Will It Really Be the “Most Consequential Election of Our Lifetimes”?

Ambiguously optimistic thoughts about the Guy Fawkes Day drama.

Unless you are extraordinarily fortunate (or never online, in which case how can you be reading this?), you have been bombarded for the past several weeks with reminders that no more significant election has taken place in America since before you were born. The future of America teeters on a knife’s edge, and the wrong outcome will plunge us into a bottomless abyss.

That is what the campaigns say, shout or cackle. Commentators go further: The abyss looms no matter what the outcome. Four years from now, our country will be fundamentally different. Those on the Left warn that democracy will be dead and Christian Nationalists will cow women and minorities with a medieval morality indistinguishable from serfdom. Those on the Right foresee an omnipresent surveillance state ruled by a caste of the cognitive elite and infused with the bizarre LBGTQIA2S+ religion.

One expects elections to call forth exaggerated rhetoric, but the histrionics have a surface plausibility this time. Whichever candidate wins the Presidential election will be burdened by grave character flaws and policy preferences of questionable merit. Making the case that one or the other is a potential despot is a lot easier than it was in, say, 2000, when the alternatives were the personality-free Al Gore and the reticent, eager-to-please George W. Bush.

Yuval Levin takes a contrary view in the December issue of National Review: “The 2024 Stakes Are Lower Than You Think”. His argument is straightforward:

The American regime is built to restrain narrow majorities. Unlike the consolidated parliamentary systems of most of the world’s democracies, where assembling a majority coalition gives you all the power of the state for as long as your majority holds, the American system pits multiple power centers against one another. Advancing meaningful policy objectives requires relatively broad majorities that endure for an extended period – long enough to craft legislation, see it through the series of complex obstacles that must be overcome in our bicameral Congress, and secure a presidential signature. Narrow majorities can rarely do this effectively, which means that close elections generally do not yield transformative governance. . . .

Major legislation in this century has generally responded to emergencies – the September 11 attacks, the financial crisis, the pandemic – and has usually advanced with bipartisan support.

That was true before this century, too. A striking instance was Medicare, which we remember as a cornerstone of the Great Society but for which over a third of Republican Senators (13 of 32) and exactly half of Republican House members (70 or 140) voted. On the other side of the partisan divide, President Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 won overwhelming approval in the Senate (89-11) and the House (323-107).

Obamacare was a rare exception. It passed without a single Republican vote in either chamber and after the Democrat-controlled Senate unconstitutionally delayed the seating of the Senator whose vote would have defeated it. As Dr. Levin notes, events of that kind “have been very rare” and “have exacted a high political price for the party that pursued them”. The Democrats have yet to recover fully from the pummeling they suffered in the post-Obamacare off-year election. Bill Clinton’s tax increases are a parallel: They were enacted without any Republican support, and the sequel was an off-year shellacking that ended the GOP’s status as a polite, loyal and futile opposition.

Unless the polls are badly mistaken (as they could be), November 5th will produce a razor-thin Presidential victory, an almost-tied Senate and a tiny majority for one party or the other in the House. History suggests that the ensuing two years will see trench warfare marked by gains measured in metaphorical yards rather than sweeping offensives: the Somme instead of the Blitzkrieg.

Within living memory, no sweeping legislation with long-term effects has been enacted without Presidential leadership. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which President Hoover didn’t propose and only reluctantly signed, and the Taft-Hartley Act, which passed over President Truman’s veto, are the most recent counter-examples that come to mind.¹ Presidents with limited leadership qualities generally do nothing memorable. Do you remember anything that John F. Kennedy, a drug-addled hedonist, accomplished legislatively beyond the lay-up victory of a tax cut? The “New Frontier” became law only to the extent that it was incorporated into the “Great Society”.

Yet History only suggests; it does not dictate the future. If we add to precedent what is observable today, the case for an inconsequential election becomes stronger.

Donald Trump has some spectacular business successes (and failures) on his résume, and his Presidential term saw genuine accomplishments, notably in tax policy, economic liberalization, judicial appointments, resistance to Iranian imperialism and even immigration. (If he didn’t Build the Wall, much less build it at Mexico’s expense, he did slow the pace of illegal arrivals.)

Not about that was extraordinary for a Republican President. Trump did domestically what his party traditionally wants to do and very little that it traditionally avoids.² Abroad, his major substantive foreign policy achievement, the Abraham Accords, and his showiest symbolic one, the relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to the country’s capital, accorded with what have become core Republican preferences.

Most of that record was, alas, written on sand. The tax cuts expire at the end of 2026. Joe Biden abandoned the “remain in Mexico” deterrent to groundless asylum applications and undermined the Abraham Accords while reviving President Obama’s soft line toward the Iranian mullarchy. He is on track to appoint more judges than Trump. And he has taken his own executive and regulatory actions (e. g., embedding transgender delusions in education regulations) that a new Trump Administration would need to scrutinize and (often, one hopes) overturn. As the Biden term draws to its inglorious close, not much of its predecessor remains extant.

There’s no reason to think that a second Trump term will have a more decisive impact. His traditional Republican policies were crafted and implemented by traditional Republican advisors and think tanks. Trump alienated many of those and has denounced others, notably the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. It’s not clear where his second term ideas and the arguments supporting them will come from. Not, one prays, from the likes of Matt Gaetz and Jack Posobiec.

Moreover, if one listens to Trump 2024, it is hard to hear more than faint echoes of Trump 2016. He has pushed protectionism to the top of his economic agenda, chosen a running mate who advocates reviving the power of union bosses (or who is lying about his views, which is no virtue), spouts increasingly isolationist shibboleths, and has suddenly become indifferent to the fate of unborn children (albeit not affirmatively pro-Moloch; he stops well short of the governess of New York, who has declared that opposition to abortion is “anti-American”).

In sum, Trump 2024 has thrown down the foundations on which Trump 2016’s term rested. Constructing them anew will be a massive job. It’s doubtful that he can, or will try to, do it in a mere four years.

As for his opponent, readers of The Hesperian may not need to be convinced of her unfitness as a leader. Another piece in the December National Review, “The TikTok Candidate”, summarizes what all observers whose brains are above room temperature think:

After spending time on Harris’s TikTok feeds, though, one is left with an unsettled feeling about her ability to do the job of president. There is little evidence she can think strategically or creatively on her feet when pressed about even the most basic policy issues, whether they concern the economy, crime, or the border. Her strong debate performance against Trump required a week of preparation, and even then, she won not because she was a stellar debater but because Trump predictably succumbed to his own vanity when she needled him. Most of her campaign has involved a careful effort to avoid tough interviews in favor of coconut-tree memes and chats with gushing celebrities. The Baier interview on Fox was notable in part because it was the first one where she not only faced tough questions but where, unlike her earlier appearance on 60 Minutes, the network did not heavily edit her answers to make her seem more competent when the interview aired.

As I have written before, the theory that Kamala Harris is simply stupid is untenable. Ockham’s explanation for her unwillingness to talk about policy is that she has has been too lazy and pampered to bother learning much about the world. As a left-wing California Democrat, she didn’t have to, and cramming for the Presidential campaign was more work that she cared to undertake. She will inevitably be led instead of leading. Who will lead her? It won’t matter a great deal. No Presidential advisors, however talented, can carry a Presidency on their backs. Not that today’s progressive Democrats abound in talent either.

Furthermore, even a Roosevelt (TR or FDR) or a Reagan would find it hard to cut his (or her) way through the contemporary political swamp. Over the past few decades, the parties have become more ideologically monotonic, rendering it harder for a President to pick up support in the other party, which will often be needed when the legislature is closely divided.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I do not deplore the next President’s prospective impotence. Since neither candidate is a reliable champion of sound policies, it is best for them to do nothing. Happily, “nothing” is the odds-on favorite for their long-term impact on our country. Either one can do short-run damage, but that is repairable.

Yes, Kamala could win the election while the Democrats held onto 50 Senate seats and gained a majority in the House of Representatives. Then they could exploit their trifecta by abolishing the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court and enacting a woke legislative dream list. That would turn 2024 into a most consequential election – until the voters annihilated the Democratic Party in 2026. It takes more than a transitory one-vote majority to make a dystopia.

1. Perhaps the War Powers Act and the post-Vietnam “reforms” of the intelligence agencies also qualify, but the context was highly unusual, and it isn’t clear that much really changed. Certainly the War Powers Act has imposed almost no practical limitation, for better or worse, on Presidential ability to make war.

2. Even his strident protectionism, his biggest departure from GOP orthodoxy, was somewhat of an illusion. The pact that he negotiated with Canada and Mexico to supersede the North American Free Trade Agreement was at worst a baby step backward.