June 12, 2012

My Crystal Ball for Politics in 2024

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.


The journal Democracy has put together a package of short essays for its latest issue about the likely face of American politics in 2024. Most of the contributors focused on one or two big trends and how they’re likely to play out over the next dozen years, but I took a different tack. Instead I identified six big trends: 

  1. America will keep getting older.
  2. If Obamacare survives the Supreme Court, the social welfare state of FDR and LBJ will be more or less complete.
  3. Economic growth is going to be slow.
  4. The fact of climate change will become undeniable.
  5. The Republican Party will continue getting whiter and the Democratic Party will continue getting browner.
  6. Computational horsepower will continue growing.

What does all this mean? Probably nothing good, but a bleak outcome isn’t inevitable. Click the link to read my guesses.

DOES IT FEEL LIKE POLITICS IS AT A BREAKING POINT?

Headshot of Editor in Chief of Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery

It sure feels that way to me, and here at Mother Jones, we’ve been thinking a lot about what journalism needs to do differently, and how we can have the biggest impact.

We kept coming back to one word: corruption. Democracy and the rule of law being undermined by those with wealth and power for their own gain. So we're launching an ambitious Mother Jones Corruption Project to do deep, time-intensive reporting on systemic corruption, and asking the MoJo community to help crowdfund it.

We aim to hire, build a team, and give them the time and space needed to understand how we got here and how we might get out. We want to dig into the forces and decisions that have allowed massive conflicts of interest, influence peddling, and win-at-all-costs politics to flourish.

It's unlike anything we've done, and we have seed funding to get started, but we're looking to raise $500,000 from readers by July when we'll be making key budgeting decisions—and the more resources we have by then, the deeper we can dig. If our plan sounds good to you, please help kickstart it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Thanks for reading—whether or not you can pitch in today, or ever, I'm glad you're with us.

Signed by Clara Jeffery

Clara Jeffery, Editor-in-Chief

We Recommend

Latest