Democrats have been breathlessly insisting that if Donald Trump is elected again that this could be our last election. That is obvious nonsense, but as the journalist Walter Kirn recently pointed out, “with their wanton rhetoric, they’ve also made many of us never want another one.”
While many Americans, myself included, are addicted to following electoral politics, these idiotic contests are clearly bad for society and caring about them is bad for us an individuals. Further, constant electioneering prevents our government from functioning, as there is no time to govern well and be rewarded for positive results. Instead there is just an endless stream of generated panic, cheap political stunts, bribing the public with the public’s own money, and investigations and counter-investigations. In theory, in a functioning commonwealth which selects its leaders through elections, those elections may present a challenge to society but it is an exercise that builds strength and makes the public feel included. However, in modern American life our elections keep us permanently divided into ever more distant factions as we watch our society crack up. The “last election of our lifetimes”? We should be so lucky!
There are several reasons that elections have taken over our lives. The most important is that we are governed terribly. When Donald Trump recently joked that “After four years you won’t need to vote,” Democrats pretended to believe this meant he was threatening to end democracy. Actually he was facetiously boasting that they will have fixed all of America’s problems. The Democratic establishment can’t even conceptualize thinking this way because they worship the government and voting is a sort of liturgical activity. Every election is said to be the most important of our lives, though in some ways its hard to shake the feeling that this is the least important election in our lifetimes. I would love to not vote, and have not voted in the past, but unfortunately the political class manages to irritate me into voting against someone almost every year.
It wasn’t always this way. But in the era of twenty-four hour political news it came to be the case that presidential elections start as soon as mid-terms end. When you figure that politicians spend a year preparing for mid-terms, that gives us one year out of every four where electoral politics are not really taking place. However, now that year is spent litigating the prior presidential election. In fact, Democrats spent all of Trump’s first term trying to prove he wasn’t rightfully the president and remove him from office. We never got a break!
Then in 2020 it was Republicans who didn’t believe the results. What’s more, on top of them trying to perpetually adjudicate the election, Democrats were also constantly seeking to prosecute Republicans for not believing in the election results. If one believes the results—and why should anyone have faith in American elections—the inconclusive 2020 election should have been a chance for our country to relax. But no such thing happened. Instead, the political heat is up all the time and the Joe Biden administration tried to transform America on a tiny margin.
There is no single answer to fixing the problem of permanent elections. Our system as well as our legal rights make it hard to do what many other countries do, where there is a short, allowed campaigning season. However, political campaigns and advertisements and everything else are already heavily regulated, and it wouldn’t be impossible to limit the length of time before an election when someone is allowed to start a campaign committee. The parties could also get together and agree to start primaries later, something which the Democratic National Committee has made some effort to do, only to find themselves in a big dispute with New Hampshire’s Democratic Party. It’s difficult to support laws which could limit political expression, but it’s also easy to see the deleterious impact the current permanent election system is having on America.
The worst instance of the impact campaigns have on the running of our country is the presidency itself. For the most part, any president spends the first four years trying to get re-elected. If he does, then he spends the next two years hoping to have a good final midterm, so he can implement his agenda with a free hand. If that doesn’t work out he just does whatever the hell he wants with executive orders like Barack Obama, knowing he is out to pasture when his term ends. This creates a situation where the president is never devoted to ruling well, but instead spends about six years trying to win elections, followed by two years on ideological or vanity projects. There is a solution to this, but it requires an unlikely constitutional amendment.
Instead of allowing a president two total terms, they could be allowed unlimited non-consecutive terms. This isn’t foreign to American politics; some states have this rule for governors and by all accounts it works fine. With the required gap, by the third time a president were to run for office it would be sixteen years after the first campaign, and it seems unlikely many men would be willing and able to get the third term. We would probably get lucky and have to deal with many presidents for only four years since once out of office restarting your entire political apparatus is a pretty big pain.
Regardless, the enormous advantage would be that the president is never campaigning (for himself at least) while in office, but still has to consider his future. Further, it often takes some time for a president’s policies to show effect. Both Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama inherited economic problems caused by the irresponsible spending of their predecessors, and though they were ill equipped to deal with those problems, they suffered from challenges which were not of their own making. Though distance may cloud people’s minds, it’s still more clear if someone’s policies were beneficial four years later than while he is the incumbent, which seems to be how many Americans currently feel about Trump.
There is no reason to believe any of these changes will be implemented. We are clearly at the point in the life of our republic where we are in constant panic mode. We have entered the sort of post-revolutionary space where private life is dead and the personal is political. Campaigns are not meant to be won, they are meant to be permanent. If you want to see the future of the American man, it’s politicians demanding he vote for all eternity. Being as this never leads to good government but instead only oppression or corruption, not having elections anymore doesn’t sound so bad. The Democrats are rapidly selling me on it.
