The 51 biggest American political moments of the 21st century

I hope you’ve had a Merry Christmas and/or happy holidays so far! As Matt Yglesias writes, it’s usually hard to find traction on newsletters this time of year. At the same time, the rest of the industry may overcompensate by hardly publishing any fresh content at all. And I’m sure some of you are waiting out airport delays today, or peeking at your phones while Uncle Stu tells the same story for the fourth time.

So I can’t resist the urge to swim upstream by publishing a semi-serious post, with a question inspired by The Ringer’s countdown of the top 100 sports moments of the past quarter-century. What are the most important American political moments of the 2000s so far?

Although the headline says “21st century”, I’ll allow events taking place in 2000 even though they were technically in the 20th century. So we have 26 years of history to consider here, in other words.

As usual, paid subscribers are welcome to argue about this in the comments. But be nice: it’s the holidays! And please think of my list as a draft, written in pencil. I undoubtedly have my biases, including probably rating elections more highly as compared to non-election events than others might. There are also various criteria that one might use to judge big moments:

• The impact of the event on the future direction of politics. This might privilege surprising events versus predictable ones.

• The objective consequences for the lives of American and global citizens.1

• Drama and the sense of “living through history”.2

• And as a tiebreaker, agency — meaning that the event reflected the consequences of deliberate decisions made by American political actors. In that sense, a war that the U.S. initiated counts more than, say, a natural disaster.

There’s another slightly tricky component to this. As a conceit, I’ve assigned each entry to a particular date. But some events don’t map onto dates so neatly. For the Iraq War, for instance, you could use the day the Senate authorized the use of military force (Oct. 11, 2002) or when the war actually started (March 20, 2003), or even Bush’s premature declaration of “Mission Accomplished” (May 1, 2003). In some cases, the dates on this list represent the cumulative impact of events that unfolded over weeks, months,