AFTER MONTHS OF EURO-TRAVEL, I’m back in my home base of New York City. I returned at that point in the calendar when journalists of a certain bent try as an annual ritual to predict the coming year.  

It’s a year that will clearly set a peculiar record. More national and regional elections will be taking place in one year than ever before, with more than 2 billion voters going to the polls. However, when I turned to my mostly reliable home-town newspaper, the New York Times, I saw a disappointingly inaccurate headline for the coming year.

It said “Two Wars, 50 Elections: The Economy Faces Rising Geopolitical Risks. The Times headline-writers clearly mean the wars of Gaza and Ukraine. But their editorial myopia seems to have made them forget Sudan, for instance, where 14,000 people have been killed this year and more than 6 million people uprooted from their homes. It’s a war that I noted serious journalists in Europe have been painstaking about not forgetting.

And with varying degrees of impact on the world economy, there is also the war in Yemen, endangering global shipping in the Red Sea straits … elsewhere in the Middle East there is the fighting in Syria and Iraq, which directly involves American forces – as evidenced only this week with the destruction of militant facilities there in retaliation for the wounding of 3 US soldiers.

There is the long-lasting war in the Sahel and Maghreb against Islamic jihadists … plus the continuing conflicts in Somalia, Philippines, and Maynmar. And of course there are evermore lesser but still deadly wars being fought.

Nevertheless, The Times’s forecast of 50 elections worldwide is more accurate – though the global electoral scene is a little more complex to convey in a headline. Among those 50 prospective opportunities for citizens to vote is one single set of elections for the European Parliament, which will in fact take place in 27 different countries. (One country less, I can’t help pointing out, than in the last vote four years ago – because Britain has left Europe).

The individual countries that will be voting include some undeniably significant nations: Our own US of course, plus India (the world’s largest democracy by population), South Africa, the UK, Indonesia, Mexico. Oh and Russia too, though it’s hard to seriously count Vladimir Putin’s despotic rule as anything like an electoral democracy. Nonetheless a hundred million Russians are expected to be voting, in March of the new year.

But inevitably media attention here is concentrated most on the not-so-far-off polling day of November 5th, 2024 in our own country, the US of A.  Not too distant for political correspondents in their legions to be declaring how the campaigning will go, especially on the White House side where, of course, there is greater communication between the candidate’s team and the press – and of course there’s more clarity, and more objective evidence, as to how campaign money is being used – always the clearest indicator in American elections.

The Joe Biden campaign is already reported to be spending heavily on advertising directed sharply toward Black and Latino voters in key swing-states. The motivation is not so much that these voting blocks will (out of disappointment, political weariness or apathy) switch to Donald Trump, but that they could stay home,  or vote for a third-party candidate.

Reporters, clearly briefed by the Biden side, are emphasizing how much of a threat to our whole way of life Trump presents – some stories have cited for instance a private meeting with cash contributors to the Biden campaign in Boston, that was put on-the-record by being videoed on a misbehaving attendee’s iPhone (This is 21st Century political reporting, after all). Biden himself was there, and he said that he’ll be pointing out how Trump “threatens the right to choose, the Affordable Care Act, healthcare overall, and America’s standing in the world. But the greatest threat he poses of all is towards our very democracy.” Such are the crucial, and very basic, all-encompassing grounds on which the 2024 contest will be fought – at least that’s what the White House expects.

ON THE MEDIA SIDE, though, how does it look? The Trump phenomenon, which of course shows no sign of fading, looms justifiably large. Perhaps most of all, in the venerable columns of The Atlantic magazine, which dates back to 1857 but still remains up-to-date, agile, and comprehensive in its thoroughly-argued insights (It was stunningly effective, I can’t forget, in its science-based coverage of the Covid pandemic).

For the dawn of 2024, The Atlantic‘s January-February edition is devoted entirely to an almost apocalyptic set of analyses – many different takes on the single question ‘What if Trump Wins’. I don’t believe the Atlantic has ever devoted so much attention to a single topic since the days of immediate shock after 9-11, or (earlier) in the darkest days of the Vietnam War … or the massive reassessments called for after the Pearl Harbor attack 82 years ago.

The Atlantic’s examination is a mass effort in which 24 different writers, many of them distinguished practitioners, explain exactly how it would look as Donald Trump worked to destroy America’s civic and democratic institutions, including our courts, our national political culture, and even the US Military.

Staff writer Tom Nichols sets out to forestall any argument that arraying all these big journalistic guns is over-reaction, reminding us that criticism of Trump in 2016 as a “fascist” and an “autocrat” were dismissed then as alarmist. Nowadays we have the evidence of his four years in power by which to judge him empirically … and Nichols calls on his own days of being a self-confessed pedant, as a college professor of politics, when he lays out an overarching definition of fascism for us (a term coined by Benito Mussolini, I should remind us all).

“Fascism,” Nichols writes, “is a holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates and wants to crush liberal democracy.”  It’s hard to argue against that sounding very apt, in the here and now.

Elsewhere among the two dozen carefully framed articles there’s one by David Frum, who once advised George W Bush in the White House and still describes himself as a conservative Republican. He baldly predicts that our much-cherished checks, balances and safeguards are simply not designed for the likes of Trump. “Our existing constitutional system” he says, “has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal-in-chief.” Frum goes on to say that Trump’s great pile of legal troubles, especially the multiple felony indictments, will lead him in even more drastic directions. “For his own survival,” says Frum, “he would have to destroy the rule of law.”

As we all begin a year of processing how we will exercise our most precious democratic gift, in the voting booth, I strongly urge you to take a good look at The Atlantic’s full and very valuable new issue. And if you feel you can … have a very good year ahead.