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Harris and Trump -- duMond/Brendan Smialowski/AFP/GETTY |
After Tuesday, November 5, it will become clear who had a
sufficient number of electoral votes to win the 2024 presidential election,
former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. The election, we
have been repeatedly told by pollsters, is “too close to call.”
Political commentators, of course, are not content to wait
on certainty. It is speculation, some of it improbable, not certainty, that
sells newspapers.
On the Republican side, Trump and Vice President Nominee J.
D. Vance appear to be gathering momentum in the two weeks before the election,
but momentum is not always dispositive. Money and positive coverage are also important
in elections.
If Harris wins the presidency in November, the attempt by
Democrats to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a popular vote
may well succeed. The Electoral College was first introduced by the founders
because they did not want populous states to push smaller states out of the
running. And, even today, if presidents were to be chosen by popular vote – 50%
of votes cast plus one – presidents will be elected by large states and cities
only. Or, to put it in other terms, nearly all of the country will be denied an
effective presidential franchise. This, one may reasonably suppose, will not
disturb the consciences of Democrats, who control most of the larger cities in
the nation.
The Electoral College is not an institution whose time has
passed. It is a necessary part of what neo-progressive Democrats might call in
their sunnier moods “the democracy,” under constant threat, so we are told, by
presumptive “fascists” who wish to impose upon the country a new political
order that would effectively abolish democracy’s guard rails. The move to
eliminate the Electoral College is profoundly undemocratic.
Neo-progressives have yet to explain why any measure that
would extend the voting franchise to citizens of foreign countries is
“democratic,” however one chooses to define the term. Secure borders prevent
those who illegally cross into the United States from polluting the voting franchise.
Those who have dismantled guardrails that prevent the unvetted passage into the
United States of citizens of Venezuela, to choose one country among many,
cannot reasonably claim to uphold democracy. Open borders are profoundly
undemocratic, because they introduce into the country illegal unvetted
immigrants under false pretenses. The Biden-Harris administration has now shown
its disdain for border security by facilitating illegal entry. Planeloads of
illegal migrants may now thumb their noses at a border-in-name-only as they are
transported across vanishing borders by politicians who, when elected to office
in November 2024, may conspire to readjust laws and borders that protect their
constituents’ inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Commentators, in the meantime, have turned their attention
to “What if?“ questions. What if Trump loses the election? What if Trump wins
the election? If he wins by a sufficient majority, will the down-ballot vote be
sufficient to pull Republican majorities into the national legislature, state
legislatures and, where applicable, state executives offices?
This possibility, rattling in the synapses of Democrats, has
set brains afire.
In a column printed in the Hartford Courant, Jonah Goldberg,
addresses one of these questions and concludes, in “A Republican rebound, if Trump loses, seems
likely,” that the Republican Party will survive the loss. Goldberg is
the past senior editor of National Review, the Bill Buckley inspired magazine
that, early in Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, devoted an entire issue to
“Never Trump.” Goldberg rightly
doubts that the Republican Party will disappear if Trump wins or loses the 2024
election.
Can Trumpism survive Trump? Goldberg tells us, “… other
[Republican] candidates who sought the party’s nomination this year generally
spoke the Reaganite language of the traditional GOP because that is where their
instincts remain. There will be a battle for the future of the party, to be sure.
But Trump’s departure from presidential politics would presage the end of the
Republican identity crisis, not the beginning.”
Goldberg is skeptical concerning a recent claim by Axios:
“Axios predicted that the party would be plagued by an “identity crisis,” a
“brutal power struggle” and “years in the wilderness.” Why? Because “never
before has a party’s identity been so deeply entwined with the fate, fortunes
and flaws of one man.” On the bright side, the US survived two World Wars and a
Cold War with the now kaput Soviet Union, showing that the country has
remarkable powers of regeneration.
Should Trump win election, Americans will find that at the
end of his single term in office the pillars of the Republic will still be standing. Venezuela just now, under the thumb of a
hapless socialist/communist regime for the past 22 years, finds itself in
danger of reverting to its once vibrant capitalism under pressure from one of
the most courageous women of the new century, the indomitable Maria Corina Machado.
This writer praised Machado in July: “The propaganda has
worn very thin in Venezuela, once the Venice of South America, now a
communist-Stalinist ash heap. The country’s current Stalin, Nicolás Maduro,
president of Venezuela since 2013, is holding on to power, but a vigorous
populist opposition led by Maria Corina Machado, is inching forward. Maduro has
his terror and his bullets and his jail cells, still effective methods of
persuasion within South American communist countries. But Machado, called the ‘Iron
Lady of Venezuela,’ has her rosary beads and a truly revolutionary message.
According to a report in The New York Times, ‘On the campaign trail, she has
promised to “bury socialism forever” and create a nation where “the criminals
and the corrupt go to prison.”
The whole notion of Trump turning the United States into a
corrupt authoritarian state like Venezuela – and in four years too! -- is
campaign claptrap. So is the notion that Trump is a fascist. Asked to define
fascism, the founder of the fascist movement in Europe, Benito Mussolini, said
– everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state. Mussolini
was a socialist journalist before he invented fascism. The fascist description
of fascism is hardly compatible with American conservatism.
People in the United States are very good at making proper
distinctions between sense and nonsense. Trump is not Maduro or Hugo Chávez,
both socialists. Neither is Harris a moderate version of President Joe Biden.
Her career path in politics points left, feints to the middle notwithstanding.
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