The Year of Our Lord 2020 might go down as a watershed year in the history of the United States and the Western world, akin to the Fall of Rome, the Defeat of Napoleon or the start of World War I.
At least, that’s how people who just lived it tend to see it looking back over a highly unusual year. If we were honest, we would note that 2020 wasn’t all that different from the last. Sure, you didn’t go out as much and you didn’t see the folks for Christmas, but all things considered, most of the crazy stuff was on the TV. It was a year of sickness, a year of civil unrest and an election year to boot, culminating in the specter of a contested presidential race.
The predominant feeling of 2020 has been fear, but not fear of the coronavirus. Everyone knows that diseases exist, that they spread and that they can kill you. Everyone knew that Grandma could get a nasty flu one day and die. No, the fear associated with coronavirus was not your run-of-the-mill, reasonable fear of disease and death that people naturally have. This fear was a kind of paranoia, not about the disease but about those tasked with leading the global population through the era of pandemic.
For many, the effects of the disease seemed greatly disproportionate to the measures taken by local and national governments to stop its spread. In the early days of the outbreak, medical professionals flipflopped on questions like the effectiveness of masks, the exact nature of social distancing, and which activities were safe versus which were likely to spread disease. The pandemic took on a political bent, and public health became a political football. That was the environment that allowed paranoia to stew. Suddenly, people were wondering whether the virus (real though it might be) was a tool being used to subvert their freedoms.
Viewed through the right prism, normal public health practices could be viewed as evidence of malice. Mask-wearing could be construed as a form of petty despotism, enforcing compliance in small, mundane things to facilitate obedience in larger schemes. Social distancing could be viewed as an attack on traditional religion and family, as church services and family gatherings observed for untold years without cease were now suddenly verboten. New economic measures under the moniker “Build Back Better” and “The Great Reset” could be seen as thin veneers of corporate nothing-speak veiling an insidious plot underneath. All of these conspiratorial ways of viewing the pandemic response were reinforced by the shrill tone that traditional news and social media figures took towards the phenomenon and their attempts to censor those “spreaders of disinformation.”
This year was a benchmark year for American censorship, actually. Just to name a few examples, Twitter and Facebook actively censored coverage of the scandals associated with Hunter Biden, Twitter blocked the ability to share links from Bitchute (a YouTube alternative with an emphasis on free speech), and (most stunningly in my opinion) YouTube banned any video mentioning ongoing allegations of election misconduct after the certification of the electoral college for Joe Biden in December.
All of this suggests, to the average observer, “maybe they really do have something to hide.” After all, people who wrap themselves in the cloak of truth, like the media establishment, shouldn’t be afraid of people thinking for themselves and following the sources where they may go. The sheer hostility that social media and news providers evidence towards so-called “alternative media,” in such an environment of suspicion, becomes a de facto admission of bad faith.
In addition to paranoia surrounding COVID, America is experiencing a slow-motion political meltdown the likes of which no nation has survived without a regime change. With controversy surrounding the presidential election priming both sides to view the spectacle as illegitimate, more and more people are getting scarily-comfortable with the idea of civil war, or at the very least partition of the nation. After the Supreme Court ruled that a Texas lawsuit, alleging swing states unconstitutionally changed their election procedures to hand Joe Biden the win, lacked standing, some Texas GOP members called for out-and-out secession. According to recent polling, over half of Republicans and the vast majority of Trump supporters believe the 2020 Election was rigged.
Frustratingly, the very same people who would have been doing the stealing (county election commissioners, poll workers) are, in many cases, the ones also doing the auditing and recounting. It goes without saying, this does not engender confidence in the system.
Whatever the actual truth is, it is irrelevant in a sociological sense. With every passing day, the paranoia deepens. Institutions like the government, Big Tech, news media, the CDC, and law enforcement continue to lose their grip on a portion of the population, primarily white, working-class people but also (if the election results are anything to go on) a substantial portion of the minority working class. As those people become convinced that this nation’s institutions are out to get them in every conceivable way, they will be driven towards extremism.
Likewise, as media outlets continue to label anti-lockdown protesters angry about losing their businesses and incomes, i.e. basically the same people referred to above, part of the “radical right,” they will provoke a counter-reaction in the form of antifascist militancy of the kind that turned Portland, Oregon into battleground for months over the summer.
No matter whose fault it is, the fact remains that America is slowly beginning to resemble not a peaceful, developed nation but Northern Ireland during the Troubles or Mexico during the revolutions of the early 20th century, and we have to blame a system which breeds mistrust, which thrives on paranoia, and which tolerates no dissent.
Photo Credit / Associated Press
