My 2020 Existential Dread
The long-awaited reckoning with Trumpism is about to arrive
By Ed Kilgore
After an unusually long period of anxious anticipation (on my part, at least), the year 2020 arrives this week bearing many fearful possibilities balanced mostly by the hope of narrowly evading them.
Some developments in and subsequent to 2020 that I fear are general in nature: another year of largely unaddressed climate change punctuated by insane weather that half the U.S. population appears to consider random; another inevitable set of revelations about corporate abuses of market power and technology to degrade privacy, competition, and their own employees’ dignity; innovations in social media that further separate people from each others’ experiences while empowering predators of all sorts and spreading disinformation — you know, the whole range of Old Guy anxieties about the 21st century being the 20th on steroids. And I have some fears of the immediate future that are not so broadly shared but are intense among those who do: the liberal Christian’s fear of being entirely ground up in the conflict between militant unbelievers on the left and culturally conservative idolators on the right or the middle-class Californian’s fear of being forced to move far away because of lunatic housing costs.
