We are officially in the final hours of the 2024 presidential election and the only thing we can say for sure is that most people are upset and unhappy about the options before them.

Supermajorities of voters systematically say that the country is on the wrong track. Neither of the two main party candidates is seen favorably by a majority of voters.

The polls therefore give rise to a neck-and-neck election. Last-minute pitches from candidates mostly boil down to Why the other side deserves to lose. Reluctant voters’ last-minute explanations of who they are voting for also mostly describe what they are voting against.

“Never Trump” conservative David French used its Sunday New York Times A column to argue that a Harris victory offers the opportunity to break the “unique influence over Republican hearts and minds” that Donald Trump possesses.

Across the aisle, comedian and vaguely conservative political commentator Bridget Phetasy explained that she “is not voting for Donald J. Trump. I am voting against the left” and its “anti-civilizationist” attitudes on the crime, transgender and cancellation. culture.

This is not a unique opinion. People who have never voted for Trump before say they plan to vote for him in 2024 as their candidate. protest against the party that “closed playgrounds and schools, but opened dog parks and liquor stores.”

No matter who one supports, everyone has a palpable feeling that the best this election can offer is a chance to save the country from the worst cultural and political trends of the last decade.

In a Monday Substack essay, pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson summed up this collective attitude like the “stop the madness” election.

In the focus groups she conducted, Anderson says few voters focused much on specific policies. Instead, they said their vote was about “returning this country to a place all citizens can be proud of,” that the election marks “a turning point in whether our democracy endures or dies,” and that they were very worried. on “my right to exist, to live and to be free”.

“You may think you know which party someone is voting for from these answers. I assure you that is not the case,” Anderson writes. “Despite the fact that we are so divided, I am struck by how many Trump and Harris voters are talking about the election in these terms.”

All these voters risk being disappointed. The only thing we can be sure of about the 2024 election results is that the madness won’t stop.

We know this because we have already experienced both outcomes that elections offer.

We know what a Trump victory means in defeating the “anti-civilizationist” tendencies of the left. We know what a Trump defeat means to close the book on toxic Trumpian populism.

Into an insightful weekend column, The New York TimesRoss Douthat details how liberals failed to keep their post-2016 promise that they would “avoid madness, maintain stability, and demonstrate intelligence and competence far beyond that of Trump and his servants.”

Instead, he claims, they added to Trump’s madness with their own madness; enact authoritarian COVID-related policies, promote unproven treatments for gender dysphoria in children, and abandon the very concepts of law enforcement and border security.

The result is that what liberals wanted to believe was an “obvious” choice between Trump and the adults in the room is actually a bitter fight in which the “healthy” option is far from clear.

You don’t have to agree with all of Douthat’s diagnoses of liberalism’s failures to understand why many conservative and moderate Trump-skeptical voters still think he can be a bulwark against the continuing unreason of LEFT.

And yet, anyone who thinks that voting for Trump will mitigate the excesses of Trump-era liberalism is mistaken.

The so-called “anti-civilizational” attitudes of the left were not defeated during Trump’s first term. On the contrary, they accelerated against him. Cancel culture, political correctness, “wokeness,” and “follow the science” fanaticism all reached their peak under his administration.

Trump’s control of the White House has been unable to stop broad cultural forces that often manifest in state, local and corporate politics beyond the control of the executive branch. Trump’s polarizing ownership of the bully pulpit has only encouraged the liberal excesses that his voters (whether diehards or reluctant) so detest.

The Biden administration has been remarkably left-leaning. However, it is over the last four years that we have seen waking up relaxes as a political force and identity politics begins to lose its grip on the discourse.

Trump’s return to the White House will reverse this trend. His supernatural ability to irritate his adversaries will once again agitate the most fervent, most ridiculous elements of the democratic “resistance”. Expect to see more of cancel culture, not less, under a second Trump.

Meanwhile, a Harris victory cannot hope to purge politics of Trumpian populism or even the man himself. We have already conducted this experiment as well.

Biden won the White House in large part because of voter exhaustion with Trump and the daily chaos he created.

Rather than accept this limited mandate to govern as a moderate, Biden transformed his administration to the most left-leaning partisans in the room who then regulated aggressively, spent with inflationary abandon, and pushed a progressive, hard-line agenda on social and environmental issues.

The electorate largely hated the results. By the end of the night, he may well choose to punish the Democrats by putting Trump back in power.

In a final effort to prevent this eventuality and to compensate for the manifest unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration, the Democrats tried to make the most of the day of January 6. decision to hold his final large-scale rally at the same location where, several years earlier, Trump had urged his supporters to march in force to the capital.

This attack also failed, and predictably so.

That’s because Democrats can only invoke January 6 as a cudgel, not an olive branch.

Their message to moderates, conservatives, libertarians, and anyone skeptical of Trump is not that they will lead a moderate, inclusive administration. The last four years prove that this is not the case. Rather, the Democrats’ message is: “No matter how much you hate our policies, Trump is even worse, so you should let go and vote for us.”

Perhaps the best summary of this abhorrent speech came from US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a few weeks ago. “Libertarians: If that’s not a five-alarm fire to you, then what is?” he job on Washington Post article about former Trump advisors warning he would use the military against American citizens.

It apparently did not occur to Buttigieg, or his boss, that libertarian-leaning voters would have been a little more receptive to this speech if the last four years of their governance had been vaguely libertarian.

Indeed, during the 2024 campaign, neither Trump nor Harris spent much time claiming they would reduce the size and scope of government. Libertarians can expect few policy victories over the next four years.

Nor should voters of all stripes expect our politics to improve.

There are a lot of destructive and toxic things going on in American public life right now. It’s no surprise that everyone is unhappy, most people vote for the lesser of two evils (if they feel motivated to vote), and we continue to play ping-pong between unpopular and unsuccessful administrations .

To transcend this sad status quo will require talented and transformative candidates. None are on the ballot today.

Bad policies and bad ideas cannot be fixed by bad candidates. But in this election, we only have bad candidates to choose from.