Having reached the point where I can say conclusively that I’ve been around for a while, I’m here today to say that I do not recall anytime in my many years that so many people I know or read have expressed so much apprehension for the coming of a new year.
Everyone is expecting the worst.
It comes up in conversation — ok, mostly with my lefty, Trump-despising cronies — but also in blogs, in comments, in asides from strangers. With “Jesus, this one going to be sick … “, being — in para-phrased form — a common refrain. Maybe you do, but I don’t remember this as the calendar turned from say, 2013 to 2014. Or even 1967 to ’68, and ’68 was a seriously bad year anyway anyone looks at it.
For a while I was thinking of doing a semi-facetious list of the ways 2024 is really going to jump the rails of common sense, decency, legality, etc. This list would have included predictions like:
1: Thanks to a ruling of the Supreme Court, with Clarence Thomas refusing to recuse, Donald Trump will be declared the winner of the 2024 election despite again losing the popular vote by millions. Legal battles in Ohio, Michigan and Arizona will result in the Court certifying contested Electoral College electors mere days before the inauguration.
2: Violent protests will erupt across the country and in D.C. as a result, suspending the inauguration and forcing Trump to take the oath indoors under heavy security.
3: An “October surprise” — a startlingly realistic AI-generated deep fake — will so badly damage Joe Biden, much as the Comey letter eroded Hillary Clinton’s support days before the election in 2016, that it will shave tens of thousands of votes in key states, putting a Court decision about the Electoral College in complete control of asserting the winner.
And so on …
But, good lord! What a bummer, right? Who wants to think about this stuff, even if — guessing here — millions already are?
While I continue to doubt both Biden and Trump will make the 2024 ballot, neither has any serious impediment — other than age — in this first week of the new year. I can not imagine the Supreme Court, its dogmatic allegiance to “originalism” withstanding, will do anything to complicate Trump’s myriad legal fights. It certainly won’t uphold Colorado’s 14th amendment decision, no doubt resting its decision on an argument Sam Alito intuits from a Spanish Inquisition case from 1503.
Likewise, in my morose stupor of the moment, I predict the same Court will strategize a way to avoid making any definitive decision on Jack Smith’s request for a ruling on Trump’s total immunity from prosecution on anything; parking tickets, exploiting illegal immigrant labor, stiffing contractors, raping women in department store dressing rooms, inciting a riot to overthrow the government, you name it. The Alito-Thomas bloc will devise a plan effectively exonerating Trump, certainly until after he’s reelected, at which point he can (and will) pardon himself.
I had a couple dozen more like this penciled in for added emphasis, but, damn man! It’s just too dystopian, even for me, a guy who can’t wait for the “Mad Max: Fury Road” sequel.
One thing that constantly rattles through my alleged brain though is how much of the over-arching chaos of this moment, and the looming chaos of 2024 (and beyond), rests at the feet of two people: Trump and Vladimir Putin, two guys who are not exactly unfamiliar or uninvested in each other.
Putin is obviously the key element in the war in Ukraine, and the powerful suspicion is that he is also a primary figure behind Iran’s support of Hamas and Hezbollah, on the grounds that any and all chaos that absorbs and consumes western democracies serves his long term interests.
It seems smart to bet that Putin’s long-standing support for Trump — via internet troll farms and social media disinformation — will, as I suggest with that “October surprise” business — only accelerate and become much more sophisticated this year, since a Trump defeat could likely seal Putin’s fate as well among the Russian elites.
Anyway, I promise I’m scouring the web for more uplifting topics to rant on about in the months to come. Maybe even something about Taylor Swift! Please stay tuned.
Please! Talk Taylor Swift!
And just to make you feel extra special secure and comfortable about 2024, here is a recent article from (of all people) Mitch Daniels:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/02/crisis-looms-united-states/
Opinion I surrender. A major economic and social crisis seems inevitable.
By Mitch Daniels
January 2, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
On the list of words in danger of cheapening from overuse — think “focus,” “iconic,” “existential,” you have your own favorites — “crisis” must rank near the top. A Foreign Policy article in 2020 urged some “crisis” caution, listing health care, housing, energy, drugs, education, marriage, police violence and others as declared “crises” that might not fully qualify for such an extreme label.
A host of prognosticators, coming from diverse disciplinary directions, seems to think something truly worthy of the term is coming. They foresee cataclysmic economic and social change dead ahead, and they align closely regarding the timing of the crash’s arrival. Unsettling as these forecasts are, the even more troubling thought is that maybe a true crisis is not just inevitable but also necessary to future national success and social cohesion.
The causal diagnoses differ somewhat. Looking through a political lens, James Piereson in “Shattered Consensus” observes a collapse of the postwar understanding of government’s role, namely to promote full employment and to police a disorderly world. He expects a “fourth revolution” around the end of this decade, following the Jeffersonian upheaval of 1800, the Civil War and the New Deal. Such a revolution, he writes, is required or else “the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”
In “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” published this summer, demographic historian Neil Howe arrived at a similar conclusion. His view springs from a conviction that human history follows highly predictable cycles based on the “saeculum,” or typical human life span of 80 years or so, and the differing experiences of four generations within that span. The next “turning,” he predicts, is due in about 2033. It will resemble those in the 1760s, 1850s and 1920s, Howe writes, that produced “bone-jarring Crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged wholly transformed.”
Others see disaster’s origins in economics. Failure to resume strong growth and to produce greater economic equality will bring forth authoritarian regimes both left and right. This year, in his book “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism,” Financial Times editor Martin Wolf advocated for an array of reforms, including carbon taxation, a presumption against horizontal mergers, a virtual ban on corporate share buybacks, compulsory voting, and extra votes for younger citizens and parents of children. He fears that, absent such measures, “the light of political and personal freedom might once again disappear from the world.”
Then there’s that little matter of our unconscionable and unpayable national debt, current and committed. Erskine Bowles led the last serious effort to rein it in, before his commission’s report in 2010 was torpedoed by President Barack Obama. Bowles called what’s coming “the most predictable economic crisis” — there’s that word again, aptly applied — “in history.” And that was many trillions of borrowing ago.
Now, market guru John Mauldin has begun forecasting a “great reset” when these unsustainable bills cannot be paid, when “the economy comes crashing down around our ears.” Writing in August, he said he sees this happening “roughly 7-10 years from now.”
Encouragingly, if vaguely, most of these seers retain their optimism. Piereson closes by imagining “a new order on the foundations of the old.” Confessing that he doesn’t “know exactly how it will work,” Mauldin expects us to “muddle through” somehow.
Howe, because he sees his sweeping, socially driven generational cycles recurring all the way back to the Greeks, is the most cavalier. Although “the old American republic is collapsing,” he says, we will soon pass through a “great gate in history,” resolve our challenges and emerge with a “new collective identity.”
Acknowledging the chance of unfavorable outcomes, including a war we neither win nor recover from, he still leans toward expecting a new era of optimism, national unity and civic engagement. Like economist Mancur Olson in the 1980s, he notes the flourishing of societies where disasters — natural or man-made — swept away encrusted bureaucracies and vested interests.
Paradoxically, these ominous projections can help worrywarts like me move through what might be called the stages of political grief. A decade ago, an optimist could tell himself that a democratically mature people could summon the will or the leaders to stop plundering its children’s futures, and to reconcile or at least agree to tolerate sincerely held cultural disagreements.
For a while after that, it seemed plausible to hope for incremental reforms that would enable the keeping of most of our safety-net promises, and for a cooling or exhaustion of our poisonous polarization.
Now, I’m grudgingly ready to surrender and accept that the cliché must be true: Washington will not face up to its duty except in a genuine crisis. Then and only then will we, as some would say, focus on the existential threats to our iconic institutions.
So maybe we might as well get on with it, and hope that we at least “muddle through.” I’ve arrived at the final stage: Crisis? Ready when you are.