I much prefer New Year's Resolutions to New Year's Predictions.
I can try to control myself. The future is unknowable. You can see the patterns of the past, you can see how things should knit together, but you can't know, and you shouldn't try to predict specifics.
But let's get the chore out of the way with some generalizations.
If history is any guide, 2007 is going to be a bad year. By my reckoning we're a year removed from a Generational Crisis election, one that will define our politics for the rest of my life, and most of the lives of my children. Such years are always filled with terrifying events which make the nature of the next crisis crystal clear to everyone.
Things like the Summer of Love. The KreditAnstalt collapse. The Gold Bond. John Brown's raid. Each of these events crystallized the coming crisis. They helped define the abyss, and the choices which people at that time had to make. And it was the climb-down from these crises that defined the politics of the next generation. Listen carefully when a right-winger is cornered by events, forced to dig deep into the id of his ideology. A hippie is going to fall out of that tree.
I can't tell you what that event might be. It is likely to be an environmental catastrophe that will make Katrina look like a small thunderstorm. Or it could be something else. Whatever it is, it will generate enormous fear, one that will be met with paralysis by all our leaders -- political, economic, cultural, media. The Washington "cocktail party" will end, to be re-formed only after the crisis has been addressed by the people, and only after a new set of political myths and values have replaced the Nixon Thesis. (You know which ones I like.)
So on to my own New Year's Resolutions, which I hope you will enjoy and (perhaps) share:
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