Who’s that battered old man making his way down shuttered streets, facemask hanging from an ear, IV pole dragging at his side. A poignant figure. Didn’t he used to be someone?
But wait, look. He’s not walking, he’s marching. Like he’s got his old strut back. As if he just remembered who he is.
That was the picture that came to mind on Monday. We were like America of old. And I’m not sure we’re fully seeing it. But on that day our Constitution did what it was built to do, prevail. And our scientific genius and spirit of invention asserted themselves as national features that still endure.
So here’s to you, Dec. 14, 2020. You provided a very good ending to a very bad year.
On that day the winner of the 2020 election was formally declared president-elect by the Electoral College. This would normally be a formality, but this year it had—let’s call it deeper than usual resonance. Presidential electors met and voted throughout the day in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The vote was 306-232. It was done as in the past, in an orderly manner without great incident.
For all the postelection threats and accusations the system held. It turns out some words in a 4,543-word document that was ratified 232 years ago, on June 21, 1788, still had the last say. Article II, Section 1: “The electors shall meet in their respective states.” The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, established procedures more specifically and clarified confusions that had caused mischief in the election of 1800.
Our mess of an election has finally, officially, irrefutably been resolved. We owe this to the brilliance of our Founders, but we deserve credit too for our continued fidelity to their vision. (Those who would abolish the Electoral College: Keep in mind the role it just played.)
Three days before the electors met, the Supreme Court, often now referred to as “the conservative court,” refused to hear a case that implied the election’s illegitimacy. There had long been accusatory talk that justices would, if they got the opportunity, vote with the man or party that had appointed them. But no. They’d read the Constitution too.
On Dec. 14 it was clear: Structures stood, institutions served their purpose, we kept our wits about us. The rule of law prevailed, including the tradition that you need more than a theory or notion to make a case, you actually need facts.
The young have learned many unfortunate lessons from the grown-ups the past few years, but that was a wholesome one, and it too will have reverberations.
The second big thing that happened Monday: the human and scientific miracle of the first Covid-19 vaccines began that day to arrive at American medical centers and be administered to health-care professionals. You saw the pictures of nurses getting the shots from doctors, and health-care workers in Boston dancing in the hospital parking lot. It was beautiful. Shipments of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine carried about three million doses, and they arrived—this is so American—by UPS and FedEx. I don’t know why that pleases me so much, but it does. I keep wondering who signed for the delivery.
All this was done against the odds, against scientific history—no vaccine had ever been developed and produced so quickly—and by a country battered by illness. People slept in their offices to get this thing done. The ability of drug companies to shift focus, reorient research and development, race for an answer—all this is a triumph of medical science, of manufacture and distribution. They retrofitted factories to ensure manufacturing capacity even before the Food and Drug Administration approved the inoculations. The sheer scientific brain power involved, the level of organization demanded, all came at record speed. Billions came from the U.S. government; big profits will be made. I don’t care. This was a kind of greatness. We all decry Big Pharma, and high prices, and opioids. We like to hate them. I like to hate them. But look what they did.
Our country got pummeled by an illness, and we did this. Really there must be more to us than we think.
A bad thing also made itself clear this week. We’ve written of it in the past and will in the future. It is that the estrangement between average working people and the elites of government and media, here defined as people who regularly or will eventually appear on cable news, has become deeper. I believe we’ve been witnessing an utter lack of empathy for—actually an inability or unwillingness to hear—the owners of small businesses that have had to close up or limit services or recede in general during the pandemic. I believe small-business men and women looked up during this holiday season, on which they depend so much to make a living, and saw uncaring officials and unpredictable, seemingly political fiats and decisions. And I am certain they thought: Our elites don’t care about us at all. They don’t even think they have to imitate caring.
The professional class of politicians, media people, scientists and credentialed chatterers care about business in the abstract—“small-business bankruptcies” concern them; they have a sense some people will lose livelihoods. But they have no particular heart for them. They never betray any appreciation of the romance of opening a place and being your own boss and offering a good product and being part of the town and being a success. They don’t understand the sacrifice it takes. Or that the shuttering of a store is, literally, the death of a dream.
The growing estrangement between the elites and everyone else has for years been a preoccupation of this column. Historians looking back will see the capsizing of small businesses and jobs in America, and how owners were allowed to drown, as a deepener of that estrangement.
It seems a funny thing to say of public policy, but so much of what doesn’t work in life has to do with an absence of love.
We’ll be seeing the working out of this further estrangement over the next decade. It will have big political implications.
But for now—well, for now it has been a good week, one of triumphs. In one day our Constitution and our scientific inventiveness came through. Every time Elon Musk sends up a rocket I think: That used to be us. This week that was still us.
I have been rereading Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), a poet whose work was important to me as a child. He was half crazy, almost a genius and his subject was America. When I was thinking about this column, I remembered Lindsay’s “General William Booth Marches Into Heaven,” about the death in 1912 of the Salvation Army’s founder.
And this is how I imagined Uncle Sam:
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum . . .
The Saints smiled gravely and they said: “He’s come.” . . .
Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod,
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.
Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief
Eagle countenance in sharp relief,
Beard a-flying, air of high command
Unabated in that holy land.
Unabated. Exactly right.