How Will the History Books Remember 2021? – POLITICO

Despite its pathetic fatuity, the assault on the Capitol vividly highlighted the depths of alienation that afflicted tens of millions of citizens. To a striking degree, Americans had become distrustful people, with scant confidence in their institutions and waning trust in each other. As those grievously disaffected malcontents continued to stew in their resentments, delusions and disappointments, they sought ever more aggressive challenges to the norms, values and institutions that had sustained the republic for more than two centuries. A tribal political culture had emerged, polarizing the electorate and paralyzing the political system.

And even as the federal governments successful promotion of unprecedentedly rapid vaccine development impressively demonstrated the awesome capacity of the modern state to marshal financial, human and scientific resources at scales and velocities once unimaginable when political will could be mustered and focused vaccine refusers no less impressively demonstrated the degree to which plain old irrationality could torpedo even the most beneficially enlightened policies.

Meanwhile, as Americans continued to squander their dwindling stock of social capital, and struggled to sustain an effective government of, by and for the people, on the other side of the planet, an ascendant China, repressive but remarkably resilient, was relentlessly demonstrating the efficacy of a radically different kind of social and political order.

Two societies, two systems of governance, two visions of the world ahead. Which would prevail as the 21st century unspooled was a question that lay uncomfortably and urgently in the lap of the future.

Claire Bond Potter is professor of historical studies at The New School for Social Research and co-executive editor at Public Seminar.

In 2021, Americans learned that schools were critical to a United States economic infrastructure that was underprepared and unready for a national crisis. Every school onsite or online became both a public health project and a political target. School board meetings became politicized and angry, and elections to those bodies suddenly became hot contests. As the nations instructors, students, parents and school administrators navigated in-person Covid-19 protocols and emergency online learning, school boards, librarians, administrators and teachers were bombarded with revived demands, often driven by political operatives, that subversive teaching materials about race, gender and sexuality be purged from classrooms.

What did Americans learn? When parents became remote or essential workers, they were also expected to be teachers aides, revealing that underfunded schools were a critical component of an equally underfunded, and understaffed, American childcare system. When students appeared in class erratically, often on mobile phones, the country learned it had vast internet deserts, affecting millions of Americans ability to fully participate in society. It learned that many public school students, and presumably their parents, were so loosely attached to the educational system that an estimated 3 million simply disappeared. When teachers, already exhausted from 2020, quit or retired in record numbers (Florida, a state hammered by both Covid-19 and the culture wars, saw vacancies increase by more than 67 percent), the nation learned that school personnel were frontline workers, too. In 2021, Americans learned that what used to be the best school system in the world had bent and broken under a cultural and public health crisis and that it was crucial infrastructure that had to be systematically rebuilt.

Catherine Ceniza Choy is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book Asian American Histories of the United States (2022) and professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

The racial and medical scapegoating of immigrant and U.S.-born Asian Americans, the fastest-growing group of all racial and ethnic groups in the early 21st century, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic persisted in 2021. According to the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center, between March 19, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021, nearly 1 in 5 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders experienced verbal harassment, shunning, physical assault and/or civil rights violations. Although Filipino nurses comprised just 4 percent of the U.S. nursing workforce, they accounted for approximately 25 percent of Covid-19 cases and deaths among nurses. Tragically, Asian American contributions to health care did not make them immune to coronavirus-related harassment and violence. Age-old stereotypes of Asians as disease carriers, perpetual foreigners and exotic objects were tenacious and deadly. These hate incidents and the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021, which resulted in eight lives lost, six of whom were Asian American women, challenged cherished notions of the American dream and its promise of equality and upward social mobility. Asian Americans reckoned with contemporary anti-Asian violence and its longer history by organizing to raise awareness of their over 150-year-old presence and unrecognized contributions. Activists relied on existing Asian American advocacy organizations as well as created new ones. Artists and scholars documented loss, grief and survival so that we would never forget.

David W. Blight is Sterling professor of history at Yale and the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

Behold, I have put my words in your mouth to pluck up and to breakDown, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Jeremiah 1:9-10

The year 2021 was remembered most vividly by its first month, in which a sitting president and his allies, including within Congress, attempted a coup against the United States government by trying to overturn an election and install the defeated Donald J. Trump instead of the duly elected Joseph R. Biden. The unprecedented, violent insurrection of Jan. 6 prompted the second impeachment, and eventual partisan acquittal, of Trump. In the long run, however, the coup began to succeed by failing, morphing into a potent Lost Cause ideology that millions clung to as a victory narrative a victory over liberalism and pluralism. A right-wing authoritarianism, increasingly prone to violence, craved a hopeless utopia without multiculturalism and rooted securely in local or state control.

2021 would be remembered as the year of a calming yet stymied Biden presidency, hamstrung by the Covid pandemic, by the withdrawal from Afghanistan and by divisions in his own party embodied in a senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, who saved his patriotism for his own state. The Biden presidency was also thwarted by a virulent new neo-fascism embedded in a Republican party openly devoted to voter suppression, racism, states rights, tax cuts, investment portfolio enhancement and one of modern historys most pathetic yet successful Big Lies. The stolen election of 2020, Trumpisms most potent lie, thrived by sheer dint of its repeated uttering on Fox News. Political polarization, between completely separate information systems organized along ideological lines, morphed by the end of 2021 into what many commentators began to label as a new kind of civil war. Americans steadily lost hold of the very meaning of a nation, a composite of many peoples, cultures, and regions that all give up something dear to build and preserve the whole.

2021 was not the single moment of apocalyptic breakup of the 21st-century American experiment in democracy but the prelude to less visible yet routine coups against the constitutional republic. 2021 revealed the dysfunctional elements of the U.S. Constitutional system, especially the undemocratic U.S. Senate, the Second Amendment, the absurd electoral college and a fatefully politicized Supreme Court serving for life and driven by righteous right-wing ideologies. That Republicans practiced voter suppression so openly led to violent clashes during elections. Advocates of universal suffrage embraced going to jail and other civil disobedience to fight voter restrictions.

The left fought back in the wake of 2021 with the tools they had. The House of Representatives Jan. 6 investigation exposed the crimes against the state and the Constitution by former President Trump and his allies, although only handfuls were ever prosecuted and jailed after the right-wing took back control of Congress in 2022.

Year after year book prizes and artistic and journalistic awards would go to those who served as Jeremiahs, showing the people the future of their republic, always teetering on the brink of political and environmental collapse. The post-Trump era would produce great history, drama, art and literature as the nation atrophied and at times exploded in the streets. Mass shootings increasingly gave to classical tragedy a new American meaning. Across the turbulent world ravaged by pandemic and climate change, America was increasingly considered a failing democracy and often referred to in countries where liberal democracy survived as The United States of Guns. The Trumpian Lost Cause built its monuments in laws and stories and well-funded networks of communication, while liberalism fought with reason and logic against a foe with too many guns.

Brenda E. Stevenson is the inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton chair in Womens History at St. Johns College, University of Oxford.

2021 was a year filled with hope of return to a normal way of life that had been stripped bare by a global pandemic that, by New Years Day of 2021, had killed at least three million, more than a tenth of that number of lost lives in the U.S. Just a few weeks before the end of 2020, the first American had received the Covid-19 vaccine. There was (or seemed to be) some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel thanks to rapid development of multiple vaccines that proved largely effective in curtailing deaths of those who contracted the illness. By April, some 200 million vaccinations had been given and Americans were optimistically returning to work, school, houses of worship and more. The economy, too, experienced a recovery, with unemployment falling over the year to just over 4 percent.

Go here to read the rest:

How Will the History Books Remember 2021? - POLITICO