Welcome to Election 2024. In this corner, we have a builder. Across from him, we have a lawyer and former prosecutor.

And maybe that’s all you need to know.

What’s the difference between these two occupations? For most lawyers (aside from the occasional Abraham Lincoln or Mohandas Gandhi), process is everything. Your goal is to earn a piece of paper, and if you get that paper, you bill $400 an hour and count yourself the winner. Even if you lose your case, you still mail a fat invoice to your client for hours served.

Builders tend to care most about the finished product. They want a colonial cottage, Victorian mansion, or maybe even a skyscraper or luxury casino to stand out against the sky. And they don’t want their building to topple “when the rains come down and the floods come up:” they want to see it standing forty years from now. (I grew up in the home of a builder — a home Dad had mostly constructed himself. Even after he was gone, Mom would look on houses he had built with pride as we drove by.)

To grasp the difference between a focus on process or product, consider how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris gauge success at the border.

Immigration Invasion

For Trump, success may have initially meant a “big, beautiful wall,” but it certainly indicated few illegal border crossings. While not all the border wall was built under his watch (still less of it paid for by Mexico), illegal crossings did stay relatively low during his tenure. This is what builders do: erect structures which physically impact the neighborhood. (If they can get permits to do so, or for a president, win approval from Congress with the 175 lawyers currently serving in office there.)

But millions of unvetted foreigners began pouring across the US border almost from the day Joe Biden (Syracuse Law, 1968) and Kamala Harris (California Law, 1989) strode into the White House.

After three years of this practically unchecked invasion, as a new election drew near, Democrats in Congress (and some Republicans) wrote a paper they called a “Border Enforcement Bill.” Most Republicans frowned and blocked the bill in February. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Harvard Law, 1974) reintroduced it in May, making it clear that reintroducing a bill that had already failed was kabuki theater, not a serious attempt to shut the border down (which Biden could have done three years ago).

“We gave Republicans a second chance to show where they stand,” he said. In other words: “Our goal in bringing this bill to the floor is not to protect the country, but to blame the other guys for the mess that we manifestly caused. This paper is more real than the millions of unvetted invaders we have let across the border the past few years. With the help of a compliant media, we hope voters will buy our lawyerly spin and vote our gal president, ignoring the ugly reality outside their windows.”

Abstract Ideas in the Real World

Contractors dread that process-oriented mentality, which they often encounter at City Hall. Like many lawyers, what counts for some bureaucrats isn’t where the rebar is, did you attach enough hurricane clips, is the foundation cracked, or are the studs properly spaced and the plywood thoroughly nailed. What counts is getting the inspector to sign off on your work, regardless of its quality — because so long as all your Ts are crossed and your Is dotted, you’re legally off the hook.

Nor is this lawyerly spirit only manifest at the border. The Democratic Party fervently believes that a person can change his or her gender by signing a form declaring themselves to be something they are not. And then we must consider the many dark turns international politics have taken under an aged Syracuse Law grad who clearly doesn’t have a clue how to put a roof on geopolitical chaos.

America watched with horror as Biden botched our military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving hundreds dead and billions of dollars’ worth of our military equipment in Taliban hands. It was after Biden seemed to countenance a “minor (Russian) incursion” and Putin witnessed his debacle in Kabul that conflict broke out in Europe on a scale that the continent hasn’t seen since World War II. And voters can hardly have forgotten that while Trump brokered the Abraham Accords — a useful piece of paper, because both Arabs and Jews who signed it showed they were serious about making peace in the Middle East (for instance by not launching missiles at one another) Biden’s tenure has seen all hell break loose there.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (Columbia Law, 1984) has an answer to all the ordinance flying over his head: Just plaintively begging everyone to “just get along,” or in his preferred cliche, “break the cycle of violence.”

“What it comes down to really is all parties finding ways to come to an agreement, not look for reasons to delay or to say no,” he said. “It is urgent that all parties make the right choices in the hours and days ahead.”

“All parties.” Got that? It’s a fine term from contract law.

What a Party

What America pleads for under this plague of lawyers is an “agreement” between “all parties.” One piece of paper with many impressive autographs on it!

The first to sign would be the new leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, who plotted the October 7 terrorist attack. (Sin-war! What a name for the man who started this ungodly conflict!)

Then the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which arms Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis (add “hell” to make the perfect Middle Eastern 4-H club), and who would rather nuke Tel Aviv than embrace 72 virgins in the afterlife.

Then, no doubt, Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is backing Iran, and after all his aggression against Taiwan, India, Bhutan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, would love to nab a Nobel Peace Prize.

Vladimir Putin will no doubt sign, too, if his finger isn’t sore from pushing all those launch buttons.

And shooting missiles at passing merchant ships makes the Houthi leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi one of the parties to this party. So he’ll get to affix his Malik al-Houthi, too.

Until that document is signed and the world’s wolves lie down the with the lambs, the US will go on showing its resolve by low-level tit-for-tat ordnance swaps with al-Houthi’s desert rats. (“Proportionality” is the language of lawyers. Warriors prefer to talk about “victory.”)

Surely any reasonable person would trust the word of this rogue’s gallery of Bond villains, beady-eyed missilemen, assassins, and cutthroats! With their names on the dotted line, the lion will lie down with lamb and the dove will flutter benevolently over a Middle East that’s in harmony with God, Gaia, and the Jewish state. One paper to rule them all, one paper to find them, one paper to bring them all, and in Law School Enlightenment bind them!

Group hug, everyone! Peace in our time!

Real-World Tests

Builders, by contrast, practice physics with a Skilsaw. Construction is about applying force in accord with gravity, geometry, and the coefficient of friction between the rubber on your shoes and the Douglas fir rafters you’re standing on. If your angle is a little off, or you misjudge resistance, a two-story church wall may topple toward you, you could fall through the ceiling, or shoot yourself in the butt with a nail. (Incidents I experienced or witnessed while wearing a tool belt around my waist.)

When things don’t budge, a contractor looks for a sledgehammer and crow bar to put up a great, big, beautiful wall to protect the inhabitants of the house he is building. He knows it is the nature of thieves, rats, and cockroaches to break and enter, and they must be physically kept at bay. Or if a house must fall, he carefully applies what force it takes to bring it down. He is used to making things move in the real world, or staying firm on hard pack.

But lawyers are pleased as punch with a stack of freshly inked papyrus through which they can burrow like paper mites, or hold up so the lickspittle legacy media can take photos. (Journalists worship paper and screenshots even more piously than lawyers.)

Maybe that’s why the working class, from which concrete results are demanded, is increasingly siding with Trump, while college-educated, white-collar workers who shuffle paper and stare at screens vote for the party of abstract theory and abject failure.

To be sure, contractors are often a rough, unruly lot. Electricians and people who pour foundations tend to brag and swear, and on occasion may not even show up for work because they drank too much the night before. Yet we live and work in the buildings they put up, which are tested every day by the elements.

Such is our choice this fall. If you want America’s safety secured by attorneys for another four years, vote California Law, 1989.

David Marshall, an educator and writer, holds a doctoral degree in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.