History is clear only with the benefit of hindsight, so I am going to put forth some “anticipatory hindsight” here and now that some might find either insightful, incendiary, or ignorant: 2024 will be the most pivotal year in American domestic affairs since 1860, the year before the start of our Civil War, and far too few of our political, academic, and cultural leaders seem aware of the risks we could be running in the year ahead if we do not work to reduce the destructive insularity today tearing our nation asunder.

The outcome of the election between former-President Trump and President Biden will be an undeniable tipping point this year, but it will settle few of the underlying tensions that cause Americans to now glare at one another with suspicion.

The dominant electoral strategy of Democrats over the past several destructive decades, has been to micro-slice Americans into distinct constituencies based on group identities and priorities rather than shared moral and ethical values springing from a common belief that we are all Americans. This has been a disaster for our country that has divided us and diminished our ability to understand the sacrifices of our parochial self-interests that we must make to survive as a united people instead of a miserable conglomeration of fractious interest groups concerned only with ourselves—and not the wellbeing of our nation as a whole.

The root of our current difficulties is that Democrats have spent the years since the 2020 Presidential election with the pedal to the metal pushing a toxic hatred of roughly half of our citizens, the so-called “Deplorables” that reside outside of Brooklyn and Berkeley, while laughing away the very notion that ballot security was a problem in that year. The foolish and fallacious narrative, which has been pushed to the breaking point, that the confusion and frustration expressed by so many voters on January 6th was an attack on par with Pearl Harbor has thrilled their partisans but irretrievably alienated a broad swathe of Republican and Independent voters, all while unnecessarily politicizing a debate we should have had about the integrity of mail-in and dropbox voting long before we got around to this year’s elections.

All of the talk of right-wing conspiracies and insurrections blaring through cable news programs and social media has, unsurprisingly, increased the paranoia of Democrats, who continue to issue fevered warnings about “the end of democracy” while using every possible nefarious method to undermine the possibility that Donald Trump will be our next democratically-elected President. Even should he win at the ballot box in November, a recent Rasmussen Poll found that 57% of Democrats are in favor of not certifying his election, so expect that more chicanery flying in the face of protecting democracy could drag into January of next year.

Whether attempting to kick him off state ballots (an idea the Supreme Court duly quashed), destroy his various businesses, or selectively charge him with crimes that no Democrat would ever need answer to, the Leftists infected with the so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome are everywhere we look today. Their ability and willingness to even pretend to have reasonable conversations about the direction of our nation is approaching absolute zero, and the fuse for a national explosion is already burning in plain sight in the form of a decades-long debt super cycle that is crashing to an end.

Karl Marx once wrote that “religion is the opiate of the people”. He was wrong. 

What is actually used to placate Americans today is government transfer payments, whether we are talking about Social Security, SNAP, Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, rental assistance, money for sports stadiums, education grants, free cell phones, or the myriad of other direct and indirect cash doled out to virtually every citizen (and non-citizen) residing within our borders. This spigot of money must be kept open at full blast to quell societal unrest, which explains why government spending continues to spiral to the stratosphere. However, our ability to live hip-deep in borrowed dollars is rapidly coming to an end due to the doom loop of government debt that is rapidly consuming our national wealth.

When it comes time to make hard decisions about how to divvy up a substantially diminished hoard of government benefits, whether it happens this year or some year in the not-too-distant future because we just cannot keep borrowing a trillion dollars (or two) every year, the cultural and political rancor and division now being papered over with dollar bills will surely detonate.

Imagine the arguments dead ahead over whether to spend money on educating the children of illegal immigrants versus paying for Medicare, supporting colleges versus spending on national defense, or paying for drug treatments versus providing scholarships to gifted students—to use just a few examples. 

Every necessary and difficult discussion about reconciling tax revenues and government expenditures will be quickly transformed into never-ending tribal battles between gender, racial, ethnic, national, religious, and other interest groups that decades of divisive Democrat identity politics have developed. Expect a lot of cries of holocaust, genocide, murder, bigotry, and a host of other derogatory terms to spin through the air, further shredding our unity while the shrinkage of government spending inevitably and inexorably proceeds.

There is an old—and very true—expression: “You can’t help people who don’t want to be helped.” I would like to believe that we will eventually come together as Americans instead of partisans, but we will first have to clamber over the high and depressing walls cunningly built between us, ones that block our shared vision of an invigorating and inclusive national purpose in favor of a sad and shadowy isolation that offers the questionable comforts of group affinities. Too many of us simply might enjoy our sad and selfish virtue signaling more than we appreciate the benefits of cooperation and problem solving, and there is little we can do to save ourselves if this turns out to be the case.

We will, if we stick to failed identity-based ideologies over caring for our country as a whole, continue to live balanced on the painful knife edge of our own pitiable narrow mindedness. Should this be the case, the years ahead will be very difficult indeed.