'Cultural tyranny' and the 2024 'No Labels' trap
Red Meat For Mushy Moderates
Anytime I hear commentators and others throw around the word “tyranny,” my radar activates immediately. After all, it’s easy to dismiss inconveniences and policy differences as autocratic repression. And of course, anytime someone shouts “tyranny,” that intoxicating cry travels halfway around the world before sobriety can even get out of the starting blocks.
But an op-ed last week by New York Times columnist David Brooks got me to thinking. Headlined I Won’t Let Donald Trump Invade My Brain (free link), Brooks acknowledges having “consistently underestimated [Trump’s] depravity” and confesses his shock at how “aggressively Trump had worked to overthrow the election.”
It was a case, Brooks said, of “perpetual naïveté.” I can relate. With Trump, I never really knew where the bottom was, yet I was relatively certain there was one. But I should have known that a man who only accepts the results of elections he wins, who incites a violent insurrection — and who most recently branded the men and women prosecuting him as “thugs” even before any trial — has no bottom.
Nevertheless, it is terribly difficult to get him out of our minds. Irony alert: For all his railing against the press, Trump has provided a boost for the media business when it needed it the most. He attracts eyeballs that ultimately translate into dollars. Indeed, all that Trump Sturm und Drang drove handsome media profits for at least five years.
Because the man dominates the coverage of so many important news outlets, it is exceedingly difficult for those of us who want to follow important developments around the world to ignore him. Brooks calls this phenomenon “cultural tyranny.” Notwithstanding my reluctance to pull the trigger on the T-word, I do agree with him.
Of course, there’s also the tyranny of relentless positivity, but that’s a matter for a different column …
No Labels, now way in 2023
This brings me to our current predicament. It’s looking increasingly like we’ll have two deeply flawed party nominees running for president in the fall of 2024. A NewsNation and Decision Desk HQ poll released earlier this month found that nearly half of voters surveyed said they would consider voting for a third-party candidate over Biden and Trump. Both NewsNation and Decision Desk HQ are considered nonpartisan outfits.
As someone who has never belonged to a political party, I often feel this way — not just about the presidency but about my state and local races as well. This quandary seems unique to those who, like me, hold views that don’t fit neatly into a box. And it’s an especially vexing problem in places like the United States, where in most political races we are confronted with only binary choices. It doesn’t have to be this way — and in most other countries it isn’t.
For nearly five years, I lived in Canada, where there are three major parties, the Liberal Party historically in the center; the Conservative Party on the right; and the New Democratic Party on the left.
The typical knock on voting third-party in the U.S. is that: 1) your vote is wasted because your candidate has no chance of winning and 2) you could be unwittingly playing a role in electing someone you despise even more than the major-party candidate s/he defeated.
For all their practicality, those admonishments rest on the logic that all votes rightfully belong to Democrats and Republicans, and that attempts to disrupt that binary choice simply grabs votes that rightfully belong to the two major parties.
I’m generally hostile to that point of view, but in this particular election cycle I will concede that voting third-party could spell trouble. Still, the likely choice between Biden and Trump will, for me, be a case of picking your poison. Regretfully, I cannot vote No Labels or Andrew Yang’s Forward Party, if either puts up a credible candidate. I would hold my nose and mark my ballot for Biden.
In his four years, Trump managed to swing the country hard to the right. He packed the Supreme Court and the lower courts, resulting in the loss of the constitutional right for women to obtain an abortion. He has shamelessly cozied up to dictators, made white nationalism fashionable again and, with the help of a GOP Congress in his first two years, ran what were at that time record deficits — far worse than anything Obama had racked up.
Trump did make one gift to the Democrats: once and all, he busted the myth that the GOP is the fiscally responsible party while the Dems alone are the party of tax-and-spend.
Now on to the current president. Whatever you may think of Biden’s policies, the man is simply too old. I just turned 66, so I’m pretty sure I have the standing to suggest that no man or woman in their 80s should hold what is one of the most demanding jobs in the world.
Biden faces only token opposition for the Democratic nomination (see self-help guru Marianne Williamson, and anti-vax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). The president appears unsteady at times and has trouble pronouncing his words — or completing a sentence, for that matter. I really think Dems are in denial about his obvious decline.
What happens if the president, who will be nearly 82 by then, suffers a debilitating stroke a month before the election? The ensuing crisis would be devastating not only for the Democratic Party but for America and its allies. While Biden’s unsteadiness scares me, another four years of Trump would surely be a disaster. With apologies to my friends in the third-wave movement, I will not vote independent this year.
One more question: if you’re a voter who believes in fiscal sanity, limited government, equitable gun control and moderation on the courts, but are sick of the anger, the erosion of previously established rights and the endless culture wars against marginalized groups such as immigrants and the LGBTQ community, which party are you supposed to vote for? Really. I’m open to suggestion.