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Ruth Marcus:
Properly, I am considering I am often the pessimist and David’s often the optimist. So, I — perhaps we’re switching roles in 2021 or one thing.
However I truly take away two issues from 2020. One is a extra hopeful imaginative and prescient of the pandemic classes, which is that good authorities, accountable management, succesful administration may have labored. We may have, with a greater president, who had assembled a greater administration, and had taken this extra critically from the beginning, and had not failed at nearly each step alongside the way in which — the one brilliant spot is the vaccine improvement, however now we’re botching the rollout of it.
We may have performed higher. We may have had — that 20 million determine is simply appalling. We’d have had plenty of injury and tragedy and financial misery, however not on the dimensions that we’re having, with a greater authorities.
And now we have a president coming in who’s going to inherit this mess, which is so much more durable to scrub up than it’s — was to — is to ameliorate from the start. However authorities can carry out higher than our authorities carried out for us.
The half that, for me, is unsettling is the teachings on democracy. Democracy in — on the finish of 2020 seemed to me much more fragile than I understood it to be at first of the yr, particularly the aftermath of the election, the place we noticed what all people had assumed was a very unassailable democratic norm, that you’d settle for, even when — a president as irresponsible and self-involved and unpatriotic as Donald Trump would settle for the — in the long run, nonetheless, grudgingly and ungraciously, the outcomes of a democratic election.
And, as an alternative, we see the spectacle that’s persevering with and goes to proceed by way of subsequent week on January 6, when Congress assembles.
I’m very nervous concerning the penalties of that, not for Joe Biden, who might be sworn in as president on January 20, however for the way it simply shakes our norms going ahead and makes the unimaginable extra possible.
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