The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
The November election for president, the Senate, and the House is going to be extremely close for nearly everyone who runs for office. Some of the Senate and House seats are shoo-ins, but most other races are teetering on a razor’s edge, particularly for president.
From my perspective, the best outcome is that the Democrats win an anemic but recognizable majority in the two houses of Congress, and that Kamala Harris crushes Trump, although of course that is a pipedream .Even if Trump loses by a wider margin than in 2000, Trump will insist the election was stolen, and his attempt to seize the presidency will make Jan. 6, 2021 look like a Brownies picnic. (Few people go to Sunday School anymore.) In that case, slightly more than half of the voters will get what they want. If Ms, Harris does win, it will need to be by ten-plus million popular votes and an Electoral College vote of 421-122 (or so).
Only then can the Democrats and the 3.2 million reasonable Republicans still alive congratulate themselves for “getting out the vote.” Heaven knows, and is mightily displeased, over the billions it will have taken to get the job secured. At least it will be easier for the president and Members of Congress to govern, which is what the winners think they will deserve,
If the Republicans win the presidency and both the Senate and House, they too will get what they deserve, which will be an unchallenged autocracy, a far more unpredictable and erratic president than we had from 2016 to 2000, and the swift and certain loss of major American influence in a world thrown into overwhelming panic by the re-election of DJT. The Republicans will have brought this disaster on eight billion people in both America and the world. They will deserve the animosity they will have heaped upon themselves by causing so much agony to so many countless innocents by their highly defective ideological misjudgment.
Anyone who cannot foresee the disaster of a Republican victory of the president and Congress is a victim of the most clever, dangerous, consummate political liar in the long history of persuasive and demonic American liars. The peril represented by Donald Trump makes Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Huey Long, Richard Nixon, Bob Menendez, and Eric Adams look like squeaky clean saints by comparison.
Hundreds of GOP luminaries from as far back as the Reagan administration have publicly declared that Trump is the clearest, most present danger, the USA has ever faced. Yet half the electorate professes their unbending allegiance to him. The half of the electorate who feel as strongly repelled by Mr. Trump and that small percentage of laudable Republicans do not deserve the chaos that Trump will undoubtedly unleash upon everyone in the USA and beyond. Those who elect him will deserve the blame for the disaster Trump will wreak upon our nation and the world. The real blood to follow his electoral defeat will be upon their hands.
If Kamala Harris and the Democrats win the presidency and a majority on both houses of Congress, they will not get everything they think they deserve, because politics never works that way. Politics is too inflexible an enterprise to accomplish everything it promises to do.
The truly tragic aspect of the 2024 election is that if Trump wins, there will be blood. If Trump loses, there will be rivulets of blood. No one wants either of those outcomes, except Donald Trump and his most devoted acolytes. If Trump wins, bloodshed is guaranteed. How much and whose blood is spilled remains to be seen.
Does this sound like a prediction of revolutionary zeal gone terribly amuck? I certainly hope so. Anyone who is not terrified going into this election is blind to the inescapable signs of the times. Ominous dark days may be hanging in the balance, but so may be a bright future. Which half of American voters will determine our future?
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.