Move Over Grover Cleveland!

Thoughts on the second president to win nonconsecutive terms.

If I were a full-time writer, then I would probably have posted my thoughts on this election two days ago. I might have even sat down last week to write two articles, one each for a Trump/Vance win and a Harris/Walz win. But it turns out that I’m the sort of person who has a lot of other responsibilities in life, responsibilities that don’t have anything to do with politics, so it might take a while, after a big event like what happened on Tuesday, for me to get my thoughts together.

I am very happy that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance won this time, and that, as a consequence, Grover Cleveland will no longer be the only US president with non-consecutive terms. (Does that mean most people will forget that he ever existed? That would be sad – he was a good president.)

And I’m happy to see that not only did Trump and Vance win, they won the popular vote, and improved over Trump’s 2020 performance in all fifty states, and massively improved among all the non-Germanic races that Democrats insist that you have to hate in order to be a Trump voter. (Trump and Vance even got a majority of Hispanic men!) And then there is the Senate, where the Republicans went from 49 seats to 53, and the House of Representatives, which they held.

I wasn’t involved in Trump’s ground game this time like I was in 2016 – I happen to live in a state that’s deep red right now, so there’s less to do in person – but I gave money to the campaign, and I supported it with American Thinker articles (reposted at my Substack here, here, here, and here). So I still get to say that I did a small part to make this happen.

I’ll write later about why I think the Democrats fell short of almost everyone’s expectations. (Mostly it’s a combination of their having no positive vision of their own beyond “Trump bad, Kamala brat,” and their patronizing obsession with race and sex. Well, that and also inflation, and the events in Afghanistan and Ukraine and Israel, and the dishonesty of hiding Joe Biden’s condition as long as possible and then swapping out the candidates at the last moment. The Democrats have not lost a presidential election this badly since 1988.)

I am especially excited to see how J.D. Vance does in the vice-presidency.

Until now, Trump’s movement has been hobbled by (1) his lack of an heir and (2) what seems, a lot of the time, to be his lack of a brain. Granted, Mr. Trump is great with a crowd, and he was the only serious candidate with the vision to see past the dead ideologies of the pre-2016 GOP, and he’s even racked up a good record on the issues where presidents are the least constrained – that is, foreign policy and judicial appointments.

But the plain truth is that Trump also indulges in a lot more useless bullshitting than a typical politician, and he never had the discipline to do anything substantial with legislation or the civil service. (Does anyone remember the border wall?) J.D. Vance, who is a much more intellectual man by nature, and a more disciplined man by training (read Hillbilly Elegy) likely does have the qualities to make progress on those things. So I am crossing my fingers that Trump will keep Vance close instead of letting his administration get steered in circles by grifters and establishment hacks like he did the first time around.

And now for the big question: What can we – and by we I mean men and women of the Right who know how bad the situation is – expect to gain from this win in the long run?

Well, as much as I hate to say it, I don’t see it as a big turning point for America. I don’t think that people in the 22^nd or 23^rd century are going to look back on the first or second Trump Administrations (or even the Vance Administration, if there is one) as the time that the United States got back on firm footing. There are just too many problems that nobody, not even J.D. Vance or Rand Paul or Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell or even Elon Musk, has any idea how to solve.

We are still running up $2 trillion deficits to pay for out-of-control entitlement spending. Our industrial base has been so badly strangled by regulatory agencies and (to a lesser extent) bad trade policy that we’re only able to maintain a first-world living standard because US dollars are in demand everywhere – a circumstance that won’t last forever (especially with a spending level that’s likely to cause hyperinflation within the next two decades). Young people are, for the most part, irreligious, deeply in debt, and so badly wrecked by a combination of social media, pornography, and psych drugs that they suffer from record-low rates of marriage and childbearing, and frequent deaths of despair. Our foreign allies, long used to Americans caring more about their defense than they themselves do, have grown soft and are now easy targets for the revisionist powers that look forward to America’s decline.

None of these problems are going away because of an election. And I, for my part, am going to keep the upside-down flag as my avatar, since the overall theme of this blog – that my country is in deep distress and there’s nothing to be gained by burying one’s head in the sand – still holds.

The main benefits of the Trump/Vance victory, in my opinion, are that:

(1)   Trump is less likely than Harris to blunder the United States into a large war, and more likely to pressure the democracies of Europe and Asia to make themselves strong enough to survive a war on their own.

(2)  Trump’s judges will be friendlier to small business, gun owners, and religious people than Harris’ judges would have been.

(3)  When the next big crisis comes, it is more likely to end with the United States splitting up (hopefully temporarily!) into a collection of successor republics, than with the whole country transforming, in one piece, into a sprawling late-Roman style autocracy.

(4)  Child castration is less likely to be normalized.

All of these are worth struggling for, and Tuesday’s vote has gotten us a lot closer to achieving them.

In terms of immediate threats to the stability of the United States, I don’t see much to be concerned about. Resistance to the election result by the Democrats was only a possibility if it was extremely close, and if most Democrats believed it had somehow been stolen – if, for instance, both candidates claimed to have won some crucial state or states, and the matter was settled by Congress or the Supreme Court on a party-line vote like in 1876 or 2000. But Trump won by a big enough margin that this won’t happen. The ways we might still get a breakdown of order are now (1) direct war with Russia or China or (2) mass deportations sparking massed violent resistance. But neither of these are likely to happen without a lot of warning beforehand, and a lot of chances for the various parties to back down.

At the end of the day, most of the things which patriots would do well to put their spare efforts into are apolitical and (for some people) boring. Live frugally. Learn how to garden, if you can, and learn first aid and how to shoot. (Rifle for infantry combat, shotgun for drone clearing.) If, like me, you live near a nuclear power plant, then get some potassium iodide pills – those reactors were generally designed to run for just 40 years, but nowadays the amount of red tape involved in building a new one is so high that some are getting their licenses extended to 60 or even 100 years.

If you have children, be choosy about their education – both about where they go to school, and what media they read or watch. If they’re not old enough to drive, they should not have smartphones. If you keep them away from wayward peers and vulgar television, and off of psych drugs, even the common ones like Ritalin (remember that not too long ago giving toddlers morphine for teething pains was common), and if you make sure they spend a lot of their time in nature, and a lot of their time with old books that teach virtue in all of the senses of that word, then they’ll probably turn out fine. Otherwise, all of the votes that you’ve cast for Donald Trump might as well have gone to Jill Stein, since politics is merely about the future, while children are the future.

Get involved in local communities – churches, schools, societies promoting sports or arts or music or handicrafts, gardening clubs, fraternal orders, and whatever other organizations you can join that will help you learn useful skills – including the skill of small-group self-government, since all of the really great republics are built out of a great many little republics. And in the process you’ll make friends who will have your back in a time of crisis. (Unless politics is your day job, then you should mostly join societies that aren’t political. Politicized prepper and militia orgs have lots of infighting, and their members tend to get bored and walk away when the years go by and “the happening” doesn’t happen.)

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance might end up doing things in office that make it easier for us to preserve our way of life. Or they might fail. But either way, it’s mostly up to us commoners to decide whether there will be any authentically American civilization left to preserve.