- General Election in UK – Labour landslide. PM – Sir Keir Starmer. (No great change in policies from the Tory government that Labour will replace).
- US politics will continue to be dominated by Donald Trump
- In the US Presidential election in November there will be victory for the Republican Party.
- AI/Deepfakes have a significant effect in electoral politics.
- Conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine unresolved by end of 2024.
- No progress for those wanting marriage equality in the Church of England.
- Twitter goes bust or is sold or both.
- The world will be warmer in 2024 than ever before.
- Another country will join Nato.
- A new agreement is reached between the UK and Greece on the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles that opens the door for at least some of them to be displayed in Athens.
15 responses to “The Trump of Judgement for Liberals”
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I heard someone talking on the radio who had looked at actual voting data (wherever such people get that from). Predictors of whether someone was a Trump voter, though by no means decisive ones, were whether someone earned more than $50000, had never gone to college or had done so but dropped out, was male, and over 44 years old. But there were people in those categories who had voted for Clinton as well. Even the much spoken of Hispanic vote was not as big a predictor of voting preference as thought and there were too many women who hated Hilary Clinton for misogyny to be the overarching factor.
The stand out predictor which went across all categories was colour, whites going for Trump, up to %58.
This vote was an anti-Obama backlash from people who couldn’t quite forgive the fact that an African-American had been running the show for eight years, whether the racism was of the vitriolic nasty sort or the more urbane sort that says that some of the other lot are probably ok, but only as long as we don’t have to actually mix with them and they’re somewhere else, it amounts to the same thing. The analyst speaking referred to a sort of nostalgia for when whites seemed to be in overall charge of everything.
As to our response: as far as I can see the reason American politics is so vitriolic is because Liberals and Conservatives hate each other and also want to remake the other side in their own image.
Love the other: well very gospel, but pretty darned hard when you struggle to even like xenophobic misogynistic lgbt-haters, let alone love them!
Love might be the attitude that those of us who call ourselves Christians have to struggle towards, but I’m less sanguine than Kelvin is on this one and the verse that keeps going through my mind is the bit in Ecclesiastes about there being a time for this a time for that.
Sometimes conflict is inevitable and has to be fought to a finish. You can’t react to the kind of person who shouted out at Trump’s victory speech “jail Obama” on the basis of well, six of one and half a dozen of the other. And such people aren’t exactly amenable to sweet reason.
On the other hand sometimes people have just to be left alone. Forceably trying to remake the other in your own image just antagonises.
I think our response has to be to discern the difference between the two situations. And to redouble our efforts to make sure that a Trump can’t become Prime Minister in the UK.
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A prophetic and timely warning, Kelvin. What Trump represents is on the way to becoming a global phenomenon. The tone of his rallies, and the chanting of mindless slogans, is all too reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. The fact that his election has been welcomed by Marine le Pen and other far-right leaders in Europe speaks volumes.
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Something to think about: when it penetrates the general consciousness that the majority of white conservative evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, what if anything will be the fall out for Christianity as a whole?
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