Looking Back and Looking Forward
An analysis of last January's predictions - both the accurate and the less-than-accurate - and a new political forecast for the year to come.
Ever since I started Twilight Patriot back in 2019, I have made it my habit to begin each year in January with a predictions post, in which I try my best to foretell the political and economic events of the coming year. My first two prediction sets – in 2020 and 2021 – were fairly accurate, with only one serious error (I predicted, prior to the appearance of the coronavirus, that Donald Trump would be reëlected in 2020).
On nearly every other issue – Joe Biden winning the Democratic primary, inflation, congressional action/inaction, foreign affairs, the rising tide of censorship, and the absence of serious threats to the stability of the US regime – nearly everything I have said has come true.
Unfortunately, as far as predictions go, 2022 was my bum year. To recap: at the beginning of last year, I predicted, among other things, that commodity inflation would exceed 11 percent (as it had done the last two years), that the Republicans would retake the House of Representatives, that neither party would gain more than one Senate seat, and that President Biden would be unable to get any high-profile legislation through Congress. I said that, by the end of the year, the vast majority of Americans would be ignoring whatever mask-mandates and other anti-covid measures remained. And I also predicted that the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would neither go to war with one another nor experience regime change, and that Russia would not invade Ukraine.
Inflation and Ukraine were my big failures.
To understand how I got inflation wrong, you may want to read an explanation of how I calculate it. Basically, instead of looking at official inflation numbers (which are easy to manipulate) I calculate inflation based on taking the geometric mean of the prices of eight important commodities. The downside is that commodity prices are much more volatile than typical cost-of-living items (groceries, housing, health care, etc.); the upside is that, over the long term, the one really does drive the other.
(The reason that I don’t just measure cost-of-living directly is that this would require taking the Bureau of Labor Statistics at its word. But if, for instance, you go to the BLS website and ask how much a $1 item from the year 2000 would cost today, it says $1.71. Yet anyone who actually has to buy food regularly knows that it just ain’t so.)
As you see in the table above, commodity inflation was huge in both 2020 and 2021, clocking in at around 24 percent in each year; then in 2022 the trend reversed and prices shrunk by about 10 percent. Of course, what actually happened with most day-to-day expenses was that they grew steadily in all three years, just as I said they would. But since my prediction of 11 percent or higher commodity inflation for 2022 was technically wrong, I’ve counted it as a failure.
As for predicting that Russia would not invade Ukraine, I ascribe my error to two main sources. The first was my normalcy bias: essentially, I have seen fears of imminent war reverberating around the media for a long time: think, for instance, of the Soleimani killing, or any of a half-dozen other things that were supposed to cause war with Iran, or even the numerous near-misses with Russia since Vladimir Putin came to power. Thus, after a while I became cynical, and started seeing “no war” as the safe bet. (And most of the time that I predicted “no war” I have been right!). But there are limits to this sort of thinking; the point of the old story about the boy who cried wolf is that eventually, the wolf shows up.
The second reason I missed this one was that I had been getting too much of my information about Russia from pro-Russian sources, especially the Saker blog, which was dismissive of the possibility that President Putin would resort to open war to achieve his (justified) objectives. Now, the proprietor of the Saker is a Putin admirer who is also a devout and peace-loving Orthodox Christian, and who has a bad habit of projecting his own principles onto his object of admiration. Hence his confident predictions that Putin either would not invade the Ukraine, or would enter the war in only a very limited way aimed at propping up the Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples’ Republics. (“...there is something morally repugnant in the attitude of those who see warfare as anything but the weapon of last resort. Christ said ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ not ‘blessed are the warmakers’...”)
Needless to say, I’ve learned my lesson, and I do not take the Saker as seriously as I used to. While I still visit the site regularly (along with SputnikNews) to get a handle on the Russian side of this story, I am fairly dismissive of the quality of those sites’ analysis. Just because the Russian nationalists can accurately point out the flaws of the West does not mean that they have a better vision of their own on offer, and I have already explained at length how the events of the past year have destroyed any optimism I once felt about Vladimir Putin and the movement he leads.
On the positive side, most of my individual predictions from last January still came true. The Republicans won a House majority in November. Neither party gained more than two Senate seats (the swing was +1 Dem). The great powers avoided going to war with one another, and none of them suffered regime changes.
Most Americans are paying more for food and gas than they did a year ago. And President Biden’s legislative agenda has spluttered; this year’s marque item, student loan forgiveness, is tied up in judicial limbo as numerous district judges have issued nationwide injunctions against it.
While most people on the Right seem happy about this, I find myself unable to feel the same way, because (1) the hypocrisy is too glaring – a lot of the Republican politicians who pounced all over $10k of student loan forgiveness have personally benefited from much larger sums in cancelled covid-related business loans, and (2) there are well over 600 federal district judges in this country, many of whom have eccentric political opinions, and letting each and every one of them dictate policy for the whole national administration is bound to end in a tangled mess of government dysfunction and petty tyranny.
But none of this will surprise regular readers of Twilight Patriot. You already know that my general outlook is gloomy, and that I don’t expect America’s political or economic institutions to reform themselves anytime soon. And you know that I think that the best response that most of us can make right now consists of disengagement from the broader society, focusing on personal and family self-sufficiency, developing a stoical attitude toward the ups and downs of life, and putting one’s talents to work in voluntary associations like churches, private schools, farmers’ coöps, and masonic lodges.
But I digress. Now that I have reviewed my predictions for 2022 – both those that panned out, and those that didn’t – I will make an attempt at forecasting the events of 2023.
First: inflation. While my prediction of 11-percent-or-greater commodity inflation for 2022 was wrong, I’m going to go out on a limb and make the same prediction for 2023. Because commodity inflation is volatile, in a 2-steps-forward, 1-step-back sort of way, I’ll admit that I’m only about 75 percent sure that this will happen. Even so, it’s pretty clear, from the record of the last two decades, that the process moves forward quite a bit more than it moves back.
As for the Ukraine War, I think that the odds of some sort of ceasefire or de facto peace agreement being reached by the end of the year are about even. (A de jure peace treaty is much less likely). However, as I explained in December, I think Ukraine’s chances of prevailing in a long war are poor, and the Ukrainians are better off settling for peace sooner rather than later, even if it means accepting small territorial losses. Thus, I am predicting that, if the fighting is still going on at the close of 2023, Ukrainian forces will have lost ground compared to where they are now.
I do not expect the Republicans to impeach Joe Biden. If they had won the House with the kind of blowout margins that some people were expecting, they might try, for the simple reason that most Republicans hate Joe Biden just as much as most of the Dems hated Trump, and impeachment was just about the first thing the Dems did with their House majority in 2019. Nevertheless, I think that the Republicans’ lukewarm performance in the midterms, and their razor-thin House margin, have put an end, at least for now, to the sort of politics-as-showmanship in which Donald Trump has so shamelessly wallowed.
Speaking of Trump, I expected that his third presidential campaign will continue to flag during the coming year. While Trump was very good at channeling his base’s emotions before and during his time in office, he has always been long on showmanship and short on substantive policy (his one bright spot, judicial nominations, was in large part the work of the Federalist Society and Mitch McConnell).
Trump in his post-presidency has rapidly devolved into a ball of content-free egotism, and as such he has shown little staying power. If last November’s elections are anything to go by, Trump’s influence is already on the wane. Thus I expect that, while Trump will spend 2023 campaigning hard for next year’s primaries, his support (as measured in the RealClearPolitics polling average) will have fallen behind the combined support of his top two rivals – whoever they may be – by the end of December.
In foreign affairs, I expect that the major powers – the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Iran, and Israel – will continue to avoid direct wars with one another. If any of them suffers regime change, it will be Russia (coups are common when an authoritarian leader is doing poorly in a war, and Vladimir Putin might be dying of cancer anyhow). Even so, I am not going to hold my breath waiting for Putin to fall from power; the odds are still in favor of him being President of Russia at year’s end.
Expect dedollarization to continue, but at a slow and cautious rate. While the US sanctions regime going into overdrive has impressed on a lot of developing countries the need to find alternatives to dollar-based global trade, the continuing weakness of America’s main rivals, Russia and China, means that finding an alternative will not be easy. Granted, there will still come a time, probably no later than 2040, that the wheels finally fall off of the American tribute economy, but right now we’re still way to early for that. Also, expect China’s economy to continue performing poorly, even after Xi Jinping’s sensible decision to finally retreat from zero covid. The plain fact is that if you have a fertility rate of 1.2, then all the central planning in the world is not going to stop it from biting you in the ass when the parental generation ages out of the workforce.
Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, you can expect more people to suffer censorship, dismissal from their jobs, or other career setbacks for expressing dissent on the issues that are most sacred to the Left – race and sexuality/gender. But except on those issues, we Americans will not find ourselves subject to overt, in-your-face tyranny – just to the same slow rotting away of the country we once knew.
The United States’ fertility rate is at about 1.64 – the lowest it has ever been – and both marriage and workforce participation rates for young men are dismally bad. Church attendance is no better. The things that previous generations of Americans cared most about no longer hold much interest for the young. And these circumstances are mirrored by America’s material decline, as food, rent, and interest on debts are eating up an ever-larger share of household budgets. Meanwhile, despite pouring lots of money into infrastructure projects, America’s governing institutions have shown little ability to add to, or even maintain, the collection of roads, railroads, bridges, and power plants that made our way of life possible in the first place.
In the long term, the United States is well on its way to becoming a third world country. Yet I expect that 2023 itself will be a year of continuity. There are plenty of indicators that the regime under which we live is very stable, at least in the short term. And even the weak and uncoördinated threat which was posed by Trumpistry has mostly dissipated by now, as people have gotten tired of Trump’s antics and turned out en masse in both 2020 and 2022 in support of the party promising normalcy.
But at this point, I am only repeating things that I have already said. After all, one does not call one’s blog “Twilight Patriot” if one thinks that the future of one’s country, and of its traditional cultures, is going to be bright and sunny! For us Americans, one way of life is ending, and another way of life (or multiple ways of life) will arise in the ruins.
Whether or not your own descendants are around to help build the new high cultures that will arise in North America over the next few centuries depends largely on what you do in the present. Will you be careful about what school you send your children to, and what media you allow to educate them? Will you choose to live frugally when doing so is still voluntary? If you happen to own land, will you plant fruit trees on it, or learn organic gardening? Will you join a fraternal organization or a tight-knit church group so that you will have people to rely on in times of trouble? And so forth.
One way or another, the present generation of soft men will be swept away, and a new generation of hard men will take their place. Having the right politics will not let us escape this. Donald Trump was better than the Republicans who came before him, but he was still mostly light and noise. Ron DeSantis is better than Trump, but on a lot of issue even DeSantis is pushing half measures. Outer Party politics just isn’t all that effective against the Inner Party. And neither party’s politics is effective against low fertility rates, decaying infrastructure, or the unraveling of the dollar-based global tribute economy.
To summarize: I expect that in 2023, commodity inflation will exceed 11 percent, the Ukraine War will either become a frozen conflict or else develop in a way favorable to Russia, Joe Biden will not be impeached, and Donald Trump will trail the combined polling average of his top two Republican rivals at the year’s end. The great powers will avoid wars with one another, and they will also avoid regime change, with the possible exception of Russia. Dedollarization and infrastructure decay will continue, but at too gradual of a pace for most Americans to notice their effects, and the Chinese economy will remain weak.
On the whole, most Americans will experience 2023 as a year of normalcy, even as their country keeps sliding toward third world conditions. And the future will belong to those who have the foresight to choose individual and small-group self-reliance as the best preparation for the coming time of troubles.
Very good analysis, just what we have come to expect of the Twilight Patriot. So important to be cold-blooded about one's own mistakes, the better to correct them. Always hear the bad news first. Always look for the flaws in your own side.
Two things for the Twilight Patriot to think about:
(1) Re Great Power conflict/war. Human beings are not always rational, and even when they are, reality is never perfectly perceived. The Japanese thought knocking out the American's Pacific Fleet would keep us out of the war long enough for them to conquer and fortify the areas they wanted ... if, indeed, we even decided to go to war at all. They didn't get the carriers, the real capital ships by then, which were, by luck or something else, all at sea on 7 December; they didn't hit the fuel dumps and repair docks; and decided not to risk a third wave attack. Hitler was then not obliged to declare on the US, but he did -- just what FDR wanted. In the previous world war, the nations stumbled into conflict ... Christopher Clark's 'The Sleepwalkers' is the title of a history of the start of the war: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/books/review/the-sleepwalkers-and-july-1914.html
War between the great powers has been objectively irrational for more than a century, as argued in a book published a few years before 1914: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion ... but we are not entirely rational animals.
(2) American decline. The Twilight Patriot sees this clearly, as do many others. There seems to be no realistic prospect of reversing it. But ... will it just go on, and on, like the melting of an iceberg, decade after decade? Or will, as the Marxists say, quantity turn into quality at some point, a historical leap, or plunge, of the sort that brought down some of the great monarchies of the past?
There is a deal of ruin in a nation, as Adam Smith noted. But not an infinite amount, and we must be careful to avoid the comforting illusion psychologists call "normalcy bias", linear project from the recent past and present indefinitely into the futue, just because it's almost always true ... until it isn't .
Consider that the US is extended all over the world, with 400 military bases, facing off two serious military powers, with its elite believing it has a Divine Mission to lead the world to liberal democracy. It has had unquestioned dominant conventional military strength for the last 75 years ... but modern technology is undermining that. To consider one scenario: what effect would the sinking of the Pacific Fleet by Chinese hypersonic missiles have on the US?
Then there is the world economy. The Twilight Patriot ought to reviewing at least these two books:
---- The Accidental Superpower, by Peter Zeihan, [ https://zeihan.com/the-accidental-superpower-maps/ ]
and
---- Megathreats, by Nouriel Roubini. [ https://nourielroubini.com/the-age-of-megathreats/ ]
As for his prescriptions for us as individuals, they're fine. Prepare, first yourself and your family. In the event of some natural or man-made disruption of the social/legal/economic framework -- to put it academically, or SHTF situation, to put it succinctly, could your family 'sit it out' for two or three months until the web of society is re-knit? Food, water, electricity, gas ... all dependent on computer-controlled networks of warehouses, transport, storage facilties, other people, all targets of our enemies.
But that's just a first step. The Twilight Patriot mentions, quite rightly, the importance of being part of local social networks: church, veterans' groups, the Masons or Lions or similar organizations. But how much better, if possible, to organize with like-minded people for the explicit purpose of dealing with serious emergencies, like the former Oathkeepers of Arizona, in their Community Protection Teams (https://USCPT.org).
A few dozen adults will encompass a range of skills and abilities and specialized equipment -- giving you the benefit of the division of labor, one of the key factors lifting us from the animal state. An organization with the right leadership allows ordinary people to act like the smartest ones among them. Here the individualism that characterizes Western society works against us -- we have no tribes or clans to be part of. We need to re-invent that structure.