Andrew Sullivan on 2013

Andrew Sullivan sums up his ambivalence about 2013 on The Daily Dish.

2013 was one of the most dreary and depressing I can remember. Politically, it seemed scarred by the Republicans’ ever greater extremism and by the Obama administration’s surprising incompetence. Brutal, dispiriting gridlock and the lame embers of an exhausted culture war set the tone for the rest. It was a year in which most of the forces propelling our culture and politics seemed played out: Obama reached his delivery moment, and he was horribly exposed. The GOP had already seen their electoral crisis the year before, and yet they failed to grasp the nettle of immigration reform and, if anything, took pure nullification to newly manic levels in the states and the Congress. No deal on long-term debt; no immigration reform; no serious infrastructure investment; and a horrible roll-out of healthcare reform.

Still, I had no sooner spelled out these core, depressing facts than I kept thinking of the other, less noticed ones. There were, after all, plenty of reasons for be cheerful in 2013. The number of US troops killed in Afghanistan reached a new low of 161, down from 711 three years’ ago. The war in Iraq remained over. Growth accelerated to 4.1 percent in the third quarter and looks set to continue next year. The Dow is now comfortably over 16,000 – more than double where it was five years ago, at the trough of the recession. The budget deficit shrank 37 percent in 2013, and was falling faster than at any time since the end of the Second World War. Yes, perhaps the austerity was premature and the big fiscal crisis has yet to hit. But an economy that’s growing and a deficit that’s fast shrinking is a pretty good combo for the time being. For good measure, the US is now in the full throes of a domestic energy revolution and is scheduled to be energy independent by 2020, a goal sought for decades. In part because of this, the US position in the Middle East is far less constrained, enabling a potentially world-changing detente with Tehran. Terror attacks – widely thought after 9/11 as a new norm – have dwindled to negligible levels in the West. Crime perked up a little, but was still way, way down from its past heights, despite the recession.

Sullivan also writes at length in this post on the surge in marriage equality both in the US and world-wide and the influence of Pope Francis.

In a few months, he has almost miraculously reasserted Christianity against all the modern “isms” of our time, utterly eviscerated the supreme papacy as envisaged by his two predecessors, and reminded billions of the core and simple message of Jesus.

Summing up:

So count me a revisionist. Everything on the surface this past year was horrible; but the tectonic shifts from below were anything but. We’ll see what lasts. But it helps not to forget what recedes ever so slightly from our news-cycle horizon. Know hope. Or perhaps that requires reformulation.
Know pope.

What say you?