2024 will show us what America wants to be. Our USA TODAY Opinion team is hopeful – and worried.
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The USA TODAY Opinion team looks ahead − with no small measure of trepidation and a dash of hope − at what 2024 may bring.
I'm fearful of 2024, and it's all because of Trump
I’m not going to lie to you, America. I’m fearful of 2024, and that fear all traces to one person: Donald Trump.
If you’re a Trump supporter, go ahead and get your “Oh, frightened little liberal snowflake!” comments out of your system. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before.
But for everyone else, the other liberals and the independents and the conservatives who wisely recognize the threat this man poses to our nation, I’m betting my fears are shared.
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The key problem with whatever the outcome of the 2024 presidential election – I’m assuming based on all available evidence Trump will be the GOP nominee – is this: We’re in trouble as a nation either way.
If Trump wins, watch out. He has made clear his second time leading the country will focus on destroying any and all he feels have wronged him. He speaks of his dictatorial longings and hatred of immigrants and a wide array of “others” out loud. Believe what he says.
And if the one-term, twice-impeached, multi-indicted former president loses again? Well, he still hasn’t acknowledged he lost the first time. He has relentlessly and narcissistically eroded trust in our electoral system. His desire to overturn the last election fomented an attack on the U.S. Capitol. What do you think will happen this time?
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Still, the better of the two outcomes is beating the man at the polls in the hope his angry movement fades. It’ll take resilience on our part, and a united front made of people who might not always agree or get along – but who know full well the peril we face if Trump isn’t stopped.
2024 will test our resolve to keep our republic
I look forward to New Year’s Eve. I don’t make resolutions, but there’s something about the beginning of a new year and the fresh start it implies. And it’s always fun to find the mistletoe.
I’m having a harder time mustering enthusiasm for 2024. It becomes more clear by the day that the country is in for a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. The majority of Americans keep saying they don’t want this, yet it sure looks like it’s what we’re going to get.
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I worry about where this will lead. Trump and chaos go together, and the left has already crowned him a dictator. Democrats, who fear Biden’s weakness as a candidate, are turning to the courts to keep Trump off the ballot.
Even for those who aren’t Trump fans (myself included), preventing citizens from voting for him is the definition of undemocratic. It would only feed fears that the election is rigged from the get-go.
The divisions in the country are already deep. There’s little interest in understanding any view different from one’s own, and compromise has become a dirty word. The incivility of the online world has seeped into the real one.
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Before the funeral for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, I heard an interview with her son, Jay O’Connor. His mother believed strongly that finding common ground was essential to preserving democracy. He said: “It seems like we've forgotten to disagree in an agreeable way … and unless you understand, listen and engage with others, the democracy breaks down.”
Are we still capable of doing that?
When asked what kind of government America would have, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
My wish for 2024 is that we can.
We'll muddle through − again
Every four years, since at least the Carter administration, I've heard people say that this election − whether it was 1980, '88, '92, 2000, 2008 or 2020 − was the most important election of our lifetimes. So let me be not the first to say it: 2024 will bring with it the most important election of our lifetimes.
This time, it's probably even true.
With that reality acknowledged, however, allow me to raise another essential point: We will get through it. The nation will endure, and hundreds of millions of Americans will still thrive, on Nov. 6, 2024 − no matter the outcome of the seemingly all-important presidential vote.
As a conservative, I don't believe that the full strength and future health of these un-United States rests in the Oval Office or the halls of Congress. Nor even in the cloistered corridors of the supremist of courts.
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No, the real strengths of our nation are stewarded by a wise old lawyer I know in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; the dedicated and perseverant middle school teacher in Brownsburg, Indiana; the thoughtful, careful journalist in Seattle, Washington.
That's just a small sample of my list of people who form the true bedrock of our society. You undoubtedly have your own list of those who will keep calm and carry on serving − no matter how the electoral blitz of '24 assails us.
I will be blunt to the point of triteness: We have each other. And that will be more than enough.
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So, let's temper the apocalyptic rhetoric. Let's summon compassion and grace for the people whose politics we despise. Let's grip perspective like it's the last life vest floating in the icy waters of a raging sea.
In the year ahead, my wife and I will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. As Ferris Bueller said, "Life moves pretty fast." Yet, the older I get the more I understand that the prophets of doom who predicted our mutual assured destruction were wrong − then and now.
This one is easy. What do we actually want for our country?
I’m looking forward to finding out what America wants to be. I know, it’s a big question. But thankfully the 2024 election will give us that answer.
We’re likely going to be asked to choose between two presidential candidates whom most people don’t want. So we’ll have to get over that and get into what the winner will say about us as a country.
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Do we want Donald Trump, a twice-impeached president who has done everything he can to destabilize the election process while getting full support from a Republican Party leadership that wants to legislate the existence of people and ideas nationally?
Do we want less abortion rights?
Do we want a government that attacks, through actual legislation, people and groups who disagree?
That’s one side.
The other gives us a wholly unpopular president hellbent on erasing student loans, defending Israel and taking control of the economy by directly influencing interest rates in hopes of turning this thing around.
Do we want Democrats to take full control of the federal government and continue to push for expanding abortion rights and the idea that LGBTQ+ people and kids deserve to exist free of oppression?
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Do we want four more years of President Joe Biden and his border policy mixed with his efforts to expand health care access?
This election will tell us what we want. And how you read the facts of what each side is offering will help you sort out what side you want to win.
Women can decide the 2024 election if they just show up
You wouldn’t know it from watching the incessant hand-wringing from Democrats over the 2024 election that they have the winningest issue in a generation in the palms of their sweaty hands. But election after election over the past two years has shown it’s theirs to lose: abortion rights.
In Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s own glib words as he signed away the constitutional right to abortion for those who live in the worst-ranking nation in the developed world for maternal mortality rates, “Women are not without electoral or political power.”
Indeed they are not.
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Progressives have scored victory after victory in statewide ballot measures on abortion, most recently in Ohio.
A majority of Americans in at least 43 states support legal abortion, and the impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision only seems to be growing that support – not to mention increasing the number of abortions nationwide.
Among adults under age 30 – arguably the most powerful voting bloc if they turn out in 2024 – 74% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
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Lawsuits challenging restrictive abortion laws in Kentucky and Texas have laid bare the cruelty and strategic foolishness of the far-right compulsion to pull up a stool between birthing people and their doctors. Kate Cox was forced to flee Texas to receive a medically necessary abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with a deadly genetic condition, leaving a slate of stammering Republicans in her wake.
Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s persecution for speaking out about giving care to a 10-year-old rape survivor has created a whole new slate of red-state political enemies among medical care providers.
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The mythical "women’s vote" might remain just that, but leaders of the right certainly have done everything in their power to build a voting bloc to their detriment.
Whether the abortion fervor among voters can survive 10 more months of political theater remains to be seen, but the cultural appetite for basic human rights seems to continue surprising everyone but women. From 2023's record-busting success of the "Barbie" movie’s tepid feminism to the Swifties’ seismic impact and the Beyonce bump, who runs the world isn’t the question – it’s just who shows up at the polls.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Year will bring Biden vs. Trump. And a whole lot of uncertainty.
