The Next Three Years...

Here's a fearless prediction. The next three years will be the most consequential, politically, in my lifetime. And probably yours.

Let's start with Point One, in a New Criterion piece by Conrad Black.

The United States was at a unique political crossroads when a man who had never served in any public office nor held a high military command, elected or unelected, astounded the country by winning the presidency—the only such candidate to do so, ever—on a campaign to reverse bipartisan agreed policy and to reorient or dismiss almost the entire community of senior government personnel.

Do you see the staggering implications of Donald Trump's achievement in 2016? "Never served in any public office." But he won the presidency.

Obviously, such an event means that something is wrong with the rulers of America. Because the voters don't do things like that in normal times. Andrew Jackson got elected president without serving in a previous political office. But he won the Battle of New Orleans. Abraham Lincoln became president at a time of national crisis. But he had served in the Illinois state legislature and the US House of Representatives. Franklin Roosevelt became president at the bottom of the Great Depression. But he had been state senator, assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Governor of New York. Dwight Eisenhower never served in political office before being elected president. But he was the general that invaded Europe in World War II. Etcetera.

Then, after Donald Trump got elected the Democrats and the media hounded him every moment he was in office and beat him in 2020 under conditions that, while not exactly "stealing the election" certainly gave rise to understandable suspicion among his supporters. OK. So the combined efforts of the Democrats and the media and the Zuck bucks and the BLM/AntiFa riots and the "mean tweets" combined to defeat President Trump.

But obviously, that's all ancient history, what with the singular incompetence of President Biden, the absurd spending agenda of the Progressives, the rising inflation, the problems on the COVID vaccination front, the anti-CRT movement among parents of school children, and the recent off-off-year elections.

The reason I say that the next three years will be consequential is that I believe that our ruling class will make several efforts to head the organic movement of the Great Rebellion of the ordinary middle class off at the pass.

I suspect there will be a number of ugly incidents in the next three years as the ruling class and Democrats and media and the NGO activism community get more and more desperate, as they see their power slipping away.

They may succeed, but my guess is that they won't. Why? Because I don't think they are very bright. And I don't think they are ruthless enough and courageous enough to behave like a Lenin or a Hitler.

And the basic problem is that the American people are going to be hurting economically for the next three years. We are going to have inflation, number one. Then the Fed is going to have to jack up interest rates, and that will hurt the housing market and all the people with mortgages and very little equity. Then there is going to be a recession, maybe before 2024. Ordinary Americans hate it when gas prices go up. They hate it when food prices go up. They are terrified when their mortgages go "under water." And when they lose their jobs...

So we are looking for a real wipeout for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. And then we are looking for the mother of all Time for a Change elections in 2024.

That's the overview. But in the details and the day-to-day events it's going to get ugly. You can see that with Democrats already blaming oil companies for the increase in gasoline prices. It looks to me as though oil production is having a problem returning to its 2019 high after the sharp drop in production at the beginning of he COVID crisis, and things will repair themselves soon. But you don't clamp down on pipeline construction and oil exploration before everything gets back to normal.

You see, a competent government, whatever its ideological framework, needs to keep the lights on, keep the oil flowing, keep people content in their homes, their jobs, their hopes. And, with its appetite for reelection, a new administration makes sure to take all the tough decisions right away so that in four years, when it is time for reelection, the economy looks great and Americans are optimistic about the future.

I would say that an administration that fails on these real simple responsibilities does not deserve the confidence of the voters and does not get it.

But you never know.