The Alarmingly High, Frustratingly Unknown Stakes of the 2024 Election

There are three good reasons for this Democrats And Republicans they use it the same way apocalyptic, this-may-be-the-last-choice closing arguments on what happened worth double hate 2024 campaign.

First, the tactic of setting the hairs on fire works– at least until it’s over. Negative framing is natural more sticky in our brain.

Second, it’s reasonable. Voters are consistently pessimistic about today’s economy (46 percent rate it as “poor”) Gallup), tomorrow’s outlook (62 percent say “worse”) and the country’s overall outlook (72 percent negative). Many of the biggest public policy decisions and their disasters— occurs independently of their input.

Finally, that age-old instinct of fight or flight, squirrelThe terror of the unknown approaching in the headlights. We fear most of the things we hear coming but can’t quite see. And for all the political certainties expressed, we can’t know how bad Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will be.

This doesn’t sit well when considering who should have executive control over a company. $6.8 trillion With the (and rapidly growing) Leviathan More than 4 million employeesONE 89,000 pages Federal Register one of the regulations law enforcement department larger than most countries standing armiesand the deadliest army in history.

The next president will face life-or-death decisions about the hot wars in Ukraine and Israel. ugly facts Debt service, exceeding already sky-high military spending, continues to drain the budget Social Security trust fund within months of triggering the mandatory 20 percent benefit cut. 70 million Americansand using the broad authority of the presidency to reshape both immigration policy and the global tariff system. This is all in addition to responding to Black Swan challenges that we cannot currently foresee at home and abroad. What will they do and what will be the impact of these efforts? Who knows!

From Harris’ perspective, policy uncertainty is by design. axios reported Over the weekend, the vice president and his campaign staff “declined to detail his position on more than a dozen previous stances over the past three months in response to Axios’ questions. Response to those questions: No comment.”

These are not just the usual political symbolic or impossibly grandiose promises of a presidential campaign, but entire actionable categories, such as immigration, that attract intense voter attention. “Harris promised in 2019 four managers As president, he will take actions that will open a path to citizenship for 2 million Dreamers. shield “More than 6 million undocumented immigrants have been spared deportation” axios noted. So what will 2024 be like? All the campaign had to offer was that “as President, he will continue to protect Dreamers while also pushing for a bipartisan border agreement that would significantly strengthen border security.”

Harris made himself less accessible to the press His farm in 2024 is even greater than the geriatric Joe Biden in the COVID year of 2020. His few interviews with journalists were weak and full of his own contradictions. Even on traditionally Democratic issues like education, Harris saidshed light on the details” focuses instead on what kind of monster Trump 2.0 could be. “Kamala Harris’ most consistent political trait,” says longtime Harris watcher Elizabeth Nolan Brown observed November issue Reason“There may be a lack of consistency.”

On Israel, Harris was arguably the best name before entering the presidential campaign. biggest White House critic How Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging the war against Hamas; now, he declares that he is there there is no daylight between him and Joe Biden. The rest of his foreign policy appears to be a continuation of Bidenism, a rhetorical commitment to the worn-out institutions of the post-World War II era, with little or nothing in the way of new thinking (as American public opinion has rancid About Washington’s leading role in world affairs).

On the domestic front, many of Harris’ worst ideas, such as price controls, Volokh Conspiracyhas Ilya Somin noted“New legislation is needed, which will be difficult to pass in a closely divided Congress, especially with Republicans included.” Likely to regain control of the SenateOne of his few policies that is clearly better than Trump’s repeal of federal marijuana prohibitionIt seems more reasonable from a legal perspective.

Mostly, though, he seems like a continuity candidate, someone whose cipher-like persona was designed by a laboratory to allow imperial Washington (its growth, its bureaucracies, its Pax Americana) to run on autopilot. If you like your Biden administration, you can keep your Biden administration. From a voter motivation perspective, he, like his boss, is a tool to thwart Trump.

So what would Trump do? It’s just a gameAlthough political warriors still seem to enjoy the challenge (or at least lack the ability to escape). boring going round and round The GOP nominee said something that would have horrified pre-2015 political watchers, then the media and his opponents took it out of context and speculated about fascism, then the centrist literati stepped in and the anti-Trump brigades set up the barricades, and then did you hear what he said? Today?

There’s an argument that we have to constantly calculate the odds between taking on an indecisive manager. Really And Really It is a kind of citizenship tax in itself. To take two semi-random examples from 2015-2017, no, President Trump did not do this. Deporting US citizen children like illegal immigrants do serial threat on the campaign trail. But at the same time, yes, he took action immediately”muslim ban“trial balloon suddenly suspend input The entry of all legal refugees and citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries has thrown families and airports into chaos.

It may be difficult to sort through the clutter of political talk to rationally evaluate how a second Trump administration would wield power. Reason‘s Jacob Sullum He did his best to conclude that “things are different now in a few important ways”:

First, Trump has accumulated more grievances against political opponents he accuses of persecuting him. it exists was threatened many times to punish them”enemies within“If he regains strength, criminal investigationscancellation broadcasting licensesor other ways of revenge.

Second, the US Supreme Court approved A broad version of presidential immunity from criminal liability for “official acts.” This license expressly covers a president’s communications with the Justice Department; This is one of the primary ways Trump makes life unpleasant for his critics.

Third, Trump in his first term measured with quieter voices It does not seem possible for them to be at the table in the second term.

Trump will have wide latitude to shape immigration enforcement as he sees fit; Therefore, if you like restriction, all collateral damage That comes with it, he’s your man. Commanders in chief have greater authority over foreign policy and the use of military force. ReasonBrian Doherty noted this week, “Overall, it preserved both the expenses and the scope of the American empire’s military-industrial complex growing or at least the samePresidents also have a unique and important pardon power, which Trump promise Libertarians’ release of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is a tantalizing possibility, limited only by his reliability in keeping his promises.

Trump’s biggest single And foreign policy issue – enacting general import tariffs and thereby solidifying the reversal of the global reduction in trade barriers that has alleviated seven decades of poverty – broad authority to make these changes Quite a departure from his oft-paired ideas of cutting or ending federal taxes on all types of income (tips, car loan interest, Social Security benefits, etc.) without congressional approval. In other words, the federal government’s vaunted bridge back to the 19th century, when it somehow recreated a regime of high-tariff, federal tax-free financing in a world full of global supply chains and trillion-dollar governments, will likely be destroyed by the tax. last. More tariffs and no across-the-board tax cuts will make living in the United States prohibitively expensive at a time when Americans are bemoaning the malaise of inflation.

Long before the current populist era, possible presidencies were always unpredictable. George W. Bush campaigned against nation-building, then embarked on two major (and largely unsuccessful) nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney for being obsessed with Vladimir Putin just two years before the Russian President upended the global order by annexing Crimea. Bill Clinton certainly did not initially campaign for president to end big government as we know it.

But the two major party candidates America is considering today are shrouded in more mystery than any presidential election in my lifetime. We know this is really important, most of us have a clear and passionate preference, but we don’t know what the next presidency will be like. His turtles all the way. Or maybe squirrels.