Predictions for 2025-2026

Reprinted from the Phora (a private forum):

https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/macrobius-makes-predictions-for-2025-2026.1680

I’m writing up an article making predictions for 2025-2026 in the categories of Politics, Economics, Society, and Technology.

This OP is just my draft so far… surely needs a rewrite and only does the first quarter (Politics).  This thread is for reaction and discussion, and eventual drafts of the remaining three parts.

I decided to go with a non-traditional two-year prediction rather than a single year, for a few reasons.  Not the obvious one of getting an extra year’s grace before people get to say I was wrong and laugh at me — but because we are coming into a period of time in which slightly longer periods are more predictable than next month or next year.

With the shorter, one-year timeframe, you get a forecasting effect well known to meteorologists:  that ‘tomorrow will be just the same as today’ outperforms most models.  The reason being, day to day change in weather is relative rare compared to fronts coming through, seasonal changes, even predictable stuff, and the time of those events on an hourly or daily basis is actually quite hard.

Of course, ‘Nothing ever happens’ misses every single change of importance eva.  That’s the downside of being right nearly all the time.  Weather is a crapshoot and the House always wins.

The main reason, however, is that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has started to put us in a prediction regime in which *climate* events are starting to clock human events, as we lose control of the planet (as if we ever had it).  Economic events, such as agricultural harvests, as well as public expenditures to rebuild regions of the country after hurricanes, and supply chain issues related to global competition to *deal* with such things as the oil supply needed to make fixing disasters economical, which in turn links the *outcome* of the inevitable disasters, to success at shaping the Hubbert Curve (‘peak oil’) to one’s national or regional advantage.

A dependence on clocking from AGW, in turn, makes North American predictions, at least, dependent on the El Nino/La Nina cycle, the so-called ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation), which is quasi-biennial. We are at the end of a moderate La Nina event (more moderate than previously predicted in fact), for our North American winter, and will doubtless some time in the next two years, probably in 2025, move through a neutral phase in El Nino.  And that’s a problem.

In recent years, the predicted AGW effects on North American climate have started to come true, with the regional effects that implies.  El Nino years have less rainfall in certain areas where it counts, colder winters in certain areas of high population (with associated grid outages more likely), different flooding patterns of certain areas and different kinds of storms, etc.

There will come a day when the climatologists make the call that we are shifting into the next, inevitable El Nino phase, in about the same timeframe we always do (because nothing ever changes, you know), and therefore *that is when* the predictions start, for the year following the commencement and strengthening of the NEXT El Nino.

Will 2025 be the same as 2024 then, since that most likely to happen well into 2025, and not really matter much in North America, until next winter?  Hardly.  Trump winning the November 2024 election in America guarantees some differences up front.  In fact, I could be waggish and predict that Trumpism will win in La Nina years and run into trouble in El Nino years, and politics will become a quasi-biennial periodic oscillation driven by ENSO, with Republicans and Democrats taking office in synchronicity with the Christ Child and Infant Blessed Virgin bringing good harvests to the fishermen off the coast of Peru (assuming they aren’t all overfished).  However, I consider such a simple oscillation in politics to be likely.

(It does happen though, at least regionally.  Oldsters will remember that time Jane Byrne lost the election for the office of Mayor of Chicago because of poor management of a snowstorm, or Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts rose to national prominence for his successful handling of a similar event.  The relation to W. Edwards Deming’s Read Bead experiment should be evident[1]).

[1]: [Red Bead Experiment – The W. Edwards Deming Institute](https://deming.org/explore/red-bead-experiment/)

And my PRIMARY prediction for the next two years, and the five or ten after that, is the increasing importance, in North America, of regional differences — at all scales.  The future is a fractal in fact, and we will see similar patterns on the local, state, regional, national, and indeed global levels, as ‘space fragments into smaller regions, the regions become roughly like the globe used to be, and even city-states start to become more similar to nation-states, than has been the case in a long, long time’.  Think ‘multipolarity in geopolitics’ or ‘regional electoral change in North American voting patterns’ or ‘the urban-rural divide’ within roughly similar climate zone *also* causing the rural-urban balance to vary as different regions face different climate challenges, which imply problems with energy, the electrical grid, and logistics — and drive economic factors that people certainly *will* notice.  Economics will, as usual, drive Politics and Social Issues.

Having put the Environmental horse back in front of the Social cart that is traditional in the ‘Annual Year End Prediction Festival’, I will quickly set the framework for my predictions, which is the one I share with John Michael Greer (formerly of the _Archdruid Report_ but more on that later).

Here is my summary, and if I do violence to it, apologies in advance.  I will cite a couple books that will get it right:

1. The 1972 version of _Limits to Growth_, and the importance of Environmental factors and Ecology, implying the importance of both peak oil and supply chain disruption due to resource competition and exhaustion.

2. The importance over the next 400 years of AGW, including possible near term tipping points.  (I will discussion prospect for and timing of an AMOC tipping point later).

3. The usefulness of Oswald Spengler’s framework from _Decline and Fall_ for social and political analysis of the events from now out to approximately the 26th century, so certainly the mid to late 21st.

I won’t, in this predictive post, *defend* these analytical choices, but am certainly able to defend and discuss them.

Greer, for his part, has given a very recent (2021) analysis of his viewpoint, with discussion of Trumpism and the first part of Trump’s first term, and since I agree with his analysis and conclusions there mostly I recommend you read:

John Michael Greer, _The King in Orange_

If you know or are a member of the ‘Alt Right’, know who Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug is and Neo-Reaction, understand the role of the ‘chans’ and Bannon in 2016, and know what Kek is, you will likely enjoy and learn from this book, no matter how you feel about individual points above of what I am calling the ‘Greer Framework’.  These are all discussed in the book, sometimes even approvingly.

If you simply cannot bear to read anything about Donald Trump without feeling an extreme need to vituperate anyone who finds anything at all positive about the man, and feel the same about Elon Musk, I recommend you read his earlier book from the run up to the Obama era, which will calmly walk through most of the analysis, though without quite the emphasis on AGW which was far less known in 2008 than now.

John Michael Greer, _The Long Descent_ (2008).

You can console yourself that Trump and Musk will undoubtably *not* be with us for all of the 400 year Spenglerian prediction time frame remaining.  Or, to use the terminology of the _King in Orange_, the fate of INDIVIDUALS is *not* DESTINY, until it is.

For predictive purposes, I will follow the traditional PEST format of what is called (Business) Environmental Analysis — Politics, Economics, Society, Technology.

2025-2026 is of course just the beginning of the next 5-10 years, which will have four more presidential elections and twice as many mid-term elections, not to mention all the state and provincial politics of a decade.

# Politics

1. Trump will probably take office next year and remain in office all year and most of 2026 at least.

I hedge slightly, because strong forces are at work, and the fate of individuals, even of a single individual of such great political and world-historical importance, such as Donald Trump or Julius Caesar, is inherently unpredictable.  Robust analysis, even over short time frames (I’m thinking more 5-10 years here rather than the biennial crapshot we call in politics ‘The US Congress’ and what politics it will choose).

Whether or not Trump takes office, and whether or not he serves out his term Trumpism, as we might call it, is the future, and has DESTINY on its side.

2. Congress and the Legislative branch will continue to drive American politics and dominate the Administrative branch and Judicial, on behalf of primarily Oligarchical and Corporate interests, but with a grudging eye to their future electoral prospects, which sadly they will almost certainly fail to calculate properly, in the face of DESTINY.

(Agreeing with Curtis Yarvin here as discussed in

[URL unfurl=”true”]https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/a-mencius-moldbug-double-header.2893/[/URL]

Yarvin is more or less to the left of Greer now, despite the Neo-Reactionary rhetoric

)

3. Regionalism will continue to drive apart not only the Rich-Poor, Red State-Blue State, Progressive-Libertarian divides, but also grow the Establishment split, even in the Uniparty (Democrates and GOPe = RINOs), between East Coast interests and West Coast interests.

This is elaborated in prediction 9 below.

4. No matter what happens as individuals to the likes of Trump, Musk, any particular appointee, Newsom, DeSantis, RFKjr etc… we will *continue* to move away from ‘identity politics’ to a sort of ‘interest politics’ that focuses on the prospects of Individuals (personalities… Caesars) to represent class interests.

5. This means in 2025 and 2026, the primary political discussion will be the relative interests of the Elites vs the Dependent classes, which will continue to include most of what used to be the Middle Class (and of course Retirees, to the extent that ‘Social Security is Insurance’ face-saving move is a torn mask covering what will be increasing a welfare benefit and not even an entitled one, as in, ‘pray I do not alter the deal further’)

Again, agreeing with Yarvin on this one, and with Greer’s analysis of the classes (Elites, Salaried-Managerial, Wage Earning, Dependent including Underclass and ‘Illegals’).

6. The failure of Obamacare to provide Affordable Healthcare to any of its constituents, will be primary driver of lower middle class and dependent class dissent.

Obviously, Immigration, Tariffs, Trade, Offshoring vs Re-Industrialisation, taxation and government funding etc. will continue to be the focus of contention between what will be increasingly the Elites (‘Dominant Minority’) and their Overseers (Law Enforcement), against the Internal and External proletariats — that is, the low paid workers in urban and rural areas, who include a large portion of the Dependent class of Romney’s 47% and I’m sure now much, much more), as the usual dynamic of an Oligarchy (a Plutarchy pretending to be a Democracy, really), plays out.

7. Greer will be proven correct about the continuation, in 2025-2025, of the Rescue Game of transactional analysis (you have to read the first book I’m afraid — the Map is not the Territory) will continue to be the Narrative template, but with a likely reset of its three stages back to the first:  1/ Pin the Tail on the Persecutor 2/ Show Trial, followed by a rousing finale of 3/ Circular Firing Squad.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say the ‘Persecutors’ role, who will be blamed for the ills of the ‘Victims’ (the Deplorables whose coalition just won an election), will be assigned to the Illegals, since well they are ILLEGAL and that means helpless to do anything about it.  To Victor/Victims go the Spoils. The role of ‘Persecutor’ is the worst role in this Narrative game, because the ‘Rescuers’ (hint: the richer members of the White ruling class) get to rescue the victims from their persecutors, by punishing the latter and giving goodies to the former.

But that’s only one likely possibility among several.  We’ll most likely have several versions going at once, a very liminal and chaotic political situation.

We are likely indeed to see the current (DEI, CRT, Woke) version of this game wind down, but there will be another round.  The Elites *cannot* afford to follow the most iron rule of the game: the GAME must continue (both the Great Game of Geopolitics, and the Nation-State Game of the dominant minority deceiving the underclasses that things will get better, or at least be ok-ish).  The game can only end with a rotation of the elites, or with a merger of Caesarism and winners among the elites (rotated or not).  We’re in the early game of End the Republic still, so that is unlikely.

8. Sadly, every means of culling the Dependent class that can be covertly and ‘decently’ done, and without a full-scale revolt, will be done.  Euthanasia, Eugenics, Birth-Control, continuing to dump Estrogen in the water and food.  Vaxxing and unhealthful food to the extent RFKjr is stopped and the medical classes evade lynching. Dumping chemicals and releasing radioactive gases in ‘accidents’. You name it.

9. I will predict that in 2025-2026 it will be evident that the urban/rural divide is an avatar of the heartland/borderland one (which exists already at global and nation scales).  The climate and civilisational dynamics that are clocking the change here, will modulate to fracturing small and small scales– thus the rural areas immediately past urban ones, will become more and more important as agricultural areas, because transport and logistic costs, and supply chain uncertainties, will drive our new Caesars to control and feed not only poor Roman wage earners, but also their imported slave class.  Each ‘city-state’ esp. if unique to its climate region, will became a political focus as regional interests *necessarily* fragment and diverge.

This point, by the way, is the dynamic behind prediction 3 above, that East and West coasts will diverge, essentially creating, eventually, not one North American civilisation but two.  Here I go beyond Greer’s 2021 book and look into the mists.  As trade becomes more and more disrupted by the effects of AGW, and global fragmentation makes trade both more regional and global trade less capable, we should see the interests of the Pacific and Atlantic basins diverge greatly.   They have very different ocean currents and climate, and are adjacent to different Nation-States.

Russia will face similar pressures, as an East-West continent scale nation, but is both at a different stage in Spengler’s analysis (Greer puts Russia’s late 21st Century as equivalent to America in perhaps the 26th — that is arguable for reasons I won’t go into, but in either case, the dynamic for an eventual East/West split in America, with the Pacific North West and LA both becoming borderlands of a Dominant San Francisco (say), and the Great Lakes and American South becoming Borderlands of the North East, is quite possible.  They even have different grids and a vast Desert/Prairie coming to separate them, with no obvious and easy transportation between the two.

In that case, predicting a long term trend of one elite to side with China (and like the rule four families of California, Newson, Brown, Getty, and Pelosi, with the last one’s Kamala Harris), to favour a Chinese style Marxist but pseudo-Confucian style, and favour East Asian interest over Russia or Europe, and a traditional but more limited role for the Atlantic Alliance, with its dollar Reserve currency and Eurodollar ruled from the City on Airstrip One.

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