I’m curious to see how you all predict the rest of the 2020s will manifest itself in terms of politics and global affairs? What trends do you see happening in the United States or for Dopers living in other countries? Not jsut internal affairs but wider international relations.
Here are some of my predictions and feel free to let expand on them and say whether you agree or not:
In the U.S i predict for the 2020s, politics will trend toward “normal”, “boring” and “sane”. I see this in the recent midterm elecfions, in which many candidates like Kari Lake, Mehmet Oz, and others, lost to better, more qualififed, not always, Democrats, but most for the most yes. Trump’s endorsements turned out to be in vain. The 2021 Capitol riots highlight we need to reject cosnpiracy theory spewing candidates.
Trump will most likely fail to garner another nomination, and presidency. Times are different in 2024 than 2016, even Republicans will yearn for a more “normal” candidate(see above). He will be seen as a pathetic ex-president who only appeals to a shrinking base and trying to live off of his glory days of 2017-2021.
A backlash against authoritarian regimes. The 2010s saw the rise of populist dictator wannabes in the otherwise democratic nations; Brazil, U.S, Hungary, etc. This was especially true starting in 2015. The 2020s will reverse that trend, with people going back to voting for poltiicans who are not strongmen. Strongman fatigue is already tsking root, we see this with Trump losing and Brazil replacing Bolsanaro and embracing Lula as president.
More unity among democratic countries and institutions: With the Russian Invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s underming gone, Organizations like the EU and NATO will strengthen unity among themselves and make such orgnaizations even stronger.
The rise of China as the most powerful superpower is not as inevitsble as many believe. America will still reign supreme.
The Taliban will struggle, maybe not fall, during the course of the decade. Already, less than two years after overtsking Kabul, the Taliban is strugglig to govern and build a state. They had probably built up in their minds that once NATO leaves Afghanistan, it will be the “good days” of pre-9/11. The country is struggling with famine and catastrophe. Ruling Afghanistan will turn out to be more difficult for the Taliban, not to mention the power struggle. My take is a forevsr Taliban ruled Afghanistan is not a given.
MODS, feel free to move this to another section such as Great Debates.
I hope your predictions come true! I’ll add one - Ukraine will be victorious and expel Russia from all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. This may take at least another year.
I think that China will be the hardest to predict. They still have ambitions in The South China Sea and Taiwan. They do have internal problems, not least with a declining population. Of course, the USA has the same problem, but can easily overcome it with immigration. This does not seem to be an option for the Chinese.
Justin Trudeau will stay on as leader of the Liberals, but will only eke out a minority government in the next election. Poilievre will continue to be a loony loudmouth, and his profile will rise in the west. Trudeau will bow out before his next term is up to “spend time with his family.” His successor is shellacked in the general, though not quite as badly as the Tories in 1993. Poilievre gets into 24 Sussex and proceeds to run the place not unlike Harper did, but with a bit more Fox News styled venom and a much shadier and corrupt cabinet. Though saner heads talk him down from pegging the Canadian dollar to Bitcoin, as he’d floated in the past.
In the U.K., Labour continues to eat itself alive. Brexit will still fail to produce any dividends, and the GDP will shrink even further. Sunak makes slight, inevitable moves towards some kind of customs union with the EU, and the ERG folks wail and moan, but by this point even the hardcore Leave areas of the country just want to be able to ship their meats overseas without a phone book’s worth of paperwork for each lamb shank. The Tories, like the Liberals here in Canada, still win the next election (and Starmer is defenstrated) but only with a minority. The LibDems, wary of a repeat of their experience with Cameron, don’t enter into a coalition with them, and things are hung in limbo for many months. No idea how it resolves.
Interesting predictions! I draw a blank when it comes to Canada, but for the UK i think Labour will come to power. The Tories have been in power for too long and they have been screwing up lately. Keir Starmer is more moderate than Jeremy Corbyn and step up to the llate and snatch victory in 2025.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see JT retire before the next election. I’m half-convinced he called the last election in hopes of losing, and sticking the Tories with trying to clean up the last of the COVID mess with a minority Parliament, because I think most of JT’s time in office has just been draining on him. He had a few fun years with Obama as President, then got hit by both Trump and COVID.
I’m not so sure PP will succeed JT, though. PP is in a hard place. He needs to push right to satisfy the increasingly loony members of his party, but not look too insane to the rest of the country. And that, while maybe possible, would take a lot more skill at balancing than I’ve ever seen out of PP. His “attack dog” routine doesn’t lend itself to subtlety, and he hasn’t practiced anything else in his time in politics. I’m not sure he can pull off a transition now.
My prediction is, variations on the current set-up. A Liberal minority, not sure with who as leader, propped up by some variable number of NDP seats. If something really weird happens to upset the current balance, then maybe we get an NDP minority. I don’t see anyone getting a majority any time soon, and the Cons will be so crazy that everyone who isn’t a Con will suddenly discover that coalition governments aren’t such a bad idea.
I think Labour have a nearly unerring ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in recent years. And sadly, the left is still fractured enough that FPTP will give the Tories a structural advantage for the foreseeable future.
Just this week, Starmer announced that Corbyn, the former leader of the party, won’t be allowed to stand in the next election as a Labour candidate. It’s mainly because of Corbyn’s resistance to actually taking a stand against anti-Semitism in the party, but it’s also because Starmer is supposed to be the clean break from that bizarre period after New Labour when the party put a caricature of a fading, ripped-jumper-wearing, uni professor who looks like he always smells of weed and chalk, communist wanna-be at the head of the ticket. And it’s going to piss off the far left of the party, but he’s gambling that it’ll help win back the former Labour strongholds that went for BoJo because they were exhausted over the Brexit saga, and besode, Boris seemed like a larf. It’s a gamble that might fail, and Sunak could actually win next year.
I hope you’re right but I’m not quite so optimistic.
This may happen. The 2022 election did a good job of talking me off the ledge with respect to the fate of our nation, but the Republican party has shown absolutely no interest learning from its mistakes and returning to sanity. The current media landscape is still set up to encourage fear, loathing, and radicalism since those orientations get the most clicks, and most GOP candidates are more scared of their base voting against them in the primary than of losing the general. The only way I can see them moving towards moderation is if either A) They lose multiple election cycles in a row such that it even becomes clear to the base that if they want to achieve anything they have to reject radicalism in favor or electability. B) There is a major right wing terrorist attack on the order of the Oklahoma City bombing that slaps America in the face with how far off center these radicals have become that, that it socially unacceptable to be associated with them. I’d hoped that Jan 6th would have been such an event but apparently it would need to be even bigger.
This seems likely to me. He is becoming old news and his rants about the 2020 election are getting boring. He may make a lot of noise and play spoiler to the Republican nominee but he’s on his way out.
The pendulum does seem to be swinging back against elected authoritarians, but I think this has more to do with the fact that the elected authoritarian populists tended to be incompetent rather than that authoritarian populism is out of style. Israel meanwhile seems to be marching strongly towards authoritarianism. The media environment supports radical authoritarian conspiracy theorists, and climate change is going to cause a great deal of pain (either the substantial pain of the austerity that comes with reducing emissions or the even greater pain that comes with not doing so), which leads to people supporting tyrants who make big promises offering easy short sighted solutions and blame any problems on the “Those people”.
Russia has certainly united NATO and Brexit has demonstrated the folly of leaving the EU, but I’m not sure what trend this represents beyond those particular happenstances.
You are certainly correct as regards to the 2020’s time frame specified in the OP, 7 years is too short a time for a complete global realignment away from the US, but despite a temporary set back as China figures out what to do about Covid, I think long term China is on the rise and the US is on a decline. Whether that means that China will overtake the US or whether they simply settle down to a more equal state is not clear.
I can’t argue with this. Being the perfect pure Muslim for Allah doesn’t pay the bills, and nobody else is either. I predict a Afghanistan falling into general chaos, with the rest of the world just letting it go rather then risk getting dragged in.
That’s pretty much how I hope things will go. A whole lot of new voters came out to vote against Trump in 2020, and enough of them came out again in 2022 to at least stave off the worst of the “Red Wave” the GOP were counting on. The hope is that continuing GOP outrage politics will keep these voters engaged enough to keep coming out to vote against the GOP. If these voters get fatigued, though, there will be problems.
But, assuming the GOP electoral victories do become so rare that they actually do decide to make a change, that’s still not going to be enough, not for a long time. They’ll have to stick with the new program long enough to convince voters that they’re not just faking it for votes. This will require either a thorough house cleaning, so very few current GOP office holders and candidates are still in the party, or it will require the current GOP office holders to actually do something. Support real bi-partisan bills, back off on making demands they know are non-starters, admit that “trickle down economics” is a failure, things like that.
The “put up or shut up” stage of their reform will be long and hard, but it’s what they’ll have to do if they want to stop a slide into rage-fueled impotency.