Notes on the Way

A special note for Election Day 2024

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Following sage advice, I make predictions only about things that have already happened. So I have no prediction to make on the outcome of today's presidential election. And I have only one note to make:

Whoever wins today, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, it will be a misfortune for America and the world. For months now, the conviction has been growing on me that a time of troubles is upon us, with events around the world conspiring with America’s domestic travails to ignite a profound crisis, the worst since that which burst upon the nation on December 7, 1941.

The Biden Administration’s policy failures, domestic and foreign, have left his successor to confront a daunting task. The moment demands strong leadership: a Lincoln, an FDR, a Ronald Reagan. At the very least, what America needs now is a president of resolute will and good common sense. But thanks to the breakdown of our political system, the people’s choice lies between the Bratgirl and the Prince of the Golden Escalator.

Neither candidate is fit to serve as president of the United States. Trump is a mercurial, know-nothing narcissist; Harris is a hole in the air. Both advocate ruinous domestic and foreign policies: reckless government spending and fanciful economic policies at home, isolationism and appeasement abroad. Both, as president, are likely to accelerate the descent into the maelstrom.

The decline of American resolve and military power, which began with the presidency of Barack Obama, has had its inevitable effect: a major European war, a major Mideast war, a growing Chinese military threat in the western Pacific. Our alliances around the world were made to cope with such threats, but they’re effective only if buttressed by a credible deterrent—which today they aren’t.

Put very simply, the United States no longer possesses the military means to cope with these simultaneous outbreaks. What is required, beginning on the first day of the next president’s term, is a major military buildup to restore American deterrence. The Navy needs more ships: submarines, surface combatants, aircraft carriers. The Army needs more combat units, tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery systems, helicopters. The Air Force needs more combat aircraft. All the services need more manpower. And immediate action is required to revitalize the country’s military industrial base.

But both presidential candidates have ignored the parlous state of American military power.

They’ve ignored it because their foreign policy is one of illusions and magical thinking. This is well symbolized by Trump’s empty pledge to end the Russo-Ukrainian War as soon as he becomes president, and by Harris’s two-faced Mideast policy, with appeasement of the Iranian regime in the background.

V. Putin knows quite well that in any Trump-managed negotiation, all the pressure to make concessions would be on Ukraine. The Iranian mullahs and their proxies know quite well that with a Harris Administration full of “anti-Zionists,” all the pressure to reach an agreement would be on Israel. The outcome in both cases would be victory for the aggressors. And that would only encourage China to solve the Taiwan question by force of arms—for why would the regime fear an American military response to an invasion of that island, with Trump or Harris in the White House?

Domestically, both Harris and Trump are committed to fiscal and economic policies that take no account whatsoever of reality. The national debt totals $35 trillion; the annual federal budget is over $6 trillion, with a nearly $2 trillion annual deficit. Both candidates have simply ignored this fiscally dangerous situation. Trump talks of tariffs, as if they’ll magically solve all our problems; Harris proposes to spend trillions more, with no credible explanation as to where the money will come from.

There is of course a path to fiscal sanity: budget discipline based on real priorities, coupled with broad-based tax increases. Entitlement spending lies at the root of the problem. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs are consuming an ever-greater percentage of the federal budget. They must be reformed to lower their cost. In the same way, promises to reduce taxes on the “middle class,” on tips, on overtime pay, etc., must be abandoned. The necessary broad-based tax increase need not be too painful, since the sacrifices demanded would be more evenly borne—especially if accompanied by serious fiscal reform.

The alternative is a fiscal meltdown that would ravage the American economy, but Trump and Harris seem oblivious to that grim prospect. They both, for example, issue empty pledges to “protect Social Security,” refusing to acknowledge that if purposeful reforms are not carried out now, the arithmetic will soon impose reform in a much more painful manner.

I suppose we deserve this. Republicans could have chosen among several credible candidates to carry the party’s standard this year. But no, they went with Trump. The Democrats could have taken timely action to replace Joe Biden on their ticket with a credible candidate. But no, they covered up his accelerating decline until it couldn’t be denied, then coughed up the hairball that is Kamala Harris. We, the people, let this happen. And over the next four years, we’ve going to suffer the consequences: Cosmic Justice is coming for the Land of E Pluribus Unum.