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Looking back at 2020, we see how Covid-19 has made this a dystopian year.
There are a series of vignettes towards the climax of Roland Emmerich’s 1996 film, Independence Day (ID4), when the Americans launch a global effort to push back the alien invasion by rallying their allies. Somewhere in the desert, RAF pilots receive a radio message.
“The Americans are planning a counterattack!” says the radio boy.
“Well, it was about time!” an airman responds.
This was not a nod to British irascibility; It was, rather, an ode to American exceptionalism, subtle messages that in world affairs, everyone looked to the United States for leadership, and that Americans were the perennial goodies, the heroes of any global history, so much so that even the descendants of the British Empire were subordinate.
In 2020, myths like these and how were shattered.
Not that the rest of the world didn’t know better. There have always been examples of American hypocrisy, transgressions, and occasional war crimes. There was the soft handling of successive administrations of repressive regimes that turned out to be oil-producing allies, or the fabric of “weapons of mass destruction” lies that led to the Iraqi invasion.
But the myth persisted, partly because of American dominance in popular culture, be it in literature, film, or music, and partly because Americans themselves would be among the first to question their government and try to fix things.
And since they always strived to be better, goodwill would return once again. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. “… the arc of the moral universe is long, but it leans toward justice,” America may deviate, but the arc always leans toward its idealistic principles.
That does not appear to be the case in 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic, and the Trump administration’s response to it, has exposed the nation like nothing else could have.
Nor was this something that happened in isolation. For decades, there has been a slow build-up: the anti-science thinking that saw climate change and the rise of the anti-vaccine movement denied, the denial of systemic racism, the growing wealth gap and social inequality, the disparity between how criminalize blue-collar and white-collar crimes, partisan politics and the inordinate influence of lobbyists in policymaking, the rise of white supremacy, and fascism … the list is almost endless.
It is not that the United States is the only country suffering from these problems. You can also check many of the boxes above for Malaysia.
But we are talking about the United States. Ronald Reagan’s “lighthouse on the hill” turned out to be the light of tiki torches.
All of this culminated in the arrival of Donald Trump to the presidency, and the four years of his administration have focused on how he tackled the pandemic: a series of blatant lies that denied it was a problem at first, something cooked up by the media of communication and the Democrats, and then another hose of lies to pretend your government was doing an exceptional job. Cue: the Everything is amazing song of The Lego Movie.
Accused but ‘not guilty’
Even without the pandemic, the year did not start well for President Donald Trump. In December 2019, the United States House of Representatives had indicted him for attempting to extort money from the Ukrainian president to interfere in the elections for him.
January began with Trump’s trial for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Despite the overwhelming evidence, the Republican-led Senate decided to acquit him, and all Republicans except Mitt Romney (Utah) voted “not guilty.”
As for Romney, in breaking with his party, he said: “The serious question that the Constitution requires senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and heinous that it rises to the level of ‘a felony and a felony less’.
“If he did. The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.
“The president withheld vital military funds from that government to pressure him to do so.
“The president delayed funding for an American ally at war with the Russian invaders.
“The president’s purpose was personal and political.
“Consequently, the president is guilty of a terrible abuse of public trust,” he said.
His one voice was not enough. Trump stepped down and immediately began a purge of witnesses who testified against him.
BLM resurgence
A protester reacts by standing in front of a burning building during a rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 29, 2020, in the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck during several minutes. . – CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP
In May, a white police officer calmly knelt on the neck of George Floyd, an African American who had been accused by a store clerk of using a counterfeit $ 20 bill to subdue him. He ignored pleas from passersby that the suspect was not resisting arrest and also ignored Floyd’s complaints that he could not breathe.
Floyd died, and the more than eight minutes of footage that captured the incident is probably one of the most harrowing videos I’ve ever seen.
America’s racial problems had come home once more. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were unleashed not only in major cities in the United States, but even in other countries.
The president’s response was to deny that there was systemic racism in the United States and to claim that police brutality towards minorities was rare and amounted to a few bad apples. He called the protesters “antifa terrorists” and tried to get cities to use force to quell these protests.
When the protests reached Washington DC, Trump felt he needed to establish himself as the president of “law and order”, although he was indicted, with a photoshoot in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, near the White House. Police were ordered to fire tear gas at peaceful protesters to clear their way.
It was the kind of scene you would expect in a Third World country.
The final nail
President Trump holds up a Bible as he stands in front of St. John’s Church in Lafayette Park from the White House in Washington on June 1, 2020, after law enforcement officers used tear gas and other police control tactics. riots to forcibly expel peaceful protesters from the area. – PATRICK SEMANSKY / AP
Meanwhile, more scandals broke out, including exposures about how he had evaded federal taxes for taxes. None of that stuck to “Teflon Don”.
But he still couldn’t escape the pandemic, despite several pleas that his administration was in “total control” or that the coronavirus would “just go away, just like that.”
Meanwhile, public health officials and scientists were not only marginalized, but defamed for being operatives of the imaginary “Deep State”, prompting death threats against many of them and their families, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. , director of the National Allergy Institute. and infectious diseases.
Few governments have managed the pandemic well. There were some who did exemplary work in various stages, only to stumble at some point. There have been too many deaths to pretend otherwise.
But some have certainly done better than others, and in a Pew Research Center survey of 14 countries, 12 countries thought their governments were doing a relatively good job. Public approval was highest in Denmark (95% good, 5% bad), Australia (94% good, 6% bad) and Canada (88% good, 11% bad).
Yet the UK and US populations gave their governments the go-ahead: in the US, 52% of respondents said the Trump administration had mishandled the outbreak, while 47% approved of it. The figures were similar but reversed in the UK: 46% thought the UK government did a good job and 54% said otherwise.
The average rating in the 14 countries surveyed was 73% good, 27% bad.
The US think tank also noted, in the report published in August, that the UK and the US have “high levels of political polarization.” For example, 76% of Republican supporters believed the Trump administration had done a good job, while only about 25% of Democrats said the same.
In the United States especially, not listening to scientists and not wearing a mask have become ideological and political statements.
For many Americans, the entire year has been a wake-up call. Many discovered, for the first time, that the United States is the only developed country without universal health care, and that its social safety net is so rickety that it hardly exists.
Even though the United States recorded the highest number of deaths per capita (and at one stage, a quarter of all infections worldwide occurred in the United States), even though its president had been indicted, a Despite the revelations of his tax evasion, despite all the rampant racism, corruption, cronyism, and nepotism in his administration, more than 74 million Americans voted for him to be reelected in the November U.S. presidential election.
Sure, his opponent Joe Biden got more than 81 million votes and an important 306 Electoral College votes to win the election, but that hasn’t stopped Trump’s train, with his administration claiming the election was rigged and refusing to recognize Trump. Biden as president-elect.
Trump’s attempt to stage a coup to deny the election results and the mandate of the people is perfectly in keeping with his character, but the tragedy for Americans is that so many Republican political leaders and sympathizers back his despotic moves.
Biden has a lot of work ahead of him. Not only does he have a host of domestic problems to solve, including the rising tide of white supremacy and domestic terrorism, he will also need to undo so much damage to politics and public perception to restore America’s position on the world stage.
Establishment Democrats backed him in the primaries because he has centrist leanings and because they believe he can wrest cooperation and consensus from the reality-denying Republican Party.
That may not be good enough given the position America is in today. For all his ruthlessness and careless antics, Trump did not lose in a landslide, illustrating the fact that the problem is not just Trump’s and that the United States is suffering from deep-rooted social problems that may require generational changes to fix. .
Biden’s next presidency can and should be just the first step on a long journey.
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