Last night, Oprah Winfrey said women gathered at a rally for vice president Kamala Harris that if they “don’t show up tomorrow, it’s entirely possible that we will never have the opportunity to vote again.” The same day, Asset boost Elon Musk said Joe Rogan said that if “Trump doesn’t win, it will be the last election.”

I hated almost everything about the 2024 race: the inconsistency of the candidates. The arms race in economic complacency. THE violence. The weirdos who dewormed their path to positions of influence. The law. The unprecedented corruption and lies of the media. But there will be other elections in two years that will have great importance for millions of people. And another two years later. Most of the same people, among the experts, will be there to campaign, raise funds and warn you that the end is near.

Modern elections don’t put us out of our misery – they just degrade our rights and decency in incremental two-year increments.

And while I have no idea who will win the presidency in 2024, I’m quite confident in predicting that the Democrats won’t. carried away in concentration camps if Harris loses the election. Not a single journalist, not even Joe Scarborough, will confront a firing squad for making comments critical of the president. Indeed, there has probably not been a public figure in American history who has been the subject of so much scorn and scrutiny (some deserved, most vilified). No one has ever been censored.

The lopsided and hysterical collapse of the left following the candidacy of former President Donald Trump is unprecedented in modern history. Women who walk around in cosplay The Handmaid’s Tale live in the richest and freest place women have ever known. They will continue to do so, even if Trump finds his way back to the White House for four years. The very idea that “democracy” relies on the unlimited availability of third-trimester abortions is a kind of corrosive illusion that only partisanship can stir up in otherwise rational people. Then again, we already know that if Trump wins, every innocuous tax cut will be treated like the Reichstag fire.

You would think that those who act as if every presidential election brings the nation to the precipice of Armageddon would want to reduce the power of the White House and reestablish appropriate constitutional limits on its term. Instead, they up the ante every four years. We treat candidates as messianic saviors. In turn, they 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 “oligarchs with a time limit.”

None of this is to say that elections don’t matter.

If Harris wins, it is likely that Republicans will advance to the House or Senate. It will be relegated to years of executive abuse, in the vein of the Joe Biden and Barack Obama presidency. This form of unilateral governance is certainly important, but it can be reversed. Obama’s legacy was decimated by Trump, who withdrew from the Paris Agreement (which was never sent to the Senate for ratification), withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and untangled many burdensome regulations, among other unilateral decisions from his predecessor. Obama, like Biden, governed with “a bureaucratic bulldozer rather than legislative transparency,” as the US president put it. New York Times once note.

It’s not nothing. Harris will almost certainly continue to attack religious freedom, militarize the Justice Department, and foster lawlessness at the border. Democrats have been pushing big tech companies to censor millions of users for years. The left is now an anti-free speech party. And it’s a tragedy for the country. But that won’t change if Trump wins. Massive bureaucratic agencies, staffed by thousands of leftists, are not going to let Republicans dismantle their efforts overnight. This battle for speech neither ends nor begins once the winner has been decided.

Yes, there are even worse scenarios to consider. If Democrats take the Senate and House And If Harris wins, they will likely overturn the filibuster via the nuclear option, destroying the character of the Senate – and, with it, any semblance of federalism. During the Biden years, only two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, stood in the way of decimating the Senate. They left. The need for the left to dominate the decisions of everyone in every nook and cranny of the country is one of the most underestimated issues tearing the country apart.

Without the filibuster, Democrats would almost surely mount one massive federal intrusion after another in the Senate, overturning thousands of state laws. Most of these measures will be unconstitutional.

The only institution standing in the way of constitutional order at present is the Supreme Court. It’s in danger. The left’s crusade to undermine public trust by vilifying judges has made progress. Harris, with a Democratic Senate, would almost certainly appoint a counter-constitutional judge who would rubber-stamp any progressive attack on liberty. Democrats have also increasingly embraced the authoritarian notion of packing the court.

But whether they lose or not, efforts to destroy the court will continue. There are 33 Senate seats up for grabs in 2026.

So Trump’s victory in 2024 is only the second worst thing that could happen to the country. One of the main differences is that most of the bad things Trump brings to the White House are related to his ego and will leave with him. The Democrats’ agenda, their attacks on the constitutional order, will be present in perpetuity.

For me, a Reaganite guy, it’s painful to see an unprincipled, big-government candidate on the GOP ticket. Trump has dissuaded the party from advocating limited government or even indulging us by talking about limiting state power. Trump’s running mate, an ideological statist, will be the party’s standard-bearer in 2028. That means more class struggle and less economic freedom. In many ways, the entire political debate has been driven to the left.

It’s a shame, of course, but none of this spells the end of the nation – just the end of modern conservatism.

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During the previous elections, I wrote columns mocking people for using the insufferable trope: “This is the most important election of our lifetimes.” » There is an ahistorical conceit in pretending that you live in the most troubled times. As far as history goes, we are probably the luckiest people who have ever lived.

In other words, America will not descend into Nazism. And no, we are not going to become Mogadishu because the populists have a lot of destructive economic ideas. There is, however, a chance that we will become France, Spain, or another mid-sized European country, where big-government nationalists regularly clash with EU socialist types. It’s bad enough. But this is not the end.