10 positive things that happened in American politics in 2021

10 positive things that happened in American politics in 2021

By Perry Bacon Jr.

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December 29, 2021 at 8:30 a.m. EST

There were a lot of horrible things that happened in government and politics in 2021, most notably the more than 450,000 people who died from covid-19 and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump. But some important positive events are worth recalling as well. Here are 10 of them:

Vaccines. More than 70 percent of Americans and more than 4 billion people worldwide have received vaccines that dramatically reduced their chances of dying from the coronavirus. This is a huge credit to the scientists who developed those vaccines and the government officials and others who set up programs to get shots into arms. A particular and notable success in the United States was greatly reducing the racial disparities in vaccine uptake — the Black and Latino vaccination rate is now only narrowly behind that of White Americans, unlike earlier this year.

The election of Jon Ossoff and Raphael G. Warnock in Georgia. It wasn’t just that Georgia elected to the U.S. Senate a Black man who is a pastor at the church the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once ran. It is also elected a 34-year-old Jewish man who worked for two Black congressmen, including the late great John Lewis, and who is also deeply invested in civil rights causes. Those victories suggest that Georgia — and perhaps other Southern states — is moving beyond a politics defined by white backlash and toward a push for greater civil rights for Black Americans.

Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris taking office. It was a relief when a normal president who wants to govern for all Americans and actually solve problems took over on Jan. 20 — and it remains so. And while the United States is becoming less democratic in a number of ways, it is making advances in opening major positions of power to people who aren’t White Christian men. It is a great thing that the vice president is a woman, especially one who is Black, Indian, a graduate of a historically Black college and the child of two immigrants and who promotes the interests of all those groups.

The emergence of a more progressive Democratic establishment. Despite his reputation as a moderate, Biden has been quite progressive and is leading a Democratic Party that has moved notably to the left in Congress and at the state and local levels, too. They still aren’t progressive enough, not by a long shot. But the Democrats adopted a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus that provided a universal child tax credit and were one Senate vote (Joe Manchin III of West Virginia) away from passing a megabill with a slew of progressive policies. The administration broke with the practice of mostly appointing prosecutors and corporate lawyers to judgeships and picked civil rights lawyers, public defenders and others more likely to sympathize with everyday people. They are committed to helping rank-and-file workers, from strongly encouraging employees across all sectors to form and join unions to appointing officials to the Federal Reserve who are committed to reducing unemployment as much as possible.

A political establishment woke to the radicalism of the GOP. This year nonpartisan experts, institutions and politicians in the center-left and center-right finally stopped suggesting that the problem with American politics is “both sides,” tribalism, polarization, hyper-partisanship or other terms that implied that the Democratic and Republican parties were equally to blame. This came far too late. That said, there were significant and important developments: moderate Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) embracing adding justices to the Supreme Court; her colleague Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), becoming a leading figure in pushing to set aside the filibuster to pass a comprehensive pro-democracy bill; Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) essentially torching her career and her family’s legacy in Republican politics to stand against Trump.

Higher pay and more options for workers. The economic recovery of 2021 had a downside (high inflation) but it also had a big upside — a lot of jobs. Many Americans have been able to win raises at their current jobs or get higher pay at new ones. And the stimulus payments and other economic supports from the federal government have given people the chance to either stop working or shift to new careers.

The rise of more equality-focused, status-quo-challenging Democrats. Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s decision to sleep outside of the Capitol for several days to shame her party into doing more to prevent evictions was courageous. We also saw the emergence or increased prominence of a number of other Democratic politicians who are pushing the party to live the values it purports to hold, such as Cleveland Mayor-elect Justin Bibb, new Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, and Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal.

Retrenchment from the “Forever Wars.” The pullout from Afghanistan was hardly perfect. But U.S. troops are no longer fighting a never-ending “war on terror” and trying to run two sovereign countries (Afghanistan and Iraq). Biden’s decisions to reduce drone strikes and complete the withdrawal from Afghanistan were wise and long overdue.

The fall of Andrew M. Cuomo. Cuomo was forced to resign as New York’s governor because of a pattern of inappropriate behavior toward women. But his terrible treatment of those women isn’t the only reason that it’s great he’s gone. Cuomo was a horrible person to be running the United States’ fourth-largest state, and the Democratic Party in New York and nationally should be ashamed for having embraced him for so long. Cuomo spent much of his governorship in an alliance with the state’s Republicans and blocking progressive policy goals. He and his advisers often bullied those who disagreed with them on political or policy matters. The governor seemed particularly obsessed with tweaking New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democrat. Cuomo was also fairly bad at his job, including dealing with covid-19.

New voices telling a deeper story of the United States’s political history. We are in the midst of a long-overdue reexamination of racial issues and how the United States has treated Black people throughout its history. Much of that reexamination is coming from authors telling compelling accounts of the past that help explain the racial inequality of the present. The books written this year by The Atlantic’s Adam Harris (“The State Must Provide”) and Clint Smith (“How the Word Is Passed”) and policy scholar Heather McGhee (“The Sum of Us”) were particularly excellent.

Anyone who has read my column over the course of the year knows that I believe that the Republican Party is becoming increasingly radical and a threat to our democracy, and that there hasn’t been a sufficient response to that from the Democratic Party or the country’s anti-Trump majority. But the progress of 2021 on a number of fronts, including real acknowledgment of that Republican radicalism, gives me hope for 2022 and beyond.