Carlos Lozada, writing at the New York Times, makes about as compelling a case as could be made for why, even though it's incredibly unpopular, a 2024 rematch between the current president and the Very Stable Genius is just what we need:
Only a third of Americans view President Biden favorably, and two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters want to nominate someone else for the presidency (no one in particular, just someone else, please). Trump is the overwhelming favorite to become the Republican nominee for the third consecutive time, but his overall approval rating is lower than Biden’s. And while 60 percent of voters don’t want to put Trump back in the White House, 65 percent don’t want to hand Biden a second term, either. The one thing on which Americans seem to agree is that we find a Biden-Trump 2024 rematch entirely disagreeable.
This disdain may reflect the standard gripes about the candidates. (One is too old, the other too Trump.) But it also may signal an underlying reluctance to acknowledge the meaning of their standoff and the inescapability of our decision. A contest between Biden and Trump would compel Americans to either reaffirm or discard basic democratic and governing principles. More so than any other pairing, Biden versus Trump forces us to decide, or at least to clarify, who we think we are and what we strive to be.
The VSG's Claremont, New Hampshire speech yesterday reinforced this assertion by Lozada:
Trump is running as an overtly authoritarian candidate — the illusion of pivots, of adults in the room, of a man molded by the office, is long gone. He is dismissive of the law, except when he can harness it for his benefit; of open expression, except when it fawns all over him; and of free elections, except when they produce victories he likes. He has called for the “termination” of the Constitution based on his persistent claims of 2020 electoral fraud, and according to The Washington Post, in a new term he would use the Justice Department as an instrument of vengeance against political opponents. We know who Trump is and what he offers.
But he offers weak tea when he frames his reasoning for why Biden is a foil to that:
Biden’s case to the electorate — for 2020, 2022 and 2024 — has been premised on the preservation of American democratic traditions. In the video announcing his 2020 campaign, he asserted that “our very democracy” was at stake in the race against Trump. In a speech two months before the midterm vote last year, he asserted that Trump and his allies “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundation of our Republic.” And the video kicking off his 2024 re-election bid featured multiple scenes of the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The question we are facing,” Biden said, “is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom.” That is our choice in 2024.
Why do I say that? After all, what happened on 1/6/21 was indeed a major assault in American democracy.
But consider the issue, along with preserving democracy, on which Biden polls better than Trump:
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll that shows Trump leading Biden in five battleground states also asked registered voters which candidate they trust on key questions. Trump won on the economy, immigration and national security; Biden received higher marks on just two issues. The first was abortion, a core priority among Democratic voters and one that proved powerful in last year’s midterms and the off-year elections and ballot initiatives last Tuesday in states like Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia.
My view on abortion boils down to this: If it's a diabolical act, a criminal act warranting the most severe punishment, and a sin against God for me to pop a hole in your skull and vacuum your brains out, why is it any less so if you're not born yet?
As I put it in my latest piece at Precipice,
The division between those who are pro-life and those who assert the necessity of legalized abortion hinges on the notion of a human soul, and whether one is present from the moment of conception. That’s why the rejoinder to the right-to-make-my-own-decisions-about-my-body argument is to assert that more than one body - and hence more than one soul - is involved when a woman is pregnant.
I’ve never been demonstrative about my own pro-life position, never attended any rallies or dinners or engaged any elected officials about the matter. It may not be the most laudable way to be pro-life, but I’ve reacted to the state of affairs over the last fifty-plus years by being sad. Sad that pro-choicers want to put worst-case scenarios - rape, incest and fathers unwilling to be fathers - first. What a hard and cold way to view human development. What would it take to uphold the ideal of family, that most basic of social units, where, when it’s in a healthy condition, is the environment in which we learn about how to lovingly interact with other people? What about venerating nurturing, guidance, encouragement, team spirit, humor, and generosity?
There seems something bitter at the core of a pro-choice position. Its inclination is to respond to what I’m saying in the above paragraph with, “Yeah, show me an actual family that unfailingly venerates those things, that sustains the happiness of everyone in it, that isn’t fraught with underlying issues.”
If you want to see the playing-out of that particular argument, click the link.
But here I bring up abortion because it's only one element of why I can't vote for Biden, or, more broadly, for Democrats.
Abortion is really a sub-category of identity politics militancy. It sets women up, not as roughly half of the human species, but as an oppressed demographic - alongside people who happen to be black, people with unorthodox sexual attractions, and people who have some notion that they'd find fulfillment in mutilating their crotches and messing with their God-given hormonal balance.
And then there's climate alarmism. Biden is a full-throated champion of having the federal government interfere in the millions of freely-entered-into agreements on the value of millions of goods and services that take place every day, in the name of weaning society off fossil fuels, which are cheap, dense and readily available, compared to any the play-like energy forms our overlords would impose on us.
And he endorses wealth redistribution as the cudgel by which he'd bring this agenda to fruition.
James Madison, the architect of our Constitution, was quite clear on this point. It is not within the proper purview of government to influence people's choices on energy forms, or to mandate preferences in hiring or college admission based on demographics, or to change the thousands-of-years-old definition of marriage, or indulge anyone's insistence on being regarded as the gender opposite what he or she obviously is.
It is wrong to take Citizen A's money to address the particular needs or wants of Citizen B.
Indeed, we ought to insist that government puke all over itself to justify taking the first red cent from any of us, ever.
So I cannot accept a choice between a cult leader who makes it clear he'll try to jail anyone who is not 100 recent loyal to him, and a candidate who has been steeped all his life in the ever-more-collectivist tilt of the Democrat party.
I have no problem with staying home next May and nest November.
I will not have the eternal record book showing that I contributed to the final shattering of this country, even if that's inevitable.
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