Happy New Year, С Новым Годом! Call me ‘the Big Nostradamus.’1 Why? Well, a few weeks ago I discovered an old writing of mine which rather remarkably got much of what occurred between the Summer of 2020 and Fall of 2023 correct — Biden’s less-than-expected margin-of-victory, Trump’s angrily disputing his loss, the fervor of wokism weakening, the tide of fascism rising, old-school indie sleaze reviving, it’s all there. Everything besides Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying prior to the 2020 election, anyway. That kind of fucked me. I thought the old bat would hold out at least till Biden took office. But no. No, now women don’t have abortion rights in large swathes of the country, and the country itself is balls-deep in the vise-grip of its increasingly-sclerotic mechanisms of government. Thanks, RBG! Oh, what? You think I’m being unfair? Impolite, disrespectful? Or alternatively, maybe, some sort of banal libtard cuck? You’re telling me now for the first time.
Anyways I have, perhaps arrogantly, though I believe justifiably, developed a high opinion of myself as a prognosticator. I know my shit, and I get my shit right. And when I’ve gotten my shit wrong, it’s usually because2 I’ve overestimated the staying power of certain signifiers, signifiers that color and spearhead larger currents of cultural and political life (e.g. my idea that QAnon would remain at the forefront of conspiratorial right-wing American populism), but which are ultimately temporary cynosures, not long-term fixtures of public fascination. Their essences distort, morph, and evolve, but their stylings are always shifting. Occupy Wall Street lulls, then leads to Bernie. The Tea Party quiets, then turns into Trump. And so on and so on.
If there’s any broader prediction I can make irrespective of my individual ones, it’s (I think) an obvious one, that the transformation of these signifiers will only speed up, and the acceleration of culture will continue to hasten. Little now is ‘Lindy,’ most everything now, and perhaps forevermore, invariably becomes passé, mere rented-out amusements or excitements forgotten when outside focus has passed. And the fragmentation of that focus, our focus, and our falling into algorithmic individual rabbit holes, only intensifies that trend. New manifestations of ‘timelessness’ are rare, and ever more elusive.
Below, I’ve curated a list of twenty-five predictions, for this, the *drum roll* twenty-fifth year of the third millennia. There are some topics I don’t feel comfortable wading into, either because they seem pointless given my own lack of ‘fluency’ on the subject, or the uncertainty of the circumstances and lack of up-to-date accurate, verifiable information concerning them. For instance, I won’t attempt to ascertain anything specifically about Israel-Palestine, which from my vantage point appears to be just about hopeless in determining much in definitive detail about, besides that there will be more death, more destruction, and a freer hand for both given by an even-more-friendly American administration. In contrast, certain predictions that are easy, expectable, almost self-evident (such as that more mass shootings will occur), will not be referenced or remarked about.
Without further ado:
This will appear to be the most ‘normal’-seeming year since ~2014, and not because it deserves to be, but because the public has largely become acclimated to the once-wacky cultural and political figures now ascendant if not entrenched in American/Western life. Where in 2016, Trump was jarring, a dramatic departure from the ‘norms’ of before, Trump is now ‘normalized,’ and his hijinks expected, as are hijinks from other cultural and political actors. The standards for public life and discourse have loosened, and are unlikely to tighten for the foreseeable future. Further, the ‘Culture War’, though not over (and never over), is decelerating3; there’s a sense of ‘settling’ in the air, or at least insofar as this phase of it is concerned. The storm has passed, the wreckage is here. Time to pick up the pieces, or really, fight for the scraps. Politics is too integrated into culture, especially now, to detach from it entirely, but the centrality of it will decrease. The ‘vibe shift’ set to take place, even taking place now, is one of silent submission and synthesis, a reconciliation to a new, New Right-inflected reality. It’s midnight, not morning, in America, but we’ve discovered we like living in the darkness.
We are at the high water mark of Trump’s popularity, failing a transcendent, truly transcendent, national tragedy causing a “rally-around-the-flag” event. Something worse than COVID, something that isn’t the sort of ongoing crisis that’s easily mismanaged (COVID…). This is the Trump honeymoon, Trump is more teflon than he’s ever been, the crazy statements are baked-in, laughed about, the psycho picks go ignored, either mentally compartmentalized as non-factors or just hand-waved away. I expect this to continue for several more months, before his favorability and approval ratings decline from their mid-40s highs, but the outrage against him, both real and performative, will not return to the fever pitch of the first administration. There’s simply no shock anymore regarding his actions; any downward movement in Trump’s numbers would have to come from poor performance in materially-affecting circumstances (e.g. presiding over a recession), not from any chaos he facilitates simply by being ‘Trump.’ Trump is too legitimized, “laundered” by both his victory (especially, however small, his popular vote victory) and his critics, if not discredited, have been brought down to his level. In their fighting him they’ve been tarred by, marred by the experience, and fairly or unfairly, are no longer considered by the voting public as having any sort of stronger truth claim or moral high ground. Indeed, much of the less-engaged, non-voting culture now appears passively fond of Trump, one only need see YMCA, or the ‘Trump Dance,’ coming with little controversy, or if any controversy, siloed caring. Like it or not, he’s well on his way to being enshrined as an American icon now, another Elvis Presley, another Marilyn Monroe, a Nixon and Reagan rolled into one… And here, now, come our late ‘80s re-run. Haven’t you seen the pastiched Ralph Lauren Americana? The Patrick Bateman haircuts? The upcoming 2028 Olympics in LA? Oh, yes, yes, the Twain adage is true, history doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme…
Liberal prestige media will have a ‘dead cat bounce,’ but only a dead cat bounce. CNN/MSNBC-addled boomer viewers will no doubt, in some part, return from their depressed post-election soul-searching to their familiar habits, but not with the same vigor as before, and with a faction permanently scarred and enraged and looking for alternative sources of information, either for better evaluations… or more delusions.
‘Cancel culture,’ and the debate surrounding ‘cancel culture,’ will confirmedly be over, already witnessed by the rehabilitation of the more-dubiously outcasted pop culture figures scandalized in the late 2010s. In its place will emerge a trend of radical forgiveness, or tacit acceptance, of certain (though not all) moral and ethical transgressions, wherein ‘bad behavior’ is understood to be part-and-parcel with any sort of public-facing life.
Continuing, there will be no significant reprisal for celebrities implicated in various scandals involving ‘complicity.’ The main perpetrators, such as P. Diddy, will be punished — but accomplices who had awareness of the various situations won’t be. It’s been speculated that the widespreadness of the P. Diddy scandal would tear down the entertainment industry in the eyes of the public, a claim usually augmented by the fact that owing to social media, the barrier to “fame” has fewer gatekeepers than ever before. On the contrary, it’s the public’s perception which will shift, consciously or unconsciously, with them viewing it as an excusable and understandable part of the ‘hustle,’ as it was before.
The identitarian, ‘woke,’ left will continue its retreat. While it has permeated the cultural institutions and magnified topics of discourse that are unlikely to recede entirely, said cultural institutions are increasingly less relevant, if not endangered, and those that will survive will do so by adapting to changing public (market) demands. Already we see universities dismantling their DEI programs, and major corporations ditching those same commitments. The means with which ‘woke’ discourse and disruptive agents have similarly become dilapidated; Elon’s purchase of Twitter, now X, created a crack in the digital public commons and allowed for alternate, heterodox, even rabidly anti-woke content to breathe and forge a new dialectic, which thereafter trickled onto other social media platforms and shaped broader public perceptions of ‘acceptable’ or ‘permitted’ belief. The great ‘vibe shift.’ The “woke” stereotype, the nose-pierced, blue-haired, stick-and-poked hypersensitive screamer, will in the next year and years following increasingly be flattened into a cartoon character object of mockery and scorn, just as the ‘80s and ‘90s made the hippie of the ‘60s and ‘70s into a drugged-out do-nothing-dumbass caricature.
In contrast, a revival of the class-first left, a New ‘Old Left’, will begin to bloom, but continue to lack the management and means for organization. The seeds of this are most plainly visible with the loud, if limited, veneration of Luigi Mangione, perhaps the first widely publicly-sympathized assassin in American history. Nevertheless, there will be no great return to the socialist moment of the late 2010s, when major publications were reporting (commodifying) the labeling as ‘hip’ and ‘trendy.’ The term may continue to be more normalized, but in a more isolated setting. The energy, to the extent it’s still extant, will be more akin to the almost-forgotten Occupy movement of the early 2010s – more practical than philosophical.
The old Left-Right spectrum will continue to dissolve, as the old paradigms that have served as shorthand for so long no longer quite encapsulate the heterodoxy of many people’s political mindsets… This will be the case amongst both the most, and least, politically informed, while the grinding midwits will stick to their labels, attaching themselves and their beliefs to prepackaged ideologies in search of a sense of security in an increasingly complex, uncertain world. Now, it’s evident that the era of liberalism as we know it is over — the adherents of the liberal-left have become more in favor an individualized tyranny, a prescribed creed and schema that makes a mental prison deemed necessary for stewardship of democracy (perhaps, however, post-X takeover and Trump restoration, this is shifting insofar as it can be considered dogma), while the right, still sharing those same tendencies and temptations, has moved to yearning for a Caesar-style savior figure, with their standards of ‘free expression’ more expansive in theory, but still muddled by their inability to wholly inflict their will on political and cultural discourse in any way approaching the past power of the neoliberal “left.” An interesting example of this new, bidirectionally illiberal era can be found in the recently-cancelled Romanian elections, where the Romanian judiciary annulled the first round victory of Călin Georgescu, a far-right Russian sympathizer who doesn’t believe humans landed on the moon, because of alleged outside social media manipulation (and presumably, because he’s a far-right Russian sympathizer who doesn’t believe humans landed on the moon), and not because of any direct voter or voting infractions.
The Democratic Party will continue softening its identitarian rhetoric, but will not shift meaningfully left on economic issues in any measurable way. They will increasingly resemble a strictly neoliberal party in the European sense of the word (Think the FDP of Germany [bad news for the Democratic Party, the FDP of Germany is a diminished, out-of-touch laughingstock…]), supporting a measured welfare state, free markets, and global institutions, resulting in their diminished, working class union former base weakening in power and continuing to exit the party. The party can’t and won’t meaningfully shift left economically because of its increasing reliance on well-earning, well-educated urban and suburbanites. Politics, despite its increasing divorce from material class considerations, remains a self-interested game.
The Democratic Party, while being in disarray, is not as doomed as many think, and will easily capture both the New Jersey and Virginia governorships next November. The Virginia governorship, in particular, has a long pattern of bucking national trends, this despite the presence of an agreed-upon national leader.
The United States will not acquire, or begin the process of acquiring, Greenland or the Panama Canal Zone. However, concessions that advance American interests (particularly, perhaps, the removal of Panamanian port managements by Hong Kong-based Hutchison Holdings), will be made by both the Danish and Panamanians that will go, largely, underreported post-resolution..
The mass deportations will not occur, and will instead be scaled-down spectacles, wherein widely-publicized arrests of criminal migrants will be bandied about in the media, but anything approaching the proposed “they’re all fucking going back” numbers will be ruled out as too economically devastating. The “Trumpist” “America First” base will grumble and be dissatisfied by the scale-back, but not to the point of abandoning Trump – it will be broadly comparable to how many leftists were disappointed in Barack Obama’s inability to fulfill their projections of him.
DOGE will fail, and no significant restructuring of the American government will happen. Piecemeal changes and spending cuts to more backlash-proof departments bulletproofed from significantly affecting the American public will happen, but every other attempt will die in the swamp. There will be a lot of talk, a lot less action. Trump in power will find himself broadly unwilling to make political trouble for himself. At least on purpose, anyway.
The Conservative Party of Canada will sweep to power, dislodging the Liberal Party from office for the first time in ten years. Already it’s unclear if Trudeau will even make it to the next contest; the majority of his caucus are now calling on him to resign. Regardless of his removal, the Liberal Party will be routed, and reduced to its lowest numbers in parliament since they fell behind Jack Layton’s NDP in 2011.
The Christian Democratic Union of Germany will win the 2025 German election, with the resulting government being a GroKo, a Große Koalition, with the SDP. The AfD (Alternative for Germany) will underperform, blamed on bad international press and an unexpected “coming home” of fence-sitting voters.
The Russo-Ukrainian War will continue but will be winding down, with another year attempting to recapture the vanishing attention of Western public; America will not remove their funding, but will reduce it, after a very public Trump-Zelenskyy spat. The expected result is the “West Germany-minus” plan that concedes the four occupied Eastern provinces to Russia, in exchange for an outside-NATO security guarantee, a path to EU membership, and permanent stationing of EU-member troops on the newly-frozen border.
The health of the American economy will not meaningfully change, but the perception of its efficacy will. The right will shift its outlook on it, and the left will become, though not to the same extent, more negative on it. But notions of this health is increasingly multifaceted; raw numbers matter less and less, especially for white collar work, especially when the barrier to hiring is so high, demanding social optimization and grueling mass button-pressing. The deficit will continue to balloon, as will the national debt; no spending cuts will offset the additional cost of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts renewals and new proposed policies.
The normalization of casual racism and race realism becomes an increasingly documented problem in Western life, with little success or even effort from the increasingly irrelevant woke, “antiracist” left in fighting it. This comes downstream of the dominance asserted by the New Right over their mouthpiece on X, where these conversations, once contained in group chats, are spoken of commonly and openly, to the point where most cultural and media personalities seem to have become desensitized to it. Notions of structural, racial genetic differences drip into broader life, including at the school level, and are widely internalized with lessening stigma, but do not bear immediate consequences (this year, anyway), and are more used in this derisive, liminally ironic, fashion. The moment of seemingly ambient, “color-blind” multiethnic unity enjoyed in the years before the Great Awokening has long passed, and whatever its faults, will be lamented.
TikTok will not be banned. Simple as that.
Elon Musk will solidify his status as the dominant player in the conservative movement moving forward, his evolving status as actively-engaged hyper-Murdoch making it necessary for right-wing figures worldwide to step up and kiss the ring. This will occur despite growing opposition within MAGA from his right (the main fissure point being additional extensions of the ongoing debate about H1B visas, and Elon’s preferencing material measures of economic advantage over immaterial ones of ‘cultural cohesion’), but with the saving grace that MAGA now constitutes the near-entirety of the right-wing electoral politics.
Widespread debate will occur over the prospect of genetically-modified “designer” babies, specifically in regards to potentialities for pre-selecting, ‘programming,’ for higher IQ. This will be the starting gun of the emerging bioconservative vs. transhumanist conflict, the next great culture war issue.
China will not invade Taiwan (yet), but tensions with the Trump-led United States will continue to escalate on a number of fronts ranging from tariffs to artificial intelligence. The prospect of China’s AI development pulling ahead of American corporations’ capabilities will widely enter public consciousness, and provoke anxiety in the citizenry, not just in the C-Suite, for the first time.
Early 2010s nostalgia will start to rival Y2K/late 2000s reminiscences, a bit early but, as remarked upon earlier, everything is speeding up; this will portend the revival of ‘swag-era’ clothing, and cheap Instagram/Tumblr filters (replacing the current blown-out digicam throwback meta).
The Boston Celtics will win the 2025 NBA Championship. I take no pleasure in reporting this, believe me.
I will complete my novel... Okay, I’m only putting this here to induce more urgency in myself, for fear of shaming myself should I publicly promise something like that, and not…
…Let’s revisit all this in a year, shall we? And to conclude, here’s some optimism for this despotism, a favorite of mine, the great New Years’ poem from the great Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
RING OUT, WILD BELLS (1850)
RING OUT, WILD BELLS, TO THE WILD SKY,
THE FLYING CLOUD, THE FROSTY LIGHT:
THE YEAR IS DYING IN THE NIGHT;
RING OUT, WILD BELLS, AND LET HIM DIE.
RING OUT THE OLD, RING IN THE NEW,
RING, HAPPY BELLS, ACROSS THE SNOW:
THE YEAR IS GOING, LET HIM GO;
RING OUT THE FALSE, RING IN THE TRUE.
RING OUT THE GRIEF THAT SAPS THE MIND
FOR THOSE THAT HERE WE SEE NO MORE;
RING OUT THE FEUD OF RICH AND POOR,
RING IN REDRESS TO ALL MANKIND.
RING OUT A SLOWLY DYING CAUSE,
AND ANCIENT FORMS OF PARTY STRIFE;
RING IN THE NOBLER MODES OF LIFE,
WITH SWEETER MANNERS, PURER LAWS.
RING OUT THE WANT, THE CARE, THE SIN,
THE FAITHLESS COLDNESS OF THE TIMES;
RING OUT, RING OUT MY MOURNFUL RHYMES
BUT RING THE FULLER MINSTREL IN.
RING OUT FALSE PRIDE IN PLACE AND BLOOD,
THE CIVIC SLANDER AND THE SPITE;
RING IN THE LOVE OF TRUTH AND RIGHT,
RING IN THE COMMON LOVE OF GOOD.
RING OUT OLD SHAPES OF FOUL DISEASE;
RING OUT THE NARROWING LUST OF GOLD;
RING OUT THE THOUSAND WARS OF OLD,
RING IN THE THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE.
RING IN THE VALIANT MAN AND FREE,
THE LARGER HEART, THE KINDLIER HAND;
RING OUT THE DARKNESS OF THE LAND,
RING IN THE CHRIST THAT IS TO BE.
I predict culture war will revert to post-9/11 levels. The first season of American Dad is a great time capsule of it. If the left can throw out the Howard Zinn moral superiority and make patriotism not cringeworthy they’ll have a fighting chance during these Trump years. I doubt they will but would be nice.
Agree with all of the ones I feel qualified to comment on. Agree on the New Old Left, I’ve been calling it “the self-critical left”. I think TikTok won’t be banned but won’t succeed bc it won’t have the same algorithm.