The week's big question: Who is the most influential figure of 2020?
1.
For many, 2020 was a year of huge loss — of loved ones, of jobs, of experiences. Indeed, the coronavirus has taken something from us all. And while the pandemic raged, so, too, did our national politics. America endured a contentious election cycle, grappled with constitutional crises, and was forced to reckon with the moral sickness that has long plagued our people: deep-seated racism. This year was hard, but it also saw great acts of bravery, innovation, and perseverance. As the year comes to a close, it's worth reflecting on the people who shaped the narrative of 2020, and will continue to do so well into 2021.
This week's question is: Who was the most influential figure of 2020?
2.
I don't want this to be true, but the most influential person of the year for 2020 — and 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015 — is President Trump.
That's not because he's admirable or the automatic result of his office. President-elect Joe Biden almost certainly won't win this title next year, which is precisely part of his appeal. He promised to be a more normal president, one who can be forgotten perhaps for days on end.
Trump is not forgettable. He's a master of inserting himself into the news cycle. If he isn't getting the attention he wants, he manufactures it. His omnipresence in our public life is unlike anything I've experienced — perhaps unlike anything anyone in a democracy has experienced throughout human history. His power is happily limited by his own incompetence, shortsightedness, and the vestigial restraints of our Constitution, but his claims of attention are totalitarian (invasive of "all aspects of individual life") even if his governance is not.
And that collection of attention is itself inherently consequential. What we think and talk about shapes what we do and who we are. Anyone who can occupy so much mental and conversational territory cannot but be of consequence.
Trump has had plenty of more tangible effects on this year, of course. His handling of the COVID-19 pandemic; his responses to this summer's protests and riots, both verbal and in deployment of federal agents to police the streets of Washington, Portland, and elsewhere; his reckless, raucous presidential campaign; his near miss of war with Iran — all this and more contributed greatly to making 2020 the year it was. But then, you already knew that, because you've already, inevitably thought about these and all things Trump.
3.
President-elect Joe Biden is both an obvious and odd choice for 2020's most important person. He earns it less for what he has accomplished than for who he is not: President Trump.
Trump's presidency was uniquely divisive even before the year began, and his impeachment trial — way back in January and February, during the last days of the Before Times — inflamed the situation even further. The coronavirus pandemic then shredded any claim Trump might make to competent or compassionate governance. Biden appealed to the electorate not on the strength of bold ideas or startling personal charisma, but with the promise to be kinder and gentler, to be nicer, and to simply be more competent. His campaign offered two messages: First, that he was on a mission to "save the soul of the nation," and second, that he would "follow the science" in battling the pandemic.
One senses that voters — first in the Democratic primaries, then in the general election — supported Biden not because they were excited for his presidency, but more out of a "first, do no harm" impulse to halt the damage being done to the country under Trump.
That turned out to be enough for victory.
It may be, as my colleague Damon Linker has suggested, that Biden was the only Democrat who could have beaten Trump. Republicans threw all the usual culture war attacks at Biden — that he was a socialist, that he was allied with urban rioters, that the "radical left" would control him. Remarkably, none of it stuck. Biden has been in the public eye so long, is so familiar to us, that the charges seemed silly. Which means that Joe Biden won the presidency, and perhaps saved American democracy, simply by being himself.
4.
More than 300,000 Americans have died during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that burden has not been shared equally. Thanks to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly revised its estimates to reflect how truly devastating the pandemic has been for people who look like me.
In a November letter to CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, Warren said "by failing to adjust COVID-19 mortality rates by age ... the CDC may not be providing an accurate assessment of the increased risk of death and serious illness for communities of color relative to white Americans of the same age." The CDC subsequently made those requested revisions and now says Black Americans are shown to die at a rate of almost three times that of white Americans.
Many of these Black folks have been working class people forced to choose between survival and death. My family members. My friends. My community. They were forced to make those choices because this government couldn't be bothered to do the fiscally and morally responsible thing: Pay people to stay home until we contain the virus.
They have served you, worked in your factories, helped you get to and from your destination, and performed a litany of other jobs so many others wouldn't dare to do. And more recently, despite this country failing them so miserably, they voted in droves in cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. In doing so, they not only stopped a would-be authoritarian from winning a second term, they gave this country a chance for a recovery many of them might not survive to see.
I hear so much about the nice white ladies in the suburbs who helped Joe Biden win the election and what must be done to keep them in the fold, but not enough about the people dying under this American horror story further complicated by long-standing racism and economic inequality. So I want to dedicate this year to the Black working class, the people who get up each day and do what it is they have to do to get through to the next. The incoming president owes it to them to make sure their days brighten.
5.
What works in America? The NBA works. It ran a coronavirus-free playoffs at its Disney World Bubble in Orlando. Amazon works. The retailer's logistics infrastructure bent but didn't break under the strain of a nation sheltering at home. And if there's one part of Washington that has seemed to work really well over the past year, it's the Federal Reserve. The Jerome Powell-led central bank acted aggressively last spring to limit the economic damage from the pandemic, cutting interest rates to zero and supplying, according to a Brookings Institution analysis, up to $2.3 trillion in lending to bolster households, businesses, financial markets, and state and local governments.
Powell's quick recognition of and response to the pandemic-driven economic shock has helped make him the Fed's most consequential chair since inflation-fighter Paul Volcker in the 1980s. In addition to his monetary policy actions, Powell has forcefully pushed Congress to spend big on aid to workers and business. It's been well beyond the typical nudging of lawmakers from previous Fed bosses, so much so that some worry Powell has damaged the Fed's political independence in the process. Finally, Powell announced the Fed would be taking a new approach to controlling inflation that will make the bank less likely to pre-emptively raise interest rates as unemployment falls. This course change basically ends an era of Fed inflation-obsession that began with Volcker.
Oh, one more thing: Powell, a former investment banker who served at the Treasury department under President George H.W. Bush, accomplished all that while displaying a calm public persona and, by all accounts, running the central bank in a collaborative and collegial way. The Wall Street Journal once called the genteel Powell "Mr. Ordinary." But he's been just the economic leader America has needed in an extraordinary year.
6.
Back in 2006, scientists in the laboratory of husband-and-wife team Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Türeci investigated whether modifying the shape of the tail-end of an RNA molecule would make it more stable. They found that certain modifications to the "tail" scaffolding portion of the structure meant that the message the RNA molecule encoded in the middle of the molecule degraded more slowly, rendering it readable by a cell for longer. The longer RNA lasts, the more a cell can translate its message into a protein. RNA can encode any protein — including a spike protein found on the surface of a coronavirus.
Fourteen years later, and in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic, an mRNA vaccine developed by Türeci's and Sahin's company BoiNTech and Pfizer appears to be 95 percent effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2. It was the first to be approved and administered in the western world. Another mRNA vaccine from Moderna is expected to be rolled out soon. Without a stable RNA molecule, such mRNA vaccines would not be possible. In other words, the research conducted in Türeci's and Sahin's lab may be among the most important biological insights of the early 21st century.
The research demonstrating the vaccine's effectiveness is rock solid. Too often, laboratory molecular biologists toiling in relative obscurity generate "promising therapies" but fail to deliver heralded "breakthroughs." To appease deep-pocketed pharmaceutical companies, experts design their experiments and trials to maximize the odds that the data will be impressive. In the end, the statistics are often massaged and overstated.
The Pfizer/BioNtech data are not like that. The results fly off the page. The vaccine has a huge effect, and it will likely save millions of lives.
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