Bad politics and bad ideas cannot be solved by bad candidates

We are officially in the final hours of the 2024 presidential election and all we can say for sure is that most people are angry and miserable about their available options.

Supermajorities of voters consistently say the country is on the wrong track. Neither major party candidate is viewed advantageous by a majority of voters.

Consequently, the polls show a neck-and-neck election. The candidates’ last-minute pitches mainly come down to Why the other side deserves to lose. Reluctant voters’ last-minute statements about who they are voting for also usually describe what they are voting against.

‘Never Trump’ conservative David French used its Sunday New York Times A column arguing that a Harris victory offers the opportunity to break the “unique influence on Republican hearts and minds” that Donald Trump possesses.

Across the aisle, vaguely conservative comedian and political commentator Bridget Phetasy explained that she “is not voting for Donald J. Trump. I vote against the left” and its “anti-civilization” stance on crime, transgenderism and cancellation. culture.

That is not a unique opinion. People who have never voted for Trump say they plan to vote for him in 2024 protest against the party that ‘closed playgrounds & schools, but opened dog parks & liquor stores’.

Regardless of who they support, everyone has the palpable sense that the best this election can offer is an opportunity to save the country from the worst cultural and political trends of the past decade.

In a Substack essay on Monday, pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson summed it up collective attitude as the ‘stop the madness’ election.

In focus groups she led, Anderson says few voters thought much about specific policies. Instead, they said their vote was about “returning this country to a place that all citizens can be proud of,” that the election represents “a turning point for whether our democracy lives or dies,” and that they were most concerned. about “my right to exist, to live and to be free.”

“You may think you know which party someone is voting for based on those answers. I assure you: that is not the case,” Anderson writes. “Even though we are so divided, I am struck by the way that both many Trump and Harris voters are talking about the election in these terms.”

All of these voters are likely to be disappointed. The only thing we can say with certainty about the outcome of the 2024 election is that the madness will not stop.

We know this because we have already experienced both outcomes that the election offers.

We know what a Trump victory means for defeating the left’s “anti-civilization” tendencies. We know what a Trump defeat means for closing the book on toxic Trumpian populism.

In a mindful weekend column, The New York TimesRoss Douthat explains how liberals failed to deliver on their post-2016 promise that “they would avoid insanity, maintain stability, and demonstrate far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his supporters.”

Instead, he argues, they have supplemented Trump’s madness with their own; embracing authoritarian COVID policies, pushing unproven treatments for childhood gender dysphoria, and abandoning the concepts of law enforcement and border security.

The result is that what liberals wanted to believe would be an “obvious” choice between Trump and the adults in the room. It is in fact a nerve-wracking match in which the ‘healthy’ option is far from clear.

You don’t have to agree with Douthat’s diagnosis of the failure of liberalism to understand why many Trump-skeptical conservative and moderate voters still think he can be a bulwark against continued leftist irrationality.

And yet anyone who thinks that voting for Trump will eliminate the excesses of Trump-era liberalism is wrong.

The left’s alleged “anti-civilization” stance was not defeated during Trump’s first term. On the contrary, they accelerated their resistance against him. Cancel culture, political correctness, “wokeism,” and “follow the science” fanaticism all reached their peak under his administration.

Trump’s control of the White House could not stem the broad cultural forces that often manifested themselves in state, local, and corporate policies beyond executive branch control. Trump’s polarizing possession of the pulpit has only emboldened the liberal excesses that his voters (of both the die-hard and reluctant variety) so hate.

The Biden administration has been remarkably left-wing. Yet we have seen it over the past four years wokeism is calming down as a political force and identity politics begins to lose control of the discourse.

Trump’s return to the White House will reverse this trend. His preternatural ability to infuriate his opponents will once again agitate the most fervent, most ridiculous elements of the democratic “resistance.” Under a second Trump, expect more cancel culture, not less.

Meanwhile, a Harris victory cannot hope to cleanse politics of Trumpian populism or even of the man himself. We have already conducted that experiment.

Biden won the White House largely because of the electorate’s depletion of Trump and the daily chaos he caused.

Instead of accepting this limited mandate to govern as a moderate, Biden reversed his administration to the left-most idiots in the room, who then aggressively regulated, spent with inflationary abandon, and pushed through a hardline progressive agenda on social and environmental issues.

The electorate has largely hated the results. By the end of the evening, the country may well choose to punish Democrats by putting Trump back in power.

In a last-ditch effort to prevent that eventuality, and to make up for the manifest unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration, Democrats have tried to make as much profit as possible from January 6. decision to hold its last high-profile rally at the same spot where Trump urged his supporters to march on the current capital several years earlier.

This attack also, predictably, failed.

That’s because Democrats can only invoke January 6 as a cudgel, not an olive branch.

Their message to Trump-skeptical moderates, conservatives, libertarians and anyone else is not that they will lead a moderate and inclusive government. The past four years prove that this will not be the case. Rather, the Democrats’ message is: “No matter how much you hate our policies, Trump is worse, so you should suck it up and vote for us.”

Perhaps the best distillation of this unpleasant pitch came a few weeks ago from US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “Libertarians: If this isn’t a five-alarm fire for you, what is?” He posted to X in response to a Washingtonpost article about former Trump advisers who warned he would use the military against American citizens.

It apparently did not occur to Buttigieg, or his boss, that libertarian-leaning voters would have been slightly more receptive to that position if the last four years of their administration had been at all libertarian.

During the 2024 campaign, neither Trump nor Harris spent much time pretending they will reduce the size and scope of government. Libertarians can expect few policy victories over the next four years.

Voters of all stripes should not expect our politics to improve.

There is a lot that is destructive and toxic in American public life right now. It’s no surprise that everyone is dissatisfied, most people vote for the lesser of two evils (if they feel motivated to vote at all), and we continue to play ping-pong between unpopular, failed governments.

To transcend this sad status quo, talented, transformative candidates are needed. Today there is nothing on the ballot.

Bad politics and bad ideas cannot be solved by bad candidates. But in this election there are only bad candidates to choose from.