problems remain the same.

And unlike a year ago, there is no obvious turn of the page — an incoming president, a newly released vaccine — on the horizon. As the U.S. enters the new year, the same players will continue to play their roles on the same stages, and try again to find a way to write a happier ending.

In the meantime, there is less talk of a “return to normal.” After a while, what seems normal becomes different from what it used to be.

Edward Keenan is the Star’s Washington Bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca