Why 2021 will suck (even if it's a good year)
People are hard-wired to concentrate on the worst possible news, especially in the era of social media.
We’re all agreed: with a deadly pandemic, economic uncertainty, an out of control President of the United States who continues to challenge his election defeat, shocking incidents of racist violence and police brutality, protests that have sometimes turned violent, and the worst shooting rampage in Canadian history, 2020 is officially the worst year ever.
The funny thing is, I remember people saying 2019 was the worst year ever. And that 2018, was the worst year ever. And so on for pretty much every year in recent history.
Yeah, I think the COVID-19 year has been unusually traumatic. But according to National Geographic, we’re pretty much wired to believe that things have never been worse:
Our ancestors might disagree that 2020 is the worst year on record. Sure, frightening things are happening, but many of those things happened in the past, too, including the 1918 flu pandemic, during which 50 million people died. Plus, the belief that civilization is on the decline is a tradition as old as civilization itself. Even Ancient Athenians complained in the fifth century B.C. that their democracy wasn’t what it used to be. These days, we call that belief “declinism,” or “decline bias.”
Before the pandemic, a majority of Americans already believed the country was going downhill. About 60 percent of respondents thought that the nation’s influence on the world was decreasing, according to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center. Only 12 percent of the people who responded to the poll were “very optimistic” about the country’s future, while 31 percent were “somewhat pessimistic” and 13 percent were “very pessimistic” about America’s future.
Now, Americans might feel worse about the future than they did before, especially because stay-at-home orders and isolation have been affecting our mental health, which in turn increases the likelihood that we’ll see the world through the lens of negativity bias.
In Western culture, people already have a propensity to interpret present events negatively and tend to prefer the past, according to the research of Carey Morewedge, a professor of marketing at Boston University. That is because our autobiographical memories are biased toward positivity. When we think about the past, we tend to remember positive experiences. This is sometimes called “rosy retrospection,” or “nostalgia bias.”
When we look back fondly on the eighties, most of us don’t think about the AIDS or crack cocaine epidemics. And while we now think of the nineties as a golden age of peace and prosperity, it was a time when Generation X-ers were so disaffected that grunge music became a thing.
As with so much else, social media makes it even worse:
Enter social media, which gives us never-ending dollops of our messy, nuanced, seemingly dire present. It’s no wonder that the past looks rosy when we have so much data on the current tribulations of the world right at our fingertips.
Shocking almost no one, excessive news consumption causes stress. According to a 2017 survey by the American Psychological Association, respondents who kept up with the news cycle reported lost sleep, stress, anxiety, fatigue, and other negative mental health symptoms. The same survey found as many as 20 percent of Americans constantly monitor their social media feeds for updates, and one in 10 check the news every hour.
Although it seems like the news today is more shocking than ever, the idea that media consumption negatively affects our perception of the world is nothing new. In 1968, an ambitious investigation kicked off at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Called the Cultural Indicators Project, it became one of the first comprehensive studies of the influence of television on the attitudes and perceptions of American viewers. The study, led by the school’s dean, George Gerbner, found a direct correlation between time spent watching television and the likelihood that the watcher will perceive the world as more frightening or dangerous, a phenomenon he called the “mean world syndrome.”
Gerber found that viewers who watch violent television shows typically believe violence is common in reality. This fell in line with his “cultivation theory,” which hypothesized that the more television people watch, the more they begin to believe that television mirrors reality instead of being stylized for dramatic effect.
Twenty or thirty years from now, people will be looking back at 2020 with affection. Seriously. If people can have nostalgia for the sixties (an era of racial strife, political assassinations and a controversial, deadly war in Vietman) and the seventies (political corruption, energy crises, skyrocketing crime, “You’re Having My Baby” hitting number one) I’m sure people will be fondly remembering playing “Among Us” more than being locked down and gawking at Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.
In 2020, Joe Biden won the election (deal with it) and the Democratic Party held the House of Representatives. But the party didn’t make gains at the state level like it had hoped, and a Senate takeover appears unlikely. Georgia picked Biden over Trump by a small margin (again, deal with it) but winning two Senate run-off elections is a tall order.
Mind you, if you had told Democrats in 2017 they’d hold the White House and the House of Representatives, with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski holding the balance of power in the Senate, they likely would have been very happy with that. But their expectations were much higher by the summer of 2020, and they expected a blue tsunami. They got a blue ripple.
Why did the Democrats underperform? Byron York writes that the “defund the police” argument hurt them when it came time to vote:
…Remember the debate over the meaning of the phrase "defund the police"? Repeated over and over on the progressive left, it seemed pretty clear -- it meant that cities should no longer fund, and thus effectively abolish, their police forces. But some Democrats worried that embracing such a radical proposal might hurt them politically, so they suggested that it actually meant re-directing some, but not all, funds from police to things like mental health treatment and affordable housing. Nothing too radical.
Every time Democrats thought they had limited the political damage done by a literal interpretation of "defund the police," some progressive voice would mess it all up. For example, in June, the New York Times published an op-ed headlined, "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”
In the recent campaign, many Republicans sought to tie their Democratic opponents to efforts to defund the police. It drove House Democrats running in fairly conservative districts nuts. "The number one concern that people brought to me in my race, that I barely won, was defunding the police," said Virginia Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger on a conference call with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "And I've heard from colleagues who say, 'Oh, it's the language of the streets, we should respect that.' We're in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we are talking about. If we don't mean we should defund the police, we shouldn't say that." Another House Democrat, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, recently said it more succinctly: "Defund police, open borders, socialism -- it's killing us."
But that's just politics. The tragic thing is, the cause of defunding the police is killing real people. Look at a new report in the Washington Post from Minneapolis, one of the nation's centers of anti-police activism: "Minneapolis violence surges as police officers leave department in droves."
"Homicides in Minneapolis are up 50 percent," the paper reported, "with 75 people killed across the city so far this year. More than 500 people have been shot, the highest number in more than a decade and twice as many as 2019. And there have been more than 4,600 violent crimes -- including hundreds of carjackings and robberies -- a five-year high."
All but the most hardcore back-the-blue crowd agrees that American policing has serious problems related to racial profiling, militarization, and excessive use of force. But the extremes came to dominate the debate, as usual, and many voters decided they didn’t want to risk going that far.
The slogan “defund the police” was a disaster from the start, because its defenders were forced to explain what it actually meant. As a very smart man observed earlier this year, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.
If you think the problem with the Republican Party is that it hasn’t sold enough of its soul to Donald Trump, Newsmax host Greg Kelly has an idea for you:
“We need a new party,” Kelly told viewers of his 7 p.m. show, Greg Kelly Reports, on Wednesday evening. “Democrats aren’t cutting it, and quite frankly, I don’t think the Republicans are cutting it. At least a lot of them are just mailing it in.”
Kelly said the new party should be endowed with the acronym for “Make America great again,” the campaign slogan popularized by President Donald Trump in 2016. “The ‘MAGA Party’ — a party about ideas, the Constitution, opportunity, liberty,” Kelly said. “Term limits, the Second Amendment, and canceling … the deep state and the federal bureaucracy.”
“There are some good people, but let’s face it,” he added. “It is big and bloated, and all kinds of waste could be cut away. I think it’s something that deserves serious, serious consideration in this country.”
Allahpundit is all for it: “The only good thing that could conceivably come from the national humiliation we’re enduring this week is a full-on schism on the right between those who support democracy and those who support a fascist coup.”
The schism I wanted on the right was for RINOs like Mitt Romney and Charlie Baker to leave and start something new. But the more I think about it, the more I’m on board with Trump and his cultists quitting the GOP and starting something new - because the Republican Party frankly deserves nothing less.
Yes, there are some true believers like Georgia QAnon Lady in the Republican caucus, but most elected Republicans know exactly what Donald Trump is all about and will confess their true feelings about him when the cameras are off. But they stuck with him anyway, for their own cynical reasons - and because they’re frankly terrified of ticking off a Republican base that has gone all-in on Trump and Trumpism.
Trump is Trump. He can’t help what he is. But the ones who know better are the ones I’ll have a hard time forgiving. And what better fate for them than being stuck with the empty shell of a once-great political party, their reputations damaged beyond repair, while the man who led them off the cliff runs off with the Twitter account and the mailing lists?
American needs a center-right political party, but the one it has now deserves to crumble like one of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos.
When you’re explaining, you’re in the defensive position. Never good. So what I still don’t understand is why the Dems didn’t go on the offensive. Redefine the police issue in a fundamentally new perspective that was neither the status quo nor “defunding”. The stakes were high enough to warrant such an all-out approach...they should have taken control of the situation instead of allowing it to be used to control them. But they were overconfident and thought they had it in the bag. They needed an entirely new approach on this issue to get a real chance at a blue wave.
It’s always wise to check one’s weak spots and work on them, especially when one thinks it’s not necessary.
2020 has been a change of direction. A chance to take a breath and redefine priorities. Many Canadians had far better government support than they would have had if they had ‘merely’ been struggling to find a future under normal conditions. It has given us a chance to learn what we’re really made of and reach out to connect with others with whom we can learn and become stronger, more caring people. If that sounds trite...well, I made up my mind early in life that I would always work on being as good as I could be. It’s something to focus on. Looking for the positives along with the negatives provides a sense of balance and shows us that we’re making progress, if we’re willing to see it.
We’re heading into Covid winter. It’s up to us to get our act together and hold up through this time. A vaccine is coming...
The Trump casino is such a fitting image for its namesake...hopefully, also about to be conclusively taken down.