Unable to provide a unified endorsement this year, TAC took a different approach:
This election offers particularly dismal prospects for conservatives: the Senate’s most liberal member versus a Republican who combines the worst policies of George W. Bush with an erratic temper and a thinly veiled contempt for the Right. No third-party candidate has been able to break past the margins to mount an insurgent campaign.
Given these impoverished alternatives, no easy consensus emerges. So rather than contrive to deliver an official endorsement, we asked friends from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to discuss how they are voting, whether they see their vote as advancing a particular issue or fitting into a larger strategy, and what conflicts their choice might entail.
A few arguments worth noting follow:
This will be the first year since I was old enough to vote that I will not cast a ballot in a presidential election. I quote a character from Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” in my defense: “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.”
I can’t vote for Barack Obama. He is a pro-abortion zealot and wrong on all the issues that matter most to social conservatives. Mind you, one should not be under any illusion that things will markedly improve under another Republican administration. But there is no question that on issues related to the sanctity of life and traditional marriage, an Obama administration, with a Democratic Congress at its back, would be far worse.
The best case that can be made for John McCain is that he would serve as something of a brake on runaway liberalism. But the country would be at significantly greater risk of war with the intemperate and bellicose McCain in the White House. That was clear months ago, but his conduct during the fall campaign—especially contrasted with Obama’s steadiness—has made me even more uneasy. His selection of Sarah Palin, while initially heartening to populist-minded social conservatives, has proved disastrous. Though plainly a politician of real talent, the parochial Palin is stunningly ill-suited for high office, and that’s a terrible mark against McCain’s judgment.
As both a conservative and a Republican, I confess that we deserve to lose this year. We have governed badly and have earned the wrath of voters, who will learn in due course how inadequate the nostrums of liberal Democrats are to the crisis of our times. If I cannot in good faith cast a vote against the Bush years by voting for Obama, I can at least do so by withholding my vote from McCain.
While it is foolish to look forward to a decisive electoral defeat for one’s side, I can’t say that the coming rout will be a bad thing. The Right desperately needs to repent, rethink, and rebuild—and only the pain of a shattering loss will force conservatives to confront reality. Not only must there be a renewal of our political vision and message—and this time, dissenters from within the Right must be heard—but there must also be a realization at the grassroots that we have long given too much importance to politics and not enough to building cultural institutions at the local level.
Voting symbolically is one thing—that’s what almost all of us do anyway since statistically our votes are not likely to sway the outcome. But organizing symbolically, committing hundreds of thousands of dollars and man-hours to third parties, is a waste of capital and talent that could be put to better use in Republican or Democratic primaries. The difference between Ron Paul’s 1988 Libertarian campaign and his 2008 Republican bid illustrates the point. Forget the minors; take over the majors.
With that in mind, I’m writing in Ron Paul for president and Barry Goldwater Jr. for vice president. Why agonize over whether Barr or Baldwin is the better constitutionalist, when you can cast your ballot for the very best? A vote for Paul is an endorsement of all he has accomplished (and might yet achieve) and a rejection of the often honorable but never effective course of the third parties.
The critical problem we face today is the same one all mankind has faced: the state, those monopolists who claim the right to break the laws that they make and enforce. How to restrain them is the critical problem of all sound political thinking. Making matters worse, this gang now has a monopoly on the money and the ability to print it, and they are abusing that power at our expense.
How does voting change the situation? Neither of the candidates for president wants to do anything about the problem. On the contrary, they want to make it worse. This is for a reason. The state owns the “democratic process” as surely as it owns the Departments of Labor and Defense and uses it in ways that benefit the state and no one else.
On the other hand, we do have the freedom not to vote. No one has yet drafted us into the voting booth. I suggest that we exercise this right not to participate. It is one of the few rights we have left. Nonparticipation sends a message that we no longer believe in the racket they have cooked up for us, and we want no part of it.
You might say that this is ineffective. But what effect does voting have? It gives them what they need most: a mandate. Nonparticipation helps deny that to them. It makes them, just on the margin, a bit more fearful that they are ruling us without our consent. This is all to the good. The government should fear the people. Not voting is a good beginning toward instilling that fear.
This year especially there is no lesser of two evils. There is socialism or fascism. The true American spirit should guide every voter to have no part of either.
During the so-called presidential debates, I failed to hear a single mention of the U.S. Constitution, which should have been the chief subject. What are the proper powers of government, of the federal government, and of the president? These questions don’t even come up anymore. The debaters wrangle heatedly about “the economy”—a phrase that never appears in the text of the Constitution but preoccupies today’s pundits and politicians.
Neither of the major-party presidential candidates, let alone President Bush, could have held an intelligent conversation with Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, or John Jay, the authors of The Federalist, our best known commentary on that Constitution. I happen to think that time has proved abundantly that their opponents, the “anti-Federalists,” were profoundly right in their fears of where adoption of the Constitution—a grievous act of centralization—would lead: to say no more about it, to a gigantic war between the states, to two world wars, and to the endless usurpation of power implicit in all yakking about “the economy.”
Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin can no more undo this sorry history than he can reverse the direction of the globe’s axial rotation. (I believe in miracles, but I don’t expect them in politics.) And he and I might well disagree on the authority of the Constitution itself. But he is a godly, reasonable, wise, and intelligent man—as worthy a candidate as I ever expect to see. He knows what the Tenth Amendment means; he understands the crucial 45th number of The Federalist, which reminds us that the powers delegated to the federal government are “few and defined,” whereas those remaining with the states are “numerous and indefinite.” Furthermore, he knows what the Holy Scriptures mean when they speak of a woman being “with child”; and no amount of pseudoconstitutional gobbledygook about “choice” or “privacy” can shake him on this point. His horror at legal abortion is still fresh.
I’ve been reading Chuck Baldwin’s essays for several years. My first reaction to them was to wish we had rulers who could read him, grasp what he was saying, and take it to heart. I never dreamed I would have the chance to vote for him myself.
