Fear, Courage, and the Fourth of July.

Voting for Trump is risky, but courage means accepting some risks.

A lot of people are afraid of another Donald Trump presidency. The fear comes from many places. Some liberals just don’t want four more years of Republicans enacting pro-business legislation, and appointing judges who defend freedom of speech, the press, and religion, who don’t enforce imaginary constitutional rights that voters never created, and who don’t let administrative agencies write the law in place of Congress. (Good riddance to the Chevron doctrine!)

I don’t really have any sympathy for those people. But there are other reasons to be against Trump that I can at least understand and respect somewhat, even if I don’t find them convincing enough to change my own vote.

And since it’s the Fourth of July, a day when we Americans celebrate our ancestors’ willingness to overcome their fears and fight for their freedoms, I’m going to address my post to these people. I’m going to argue that no one should let his or her fear get in the way of voting for the one candidate who’s at least making an effort – even if it’s an effort of uneven quality – to get our country back to its roots.

One of the legitimate reason to fear Trump is his foreign policy. A lot of people are worried that Trump will withdraw the military aid, and the mixture of formal and informal security guarantees, that America has long been extending to its various allies. And they think that this removal of support will embolden countries like Russia, China, and Iran to start more wars, which will make everyone less safe in the long run.

Some people even go so far as to accuse Trump of encouraging dictators to start wars. (This is the idea that Joe Biden was trying to get at in last week’s debate, when he rambled about Vladimir Putin telling Donald Trump to “do whatever you want” and invade Ukraine. Needless to say, most viewers didn’t come away thinking that Biden had gotten the best of the exchange.)

And then there are the people who are freaked out about Trump trying to rule as a dictator. They point to his refusal to concede the last election until after the mob action of 6 January, his occasional threats to prosecute or jail his political opponents, and his Supreme Court win on Monday where the majority opinion declared him immune for prosecution for all “official acts” committed while in office (while leaving it to the three dissenters to point out that “all official acts” might include ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate his political opponents.)

But I’m still not convinced that Trump is a unique danger to the Republic above and beyond what’s been happening for the last fifty or sixty years. After all, there are already tens of thousands of people in this country who are absolutely immune from punishment for their “official acts,” no matter how lawless. We call these people “judges” and “prosecutors.” And I’ve already written here about the key SCOTUS case establishing judicial immunity – Stump v. Sparkman, decided way back in 1978 – in which the Court ruled that parents have the right to surgically sterilize their children if they get a judge’s permission first, even if the judge doesn’t examine any evidence and doesn’t justify his decision by citing any laws.

Nothing that Trump has been accused of doing is even close to this bad. (While his antics in the wake of the last election were childish and embarrassing, it’s important to note that he never ordered anyone to do anything violent).

However, if the Democrats win the 2024 election, they’re only a few judicial seats away from creating a universal right to sterilize one’s child (this time in the name of LGBT rights rather than eugenics, but the result is much the same). And they’re just as close to reinstating the Chevron doctrine, Roe v. Wade, and race-based university admissions, opening up the border even wider, and doing a lot of other bad things which voters and their elected representatives will have no meaningful chance to resist.

Perhaps you remember how, back in 2021, the Director of the CDC singlehandedly imposed a moratorium on all evictions in the country, and when she defended this at the Supreme Court she only lost by 6-3? Well, if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 and appointed the next three justices, then the CDC would probably have won that case. And then the mere fact that the country was undergoing a health emergency would have given CDC Director Rochelle Walensky unlimited legislative power over 330 million other Americans, property rights be damned.

Yes, America, you really did come within one election of giving the CDC Director the powers of Benito Mussolini.

Granted, the fact that the Left has totally ditched the substance of liberal democracy (while still wearing the label) doesn’t prove that Donald Trump is a white knight. And I, for one, have never looked at Trump through rose-colored glasses. I freely admit that Trump is a chaos agent. He has the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old child. While he does love his country and respect his voters in a way that most politicians don’t, he also requires consistent steering from groups like the Federalist Society to direct his energies in useful directions.

But Trump, during his first term, definitely had some big achievements. He appointed originalist judges who are now interpreting the constitution in an impartial manner, and letting both red states and blue states legislate freely on local matters (as I’ve explained here) unless there’s a good textual reason to do otherwise. Trump avoided starting any new wars, and he successfully pressured America’s allies in both Europe and Asia into putting more resources into their own defense. Trump got the country moving away from free trade – and the Biden Administration has continued and expanded his policy of decoupling with China, without giving him credit for it. And so forth.

Voting for Trump carries risks. But a vote for Biden (or for Harris, if the Democrats are freaked out enough over Biden’s obvious senility to replace him at the last minute) is a vote to keep on sleepwalking into ruin.

What does that ruin look like? The regulation that the Supreme Court overturned last Friday, over the wailing of so many Democrats, is as good an example as any of the way that Biden’s people think our country should be governed.

At issue in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo was a rule that required fishermen in the North Atlantic to pay the salaries of the federal inspectors who were stationed on their boats. The National Marine Fisheries Service has authority, under a 1976 Act of Congress, to make fishermen carry federal monitors aboard their vessels, but this law doesn’t make the fishermen pay the monitors’ salaries – that came from a 2013 rule change that never passed through Congress.

The bureaucrats argued before the Court that, under the Chevron doctrine, courts must defer to an administrative agency’s interpretation of its own rules so long as said interpretation doesn’t plainly conflict with the text of the relevant statute. The Court, rather than allow such an obvious abuse of power, overruled the Chevron doctrine entirely.

But before getting into the weeds of stare decisis and rival schools of statutory interpretation, let us think for a moment about who this particular rule was harming the most. Was it mainly a problem for large fishing firms with dozens of crew on each boat, and with the right connections in government to make sure that the inspector always reported that the rules were being followed, whether they were actually being followed or not? Or did it mostly hurt small, family-owned boats that often go to sea with only five people aboard, and whose owners couldn’t afford to support a sixth at a much higher salary than they themselves were making?

Democrats, as it turns out, are not the party of the working poor, and they haven’t been for a long time. (The idle poor do fine under Democratic rule, as do the well-connected rich, and pretty-much anyone at any income level who works for the government).

Wealthy progressives know how to make sure that the burdens of progressivism fall on everyone but themselves. When they’re annoyed about racial disparities in education, they loosen up discipline and do away with gifted programs at the public schools… while doing nothing to the private schools where they send their own kids. When someone like George Floyd becomes a martyr for the criminal underclass, they put a bunch of soft-on-crime Soros DAs into office… while continuing to live in low-crime areas themselves, and/or in houses surrounded by private security.

When they want to show that they care about the environment, they enact or expand laws like NEPA, which allow private litigants to halt infrastructure projects of all kinds for years or even decades – and not just things like coal mines and oil pipelines, but also solar plants, high speed rail, and other projects that environmentalists in theory should like. So the poor pay the burden, in the form of lost jobs, or a lack of good rail transportation, or higher power bills, while the lawyers and bureaucrats who imposed all this continue to jet around the country, burning mostly imported fuel, and making much bigger carbon footprints then the proles whom they despise.

Re-electing Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, means more of this. Plus more pornography in the public schools, more illegal aliens pouring in at a rate of two or three million each year, and a continuation of the dangerous Biden foreign policy that needlessly provokes enemies we’re not actually willing to fight, encourages foreign countries to neglect their militaries and rely on America for their defense, and then refuses to get directly involved when these countries need America to defend them.

A Biden/Harris win means that, twenty or thirty years from now, our children will live in an impoverished, crime-ridden country with hardly any infrastructure left, where they have little personal freedom, and where most of their labor goes toward supporting a huge parasitic class of bureaucrats, lawyers, DEI officers, and other plunderers whose action aren’t subject to any democratic limits. And also some of these people (both the children and the bureaucrats) will be eunuchs. Just like in the Byzantine Empire.

(And there will be more foreign wars. There is a reason that Russia took territory from Ukraine during the presidencies of both Obama and Biden, but not Trump. And the clueless foreign policy of the Obama Administration, and the Bush Administration before it, is a big part of that reason.)

A Trump win, on the other hand, could mean anything. Perhaps Trump will appoint even more originalist judges, and also fill his cabinet with policy wonks from the Heritage Foundation who will begin the long, slow work of dismantling the administrative state and the coercive equity regime, and of restoring the lion’s share of political power to state and local governments where it belongs.

But perhaps Trump will crash the global dollar economy, by trying to mint a trillion dollar coin, or allowing China to invade Taiwan (a country which has done a very poor job of carrying its own burdens) or some other destabilizing move. And then America’s near instant transition to third-world living conditions will probably trigger a regime change.

Perhaps the Democrats will panic at the thought of a Trump dictatorship, and the blue states will try to secede from the Union rather than accept him as President. Perhaps Trump will be overthrown in a military coup. Perhaps something entirely different will happen. (A successful Trump dictatorship isn’t a serious possibility; Trump is just too old and too indisciplined, and has too few powerful friends, to pull it off.)

So why am I choosing the chaos candidate? Because even the bad outcomes of a Trump presidency – economic crash, secession, military coup – are better than the slow but certain decline that we’ll get if we return to progressive rule. Yes, those things sound scary, but think about it. If we end up with a military dictatorship, then everyone, Republican and Democrat alike, will be forced to admit that what we called “liberal democracy” in the late twentieth century was a failure – and then we’ll have a chance to come together and fight for something better. And if the country breaks into pieces, then it’s virtually certain that at least one of those pieces will restore something resembling an old-fashioned constitutional republic. (And the present ruling class will fall from power everywhere.)

Now it’s also a possibility that Trump wins the 2024 election, assumes office peacefully, and then gets stymied by the Deep State, enacts no meaningful reforms, and lets his whole movement get sloughed off in 2028, after which the progressives return to business as usual. But with Trump, that’s only a risk. With Biden, it’s a certainty.

And that’s where 1776 comes in. Because Americans living during the Revolutionary War – and especially at the beginning of the war, when the battle lines weren’t clearly drawn – had a similar choice to make.

They could refuse to fight for their liberties. They could content themselves with saying that British rule wasn’t wholly bad, and that the taxes they were forced to pay were small, and that even being a second-class citizen within the British empire was still better than living under the Bourbons or the Hapsburgs or any of other regimes that existed at the time.

But the Patriots were too brave and too proud to settle for this. They were unwilling to live under a government that thought they had left their rights as Englishmen at the dockside when they boarded ships for the New World. They felt just as much loyalty to their own representative assemblies in the colonies as anyone back in Britain felt to the Parliament in London, and they weren’t going to let their assemblies get stripped of power, and their rights get eaten away little by little, until they ended up in a similar condition to the Irish.

These are the ideas that Thomas Paine was writing about in his first American Crisis pamphlet, which George Washington read to the Continental Army a few days before the famous march on Trenton in December of 1776. Here is an excerpt that’s worth pondering. (Tories, in the language of the day, are the Americans still loyal to Lord North’s regime):

I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.

But, before the line of irrecoverable separation be drawn between us, let us reason the matter together: Your conduct is an invitation to the enemy, yet not one in a thousand of you has heart enough to join him. Howe is as much deceived by you as the American cause is injured by you.

He expects you will all take up arms, and flock to his standard, with muskets on your shoulders. Your opinions are of no use to him, unless you support him personally, for 'tis soldiers, and not Tories, that he wants.

I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! give me peace in my day."

Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;" and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

The siren song of “peace in our time” is an old one. But Thomas Paine saw right through it. He knew that fighting in the Patriot cause was dangerous. He knew that Washington’s army might lose. And every soldier who enlisted in that army knew that, even if the Patriots won, he personally might not be alive to see it happen.

But these men also knew that the alternative was a certain loss of their liberties, and the certainty that their children, after growing up under tyranny, would probably have to fight out the same war all over again without any of the advantages which their fathers had had.

And the Patriots feared that more than they feared the British cannons and muskets. So they fought, and in the end, they won their freedom.

We Americans in 2024 have to make a similar choice. Will we choose the uncertainty of a Trump victory – which carries the possibility of a constitutional crisis, the possibility of disunion and violence, but also the possibility of cashiering the present ruling class and moving the country back toward liberty? Or will we choose “peace in our day,” and with it, a slow but certain slide even deeper into despotism?