By Ramesh Ponnuru
Thursday, June 02, 2016
Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he has never
lied to the families of dead servicemen. He has not committed himself to
appointing to the Supreme Court left-wing justices who would protect a right to
abortion found nowhere in the Constitution. He is not promising to raise taxes,
or endorsing President Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty and pledging to expand
it.
And say what you will about Hillary Clinton, but she has
never mocked someone’s disability, or tried to link a political rival to the
JFK assassination, or encouraged political violence. She has not promised to
launch a trade war. She has not said she would order troops to commit war
crimes against innocent people.
Trump vs. Clinton is a dismal set of election choices for
Americans and especially for conservatives. So it is not surprising that
conservatives are divided about what to do. Most are backing Trump, the
presumptive Republican nominee. Others — especially among conservative writers,
activists, and think-tankers — say they will never vote for him. This minority
is further divided: Some say that they will vote for the candidate of a third
party (maybe the Libertarians, or a new party), and some even say they will
vote for Clinton.
This debate splits people who have heretofore been
friends with similar views on almost all issues, and who on each side have
reasonable arguments to hand. It is therefore being conducted in a spirit of
mutual rage, bitterness, and contempt.
Trump supporters cannot believe that some conservatives
would rather see Clinton in office than support the Republican nominee — and
that they deny that their lack of support for him amounts to effective support
for her, and all her prospective works. These supporters admit, many of them,
that Trump has serious flaws. But their uncertainty about what he would do in
any given situation translates into a certainty that he would do better than
she.
They allow that Trump’s promise to appoint conservative
justices to the Supreme Court cannot be wholly trusted. Getting them confirmed
would take a fight, and he has shown very little interest in the issues, from
the protection of religious liberty to the restoration of democratic authority
over abortion, that it would involve. But any Clinton nominees, they note, are
guaranteed to be left-wing activists.
Anti-Trump conservatives, on the other hand, argue that a
President Trump would do more profound and long-lasting damage to conservatism
than a President Clinton would. Her liberal initiatives would elicit nearly
uniform opposition from Republicans; his would split them. He would make the
Republican party less conservative while simultaneously discrediting
conservatism with large portions of the public, possibly for many years.
For many of Trump’s critics, though, these concerns are
not the decisive ones. If they merely disagreed with him on trade and
entitlement reform, they would still strongly favor him over Clinton. But they
think his morals and personality make him not merely flawed but unfit for the
presidency. He is cruel, impulsive, petty, and insecure; he admires dictators;
he undermines standards against political violence and bigotry.
Some conservatives who work in foreign policy have
already declared a preference for Clinton. In part that is because Trump
sometimes makes Buchananite noises. But even people who disagree with Pat
Buchanan on foreign policy have to admit that he has given some serious
attention to the topic, as has Clinton. Trump acts as though bluster is all a
president needs.
For many conservatives, then, the choice of which
candidate to put in the Oval Office — Trump or Clinton — is a difficult and painful
one. What might make it easier is that individual voters are not really in the
position of having to make that decision.
When John Bolton endorsed Trump, he said that the
election presented voters with a “binary choice.” That may be true for them
collectively. Barring a strong third-party run, which is not showing any sign
of happening, the next president will be either Trump or Clinton. But from the
standpoint of an individual, conservative or otherwise, the choice in the
ballot booth is not nearly so fraught.
Arguments over whom you should vote for usually ask you
to picture yourself as the deciding vote: to imagine that your vote will swing
your state and the election. It is a useful exercise of the imagination insofar
as it encourages you to take your vote seriously. But the imagined picture is
obviously false: The probability that your vote will determine the winner
cannot meaningfully be distinguished from zero. (And that probability diminishes
still further if any candidate has a wide lead going into the election.)
Political theorists have had a hard time coming up with
convincing explanations for why people should vote given that fact. Any
explanation has to start with the idea that voting is, first and foremost, an
expressive act. It expresses what the voter values and prioritizes; what he
wills for his country.
The fact that individual voters have almost no effect on
the outcome of an election should make anti-Trump conservatives feel less
pressure to vote for Clinton, and anti-Clinton conservatives less pressure to
vote for Trump. They may accept that one of them will be president. But in the
special, and, let’s hope, not to be repeated circumstances of this year, they
may reasonably decide that they will not join their will to either outcome:
that if either one of them will be president, they at least will not be
formally complicit in elevating one of them.
No voter is under any moral obligation to judge whether
Trump or Clinton is the lesser evil.
Refusing to vote for either one of them — by writing
someone in, voting third party, or voting only for other offices — need not be
an evasion of reality or a shirking of civic duty. It may be the right choice,
at least if it is combined with tolerance for conservatives who make different
judgments in this dismal year.
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