Existential Threats

Existential Threats

By

Leonard Zwelling

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/kamala-harris-is-an-artless-dodger-she-evades-every-question-of-substance-7cd0d26b?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns would have you believe that if the other wins the presidential election, an existential threat to the United States as a country will come to pass. This is nonsense on every level.

If Mr. Trump wins, it’s not like he hasn’t been in the White House before. He has. We expect that he will use the full power of his office to sculpt a government to his liking especially in his appointments to the executive agencies and the federal courts. After all, that’s exactly what he did with his Supreme Court appointments. You may not like the decisions that have come down since the three Trump justices were installed, but the country still lives. It is, as Peggy Noonan notes in the attached from The Wall Street Journal on September 21, awful, but survivable.

If Ms. Harris wins, you can expect a pretty similar cast of characters as work for Joe Biden. There will be a more leftward tilt to decisions and appointments and there will be far fewer massive changes than are expected if Mr. Trump is at the helm. In truth, as Ms. Noonan also notes, Ms. Harris won’t answer questions about any of her proposed policies. She’s Empty compared to Mr. Trump’s Awful. You choose: Empty or Awful.

In neither case is the country in an existential crisis. Congress is still there to do next to nothing but prevent the passage of bad bills. It is likely to do that, thank goodness.

The Supreme Court will stay on its originalist track, which is probably bad for public health. For example, to use the originalist argument about guns when guns in 1789 were muskets and were not assault weapons—well, you get it. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will remain embarrassments and Chief Justice Roberts will try to assert some sort of control, probably without success. The country will survive.

If you want to see some real existential threats, you must look overseas. Surely Ukraine is in dire straits. Russia wants all of it. Putin is like a Pac-Man on steroids and if he gets Ukraine he will aim for the Baltic states next.

In the Middle East all the chickens are coming home to roost. The many Iranian proxies that have caused serious mischief throughout the region are now being met with Israeli force. Israel is not going to tolerate Hezbollah determining which parts of Israel its people can inhabit. The 60,000 or so who have left northern Israel want to go back home and the government wants them there. Israel has to make a key decision about what the West Bank is going to be. Is any of it going to be a Palestinian state? Is all of it going to be annexed by Israel? And ultimately, is Iran going to acquire nuclear weapons and if they get close will Israel or the United States allow that? Now there’s an existential crisis.

If there is an existential threat domestically, it comes from the extremes of both parties. The left wing of the Democratic Party appears to be pro-Palestinian. This is not tolerable. The extremists on the right marched up Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. That’s what an existential threat looks like.

There are existential threats in the world, too in Ukraine, Israel, Iran, and Russia, not to mention Taiwan. But there are existential threats in the United States from those on the extremes of the political spectrum. The next president will have to deal with all of this.

So, choose, as Ms. Noonan says. Empty vs. Awful. Neither is an existential threat. Neither is likely to improve the true existential threats that are present at home or abroad.