One year ago, I descended from the mountain with seven prophecies for 2023. Unfortunately, the year 2023 failed to hold its side of the bargain and accurately reflect all of them. For instance, I began by prophesying that ‘Donald Trump will not be the presumptive Republican presidential candidate by the end of 2023. Instead, he will be dead.’ I really didn’t give myself a lot of leeway with that one. I continued: ‘This is not a metaphor. I do not mean that his primary campaign will splutter out. I am not saying that his poll averages will decline. I mean that he will die: that his big wet sock of a heart will flop about one last time, and then stop.’ I’m writing this on the 29th of December, so there’s still some room for a miracle, but it looks like I was quite badly wrong here. And some mockers and naysayers might seize on this, and claim that I’m ‘not a real prophet’ and ‘not actually gifted with the holy curse of foreknowledge,’ that I’m ‘just a common-or-garden culture critic trying to imbue his basically standard-issue lefty opinions with a vatic woo-woo vibe for no very good reason,’ and that my so-called prophecies actually consist of ‘hunches, stabs in the dark, vague trend analyses, and sometimes just ordinary preferences, stated with a degree of overconfidence they don’t really merit’ combined with ‘actual nonsense mostly derived from Tarot cards.’
As always, the mockers and naysayers are wrong. Consider my other prophecies. I revealed, for instance, that after Andrew Tate, the next big totemic cybercretin would be a girl who just screams at her audience to kill themselves. She has arrived in many guises, but one cultural figure who came to prominence online in 2023 is Hannah Pearl Davis, a young woman whose sole message to her mostly female audience is that women are stupid and useless and there is absolutely nothing they can do to rid themselves of the stamp of this condition.
I revealed that people would stop critiquing elite institutions and distance themselves from popular enthusiasms, and they have. I said that as part of this, people would stop talking about Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul, and they really have. Illich used to be inescapable; I don’t think I’ve seen his name dropped once since the summer. The retreat from critique has been ongoing on the left for a while, but in 2023 it totally subsumed the right: whatever populist, labourist energies were still floating around there basically dried up as soon as 1) a man who calls himself Bronze Age Pervert pointed out that free-market dogmas are easier to reconcile with creepy bio-determinism and 2) an Austrian School devotee who gets his economic policies from actual dogs was elected as the President of Argentina. (I also said that people would stop talking about René Girard and they haven’t quite yet; I suppose it didn’t help that I wrote a big blockbuster essay on the man in Harper’s.)
I prophesied that people would stop paying attention to the war in Ukraine, and I was possibly more accurate than anyone has ever been in human history. But even the new war in Gaza that’s replaced it in the spotlight has some of the same weird features I describe. War without war, destruction without antagonism. Israel directs aid trucks to feed its captives in Gaza; a few hours later, it decides those same people are enemies and massacres them. Hamas fighters film themselves infiltrating IDF camps and then doing nothing. Each side claims they’re trying to obliterate the other, but mostly they jointly produce an overwhelming sacrifice of the civilian population.
Finally, I prophesied that art would no longer attempt to bear witness to the present. In 2023, Zadie Smith—Zadie Smith, poet of the Kilburn High Road, the great witness to Willesden, chronicler of Cricklewood, the person who documented the life of the same shabby corner of north-west London where I grew up in glugs of polyphonous prose—published a historical novel set in the Victorian era. Meanwhile, the most talked-about book actually set in the present last year was something called Yellowface, which is about a white woman who becomes a literary superstar after stealing a manuscript from a better, more virtuous, more talented, but also dead Asian woman. This thing is notionally a satire of the publishing industry, but it also appears to have become a bestseller solely because the publishing industry decided to make it one. Does this really feel like an attempt to actually grapple with the questions of the present? Or is it, in fact, a retreat from the matter of actual life into a set of highly formalised—almost medieval—conventions?
Anyway, today I have returned from the mountain with seven further prophecies. I drew three cards for 2024: the Hermit, the Page of Pentacles, and the King of Pentacles. All auspicious cards! But the Hermit is a lonely card, and both the Page and the King are also solitary figures. The Hermit sets out with a lamp in the darkness. His journey is not a fruitful one: the Page stands in a blossoming meadow, but his only focus is on the glowing coin in his hands. The light that guides the way has become the only destination. Finally, the King sits in all his finery, but vines grow over his form. He looks like he’s been sitting there for a thousand years. Behind him, his castle lies in ruins.
This will be the shape of your year.
Nobody will win the US election
There’s usually a very reliable way to predict the outcome of American elections, which is that the dumbest, funniest outcome is always what comes to pass. But this year, there’s a problem: every possible outcome is dumb. It’s virtually guaranteed now that the election will be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which is already incredibly funny. It’s funny that in the most powerful country in the world, the democratic system—guarantor of human freedom, engine of prosperity, the treasure for which so many have died, and which must be imposed on the rest of the world by guile or force—has chosen the exact same people it did last time. Clearly, these must be the absolute best that America has to offer. And who are they? An incumbent who is so far gone that—let’s be honest—he does not reliably know that when the doctors try to gauge his awareness by asking ‘who is the President of the United States?’ the correct answer is actually ‘me.’ And the previous incumbent, who is literally a clown, a big fat clown from the circus with a lurid orange face, white circles around his eyes, and some implausible origami going on in his hair, a hamburger-eating fucking clown.
Biden is a funny candidate. Last go round, when a voter challenged him with some barely coherent objections, Biden called him a ‘damn liar,’ addressed him as ‘Jack’ and later as ‘Fat,’ and challenged him to a push-up contest. When one of those unbearable campus conservatives asked him how many genders there are, he replied that ‘there are at least three.’ He has a very enjoyable habit of just wandering off, physically or mentally, in the middle of whatever he’s supposed to be doing. But clearly, he’s not as funny as Trump. I don’t mean that Trump is a better comedian, although he probably is. But the act of re-electing Trump—whatever else it might be—would be hilarious. After all the high dudgeon of the 45th Presidency, the incomprehension when he won, the sense that culture had reached its final, lowest possible nadir, then the negative personality cult, the paranoid conspiracy theories on every side, the political obsessives all losing contact with any kind of reality, plunging into unreason, one after another, sacrificing their sanities in the name of Trump—and then afterwards, when it was all over, the crowds cheering and crying in the street, blubbing that they could finally be proud of their country again, now that order and civility had been restored, now that sanity reigned, now you no longer had to care about the people in camps at the border, now that the demon of pure spectacle and showmanship had finally been exorcised, and we could all go back to brunch, back to bipartisan infrastructure bills—after all that, to just make Donald Trump the President, all over again, is possibly the funniest thing that can be imagined.
Except—what about the possibility of a President Kamala Harris? Because it really is possible; it gets more possible with every neuron that fizzles out inside Joe Biden’s brain. And she is funny in a way that even Trump might struggle to match. There’s a Trumpian derangement of language: those sentences that coil and flex according to their own inner associative madness, so beautifully distinct from any of the stale forms of political discourse. But I’m not sure even Trump could come up with a statement as magnificently meaningless as ‘it is time to do what we have been doing and that time is every day,’ or ‘there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs, and there is such great significance to the passage of time, when we think about a day in the life of our children and what that means to the future of our nation, depending on whether or not they have the resources they need,’ or ‘I think it’s very important for us at every moment in time and certainly this one to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present and to be able to contextualize it—to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future,’ or ‘we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy, because, you know, it comes in the morning—we have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life.’
There’s something about time; whenever Kamala thinks too long about time, its passage, its movement, her pupils go wide and her brain starts generating chewed-up passages from Sein und Zeit. But actually, this drivel reminds me of something else. Last month, I noticed that Disney’s latest offering contained songs with lyrics that weren’t just bad, but actively meaningless. It didn’t read like AI text, because AI text is actually very diligently coherent. It wasn’t just incorrect English; it read like it had been written by an entity with a very limited understanding of how language in general is supposed to work. It was written in Kamalese. And once you start noticing the Kamalese, you’ll notice that it’s everywhere. In advertising. In books. Trump’s madness is all his own; Kamala’s madness is the madness of an entire world. And that’s pretty funny.
So: a deadlock. Two equally dumb and funny outcomes. Neither can win. So neither will. The 2024 election will simply never end. The rallies and debates and frenzied arguments will continue past November, through all of 2025, and out the other end. Trump and Biden are the perma-candidates in the Forever Election; they’ll probably still be the perma-candidates long after their physical bodies have died. And already, events are conspiring to render the entire process infinitely indeterminate and interminable. Two states have announced that Trump will not appear on their ballots, and you morons take a stance on this based on whether you’re pro or anti Trump. It’s not about Trump. It’s about the ballot as a partial object, an incomplete text, an unfulfilled prophecy. It’s possible that one man and not the other will stand on some steps and recite an oath at some point, but that will not end the election. (Don’t be surprised if both men perform the ceremony.) Whoever ends up taking their shits in the White House, there will be no period in which anyone can be said to have won, and to be engaged in the government of the country. Election Day is just another pit stop before the next campaign event. Nobody pretends that elections are about choosing a leader any more; it’s been a long time since politics jad anything to do with making anything happen. America is not governed by its elected officials. The only thing that governs America is the election itself, the frenzy, the private neuroses of three hundred million Americans writhing in hostility against everything and all.