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It was a dreadful year, obviously, and that applies to US politics, too. Nevertheless, believe it or not, some stuff was worth celebrating. Here are five good developments:
Republicans for democracy: In a year when the Republican Party overall showed an alarming and apparently accelerating lack of support for US democracy, we should recognise those who stepped up when it counted. Begin with Mitt Romney, who was the only senator in his party to risk the consequences when he voted to remove President Donald Trump from office. That was an honest-to-goodness-profile-in-courage moment.
And don’t forget the NeverTrump conservatives who were not only able to see the flaws of the man in the White House (which really wasn’t hard to do), but who were willing to examine how their own party reached the point where Trump could dominate it. And then there were the GOP politicians in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who, when push came to shove (sometimes literally), chose democracy over blind loyalty to a Republican president.
It’s not that these politicians are always heroes of the republic. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, for example, has gone right back to fighting to make it harder for people to vote, just as he did before the election. But when it really counted, Raffensperger and many others made the correct choice.
Elections and their supporters: A pandemic. Post office troubles. Underfunded governments. Unprecedented nonsense coming from the White House. Even threats of violence. Yet voters, state and local governments, and thousands and thousands of poll workers combined to make the 2020 elections remarkably successful. The turnout was the highest in over a century (or ever, given voter rules), and the process went relatively smoothly and with no hint of irregularities. Indeed, there was so little in the way of fraud that Trump’s lawyers didn’t have much of anything to allege in court, no matter what they alleged on third-rate cable-news shows.
Yes, we shouldn’t ignore significant efforts to make voting harder even while the virus was spreading. But even Republican states (like my own Texas, for example) did quite a bit to make the election go reasonably smoothly.
Diversity, Republican Party edition: After several cycles in which Republicans nominated Anglo men for the overwhelming bulk of winnable open seats and seats held by Democrats, the party finally made progress in fielding candidates that look like 21st-century America.
—Bloomberg