Liz's decision

 I'd been wondering if she'd go the binary-choice route:

Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, she said during remarks at Duke University, according to audio obtained by CNN.

The former Wyoming congresswoman noted the importance of voting for Harris in states like North Carolina, where she appeared on Wednesday.

“I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I just said about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Cheney said.

She made the announcement in North Carolina specifically because it is a battleground state, according to a source close to Cheney.

“And as a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she continued.

She joins her fellow Republican member of the J6 committee Adam Kinzinger in opting for this means of opposing the Very Stable Genius. They have considerable company. Over 200 staffers for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney have endorsed Harris.

I 've been rethinking my harsh view of at least some of the people who have decided thusly. Cheney and Kinzinger are serious people with solid conservative bona fides, and I have no disagreement with their assessment of Trump and Trumpism. Cheney has chosen the word "danger" wisely.

But as I said recently over at Precipice, I have to conclude differently:

I’m not sure that stressing which is worse, which requires establishing some kind of criteria for how to line the two candidates up side by side to determine that, is a productive use of our time as summer turns to fall in 2024. The Very Stable Genius is a solipsistic man-child driven solely by self-glorification, but Kamala Harris has no redeeming qualities, as a politician, statesperson, or an example of character.

I mean that. John Kelly was exactly right last October when he said that Trump has no idea what America stands for. That goes for Harris as well.  From her abysmal economic policy stances (increase in corporate and capital gains taxes, price controls, minimum wage increase) to her zeal for having government impose play-like energy forms on the post-American people to her horrible choice of a running mate to her apparent inability to see that for a ceasefire to be agreed to in Gaza, Hamas would have to come to the table and negotiate, she is a nightmare.

The likelihood that Republicans could take the Senate could mitigate her ability to do damage. But consider the symbolism-level power a US president has. No one else serves as a national emblem the way a president does. 

Presidents have cultural influence. Her people are big on talking about vibes, so consider what kinds of vibes she'd emit from the White House.

It's pretty apparent that one of our most dire cultural dilemmas is the diminishing centrality of the nuclear family headed by a mother and father. Such a family unit is where we first learn about loyalty, trust, teamwork, humor, balance, encouragement, boundaries, and a host of other human essentials. Growing up in such an environment, we get to see a model of a man and woman relating to each other with affection and respect.

Kamala Harris thinks this is at best a boutique arrangement, one of many in which people can thrive. Why wouldn't she? Her leftist parents met at Berkeley in the 1960s, stayed together long enough to have two daughters and then split up. Her mother then emphasized the primacy of the "strong, black woman" role in approaching life while raising her daughters, setting the path for Harris's identity politics focus - and defense of abortion. Alas, at age 29, she had an affair with the married Willie Brown, and that's how she began her political career. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, lost his first wife because he impregnated the couple's nanny. 

In short, she doesn't have a lot of personal experience with stable two-parent (as in father and mother) families. She would no doubt advocate on the world stage for inclusion of all manner of exotic arrangements by which children are raised. 

I am not alone in my insistence that not voting for either Trump or Harris is the best choice for conservatives. Meghan McCain pretty much speaks for me on the matter:

“I greatly respect the wide variety of political opinions of all of my family members and love them all very much,” Meghan McCain wrote Tuesday on the social platform X. “I, however, remain a proud member of the Republican Party and hope for brighter days ahead. (Not voting for Harris or Trump, hope that clears things up).”

She did not touch upon who else, if anyone, she might support for the White House.

Responding to calls last month to endorse Harris’s ticket, McCain said, “Please stop trying to turn me into a progressive.”

“It’s a fever dream,” she added “I’m a life long, generational conservative.”

My fellow contributors at The Freemen News-letter also generally inhabit the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. It's the subject of much discussion in social media threads.

I am well aware that either Trump or Harris will win the election in November. I can't, with my meager resources, persuade a critical mass of voters to stay home.

But I come back to this: I will not have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of national ruin.

No filter between that brain and that mouth - today's edition

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Heath, you bought the binary-choice ticket; now you're getting it punched

 My most recent post here at LITD dealt with the logical conclusion of the hey-it's-going-to-be-one-or-the-other-nd-consider-the-stakes mindset: Charlie Sykes making the mirror opposite of the Michael Anton-Flight 93-election argument. It's what a number of folks I''d greatly respected until recently had concluded.  I'm talking about those vehemently opposed to the Very Stable Genius who feel the need to publicly endorse the Harris-Walz ticket. 

My dismay was considerable when Adam Kinzinger went this route.

When Heath Mayo of Principles First so cast his lot, I was less so, because he'd already taken positions that made me question his conservatism.

Still, I think it's a little amusing to see him so disappointed that this is his ticket's first indication of an economic policy position:

Price controls? Really?! Come on, Dems. This is not a time to propose first-of-their-kind federal controls. Few want top-down government rethinks of the economy. Sanity, stability, and a commitment to the Constitution. That’s all it takes to win this election. Don’t blow it!

Collectivists gonna collectivist, Heath. Free market enthusiasts extending good faith to them usually does not result in anything the free marketers want. The collectivists care not a whit about the debt and deficit their redistribution incessantly exacerbate, much less the freedom of individual producers and consumers to arrive at agreements on the value of goods being exchanged without interference.

Giving a thumbs-down to Trumpism does not translate into support for this stuff.

Charlie Sykes and the mirror opposite of the Flight-93-election argument

 You may recall the article that instilled a sense of urgency in a number of right-leaners two presidential election cycles ago:

In September 2016, Michael Anton wrote an essay for the right-wing Claremont Institute, “The Flight 93 Election,” making the case for Donald Trump’s election as a necessary gamble to stave off the destruction of conservatism. Anton then did a stint in Trump’s National Security Council, and last night was rewarded by the president with a posting to the National Board for Education Sciences. It was a fitting coda for Trump to single out the figure who most perfectly captured the spirit that right-wing intellectuals brought to the era.

Anton’s case was notable, first, for its novelty. Before Trump won, “Never Trumpers” constituted the dominant strain of right-wing intellectual sentiment. Here was a prestigious organ of the intellectual right making a positive case for a nominee that the movement had dismissed as a clown and a surefire loser. Anton memorably seized the imagination of his audience by likening the choice to that faced by the passengers of Flight 93, who wrested control of the plane from Al Qaeda hijackers on 9/11. Allowing Hillary Clinton to win would mean certain death for conservatism, whereas electing Trump was risky — “you may die anyway” — but clearly preferable to certain death.

Anton’s argument was filled with dramatic rhetorical flourishes like this, and what little of it that was not non-falsifiable was demonstrably false. (According to Anton, “liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s,” Democrats “treat open borders as the ‘absolute value,’” and Barack Obama engaged in “flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents.”)

Despite (or perhaps because of) these flaws, Anton articulated the bedrock principle that has driven the right the last [eight] years: The Democratic Party is so terrifying and all-powerful that literally any measures, however unwise, are justifiable to block them from winning an election. That is the power of Anton’s chosen analogy, which urges his audience to overlook all of Trump’s complete unfitness to handle the job (“You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane,” he concedes) on the grounds that the alternative means imminent national death. 

Now, in summer 2024, former radio host and Bulwark cofounder Charlie Sykes has employed the same quickening-of-the-senses tactic, but from the opposite end of the spectrum:

 My latest in The Atlantic:

When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what never meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant never as in “absolutely never.” As the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.

For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared in a post on X. “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”

There's nothing bizarre about that characterization, Charlie. She's on the record as, prior to this week's flip-flops, supporting the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a path to citizenship for pretty much anybody coming over the border, pretty much unrestricted abortion, creating of a federal Office of Paid Family Leave, and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which conferred legitimacy on Iran's toxic regime.

He enlists the help of fellow Atlantic writer Tom Nichols in his disingenuous attempt to paint Never-Trumpers as looking for an excuse to vote for the Very Stable Genius:

It’s important to understand what’s going on here. Theissen leans on this sort of crude caricature because it’s useful for anti-anti-Trump Republicans who have been scrabbling desperately for an excuse — almost any excuse — to vote for Trump. For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Trump, whatever his crimes or his frauds, the other side is always worse. As Damon Linker once wrote, anti-anti-Trumpism “allows the right to indulge its hatred of liberals and liberalism while sidestepping the need for a reckoning with the disaster of the Trump administration itself.”

But the gravamen of Thiessen’s argument was that Harris also posed an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives. 

“Even the pretense of a benign alternative has been eliminated,” he claimed.

But, as it turns out, the choice of Trump vs. Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy choice for Never Trumpers, who have moved far beyond searching for a “benign alternative.”

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols posted a quick answer to Thiessen: “Yes, I have to pick between a normal person who is going to have some policies I won’t like and an unhinged, deranged wannabe dictator sociopath surrounded by goons.”

In other words, not really that hard at all.

On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.

Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledged that endorsing Harris “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”

The trauma of the last month also made the choice somewhat easier. 

Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power. 

Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most dominant political position of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering. 

For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.

There are, however, still bumps ahead, and not every Never Trumper will be able to reconcile themselves to Harris’s style of progressivism.

That would be me.

But according to Sykes, this makes me a poseur, wishing to appear aloof:

Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance.

Irrelevance. Interesting framing. Just what sets the standard for relevance? A seat at the table for the food fight over which presidential candidate and political party will achieve the victory of clinging to power by its fingernails while being pelted with investigations, lawsuits and inevitably disillusioned purists of either stripe? Count me out. I'm interested in something with some lasting power, the immutable stuff.

I realize that identity and power are a lot sexier to the 2024 post-Westerner than the quest for truth, justice, beauty and wisdom. But that's what is. I'm interested in what should be. And I'm so damn interested in it that I can't abide by what Kamala Harris is about any more than I can what the VSG is about.

So, yeah, I still plan to stay home in November. For a reason I've laid out here before: I don't want to have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of American ruination. 

It is the right thing to do to stand on this narrow sliver of terrain. 

Charlie, why are you so eager to write us off? Do you maybe harbor occasional thoughts that ours is the honorable stance?

Don't look to either major US party for a friend of the free market

 The Republicans, as we know, have gone full-tilt populist, as confirmed by the choice of tariffs-and-industrial-policy fan J.D. Vance as their vice presidential nominee.

But how does freshly minted Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris stack up with regard to economic policy?

Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute reminds us of some of Vice President Kamala Harris’s positions on economic policy.

• Pandemic checks of $2,000/month for most individuals until three months after the end of the declared emergency.
• Mandate that Federal Reserve banks interview at least one person of each gender and racial or ethnic diversity for the position of president.
• End of minimum work requirement during the preceding year before becoming eligible for family and medical leave.
• $15 minimum wage (I assume she will want more now).
• The federal Price Gouging Prevention Act that would guarantee bigger and more widespread shortages during emergencies.
• A climate “equity” bill that would create a new agency to assess legislation for DEI purposes: the Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability. The name says it all.

She is also a protectionist and voted against president Trump’s free-trade USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement). During her first campaign (she got fewer votes than the Democrat who won the primary in Samoa this year, as I learned from Matt Continetti), she supported Medicare for All (though she later modified her stance. That means she may shift again), the Green New Deal, federal paid family leave, and free college tuition for most Americans. These are only a few things she is for, in addition to all the things that happened during the last few years.

The Dems are reliable, at lest, unlike the Pubs, who seem to relish mercuriality. Still driven by their Big Three: identity politics, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution.  

I am not moved by the binary-choice political argument - today's edition

 LTID readers who have been here any length of time know that I am unequivocally opposed to another Donald Trump presidency. I was opposed to the first one. I wrote in Evan McMullen when I voted in 2016, and Ben Sasse in 2020. Donald Trump had established himself as a solipsistic charlatan long before he descended the elevator in 2015. He has transformed the Republican Party into a cult and to a disgusting degree has defiled the worlds of conservative punditry and institutional Christianity.

But the Democratic Party is no alternative. It is too spiritually rotten for the nation to consider for governance.

Today's Exhibit A is the vice president's trip yesterday to Minnesota:

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday toured a health clinic that offers abortion services while she was in Minnesota, spotlighting growing restrictions on women's rights that Democrats believe will animate voters in November.

The visit, believed to be the first of a sitting president or vice president to such a clinic, comes as President Joe Biden highlights abortion rights as a key issue ahead of the November presidential election.

Harris arrived for a tour at Planned Parenthood's St. Paul Health Center-Vandalia facility as some two dozen anti-abortion protesters stood in the street outside holding signs that read, among other statements, "Abortion is not healthcare."

After completing a tour that was closed to the press, Harris said women in the country are undergoing "silent suffering" because of attacks on their health. The clinic in Minnesota's state capital provides a range of care, including birth control and preventive wellness services.

"Right now, in our country we are facing a very serious health crisis, and the crisis is affecting many, many people in our country," the vice president told reporters.

"I'm here at this healthcare clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like."

Democrats think personal freedoms could be a key issue for women, independents and other key voters after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade abortion rights in 2022. Harris has held more than 80 public meetings on the topic since then. 

This is not the occasion to revisit the entirety of what's happened to Western civilization since Rousseau and up through Shelly, Marx Freud, John Dewey, Hugh Hefner, Gloria Steneim et al. I've done so a few times at Precipice, and it's a subject of great importance. For our purposes here, let me say that what we've done over the last 400 years is jettison something key to human flourishing: acknowledgment of a transcendent order, of the fact that we are designed in certain ways and not others, that female human beings, like females of lower species, bear young. 

And I'm well aware of the very important debates going on within institutional Christianity regarding complimentarianism versus egalitarianism, which plays out in such ways as whether women can preach. I'm well aware of the boneheads such as John McArthur - he who infamously told Beth Moore to "go home" - and the damage they have done to the appeal of the Gospel to the unacquainted.

On a larger scope, I'm aware that there's no turning back regarding the leadership roles women have assumed in business and government. That ship has sailed, and civilization is the richer for it.

But the basic fact to which I allude two paragraphs above will not be disproved. The design of nature, and the fact of a designer who decreed it so, is impervious to the perverse trends by which we attempt to rebel.

To speak plainly, we can call a days-old embryo a pomegranate or a carburetor, but the fact remains that whatever term we use to deny his or her humanity, we each and all were one once.

Vice President Harris may couch her rebellion against the transcendent order in terms of women's health, or personal autonomy, but the Creator will not be mocked. 

Exhibit B is what Senator Chuck Schumer said yesterday:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker, levied some of the harshest criticism yet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from a top U.S. official, calling on Israel to hold elections for a new government to deal with the threat of Hamas.

Why it matters: Democrats have felt increasing pressure from their left to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and be tougher on Israel, while also standing with a key ally.

• Schumer had largely stayed away from criticizing the Israeli government and Netanyahu in recent months.
• His remarks come as President Biden and other Democrats are wary of alienating progressive voters who are concerned about Israel's attacks that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

Driving the news: Schumer said in prepared remarks that new elections are the "only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel."

• Schumer criticized Netanyahu for aligning himself with far-right extremists in the Israeli government, saying he has turned away from a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Biden supports such a plan.
• "Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel's credibility on the world stage, and work toward a two-state solution," Schumer said.

The big picture: Schumer said the four obstacles to a two-state solution are Hamas, far-right extremists in the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and Netanyahu.

The other side: Israel's Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog fired back, "Israel is a sovereign democracy. It is unhelpful, all the more so as Israel is at war against the genocidal terror organization Hamas, to comment on the domestic political scene of a democratic ally.

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also rebuked Schumer for his remarks, labeling the Democrat's call for new Israeli elections as "unprecedented."
• "It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel," McConnell said.

To reiterate some basics, Israel is the only Western nation in a region hostile to Western values, it has had war waged against it multiple times since the 1947 founding of its modern iteration, the October 7 Hamas attack unified Israeli public opinion, and, yes, the Jews were selected by God to show the world how He wishes humankind generally to relate to him.

For Schumer to speak of a two-state solution before Israel has ended Hamas's existence, and as Hezbollah intensifies hostilities on the northern border, calls into question his understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the Mideast. 

A party whose most prominent leaders are so very much on the wrong side of the truth is no more qualified to steward the United States of America than the one slavishly devoted to the least dignified person to ever enter American politics.

I'm staying home in November.

You should, too.