Contemporary American politics is a shameful spectacle. And we’re going to keep getting heaping helpings of it until the day we die.
Last night, Oprah Winfrey told women assembled at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris that if they “don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.” On the same day, Trump booster Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that if “Trump doesn’t win, this is the last election.”
I’ve hated nearly everything about the 2024 race: The incoherence of the candidates. The arms race in economic pandering. The violence. The nutjobs who’ve wormed their way into positions of influence. The lawfare. The unprecedented corruption and mendacity of the mass media. But there will be another election in two years that will matter very much to millions of people. And another one two years after that. Most of the same people, on experts, will be out there campaigning, raising money, and warning you that the end is near.
Modern elections do not put us out of our misery — they merely degrade our rights and decency in incremental two-year chunks.
And though I have no idea who will win the presidency in 2024, I’m quite comfortable predicting that Democrats won’t be carted off to concentration camps if Harris loses the election. Not one journalist, not even Joe Scarborough, is going to face a firing squad for saying critical things about the president. Indeed, there probably hasn’t been a public figure in America’s history who has faced as much scorn and scrutiny (some of it earned, much of it slander). Never has anyone been censored.
The unhinged, hysterical meltdown of the Left over former President Donald Trump’s candidacy is unparalleled in modern history. Women who walk around cosplaying The Handmaid’s Tale are living in the wealthiest and freest place women have ever known. They will continue to do so, even if Trump finds his way back into the White House for four years. The very notion that “democracy” hinges on the unfettered availability of third-trimester abortions is a kind of corrosive delusion only partisanship can whip up in otherwise rational people. Then again, we already know if Trump wins, every innocuous tax cut will be treated like the Reichstag fire.
You would think that people who act like every presidential election brings the nation to the precipice of Armageddon would want to reduce the power of the White House and restore proper constitutional limits on the office. Instead, they up the ante every four years. We treat candidates as messianic saviors. They, in turn, make bigger and bigger promises. The country increasingly seems to want dictators — not in the Mussolini goose-stepping sense, but in the Roman sense of being “oligarchs with a time limit.”
None of this is to say elections don’t matter.
If Harris wins, it is likely that Republicans would go on to the House or Senate. She will be relegated to years of executive abuses, in the vein of Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s presidency. This brand of unilateral governance matters, yes, but it can be reversed. Obama’s legacy was decimated by Trump, who backed out of the Paris Agreement (which was never sent to the Senate for ratification), withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, and untangled scores of burdensome regulations, among other unilateral decisions of his predecessor. Obama, like Biden, ruled with “bureaucratic bulldozing, rather than legislative transparency,” as the New York Times once noted.
It’s not nothing. Harris will almost certainly continue to attack religious freedom, continue the weaponization of the Justice Department, and foster anarchy on the border. Democrats have been pushing big tech firms to censor millions of users for years. The Left is now an anti-free speech party. And that’s a tragedy for the country. But it’s not going to change if Trump wins. Massive bureaucratic agencies, staffed with thousands of leftists, aren’t just going to let Republicans dismantle their efforts overnight. This battle over speech doesn’t end or start after the winner is named.
Yes, there are even worse scenarios to contemplate. If Democrats take the Senate and the House and Harris wins, they will likely overturn the filibuster via the nuclear option, destroying the character of the Senate — and, with it, any remaining semblance of federalism. During the Biden years, only two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, stood in the way of the decimation of the Senate. They are gone. The Left’s necessity to lord over the decision of every person in every nook and corner of the country is one of the most underappreciated issues tearing the country apart.
Without the filibuster, Democrats would almost surely cram one massive federal intrusion after the next through the Senate, overturning thousands of state laws. Most of it will be unconstitutional.
The only institution holding up the constitutional order right now is the Supreme Court. It is in danger. The Left’s crusade to undermine the public trust by smearing the justices has been making inroads. Harris, with a Democratic Senate, would almost certainly appointment a counterconstitutional justice who would rubber-stamp every progressive assault on liberty. Democrats have also increasingly embraced the authoritarian notion of packing the court.
But whether they lose or not, the effort to destroy the court will continue. There are 33 Senate seats up for grabs in 2026.
So Trump winning in 2024 is only the second-worst thing that can happen to the country. One of the key differences is that most of the bad things Trump brings to the White House are tied to his ego and will leave with him. The Democrats’ agenda, their attacks on the constitutional order, will be with us in perpetuity.
For me, a Reaganite type, it’s distressing to see an unprincipled, big-government candidate on the GOP ticket. Trump has turned the party away from championing any limited government or even humoring us with talk about curbing state power. Trump’s running mate, an ideological statist, will be the standard-bearer of the party in 2028. This means more class warfare and less economic freedom. In many ways, the entire political debate has been dragged to the left.
That’s a shame, sure, but none of it heralds the end of the nation — just the end of modern conservatism.
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In past elections, I used to write columns mocking people for using the insufferable trope: “This is the most important election in our lifetime.” There is an ahistorical self-importance to pretending you’re living in the most troubling times. As far as the sweep of history goes, we are probably the luckiest people to have ever lived.
That is to say, America will not descend into Nazism. And, no, we’re not going to become Mogadishu because populists have a lot of destructive economic ideas. There is a chance, however, that we will become France or Spain or some other middling European country where big government nationalists clash with socialist EU types every few years. That’s bad enough. But it’s not the end.