Maybe because the past 12 months have felt more like a decade, it’s already become a popular bit of revisionist history to describe 2020 as a normal year that suddenly went off the rails when pandemic shutdowns took hold and a string of police killings set off widespread racial justice protests.
But the truth is 2020 was never going to be ordinary: it started with presidential impeachment proceedings and was always destined to end with a historically contentious general election.