Here we are in a shiny new year, and it is time for policy analysts and others to make their predictions about what will happen in the next 12 months.
Of course, no one has the slightest idea what is going to happen. The biggest reason for that ignorance is that the people who control things do not yet know what they will do. They do not yet know what upcoming catastrophes they have already set in motion, and they do not know what the political ramifications of those disasters will be.
“The people who control things” today are largely of the left, which might come as a surprise to those who believe the left is anti-business and hence in a weak position to control events. It is not. Today’s leftists love any business they can control.
Leftists, in fact, idolize money and crave control over it. They hate money only when other people have it.
In the United States today, the federal government asserts ultimate power over the flow of money — how it is invested and consumed and by whom. As such, the U.S. government is fundamentally leftist.
Naked power, however, is unattractive to those not already corrupted by its blandishments. Consequently, the left’s goals are clad — or shrouded — in calls for greater equality.
From the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution to the present day, leftists have continually promoted the remaking of society to destroy corrupt institutions that they presume create inequality. The means for this fall under the rubric of “democracy,” which is the euphemism the left uses for its unrelenting accumulation of power.
Destruction is the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of forced equality.
Regardless of whether the reduction of inequality is a sincere goal or merely a pretext for power grabs (or both), the pursuit invariably leads to oppression. Inequality is a natural outcome of human variety and diversity. The only way to reduce it is by suppressing excellence — including excellence of character. Good character is associated with desirable outcomes and is the foundation of human flourishing.
That helps explain why the initiatives of the left tend to undermine the development of positive traits of personal character — such as probity, thrift, courage, honesty, temperance, modesty, patience, liberality, magnanimity, friendliness, proper ambition, and devotion to what is right.
For example, the presumably well-intentioned national-scale attempt to give all children an equal start in life through the welfare state has undermined personal character by removing fathers from homes and weakening the connection between effort and reward. The reluctance to acknowledge natural differences between human males and females has progressed from “equal pay for equal work” to a war on masculinity and even on the obvious and entirely natural differentiation of human beings into two sexes.
Efforts to treat criminals as victims of oppression — morally equalizing them with their own victims, when not elevating perpetrators above their prey — increase crime rates and reduce the availability of goods and services to those living in crime-ridden areas, further expanding the number of victims. The refusal to accept that different children naturally have dissimilar ceilings on their potential academic achievement has led to a continual decay of academic standards and the pursuit of damaging education fads that further undermine achievement — which reduces the quality of life for all because of missed opportunities for greatness among those so ill-taught.
Such destruction is the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of forced equality. Then, as the actions taken to promote equality create more inequality and social chaos, the left presses for further government action to solve the problems it created. Identification of ever-more cases of inequality incites further panicked action to remediate them, thus creating more problems and unhappiness and fevered calls for new remedies.
The continual failure to solve the problems created by the pursuit of equality ultimately leads to hatred toward one’s nation and, soon enough, toward one’s fellow citizens.
That is why our “progressive” president has failed so badly. It is also why the failed president has chosen to base his re-election campaign on the presumption of gross malevolence on the part of anyone who rightly chooses not to support him. Persistent failure leads to hatred of those who insist on standing in the way of the equalization steamroller and the Sacred Democracy that fuels it.
None of that is a strategy. Leftism is a self-perpetuating mechanism of destruction of all natural human endeavors, enterprises, and institutions. That is why we cannot predict what the left will do, now or ever. We cannot know what will offend leftists next and what disasters their own actions will trigger.
All we can confidently predict is that the outcomes will be awful, unnatural, and highly destructive. That is my prediction for 2024.