{"id":20923,"date":"2024-10-09T08:00:34","date_gmt":"2024-10-09T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=20923"},"modified":"2024-10-09T08:00:34","modified_gmt":"2024-10-09T12:00:34","slug":"my-tenth-depraved-presidential-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/09\/my-tenth-depraved-presidential-election\/","title":{"rendered":"My Tenth Depraved Presidential Election"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Libertarian Institute<\/p>\n

My Tenth Depraved Presidential Election<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, October 9, 2024<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Actually, I\u2019ve had a bad attitude on presidential elections going back to the end of the Reagan era.<\/p>\n

In a 1988 Detroit News<\/em> piece headlined \u201cQuadrennial Hunt for the Great Man,\u201d I wrote, \u201cEvery four years or so, the absurdity of our current system becomes vivid. We have created a huge engine of government\u2014even though there is no one even vaguely capable of intelligently\u00a0 <\/span>driving it. We have a paternalistic system where almost everyone has contempt for the\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the day after the 1992 election, I wrote a spoof titled \u201cThe Barf That Broke<\/span><\/a> the New World Order.\u201d 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\u2019s Yassar Arafat, he might have received enough additional votes to carry New York state and its 33 electoral votes. Alas, The Washington Times<\/em> considered my piece in bad taste and it never got published. Readers were denied learning the clearest lesson of the 1992 election: \u201cBill Clinton has received an overwhelming mandate from the American people not to publicly vomit on foreign leaders or even White House staffers or lobbyists.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1996, I struck out at The New York Times<\/em> with a piece titled, \u201cThe Fraud of American Democracy.\u201d I wrote, \u201cModern democracy is based on a blind faith that the people can control what they do not understand\u2026Democracy should be something more than an overglorified, ceremonial choice of cage keepers\u2026The idealizing of American democracy is one of the worst threats to the future of American liberty.\u201d By the standards of media gatekeepers, my cynicism was premature.<\/p>\n

In 2000, St. Martin\u2019s Press published Feeling Your Pain<\/span>: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years<\/em><\/a>, a number one bestseller in Florida before the election. In \u201cVoting is Overrated<\/span><\/a>,\u201d an op-ed picked up in papers around the nation, I declared, \u201cVoting 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\u2014regardless of who wins the Presidency.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2004, St. Martin\u2019s Press published \u201cThe Bush Betrayal<\/span><\/a><\/em>,\u201d 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<\/span><\/a> who denounced me as a \u201ccommunist bastard<\/span><\/a>,\u201d \u201cone sick motherf*****,\u201d \u201cpsychotic,\u201d \u201ca gutless individual,\u201d and a \u201cliberal pig.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2008, Reason<\/em> magazine<\/span><\/a> asked me (and other writers): \u201cIs this the most important election in your lifetime?\u201d I responded, \u201cIt is the most important election since 2006, and maybe even 2004. Elections are vastly overrated as a means for restraining government abuses.\u201d In a Freeman<\/em> piece<\/span><\/a> shortly before the election, I noted, \u201cThe Friends of Leviathan are once again encouraging people to forget about freedom\u2026The 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2012,\u00a0 <\/span>in an American Conservative<\/span><\/a><\/em> pre-election symposium, I wrote, \u201cThis election has almost guaranteed that America will have at least four more years of bad government\u2026<\/span>Both Obama and Romney apparently believe that the president is entitled to do as he pleases, the law and the Constitution be damned\u2026Is 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Days before the 2016 election, I wrote a Washington Times<\/em> op-ed on our \u201c20 Years of Dictatorial Democracy<\/span><\/a>.\u201d I groused, \u201cWe now have a political system which is nominally democratic but increasingly authoritarian\u2026By the end of the next presidential term, America will have had almost a 20-year stretch of dictatorial democracy\u2026Neither Trump nor Clinton are promising to \u2018make America constitutional again\u2019\u2026If presidents are lawless, then voters are merely designating the most dangerous criminal in the land.\u201d In a pre-election Mises Institute piece on \u201cThe Great Democracy Scam of 2016<\/span><\/a>,\u201d I scoffed, \u201cThe only certainty is that America will have another bad president for the next four years.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the 2020 election, I warned in a July article<\/span><\/a>, \u201cThe 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.\u201d Writing for The American Conservative<\/span><\/a><\/em> on October 19, \u201cThe most dangerous political illusion is that votes limit politicians\u2019 power\u2026The worst violation of \u2018voting rights\u2019 occurs when election winners capture unlimited power to abuse voters.\u201d <\/b>On October 22, I declared that the 2020 election epitomized a \u201cChoose Your Liar Democracy<\/span><\/a>.\u201d On October 27, I wrote that \u201c[t]he simultaneous defining down<\/span><\/a> of both democracy and despotism is 2020\u2019s darkest legacy.\u201d On Halloween, USA Today<\/em> published my piece, \u201cNeither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden deserve a honeymoon from cynicism<\/span><\/a>\u201c; \u201cCynicism can be pro-freedom, spurring resistance rather than resignation\u2026\u2018Think well of your masters\u2019 will be the death of democracy. The more cynical Americans become, the less power politicians can seize.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the 2024 election will be different, right? We\u2019re on the eve of political redemption, right? In the The American Conservative<\/em><\/span><\/a>, I lamented, \u201cThe more\u00a0power the White House possesses, the more that it attracts ruthless individuals who do and say anything to win elections.\u201d In the New York Post<\/span><\/a><\/em>, I caterwauled, \u201cEndless vote-buying schemes will be an economic wrecking ball, unleashing perpetual political warfare guaranteed to make America poorer.\u201d Writing for the Libertarian Institute<\/span><\/a>, I predicted, \u201cDemocracy will perish unless citizens speedily get better political bullshit radars.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cgovernment by the people,\u201d we now have Attention Deficit Democracy<\/span><\/a><\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Will Americans ever see a presidential election that offers more than the triumph of hope over experience? Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20924,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2005,22,2124,10,51,509,527,3103,38,739,50,708,252,1071,269,919],"class_list":["post-20923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-conservative","tag-attention-deficit-democracy","tag-biden","tag-bush","tag-clinton","tag-humor","tag-memoir","tag-new-york-post","tag-obama","tag-presidents","tag-taxation","tag-trump","tag-tyranny","tag-usa-today","tag-voting","tag-will-of-the-people"],"yoast_head":"\nMy Tenth Depraved Presidential Election - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I have been scoffing at presidential elections since the end of the Reagan era. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20923"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20926,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20923\/revisions\/20926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}