The 2024 election was a referendum like no other. Unlike past elections, it was not an inconsequential choice. It was not a choice between candidates who campaign as political opponents with competing philosophies and different visions (as those erudite pundits characterize most presidential elections) but then govern indistinguishably as uniparty puppets. It was not that kind of election in which, regardless of partisan proclamations, all candidates eventually become foreign policy McCains and domestic policy New Deal, Great Society, Keynesian drunken sailors with a modern monetary theory open bar. 

This was the kind of election in which I felt compelled to wait for the inauguration before even seriously reflecting on it, just to make sure it would really happen. While the election did involve major themes and core concepts of rights and liberties that have always defined our country, the election also seemed unusually personal. For this was an election that took direct aim at me and how I think, how I think of America, how I am for civil liberties and limited government and against the welfare state and the warfare state and the wokefare and the lawfare. It felt like a referendum at least in part on those who think like me, whether often or occasionally.

It was as if we were on the ballot, asking voters to determine whether we are racists, misogynists, deplorables, threats to democracy, domestic terrorists, and garbage, or simply Americans. And anyone who would associate, however tenuously, with garbage would also have to be considered garbage or garbage adjacent creatures, like cockroaches. So if your candidate loses an election, you could wake up one day and find that you are a cockroach, just like Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. If you persist in your traditional American ways with your liberty-minded rights-based American ideals, you could wake up one day and find that you........

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