After a catastrophic 2020, the big story of 2021 could be a hopeful one

December 31, 2020

One feels reckless nurturing hopes for 2021. If John McCain were here, the late Republican senator from Arizona would no doubt say farewell to 2020 with one of his favorite lines: “It’s always darkest before it gets pitch black.” After the year the world has just endured, wouldn’t low expectations be more prudent? A year that began with a failed impeachment and ended with a failing soft coup. A year in which Depression-level unemployment coexisted uneasily alongside a booming stock market. When a virus fractured our daily routines and politics and — in one way or another — broke a lot of hearts.

And like gum on the nation’s shoe, 2020 looks determined to stick around. The pandemic, it seems, will get worse before it gets better. The economy is making some weird noises under the hood. The stock market is as fizzy as cheap champagne, full of bubbles threatening to go pop. Not to mention the president, stomping his foot on an empty ballfield, demanding do-overs.

Yet the big story of 2021 could be a very hopeful one. This will be the year of the coronavirus vaccines, the vaccines that we have in hand and possibly others in the research pipeline. Though delivery of these scientific wonders is off to a predictably slow start, there is an $8 billion jolt coming via the new covid relief package, and President-elect Joe Biden has laid down a marker to deliver 100 million doses in his first 100 days. The end of the pandemic, in other words, is a matter of when, not if.

Covid-19 won’t be entirely eradicated in 2021, but the tables will turn. We know this from experience, for these vaccines are just as effective as the vaccines that tamed smallpox, polio and measles. In the coming year, the cloud of grief, frustration, resentment and even helplessness bred from the pandemic will lift. That’s the promise of a 90 to 95 percent effective vaccine. Arm by arm, syringe by syringe, it corners a virus and traps it there. The numbers will be astonishingly large: billions of doses eventually, around the world. But the arithmetic of eradication is straightforward.

There likely will be problems of production and distribution, continued resistance to basic public health measures, and further spread of conspiracy theories cynically fomented by enemies foreign and domestic. Without a doubt, there will be sorrow — oceans of it — for those who will die of covid-19 before the end is reached. Still, no matter how poorly the pandemic is handled in the United States and across the world this winter, by next winter things will be better. That’s vaccination math. We might even emerge from this ordeal having learned a few lessons about public health and responsible leadership that will make us better prepared for the next emergent pathogen, foreseeable but unforeseen.

And there might be even more to hope for. Covid-19 is not the only fever burning across the United States. Blind partisanship, fractured trust and a widespread belief in the nation’s decline are sapping America’s energy. Successful deployment of safe and effective vaccines could be help to douse those fires as well.

Of all the disheartening facts of 2020, perhaps the gloomiest was the transformation of simple masks into partisan weapons. It hurts to think of sacrifices nobly borne by past generations: lives and limbs lost in battle, the hardships of rationing. “We shall pay any price, bear any burden,” a president once pledged on behalf of the American people. But for many of us, in these troubled times, it was too much to wear a lightweight mask in public. Could the vaccination campaign collapse under the same decadent solipsism?

Hopefully: no. To an unusual degree, every faction in American politics has an interest in success. Trump supporters are heavily invested in the vaccines’ success. The vaccines are President Trump’s answer to the charge that he botched the covid-19 crisis. On the contrary, the president launched Operation Warp Speed, a sprint to vaccination. Trumpists need vaccination to be a huge success so history might confirm their conviction that they were right all along.

On the other side of Partisan Gulch, the incoming Biden administration is equally invested in success. Ending the pandemic is Job One. And the quicker it ends, the better Biden’s chances will be to tackle Job Two, whatever it is. The election gave Biden a mandate for an attitude — of common courtesy and emotional maturity — but not for an agenda. For that he needs to build some political capital by putting the pandemic in the rearview.

Congress is also stoutly pro-vaccine, House Democrats and Senate Republicans alike. They, as much as Trump, deserve credit for speeding the vaccines. Lawmakers put aside their grudges and stratagems long enough to add billions for vaccine development and delivery into the Cares Act last spring. And now they have added billions more.

Private philanthropists and public corporations also have skin in the game. In short, the coronavirus vaccines are the largest bipartisan, even nonpartisan, project undertaken by the United States and its partners in many years. The eventual win over covid-19 will be a victory for pragmatism over ideology.

Not to be naive. Powerful values, biases, sentiments and interests will continue to divide Americans. But there is a difference between partisanship, which is baked into American government as one of many checks on power, and nihilism. Defeating covid-19 one bare upper arm at a time can deliver a booster shot of common purpose and shared success to hold the civic machinery together when partisan energy threatens to tear it apart.

Another disease in need of a cure is the anemia of official credibility. This has been a long time coming. Half a century ago, in the disillusioned early 1970s, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas diagnosed an illness he called “legitimation crisis,” in which governments lost so much trust that they could no longer address common goals. Since then, the diagnosis has been applied to all varieties of public, corporate and religious institutions.

Now America’s legitimation crisis has reached Stage 4, in which even the institutional authorities themselves have lost faith. What used to be government is now “the swamp.” What was the intelligence community is now the “deep state.” Institutions that formerly served as referees of the civic arena — the media and higher education — have themselves lost credibility. Even the Supreme Court is “very incompetent and weak,” in the opinion of the same president who has stamped that court for the next quarter-century with his appointments.

Institutions regain credibility by delivering results. Trust can’t be demanded from a free people; it must be earned. The coronavirus vaccination campaign is a chance to regain a measure of public confidence in legislative bodies, government agencies, research universities, public and private hospitals, philanthropic foundations, and pharmaceutical companies large and small.

Finally, one hopes the vaccines will relieve America’s malady of misplaced pessimism. Historians tell us this is a chronic disease, flaring up unpredictably in a nation that is otherwise pretty confident. Among its side effects is amnesia, the kind that makes people think of the 1950s as purely an age of happy families and booming factories — when it was also a time of existential dread over nuclear arms, mutual suspicion over Cold War loyalties, an unpopular war in Korea and widespread labor unrest.

The past looks pleasant because we know that it came out fine in the end, even if those in the midst of it were sure that it wouldn’t. So it can be for 2021. Despite our divisions and raw emotions, our missteps and mistakes, we are not defeated, because (as a poet once put it) we have gone on trying. A novel coronavirus got the better of us; knocked us on our heels in confusion; tossed us out of our jobs and schools and disrupted our ways of life; exposed the weaknesses — and strengths — of our leaders; highlighted the courage of some and the heedlessness of others; killed far, far too many.

We pressed on. Now we will start getting the better of the virus, thanks to innovative vaccines developed in record time. Underlying strengths of the United States — the human capital from around the world, the infrastructure of research, the global friendships — will turn the tide in coming months. We need only a sense of urgency and a faith in math. That’s reason to be hopeful for 2021, and reason to go on trying, undefeated.

Megan McArdle: We should embrace the Cassandras when the next disaster comes

The Post’s View: The vaccine rollout is flagging. It must be accelerated.

Jonathan Capehart: Dionne Warwick wasn’t exactly wrong about the coronavirus vaccine

Paul Waldman: Yes, we should ‘politicize’ the pandemic

Molly Roberts: 2020 was the worst year, except for all the others

Source: WP