There’ll come a time when Americans are freed from Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
On January 20, 2029, neither man can (legally) serve as POTUS, and maybe the new commander in chief will be the first resident of the White House born since the construction of the Berlin Wall, death of Marilyn Monroe, and Cuban Missile Crisis.
We can hope. America awaits is first president with a birthday after mid-summer 1961. Seriously.
So as attention begins to focus on 2024, it’s worth looking even further ahead, to a moment when the leader of the federal government’s executive branch is not a nasty, erratic codger. For principled supporters of limited government — those of us who don’t make exceptions when it is politically risky, or conflicts with the ravings of a “holy” book — it’s not too early to assess the post-Trump, post-Biden pols likeliest to appoint justices to the High Court, confront the inevitable debtpocalypse, and make decisions that might bring about nuclear war.
Once, many Democrats could be relied upon to challenge the “intelligence” community. Deregulation wasn’t necessarily a dirty word, and lockstep support for foreign adventurism wasn’t a thing. A considerable number of Democrats embraced free(ish) trade and mild welfare reform.
But today? Please. Kamala Harris? Pete Buttigieg? Gretchen Whitmer? Gavin Newsom? If you know of a single limited-government policy backed by the rogue’s gallery of statists maneuvering to succeed Biden as top dog of Thomas Jefferson’s party, shoot NDAI an email.
That leaves Team Elephant. The paramount non-Trump candidates are young — two in their fifties, one in his forties, and one in his thirties — and possess ambition enough for second runs in 2028. But are they consistently pro-freedom?
Let’s start with a libertarian litmus test: noninterventionism. Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy do not approach Lindsey Graham-level stupidity on Ukraine. Good thing, that. But all four enthusiastically substitute Xi Jinping for Vladimir Putin.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Dowd About It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.