The Market Has to Demand a Better Presidential Candidate

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, November 03, 2023

 

The greatest rhetorical problem suffered by champions of the free market is their inability to answer the question, “How?” For Five Year Plan-style communists and progressive micromanagers alike, this inquiry is easy. “How will we get more widgets?” the people ask, and out comes the exhaustive response. That the outlined programs never actually seem to work is, politically, besides the point. What matters is that they sound good. It is tough to beat something with nothing, and, beyond explaining the broader circumstances that will lead to prosperity and innovation, capitalists simply don’t know the details that voters crave. We did not know, ahead of time, that Henry Ford would develop his assembly line. We did not know that Steve Jobs’s Apple would invent the iPod. We did not know that Edison was working on a lightbulb. We knew, vaguely, that someone would do these things — or that someone like them would do something like them — but, by necessity, the specifics were all missing. Invited to share when, where, how, and with what result, we must shrug our shoulders. This, I am aware, is unsatisfying.

 

I mention this because, at present, I am struggling to put into more precise words the vague feeling I have that something, somewhere, somehow just has to happen to our political status quo. As a pundit-of-sorts, I am supposed to be able to predict what is going to occur — and why it is going to occur — and to do so using polls, anecdotes, analogies, historical comparisons, and other concrete tools. If I believe, as I do, that it simply cannot be the case that we are going to end up next year with two presidential candidates whom the public openly loathes, I am professionally obliged to do more than simply share my thesis, wave my hands, and hit the bar. But the thing is: I can’t, because I don’t know. Instead, I must point to the same rules that govern the free market, and propose that, as matter of elementary logic, our democratic system surely cannot be that different in kind from our private system of exchange.

 

Politics and economics are not precisely the same thing, but, in free countries, they do share a key characteristic: choice. And, in this sense, democracy is very much a free market. If Company A and Company B both make products that are important to people, and those people make it clear that they dislike both of them, one of two things tends to happen: (1) One or both of those companies will change their product so that it meets with consumers’ approval, or (2) a third company will come in and put the two intransigent ones out of business. The persistent recalcitrance of both the Democratic and Republican parties makes either of these eventualities seem unlikely to us — perhaps even unthinkable. But I am not so sure that they should be. Americans are restless, inventive people who dislike entitlement, inertia, and condescension. I do not believe that they will allow themselves to be captured indefinitely by institutions that clearly hold them in contempt.

 

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are defective goods: Trump is an unhinged criminal whose conduct in and out of public office show that he belongs nowhere near the levers of power; Biden is a corrupt, senile Dunning-Kruger-case who has exhibited open contempt for his oath. Supermajorities of voters do not want either of them to run for president, and supermajorities of voters are correct. Already, we are seeing signs of market dynamism. In a recent poll, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — another man who ought to be widely reviled — garnered 22 percent of the vote in a hypothetical three-way race against Trump and Biden. One can only imagine what those numbers might look like if they were attached to someone useful. There exists no such thing as permanent loyalty to a brand.

 

The economist Herb Stein liked to say, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” It may take time to stop. Its stopping may be resisted or denied or lampooned. But, eventually, it will stop. Contrary to the obvious expectation of both of our political parties, Americans are not going to sit back and accept substandard candidates in perpetuity. An election between a man whom a majority expects will die soon and a man whom a majority expects will soon be in jail is good for the joke-writers and carnival-barkers, but lousy for everyone else. Something’s gotta give.