Your Predictions For 2024

What do you think will happen–or might happen–in 2024?

This is the time to hazard a guess in our annual contest to see who can make the best prediction for the year ahead. When 2024 draws to a close, we will review the predictions and proclaim a winner, as we did on last Friday’s post.

You may be the next winner of the GlutenFree Prize, a non-physical honor named after the reader who won the 2020 prize for predicting COVID! The winning guesses are not always that dramatic–ADP won this year’s contest for some detailed projections about the price of eggs, among other things.

Since 2024 is an election year, not to mention an Olympics year, there will be plenty of fodder for prognostication.

Here are the instructions from last year and the years before that:

The custom on this blog on [or around] New Year’s Day is for readers to predict what they think will happen over the course of the year ahead. Then, once the year is over, on or around the next New Year’s Eve, we will revisit those predictions and see who made the best one. . . .

The predictions can be weighty or light, serious or whimsical. Winning predictions will likely be highly specific. They tend to seem highly unlikely at the time they are made, but then, to our surprise, they happen anyway. The winning prediction makes us think, “How could anyone possibly know THAT was going to happen?”

These are free posts, so you do not need to be a subscriber to make a prediction or see the results next year.

Also, these are predictions, not prophecies that claim supernatural authority. The Deuteronomy 18:21-22 principle will not be enforced.

I’ll go first. . . .

(1) The election will be full of sound and fury, but both Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be their party’s nominee. When it’s all over, the Democrats will win the presidency and both houses of the legislative branch in a landslide.

I say this (in sorrow) for two reasons: the Republican Party is in a state of complete disarray. There is not even a consensus on what conservatism is. And even Republicans who are devoted supporters of Donald Trump are at each other’s throats, as we saw in the House Republican’s inability to so much as elect a Speaker. The Democratic Party, in contrast, is unified and disciplined. They don’t care that President Biden is so inept and unpopular. He does the party’s bidding, so the political apparatus will keep him in office . We saw a foretaste of the political effectiveness of the two parties in the 2022 midterm elections.

Also, while lots of us conservatives have grievances of our own and sympathy for what Trump has been put through, the general public is not interested in Trump getting to have his revenge. Most people are sick of that sort of thing and want to put it all behind them.

(2) Woke progressivism will fade, as its pretension of intersectionality collapses in anti-semitism, and corporations, entertainers, politicians, and academics “awaken” to its true nature and move on. This will result in a return to more old-fashioned liberalism in the Democratic party, which will contribute to my first prediction by removing what ordinary voters most despise on the Left.

(3) Transgenderism will fade under the pressure of major malpractice suits. Fewer young people will identify as “non-binary” and fewer will be subjected to mutilative surgeries and sterilizing hormone treatments. Mainstream culture will transition from the assumption that “this is just the way things are today” to “how could we have possibly thought that?”

Now your turn. . . .

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