Leonard Zwelling

We are not in December yet, but most of us wish 2020 would end early. Whether it does or not (unlikely), it is time to start thinking about year-end awards and the People of the Year seem pretty clear to me.

The election of 2020 tested our democracy like little else has. We passed. With a D. We will not make the honor roll of democratic countries with a performance like that.

“The old liberal left paid attention to complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas. A sense of complexity induced a measure of doubt, including self-doubt. The new left typically seeks to reduce things to elements such as race, class and gender, in ways that erase ambiguity and doubt. The new left is a factory of certitudes.”

As usual, Peggy Noonan gets it exactly right in her column on November 14 in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Biden knows what he’s doing, is in control of the transition process, can move that process forward without Presidential Daily Briefings, and must give his Republican Senatorial colleagues running room to back the current president’s nonsense about not having lost the election. In time everyone will come around.

We still have no winner yet in the Senate. The Democrats could still gain control if they win both seats in the Georgia runoffs and Biden is president. That’s a lot of ifs in a year that should have been a blue wave if ever there was one. Why did that not happen?

In a pointed op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on November 10, Cenk Uygur, CEO of “The Young Turks” makes the case that the Democratic Party is being led by the conventional wing of that party into election ruin and that it’s time to let the progressives take over. I believe that this is both right and wrong.

Tom Friedman’s op-ed in The New York Times on November 5 puts its finger on what has been so bothersome to me since the election results started to roll in.

The closeness of the result and the fact that a winner had yet to be declared as I wrote this on November 5 says a few things about the state of the nation in 2020.

I was taking on heavy artillery in my email the morning I posted “I Don’t Recognize My Country.” My conservative readers insist that Trump was good for the country and that Biden is the short route to socialism and widespread chaos. My liberal readers think I was too tough on Biden and that he represents exactly what I said I was looking for in a president. I guess I must have gotten it right if both sides think I got it wrong.

      I bought into it years ago. I am an American. Even when I felt like a foreigner, I was always an American. I pledged allegiance to the flag and learned the Star Spangled Banner. I memorized the Preamble to the Constitution and learned my American history. I visited all the monuments in Washington, DC and climbed the Statue of Liberty. I’ve been to Pearl Harbor, Ground Zero, and the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. I’m an American.

On the morning after the election, we awake to find—confusion. It’s three days later and we haven’t gotten to clarity yet.