Brooks and Marcus on American politics in 2020 - PBS NewsHour

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Ruth Marcus:

Well, I'm thinking I'm usually the pessimist and David's usually the optimist. So, I — maybe we're switching roles in 2021 or something.

But I actually take away two things from 2020. One is a more hopeful vision of the pandemic lessons, which is that good government, responsible leadership, capable management could have worked. We could have, with a better president, who had assembled a better administration, and had taken this more seriously from the start, and had not failed at almost every step along the way — the one bright spot is the vaccine development, but now we're botching the rollout of it.

We could have done better. We could have had — that 20 million figure is just appalling. We would have had a lot of damage and tragedy and economic distress, but not on the scale that we are having, with a better government.

And we have a president coming in who is going to inherit this mess, which is a lot harder to clean up than it is — was to — is to ameliorate from the beginning. But government can perform better than our government performed for us.

The part that, for me, is unsettling is the lessons on democracy. Democracy in — at the end of 2020 looked to me a lot more fragile than I understood it to be at the start of the year, especially the aftermath of the election, where we saw what everybody had assumed was a really unassailable democratic norm, that you would accept, even if — a president as irresponsible and self-involved and unpatriotic as Donald Trump would accept the — in the end, however, grudgingly and ungraciously, the results of a democratic election.

And, instead, we see the spectacle that is continuing and is going to continue through next week on January 6, when Congress assembles.

I am very nervous about the consequences of that, not for Joe Biden, who will be sworn in as president on January 20, but for how it just shakes our norms going forward and makes the unimaginable more imaginable.

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Brooks and Marcus on American politics in 2020 - PBS NewsHour
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