Happy New Year 2024!

January 1, 2024 Hunter Wallace Blogging, Capitalism, Conservatism, Progressives 17

Happy New Year!

For some reason, I decided to spend the last two days watching an old two-part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 called “Past Tense.” It has been on my mind as 2024 approached probably because I have spent the last few days thinking and making my own predictions about 2024.

In the episode, a freak transporter accident sends Captain Sisko, Dax and Doctor Bashir back in time to San Francisco in the year 2024. Neoliberal capitalism has run wild in the United States. The have nots who have lost out under our economic system have been incarcerated in “Sanctuary Districts.” Homeless people, common criminals and down on their luck Americans have been swept up off the streets and put of sight in San Francisco. American society has moved on and forgotten about these losers.

Captain Benjamin Sisko leads an uprising in Sanctuary District A in early September in what history remembers as The Bell Riots. It is a turning point in American history. The Sanctuary Districts are closed and the Federal Employment Act is reinstated. A shocked America has its conscience stirred by The Bell Riots and turns away from neoliberal capitalism and toward economic justice where every American is guaranteed the right to a job. It is a key progressive stepping stone toward the world of the Federation. The whole timeline is temporarily erased when Gabriel Bell is killed and event doesn’t happen.

Anyway, I am bringing up this cultural artifact from the mid-1990s because its shows how Progressivism has changed over the past thirty years. There isn’t a single accusation of “racism” in the two episodes. No one is “woke.” The protagonist Captain Sisko is a black man, but race is muted and the focus is entirely on class conflict. The Bell Riots are about economic justice, not racial justice. There is no obsession with gender or culture either in “Past Tense” and the happy ending is envisioned as guaranteed employment.

The writers of the episode got some key things right about the future: San Francisco is a shithole in 2024 and neoliberal capitalism has indeed created a huge gap between the haves and have nots there. At the same time, they got some major things wrong: the criminals and the working poor aren’t locked up together with sympathetic people in Sanctuary Districts. There are no drug addicts in the episode. Instead, the criminals, drug addicts and homeless people have been allowed to overrun the city and drive out the middle class. It is inconceivable that Gov. Gavin Newsom would ever launch an authoritarian crackdown on homeless people in San Francisco that changes the course of American history. The lumpen proletariat is coddled and glorified by the Left, not shunned by it in favor of the forgotten man.

Where is the Left in 2024 in the fourth year of the Biden administration? Is it going anywhere?

It is inconceivable that anything like the Federal Employment Act will pass Congress in 2024. Also, while we can all imagine riots in the summer of 2024, it is difficult to imagine the Left rioting over economic justice. Instead, the Left riots over things like accusations of “racism,” police brutality, Trump rallies, monuments of Christopher Columbus, which ultimately fizzle and amount to nothing like the Summer of Floyd. Endless rounds of backlash politics against what the Left has become is propelling Trump back to power. Rich people in America are also doing better than ever as we close in on Dow 40,000.

The Star Trek timeline that the Left imagined in the mid-1990s has been erased. We are clearly on a trajectory to a very different future. What happened?

17 Comments

  1. The internet happened, and then social media and smart phones.

    That development evolved to be more and more user friendly, transforming the internet from a tech savvy white man and Asian nerd platform into a public platform welcoming to women and blacks.

    Echo chambers formed, and childless, young white women got sucked into man-hating platforms like Tumblr, while “MGTOW” and the like formed as a response to the fundamental transformation of dating and bond pairing formation that the internet facilitated.

    This fissure came to fruition by the time Obama was elected president, and a perfect storm of antiwhiteness was brewed up.

    None of these things were really being predicted by people in the 90s. The progressives fully believed that racism was going away in the 90s, so the legacy of Marxism was still the guiding principle.

    • “This fissure came to fruition by the time …”

      The seeds of hostility were planted long ago.
      Go look at any ((woman’s magazine)) from the 70’s onward and you can easily see the ((media)) created female hostility and the easily predictable male aversion. All designed to wreck the goys family and society.

    • The left sent out teasers about their wet dream of a black president with Deep Impact in 1998 where Morgan Freeman played the President. Chris Rock called that out in one of his stand up routines as a total joke, the idea of a black president seemed so far out in the late 90s when just ten years later it became reality.

      I remember in 2019 when the circus of Democrats were making the rounds of the talk shows during the primary and we were still talking about real, concrete issues. Sanders of course had medicare for all, and Corey Booker was seriously talking about expanding Medicare down to 55+ Where did this all go? Suddenly the left went totally nuts with their Trump Derangement Syndrome and all that talk vanished to “legalize all black criminality” and allow teenage girls with mental angst to suddenly decide to chop off their tits and grow a beard with testosterone supplements! Issues that are clearly just malevolent insanity.

  2. There is no politically viable contemporary leftwing in the Anglosphere.
    Instead we have two neoliberal crony capitalist parties.
    They differ culturally much more than they do fiscally.
    ‘Democrats/liberals’ are culturally Marxist, ‘republicans/conservatives’ are lukewarm social conservatives; it’s a broad sort of conservatism, a conservatism for all colors and creeds rather than a conservatism specifically for whites and Christians, one that Rishi Sunak, Nikki Haley and Vivek Salami can feel more than welcome and right at home in.

    Both parties leave the borders wide open, tho ‘democrats/liberals’ tend to be a bit worse on this issue.
    Both parties are imperialist, interventionist and Zionist.

    So, that’s where we are.
    More than anything, contemporary politics can best be characterized as anti-populist/undemocratic.
    So far in the 21st century, the elite are dictating the overall flow of society, government and economics, the people are a largely passive entity, we just adapt to what the elite do.
    We have virtually no say in things, except indirectly, we can choose to comply or not comply with their political agenda, but we have no viable political agenda of our own.

    Politics is, may always have been and may always be their domain, the elite’s, not ours, especially with the gap between rich and poor as wide as it is, it’s never been wider.
    Insofar as we have any power, it’s through noncompliance, not through voting.

    Liberal democracy is a failed experiment, so is the right’s constitutional republicanism, the powers that be routinely disregard the constitution.
    We are living in a failed experiment, the sooner we realize that, the better, we owe the system no allegiance.
    We need to open ourselves to alternatives.

  3. And of course the neoliberal crony capitalist elite use cultural Marxism as a divide and conquer strategy, that is why BlackRock, Vanguard and the WEF promote it.
    Keep women fighting with men and minorities fighting with the majority, keep them busy, put men and the majority on the defensive, prevent them from uniting and getting anything meaningful done politically on the left, or the right.
    Both the left, and the right have been neutralized, made toothless, they can’t challenge the globalist/Zionist elite in any way in their current form, they need to be abandoned, we need to start over from scratch.

  4. What Star Trek got fundamentally wrong is, that given enough time, liberal democracy will evolve into a utopia.
    It won’t, not even close.
    And so we need to start over.
    The right’s constitutional republicanism failed too.
    The political/ruling class has been routinely disregarding the constitution for well over a century now, really ever since Lincoln, it’s just gotten worse and worse.
    Whether you’re on the right, or the left, or somewhere in between, we need to open ourselves to new ideas, as well as old but forgotten ideas.
    We will never agree on everything, and that’s fine, but what the left, right and center can agree on is, in 2024, no one but the upper 90%-99% is happy with the status quo, even the woke left and the nationalist right can agree on that.
    The system just isn’t working for Joe and Jane average, and it’s getting worse all the time.
    Let’s start there.

  5. “race is muted and the focus is entirely on class conflict. ”

    ‘class conflict’, deep shades of ((Marxist)) ideology.

  10. Every futuristic movie from the 20th got one thing very wrong about the way they portrayed the 21st century. These old movies all portray a White future with a White majority. I remember noticing that at the time. When Aliens came out in the mid 1980s I blurted out that there wont be any blond people 500 years from now. My friend got mad and stomped out of the room. Because I pointed out the obvious truth that he didnt want to face.

    Why did no movies made last century portray the total success of the 1965 immigration act in replacing us with a gigantic mud slide. A mud slide that was well underway then.

    • No more blonde hair, no more red hair. No more blue eyes. What a beautiful, shit colored future.

  11. Happy New Year folks.

    Unfortunately, this doesn’t look like it will be a a very good 12 month, but a year of living dangerously.

    • You’re by no means alone in this assessment. At least 1.5 million military-ages males since Joey Shitpants assumed the teleprompter. That’s not even counting those that entered under Obama (who openly bragged about creating an internal army), and the Caravans which entered while Cheetohead was busy fellating jews. Remember the vast government purchases of weapons and ammo stockpiles under Obama? They haven’t gone away or been sold off. Delta airlines have been flying the invaders to all sorts of places around the country.

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