Even a most optimistic gloss on 2021 would say it was a year of high hopes and huge disappointments. All the things that looked to have been chased away in 2020—totalitarian Republicans in control, coronavirus out of control—are either back, or a near-certainty to return imminently. Democrats seized power at the beginning of the year and by its end had proven beyond argument that they, as ever, had no intention of wielding it. My year in review traces a few of those steps.