A Brighter Assessment

My assessment of 2022 has been pretty dark. But E.J. Dionne writes that last year wasn't all doom and gloom:

We have become so accustomed to bad news, crisis and dysfunction that it’s hard to accept the ways in which 2022 was a surprisingly good year for democracy, innovative government action and even a degree of social peace.

Accepting that things have improved is almost never fashionable. It’s bad for page views and it carries the whiff of complacency. It’s safer to say that things are a mess because there are always so many injustices to be confronted and so much human suffering to be relieved. There’s also this: Since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, we’ve suffered from a frenzied addiction to the prospect of ruin.

But supporters of democratic governments and societies will never right the world’s wrongs without confidence that democracy itself can work — and unless a majority of citizens sees evidence that this is true. In 2022, the evidence began accumulating.

Dionne believes that democracy's chances are improving:

The failure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the courageous rallying of the Ukrainian people and the remarkable unity of the world’s democracies in standing against aggression is the most obvious sign that the democratic distemper of recent years is abating.

The relative success of democracies in dealing with the covid-19 pandemic contrasts with a regime-challenging failure in China. This, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic misadventure, has quieted talk — reminiscent of similarly misguided commentary in the 1930s — that authoritarian governments are inevitably more “efficient” and “effective” in solving problems.

In the United States, the congressional session that just ended was remarkably productive. Major investments in infrastructure, clean energy and technology showed that our government has the capacity to think ahead, not just react to political pressures and short-term problems.

Government is building things again on a large scale. As it did in the era after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the United States is using public outlays to make the nation more technologically competitive. And the push for green energy shows there are ways to avert a planetary climate calamity while also restoring our manufacturing prowess.

Finally, the skeptics who said that campaigning on democracy in the midterm elections was a foolish strategy for Democrats were proved wrong. The GOP’s red wave failed to materialize for many reasons — Supreme Court overreach, especially on abortion, was a factor, and the actual achievements of a Democratic president and Congress counted, too. But democracy mattered. The Republican candidates rejected by voters tended to be the most extreme, the ones especially committed to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and those least ready for office.

So, as always, it comes down to whether you see the glass as half full or half empty.

Image: Wikipedia