Election 2024 and Perpetual Political Chaos

Election 2024 and Perpetual Political Chaos

A great many people, it seems, are tired of this election.  They want nothing more for it to be over so that they can move on with their lives.  They’re tired of the bickering.  They’re tired of the salacious stories.  They’re tired of the ads.  They’re tired of the town hall meetings and the rallies.  Mostly, though, they’re just tired:

Presidential elections get plenty of people tense, but 2024 may be the most nerve-racking race of them all. More than 60% of Americans in a new poll say that their mental health has either been slightly, moderately, or significantly impacted by November’s election.

In fact, 46% say they have feelings of anxiety, 37% are stressed out, and 31% are experiencing fear when it comes to the 2024 presidential race. Election anxiety is impacting younger Americans in particular, the survey by Forbes Health found….

For some participants, political stress extends beyond the voting booth and impacts their productivity at school and work, according to the survey. When asked how much their performance at work or school has been negatively affected by the upcoming election (for example, due to uncontrollable worry or anxiety), 28% claim their performance has been at least slightly affected in a negative way by the upcoming election.

Unsurprisingly, I agree with the masses here.  I too want the election to be over.  I too am “stressed out” about it.  I too have had enough.  I too will be glad when Americans head to the polls in just 11 short days to cast their votes.

There’s only one catch: it won’t end after November 5.  Indeed, it may never end.  This election is a mere proxy for the politicization and the bifurcation of our society, and the technical end of the campaign isn’t going to make the ugliness stop.  Even if one of the two candidates wins a clear-cut victory that the other side can’t help but accept, nothing will change.  It will go on and on (and on and on) until we, the American people work up the nerve to make it stop.

If Donald Trump wins – as I have said I think is likely – then the next four years will be very much like his first four years in office, only worse.  Every day the mainstream media will do its damnedest to undermine him and his administration somehow: he’s not mentally fit; he’s too old; he’s trying to undermine Our Democracy™; he’s committing crimes; unnamed sources close to him say he wants to have his burly Secret Service agents beat up reporters and actors and the pretty ladies from “The View.”  They will be relentless, both in their pursuit of real stories (which is good) and in their pursuit of any hypothetical dirt with which they think they can damage him (which is not so good).  The media – and even social media – will follow a set format all day, every day: “Trump did this!  Trump did that!  OMG!  Did you see?  Trump did the other!”  It’ll be exhausting and every bit as grotesque as anything we’ve seen during the campaign.

And none of that even takes into account what Trump himself will be doing, about which – let’s be honest – there’s not a soul in the world who can predict a thing.

If Kamala Harris wins, then she and her administration, as well as their allies in the mainstream media, will begin the process of de-Trumpification of the country.  It won’t be good enough for them that Trump is all but certain never to run again – given his age, mostly.  They’ll also want those who share his beliefs about them and the rest of the Ruling Class to be duly punished for their wrongthink.  Elon Musk, among others, will be a primary target – as we already know:

In an explosive leak with ramifications for the upcoming U.S. presidential election, internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate—whose founder is British political operative Morgan McSweeney, now advising the Kamala Harris campaign—show the group plans in writing to “kill Musk’s Twitter” while strengthening ties with the Biden/Harris administration and Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced multiple bills to regulate online “misinformation.”

The documents obtained by The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket show CCDH’s hyperfocus on Musk — “Kill Musk’s Twitter” is the first item in the template of its monthly agenda notes dating back to the early months of this year.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is the anti-disinformation activist ally of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, and a messaging vehicle for Labour’s neoliberal think tank, Labour Together. Both the CCDH and Labour Together were founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street, much as Karl Rove is credited with guiding George W. Bush to the White House.

The CCDH documents carry particular importance because McSweeney’s Labour Together operatives have been teaching election strategy to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, leading Politico to call Labour and the Democrats “sister parties.”

Musk will hardly be alone, however.  Heaven only knows who and what the administrative state will target.  Certainly, any of Trump’s prominent campaign surrogates and their various business interests will, undoubtedly, be on the proverbial hit list, if they are not already.  The biggest target, however, will be the First Amendment itself, which the current administration and its allies consider little more than a thorn in their side as they attempt to fix the world.

Regardless of which candidate wins, the nonstop prattling from the media and various other elites about the “impending civil war” will ring constantly in our ears, as will the insistence that dark and malevolent forces have been unleashed upon the land to make life miserable for <<insert preferred interest group here>>.  Again, it will be exhausting and grotesque.

Yesterday, the U.S. edition of The Independent ran a long story about some random Canadian author who thinks that the next American civil war has just started and then will dominate the news for the next several years:

“I think it would very much be a free-for-all,” he said, “neighbour on neighbour, based on beliefs and skin colours and religion. And it would be horrific.”…

“Trump is very much a symptom, not a cause,” [Stephen] Marche continues. “The underlying problems in the United States are huge: inequality; a massive decline of trust in the legal system; a hyper-partisan duopoly between the two political parties, which creates election victories rather than plans for the future. And also a decrepit and dysfunctional constitution that is nonetheless worshipped as a religious document, even though it doesn’t really apply to the 21st century.”

It’s important to note here, that this isn’t what Ruling Class fears.  It’s what it wants.  It doesn’t want actual civil war, necessarily, but it does want chaos.  It does want Americans obsessed with politics and ideology.  It does want Americans constantly agitated, constantly anxious, constantly concerned about the next bit of political turmoil.  This suits their purposes, even if they aren’t willing to come right out and say it, as Marche does.  They think the Constitution is decrepit, and they want to “fix” it – for the common good, of course.

The irony here is that the allegedly decrepit Constitution contains the seeds of our salvation.  Federalism, communitarianism, the defanging of the federal Leviathan, and the depoliticization of American life are the only ways forward.

Otherwise, it’s pre-election-levels of chaos around the clock for as far as the eye can see.

Mark my word.

Stephen Soukup
Stephen Soukup
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Steve Soukup is the Vice President and Publisher of The Political Forum, an “independent research provider” that delivers research and consulting services to the institutional investment community, with an emphasis on economic, social, political, and geopolitical events that are likely to have an impact on the financial markets in the United States and abroad.