Susan B. Glasser writes:

The best thing you can say about 2021 is that it will soon be over. A year that started with an insurrection at the Capitol is ending with more than eight hundred thousand Americans dead in the Covid pandemic, as a contagious new variant, Omicron, produces the biggest wave of cases yet. Inflation is the highest it has been in decades. The twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan concluded with an embarrassing and botched American retreat. The Republican Party, rather than rejecting the defeated ex-President, has redoubled its commitment to Trump and Trumpism, purged dissenters, and embraced outright denialism, whether of vaccines or election results. Who’d have thought that 2020 would ever look good by comparison?

Joe Biden, taking office amid multiple crises, was never going to have it easy. He campaigned on the promise of restoration—of sanity to our national politics, of competence to our governance, and of civility to our public life. He has lived up to his personal part of the bargain, at least, returning dignity to the White House, rejecting the inflammatory lies and demagoguery of his predecessor. The nation is no longer subject to early-morning and late-night tweetstorms of Presidential invective. The White House is neither a superspreader of misinformation nor, as it was under Trump, a platform for personal aggrandizement and self-enrichment.

Many of the national indicators have improved, too: more than seventy per cent of American adults are vaccinated; there are promising new treatments for Covid; unemployment has fallen, wages have risen, the economy has rebounded, and the stock markets have hit record highs that would have had Trump beating his chest. Biden managed to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill through Congress, with more than a trillion dollars in new spending, something that Trump never delivered. All of this, to some Biden backers, is an example of a President who “won big with a bad hand,” as David Frum put it the other day.

But the national mood is sour, and understandably so. Sanity, competence, and civility have not exactly returned to Washington; normalcy is not just around the corner. Biden, it is now clear, promised what he couldn’t deliver in a nation divided against itself. He trafficked in hope that was arguably as misleading in its own way as Trump’s lies. More than four hundred thousand Americans have died of Covid since Trump left office—many of them because they refused to get a free, lifesaving vaccine. More than two-thirds of Republicans to this day refuse to accept that Biden is the legitimately elected President, preferring Trump’s Big Lie to the uncomfortable truth of his defeat. There is no restoration possible in such a country. [Continue reading…]