The most intelligent and moral form of bipartisanship would be all of us admitting that if either of the two major-party candidates wins the presidential election in November, a rambling, evasive, authoritarian idiot will be poised to govern us for the next four years. The first step toward finding a solution is admitting the depth of the problem.
I hope we’ve reached the point where someone like former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele doesn’t sound so much wrong or right as simply detached from reality when he claims to take seriously a mainstream publication using very mainstream language to evaluate one of the two mainstream candidates. Who believes such stuff anymore? Yet Steele calls The New York Times’ editorial that endorsed Kamala Harris—which dubbed her the “patriotic” choice in this election—a “sobering” editorial.
Does anyone believe the Times cares about patriotism? Does anyone believe words on paper change the views of a former RNC chair? Does anyone believe Harris has a sobering effect?
I admit the right is lately so dumb that much of what it says and does feels like a punch in the face, perhaps stinging enough to drive even a former high party official away from the right, but that shouldn’t cause us to relish the contrasting death-by-a-thousand-cuts that is liberalism. Like any good libertarian, I see building a wall to impede travel from Mexico as an imposition on freedom, but that doesn’t cause me to forget 100 years of gradually-accumulating other regulations and taxes for which the Democratic Party is primarily responsible and which Harris has shown zero sign of regretting or criticizing. All that is also, as you may recall, an immense burden upon a potentially free populace.
But then, Harris is, as we know, “unburdened by the past.” Even her own, apparently: she has taken to describing her Indian grandfather as if he were a rebel and a freedom fighter in India, when in fact it appears he was merely an imperial soldier for the British.
Some Democratic candidates such as Harris’ running mate Tim Walz “steal valor” by trying to glom onto the accomplishments of their fellow soldiers, while Harris herself steals valor by glomming onto the accomplishments of anti-imperial rebel movements (not surprising from a punitive, statist candidate lately trying to rebrand herself as the herald of joy and freedom). There’s a certain liberal balance in that, almost as if one were faking having been a hippie war protestor while your running mate fakes being a war hero. Bases covered. Very Democrat.
Meanwhile, even as the Democrats cynically exploit Indian history, they try to convince us it must be torture for an Indian-American woman to be married to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. She doesn’t seem any more miserable than Vivek Ramaswamy or Nikki Haley, but the Democrats now fight a multi-front war for their party’s very survival against the dawning realization that being non-white does not automatically mean your interests align with those of the socialistic, censorious, big-spending Democratic Party.
Imagine the realignment that could now be occurring if only the Republicans were trying to win over such people instead of quadrupling down on the white hillbilly vote.
There really are ways to make the civil, rational case that all Americans, of all ethnic groups, are better off with markets and deregulation than with expensive government programs, but our Blowhard-in-Chief-in-Waiting has no real interest in making that case in an intelligent fashion, not when his free-associative insult comedy and theater antics still get a rise out of some otherwise inattentive yokels. His victory, if he gets one in two weeks, will be narrower than it needed to be, but if by some miracle that keeps him the tiniest bit humble once he’s in office, perhaps that’s for the best.
Some on the left seem to see Democratic vice presidential candidate Walz, with his jazz-hands waves and frequent little dance-kicks, as the welcome antidote to all of Trump’s grouchy macho bluster—and hey, I’m as big a fan of Minneapolis’ own Prince as anyone, so I’m not pushing masculinism for its own sake—but I can’t be alone in thinking that Walz doesn’t sound like the trustworthy, plainspoken guy in the mix this year but rather sounds exactly like the soft, spineless guy who consorts with the enemy but then gets discarded by them in the penultimate act of every cheap action movie, the one last seen holding up his hands helplessly while shrugging and grinning and saying, sweat on brow, “Shucks, guys, you know me—I wouldn’t spill any secrets! I wouldn’t steer you wrong! C’mon, cut me a break here.” Perhaps the gunmen in this iteration of the scene will be Chinese.
The top and bottom of each of the major-party tickets is dizzyingly, quakingly unreliable-seeming: the drunk-sounding verbal diarrhea of a callous establishment lawyer partnered with the gee-whiz platitudes of a disingenuous socialist schoolteacher vs. the egomaniacal, illogical navel-gazing of a would-be tyrant partnered with a lying, hypocritical bigtime capitalist pretending to be a hick. Two weeks from now, one way or another, something very stupid will have happened.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey