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Twenty twenty defies summation. All of us tried; no words ever seemed to capture the whole. But three things are true:
You’ll tell your grandchildren about this year, you’ll never forget this year, and your life changed this year, though it may be some time before you know in exactly what way and how much.
For now, just scroll down. Go to any social-media account and scroll back to March. You’ll see videos that still have the power to bring tears to the eyes—people in Italy serenading each other from balconies; New York erupting in the 7 p.m. beating of pots and pans.
As we scrolled down through this column’s archives, the year flashed before our eyes.
In February we were alarmed: We’d been following the virus in China and Italy and felt certain that something bad was coming. There were 13 cases in Canada and one, origin unknown, in California: “We live in a global world. Everybody’s going everyplace all the time. Nothing is contained in the ways it used to be. It seems to me impossible that there are not people walking along the streets in the U.S. who have it, don’t know it and are spreading it.” We thought what was coming would decide the 2020 election. If the virus hit hard, “it is going to change a lot—the national mood, our cultural habits, the economy.” Was the president up to the challenge? “Or has he finally met a problem he can’t talk his way out of?”
Criticism came in sharp and heavy: We were fear-mongering.
In mid-March we urged readers and leaders to become “health hawks”: “Close the schools a few weeks. . . . Cancel celebrations. Marry but have the wedding party later.”
A week later, courage was all around us: “We are surrounded by nobility.” We must thank again and again those keeping us going, “the garbagemen and truckers, the people who stock the shelves and man the counters.”
By April, America had changed who it cheers. A nurse in New Jersey sent a series of texts: “Our dead are multiplying in my hospital. We have a refrigerated trailer behind the hospital for the bodies. We went from one to 3 to 9 in 3 days.”
Everyone in her town was gathering Fridays at dusk—they’d go to the edge of their property and wave to each other, yell hello. “They applauded me,” she wrote.
We teased: “Because you’re cute and sexy.”
“No,” she said, with wonder. “Because I’m a nurse.” In 30 years that had never happened to her.
Soon after came a great observation of 2020. “We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm.” It came from the writer Damian Barr, on Twitter. He was right. Some were in yachts, some rowing alone in small skiffs. Some would sail through, health and professions intact; others would lose both.
By May it was clear the economy was experiencing a severe contraction. “We can’t grapple only with the illness, we have to grapple with the crash. The bias now should be toward opening.” In mid-May it seemed to me there was “a class element in the public debate.” The airwaves were full of scientists and medical experts. Far less attention was being paid “to those living the economic story, such as the Dallas woman who pushed back, opened her hair salon, and was thrown in jail by a preening judge. He wanted an apology. She said she couldn’t apologize for trying to feed her family.”
Regular people were suffering. Red states were pushing back harder than blue states, not because they didn’t think there was a pandemic but because they were seeing it this way: “Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.” They thought the latter better.
That column got a lot of pushback, too.
Some three months into the pandemic, in late May, we saw a new reflectiveness. People were thinking deeply about what they value, who they are: “Here is what I am certain of. We will emerge a plainer people in a plainer country, and maybe a deeper one. Something big inside us shifted.”
Even in one sliver of national life, fashion, something was changing. “The world has admired and imitated America’s crisp chic,” but “for reasons economic and existential a new simplicity is coming, glitz leaving.” This would be especially true of those over 40, but that’s more than half the country. “We’re getting pared down. We’re paring ourselves down.”
Andre Leon Talley, former creative director at Vogue, agreed: “I think more people will be dressed, when we come out of this pandemic, in almost Amish stoicism—a simple uniform of basic wash and dry. It’s going to be difficult for fashion to exist as a mainstream addiction.”
By June a major political shift: “ Donald Trump’s hold on history loosened, and may be breaking. In some new way his limitations are being seen and acknowledged.” Judgment of his pandemic leadership had settled in: “He denied the scope and scale of the crisis.”
At the same time social upheaval surrounding the death of George Floyd was sweeping the country. The cultural reverberations of that upheaval will be felt for decades. It couldn’t have been more consequential—protests, riots. From the president, photo-ops and “angry, blustering tweets” flew from the White House “like panicked bats fleeing flames.”
We lauded the most transcendent moment of the campaign, Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden, which made him the nominee, and welcomed vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris to the fray.
Important to us personally: Last March we dreamed up a legislative action we think right and just. We know who kept America going during the pandemic—the stackers, counter clerks and others, some of whom were here illegally. When this is over, give them full U.S. citizenship, no questions or penalties. This week we received word the government of France has proposed just that, offering naturalization to hundreds of workers who helped that nation through the pandemic.
Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell: This would be a grand first piece of bipartisan legislation.
Finally, in the middle of this year we marked a personal milestone, the 20th anniversary of this column. From the beginning the intention each week was to try to answer these questions: What’s happening? What’s true? What am I seeing? Are you seeing it too? Then we’re not alone!
The key is to try to say clearly what you believe to be true, even if it makes people mad. Especially if they get mad—that means you’re over the target. Among my antagonists this year: an angry president, (“Peggy Noonan, a ‘Concast’ MSDNC @WSJ puppet, doesn’t have a clue,” Donald Trump tweeted on Aug. 1) indignant cable-news anchors and personalities who didn’t like my criticism of Kamala Harris on the trail, enraged Trumpers who called us elitist, and Never Trumpers who called us blind.
This little space was in the thick of it. What did it feel like? Like what it is, a privilege. To be here, to be part of it, to get to say what you see, especially in this of all years.