The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election in a Philosophic and Historic Context

Time is Running Out on a World-Historic Idea

America was and is a magnificent, transformative, world-altering idea. Consequently, when it was reasonably consistently implemented in politics, the results were world historical. The lingering effects of those results are still standing and enduring. But something fundamental changed long ago.

In his seminal works The Ominous Parallels and The DIM Hypothesis, philosopher Leonard Peikoff has explicated what changed and why. First, German philosophy was imported into American universities. Concomitantly, since around the 1880s, American politics have become increasingly German and distinctly not American (in the context of this country’s founding).

There were fits and starts of a counterrevolution. The best example is President Calvin Coolidge, but the maligned President Warren Harding’s laissez-faire approach to the Depression of 1920 quickly ended that economic contraction and is another example. (That is one reason most people have never heard of the Depression of 1920—it is a refutation of modern politics and economics.) But most political trends since the election of Herbert Hoover in 1928 have moved America away from its fundamental roots as a rights-respecting republic that guaranteed liberty of the mind and body, including economic liberty, into something that was increasingly, fundamentally, anti-American.

No, the country was never consistent politically. Fortunately, the worst, blackest contradiction, chattel slavery, was eradicated by more consistent American heroes and other Western heroes. At that time, the nation and culture were essentially still a product of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. Within decades, that would start changing as those anti-Enlightenment, anti-American ideas permeated first the ivory towers than the rest of the culture (as Peikoff and his mentor Ayn Rand detail in their books). As a consequence, the country and its culture started to drift politically. The result has ben an exponentially increasing, anti-American statism. This politics, the opposite of the political views that thrived during the Enlightenment, violates rights instead of protecting them. (This is a bipartisan phenomenon. Herbert Hoover, e.g., was a. Republican.)

Which brings me to the subject of the 2024 presidential election …

As office holders have progressively deteriorated after Calvin Coolidge, the candidates who became presidents (and most who ran and lost) have, necessarily, also progressively deteriorated.

In 1996, a commentator whose name I do not remember wrote that she envied the voters of twenty years earlier. In her view, the 1976 presidential election was a race between flawed candidates but was a more or less black-and-white choice with an obvious favorite. She referred to Bill Clinton and Bob Dole as “two shades of mottled gray”. I agreed at the time but no longer think Gerald Ford was as favorable as she and I did then.

In 2004, blogger Gary Cruse wrote, “People have been voting for the lesser of two evils for so long that evil is all that’s left, now.” I agreed then, and I agree now.