Why I Voted Against the Democrats
I don’t care for Trump, but I needed to strike back against the hectoring and fanaticism of the left.
Excerpt:
We agreed about the illiberal trends we were seeing, especially in public schools. Extended Covid closures even as much of the rest of the country was reopening. Teachers’ strikes blocking roads. Soaring rates of transgenderism in urban teens. Glaring educational inequities between white and black areas, despite the teaching of “critical race theory” as early as third grade.
My people were so bathed in righteousness, they’d become a living satire. For three months, I sat on a Minnesota water-conservation board with wealthy travelers who kept golf courses green while recommending water rationing for farmers. The group’s leader proposed we stage a “Pearl Harbor level” event that would scare the public into taking shorter showers.
Any objection to such ideas is met with gentle murmuring about xenophobia or fascism. Yard-sign speech is rhetorical kryptonite, especially in an all-blue place.
That’s what Americans like me voted against. We didn’t vote for Mr. Trump. We voted to stop the cancerous mutation of well-intended ideas, misused by institutions, turned self-serving and dictatorial by an elite few. This is the story of so many catastrophes, from Lysenkoism and the internment of Japanese Americans to weapons of mass destruction and the Patriot Act. We’ve been watching parallel manias unfold on myriad fronts.
Loving acceptance of trans people was transformed into speech control, and a consumer pool for Big Pharma’s hormone treatments. Empowerment of educators became disregard for the well-being of kids. Opposition to racism morphed into elaborate and profitable shaming rituals. Privileged, lucky people filched the causes of the impoverished, becoming irate and striking back when the downtrodden dared speak for themselves.
Speech has been under attack, universally. Many people I know voted against Mr. Trump in part because he has threatened to shut down unfriendly media. This is a position I respect. But from my vantage point—shared by many of my fellow anti-Harris voters—it is the Democrats who have gone too far, breaching our First Amendment rights again and again, using canny convolutions like “misinformation” and “conspiracy” to justify suppressing ideas they don’t like.
We voted to check the momentum of these movements—to halt a progressive disease. We voted against the idea that going further is always better. In our hearts, many of us were striking back against the hectoring superiority, the people who told us we were too stupid to understand, or too racist, too sexist, too self-hating, too similar to Nazis. We voted to make those fiercely divisive and destructive arguments stop.
I realized my friend had a point about the drawbacks of voting for a candidate. The last time I did so was in 2012. Barack Obama was smooth and kind and wicked smart. He wept over slain children (authentically, I believe), spoke with everyman authority, and had great taste in music and books. I felt a deep emotional tie to this man who represented hope and change. How lovely, how feel-good, how vague. Yet I—along with my community—felt held and “seen” and celebrated when he prevailed.
Years later, the revelations about Mr. Obama started to emerge. Like old infidelities, each one was a slap. The razing of protected park land in Chicago so his presidential library would have a better view. Invented histories that casually elide his cronyism and transactional social climbing. His lavish, star-infested 200-guest birthday party during Covid shutdowns. More recently, his astonishing condescension stumping for Ms. Harris, when he scolded black men for their assumed sexism and told them how to vote.
Voting for a candidate back then led me to soft criteria: charm, warmth, a quick smile. Ultimately I felt disappointed and betrayed—the pitfalls of an emotional relationship. None of this is at play with Mr. Trump. I’m not looking for him to be charming or warm; I don’t care for “YMCA.” I often dislike the things he says.
His behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, was egregious, pure hubris, and it might have been disqualifying if not for the confounding response from Democrats, who seized on the event and used it to justify constitutional infringements from that day forward. In a recent echo of this effect, I cringed and nearly caved in the day a comedian told an inexcusably offensive joke at Mr. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But my will to vote against the Democratic regime was resurrected when President Biden sneered that more than half of the country’s citizens were “garbage” for supporting Trump.
I fear the sway of Big Pharma, the mad scientific modification of children, inflationary monetary policy and Cheneyesque forever wars. More than anything, I cherish freedom of expression and believe it is our most spiritual right. Prayer, poetry, stories, music—they’re what lift us above this mortal space. Ideas have metaphysical weight. I’d rather die than live in a world without this freedom, which I saw Democrats repeatedly trying to control and restrict.
My best wager in 2024 is that Messrs. Trump and Vance will put the brakes on these dangerous runaway trends.
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