The year that ended
about a week ago was, I daresay, not quite so full of surprises as 2020. Still,
you could make a good argument that our whole country is still in the midst of
living out Chamberlain’s curse about “interesting times.”
This is my
third January since I started Twilight Patriot way back in early 2019. Each
time the new year has rolled around, I’ve tried my hand at predicting some of its
major political and economic events. This is, of course, a rather bold business
– you probably remember the saying: “It’s hard to make predictions,
especially about the future.”
But I
nevertheless see it as a crucial test of my abilities as an analyst, since if I
really understand the big trends that are shaping my country’s history at the
moment, I should be able to follow at least some of them into the future for a
while.
Now, it’s been
my consistent argument since I started this blog that American civilization as
we know it is in a state of steep decline, but that this decline is going to be
more gradual than sudden. Or in other words, we’re headed toward a future that
looks more like modern-day Mexico, or Russia in the 1990s, than the Hollywood
apocalypses that you see in films like Mad Max or The Hunger Games.
Because of
this, I don’t try to predict cataclysms. While I freely admit that black swan
events matter – things like 9/11, or a certain genetically modified bat virus
escaping from a Chinese lab, can have a big impact on history – my vision of
the future doesn’t give them top billing, because (1) they’re rare enough that
when somebody says, “This is going to be the year of the happening!” he’s
revealing more about his own psychological makeup than the likelihood of whatever
“happening” he has in mind, and (2) a crisis matters most when it befalls a
nation whose existing fault lines make it inevitable that trouble will come
sooner or later.
For instance,
9/11 was such a big deal mainly because the Neocon foreign policy
establishment, which was already in power and already hankering to
regime-change the Middle East, saw it as a convenient justification for its
nation-building adventures. Covid-19, as far as viruses go, is at about the
same danger level as the 1957 and 1969 Asian flu pandemics, which most people
hardly noticed. But it struck a much bigger social and economic blow to the
collective West mainly because it was a convenient weapon in a whitehot
political ragefest/class war that was already in high gear.
So when I make
this coming year’s predictions, I’m going to follow the same pattern: assume
that the past is the best guide to the future, identify and extrapolate the
trends that have been building up for a long time, and pay attention to the
lessons of historical cycles.
But first, a
review of last year’s predictions is in order. In January of 2021, I foretold
that the official economy would keep growing, and GDP would exceed $22 trillion
by the end of the year. (It currently stands around $23.3 trillion). I also
said that real inflation, as calculated by my own commodity-based method, would
be at least 11 percent. (You can read about the method here; inflation for this
year was 24.2 percent, compared to 24.7 percent last year, though even the
official rate of 6.8 percent is high enough to be newsworthy).
I predicted,
correctly, that the new Congress would spend liberally once President Biden was
sworn in, but that most of the money would go to various interest groups rather
than to ordinary Americans. I was also right about DC statehood getting passed by the House and
ignored by the Senate, and court-packing going nowhere.
The censorship
and firing of conservatives – or even just liberals who step on the wrong toes
– is continuing apace. See, for instance, the case of Bright Sheng, a Chinese
pianist and composer who fled to America to escape the Cultural Revolution, only to become a professor of music at the University of Michigan and then get relieved of his teaching duties for not writing a good enough apology letter
after he showed his class a scene from an old Shakespeare movie with an actor
in blackface.
Also, the people
who think that this is only happening in the humanities, and that the hard
sciences are safe, have another think coming. Perhaps you recall that time in
October when the physicist Dorian Abbott
got cancelled from giving a lecture at Harvard because word got out that he
supported race-neutral university admissions?
Another thing I
predicted was that, while the United States might see plenty of civil unrest in
the coming year, none of it would pose a serious threat to the continuity of
government. Well, having to reroute traffic for a day because a bunch of vaccine
protesters are marching up and down the Brooklyn Bridge chanting “Let’s Go
Brandon” is annoying, but it does not a revolution make.
In the realm of
foreign policy, I predicted that the United States, Russia, China, Israel, and
Iran would continue to avoid going to war with one other, and while the dollar
would continue its gradual decline, it would still be the dominant global
currency at the year’s end. Also, the protests in Hong Kong would de-escalate
in a mostly peaceful manner.
Now for what I
got wrong. I said that after President Biden was sworn in, the Democrats,
acting out of rational self-interest, would do an about face re covid
measures and become the back-to-business party. Well, they didn’t, and I had to
admit that, in this case, I had overestimated the role of interest vis-à-vis
myth in shaping human behaviour.
It turns out
that pretty-much all the men and women who make up the western neoliberal technocracy
are very strongly attached to their role
as the good people in the ongoing covid morality play. Thus, our ruling class has continued to
signal its goodness with extreme and largely symbolic virus-fighting measures,
such as making elementary school children wear useless cloth face masks, even
when their man in the White House is taking the blame.
My other wrong
prediction was that the national debt, as displayed at usdebtclock.org, would
grow to at least $31.5 trillion. Today it stands at $29.7 trillion, about the
same as a year ago. Now, part of my mistake was using a source which
sometimes changes its calculation methods, leading to discontinuities. But at
the same time, I’ve come to believe that the national debt just isn’t as big a
deal as I used to think.
Both the debt
and the deficit are just too easy to gimmick. Also, national debt is not, as
some people naively think, some sort of countdown to financial apocalypse –
when you’re the government and the interest rate is whatever you say it is, bankruptcy
is fairly easy to avoid.
By now, I
mostly just care about inflation. All forms of money are, to various degrees,
abstract – money, in itself, is not wealth, it’s just a collection of symbols
that can be manipulated by the people in power. Thus, the unraveling of the US
economy won’t be driven by events in the symbol world per se, but by the eventual
inability of the symbol world to command economic force in the real world – and
the disconnection between the two is what inflation measures.
So I will start
off my predictions for 2022 with a prediction that commodity inflation – measured, as before, with my geometric mean method – will again exceed 11 percent.
I expect the
Republicans to retake the House, since the president’s party is at a
disadvantage during midterms to begin with, even without massive stagflation. I will not make a prediction about the Senate – it’s balanced on a
knife-edge right now, split 50-50 with only a few competitive races – but I do
feel quite certain that neither party will gain more than two seats. I also
think that the energetic (?) period of Biden’s presidency is over, and even
with another year in nominal command of a Democratic Congress, he won’t get any
of his major policy goals passed into law.
Nevertheless, America’s
plutocratic oligarchy – the combination of people in the universities, the
press, the judiciary, the permanent civil service, and corporate management who
collectively run the country – is still all-in on its weird brand of woke capitalist
SJWism, and will continue to aggressively promote it. Expect more
censorship and firing of conservatives, more leftist propaganda in every
institution from kindergartens up to the military, more news stories about
children changing their genders at school without their parents knowing it, and
so forth.
I expect
America’s foreign affairs during the coming year to be rather anticlimactic.
Our country’s senior leadership will do its best to give the appearance of
policing the world, but after the Afghanistan debacle, everybody knows better
than to get into any situation in which fighting is even a remote possibility.
Thus, I expect no wars with Russia, China, Iran, or any other competent
adversary.
Nevertheless,
Vladimir Putin’s recent “ultimatum” regarding the removal of NATO forces from
eastern Europe is not to be taken lightly, as Putin is the kind of leader who
only starts things he’s ready to follow through with. Thus, I do expect that, sometime in the next few months, Putin
will find a way to “develop” the situation in that part of the world in a
way that humiliates the US and its allies, albeit without open warfare.
As usual, I
expect regime continuity in the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, Iran,
and Saudi Arabia, and I expect the dollar to persist as the world’s top currency.
As far as covid
goes, I expect that the continuing decline of the disease’s actual lethality
won’t do much – at least in the coming year – to blunt its power as a political
shibboleth.
Regarding
vaccinations, I think my earliest prediction – the one I made back in May of
2020 – has panned out fairly well. That’s when I said that vaccines would be
developed and used, but due to rapid mutation rates and other biological challenges
(already known from experiments with older coronaviruses) they would end up
having low but non-zero efficacy.
There are,
nonetheless, powerful elements in American society that cannot admit this,
because once you’ve become emotionally wrapped up in a story – and let’s face
it, faith in vaccines is filling a mythic-religious role in a lot of people’s
lives these days – it’s very hard to let go of it.
Therefore,
masks and vaccines (Fifth shots? Sixth? Seventh?) will still be vociferously
promoted in the media at year’s end. But I think that by then most Americans
will be roundly ignoring the whole matter, and life will be back to normal
except in places where it’s especially easy to enforce conformity (i.e. airports,
universities, deep-blue cities with zealous mayors, etc.)
At the end of
the year, life for most Americans will probably be going on in much the same
way as before, only with pricier food, pricier gas, other incremental declines
in the standard of living, more crime, more loneliness, a lower fertility rate
– essentially, the same things I’ve been predicting for the last three years.
Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea will keep on circling the moribund
American empire like sharks, but they’ll decide that the time to strike (that is, the
time to strike at American dependencies like Ukraine, Taiwan, South Korea, and
Saudi Arabia, not at America itself) is not quite yet.
And here in
America, the people who make it to 2023 with the fewest scrapes will be those
who prepare for the long game, and are careful to avoid getting too wrapped up in
collapsing institutions. Winning against the system is, at this point, only
possible on the individual and family level, and as I’ve explained in detail
here, it consists of small but important steps like being choosy about where
you send your children to school, becoming more economically self-sufficient,
writing letters to your newspaper about issues that matter to you, and so
forth.
In the long
run, it’s going to be rough. There are people who are working quite hard to
make sure our country remains on track toward having the social values of
Sweden, the censorship and surveillance of China, the crime levels of Mexico,
the infrastructure of Brazil, and the race relations of South Africa. I wish I
could say that by voting for the right people, we could stop this. But at the
present time, I just don’t see any realistic political solution.
Even when
Republicans are nominally in power, they’re content to let things coast, making
no efforts to reverse the Left’s dominance. It has been like this since the
Nixon years, and the Republican base has responded to its repeated humiliations
by electing politicians who are increasingly short on political competence and long on vacuous,
crowd-pleasing rhetoric – from Nixon to Reagan to the Bushes to Trump, it is
all one long downward spiral.
The American
empire is imploding. It won’t happen quickly; it will probably be several
decades, perhaps a whole century, before our country, or its successor states,
restabilize. But if you can keep your head screwed on
tight and look after your family in the years ahead, the reward is that you –
or more likely your descendants – will get to have a hand in building whatever
comes next.
