On this week’s Political Gabfest, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and John Dickerson looked back over 2019 to pinpoint the biggest, most significant stories of the year. This transcript of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
David Plotz: It’s the end of the year, and we’re looking back on the big stories. What were the most important things that happened in 2019? What are the things that stick out as representing the big themes of history?
Emily Bazelon: One of the biggest issues in the world, not just this year but maybe of the decade, is the intersection between immigration and climate change, and how mass migration is going to affect how countries see themselves, how people feel about citizenship and about the way the world’s population is presumably going to move.
So, with that as my own backdrop, I’m thinking about stories about immigrants’ reception in the United States, in particular our family separation policy. There has been distress about that, but we haven’t really walked it back. The Trump administration has really tried, with some blocking from the courts, to move the country away from a traditional understanding of asylum. And then in Europe you see a lot of nervousness and reaction to immigrants that we’re going to continue to trace through and is going to matter.
Plotz: One of the things we saw—and we’ve talked about it in segments about impeachment, the influence of Fox News on the White House, with Brexit, with Israel—is this phenomenon of chaos voters and the loss of effectiveness and coherence in political systems, specifically in the U.S. political system.
We see this complete polarization in the United States, in Great Britain with Brexit, in Europe, in India. We see nationalism and tribalism, separate narratives, and a loss of faith in the basic democratic political systems that have developed in many countries.
John Dickerson: Do you remember when then–Prime Minister Theresa May and President Trump had that joint press conference, and there was a question about migrants and immigration, and she referred back to our values? She meant the liberal Western order. Freedom House does a survey every year about the march of democracy, and it is at its lowest point in a decline of the last 13 years. It continues to go down. And it’s not just in fledgling democracies or countries that were struggling with it, but in the main old-timey actors, including the United States, which used to feel it was invested in promoting democracy. Not just promoting democracy in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, but the idea of doing everything you can to foster freedom and democracy because it is healthy on its own terms. That’s gone away.
Bazelon: This segues into the sense, in the United States and in some other countries, among white people, especially less educated white people, that their status, their lives are shrinking. We have statistics in the United States that lifespan is declining for this particular group.
The opioid crisis is linked to this. This sense of loss of power, the fear that immigrants are coming and taking things from you. In the next 50 years, we’re going to be asking white Americans to give up their majority status in this country without violence and without trying to cling to it so desperately that they destroy the democratic order. And I don’t think that is a phenomenon we’ve really seen a country accomplish. I don’t mean to excuse the racism that the sense of threat can engender and perpetuate, but in some ways it’s a tall order. And we are seeing these symptoms of it this year.
America’s always had heterogeneity—it’s one of our most celebrated facets. I absolutely believe that we are stronger for all our immigrants. But for a lot of white Americans, there was more of a sense of social fabric and commonality in the past than they feel now.
Dickerson: One of the challenges for our presidents—our next one, whether it’s in four years or one year—is how to manage diversity, both in terms of policy but also in how to talk about it. This is one of the big debates with Donald Trump: that he’s not as interested in how to manage it. He’s interested in using it successfully, driving divisions as a way to win political power.
Plotz: We are in the middle of a period of enormous protest. If you look back at 1968–69, the late ’60s, early ’70s, it was a period of mass protest, chaos, political instability, which people recognized at the time. We are in the middle of that again now, and we haven’t quite recognized it. We haven’t had the same level of rioting, but this year we had the Proud Boys in Portland[, Oregon] in August, we had these political mass shootings, like the El Paso mass murder, the mass shooting in Jersey City, the Tree of Life synagogue—I think that might’ve been in ’18, but it’s all linked. There is this political instability, political chaos, fear, that is pervading the country, and I think it’s just going to get worse.
Dickerson: I want to mention the Afghanistan Papers. Everybody blew past this story, and everybody should spend a lot more time thinking about it.
Bazelon: I think this was the year the country, and perhaps the world, finally realized that the promises that social media companies and technology companies in general are making are hollow, and in a lot of cases completely wrong. There was much more willingness to reckon with the bad consequences of Facebook and YouTube and Amazon. I think it’s a really healthy development that we’re thinking in a more complex way about the implications of what these companies do.
Plotz: I have one final theme, which is that this was the year we recognized that concern about the Trump presidency is coming from lots of different quarters. This is the year we realized that his undermining of the institutions of government for his own corrupt and personal purposes is so dangerous. We see this with the entire Ukraine issue, in the emergence of Attorney General Bill Barr and his sinister usage of the justice system, for example in the declaration of a national emergency back in February to allow the diversion of billions of dollars to build the wall. The purge of the Homeland Security Department in September, the battle over adding a citizenship case to the census, the attacks on the State Department and on ambassadors—these are all cases where the institution of government is being eroded by President Trump.
Dickerson: The wall, for me, is in a different category. That falls under “This is what I campaigned on. This is what my supporters voted for, and I’m going to push the executive branch to its breaking point to do what my people elected me to do.” That is slightly different than those other categories, which feel much more norm-threatening.
I would add the complete and total ownership of the Republican Party by Donald Trump, on every possible issue, whether it’s trade, deficits, the party, Russia. For 50, 60 years the Republican Party did very well being the party that was more anti-Russia. Trump has now basically flipped Republican sentiment completely on that. We don’t see that kind of rhetorical flip in politics. Also on values and morality. When you look at some of the Republican senators who are now some of his strongest defenders, by which I mean they’re willing to act in ways that used to be outside of what even senators used to do—I’m thinking of Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz—they haven’t just quietly gone along. They have risen to his defense and said things that are implausible or that are embarrassing relative to things they said before. These are men that he mocked, belittled, and over whose bones he ascended to greatness. Why are they doing that? It’s because of his extraordinary power in the party and because they, like all politicians before them, are attracted to power.
To listen to the full episode, click the player below or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
