Price In The Pain

No.224: August 16, 2024

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Dear Friends,

The U.S. Presidential election is only eighty or so days away, and I do not intend to write much about the race. I know that my ambivalence to politics at the moment can seem to people like I think I am “above it all.” But it is much more like I am below it all. I think the cold, hard, stark reality beneath all the breathless hype is that everything about this election season is awful, that there is no outcome that is an unalloyed good, and I think that more people need to come down here into the Pit of Despair™ and make their peace with that fact. I assure you that this is not cynicism. It is better for one’s mental health to confront reality as it is, not reality as one might wish it to be.

I vividly remember election night in 1992. Our pastor and his wife came over to our house to watch the returns. We were all dismayed when the networks called the race for Bill Clinton—we had been told, of course, that this was “the most important election of our lifetimes” and that if Clinton won “America is over.” My pastor stood up from the couch and said, “Well, we’ve survived bad administrations before.” And what do you know? We did, indeed, survive.

Likewise, I was dismayed when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. I had been assured that this, too, was “the most important election of my lifetime” and that if Obama won “America is over.” We survived. Eight years of that smug, arrogant, condescending brand of leadership that, looking back, barely accomplished a single left-wing policy aim besides adding a few trillion to the debt [Donald Trump: “Hold my beer”] and screwing up the health insurance system even more. By my count, I have survived all twelve of the “most important elections” of my lifetime.

All that is to say that I fully expect that the Harris Administration (sorry to break it to you, but that’s the more-likely-than-not outcome) is going to be awful. The smart thing is to do what financial markets do with future expectations: price it in. I mean psychologically price it in. Assume the worst, and plan accordingly. America is about to hire one of two highly unqualified people to run the executive branch of the government for four years, and then we’ll have an opportunity to hire someone else. That’s what is at stake: not the “end of America.” The good news is that our Constitutional order contains a multitude of countervailing forces that serve to frustrate even the most rabid of ideologues (especially the most rabid, because they always overreach and provoke negative reaction). The most important counterweight being, in this case, the United States Senate. And if you are looking for a silver lining in this approaching Super Cell thunderhead, turn your gaze to the Treasure State: Montana.