My Crystal Ball for Politics in 2024

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The journal Democracy has put together a package of short essays for its latest issue about the likely face of American politics in 2024. Most of the contributors focused on one or two big trends and how they’re likely to play out over the next dozen years, but I took a different tack. Instead I identified six big trends: 

  1. America will keep getting older.
  2. If Obamacare survives the Supreme Court, the social welfare state of FDR and LBJ will be more or less complete.
  3. Economic growth is going to be slow.
  4. The fact of climate change will become undeniable.
  5. The Republican Party will continue getting whiter and the Democratic Party will continue getting browner.
  6. Computational horsepower will continue growing.

What does all this mean? Probably nothing good, but a bleak outcome isn’t inevitable. Click the link to read my guesses.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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