If one election can destroy a republic, it is already dead.

Last night Oprah Winfrey said women gathered at a rally for the vice president Kamala Harris that if they “don’t come tomorrow, it’s quite possible that we won’t have the opportunity to ever vote again.” On the same day Trump booster Elon Musk said Joe Rogan: If Trump doesn’t win, this will be the last election.

I hated almost everything about the 2024 race: the inconsistency of the candidates. Arms race in economic indulgence. violence. psychos who hewn your way to positions of influence. Legality. Unprecedented corruption and deceit in the media. But in two years there will be another election that will matter greatly to millions of people. And another one two years after that. Most of the same people, among the experts, will campaign, raise money and warn you that the end is near.

Modern elections do not relieve us of suffering – they simply degrade our rights and decency gradually, every two years.

And while I have no idea who will win the presidency in 2024, I can predict that there will be no Democrats. taken away to concentration camps if Harris loses the election. No journalist, not even Joe Scarborough, is going to face execution for critical statements addressed to the president. In fact, there has probably never been a public figure in American history who has faced so much scorn and scrutiny (some of it deserved, most of it slander). No one was ever censored.

The left’s mad, hysterical collapse over former President Donald Trump’s candidacy is unparalleled in modern history. Women who cosplay The Handmaid’s Tale living in the richest and freest place women have ever known. They will continue to do so even if Trump returns to the White House for four years. The very idea that “democracy” depends on the unlimited availability of third-trimester abortions is the kind of destructive delusion that only partisanship can ignite in rational people. Then again, we already know that if Trump wins, every harmless tax cut will be seen as the burning of the Reichstag.

You would think that people who act as if every presidential election brings the nation to the brink of Armageddon would want to reduce the power of the White House and restore proper constitutional limits on the office. Instead, they raise the rate every four years. We treat candidates as messianic saviors. They, in turn, make bigger and bigger promises. The country seems increasingly to want dictators—not in the Mussolini sense, but in the Roman sense of “time-limited oligarchs.”

None of this means that elections don’t matter.

If Harris wins, it is likely that Republicans will take the House or Senate. She faces years of leadership abuse a la the presidencies of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Yes, this kind of unilateral control matters, but it can be reversed. Obama’s legacy was destroyed by Trump, who abandoned the Paris Agreement (which was never sent to the Senate for ratification), withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and unraveled a host of onerous regulations, among other unilateral decisions by his predecessor. Obama, like Biden, governed through “bureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency,” as the US president put it. New York Times once marked.

This is no small matter. Harris will almost certainly continue to attack religious freedom, continue to arm the Justice Department, and promote anarchy at the border. Democrats have been pushing big tech companies to censor millions of users for years. The left is now the party that opposes free speech. And this is a tragedy for the country. But the situation will not change if Trump wins. Massive bureaucratic agencies staffed by thousands of leftists will not allow Republicans to undo their efforts overnight. This battle for free speech does not end or begin once a winner is crowned.

Yes, there are worst case scenarios to consider. If Democrats take the Senate and House of Representatives And If Harris wins, they will likely overthrow the filibuster with the nuclear option, destroying the character of the Senate and with it any remaining semblance of federalism. During the Biden years, only two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, stood in the way of destroying the Senate. They left. The left’s need to control the decisions of every person in every corner of the country is one of the most underappreciated issues tearing the country apart.

Without the filibuster, Democrats would almost certainly push one massive federal invasion after another through the Senate, overturning thousands of state laws. Most of them will be unconstitutional.

The only institution maintaining constitutional order now is the Supreme Court. It’s in danger. The left’s crusade to undermine public trust by smearing judges is gaining momentum. Harris, along with a Democratic Senate, will almost certainly appoint an unconstitutional judge who will rubber-stamp every progressive attack on freedom. Democrats are also increasingly embracing the authoritarian idea of ​​packing the courts.

But regardless of whether they lose or not, attempts to destroy the court will continue. There are 33 Senate seats up for grabs in 2026.

So a Trump victory in 2024 is only the second worst thing that can happen to the country. One key difference is that most of the bad things Trump brings into the White House are tied to his ego and will go with him. The Democratic program and their attacks on the constitutional order will remain with us forever.

As a Reaganite, it’s disheartening to see an unprincipled big government candidate on the GOP ticket. Trump has turned the party away from supporting any kind of limited government or even entertaining talk of limiting government power. Trump’s ideological statist partner will become the party’s standard-bearer in 2028. This means intensifying class struggle and decreasing economic freedom. In many ways, the entire political debate has shifted to the left.

This is unfortunate, of course, but none of this portends the end of the nation—just the end of modern conservatism.

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At the last election I wrote columns mocking people for using the insufferable phrase: “This is the most important election of our lifetime.” There is an ahistorical conceit in pretending that you live in the most troubled times. From a historical perspective, we are probably the luckiest people to ever live.

That is, America will not slide into Nazism. And no, we will not become Mogadishu, because populists have many destructive economic ideas. However, there is a chance that we will become France, Spain or some other average European country where big government nationalists clash with EU socialist types every few years. That’s bad enough. But this is not the end.