We’re officially in the final hours of the 2024 presidential election, and the one thing we can say for sure is that most people are angry and unhappy about the options available to them.

Supermajorities of voters consistently say the country is on the wrong track. None of the major candidates are VIEWED favorable by the majority of voters.

Consequently, the polls show a running election. Candidates’ last-minute proposals mainly boil down to Why the other side deserves to lose. Reluctant voters’ last-minute explanations of who they are voting for also largely describe what they are voting against.

“Never Trump” conservative David French used his sunday New York Times column to support a Harris victory offers a chance to break the “unique hold over Republican hearts and minds” that Donald Trump holds.

Across the aisle, comedian and vaguely conservative political commentator Bridget Phetasy explained that she is “not voting for Donald J. Trump. I vote against the left” and its “anti-civilizational” attitudes about crime, transgenderism and nullification. culture.

This is not a unique opinion. People who have never voted for Trump before say they plan to vote for him in 2024 ca protest against the party that “closed playgrounds and schools but opened dog parks and liquor stores.”

Regardless of who they support, everyone has a palpable sense that the best this election can offer is a chance to save the country from the worst cultural and political trends of the last decade.

In a Monday Substack essay, pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson summed it up collective attitude like the “stop the madness” choice.

In the focus groups he led, Anderson says few voters dwelled much on specific policies. Instead, they said their vote was about “getting this country back to a place that all citizens can be proud of,” that the election was “a turning point in whether our democracy lives or dies.” and that they are the most worried. about “my right to exist, to live and to be free”.

“You might think you know what party someone is voting for from those answers. I assure you you don’t know,” Anderson writes. “For all that we’re so divided, I’m amazed how many Trump and Harris voters talk about the election in these terms.”

All those voters are likely to be disappointed. The one thing we can say for sure about the results of the 2024 election is that the madness will not stop.

We know this because we’ve already experienced both outcomes that the election has to offer.

We know what a Trump victory means to defeat the “anti-civilizational” tendencies of the left. We know what a Trump defeat means to close the book on toxic Trumpian populism.

In a perceptive weekend column, The New York TimesRoss Douthat details how liberals have failed to deliver on their post-2016 promise to “avoid madness, maintain stability, and demonstrate far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his supporters.”

Instead, he argues, they complemented Trump’s insanity with their own insanity; embracing authoritarian COVID policies, promoting unproven treatments for gender dysphoria on children, and abandoning the concepts of law enforcement and border security.

The result is what liberals wanted to think was an “obvious” choice between Trump and the adults in the room is actually a cuddling contest where the “obvious” option is far from clear.

You don’t have to agree with every diagnosis of liberalism’s failings that Douthat makes to see why many Trump-skeptic conservative and moderate voters still believe he can be a bulwark against persistent leftist irrationality.

And yet, anyone who thinks that voting for Trump will deflate the excesses of Trump-era liberalism is wrong.

The alleged “anti-civilizational” attitudes of the left have not been defeated during Trump’s first term. Rather, they accelerated in opposition to him. Cancel culture, political correctness, “wokeness” and “follow the science” bigotry all peaked under his administration.

Trump’s control of the White House has not been able to arrest what are broad cultural forces that have often manifested themselves in state, local, and corporate politics outside the control of the executive branch. Trump’s polarizing possession of the bully pulpit has only encouraged the liberal excesses that his voters (of both the die-hard and die-hard variety) hate so much.

The Biden administration was remarkably leftist. However, we have seen in the last four years awakening relaxes as a political force and identity politics begins to lose his grip on speech.

Trump’s return to the White House will reverse this trend. His supernatural ability to incense his opponents will once again stir the most fervent, the most ridiculous elements of the democratic “resistance”. Expect to get more of the cultural year, not less, under a second Trump.

Meanwhile, a Harris victory cannot hope to cleanse politics of Trumpian populism or even the man himself. I have already done that experiment.

Biden won the White House in large part because of the electorate’s exhaustion of Trump and the daily chaos it generated.

Instead of accepting this limited mandate to govern as a moderate, Biden turned over his administration to the most left-wing in the room, who subsequently regulated aggressively, spent with inflationary abandon and pushed a progressive agenda on social and environmental issues.

The electorate largely hated the results. By the end of the night, they may choose to punish the Democrats by putting Trump back in office.

As a last-ditch effort to forestall that possibility and offset the apparent unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration, Democrats have been trying to make as much hay as possible since January 6. decision to hold her last high-profile rally in the same place where, several years ago, Trump urged his supporters to march on the capital in force.

This attack also fell predictably.

That’s because Democrats can only invoke January 6th as a bottle, not an olive branch.

Their message to Trump-skeptic moderates, conservatives, libertarians, and anyone else is not that they will run a moderate and inclusive administration. The last four years prove they won’t. Rather, the Democrats’ message is “as much as you hate our policies, Trump is even worse, so you need to get mad and vote for us.”

Perhaps the best distillation of this obnoxious fluff came from US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a few weeks ago. “Libertarians: If this isn’t a five-alarm fire for you, then what is?” he POSTED on X in response to a Washington Post article about former Trump advisers warning that he will use the military against American citizens.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Buttigieg, or his boss, that libertarian-leaning voters might have been a little more receptive to this argument if the last four years of his administration had been far from free.

Indeed, during the 2024 campaign, neither Trump nor Harris spent much time even pretending to shrink the size and scope of government. Libertarians can expect little political gain over the next four years.

Nor should voters of any ilk expect our politics to improve.

There are many destructive and toxic things in American public life right now. No wonder everyone is unhappy, most vote for the lesser of two evils (if they feel motivated to vote), and we continue to toy between unpopular administrations without success.

Transcending this dismal status quo will require talented and transformative candidates. None can be found on the ballot today.

Bad policy and bad ideas can’t be fixed by bad candidates. But in this election, bad candidates are all we have to choose from.