Alan Zendell, January 2, 2024

2023 was a chilling precursor to 2024. There were a few short crescendos, brief periods of tension as we waited to see whether Georgia, New York, and the U. S. Department of Justice would indict Donald Trump and proceed toward trials. An even more intense crescendo as right-wing extremists in Congress chose to hold aid to Ukraine against Russia’s aggression hostage in its desperate attempt to find credibility in its demands to control our southern border and sharply cut entitlement programs. And finally, the day-to-day struggle as President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken tight-roped from capital to capital to keep the Israel-Hamas war from encompassing the entire Middle East.

None of those issues reached resolution in 2023. At no time since the end of World War 2 has our country faced so many existential challenges simultaneously, so the Biden administration will have to act decisively and effectively while constantly under attack by an unusually unscrupulous opposition party during this election year. 2024 is going to be an ongoing struggle between political self-interest and the future of our country.

The presidential election will capture most of our attention, as an aging president who has done a remarkable job of repairing our economy and strengthening our alliances seeks re-election amid doubts that he can remain effective beginning a second term at 82. On the Republican side will be an unprecedented primary season as Donald Trump, who has spent a lifetime putting himself ahead of everything and everyone around him, is being tried under ninety-one criminal indictments, most of which are for felonies. Since his best hopes to avoid convictions are convincing the Supreme Court to grant him immunity and delaying his trials until after the election, court battles will dominate our politics all year. If the courts support Trump, it could be a disaster that destroys everything our country stands for. Even if he’s unsuccessful, the chaos he creates can only weaken confidence in the election.

If Trump somehow loses the nomination, the winner will be former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who doesn’t understand that the Civil War was about slavery, current Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has the charisma of a charging bull and whose views are more racist and dictatorial than Trump’s, right-wing extremist billionaire Vivek Ramaswami, who most of us never heard of, or former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whose bombastic attacks on Trump are undermined by having fallen on his sword for Trump eight years ago.

Both Ramaswami and DeSantis view Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as something we should stay out of, a point of view that could bring America and Europe into direct conflict with Russia. And while they all attack each other and Biden, another government shut-down looms, as the small right-wing minority in Congress attempts to take advantage of the infighting to tyrannize the rest of the country, and voters in Iowa and New Hampshire kick off the primary season.

All this will happen against a backdrop of conflicting versions of the truth. One of Trump’s best known and most effective tactics for achieving his ends is to lie and project his own immoral and criminal behavior onto everyone else, supported by several major news outlets that do the same thing. Add to the mix the foreign actors that employ skilled hackers and internet influencers who infiltrate our social media to spread misinformation and discord. Facebook has made some token effort to control these, but Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and renamed it X, has declared that it will be a platform for free speech with no vetting or controls.

There’s little we as Americans can do to affect the behavior of the candidates and even less about the attempts of foreign governments to undermine our election. But there’s a lot we can and must do to protect ourselves from them. Since Trump became a politician, millions of Americans have shown themselves to be susceptible to the chaos and lies. That simply has to stop. Americans must overcome the ennui they’ve displayed, the sheer intellectual laziness that results in people believing lies and failing to learn the facts for themselves.

There’s an as yet unproved theory that it’s not necessary to physically invade or attack America to destroy it. All our enemies have to do is sow divisiveness, fear, and anger, and let hate, prejudice, and racism do the rest, and we’ll destroy ourselves from within. There’s a new film on Netflix, Leave the World Behind, that makes the point effectively. The problem our generation faces is that we were raised to believe that America was where the good guys lived and that would magically make us invincible. Neither statement is true. To survive, we all need to find our own truth and use our power to vote.