Next Year Has to be Better

This has been the strangest of years. We have collectively given up freedoms that took centuries to win, to temporarily take on a pandemic that has enforced misery for millions and killed tens of thousands. The speed at which these concessions have been mostly freely accepted would have alarmed this commentator less than a year ago, but we are where we are. Politically, we have come close and may come within a hair’s breadth again, of the USA becoming an authoritarian country. Joe Biden’s victory restores some of the constitutional equilibrium for now, and the alternative, a Trump win, would’ve capped off one of the most demoralizing years in living memory. The United Kingdom finally agreed the terms under which they would leave the European Union, and one of the world’s greatest democratic institutions, the Labour Party in Britain, became electable once again as it elected a new leader.

The ease with which restrictions on movement, congregation, religious worship, and even sexual relations were imposed during this global health crisis should be of deep concern long after the Covid pandemic has been vaccinated out of history. The willingness of mainstream opposition parties throughout Europe to go along with governments almost universally uncritically when it came to essentially placing their populations under a form of house arrest, meant that the job of protest was left to the lunatic fringe. That should not have been the case. Instead, there needed to be constructive criticism of a strategy that imposed collective societal punishment. It has been a brutal year. Lip service has been paid to issues of loneliness and mental health, supposedly ‘buzz’ concerns of enlightened governments. Locking people down has been the bluntest of instruments, an amputation to save the patient. Let’s hope we’ve learnt how cruel a mechanism it is before we succumb to the next pandemic. There is no contradiction in saying you believe Covid is a very serious illness, but also believing that civil rights should not be conceded without question.

The election of Joe Biden is still being contested by Trump. Not that he has any ground to stand on; the courts have rejected his baseless appeals, some Republican party elected officials have finally begun to accept the Biden win, and there’s an element for some of this being just more Trump ‘theatre’. But this is a serious. The transition of power is being put under threat by the outgoing President himself; he has thousands of supporters ready to pull triggers if he gives them the signal. The talk of civil war just over a month ago wasn’t hyperbole; it was a reasonable worst case scenario reading of how things could develop in one of the world’s more unstable large democracies. There are several ‘purple’ states on a knife-edge, and white domestic terrorism is a constant threat, both manifest, and on the horizon. America is the best and worst of us, and it is time for the good to step up and outweigh the bad.

The challenge for Biden is immense. He has to be a healing President, but part of that process will be a reversion to upholding the law and the constitution. The Trumps and their associates may or may not be prosecuted by various authorities in the coming years. 46 faces a tricky high-wire act on this; his supporters, this writer, and a few GOP senators would like to see some accountability for the last four years. Yet, he can not be seen as vindictive. He must reinforce democratic institutions, and bulwark legal independence. Part of this may include expanding the Supreme Court to allow for the implementation of democratically passed legislation. He needs to have an Augustan presidency, that of the wise and just leader, and this will a very difficult balancing act. He has already appointed some excellent members to his incoming government, and it is to be hope that his will be an era when Trumpism is eradicated.

Next year should be better. Vaccines are being unrolled, restrictions will be lifted (if not, we’re in real trouble as free societies), and there will be a democratic fight-back in the US. Sadly, for Remainers, the EU dream has gone. It will come back on the agenda, but this will be a middle to longer term project, with Labour unlikely to seek re-entry as part of their next manifesto. It has been a win for populism and nativism when the World may be looking outwards rather than the self-absorption exhibited by the New Right Tory and Blue Labour voters. It’s their loss, but also, more cruelly, the loss for the 48% who voted to remain. Progressive politics should never be taken for granted. It is a constant war of advocacy, compromise, principle and small-wins. Let’s hope 2021 is the start of a greater pushback against the anti-politics of the last five years.