Election Results Aren’t as Important as You Think

Every presidential election, many people freak out. Some cried tears of joy when Obama got elected. Others hosted support groups and ‘safe spaces’ after Trump first got elected in 2016. Some even voiced extreme fears online, such as concerns that Trump supporters posed an existential threat to transsexuals.

These are overreactions. Most people aren’t impacted that much by individual election results. Their lives just continue as before. To be sure, there are exceptions: if you work in an industry that a presidential candidate promises to get rid of, say, and then that candidate wins the election, you have cause for concern. And there is a grain of truth in this view, as I will explain below. But most people never find themselves in that situation for any particular election. Even if they did, big picture, we can already forecast the direction America and many countries in the West will go unless something fundamental changes, as I will show.

America championed the idea that people are free; that they get to live their lives for their own sake (as opposed to the king’s or pope’s or society’s sake); that they have certain inalienable rights; and that the government’s proper role is that of protector and enforcer of their rights:

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; […].

In a truly free, capitalist society with a well-oiled machinery of justice, no one’s rights depend on the violation of another’s rights, and everyone can get what they deserve: “there are no conflicts of interests among rational men.”¹

This American political foundation has been largely abandoned, both in America and throughout the West. Today, we live in a mixed economy, part capitalism and part statism, in which the government acts as arbiter in countless ongoing wars between pressure groups. The underlying basic moral principle causing these wars is altruism. Implicit in each election is the question: who gets to steamroll over everyone else’s rights this time? If your pressure group’s preferred candidate wins the next election, your interests may be prioritized through government force at others’ expense. Conversely, it’s understandable that many people get nervous during elections: there’s always a risk that the government might sacrifice them in service of some other group if the wrong candidate wins. Tax hikes may cost them dearly, regulatory changes could mean unemployment, and so on.

The thing is, all candidates are the wrong candidates in this sense. Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the economy should be mixed; that it is proper for the government to act as arbiter between pressure groups. Therefore, no single election, let alone candidate, changes much if anything about the path America has been going down for well over a hundred years now. And as long as the general public believes that the government is supposed to wear different hats in wars between pressure groups, and that each election merely determines the next hat, candidates will cater to them and party platforms won’t return to the original capitalist ideal of the government as nothing more than the enforcer of men’s mutually compatible rights.

From the basic underlying principles at work, we can conclude that the Democrats will win in the long run, even if Republicans win some elections in the meantime. We can make this prediction due to a general rule which applies to conflicting actors who hold the same underlying principles:

[…] In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.

(Again, this is a rule – not a law. I’m not saying Democrats will inevitably win, only that they plausibly will, long term, if the basic principles governing the American political system don’t change.)

As Ayn Rand explains, the dynamic between two such warring parties is generally the following: since they hold the same basic principles while disagreeing about certain issues, at least one of them must be inconsistent. She continues:

Since basic principles determine the ultimate goal of any long-range process of action, the person who holds a clearer, more consistent view of the end to be achieved will be more consistently right in his choice of means; and the contradictions of his opponent will work to his advantage, psychologically and existentially.

Rand further explains that, psychologically, although the inconsistent person promotes the same ideas as his opponent, he does so in a watered-down way – thereby inadvertently helping his opponent succeed faster. The opponent will seem more honest and courageous to observers, while the inconsistent person comes across as evasive and cowardly, damaging his own credibility.

Existentially, Rand argues, each action taken toward their shared goal leads to additional actions in the same direction. This process continues unless the goal is abandoned and the core principles reversed. And as long as the process does continue, it reinforces the consistent position while leaving the inconsistent one powerless. As Rand points out, this dynamic applies regardless of whether these adversaries share good or bad, true or false, rational or irrational goals.

Which brings us back to Democrats and Republicans:

For instance, consider the conflict between the Republicans and the Democrats (and, within each party, the same conflict between the “conservatives” and the “liberals”). Since both parties hold altruism as their basic moral principle, both advocate a welfare state or mixed economy as their ultimate goal.

Since Democrats are more consistently in favor of expanding government power, Republicans are left echoing them – resorting to awkward imitations of Democratic programs and implicitly conceding that they aim for the same goals while proposing different ways to get there. And so Republicans “sanction, assist, and hasten” the Democrats’ victory while discrediting themselves: this is the psychological aspect of the dynamic between the two parties.

In doing so, Republicans (or Democrats, it doesn’t really matter at this point) impose ever more controls on the economy to pursue altruist-collectivist ends. Such controls then cause disasters that only further controls can (seem to temporarily) alleviate. For example, building regulations cause shortages and high prices in the rental market, which the government then ‘addresses’ by introducing rent controls, which worsen the shortages, causing those affected to call for even more controls. This is the existential part of the dynamic, the “logic of the events” enabling us to predict that the Democrats will win in the long run:

It is precisely those ends (altruism-collectivism-statism) that ought to be rejected. But if neither party chooses to do it, the logic of the events created by their common basic principles will keep dragging them both further and further to the left. If and when the “conservatives” are kicked out of the game altogether, the same conflict will continue between the “liberals” and the avowed socialists; when the socialists win, the conflict will continue between the socialists and the communists; when the communists win, the ultimate goal of altruism will be achieved: universal immolation.
   There is no way to stop or change that process except at the root: by a change of basic principles.

So it’s no surprise that election results have changed drastically in favor of Democrats in the past forty years:

1984 election results. Public domain, Wikipedia

2024 election results. Public domain, Wikipedia

Today, this shift is commonly expressed in terms of the Overton window – the range of widely acceptable political ideas. This window has shifted far to the left; no politician who could potentially win an election today advocates capitalism. Communists may view this trend as evidence in support of their idea that history inevitably leads to communism. Thankfully, Rand quickly shuts that historicism down: there is no inevitability here, only the “awesome power of men’s principles” – in other words, philosophy.

Rand shares this rejection of historicism with philosopher Karl Popper. Contrary to Popper’s advocacy of piecemeal changes, though, her stance that “[t]here is no way to stop or change that process except at the root” sounds revolutionary. I consider this contradiction an exciting possibility for a unification of Popper’s and Rand’s political philosophies. As a starting point, a Popperian analysis would attribute the downward spiral identified by Rand to entrenchment and the resulting lack of error correction: the spiral is such that any attempt to reverse it only causes it to accelerate. For example, should any presidential candidate disavow our mixed economy and advocate pure, unadulterated capitalism instead, then voters standing to lose the current battle in the war between pressure groups will automatically vote for any candidate promising to help them. In any case, figuring out a solution is a piecemeal, evolutionary process – not a revolutionary one. You want changes to be easily reversible in case they’re mistakes. I invite my readers to work on this problem. It’s one of the problems of our age.

In conclusion, people overreact to election results because they don’t want to be losers in an endless war between pressure groups. Still, individual election results don’t matter that much, even in a mixed economy. In the long run, we should expect Democrats to win unless America somehow returns to its capitalist founding principle of government as nothing more than protector and enforcer of men’s mutually compatible rights. Once America does return to this principle, nobody has any need to freak out anymore because everyone’s rights are compatible. But we need to figure out how to initiate and manage the transition.