Happy New Year, America.

Happy New Year.

I know everyone would like to celebrate. 2020, that monstrous year, is behind us. A new year has dawned, and we desperately want a new day to be dawning with it. Many, if not most, of us are exhausted from the year that just ended, and we wish with all our power that we can *rest*, and recover, and have our lives return to normal.

I share in this desire, and i’ve certainly done some of it. I’m even allowing myself the luxury of believing there could be a festival this year.

But we all need to not lose track of the world. This is the most dangerous moment for our nation since the 1860s, and it’s not only *within the realm of possibility* that the United States as we know it may not survive the crisis in recognizable form, it wouldn’t even be all that surprising. The crisis is *not* over. It’s *intensifying*.

In some ways this was a surprise. A sudden unexpected event came from out of nowhere and pushed the United States to calamity. But it only brought the United States to calamity because we were already ailing, our civic society and political culture collapsing around us. So in another way, it was a long time coming; depending on which root cause analysis you believe, anywhere from two to five decades.

At a high level, of course, this is three *separate* crisis — — the worst pandemic since 1918, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and a completely novel political crisis which is guaranteed to leave a third of the country believing the election was stolen. But at least two of the crises are in fact a manifestation of a deeper problem: our growing alienation from one another and our decreasing trust in one another. And all three are interacting in ways that are deepening and hardening the alienation and lack of trust.

I am not immune. I feel more rage, this year, and more despair, than in any year past, and I am struggling to live up to my own ideals and principles. But this isn’t about me and my failures; it is about *us*, and the problem that we are facing.

— — — — —

Let’s start with the pandemic. It’s *primarily* a respiratory disease. We’ve been reasonably certain since March that it is airborne (it travels in respiratory droplets that are expelled when people breathe), reasonably certain since mid-summer that there is no significant transmission via surface contact (with a glaring exception that appeared to have involved unrealistically high quantities of virus, most attempts to test this have found surfaces only carry viral RNA fragments, not full viruses), and reasonably certain since fall that it’s aerosolized (it travels in tiny respiratory particles, much like the fecal matter that toilets expel all over bathroom surfaces). Because it’s airborne and aerosolized, we know that the easiest way to reduce the risk of infection is to eliminate contact with anyone who is infected or potentially infected (or, failing that, to minimize it), and to wear masks that reduce our chance of infecting other people by trapping large droplets and decreasing the number of aerosols expelled.

Meanwhile, the virus has *already* killed one in a thousand Americans despite having infected at most twenty percent of us. More than four times as many as the entire number of American combat deaths since 1946 and within close striking distance of the total number of American combat deaths since 1918. The deaths are primarily concentrated among the old, but it still kills an unusually high number of middle aged and young adults (several times the equivalent death rate for a normal influenza) and in a shockingly large number of cases has long-lasting side effects on a variety of different bodily systems.

Several parts of the country at various times (right now it’s Los Angeles, but it’s happened elsewhere, earlier) have simply run out of ICU capacity, leaving patients with other serious health problems with nowhere to go.

It’s a public health calamity unparalleled since the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic.

But we *know* how to control it. It’s been done in Taiwan! It’s been done in New Zealand! The answer is for people to just stay away from other people for a while. If we can’t do that, we can slow it down by minimizing our interaction with other people and insisting that everyone where masks when we do interact with them.

But we haven’t, broadly speaking, done that. Our understanding of the risk of getting sick, our understanding of how dangerous it is if we do get sick, our understanding of how to prevent its transmission, our understanding of whether or not we should even *try* to prevent its transmission or how serious a price we’re willing to pay to do so — — all of these have become *heavily* politicized, and *personalized*.

As an example. many people who always wear masks look at the people who won’t wear masks with barely concealed horror and anger — — those non-mask-wearing types are indifferent to the risk to the health of others and are increasing the risk to everyone; on the other hand, many of the non-mask-wearers look at the mask wearers and think that they are virtue signaling caring about people in order to justify seizing control and ordering everyone else to do their bidding.

One side thinks the other are callously indifferent to the suffering of others and react with moral outrage; one side thinks the other are power mad a*****s who are fraudulently using the suffering of others as an excuse to seize power and enslave their opponents.

Notice how heated this rhetoric is? How *essentialist*? And how deeply it vibrates with the distrust and hatred of the other side?

This *sounds* like mindless bothsiderism. Bear with me, because this isn’t about *sides*. I’m not trying to draw a moral equivalence between the sides. I’m trying to describe what’s happening from a position that’s as close as I can find to outside my own side. Because, as I said, i’m feeling it too. *A rounding error of the entire country is, to some degree or another*. The hatred and outrage at the things *they* are doing.

That’s *incredibly* dangerous. It’s contributed significantly to the fact that we have one of the highest number of covid deaths of *any country on earth* and roughly the tenth highest death rate per capita of any country on earth. But it’s also incredibly dangerous because both these conceptions — — the conception that the other side is full of people who do not care if their actions kill a quarter of a million Americans, and the conception that the other side is full of people who are power mad and just want to control people — — are not conceptions that are easy to give up on and walk back. They ossify. And that ossification increases our alienation from one another and decreases our trust in one another (if it’s even possible to decrease trust from the positions expressed).

— — — — —

Then there’s the economy. We’re in the worst global, and the worst national, economic contraction since the Great Depression. In the US, there was a strong snapback in the late summer and early fall, but that seems unlikely to continue in the winter. Meanwhile, we have the worst unemployment crisis since the 1930s; there was a week in March where *more than 6 million* people filed new unemployment claims; more than a million new claims were filed every week between late March and late July; and every week since Mid March has seen more new claims filed than *any* week before 2020 (including the worst weeks of the great recession). These losses are wildly unevenly distributed; certain industries (tech, finance) are hardly affected at all while other industries (restaurants, live entertainment, masseuses and other personal care services) are all but wiped out. Furthermore, there have been major shifts in consumption patterns, in particular a *dramatic* move towards online ordering of *everything*, and a lot of those shifts will remain permanent (and a lot of businesses which have closed will simply never come back, even if that economic niche is eventually filled by a new company, years hence). It’s a calamity unparalleled in the lifetime of the people *in their 80s*.

*Some* of it was inevitable. As early as late February, traffic to restaurants and bars and other public venues was dropping precipitously, and the people who are taking the pandemic seriously simply aren’t going to go to such places until the pandemic is over, even if they’re legally allowed to. These businesses typically run on small margins. The withdrawal of a huge chunk of their customer base would have wiped a bunch of them out.

But state policy hasn’t helped. In many states, these businesses have been *required by law to close*. To get no income while their fixed costs — — rent, certain utilities, certain logistics operations to make sure things are in place when you can reopen (including making sure you have staff to reopen) — — continue. *If the government had helped them in a significant fashion*, this might have been tenable, but the government gave them a small amount of help in April and then failed to do anything to provide additional assistance *until last week* — — and the help in April wasn’t nearly enough in the first place. Many *more* businesses failed than would have absent the lockdowns, and many of the business owners who have been wiped out by this angrily blame the lockdowns (notwithstanding that some of them would have failed without the lockdowns) because, ultimately, it’s easier to blame someone than it is to accept that the pandemic made the outcome inevitable.

These people are *rightly* furious; their livelihoods, and in many cases the central pillars of their lives, have been destroyed. *I* blame the failure of the government to provide the support that was needed, but many of *them* blame the policies that required their businesses to close.

That makes them *incredibly* receptive to the “the other side are a bunch of control freaks who are misusing the pandemic to steal power and then boss other people around” argument of the anti-maskers; what they have experienced is *literally* what the anti-maskers are saying! (Again, I think they put the blame in the wrong place, but once I accept their decision to put the blame where they did as a thing that’s happened whether I want it to have or not, the attraction of the argument is obvious: they believe their business was just destroyed by government edict (and they may be right, depending on the business), they’re rightfully angry about it, and someone is coming along telling them that the people in power are using the pandemic as an excuse to seize power for nefarious ends?

This argument *couldn’t have been better tailor made for this audience*.

It’s *incredibly* dangerous. Among other things, it causes this cohort of people to be more receptive to incorrect ideas about the pandemic itself; the association of the appealing argument “the pandemic worrywarts are just trying to seize power” with “it’s no more serious than the flu” makes the second argument seem more appealing and more likely to be true, and the same associational logic applies to all of the related arguments. This is *already* getting people killed.

But it also hardens the division and reduces the trust, because, i mean, duh. of course it does. how are you going to trust the people who just destroyed your business, particularly if you now think they did it for no good reason other than trying to grab power? why would you ever even want to *try* to reach out to them and reduce alienation? a saint could, perhaps, but most people couldn’t; their loss hurt too deeply, and believing it to have been done for no good reason leaves them feeling violated to the core.

And it’s not just the business owners. There are *millions* of people who have been unemployed since March. Until July, when there was an extra $600 / week in federal support, it wasn’t so bad. Working would have been better, but pretty much everyone started out taking the pandemic seriously and getting paid to not work so you could help with the pandemic wasn’t terrible. But almost nobody can get by on pure unemployment without the bonus. And a lot of people’s *entire careers* had been destroyed. *I* think the problem was that the government didn’t give them the support they needed to get through the crisis, but many of *them* blame the government for ordering their employers to shut down, for not letting them work. Their anger is every bit as legitimate as the anger of the owners, and every bit as subject to the appeal of the anti-masker “the pandemic is being used as an excuse to seize power” rhetoric.

The leadership of the left, meanwhile, *knows* that lockdowns, capacity limitation, and tougher sanitation rules are required to help keep the pandemic burning slowly enough that ICUs remain usable for other patients. But they *can’t* order total lockdowns the way some European countries have, because enough people wouldn’t comply and because doing so would worsen the economic destruction. But neither can they not have any lockdowns at all because that would dramatically worsen the medical calamity. So instead they are trying to find some sort of system which is both logically consistent *and* minimizes the economic damage, while at the same time influential lobbying groups to whom they owe metaphorical debts are demanding that the rules be tweaked in their favor. The result has been a horrible mishmash of regulations that make no sense and cannot be resolved into a consistent story, and which reek heavily of bought political influence, and that in turn is undermining broader public confidence in measures undertaken to minimize transmission. In Los Angeles in particular, a huge number of people have reacted to the incoherence of the regulations by simply giving up on masking and social distancing as well, in a sort of reverse associative effect: masking and social distancing have been pushed heavily by the same people responsible for these idiotic and incoherent regulations that are destroying people’s livelihood, so masking and social distancing seem less appealing and the need for them to be less likely to be true.

So far, at least, there seems to be a firewall around beliefs about the risk of the pandemic itself, at least among this group; it’s just that they no longer believe masking or social distancing have any hope of preventing spread. Some of it is fatalism. A lot of it is exhaustion. And it’s caused California to go from one of the best states in terms of per capita covid fatalities to one of the worst, with a trajectory that’s accelerating. This is killing *thousands* of people.

There are real, legitimate, serious policy differences between left and right on how to handle situations like this, and this is a situation where policy matters the most, so it’s natural and understandable that there would be increased friction between the two. Whichever side is losing in any given region is naturally going to feel like the other side is causing great harm and be angered by it, and is naturally going to seek to nationalize the conversation to use allies from elsewhere to try to help bring pressure to force change. So some of this was inevitable. But inevitable doesn’t mean not dangerous.

— — — — — — — —

There’s also a divide growing over vaccines, which is incredibly dangerous because it poses the risk that we may not be able to achieve herd immunity through vaccination, but that’s a *tomorrow* problem. I’m trying to describe the situation that constitutes *today’s* problem.

— — — — — — — —

Then there’s the election. And, by extension, about Trump, because the election was entirely about Trump.

Trump’s opponents break down primarily into several different camps. My camp broadly holds that the man is a narcissistic con man who has conned a large segment of America into believing that he cares about them when in fact he is only using them for his own purposes because, as a narcissist, he cares only about himself (and therefore might end up becoming a dictator, it wouldn’t be because he set out to but rather because at some critical moment he made a self-interested decision that had terrible long term results which he didn’t care about as long as he got his preferred personal short-term goals met). He’s got poor impulse control and poor executive function, he makes decisions without thinking them through, he is obsessed about what people think of him and seethes in rage at people who don’t like him enough, and he’s completely incapable of subordinating his short-term needs to any sort of principle.

But there’s also a significant group that sees something much darker: Trump is a con man, yes. But more importantly, he’s an intolerant bigot and either he wants to seize power specifically for the purpose of harming non-white and non-cis-straight Americans or is perfectly happy to co-opt people who want to harm those Americans to help him seize power for his more personal, likely financially corrupt, ends. There’s a lot of overlap between these, and what i’m describing are more poles of a continuum than hard groups, but those are the broad outlines of the two different views.

The thing that makes this dangerous is that, if you’re in the group that sees Trump as being motivated by or willing to tolerate the large scale oppression of minorities, it’s very easy to make the further step to the conclusion that if trump is in it for or indifferent to oppression of minorities, so too must his supporters be. And thus the revulsion they feel towards Trump (because of his willingness to oppress or indifference to oppression) extends to his supporters — — and hardens the divide because why would you want to reach across the divide to people who want to oppress minorities?

The core of Trump’s supporters see something different, though. Trump is this incredibly successful businessman who started talking publicly about *them* in a way that made the people in power listen to their concerns for the first time in decades. Plus, he was the guy who would openly say all the things they’d been thinking about the people in positions of political or cultural power and *force those people to listen*. The angrier those people got, the funnier they thought the situation was — — the truth hurts, doesn’t it? — — and the more they loved Trump. He was the only one who would tell the truth that everyone had been afraid to say, and he was the only one who would speak for them.

This is incredibly dangerous. It’s dangerous because it means *he is the only one who can be trusted*. Anyone else — even his closest lieutenants — could be a liar or a traitor, but he couldn’t be. Even *Bill Barr* was a traitor in the end.

How did we get to traitor? Trump is the only one who tells the truth, the only one who is truly on the people’s side. Anyone who hinders his agenda beyond a certain threshold is a traitor.

The thing that makes it even more dangerous is that part of the core of Trump’s supporters always saw the Trumpist project as a revolutionary one: the goal was to smash the corrupt political institutions which had stopped telling the truth and stopped working for the people and build new ones which would. While I think Trump was a horrible vessel for this, it’s a noble aim well in alignment with historic reform efforts, and it’s *not* primarily or in many cases significantly about racial resentment, it’s more a combination of economic resentment and cultural resentment. It’s really rooted in concerns that would historically have been considered liberal concerns but which aren’t because of a fracture which happened within liberalism decades ago. But it’s become bound up in Trump to the extent that normal liberal restraints, restraints which most of Trump’s core would have supported in practice half a decade ago and which many of them would still claim to support today, no longer apply. And Trump’s rhetoric is amping up their resentment.

*This* part of the crisis existed before the pandemic. But the pandemic made it far, far worse.

What the left saw, broadly speaking, was that Trump’s inconsistent rhetoric around masking and distancing in April, combined with the lack of white house practice on the subject, and his open support in May and June for governors who were obstructing masking and distancing ordinances and for protestors who were objecting to mask mandates — — that this encouraged, and thereby increased in number, support for the anti-mask proposition and for resistance to pandemic restrictions in general. This cemented in the left’s mind a binding between Trump and the negative pandemic outcome, and between Trump supporters and pandemic resistance. This binding has *dramatically* worsened divisions and reduced trust.

The right’s initial reaction has generally been to think that Trump’s doing a good job, that there have been problems but that was inevitable, and the left is just looking for reasons to attack him. This isn’t nearly as big an issue for the right as it is for the left; it sucks and it’s unfair but the left always treats Trump like this so it’s no different than anything else. But it has had the effect of making the right more open to pandemic skeptic arguments, because the people criticizing Trump for his bad pandemic response are the same people who have been attacking Trump for years and in a lot of cases the same people they elected Trump to get rid of, so anything those people are saying is suspect, which means that maybe those pandemic skeptics have a point.

I’m eliding a lot, of course. But at it’s essence, what’s happened is that the Trumpist core has, through pre-existing distrust of the people pushing pandemic safety measures, has been attracted to the anti-pandemic-safety rhetoric of those who don’t believe the pandemic is serious and/or don’t believe that the safety measures work, and they have picked up large numbers of businessmen and unemployed workers whose livelihood has been destroyed and who are furious beyond belief about it, and all of them have adopted the trumpist core’s belief that trump is the only truth teller and the only ally of the people.

At least one third of Trump supporters believe that Biden’s wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia were obtained by means of election fraud, that Trump is the actual winner under the constitutional rules, and that Biden and the Democrats are trying to steal the election. The courts are turning a blind eye. A hundred and forty brave congressmen are planning to try and stop it, as are twelve senators, but that might not be enough, and after that, the only options will be surrender or violence.

At least one third of Trump opponents believe that Trump is deliberately ginning up political support for a controversy based in a lie and using that ginned up support to try to steal the election from the legitimate winner.

*MORE THAN HALF OF THE COUNTRY* believes that one side or the other is currently actively trying to steal the election and that there’s a reasonable chance they can get away with it.

That’s a death knell for the legitimacy of the system. Not of a given President, but *of the system*.

And one of the sides is fueled with the righteous fury of people who believe their economic livelihood has been deliberately and callously destroyed by people trying to seize power for themselves. And one side is fueled with the righteous fury of those who believe that many in the first side have knowingly chosen to do things that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

A sitting Congressman tweeted Saturday night that if he lost a particular court case he’d brought, the court would be saying mass violence was the only option. He deleted his tweet the next day and denied it, but that doesn’t change the fact that he believes it. The homes of the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate were vandalized the same night. There’s no evidence and no reason to believe that these events were connected, but the three of them together suggest a similar mood: a lot of people are ready for violence.

— — — — —

Wednesday is a day of reckoning. On Wednesday, the Congress counts the electoral votes, and it’s at that point that the legally binding decision is recorded. It is the last point at which the election could be stolen. *After* that point, we move from a world in which the election is being stolen to the world in which the election *has been* stolen, and it’s at that point that either the immediate crisis resolves or violence breaks out.

But there is *no* possibility of Wednesday solving the underlying problem, even if it resolves the immediate issue of the election. The ossifying alienation of our political sides, the precipitous decline in trust, will remain. And that is a massive problem because *our system of government cannot function that way and will encourage a winner-take-all struggle between the two sides.

The Republic could fall on Wednesday. I think it’s more likely than not going to survive, but it’s conceivable that it does not. On the other hand, the Republic *cannot be saved on Wednesday*. Ending the election crisis will leave the pandemic crisis still burning and will not help in any way with the underlying issue. *That* has to be the work of the next decade.