When I began gathering together links for my top stories of 2021, there was really no question what would count as the top story of the year. Only one of this year's big news stories will have a prominent place in the history books a hundred years from now.
This is the year that broke America's tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.
There were many bigger threats to that tradition in the past, but none that broke through quite the same psychological barrier. When Abraham Lincoln gave his first inaugural address, for example, a number of Southern States had already formally declared their secession (and his address was one long plea for them to pull back from the edge of madness). But they hadn't yet fired on Fort Sumter, much less that US Capitol building.
This year, a politically motivated mob, incited by the outgoing president of the United States, rioted at the Capitol in an attempt to block the congressional certification of the results of a presidential election. It was an insurrection against the operations of a free society—relatively small in scale and unsuccessful, but still an evil precedent and a trial run for the future.
HOLIDAY SALE
Go to www.TracinskiLetter.com and take advantage of our Holiday Sale.
Buy a subscription or renewal and get 15% off, now through the end of the holidays. Follow the link just above, which will allow you to pay with Paypal or with a credit or debit card, or go to www.TracinskiLetter.com.
Buy now before this holiday sale ends.—RWT
The Big Lie
Let's start with the basic fact, which is that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election—and there is no rational basis for doubting it. As I observed back in February:
Every aspect of Trump's "stolen election" fantasy has already been tested in the courts and has failed for lack of substantial evidence. Claims of election fraud were either dropped from legal briefs as it came time to file them, or the claims were reduced down to levels so small that they obviously had no impact on the outcome of the election. The upshot was summed up by Trump sycophant Lou Dobbs, who complained, "Eight weeks from the election and we still don't have verifiable, tangible support for the crimes that everyone knows were committed…. We have had a devil of a time finding actual proof." But how can "everyone know" the election was stolen if there is no actual proof? That's the sort of thing you can shout on a cable news show, but most lawyers blanche at the notion of saying that to a judge.
Every "stolen election" claim still emanating from the right is based on a similar, subjectivist epistemology. Trump's supporters just know the vote was rigged—and the evidence that will finally prove it is always the next claim which will break the whole story wide open. Any day now.
Yet the claims just keep failing. Pro-Trump "audits" in Arizona and Wisconsin—essentially, free-lance citizen recounts launched in an effort to ferret out evidence of vote fraud—either found nothing or actually increased Biden's lead.
Not only has every stolen election claim failed when subjected to ordinary judicial standards of evidence, the momentum in the courts has moved in the other directions. Bogus claims of vote rigging smeared the reputations of specific individuals and businesses, who have been able to sue for damages and are very likely to win.
So we have to start with the fact that the "stolen election" is a Big Lie used by Donald Trump to avoid acknowledging his own failure. It is not an ordinary political lie, but one that has the potential to end our republic.
[T]o call this election stolen, based on a complete absence of evidence, would mean that one could make the same claim about any election. It would mean that elections as such no longer determine anything, that the results will be determined instead by angry mobs.
As Mitch McConnel eloquently put it, "If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We would never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost." That is precisely what Donald Trump set into motion.
Incidentally, I don't think we have fully taken on board how much worse the Capitol insurrection could have been—because at least only one side was seeking to overturn the rule of law. As some have pointed out, what if the rioters' left-wing antipodes had shown up to stage a recreation of Portland's Antifa-versus-Proud Boys brawls?
And it's not just Antifa. During the riot, I started getting replies to an old group text from my brother-in-law: messages from his old Army buddies talking about how, if this goes on any longer, they would fulfill their oaths to defend the Constitution by personally suiting up and going to DC to put down the riot. These are not wild-eyed left-wing radicals but fairly standard centrist liberals.
There has been a lot of chest-thumping recently from the usual performative tough guys on the right cheering on the prospect of a new civil war. But their big conceit is that they would be the only ones fighting, and I supposed they imagine they would win easily. As I recall, this kind of hubris was a problem the last time we had a civil war.
This Is How Democracy Dies: With a PowerPoint Presentation
The insurrection at the Capitol was incited as a last-ditch attempt to support a kind of electoral coup, and it might have been an even greater crisis if this had been pushed through without violence.
That coup plot has been revealed much more thoroughly in recent months, largely thanks to the congressional investigation into the events that led up to January 6. We discovered, for example, that Trump's most fanatical loyalists in the White House had produced a legal memo—and I use the term "legal" very loosely—sketching out how to overturn the election result. A similar approach was presented in a PowerPoint slideshow—no, really—which included the declaration of a "national security emergency" and the seizure of all ballots by the federal government, overriding the states' constitutional role in counting the vote. But the keystone of all of these proposals is: "VP Pence seats Republican Electors over the objections of Democrats in states where fraud occurred."
If you don't believe this, check out a recent interview with Trump advisor Peter Navarro sketching out the version of this plan hatched by him and Steve Bannon.
"'We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1:00 PM, Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,' Navarro told The Daily Beast. 'It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn't even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it....
"'The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this: by law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress....
"Later that day, Bannon made several references to the football-themed strategy on his daily podcast, War Room Pandemic.
"'We are right on the cusp of victory,' Bannon said on the show. 'It's quite simple. Play's been called. Mike Pence, run the play. Take the football. Take the handoff from the quarterback. You've got guards in front of you. You've got big, strong people in front of you. Just do your duty.'"
Navarro claims that this strategy did not require and was even undermined by the Capitol riot, but take that with a giant lump of salt. The administration knew by then that Vice-President Pence was not inclined to follow their plan, so when Trump told the throng of protestors to march to Capitol—and some of them did so chanting "Hang Mike Pence"—this was his final effort to intimidate Pence into collaborating with the coup.
Pence deserves a lot of credit for saying "no." But the big hero here is Dan Quayle, the former senator and vice-president, whom Pence sought out for advice and who reportedly told him, "Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it." Thus, as David French makes clear, the whole outcome of that day hinged on a single decision by Mike Pence, who could have annulled a legitimate vote and plunged the country into civil war, but who chose not to.
The Anti-Republican Party
What happened in January alone would be a big enough story for the whole year, but the next part of the story is that Trump's election lie has been embraced and adopted by the whole Republican party.
It started when the majority of Senate Republicans voted not to impeach Trump over his role in the insurrection.
The Republicans in the House who voted not to impeach, and the senators who voted not to convict—43 of them—are voting to accept this as a normal part of their political lives. They have voted for tyranny—not over the country as a whole, but over themselves, personally. They have voted to live the rest of their lives in fear of Trump and his mobs—and of whoever manages to establish himself as Trump's successor.
This has been followed by an effort on the right to weed out "disloyal" Republicans—that is, those not loyal to Trump personally—so that "he will go into the 2024 election cycle with far more people willing to do his bidding who run the elections in key states." This is paired with a push to get Trump loyalists elected to local offices in charge of administering elections.
Thus, as I wrote in the middle of the year, "It's Not About This Election, It's About the Next One."
Many of the crucial decisions that prevented the Trump strategy from working were made by local officials who are Republicans, but who refused to sacrifice the integrity of the system for temporary partisan advantage. Many of the rulings that tossed Trump's spurious claims out of the courts were made by judges appointed by Republican presidents.
These people are Republicans—or were Republicans. Will they remain so? Will they still even be welcome in the party?
Consider the defenestration of Representative Liz Cheney, who was voted out as chairman of the House Republican Conference for refusing to kowtow to the Trump party line. At the time, I quoted a good summary of the new rules for Republicans and added my own conclusion.
"You shall dismiss inconvenient truths as subjective. While accusing Democrats of relativism about values, Republicans have retreated to relativism about facts. When Biggs was asked about Cheney being forced out for telling 'the truth' of what happened in the election, he dismissed it as 'her vision of the truth.' Biggs complained that she should have set aside her 'personal feelings' and embraced 'what 90 percent of our conference believes.' This elevation of belief over reality makes a mockery of the conservative slogan that 'facts don't care about your feelings.' To protect Trump's lies, today's Republicans cling to their feelings and deflect unwelcome facts."
This last is the reason why the Republican Party isn't going to recover any time soon. A man and an organization can bounce back from an error. But they can't bounce back from a fundamental decision to place feelings over facts.
By the end of the year, I had come to a very harsh conclusion: "The Republican Party is quickly making itself a menace to our whole system of representative government, openly attempting to arrogate to its incumbents the power to negate the choice of the voters."
I am, in this respect, a single-issue voter. I will only support a party that I can trust to respect my vote in the next election.
The Great Transmogrification
All of this is bad enough, but it is part of a larger ideological transmogrification of the political right.
I noted the problem early in the year when Marco Rubio, the human chameleon, turned nationalist.
Rubio is now promoting the idea that economic freedom must be subordinated to a "patriotism" that sound suspiciously like obedience to a conservative political agenda....
To borrow a common ironic formula: Republicans told me that if I didn't vote to re-elect Donald Trump, socialism would take over the country—and they were right! Except, of course, that it is the Republicans who are now embracing nationalist socialism, an economic system in which "America's laws keep our nation's corporations firmly ordered to our national common good."
I later named this as part of the Great Transmogrification.
I keep trying to drive home the point that we are living in an era of ideological transmogrification. That's the word for it: "transmogrification." To "transmogrify" means "to transform in a grotesque manner."
What this means is that all the assumptions we used to have about what is "left" or "right," "liberal" or "conservative" are up in the air, and the standard ideological position on both sides is sliding toward something much worse, something much more grotesque than before....
[I]n the mid to late 20th Century, you could identify the mainstream American left and right—the left of, say, Kennedy and Clinton and the right of Reagan and the Bushes—as recognizable variants of political liberalism in the broadest sense. Now both ideological movements are veering away from liberalism—and our perspective on them has to change to recognize this.
In trying to answer what is driving the illiberalism of the right, I put forward a candidate: "I would argue that it is primarily the cultural collapse of religious belief, and the ensuing panic of the believers.... The more they see their cultural power slipping away, the more they fantasize about regaining it through politics."
The statistics on this are really remarkable. The latest? According to a new Pew survey, atheists, agnostics, and those who answer "nothing in particular" when asked about their religious views—a total of 29% of Americans—now outnumber evangelical Christians, at 24%.
This is a trend I've been tracking for a while, and I expect it to be an even bigger story in the future. Here's how I put itearlier in the year.
One of the big under-appreciated trends of the past few decades is the precipitous decline in religious belief in America. Gallup just released a startling poll result....
"Church membership is strongly correlated with age, as 66% of traditionalists—US adults born before 1946—belong to a church, compared with 58% of baby boomers, 50% of those in Generation X and 36% of millennials. The limited data Gallup has on church membership among the portion of Generation Z that has reached adulthood are so far showing church membership rates similar to those for millennials."
America is on a path to become, within the next few decades, a predominantly secular nation....
The modern conservative movement was launched with William F. Buckley's book God and Man at Yale, which railed against secularism among the elites at the universities. Well, with increasing levels of education and access to knowledge, secularism has propagated down from the elites to the average person. And as secularism has spread, the moral pressure to believe—I can still remember how shocked people used to be when you told them you were an atheist—has faded. That's why I think we see such a sharp change in just two decades. It's not just that there are more unbelievers, it's that there are more people who are willing to admit it.
Here's a little more grist for that mill: Evidence that the number of atheists is still undercounted due to the social stigma. Put that together with the figures about lack of belief among the young, and we should expect the continued and rapid fading of traditional religion as an influence in the culture.
This explains a lot of what is happening right now in the conservative movement. The people who once fashioned themselves the "Moral Majority" are quickly becoming a minority, and their panic and rage at that prospect is causing them to cast about for a new political ideology and strategy—and to indulge in dangerous fantasies that the support of the state can rescue religion from its decline.
This panicked sense of societal decline among traditionalists opens them up to even darker influences, such as Great Replacement theory: "The so-called 'Great Replacement' theory is a white-supremacist belief in a conspiracy among liberals and wealthy elites to demographically and culturally replace the white population of majority-white countries with immigrants of non-European descent." That (accurate) summary is from an article describing how the leading pro-Trump host at Fox News Channel, Tucker Carlson, has openly endorsed this theory by name.
"Yet, despite its overtly racist and antisemitic roots, the conspiracy theory—thanks in large part to Carlson's embrace of it—has become more acceptable and normalized within the Republican Party, with numerous GOP lawmakers and officials openly citing it."
This is just a more ominous expression of the same sense of cultural despair and defeatism among the traditionalists—and it is exactly this outlook that correlates with support for the Capitol insurrection.
"In the June [poll] results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them 'committed insurrectionists.' (An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that 'true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.')...
"In the CPOST polls, only one other statement won overwhelming support among the 21 million committed insurrectionists. Almost two-thirds of them agreed that 'African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.' Slicing the data another way: Respondents who believed in the Great Replacement theory, regardless of their views on anything else, were nearly four times as likely as those who did not to support the violent removal of the president."
There is an interesting symmetry here. Other polls have found that the "woke" left is also about 8 percent of the population—another small but fanatical minority that manages to keep an entire major political party prostrate in obedience.
Audience Capture
Because I send this end-of-the-year review to a wider list, I know I'll be reaching a lot of people who think I am all wrong—about Trump, about January 6, about COVID, about the vaccines. And many of them will think I'm wrong because they're getting a steady diet of media feeding them rationalizations to help explain away all of the facts I cite and all of the analysis I provide. They're getting this media diet because they seek it out—and because, in the digital media age, if you want to hear something badly enough, you can find someone who will gladly tell it to you.
For example, as I prepare to make the leap to Substack as the technological platform for this newsletter, I do it knowing that I will probably never make as much money there as Alex Berenson, who gets paid a princely sum by writers' standards—reportedly $720,000 a year—for systematically lying to his subscribers about the pandemic.
This is a wider problem with the digital media age, which has also made the mainstream media more dependent on pandering to the biases of its readers. An interesting article on this features a graph showing the collapse of traditional advertising, so that for the past five years, newspapers have been bringing in less ad revenue than they did in 1950.
"Over the past decade, a tectonic but largely unnoticed shift has happened: After 20 years of shrinking ad sales, much of the print and online news media now depend more on readers than on advertisers. At major legacy publications such as the New York Times, subscriber revenue far outstrips advertising revenue.
"But this certainly hasn't led to a new golden age of journalism, with readers getting the unvarnished truth and public discourse being conducted by well-informed officials and citizens armed with facts. It turns out that the primary demand of many subscribers isn't objective truth. They want publications that support their beliefs and confirm their biases. If a publication doesn't do that, they threaten to cancel their subscriptions."
This is an even stronger distorting force for those outside the mainstream, the Alex Berenson type. Back in the day, I celebrated the rise of blogging as a counterbalance to mainstream media bias, and the Substack era has brought about a revival of blogging by providing an easy and practical way to start a newsletter, distribute it, and get paid for it. But this contributes to a temptation that has been described as "audience capture." Jesse Singal offers a succinct definition: "It basically means getting stuck in a self-reinforcing loop in which you give your audience exactly what they want. In some cases, it can turn you from a relatively sane-seeming person to a relatively crazy-seeming one."
I've had an article go "viral" once or twice, on a modest scale, and I understand how heady the feeling can be. For better or worse, my inclination has usually been to avoid temptation by immediately telling my excited new audience something they don't want to hear.
But for you as the reader, this new digital media environment implies a need to be careful, to actively subject yourself to opposing views and information—and not to become the other half of the feedback loop, the person rewarding the guy telling you only what you want to hear, so that you can both go off to Crazy Town together.
At any rate, that is my long and perhaps counter-intuitive sales pitch for this newsletter. Sign up because I'm going to occasionally tick you off—because I will always tell you what I think is true and not just what I think you want to hear. I've been doing this long before Substack came along, and my subscribers have always served as the base of support that allows me to keep on doing this as an independent voice. So subscribe or renew to help me keep going.
The Center of Gravity
The top story of this year and its various ramifications are not very pleasant to contemplate, so I can't just leave it at that.
As bad as the current trends are, I have viewed them as an opportunity to try to shift the center of gravity in our political debate and lay the foundations for "a new ideological coalition in which the main political alternatives are no longer left versus right but liberal versus illiberal—that is, advocacy of a free society versus advocacy of some form of left-wing or right-wing authoritarianism."
And of course, every year for decades has had the one big story of our era, which gets too little attention: Capitalism continued to lift many millions of people worldwide out of poverty, which is still "The Biggest and Most Important Story in the World."
It happened again in 2021 and will almost certainly happen in 2022. That alone is grounds for wishing you all a Happy New Year.