GOVERNMENT IS STILL THE PROBLEM.

Yes, I'm on record as wanting Democrats out of power for a generation, and voting Republican as the surest way to deliver that punishment.

That noted, I commend Reason's Christian Britschgi for "Bad Candidates Can't Fix Bad Politics."  Perhaps he has stumbled on the reason for the low voting rates in last night's presidential election: voters have seen both operas and would rather not go back.

The one thing we can say for sure about the results of the 2024 election is that the madness won't stop.

We know this because we've already lived through both outcomes that the election offers.

We know what a Trump victory means for defeating the "anti-civilizational" tendencies of the left. We know what a Trump defeat means for closing the book on toxic Trumpian populism.

In a perceptive weekend column, The New York Times' Ross Douthat details how liberals failed to deliver on their post-2016 promise that "they would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on."

Instead, he argues, they supplemented Trump's insanity with insanity of their own; embracing authoritarian COVID policies, pushing unproven treatments for gender dysphoria on children, and foreswearing the very concepts of law enforcement and border security.

The result is what liberals wanted to believe would be an "obvious" choice between Trump and the adults in the room is in fact a nail-biter contest in which the "sane" option is far from clear.

One needn't agree with Douthat's every diagnosis of liberalism's failures to see why many Trump-skeptical conservative and moderate voters still think he can be a bulwark against persistent left-wing unreason.

And yet, anyone thinking that by voting for Trump, they'll deflate the excesses of Trump-era liberalism is mistaken.

The left's alleged "anti-civilizational" attitudes weren't defeated during Trump's first term. Rather, they accelerated in opposition to him. Cancel culture, political correctness, "wokeism," and "follow the science" fanaticism all hit their zenith under his administration.

Trump's control of the White House couldn't arrest what are broad cultural forces that often manifested themselves in state, local, and corporate policy outside the control of the executive branch. Trump's polarizing possession of the bully pulpit only encouraged the liberal excesses his voters (of both the die-hard or reluctant variety) hate so much.

The Biden administration has been a remarkably left-wing one. Yet, it's during the past four years that we've seen wokeism unwind as a political force and identity politics start to lose its grip on the discourse.

Trump's return to the White House will reverse this trend. His supernatural ability to incense his opponents will agitate the most fervent, most ridiculous elements of the Democratic "resistance" once again. Expect to get more cancel culture, not less, under a second Trump.

Meanwhile, a Harris victory can't hope to purge politics of Trumpian populism or even the man himself. We've already run that experiment too.

Biden won the White House in large part because of the electorate's exhaustion with Trump and the daily chaos he engendered.

Rather than accept this limited mandate to govern as a moderate, Biden turned his administration over to the most left-wing wonks in the room who subsequently regulated aggressively, spent with inflationary abandon, and pushed a hardline progressive agenda on social and environmental issues.

The electorate has largely hated the results. By the end of the night, it might well choose to punish Democrats by putting Trump back into office.

And so they did.  He also notes that the best Democrats could do with that futile and stupid gesture at the Federal Capitol was "Democrats can only invoke January 6 as a cudgel, not an olive branch."  Meaning money printing to pay off favored constituencies.  Meaning open borders.  Meaning troubled boys participating in girls' sports.  Meaning rigging the rules to favor Democrats and calling it Our Democracy^(TM).  Is it any surprise that voters turfed them out?

Not that things will improve.

Voters of all stripes shouldn't expect our politics to get any better either.

There is much that's destructive and toxic in American public life right now. It's no surprise that everyone is unhappy, most people are voting for the lesser of two evils (if they feel motivated to vote at all), and we keep ping-ponging between unpopular, unsuccessful administrations.

Transcending this sad status quo will require talented, transformative candidates. None can be found on the ballot today.

Unfortunately, the argument that transcends the status quo requires a talented transformative candidate to say "I favor more agency for you, and less power for my office, or the agencies my office funds with your money."