- 2021 Is the second year of the pandemic, and it began almost immediately with a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol.

Today's guest helps us put the big stories of the last 12 months in context, even as we name the top story of 2021.

She's Dr. Evelyn Farkas, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) Hello, and welcome to the "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Virginia University.

- And I'm G Wayne Miller with the "Providence Journal."

- This is a special episode for us.

At the end of each calendar year, we name a story of the year, the public narrative that had the biggest impact on the United States in the previous 12 months.

To help us take stock of 2021, we're joined by Dr. Evelyn Farkas, the president of Farkas Global Strategies and the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.

Evelyn, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks so much for having me.

- There is a lot to unpack in the previous 12 months, but we wanna start with the pandemic.

This was our 2020 story of the year, maybe not surprisingly.

At that point, it had claimed 325,000 American lives.

12 months later, that death toll is now nearly 800,000 American lives, and globally, those numbers are even worse, 261 million cases, 5.2 million deaths.

Evelyn, why has the world so poorly managed this pandemic?

- Well, I think for one, it's coming at a time when we have increased political polarization, not just in the United States.

Of course, most of the viewers here know what the situation is in America, but across the world, really, there's an increased polarization, and this has been fed by disinformation.

The autocratic states like Russia and China have been pouring money and a lot of effort into disinformation in the United States, specifically on this virus, although, of course, they were active on other issues.

So that's just exacerbated it.

There's a great deal also of lack of faith in government and in science, again, something that predates the pandemic, but autocrats and proto-fascist governments, including the Trump administration, I would say, and others around the world have fed this kind of dynamic.

So unfortunately, the pandemic hit at a really bad time for us politically and societally speaking.

- So you gave part of the answer to the question I'm about to ask just now, and the question is, why are some people still cavalier about this virus?

Again, you gave some of that answer, but there were other reasons, too.

And when I use the term cavalier, it's not perhaps a term that some people would use themselves, but I'm talking about people who refuse to be vaccinated, who do not like to wear masks pretty much anywhere.

Why is this still happening almost two years in?

- Yeah, Wayne, again, it's fed into the culture wars in the United States, and there has always been, don't get me wrong, a strain of individualism, which is very strong in the Midwest and down South versus more societal communalism, which has been something in the Northeast.

And unfortunately, this is happening at a time when these two cultural clashes have become colored by the political parties.

So you now have the followers of Donald Trump, what's left of the Republican party or the new Republican party, they have just said as an article of faith, "We don't believe in science, and we're going to be distrustful of government," to include scientists like Anthony Fauci, whom President Trump himself denigrated and encouraged his followers not to follow.

And then on the flip side, you have the Democrats, Joe Biden, of course, the leader of the Democrats now, who's saying, "Please follow the scientists."

But we also have a situation where our government has never been one to force individuals to mandating vaccines, although there is some mandating of vaccines and there are certainly laws that require children to be protected, for example, and these have been tested throughout the years by religious and other communities.

But unfortunately during the pandemic, the culture war really fed into a reluctance and with regard to science and vaccines, which then really fossilized, I guess, is the best way of putting it.

There are people who are hardcore adamant that it doesn't matter what you tell them.

Emotionally, they've decided they're not going to take a vaccine.

And of course, as we know, if we don't have people vaccinated to the, whatever, 75 or more percent within our population and around the world, the vaccine's going to continue to mutate and continue to be a problem for us.

- Well, you've mentioned mutations, Evelyn.

So the days before we taped this episode, the World Health Organization announced a new variant, omicron, which is believed to, we don't know yet whether it's more easily spread or whether or not it evades the bodies or the natural or the vaccine triggered immune responses.

But we do know that it's causing a lot of anxiety in governments and in markets around the world.

As someone who has spent most of their professional life working in the national security community, you're used to making those calculations about managing and assessing risk.

On an individual basis, how should Americans begin to process the risk from this new variant?

- Well, Jim, I think it's too early.

All of the scientists has said it's too early to process the risk from this new variant.

But I think what people have to think about is what are the odds if you get the coronavirus, any variant of it, of dying?

And this is where it seems obvious that from a rational perspective, you should get the vaccine because I heard on a recent newscast, Dr. Zeke Emanuel saying that if you get the coronavirus, you are 11 times more likely to die if you are unvaccinated, so that speaks for itself.

I don't think this omicron variant is gonna be any different in that respect.

In fact, perhaps it could be worse.

The one thing we wanna do is really stop the spread of all the variants because we're going to only encourage the coronavirus or provide the opportunity for the coronavirus to continue to be lethal and to continue to force us to innovate and spend money and lose lives in the meantime.

- One of the subjects that we've talked about on the show this year has been the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of individuals, on communities, countries, regions, and indeed the planet.

And needless to say, it's had a severe impact on many, many, many people.

Can you break that down for us?

How much more can we endure in terms of our mental health?

This is now going on two years of a life vastly different in many ways, vastly inferior to what many people had before.

- Yeah, Wayne.

You bring up a really good point.

President Obama's surgeon general, who is actually President Biden's surgeon general, so he brought him back to do the job again, one of the last comments he made when he was leaving the job last time was that we are experiencing in America something he called "a loneliness epidemic."

So you can only imagine how much worse that is now in light of this pandemic, and people are really struggling mentally.

We know that there's been a significant increase, I don't have the statistics on hand, in drug overdoses.

People who were addicted to opioids were unable to get the counseling help in person or even on Zoom.

There was certainly a gap before we got that up and running, and even then, that's not sufficient.

So we've had an increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, and, of course, we see violence everywhere.

You see it on aircraft.

Normally, we were always used to having more or less friendly skies, (laughs) and now people are experiencing aggressiveness among passengers, fellow passengers on aircraft.

This is all the buildup of tension, I think a lack of trust in one another, and a little bit, too, of an individualistic approach to a lot of the problems that we face in society.

But I think we do need more trained mental health specialists stat, even before we get to gun control and other issues that are related.

- Evelyn, we've talked a little bit here about the impact of the vaccines in 2021, and we could've made a compelling case for why they should have been the story of the year, but I wanna talk about one specific aspect of vaccines.

The United States and the major industrialized Western powers have been criticized for hoarding vaccines and not sharing them with enough of the underdeveloped parts of the world.

What's your assessment of that?

Is the United States and its partners around the world keeping too much vaccine for themselves and not sharing enough to hopefully vaccinate enough of the planet to avoid future variants?

- I think, Jim, that we are probably holding too much vaccine in the United States and in the Western world.

Now we have committed to release more, but the problem is that's also been really slow.

For whatever reason, we haven't gotten the vaccine to the low income and medium income countries that need the vaccines urgently, including in Africa, where we see the new variant, and that has cost us, I think, in our moral standing and certainly with regard to combating the vaccine.

The other issue, though, which is related has to do with the patents and the European Union, there were European Union leaders, maybe the union itself at the very top, was calling for a releasing of the patent so that other companies around the world could manufacture the vaccines.

And frankly, the US and the European countries said no.

And the United States government probably could have put pressure on this dynamic to change the position of the pharmaceutical companies and to actually work together with the European Union to make the vaccines effectively more available worldwide.

So it is a failure in two areas.

- So another contender for a story of the year for 2021 is geopolitics, which really feels like it's made a return in this year, 2021.

We have tensions between Ukraine and Russia, tensions between China and Taiwan, tensions between China and the United States, tensions between the United States and Russia, and we could go through a long list.

Break that down for us if you can.

Give us an overview.

Why is this happening and where are we?

- Yeah, so Wayne, we have, first of all, these autocratic states you mentioned, Russia and China.

They are putting pressure on the democracies of the world, essentially trying to prevent us from assisting the citizens and speaking up for the human rights of people living in China, living in Hong Kong, living in Russia and elsewhere.

And they are also trying to make sure that they build up their capabilities, everything from nuclear.

Nuclear is back on the table, and it's on the table with China in a way that it had not been an issue previously.

So you have everything from nuclear all the way to the cyber hacking, the cyber ransomware, all of these activities that the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and other states are engaged in.

So this is putting a terrible stress on the United States, our European allies, our allies in Asia, as well as the Asia Pacific, as well as Israel and others.

We are finding that our government has to focus on those issues with a greater sense of urgency while we're still dealing with the pandemic and many other legacy issues, and we have new ones coming down the pike because climate change is going to only exacerbate the geopolitical tensions.

We see that on the border between Belarus and Poland where the Byelorussians and, frankly, the Russians have weaponized migrant flows in order to put pressure on the European Union.

We also, of course, have the old geopolitics where the Russians are poised on the border with Ukraine, threatening to launch another invasion into Ukraine.

So unfortunately, geopolitics doesn't stop.

We have the nuclear threats.

We have the threats to borders.

That's been a lot of bad news this year on that front.

- Yeah, Evelyn, one of the most searing set of images that I think any of us have seen for some time was the scenes from Kabul, Afghanistan as American forces withdrew this summer.

As someone who has spent their life again in the national security community and at the intersection of politics and policy, what's your assessment of the American public's reaction to the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

- I think due to the heavy media coverage of the desperate Afghans trying to flee any way they could, their country, the footage we had of people climbing into the wheel wells of aircraft and the cargo planes, US cargo planes taking off, people dropping to their deaths, including a young soccer star in Afghanistan, Afghan young man, these are searing images and you don't forget.

That is seared in American minds now, and unfortunately, this portion of it was avoidable.

So were we going to be victorious in every aspect of our intervention in Afghanistan?

Not likely, not in the near term.

Was Afghanistan gonna be a perfect democracy or really a real democracy, a strong democracy?

Not in the near term, and we made the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, and the majority of the American people from both parties across the board were in favor of that.

The problem was how it was executed, the timeline, the lack of preparation for the desperate refugee flows.

This was an unfortunate episode.

- You use the term searing images, and, of course, in any year, there are many of them.

Some of the most searing and emotionally powerful and devastating were of refugees and migrants trying to get someplace better.

And you had boats where people drowned.

You had people coming through Central America, trying to reach America.

Talk about refugees and migration in the context of not only of the pandemic by climate change, which will exacerbate the flow and the demand and desire to leave places that are no longer fit for living or people believe they're no longer fit for living.

- Right, so you see refugees coming in the Western hemisphere, coming up from South America, from central America, but actually, many of them originating from Afghanistan and Africa itself.

You also see, of course, the Africans, the Afghans, many other migrants, Middle Eastern, Syrian trying to get to Europe.

This is a trend that started in 2015, and it's only going to get worse.

I predict it'll be your story of the year, unfortunately, coming up in the coming years because of climate change, because of all of the other pressures being placed on societies.

And if we continue to maintain that we can't take more immigrants, it's only going to get worse, and if we don't provide foreign assistance to other countries, it's only going to get worse.

So I hope that governments can get together and find a better solution, a more fair solution.

Right now, the "New Yorker" is highlighting an article about jails that the European Union has been paying for in Libya in order to prevent people from coming over to the European Union.

These are dirty methods.

There oughta be a better way to solve the problem, but that requires global cooperation, global coordination.

- Well, and this brings us to the 2021 story of the year.

As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump said the only he could lose the election was if it was stolen from him.

In the summer of 2020, he began seeing that same refrain.

Rather than simple red meat to stir up his base, Donald Trump continued to challenge the results of the election well after Election Day, well after votes were certified in state capitals, well after the electoral college had voted.

In fact, in the hours prior to Congress certifying the results of the electoral college, President Trump, his lawyers, and his enablers continued to press the lie that the election had been stolen.

Tragically for anyone who cares about American democracy, President Trump wasn't alone.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina reportedly pressured election officials in Georgia.

Trump himself asked the secretary of state there to help him find a specific number of votes.

As journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa documented, the president even pressured Vice President Mike Pence to throw the Constitution into peril by claiming to have an authority to reject votes in the US Senate that the vice president simply did not have.

Then on the morning of January 6th, 2021, President Trump spoke to a rally of his supporters on The Mall in Washington before encouraging them to march to the Capitol.

Once there, the marches didn't stop at the gates to the Capitol grounds.

They forced their way past police barricades and fought pitched battles with Capitol and DC police for hours, breaching the Capitol building and the sacred chambers of the US House and the US Senate before order was restored.

But by then, the world had witnessed an insurrection on American soil that threatened the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Donald Trump refused to attend the inauguration of President Joe Biden, and in the months that followed, Donald Trump has repeated the lie that his election was stolen from him again and again.

In doing so, he's not just setting the stage for a political comeback in 2024.

He's undermining the central pillar of our democratic republic, confidence in the integrity of our elections.

So for those reasons, we name the big lie and the insurrection of January 6th the story of the year for 2021.

Evelyn, you spent part of your career working in the United States Senate.

On that day, January 6th, 2021, what did those images, what did those events mean to you?

- Well, it was a tremendous violation, physical and, of course, moral of our nation, of our Congress, of the institutions, and everything that we stand for as Americans.

I'm not a historian, you are, Jim, but the last time that we had the hostile forces marauding through government buildings was, I think, the War of 1812, and these were Americans who were going through the halls of Congress.

They were attacking, physically violently attacking police officers, several of whom died as a result of their injuries and many of whom remain injured if not physically, mentally because of what they endured that day.

They were badly outnumbered.

There were members of Congress, and, of course, the organizers of these rallies who knew that there was likely violence.

They knew that they would go to the Capitol, these mobs, and honestly, the one word that comes into my head is violation.

It was a violation of America and Americans.

- So what harm did the big lie and the insurrection do to the United States both domestically and internationally?

- Well, internationally, you can only imagine.

If you turned on the television and you saw these crazy, violent marauders wearing tribal gear and saying that the president had sent them, doing things like defecating and the Capitol and destroying the property, breaking windows, if you saw that in another country, that's something we have always looked down upon and we've said that wouldn't happen in an orderly, civilized democracy.

So certainly, it hurt our reputation from that perspective, but the other thing it did was really shake faith in America as a strong country, as a country that could be relied upon internationally.

If that could happen in America, well, we can't rely on America.

And then of course, domestically, as you've already said or alluded to, it shook the confidence of the American people.

Congress, the members of Congress were directly in harm's way.

They could've been slaughtered.

Many of those people who are taking part in the insurrection that day said that if they got their hands on Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress, they would've killed them.

They were saying, "Hang Mike Pence," and he was in there.

So the reality was that it damaged our international reputation, and it very much destroyed many Americans' faith in their Congress, in one another, and, of course, it continued to put the process into question, although that was really much more on the Republican Trump side of the aisle.

- Have we done enough to respond to this?

This was a searing moment in 2021, certainly one of the most dramatic and provocative moments in my adult life, and I remember 9/11.

So have we done enough as a country to respond to this moment and to hold people accountable?

- Well, there are multiple avenues of redress, and you mentioned hold people accountable.

The hold people accountable portion is really a matter for law enforcement and for the legal community, for the justice department and across the country, various courts.

That is happening, but very slowly.

The other component, of course, is Congress investigating and getting the truth out so that the American people know.

They can turn over that information then, of course, to law enforcement.

All of this is happening a bit too slowly.

In the meantime, the media is doing its job to some extent.

They are ferreting out new information.

I just read a "Rolling Stone" article that essentially asserts that there are two or three informants.

Informants is not the right word, witnesses, (laughs) people who helped plan the Stop the Steal rally that president Trump was encouraging and his team was encouraging on January 6th.

Those people essentially have, supposedly, according to this reporting, they have told members of Congress that their colleagues, that some other members of Congress were involved in planning the rally, that some of these people knew that the rally participants would go to the Capitol.

They knew that it was likely because of the composition, the people who were in the rally.

They knew that it was likely to be violent, and at least a danger, potential danger to members of Congress and to the process of verifying the elections.

So that story has yet to be told fully.

So it's very slow because we're almost a year on.

Hopefully, that will accelerate once we have people testifying publicly.

- I think the underlying question in all of this in our story of the year is how can we, the American people, begin to heal the divides that made January 6th possible?

- [Jim] About 30 seconds for that, Evelyn.

- It takes real leadership.

Healing divides is not something that you get paid for, literally, if you're a member of Congress or if you're a politician because you raise money by getting people upset, frankly speaking, and on social media, it's the same dynamic.

So you're not rewarded for working across the aisle.

What I see is President Biden is trying to do that.

He's trying to show the American people that there are results, but I think it's up to all of us and certainly leaders, cultural leaders, Hollywood stars, sports stars, business leaders.

Everybody needs to start speaking more rationally and reaching across the divides that are real in our culture and the ones that have been fabricated and exacerbated to the detriment of democracy by social media and bad actors.

- That's where we need to leave it today.

Evelyn Farkas, thank you for helping us take a look back at 2021.

That is all the time we have, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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