U.S. Election Aftermath Part Two: Good News, Bad News

Had I been an American citizen on November 5th, I would have voted for neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump. Unlike certain Democrats and other nihilists today, however, I do not deny the basic humanity or the right to live in my community of any actual American who felt compelled to come down on one side or the other that day. I understand that whether or not to exercise one’s franchise is a very personal and grave decision. I am merely declaring my own position on the matter. If two utterly unworthy and genuinely dangerous candidates are on the ballot (and the third-party candidates this year represented nothing remotely better than the principals, apart from having no hope of gaining power), I believe that abstaining from the vote is another valid way of exercising one’s franchise, and it is this third way that I would have chosen.

Having said this, it is also undeniable that, due to the sheer pragmatic necessity of each unworthy candidate taking public positions on a wide variety of issues, it is almost inevitable that even a nonplussed or disengaged observer will find occasional areas of agreement, or at least palatability, with regard to this or that policy idea or morsel of rhetoric from one or more of the candidates. Hence, perhaps I may indulge, from my situation far removed from any vested interest in either campaign, in a little game of “good news, bad news” — a simple stocktaking, if you will, in the aftermath of America’s latest electoral self-belittlement on behalf of Donald Trump’s ever-infantilizing ego.

A second Donald Trump presidency is relatively good news indeed, at least given the alternatives, if you happen to be one of the following:

1. an unborn child, or a soul with any plans of becoming an unborn child in the foreseeable future;
2. a small business owner who likes employing people and earning profits, and dislikes hyper-regulation and inflation (but see bad news point 5, below);
3. a person who likes to speak freely about controversial issues, and understands that the freedom to speak about precisely such issues is in fact the entire meaning of free speech;
4. a laughable and vain Russian tyrant on the verge of suffering the most humiliating defeat in a war of conquest that you yourself started, and desperate for a way to escape any further dilapidation of your military and economy without having to lose any more face or to face any more internal threats to your rule;
5. a laughable and flabby North Korean tyrant eager to regain some of the appearance of international influence and legitimacy that you have never experienced outside of a brief shining moment granted to you by Trump during the latter’s first presidential term;
6. a Chinese Communist Party leader who could wish for nothing more from the United States than a president who reduces all geopolitical confrontation to “good deals” and “bad deals,” i.e., who is constitutionally oblivious to the kind of moral rectitude and good-faith intransigence that allowed Ronald Reagan, at the very moment when America had fallen into the filthy depths of pragmatic realpolitik and cultural relativism, to straightforwardly overturn the whole narrative by branding the Soviet Union “the evil empire.”
7. an American business owner or worker in a field that Trump believes, for his own idiosyncratic reasons, deserves protectionist tariffs to evade the difficulties of international market competition;
8. a person who is keen to explode the U.S. economy by blowing the national debt through a roof of seemingly infinite height, in a manner reminiscent of Quint, the old fisherman in Jaws, driving his fatally damaged boat full speed ahead, maniacally, until the engine dies in a cloud of black smoke, leaving Quint and his passengers stranded at sea at the mercy of a great white shark;
9. one who dreads the immediate social damage arising from government’s espousal of the agenda and attitudes of radical feminism and so-called “woke” identity politics;
10. a weakminded follower desperate for a demi-god to believe in, and therefore willing to buy into the showmanship of anyone with the chutzpah to tell you bluntly that he is the one.

On the other hand, a second Trump presidency is relatively bad news, at least given the alternatives, if you happen to be one of the following:

1. a person who regards tyrants not as the strongest and most impressive of men, but rather as the weakest and most spectacular of failures;
2. one who believes that immediate sexual gratification is a human right, that rights should not entail responsibilities, and hence that freedom means being able to act on your desires without the burden of considering, let alone living with, the consequences of those actions;
3. a believer in the Cloward-Piven strategy for debilitating the U.S. economy for the sake of undermining America’s insitutions of private property and individual responsibility, goals sometimes euphemized as “eliminating poverty”;
4. one whose models of statesmanship are more akin to George Washington and Winston Churchill than to Jerry Springer and Kim Kardashian;
5. an American business owner or worker outside of the fields that Trump believes deserve protectionist tariffs, and whose cost of acquiring parts and raw materials for your own production will necessarily increase due to Trump’s idiosyncratic protectionist lurches (cross-reference good news point 2, above);
6. one who believes that the words “masculine” and “feminine” correspond to ideas that are not merely social constructs of oppression but rather, at least in part, reflections of observable realities of universal human experience and civilizational common sense;
7. one who wishes to reduce all humans to collective identities based on superficial traits, or even based on subjective preferences in pleasure-seeking, and to turn politics into a shell game of ever-evolving retribution for this or that collective injustice, however abstract and theoretical it may be;
8. a person who believes that modern military technology makes old-fashioned American isolationism, which was a dangerous and ultimately damaging point of view a century ago, look like the convenient delusion of people who would simply like the real world to disappear so they can live out a delusional and myopic life of comfort and fun without concern for the winds that are slowly engulfing their neighborhood;
9. one who believes that the U.S. presidency has already vastly outgrown its constitutional limits, and that the last thing America needs is a populist demagogue who would reduce the country even further towards an anti-republican and hyper-politicized view of government and community.
10. a mature adult who is neither willing to condescend to the self-diminished millions for the sake of being accepted, nor to willingly set aside the lessons of history and philosophy for the sake of the transient satisfactions of “winning.”

We could go on, of course, but let this partial list, pro and con, stand as a satisfactory account of my general assessment of the election outcome seen from the pragmatic point of view.