Looking back at the 2020s from our vantage point in 2030, the first great event was the complete destruction of Donald Trump’s Republican Party. As the former Republican consultant Mike Murphy had noticed, there were roughly 300 state and federal elections during the Trump years and Republicans did horribly in most of them. The 2020 vote was a continuation of that trend. Trump’s landslide defeat left him humiliated, and the Republicans lost their Senate majority.

Trump cried fraud and tried to whip up his followers, but they turned their backs. He went from idol to scapegoat in an instant. It seemed they could forgive him everything but losing. Many temporarily retreated from political life, the way evangelical Christians did after the ignominy of the Scopes trial.

President Joe Biden faced an interesting dynamic in his party. The political power was with moderates. The intellectual power was with the left. People of color, whose views were largely more moderate, became the crucial swing faction.

As president, Biden resisted the interest groups that wanted him to address health care first. Instead, he did child and earned-income tax credits, infrastructure, expanded early childhood education, expanded prison reform, and so on — what some writers called “reparations by any other name.” He gave regulatory czar Elizabeth Warren a special portfolio to take on Big Tech.