The election has kept me in a state of paralysis

This is the last column I’ll file before the American presidential election, and I’ve dreaded writing it for months. (The next one, filed on election day itself, may prove impossible. Perhaps that’s when I’ll choose to share my recipe for parsley as a side vegetable.) Meanwhile, I’ve watched fellow “double haters” squirm in print. There are two models for wrestling with this dilemma, one exemplified by Andrew Sullivan. The conservative commentator “came out” in a September Substack newsletter — no, not in that dated sense: everyone knows he’s gay — in support of Kamala Harris, only to lavish the overwhelming majority of that column on what a ghastly candidate she is.

I find it impossible to determine which victorious candidate could turn out to be worse

The second model for facing down two flagrantly unacceptable electoral choices has been embodied by my friend Bret Stephens, a long-standing Never Trumper whose 2016 opposition to the Donald alienated him from his colleagues at the Wall Street Journal but inspired a job offer from the New York Times. While as committed as ever to opposing his Republican bête noir, Bret announced in an NYT column weeks ago that he couldn’t vote for Kamala Harris. She still hadn’t furnished substantive answers to a range of crucial policy questions. This puristic fence-sitting has driven the Democratic readership insane. It’s provided a running theme for Bret’s weekly public dialogue with the more liberal columnist Gail Collins, who’s never stopped nagging him to man up and back the only halfway level-headed, law-abiding candidate who has a chance of becoming president of the United States.

Academically, I profoundly sympathize with Andrew’s contention that any former president who has hindered the peaceful transfer of power, and any candidate who refuses to commit to accepting the results of the election, has invalidated himself for high office. But I am so blindingly bored by countless hysterical screeds decrying the character of Donald Trump and deploring the guy as a “threat to democracy” that I’m loath to subject you to more of the same. For what gets less play is the “Democratic” Party’s threat to democracy.

Granted, our friend Kamala is an empty pantsuit, insecure and at least subconsciously aware that she’s in this thing way over her head. So if she wins, her presidency will likely be titular. She will do as she’s told by the same handlers who controlled her senile predecessor, and her administration will pursue four more years of roughly the same progressive policies. That makes her sound like the safer bet. But continuing the same policies is only safe if those policies were ever safe, and there’s nothing safe about four more years of willful self-destruction.

More of this: an effectively open border letting in millions of low-skilled foreigners who will be a net loss to the taxpayer over their lifetimes and are already burdening major American cities such as Chicago and New York with bankrupting bills for free food, healthcare, schooling and accommodation. Whatever Harris claims now to get elected, she will continue to placate the climate change lobby, subsidizing costly green energy while denying licenses for oil and gas exploration and pipelines, thereby hobbling what had previously constituted an economic miracle and freed the US from Middle Eastern blackmail. Expect more gratuitous net-zero suicide.

Harris supports divisive, unaffordable and arbitrary reparations for slavery. In 2019, she committed to “equity” — Marxist equality of outcome, not opportunity. Elements of her current platform pandering to black male voters reflect the heavy-handed racial preferences that “equity” demands. They include a promise to provide black entrepreneurs with $20,000 “fully forgivable” loans — which sound awfully like presents to me and which, being race-based, would be unconstitutional.

But since when did Democrats care about the constitution? Supreme Court packing, Senate packing with new, Democratically controlled states (DC and Puerto Rico) and backhandedly abolishing the Electoral College all happily rattle in their bag of prospective tricks. The party has shamelessly weaponized the judicial system to keep Trump off the ballot or throw him in jail, which is creepy even to people like me who despise the guy. Democratic refusal to prosecute shoplifting abandons the state’s protection of private property. The Biden administration has systematically pressured social media companies to censor or suppress commentary unfriendly to government policy; Harris has never distanced herself from such violations of the First Amendment.

Last week, Andrew Sullivan admitted that he’s reconsidering voting for Harris, because he’s horrified by her administration’s relentless promotion of chemical and surgical sex “reassignment” for children — though he hasn’t quite formally rescinded his endorsement. By contrast, on Monday my friend Bret finally capitulated to the inevitable for any Never Trumper, conceding in his dialogue with Gail Collins that he’d vote for Harris.

I may not have embraced the label, but I’m close to being a Never Trumper myself. That makes me a Harris supporter, right? Besides, while as a voter I’ve the right to a secret ballot (in Democratic New York, it doesn’t matter for whom I vote anyway; relaxing, innit?), surely as a pundit I’m obligated to take a side? At last, I’ve decided the answer is no. I don’t recall “will make emphatic presidential endorsements” in my Spectator contract.

I detest Kamala Harris. Empty, incapable and dim, she’d make for a piss-poor specimen to break the ultimate glass ceiling. To the degree that she has any real convictions, I share few of them. With thanks to Holden Caulfield, I simply can’t bring myself to publicly plump for such a phony. I also can’t bring myself to publicly back Donald Trump. I vowed long ago to never, ever burden myself reputationally with supporting that clown on the record.

I’ve been in a state of paralysis this whole campaign season. I find it impossible to determine which victorious candidate could turn out to be worse. I accept that neutrality amounts to cowardice. Still, at the risk of appearing pathetic, for now I’m sitting this one out. I at least share Gerard Baker’s certainty in the Wall Street Journal this week that my country will survive either terrible president, a fragile confidence which these days has to pass for optimism.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.