If 2021 involves a tragic airplane crash killing 27 beloved celebrities, has half a US state burn to the ground because of global warming, a medium-bad flu season, and fewer than 8 devastating tropical cyclones, it will be a good year compared to 2020. But I think it will be better than that.
President Biden will not be able to form a cabinet since Mich McConnell will not let him, unless the two Democratic Senatorial candidates in Georgia win, so do work on that. But either way we’ll be fine. If Georgia sends two Democrats to Washington, we can get a national clean car law, start building out utility scale wind and solar, see some real farm support funding that both reduces fossil Carbon release and cleans up farms while reducing debt. We’ll see movement on health care reform (thought that is going to take a more progressive Senators) and major changes in electoral reform. It is not going to be a progressive’s wet dream, but 2021 will not be the political nightmare each of the last four years has been.
If Georgia fails us and we end up with two years of McConnell stopping every little thing Biden tries to do, that two year period will be the final two years of the Republican party, forever, and we’ll see that deterioration so fast it will be a memorable feature of 2021.
During the course of 2021 more than three different Covid-19 vaccines will be deployed and by the end of the year, enough people will be vaccinated that this plague will end. That will be a record breaking plague ending, compared to the other big ones, which usually have gone at least a few years. All plagues end, on their own, or at least have so far. Notice that we are not having a Bubonic Plague right now, and we are not having a 1918 flue pandemic right now. But that usually takes a bit longer. School will be back in session next school year, though perhaps normalcy delayed by a month or a month and a half. By the end of November all the kiddies will be in classrooms.
I suspect the spring back of the economy will be strong. In particular, I’m hoping that at a global level the spring back happens in areas that are now suffering from the kind of para-apocalyptic strife that breeds terrorism and war. Torn up regions of the Levant may become centers of energy production or other economic boom behavior, and less cauldrons of discontent and radicalization. That will take a few years, but it will start in 2021.
I assume the press will give Trump his due, which means, basically, ignoring him. The oxygen of attention starved of his Covid-streaked lungs will kill him, as public entity, and his followers, now the biggest threat to national unity, will forget he existed and crawl back into their politically dark holes. Every year the political orientation of the US shifts from deplorable to reasonable by about 1% (because of differential death rates vs. immigration and education). That means that after an 8 year long Biden-Harris administration with mostly Democrats in Congress, we will be done with them.
We need to see changes start that will take two decades to complete. The coming year, 2021, will be the year the seeds are planted.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Certainly better than 2020, but the bar was set very low. At least the orange stain and his goons will soon be gone and a coronavirus vaccine is imminent. It is also heartwarming to see Biden putting climate change mitigation front and center of his administration. The hope is that he promotes enough progressive policies to begin deradicalizing many in Trump’s cult base. That won’t be an easy task, given how these people have come to see Trump as some sort of divine messiah that came to rescue them from Marxists, communists, migrants and immigrants. That Trump actually loathes them and serves a single constituency – the rich classes – is not on their radar.
Still, I can’t wait to see the back of this year. Bring on 2021.
Very good article on the attempts by the right to steal the election here in Michigan and elsewhere by lying about fraud — right down rickA’s comments.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/24/michigan-election-trump-voter-fraud-democracy-440475?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Side note: isn’t it interesting how resident troll rickA has been silent on trump’s bull shit about fraud, vote stealing, and other crap. It’s almost as though his “concern about election fraud” was just hypocritical bullshit.
RickA is a lawyer. That might be a factor here.
Have you seen the type of lawyers who support trump? (Rhetorical, I’m sure you have.) What they’re saying is no more dishonest or fanciful than what rickA’s said multiple times.
2020 will certainly go down as one to remember.
https://apnews.com/article/AP-photos-2020-virus-racial-injustice-2dffd369c407c5b313f3db0c1fa35377?fbclid=IwAR0lgryutzcyzxRomaolCp6fciamSmnTB1azlZvb-y3fush0CgGczNieukA
Re “and his followers, now the biggest threat to national unity, will forget he existed and crawl back into their politically dark holes.”
Or, perhaps more likely, Trumpists will teach their children to live in their rightwing fantasy world so that their progeny and the remaining elders will be standing by for the next would-be dictator that calls on them. Trump and the modern Republican party have shown that our vaunted Constitutional protections and legal boundaries are actually quite easily breached, especially with a spineless majority of enablers in the Senate and now a Supreme Court majority dominated by what passes for “conservatism” these days.
In fact, if Trump had been a more sophisticated villain he might well have won a second term. Even as a malignant moron who let a pandemic rage, he attracted over 70 million votes and his party made gains in the House and may well retain control of the Senate.
If you have the opportunity to see rudy and his ‘star witnesses’ lying in front of some of our (MI’s) state officials yesterday, watch. The boldness with which they tossed out lies was astounding, and since rudy wouldn’t talk about anything if he and his folks had to be under oath, there’s no way anything more than being mocked could happen to them.
Case in point for their shit: one of his “stars” was asked for her proof of vote fraud in Detroit. She said:
Our Republicans ate it up. The only question asked of Rudy was this: (Rudy and the Republicans were upset that someone would try to hold their man accountable.)