NY Post Design
The midterm elections are rapidly approaching, and I don’t think I’m the only American who would like to be given a choice.
Because I voted for Donald Trump in 2024, people I encounter often expect me to be a MAGA supporter, a conservative, or maybe a libertarian.
I’m none of those things.
To the extent that MAGA is a cult of personality, count me out.
To the extent that conservatism means standing pat, it’s a suicide pact. There’s much in a civilization that must be conserved, but an equal need for innovation.
To the extent that libertarians embrace “experiments in living,” they can exist only as a nonconformist sect within a society anchored in traditional morality — otherwise those experimental lives will trample all over each other.
I’m trying to say that my vote is up for grabs.
And what about Trump? Here we come to the heart of the matter.
I don’t particularly love the president.
He can be petty to his opponents even as they lie on their deathbeds.
His meandering way of talking drives me crazy — as far as I’m concerned, the man speaks a foreign language.
This is much more than a problem of style. Trump’s performance as wartime communicator may be the worst in our history.
But he is also a world-historical figure towering over an age in drastic need of change, who must be taken in his totality, good and bad, effective and destructive, and judged against those who wish to replace him rather than on some abstract standard of perfection.
In politics, it’s always about the alternatives.
So I wish to talk here to those who oppose Trump most strenuously, who hate Trump to infinity and beyond: to the people of the Left.
You are responsible for both of his electoral victories.
You — the transgenderists, the antisemites, the climate obsessives, the neo-communists, the police defunders, the degrowth promoters, the online censors, all magnified by the prestige media and academia and the bureaucracy at every level — are the Great Trump Propaganda Machine.
Without you, he would be a footnote, not a movement.
If that upsets you, take a moment for once to reflect on how you appear to voters like me — the politically homeless.
The Left once stood for liberation from political and economic oppression.
Some believed this could only be achieved through a violent revolution, others held out for peaceful democratic progress.
But an epochal inversion has taken place, and Leftists have become the masters they once sought to overthrow — keepers of all the high places in government and culture.
And not surprisingly, their interest in overthrowing anything has vanished. They wish to hang on.
No one on the Left today speaks of freedom or liberation. They aim to control.
The old dream is dead, and they have replaced Utopia with a dreary dungeon to cage the vast number of sinners and transgressors — society as panopticon, or the Guardian State.
The Left we have inherited is no longer liberal in any sense of that word. The world is too far gone for such niceties.
From plastic straws to the weather, from harmful words to the flatulence of cows, late model Leftists have engaged in an exhausting number of revolts against random aspects of reality.
This is sometimes termed the Omnicause, and while such struggles appear almost psychotic in character, they share an underlying logic.
Every cause is really the negation of some Western value: equality, religious faith, or capitalism, for instance.
Every method works to intimidate and control — legal mandates and prohibitions when possible, but endless surveillance, cancellations, and violent protests when not.
Dissenting voters like me are not to be persuaded but muscled into submission.
The Left was once a coherent ideological project. All that remains of that are bits of Marx, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School, tossed like a salad and served without much flavor.
Nevertheless, a crude theory of society motivates Leftists into action.
There are, for them, two inferior classes: the deplorables, who oppress and exploit, and the victim groups, who are helpless like kittens and exist to be oppressed and exploited.
A third superior class consists quite naturally of the Left itself: wise in expertise and pure in virtue, its mission is to seize the levers of power to protect the victim groups and keep the deplorables permanently down.
Because populists like Trump are thought to manipulate the masses, extraordinary measures are necessary.
Democracy must be redefined as justice and safety and identified with the Guardian State.
That is to say, power must flow to institutions that are dominated by the Left and stand beyond the reach of the electoral process: NGOs and private foundations, the health and regulatory bureaucracies, the intelligence agencies, criminal prosecutors, the judiciary.
A running narrative, in the manner of a tragic chorus, is provided by the media and the internet mob.
Disfavored candidates can then be smeared in scandal, disqualified over a technicality, raided by the police, or prosecuted on a fictitious crime.
If they somehow manage to get elected, they can still be impeached, silenced on social media, and accused of treason with foreign tyrants.
None of this is theoretical. The Guardian State was first planted and nursed by Barack Obama, blossomed behind Trump’s back during his first administration, and came to full fruition in the Biden years.
None of it is a particularly American development, either. Populist presidential hopefuls in France and Brazil have been convicted of bogus crimes.
The German domestic security agency has tried to ban the populist AfD party, representing nearly 30% of the electorate; the case is pending.
In Romania, the courts actually nullified the results of a presidential election that went the populists’ way. The winner’s reward, as might be expected, was criminal prosecution.
Late model Leftism is a global pathology — and many countries are ahead of us in the construction of the Guardian State.
For that, I am thankful. The American Left continues to churn out the occasional sensible idea advocated by sane human beings.
I will name names.
Among politicians, Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, seems more interested in repairing bridges than in dividing his electorate against itself.
Source: https://nypost.com/2026/07/28/opinion/americans-deserve-a-political-choice-but-left-has-gone-insane/
