Counting Down to Guy Fawkes Day
Both parties act as if they want to lose.
November 5th is Election Day or, as I prefer to call it, the last day of Voting Season, to be followed immediately by Post-Election Litigation Season, which will continue until December 17th, after which comes January 6th, Partisan Posturing Day, on which the new President’s and Vice President’s identities will be officially certified after a few hours of pointless bellowing.
It is quite appropriate that Voting Season ends this year on Guy Fawkes Day. On November 5, 1605, the government of England might have been shattered and the country plunged into civil war. In the event, that didn’t occur. The conspiracy to detonate 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords, killing King James and a large moiety of the English nobility, was betrayed to the authorities, the gunpowder and the eponymous Guido Fawkes were seized, and the other conspirators were soon afterward arrested, tried and tortured to death. All that the conspiracy left behind were annual fireworks and a catchy jingle:
Remember, remember the Fifth of November:
Gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why Gunpowder treason
Ever should be forgot.
As our own Guy Fawkes Day approaches, I begin to suspect that the pundits gravely misunderstand the candidates’ strategies. Given that neither The Brat nor The Donald has any plan for, or interest in, reining in the federal deficit, the next President will be blamed for the inevitable resurgence of inflation and the other evils that spring from unrestrained spending. The blame won’t be fair. The real culprit is the voters who reject all office seekers who are suspected of fiscal responsibility. But the President must suffer for the electorate’s sins, and the party that wins the White House in 2024 will be ground zero for an earth-shattering kaboom in November 2026.
There’s only one more week to enjoy the soaring inspirational messages of this year’s campaign season. As satisfying as it’s been there remains just one little missing ingredient in America’s nearly perfect election discourse. Both major parties have essentially agreed to ignore Washington’s World War II levels of debt and gargantuan annual deficits in the absence of a national emergency. After next Tuesday Americans will need to come together to pressure the winner to consider fiscal sanity before global investors start applying their own kind of pressure.
For that reason, I have concluded that neither party wants to win. Why else would Kamala, erstwhile proclaimer of Joy, have transformed herself into a scowling harpy shrieking “Fascist! Fascist! Fascist!” into the gloom? And why has Donald Trump, whose campaign platter is piled high with delectable issues (economic conditions that the public loathes, open borders, censorship, woke bureaucracy, foreign tyrants who scoff at Uncle Sam), chosen as his signature policy “tariff reform”, which he pitches with an enthusiasm that must gladden the ghost of William McKinley? The last time the Republican Party put protective tariffs at the top of its agenda was way back in 1890, when the McKinley Tariff cost it over half of its House seats. (McKinley was among the victims. Luckily for him and his party, the Democrats then hared off after Free Silver and the Boy Orator of the Platte.)
Think of the parties’ strategies as the counterparts to a sports team’s tanking in the hope of being able to hasten a future rebuild. There’s a bit of a problem, though, when all the teams tank at the same time. This season the American political league has nothing to offer but the Chicago White Sox.