Retrospection at year’s end ought to be aimed secondarily at aiding course-correction — helping us choose more wisely in the coming year — and primarily at inculcating humility. The main lesson we need, every day, is that we don’t know nearly as much as we think we know, and the end of this year in particular is a great time to drive that home.
Nobody spent 2020 as planned. Nobody’s predictions of 2020 were correct on the most important points. So as I reflected on my own words and arguments for my traditional end-of-year accountability column, I granted myself some leeway. Still, I was wrong in some important ways.
On coronavirus, my main problem was lack of early attention. It’s easy to falsely believe that the pandemic came out of the blue in late February, but that’s not true. We all heard about it in January and made jokes about Mexican beer. Many reasonable people Pooh-poohed it for one reason or another. I never dismissed it. I just didn’t dedicate enough thought to the virus to research or write on it.
Many of my friends followed it much more closely, much earlier. There were online discussion boards and email lists that shared clandestine videos of horrors in Wuhan. I was alarmed in early February when I saw how Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, was taking very seriously the possibility of this becoming a pandemic.
My default in life is that really scary things we are warned about by media or government officials are overblown. Lawless gangs of “wilding” youths did not take over Manhattan when I was a kid. Strangers abducting children happens less than deadly lightning strikes. Saddam Hussein was not the danger to the civilized world George Bush claimed. Islamic terrorism isn’t the “existential threat” claimed by those justifying more wars and less liberty. Donald Trump was never going to be an authoritarian dictator.
This is a variety of the skepticism a journalist is supposed to possess. But in me, it became an arrogant certainty. My instinct told me the Big Bad Thing wasn’t going to happen, and I was satisfied with that single source. As the J-school professors say, if you’re instinct tells you we’re fine, check it!
I saw Gottlieb sometime in mid-February and asked him, half-joking, “Should I be afraid?” He said, basically, yes. At that point, had I followed the story, I would have been ahead of it. That’s my only big COVID failure of the year.
In March, I suggested closing the schools, while four months later, I campaigned like crazy against doing so. That doesn’t show I was wrong in March. I never claimed certainty that schools were dangerous. I gave reasons to assume schools would be sources of spread, which, given the evidence at the time, was reasonable. When we got months of evidence to the contrary, I changed my opinion — even if my county’s government never did.
Where was I most wrong in 2020? Well, check out the headline of my post-Iowa Caucus column: “Joe Biden, the Unelectable.”
I never predicted Trump would beat Biden. I just doubted the magnitude of Biden’s “electability” and his likelihood of winning the Democratic primary.
I pointed to Biden’s poor fundraising and worse organization. “How can Biden be the ‘electable’ guy when he keeps losing elections?”
“Biden has proven he can win in only two circumstances,” I argued; “(1) When he is the running mate to President Barack Obama, the Democrats’ greatest political talent since President John F. Kennedy; and (2) when he is running in Delaware.”
My column ended by quoting an Elizabeth Warren supporter saying, “Joe’s time has passed.”
A month later, Biden was the clear front-runner. Now he’s the president-elect.
My error was maybe the same error as my missing the coronavirus story: I am too apt to think that just because something has always happened that it will always happen. Just because Biden had bombed in 1984, in 1988, in 2008, and in the 2020 Iowa caucuses, I thought he would keep losing.
We are constantly barraged with cries that “this time it’s different,” and “the old ways of doing things don’t matter anymore,” and “your crusty old morality/religion/norms don’t apply anymore.” These cries are usually wrong because they are usually based on denying human nature. As a conservative, I am well girded against these arguments.
But sometimes I apply that “things won’t change” instinct to things that are perfectly changeable. So I did in 2020, and thus I was led away from what I should have seen before it happened because of hubris posing as humility.
