I still foresee abstaining from voting indefinitely

Both major parties go into 2026 and 2028 with agendas of national ruination

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Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the
lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

Hannah Arendt

I wrote in presidential candidates and voted Republican down-ballot in 2016 and 2020 and stayed home in 2024. I feel unequivocally good about these decisions, especially the most recent one. I will not have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of national ruination.

We citizens of post-America are asked to behave as though the ongoing shift in the Overton Window is no big deal, that what has happened to the country culturally and politically over the past few decades hasn’t obscured the norms and institutional guardrails that had enjoyed mass respect since the nation’s founding. But I return to the frogs-in-boiling-water metaphor. Our brains have now begun to cook, and we cannot remember how it felt to be in the fresh, temperate open air.

The government shutdown is a good place to begin a look at it. It’s pretty clear that ACA subsidies are a major factor in the stalemate. And everybody seems to find it interesting that Marjorie Taylor Greene is breaking ranks with her party over subsidy recipients losing the price points at which they’d been paying premiums.

At the risk of sounding impossibly quixotic, let me remind you that the core of the argument against the Affordable Care Act in the run-up to its 2014 passage was still an opposition to a greater government role in health care. Obama-era Democrats were so effective in framing the argument in terms of compassion that those of us who understood that health care by definition can’t be a right that we only dared speak up if we were willing to be rhetorically disemboweled.

The same thing happened the following year with Obergefell v Hodges. Again, the conservative argument was that, by any definition ever recognized by any culture at any time in history, it was impossible for two people of the same sex to be married. This position did not and does not involve bigotry or infringement of anybody’s freedom.

You don’t need me to devote paragraphs to a granular examination of what unfolded from there - namely, the trans phenomenon.

Much has been written about how the Trumpist phenomenon picked up the pieces of a disillusioned Tea Party movement, building on the frustration of conservatives unable to get traction in a time of a wealth redistribution-identity politics militancy-climate alarmism zeitgeist.

But that zeitgeist began to shift with the Republican giddiness about Trump. A critical mass of Republican voters and even some frustrated conservative intellectuals saw the table-upender from Queens as exactly what was needed. The discussions began about how conservatism had always held decorum and gravitas in high regard.Actual conservatives obliviously lost that argument, and in fact they were on the receiving end of Trumpism’s yee-haw-stomp-’em-into-the-dust ethos.

One might think that Democrats in the mid-2020s might have a strategy for going after what’s become of the Republican Party, given how actual conservative principles have been diluted, cast aside, or grotesquely employed in the service of massive government overreach. It’s been unfair since 2015 for progressives to conflate actual conservative positions - such as the above-mentioned private-sector approach to health care, or upholding the millennia-old assertions about human sexuality - with the nuttiness of Trumpsim. But they’ve done it, and that argument reaches some people.

But not enough, apparently.

Ruy Teixeria, writing at The Liberal Patriot, says that even if one accedes to the notion that government should be preoccupied with how well citizens are doing economically, Democrats are even missing that boat:

Three of the four issues voters believe are most important to Democrats—climate change, abortion, and LGBTQ+ issues—are least important to voters. If that’s the Democrats’ “vision thing,” voters aren’t buying.

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This is also demonstrated by the people who are the stars in their party: Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Gavin Newsom, Zohran Mamdani. Progressives all.

Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson rightly gets a little of our sympathy for the ham-fisted presence of ICE in his city, but no one has forgotten that he’s a leftist with a crummy track record in the office he holds.

So the Democrats don’t get it.

Which, one would hope, leaves actual conservatives to be the ones to mount a viable opposition to Trumpism. But we all know such hope is futile.

Principles First has an admirable set of principles and its get-togethers and summits have grown in attendance, but where is its entry point into a Republican Party wholly given over to populist-nationalist cult worship?

Other groups, who more explicitly evoke Reagan and the lineage of conservatism’s visionaries, likewise go door-knocking for candidates in particular legislative races, and enjoy occasional success.

But this approach hinges on there being a long game. Given what happened on January 6, 2020, what happened to Liz Cheney’s political career - losing her Wyoming seat in the House after having enjoyed a high rating from conservative groups - and what’s happened in the nine months since the Very Stable Genius moved back into the White House, that takes an awful lot of faith in post-American institutional resiliency.

I don’t think it’s warranted.

The indictments of Comey and Bolton, the Paramount deal and the gutting of CBS 60 Minutes, the call for various networks to lose their FCC licenses, the law firms that knuckled under and did pro bono work for Trumpist causes, the calls for Pritzker and Brandon Johnson to be jailed, the zapping of Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean without heed for international law, the assumption on the part of the Very Stable Genius that his personal touch can quell the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, the imposition of tariffs on heretofore friendly countries by executive order, the garish mutations underway at the White House, such as replacing the Rose Garden with a patio, the construction of a ballroom, the whorehouse-gold embellishments to the Oval Office, and talk of an arch, all have the enthusiastic support of the base, and the cowardly silence of the rest of the GOP.

Trump can swagger and do his lame imitation of a big-shot demeanor for a still-gullible domestic audience, but is clearly seen in the eyes of America’s enemies’ leaders as their bitch. The most recent substantiation for this is the VSG participating in a call with Vladimir Putin - a two and a half hour call - the day before meeting Zelensky for a one-hour lunch at the White House. And then telling the media that, hey, we don’t to deplete out stockpile of Tomahawks, and then telling Zelensky on Friday that Tomahawks probably aren’t going to happen. And agreeing to meet Putin for a “summit,” in Budapest, Hungary, no less.

I’ve always viewed Argentina’s Javier Mielei with a mixture of admiration and wariness. Yes, he is a University of Chicago-educated economist and pretty nearly a free-market purist, and the fact that his reforms have caused some temporary pain in some sectors of his country’s economy is responsible for the decline in his political fortunes. But he’s also a cartoonish grandstander. Elon Musk got the idea to wave a chainsaw around at CPAC from Milei.

But investors lost confidence in his program after his political difficulties, causing Argentina’s currency to lose a lot of value.

Hence the bailout. But, as with every damn thing Trump does, it’s transactional. If Melei and his movement don’t do well in the upcoming elections, Trumpist post-America is going to “not be generous” or “waste [its] time.” It’s a favor to a friend.

Believe me, I am aware of the fact that there are Republicans and Democrats that we all see at the grocery store who are fine people with laudatory hopes and dreams for their lives and their country. But they’re going to continue to vote for one of these two insane parties, and the problem will not go away.

So I have to stay home on election day for the foreseeable future. We’ll have one set of cartoon characters or the other imposed on us. But I won’t have participated in it.