Libertarian vs Authoritarian: Like many unhappy conservatives, I look at this election as a choice between misfortunes. Faced with a similar dilemma in 1800, Alexander Hamilton offered advice that should resonate with at least a few right-leaning voters today: “If we must have an enemy at the head of the government,” he wrote to a fellow Federalist, the House speaker Theodore Sedgwick, that May, “let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”