Libertarian Institute

My Tenth Depraved Presidential Election

by James Bovard, October 9, 2024

Presidential season is a time for Americans to restore their faith in democracy. How can folks not be filled with gratitude for being permitted a perfunctory choice of who will seize their paychecks and tyrannize them in the following four years?

Actually, I’ve had a bad attitude on presidential elections going back to the end of the Reagan era.

In a 1988 Detroit News piece headlined “Quadrennial Hunt for the Great Man,” I wrote, “Every four years or so, the absurdity of our current system becomes vivid. We have created a huge engine of government—even though there is no one even vaguely capable of intelligently  driving it. We have a paternalistic system where almost everyone has contempt for the  paternalists. The longer we spend searching for a Great Man to save us from weaknesses and our fear of the dark, the more contemptible we will be.”

On the day after the 1992 election, I wrote a spoof titled “The Barf That Broke the New World Order.” I showed step-by-step how President George H.W. Bush barfing on the Japanese Prime Minister in January 1992 cost him the election and changed world history. If Bush had instead thrown up on Lee Iacocca, he would have captured the votes of millions of disgruntled Chrysler owners and won by a landslide. If instead of going to Japan, Bush had gone to a Mideast peace conference and blown groceries on the PLO’s Yassar Arafat, he might have received enough additional votes to carry New York state and its 33 electoral votes. Alas, The Washington Times considered my piece in bad taste and it never got published. Readers were denied learning the clearest lesson of the 1992 election: “Bill Clinton has received an overwhelming mandate from the American people not to publicly vomit on foreign leaders or even White House staffers or lobbyists.”

In 1996, I struck out at The New York Times with a piece titled, “The Fraud of American Democracy.” I wrote, “Modern democracy is based on a blind faith that the people can control what they do not understand…Democracy should be something more than an overglorified, ceremonial choice of cage keepers…The idealizing of American democracy is one of the worst threats to the future of American liberty.” By the standards of media gatekeepers, my cynicism was premature.

In 2000, St. Martin’s Press published Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years, a number one bestseller in Florida before the election. In “Voting is Overrated,” an op-ed picked up in papers around the nation, I declared, “Voting is no substitute for the eternal vigilance that every friend of freedom must demonstrate towards government. If our freedom is to survive, Americans must become far better informed of the dangers from Washington—regardless of who wins the Presidency.”

In 2004, St. Martin’s Press published “The Bush Betrayal,” recapping the worst outrages and biggest lies of the politician who saved America after the 9/11 attacks. That book struck a chord with readers who denounced me as a “communist bastard,” “one sick motherf*****,” “psychotic,” “a gutless individual,” and a “liberal pig.”

In 2008, Reason magazine asked me (and other writers): “Is this the most important election in your lifetime?” I responded, “It is the most important election since 2006, and maybe even 2004. Elections are vastly overrated as a means for restraining government abuses.” In a Freeman piece shortly before the election, I noted, “The Friends of Leviathan are once again encouraging people to forget about freedom…The issue of government coercion has been taken off the radar screen of politically correct thought. Trust no intellectual who tells you not to worry about Leviathan.”

In 2012,  in an American Conservative pre-election symposium, I wrote, “This election has almost guaranteed that America will have at least four more years of bad government…Both Obama and Romney apparently believe that the president is entitled to do as he pleases, the law and the Constitution be damned…Is American democracy in a death spiral? Perhaps the follies of both Obama and Romney will help Americans recognize that no politician will be able to redeem Leviathan.”

Days before the 2016 election, I wrote a Washington Times op-ed on our “20 Years of Dictatorial Democracy.” I groused, “We now have a political system which is nominally democratic but increasingly authoritarian…By the end of the next presidential term, America will have had almost a 20-year stretch of dictatorial democracy…Neither Trump nor Clinton are promising to ‘make America constitutional again’…If presidents are lawless, then voters are merely designating the most dangerous criminal in the land.” In a pre-election Mises Institute piece on “The Great Democracy Scam of 2016,” I scoffed, “The only certainty is that America will have another bad president for the next four years.”

For the 2020 election, I warned in a July article, “The American political system may be on the eve of its worst legitimacy crisis since the Civil War. Deep State federal agencies are a Godzilla that have established their prerogative to undermine if not overturn election results.” Writing for The American Conservative on October 19, “The most dangerous political illusion is that votes limit politicians’ power…The worst violation of ‘voting rights’ occurs when election winners capture unlimited power to abuse voters.” On October 22, I declared that the 2020 election epitomized a “Choose Your Liar Democracy.” On October 27, I wrote that “[t]he simultaneous defining down of both democracy and despotism is 2020’s darkest legacy.” On Halloween, USA Today published my piece, “Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden deserve a honeymoon from cynicism“; “Cynicism can be pro-freedom, spurring resistance rather than resignation…‘Think well of your masters’ will be the death of democracy. The more cynical Americans become, the less power politicians can seize.”

But the 2024 election will be different, right? We’re on the eve of political redemption, right? In the The American Conservative, I lamented, “The more power the White House possesses, the more that it attracts ruthless individuals who do and say anything to win elections.” In the New York Post, I caterwauled, “Endless vote-buying schemes will be an economic wrecking ball, unleashing perpetual political warfare guaranteed to make America poorer.” Writing for the Libertarian Institute, I predicted, “Democracy will perish unless citizens speedily get better political bullshit radars.”

I have hammered the boondoggles, blunders, and balderdash of every president since the 1980s. Some of my attacks raised a ruckus but nothing has stopped politicians from perpetually seizing more power. Rather than “government by the people,” we now have Attention Deficit Democracy.

Will Americans ever see a presidential election that offers more than the triumph of hope over experience? Stay tuned.