2020: A New Year to Forget

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.”

“The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats

I use Yeats’s famous poem to put forward a personal reflection on the fledgling new year of 2020. So many of us engage in wishful thinking about people and life in general. This, sorry to say, runs the risk of engendering feelings of blissful ignorance.

But real-world experience tells us that the nature of human beings and their existential condition can be anything but blissful. This is a dramatic contrast from the annual, global proclamation gleefully bellowed out every January 1 with the ubiquitous phrase, “Happy New Year!”

Like I said, this is a personal reflection of mine, but one that is based on the disconcerting reality we see emerging all around us and in societies in every corner of our planet. Anyone with any ounce of ratiocination at their disposal can perceive that humankind’s collective central nervous system entering 2020 has been rendered highly-vulnerable in the midst of division, strife, and conflict.

Numerous countries, including the United States, were already mired in an “age of anger”—as Indian writer Pankaj Mishra titled his 2017 book—before the advent of 2020. This age of widespread resentment as a response against the darker side of globalization, economic development, and the secular disenchantment of religious sentiment has been an unremitting assault on coherent rationalism and liberal democracy.

Therefore, crossing the threshold into 2020 was already fraught with peril. Barely did we enter it when US President Donald Trump “tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox” as Senator Joe Biden put it, by giving the green light for the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. It was a presidential act of impulsiveness and short-sightedness that brought America to the brink of another devastating war in the Middle East.

And then there is the impeachment of Donald Trump. Eschewing nearly every ethical principle and moral currency available in such a rare and disillusioning political process, the Republican Party has exclusively focused on its members’ selfish motives and careerist expediency by strongly identifying with an American heir to political authoritarianism and social polarization. It’s true that all that heaven allows can be a lot, but in the case of Donald Trump heaven has been far too charitable.

I won’t go over the details of Trump’s blatant abuse of office and lack of respect for the rule of law. There’s plenty of news covering that. What I think is more important is that under his administration, never has America come so close to becoming a fragmented republic not only of insatiable corruption at the highest political levels but one beset by schismatic identity politics. The United States has as a result, become open to the possibility of “full-on authoritarian rule,” to use the words of New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

For too long we as Americans have taken our democracy and greatness as a nation for granted. We were singled out in the history of human civilizations as a society and country unsurpassed, a national entity par excellence. And rightfully so. For decades America had no peer in a wide range of power relationships and practical knowledges. Indeed, one could make the case that the United States of America is the most incomparable country that the world has ever seen and ever will see.

To use a medical metaphor though, the once strapping and healthy body that was the United States of America has been infected by a cancerous tumor in the form of one Donald Trump. As an alarmingly-dysfunctional chief executive, he has put our freedoms and democratic ideals on their heels, narcisstically channeled his energies into shameless political aggrandizement and petty vindictiveness rather than for the betterment of the country, and displayed a glaring disregard for the truth.

I hope I am wrong but under Trump, America is on its way toward becoming something of an post-industrial banana republic. He has as president made a severe mockery of the best and brightest that America has stood for since it declared independence from Great Britain in 1776.

With scarcely a discernible distinction between the obligations of public office and the rapaciousness of unbridled private gain, not to mention his blurring of the border that separates fact from fiction, Trump has actually made the term “dictator” relevant in 21st century American socio-political discourse.

Compounded upon the crisis of liberal democracy and established post-World War Two norms of civility and decency are major, complex, and many-sided threats such as climate change, the unpredictability of artificial intelligence, the danger of cyberwarfare, and the growing gulf between the haves and have-nots. How does anyone find islands of reason and sanity in this ocean of deep despair and venality and even deeper idiocies?

It’s all too easy to say to be optimistic in all of this ugliness. But that’s neither good enough nor practical. Hopeful statements are no longer enough. Some form of collective and universal action is required to prevent our lives from descending into a prolonged Trumpian state of what Thomas Hobbes called “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Fortunately, all is not lost for not all is quiet on the resistance front. The lesson taken among the diverse spectrum of activists and dissidents is that they have the will and the power to withstand and thwart the tidalwave of image over substance, contempt over civility, indifference over engagement, outrage over compassion, ignorance over understanding, autocracy over democracy.

What is needed now among these activists and reformers is solidarity, commitment, persistence, and direction. There is no guarantee that this will bring about the political demise of Donald Trump, the stemming of global warming, the redemption of liberal democracy, or the retracing of our steps back to what we once knew as facts and the truth. But no one should ever give up the belief that mankind can solve its problems rationally and effectively.

With dedicated effort and perseverance, the precarious start to 2020 will just be a bad speed bump on the way to a brighter future instead of being a bad omen of what is to come.

ALLEN GABORRO