Escape hatches from what we face grow harder to find by the day

Republicans have either joined a cult or mounted ineffectual opposition to it while Democrats have forged ahead with their leftist vision

Some presidential-race polls show a tightening of the numbers, but, as of this writing (Saturday, October 24), the Real Clear Politics average is 50.8 for Joe Biden and and 42.7 for Donald Trump. It’s highly possible for the Senate to stay in Republican hands, but only if tossup races go in favor if the GOP.

The possibility that history repeats itself, at least in terms of numerical assumptions, and that Trump is once again an Electoral-College dark horse can’t be dismissed. Much is different this time around, however. Biden is not loathed, either among Democrats or the general public, the way Hillary Clinton was. While, due to his years of hustling his brand, Trump was not exactly an unknown quantity in 2016, we’ve now seen how his already-known behaviors and attitudes play out in the role of president, and a whole lot of people don’t care for it.

So the likeliest possibility is that the nation is poised to once again lurch leftward, and to a degree that will dwarf all previous lurches. To say so is not pleasant, but the best way forward in life is to unflinchingly engage the circumstances in front of us.

Republicans will probably fracture in a crossfire of recriminations that will necessitate something rising anew to take the place of the party they founded in 1954. Trumpism may survive and prevail even after the defeat of its namesake and standard-bearer, or may recede into the status of a discredited and marginalized sociopolitical hiccup. Some other attempt, surely more coherent, at fusing populism with broadly private-sector-favoring sentiment may fire the imaginations of those determined to muster a resistance to the leftist program. It could even be that a reconvening of a movement determined to adhere to the lineage of actual conservatism, one that would take being cognizant of the legacy of Burke, Bastiat, Weber, Weaver, Kirk, Buckley and Burnham beyond the confines of the think-tank conference and back into the general political arena, where it was during the Reagan era, is thinkable. It seems doubtful, though, given that so much of the energy expended in that direction over the last year has taken the form of The Lincoln Project and other forthright declarations of support for the Biden-Harris ticket. No one has yet offered a satisfactory explanation of how support for that can possibly move the nation toward a more conservative future, given the unprecedentedly fierce determination of the Left to impose its vision. The since-it’s-a-binary-choice-and-Trump-is-clearly-unacceptable mindset smacks of a desperation that has given up on defending actual conservatism in the present moment.

Another scenario is that, this being 2020, societal bitterness and brittleness gets even worse, if that can be imagined, and prognostications of complete crackup move from the realm of hyperbole to being what is right outside the doors of our homes.

There will be resistance in some form. This is America, after all, and the basic assumption that freedom is a birthright still burns in many hearts, even if many have subordinated it to a preference for security provided by government.

One more thing: don’t be fooled by attempts to frame the Democrat party as having moderate and leftist wings. It’s been characterized by progressivism since the heyday of the movement bearing that name. Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, Richard T. Ely, Thorstein Veblein et al paved the way for the New Deal, the Great Society and the Obama Era. Biden is not some kind of foil to Ocasio-Cortez, Harris, Warren and Sanders. It’s merely fallen to him to make the leftist vision palatable enough to drag it over the finish line in November. His radical views on energy policy and putting demographic classification front and center are on record, reaffirmed as recently as the other night’s debate.

So the Democrat vision has cohesively moved in a fairly straight line, give or take a few blips such as labor-union Reagan voters, through the last century while Republicans got preoccupied with the jostling among factions such as a business wing, an evangelical wing, a foreign-policy-hawk wing, and a populist wing, ignoring the basic set of principles that united and empowered it in its best moments.

If anyone has a suggestion for an alternative to either the probable scenario we face, or its no-less-grim alternative (more Trumpism), now is the time to speak up. One proviso: Don’t waste our time with anything silly.