Oct 16, 2023·edited Oct 16, 2023Liked by James J. Heaney
Hi James. I appreciate your exhaustive list of reasons why we can know with certainty that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, a fact I never had reason to doubt.
However, I have to take issue with your statement that "it's a sin to vote for Joe Biden". I don't think it can ever be a sin to vote for any particular candidate so long as you are reasonablly knowledgeable about the candidate (and not simply his stated positions) and you are doing so for reasons that are not sinful.
And there is a great non-sinful reason to vote for Joe Biden: as you correctly observice, Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution. More directly, he is an enemy of the Constitution.
I once served in the US Army. I still consider myself bound my my oath to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic". (God help us, I never thought the last 2 words were anything but a formality).
There is a separate reason that voting for Joe Biden in 2024 is less onerous than voting for him in 2020: The Dobbs decision, the culmination of 49 years of prayer and effort, put the protection of the unborn back into play, making realistic progress possible. I can't imagine a future Court trying to reinstate the legal mess of Roe/Casey even if Biden is lucky enough to replace 2 originalists with 2 liberals.
But I can all too easily imagine what Trump could do if he gets another term. I'm pretty sure you can, too.
I agree that your oath absolutely forbids you from voting for Trump. Even if there were some reason someone might reasonably cast a vote for Trump (spoiler alert for this comment: I don't think there is!), the oath would foreclose it completely.
However, I disagree about Biden. I think it's a sin to do so, for several reasons. (There's a good bet I'll convert this comment to a blog post near November 2024, with an equally unsparing consideration of Trump, so brace for that. You're my rough draft guinea pig, and it's a good bet this reply will run for two if not three comments.)
First and most particularly, I think it is very naive to think that a re-progressivized Court would not immediately re-impose a universal right to abortion through the moment of birth. I agree with you that they would not reimpose the mess of Roe/Casey, because Roe/Casey involved compromises the Left never accepted. They would go Justice Ginsburg's route and impose an absolute right to abortion at every stage of pregnancy without limitation, without the possibility of regulation, and with court-mandated taxpayer funding. No mess, no fuss, just abortions as far as the eye can see. This would be accomplished through an expansive reading of what they perceive as the gender equality guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. You can read the various state supreme court decisions legislating absolute abortion rights, such as Minnesota's Doe v. Gomez, to see the shape of this argument and how it abuses state-level equal protection clauses. The argument would be wrong, but, like the state equal-protection arguments, it would be simple and absolute. The Hyde Amendment would be gone. The Partial-Birth Abortion Act, gone. Every single state-level waiting period or clinic regulation, all gone. Look at the judges on Biden's Supreme Court shortlist, look at his lower-court nominees, and tell me I'm wrong.
The oldest justice on the Court is Thomas; the next is Alito. This is a real risk by itself.
Moreover, in even more imminent threats, Dobbs was nearly overturned by an act of Congress in 2022, which failed by only 1 vote. All those votes came from Democrats. The Democratic House caucus voted unanimously in favor of the misleadingly-named Women's Health Protection Act (formerly known as the Freedom of Choice Act, or FOCA). President Biden vowed to sign it. It was blocked in the Senate because Joe Manchin opposed the bill and Sinema supported the bill and opposed ending the filibuster. Two more D senators with a D president, and that's over. (Also, two more D senators means court-packing, unless there are some secret opponents of court-packing in the Senate who haven't yet been outed. )
In short, Dobbs is very vulnerable in a second Biden term.
However, let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are correct, and that Dobbs itself is unlikely to fall even during a second Biden term. That brings me to my second reason (still particular to the 2024 election):
The Biden Administration has *already* helped kill thousands of unborn children, all by itself, without legislative support and often *subverting* the legislature. We see this in its unilateral repeal of the Mexico City Policy, the resumption of full Title X funding to abortion clinics (which violates the best reading of Title X, but nobody seems to has standing to sue over it), its aggressive and ongoing lawsuits against pro-life states to loosen their unborn-rights protections, its flagrantly illegal de-regulation of abortion-pill distribution (hello Comstock Act), its subversion of the Hyde Amendment to get taxpayers to illegally fund military abortions (which is what Tommy Tuberville is blocking the DoD's promotions list over), and its creative attempts to use Medicaid tax dollars to fund abortion travel around the country.
These are not hypotheticals. The Biden Administration has already deliberately facilitated the deaths of more infants than the past decade of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and he is eager for more. They aren't shy about this; he's literally running on his staunch support for "abortion access". I pulled that list of bloodied accomplishments off a WhiteHouse.gov press release! They're *proud* of their body count!
You are indeed sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I am frankly delighted that you take that oath as seriously as you do. Beyond that oath, however, you are *also* subject to what Sen. William Seward (Whig-NY) described as a law *above* the Constitution:
> "But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part, of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe."
Voting for a proud and enthusiastic killer of children, whose policies have *intentionally* (not indirectly, not accidentally) caused the deaths of many children, and who vows to not only continue but expand those policies, in order to *kill more children*, violates this "higher law." It is objectively worse -- by an order of magnitude -- than voting for someone who is merely a selfish tyrant who would (if given the chance) overthrow the Constitution, a really really wonderful (and you know how much I love it) two-hundred-year-old piece of paper. Put that piece of paper on a scale against the innocent human lives facing murder under color of "the law" under Joe Biden and you know which weighs more heavily.
That brings me to my third reason: I think we must seriously question which candidate actually does greater damage to the rule of law. (But I seem to be at the comment length limit. Continued below.)
...That brings me to my third reason: I think we must seriously question which candidate actually does greater damage to the rule of law. Trump, of course, has no respect for the rule of law. But does Biden? What does the "rule of law" even mean in a country where the positive law is so profoundly at odds with the moral foundations on which the law itself is constructed? Is a positive law that permits the atrocities our positive law today permits a law at all? Is the legal system that tolerates these atrocities even legitimate?
I phrase these as questions, not statements, because (unlike my first two arguments, and my fourth and fifth arguments) I really am not certain of the answers here. The last time these issues were squarely faced was in the late 1850s, after the Dred Scott decision. The argument between Abraham Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison was (happily) mooted before it was fully resolved -- thanks to the successful argument Ulysses S. Grant made against Robert E. Lee -- but now we face them again.
As my mother is fond of saying, "We have not lived under the rule of law since January 22, 1973, and now we are living with the consequences." However you slice it, Trump's contempt for the law is a natural consequence of a society that has abandoned objective truths in favor of moral relativism and legal positivism. It seems to me that it does the Constitution no favors to vote against the insurrectionist if the only way to do so is by voting for the abortionist. Indeed, we see that plain as day in Biden's own actions: if Trump would shred the Constitution, Biden at least has made a hobby of scribbling heavily on it ("The Comstock Act? What's that?!").
So, yes, even now, even as I accuse him of disqualifying insurrection against the Constitution, I think that, between the two candidates, Trump is the lesser of the two evils. I don't even think it's a close call. Yet I'm not voting for Trump, which leads me to my fourth and more general point: I think you've missed something important in your overall model of ethical voting.
It seems to me -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that your model is something like this: we must look at the goods and bads that each candidate is likely to bring about and weigh them against one another. If one candidate seems likely to bring about a greater overall good than the other, we should vote for that candidate for the sake of that greater good. Since the intention we bring to the voting booth is to accomplish good, not advance evil, the vote we cast is not evil, even if we anticipate that some of the candidate's policies (that we do not support) will have significant harmful consequences.
I agree that this is a fairly accurate model when we are dealing with ordinary political disagreements. In ordinary political disagreements, everyone agrees on the basic goals, but we disagree on how best to achieve those goals. At worst, we prioritize different goals. For example, political candidates generally agree that the goal of a good welfare policy is to protect our needy neighbors from the vicissitudes of life. Compassion for the needy is universal, but we disagree on how to design welfare programs to protect the needy from expenses, while also protecting them from dependency, while also paying for other programs with scarce resources. I might think that Candidate Alice's policy is more likely to hit the right balance than Candidate Bob's, but Alice and Bob are both pursuing good, not evil. Their voters are supporting different theories about how to achieve those goods, but, in ordinary political disagreements, they are not being asked to cooperate with intentional evil. If I think Alice's policy will do more good overall, I may vote for her. However, if my friend (with a different view of the economy) expects Bob's policy to more overall good, my friend may vote for Bob. We can disagree about that in good conscience.
On a range of issues, from "What should the tax rate be?" to "Should we have a constitutional republic or a hereditary monarchy?", voters in ordinary political disagreements can vote with a (relatively) clean conscience for the candidate they think will accomplish the greatest good. Even when it comes to very weighty questions like, "If country X invades ally Y, what should our response be?" where it is impossible to avoid carnage no matter what you do, we can all share the same basic principles and still, in good conscience, reach different conclusions -- and, thus, vote differently.
In a time of ordinary political disagreements, it's difficult to justify voting for a third-party candidate with no viable chance at victory, or not voting at all. You, as a voter, have the power to help accomplish some good, and a responsibility to use that power efficaciously. You should therefore (generally speaking) make the best choice possible between Alice and Bob and hope that you were right about the practical consequences.
However, we do not live in a time of ordinary political disagreements. Intentionally killing the innocent (and bragging about it on your campaign website) is fundamentally different from other policy disagreements. This is an announced intention to do evil, and a request for voters to validate and enable that intentional evil.
(For that matter, I think trying to overthrow the Constitution for personal gain and never recanting is also an announced intention to do evil.)
That's where I think your model falls apart. Your model doesn't account for candidates who *actively pursue evil*, and so your model forgets a key ethical rule: you cannot do evil in order to bring about a hoped-for greater good. You can't execute the kulaks to bring about utopia; you can't sterilize the poor to improve the gene pool; you can't torture a baby to power Omelas.
When we vote, the greatest effect we have is not on the outcome of the election, where the odds of our vote being determinative are infintesmial. Indeed, even if we do, miraculously, decide the outcome, We cannot predict the precise consequences that will follow. (This uncertainty is a big reason why I reject consequentialism!) In terms of practical impact on the world, our prayer for our elected officials is far more powerful than our vote.
The greatest impact of our vote, then, is not its effect on the world, but its effect on *ourselves.* When we vote for a candidate who endorses evil, our action endorses, authorizes, and enables that evil. When we participate in evil, it corrupts us. True, when we vote, we participate in evil at a substantial remove, which lessens the damage, often for basically good motives, which lessens the damage further. However, the last seven years have made me far more paranoid than I used to be about the extent of that damage.
No doubt you have had the same experience that I've had more than once: a friend of mine in 2016 would very reluctantly, after expressing many reservations, cast a vote for Trump. By Inauguration Day, that friend would be posting "Trump has a point about X"-style articles and disputing anti-Trump fact checks. By midterms, that friend would no longer express any compunction about Trump. By the 2020 election, that friend would own a red hat.
However, I have seen the same phenomenon in the other direction. My friends who, very reluctantly, after expressing many reservations, cast a vote for Hillary (or Biden). By Inauguration Day, that friend would be disputing pro-Trump fact checks. By midterms, that friend would openly question whether Republican presidents actually do anything to help the unborn. (They do.) By the next election, that friend would recognize that the REAL enemies of the good are not actually the party who enthusiastically murders children, but (let me quickly check Mark Shea's Twitter for a random quote), "the MAGA racist 'prolife' cult of death and its raw nihilism."
Not everyone who cast a vote for a major-party candidate in 2016 or 2020 went insane (and I don't know how you voted, but I certainly don't think you're insane), but I was surprised to see that almost all did suffer *some* damage of this type, as their minds raced to heal the pain of cognitive dissonance over morally collaborating with someone whom they knew to be evil.
There *might* be limited circumstances in which we would cast a vote for a candidate who supports some intrinsic evil, if we were very careful to guard our souls against damage, if the good to be achieved were very clear and very straightforward, *and* if the evil were somehow peripheral to the campaign. (For example, an otherwise-perfect candidate might say that he'd respond to a ticking-bomb interrogation by employing torture... but ticking-bomb scenarios are extremely rare, and the candidate would almost certainly never actually face one. This would be peripheral.)
But there are certainly also cases where the correct answer is to simply not vote. If Candidate Chuck's main platform is that he wants to gas all the Jews, even without legal authorization, whereas Candidate Eve also wants to gas all the Jews but would only do so by pursuing legal authority from Congress to establish concentration camps, it is objectively correct to say that Candidate Eve is the "better" candidate. But the evil in which they are both asking you to participate in is so great that you can hardly cast a vote for Eve on the grounds that you support the "rule of law" -- at least, not without suffering like 8d12 psychic damage to your soul. The profound evil of gassing the Jews, or even *attempting* to gas the Jews, even just *asking Congress* to please let you gas the Jews, is unthinkably great. You have no moral option in this scenario but to vote third-party -- or, if no third-party candidate is available, not to vote at all.
In a Trump-Biden rematch, we cannot say that the good to be achieved in either case is at all clear. We certainly cannot call the evils peripheral. Fueled by his successful midterm abortion strategy, Biden is running more openly and enthusiastically on abortion than any Democratic candidate in history. Trump, of course, is still yelling about 2020 to anyone who'll listen. These profound evils are at the very hearts of their campaigns; they are among the first things I'm signing up for when I cast my ballot for one of them. And I, for one, am not nearly confident enough in my own personal holiness to be sure of protecting my soul from the effects of voluntarily cooperating with either of these evil men.
I put it to you, then, that the situation we face is much closer to the "everyone wants to gas Jews" end of the spectrum than the "pro-life candidate is pro-torture under certain circumstances" end. I put it to you that we have reached the point where the benefit of your casting a vote for the lesser evil now *unambiguously* outweighs the cost.
There's just no plausible good reason to endorse, authorize, and enable either of these candidates... and therefore, as I see it, no excuse for those who do. Thus, voting for either is a sin.
(Because the evil Biden pursues is less than the evil Trump pursues, and pertains to an issue less inherently weighty, I think a Trump vote is probably a lesser sin, at least to someone who hasn't taken an oath to the Constitution -- but a lesser sin is still a long way from okay.)
Finally, by way of a final warning against trying to weigh up the consequences and vote for one of these two jokers anyway, my fifth reason is their character.
When we vote, we aren't voting simply or maybe even primarily for the set of policies a candidate endorses. We are voting for the candidate to exercise his virtues on behalf of the common good. Once in office, that candidate will face circumstances we cannot possibly predict in advance. The 2000 election was mostly about education policy and the budget surplus, but the 2001-2004 presidential term ended up being (very urgently) about terrorism and foreign policy. When we vote, we try to give power to someone who is fundamentally trying to pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful, and who has enough wisdom and prudence to muddle forward in its general direction under conditions nobody can imagine on election night.
I trust I don't need to argue here that Trump's relationship to beauty, goodness, and (above all) truth is fundamentally disordered.
But Biden, too, is deeply disordered on this score. In rejecting the single most fundamental human right -- even human *recognition* -- to a broad class of human beings, he demonstrates that, whatever it is he is committed to, *it is not the common good*. His choices may occasionally intersect with the choices of a good ruler (as may Trump's, for that matter), but the framework in which he makes those decisions does not. When he makes a good decision, it is by accident. If you put someone like Biden (or Trump) in power, sure, you might get lucky--but you really can't count on it. Someone who takes Biden's views on abortion (or Trump's views on the Constitution) cannot ethically be supported for any office, not even dog-catcher, because their views are too deeply cut off from the source of wisdom and goodness for them to serve as wise leaders under any circumstance.
"The 2024 election: friends don't let friends cast votes!" (TM James Heaney all rights reserved)
(As I said at the top, this is a little rough around the edges, and I reserve the right to sharpen my arguments in response to your feedback before November voting gets going.)
I appreciate your thinking about the choice we will likely face in 2024. Your caution about identifying with who you vote for, is well taken. I have seen peopple who only reluctantly supported Donald Trump in 2016, go "all in" for Trump in 2020. I agree that how you vote, has the potential to change your mind and heart. That's part of our current problem -- being too "invested" in your candidate. I will strive to avoid that.
It seems clear that defending the Constitution is a core duty of every American citizen, not necessariy requiring military service, but a duty to be carried out in every citizen's circumstances and state of life. That would include you, whether or not you have ever taken the oath, as well as myself. And it definitely applies to the most important act ordinary citizens normally do: casting a vote to choose our elected leaders charged with implementing and upholding the Constitution.
And the order represented by the Constitution, establishing our system of government, with the orderly regulation and transition of power, along with the basic functions of rule of law, maintenance of national defense and public order, is a precious thing. That we in America have maintained that for most of our history is a great accomplishment. The one time that broke down was the Civil War, which resulted in 600,000 deaths, immense destruction of property and social disruption and unrest that persists down to the present. There is plenty of world hiatory, from the history of Rome to the history of countries like France, Germany and Russia that serve as examples when systems of government break down. Germany is especially instructive, as Hitler took power, not by overthrowing the government by force, but through elections in an atmosphere of political polarization, turmoil and violence. (Trump is no Hitler, but some similarities are worrisome).
As for your points about Biden, a second biden term is not without risks for the pro-life cause. But the current trend in the abortion wars are in state level referenda. I write this the night after Ohio voters passed an expansive abortion right into the state constitution, following similar votes in Michinga and several other states last year, and more abortion measures planned in other states next year. I am not overly worried about national legislation.
Abortion laws (along with the redefinition of marriage) do undermine the rule of law, but subtly -- not in the same league with attempts, accompanies to overturn the election.
Finally, as I alluded to already, I believe that voting for a candidate, as opposed to a ballot issue, is a prudential measure, not sinful as long as the choice is made with a non-sinful motivation and carried out with due diligence.
Feel free to use me as a guinea pig for your follow-on posts.
With respect to the value of civil order, St. Paul commanded followers in Christ (Romans 13:1-6) to submit to the civil authorities, paying them taxes, respect and honor. And these authorities, up to the Roman Caesar, sinned far worse than any pro-abortion American President, sanctioning not jut abortion, but infanticide and ultimately execution of Christians for their belief in Christ.
I disagree with you that natural born citizens should be equally held to an Oath to the Constitution as we hold military or holders of public office. Primarily, because of the highly relevant mitigating circumstance of not realizing that they were ever under such an Oath, nor (in many cases) ever learning/realizing what it would mean to make such an Oath. I do not mean to say this so as to denigrate the need to protect the Constitution. I merely mean to point out that many civilians are invincibly ignorant on the matter.
Hi James. I appreciate your exhaustive list of reasons why we can know with certainty that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, a fact I never had reason to doubt.
However, I have to take issue with your statement that "it's a sin to vote for Joe Biden". I don't think it can ever be a sin to vote for any particular candidate so long as you are reasonablly knowledgeable about the candidate (and not simply his stated positions) and you are doing so for reasons that are not sinful.
And there is a great non-sinful reason to vote for Joe Biden: as you correctly observice, Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution. More directly, he is an enemy of the Constitution.
I once served in the US Army. I still consider myself bound my my oath to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic". (God help us, I never thought the last 2 words were anything but a formality).
There is a separate reason that voting for Joe Biden in 2024 is less onerous than voting for him in 2020: The Dobbs decision, the culmination of 49 years of prayer and effort, put the protection of the unborn back into play, making realistic progress possible. I can't imagine a future Court trying to reinstate the legal mess of Roe/Casey even if Biden is lucky enough to replace 2 originalists with 2 liberals.
But I can all too easily imagine what Trump could do if he gets another term. I'm pretty sure you can, too.
I agree that your oath absolutely forbids you from voting for Trump. Even if there were some reason someone might reasonably cast a vote for Trump (spoiler alert for this comment: I don't think there is!), the oath would foreclose it completely.
However, I disagree about Biden. I think it's a sin to do so, for several reasons. (There's a good bet I'll convert this comment to a blog post near November 2024, with an equally unsparing consideration of Trump, so brace for that. You're my rough draft guinea pig, and it's a good bet this reply will run for two if not three comments.)
First and most particularly, I think it is very naive to think that a re-progressivized Court would not immediately re-impose a universal right to abortion through the moment of birth. I agree with you that they would not reimpose the mess of Roe/Casey, because Roe/Casey involved compromises the Left never accepted. They would go Justice Ginsburg's route and impose an absolute right to abortion at every stage of pregnancy without limitation, without the possibility of regulation, and with court-mandated taxpayer funding. No mess, no fuss, just abortions as far as the eye can see. This would be accomplished through an expansive reading of what they perceive as the gender equality guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. You can read the various state supreme court decisions legislating absolute abortion rights, such as Minnesota's Doe v. Gomez, to see the shape of this argument and how it abuses state-level equal protection clauses. The argument would be wrong, but, like the state equal-protection arguments, it would be simple and absolute. The Hyde Amendment would be gone. The Partial-Birth Abortion Act, gone. Every single state-level waiting period or clinic regulation, all gone. Look at the judges on Biden's Supreme Court shortlist, look at his lower-court nominees, and tell me I'm wrong.
The oldest justice on the Court is Thomas; the next is Alito. This is a real risk by itself.
Moreover, in even more imminent threats, Dobbs was nearly overturned by an act of Congress in 2022, which failed by only 1 vote. All those votes came from Democrats. The Democratic House caucus voted unanimously in favor of the misleadingly-named Women's Health Protection Act (formerly known as the Freedom of Choice Act, or FOCA). President Biden vowed to sign it. It was blocked in the Senate because Joe Manchin opposed the bill and Sinema supported the bill and opposed ending the filibuster. Two more D senators with a D president, and that's over. (Also, two more D senators means court-packing, unless there are some secret opponents of court-packing in the Senate who haven't yet been outed. )
In short, Dobbs is very vulnerable in a second Biden term.
However, let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are correct, and that Dobbs itself is unlikely to fall even during a second Biden term. That brings me to my second reason (still particular to the 2024 election):
The Biden Administration has *already* helped kill thousands of unborn children, all by itself, without legislative support and often *subverting* the legislature. We see this in its unilateral repeal of the Mexico City Policy, the resumption of full Title X funding to abortion clinics (which violates the best reading of Title X, but nobody seems to has standing to sue over it), its aggressive and ongoing lawsuits against pro-life states to loosen their unborn-rights protections, its flagrantly illegal de-regulation of abortion-pill distribution (hello Comstock Act), its subversion of the Hyde Amendment to get taxpayers to illegally fund military abortions (which is what Tommy Tuberville is blocking the DoD's promotions list over), and its creative attempts to use Medicaid tax dollars to fund abortion travel around the country.
These are not hypotheticals. The Biden Administration has already deliberately facilitated the deaths of more infants than the past decade of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and he is eager for more. They aren't shy about this; he's literally running on his staunch support for "abortion access". I pulled that list of bloodied accomplishments off a WhiteHouse.gov press release! They're *proud* of their body count!
You are indeed sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I am frankly delighted that you take that oath as seriously as you do. Beyond that oath, however, you are *also* subject to what Sen. William Seward (Whig-NY) described as a law *above* the Constitution:
> "But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part, of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe."
Voting for a proud and enthusiastic killer of children, whose policies have *intentionally* (not indirectly, not accidentally) caused the deaths of many children, and who vows to not only continue but expand those policies, in order to *kill more children*, violates this "higher law." It is objectively worse -- by an order of magnitude -- than voting for someone who is merely a selfish tyrant who would (if given the chance) overthrow the Constitution, a really really wonderful (and you know how much I love it) two-hundred-year-old piece of paper. Put that piece of paper on a scale against the innocent human lives facing murder under color of "the law" under Joe Biden and you know which weighs more heavily.
That brings me to my third reason: I think we must seriously question which candidate actually does greater damage to the rule of law. (But I seem to be at the comment length limit. Continued below.)
[CONTINUED FROM ABOVE]
...That brings me to my third reason: I think we must seriously question which candidate actually does greater damage to the rule of law. Trump, of course, has no respect for the rule of law. But does Biden? What does the "rule of law" even mean in a country where the positive law is so profoundly at odds with the moral foundations on which the law itself is constructed? Is a positive law that permits the atrocities our positive law today permits a law at all? Is the legal system that tolerates these atrocities even legitimate?
I phrase these as questions, not statements, because (unlike my first two arguments, and my fourth and fifth arguments) I really am not certain of the answers here. The last time these issues were squarely faced was in the late 1850s, after the Dred Scott decision. The argument between Abraham Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison was (happily) mooted before it was fully resolved -- thanks to the successful argument Ulysses S. Grant made against Robert E. Lee -- but now we face them again.
As my mother is fond of saying, "We have not lived under the rule of law since January 22, 1973, and now we are living with the consequences." However you slice it, Trump's contempt for the law is a natural consequence of a society that has abandoned objective truths in favor of moral relativism and legal positivism. It seems to me that it does the Constitution no favors to vote against the insurrectionist if the only way to do so is by voting for the abortionist. Indeed, we see that plain as day in Biden's own actions: if Trump would shred the Constitution, Biden at least has made a hobby of scribbling heavily on it ("The Comstock Act? What's that?!").
So, yes, even now, even as I accuse him of disqualifying insurrection against the Constitution, I think that, between the two candidates, Trump is the lesser of the two evils. I don't even think it's a close call. Yet I'm not voting for Trump, which leads me to my fourth and more general point: I think you've missed something important in your overall model of ethical voting.
It seems to me -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that your model is something like this: we must look at the goods and bads that each candidate is likely to bring about and weigh them against one another. If one candidate seems likely to bring about a greater overall good than the other, we should vote for that candidate for the sake of that greater good. Since the intention we bring to the voting booth is to accomplish good, not advance evil, the vote we cast is not evil, even if we anticipate that some of the candidate's policies (that we do not support) will have significant harmful consequences.
I agree that this is a fairly accurate model when we are dealing with ordinary political disagreements. In ordinary political disagreements, everyone agrees on the basic goals, but we disagree on how best to achieve those goals. At worst, we prioritize different goals. For example, political candidates generally agree that the goal of a good welfare policy is to protect our needy neighbors from the vicissitudes of life. Compassion for the needy is universal, but we disagree on how to design welfare programs to protect the needy from expenses, while also protecting them from dependency, while also paying for other programs with scarce resources. I might think that Candidate Alice's policy is more likely to hit the right balance than Candidate Bob's, but Alice and Bob are both pursuing good, not evil. Their voters are supporting different theories about how to achieve those goods, but, in ordinary political disagreements, they are not being asked to cooperate with intentional evil. If I think Alice's policy will do more good overall, I may vote for her. However, if my friend (with a different view of the economy) expects Bob's policy to more overall good, my friend may vote for Bob. We can disagree about that in good conscience.
On a range of issues, from "What should the tax rate be?" to "Should we have a constitutional republic or a hereditary monarchy?", voters in ordinary political disagreements can vote with a (relatively) clean conscience for the candidate they think will accomplish the greatest good. Even when it comes to very weighty questions like, "If country X invades ally Y, what should our response be?" where it is impossible to avoid carnage no matter what you do, we can all share the same basic principles and still, in good conscience, reach different conclusions -- and, thus, vote differently.
In a time of ordinary political disagreements, it's difficult to justify voting for a third-party candidate with no viable chance at victory, or not voting at all. You, as a voter, have the power to help accomplish some good, and a responsibility to use that power efficaciously. You should therefore (generally speaking) make the best choice possible between Alice and Bob and hope that you were right about the practical consequences.
However, we do not live in a time of ordinary political disagreements. Intentionally killing the innocent (and bragging about it on your campaign website) is fundamentally different from other policy disagreements. This is an announced intention to do evil, and a request for voters to validate and enable that intentional evil.
(For that matter, I think trying to overthrow the Constitution for personal gain and never recanting is also an announced intention to do evil.)
That's where I think your model falls apart. Your model doesn't account for candidates who *actively pursue evil*, and so your model forgets a key ethical rule: you cannot do evil in order to bring about a hoped-for greater good. You can't execute the kulaks to bring about utopia; you can't sterilize the poor to improve the gene pool; you can't torture a baby to power Omelas.
When we vote, the greatest effect we have is not on the outcome of the election, where the odds of our vote being determinative are infintesmial. Indeed, even if we do, miraculously, decide the outcome, We cannot predict the precise consequences that will follow. (This uncertainty is a big reason why I reject consequentialism!) In terms of practical impact on the world, our prayer for our elected officials is far more powerful than our vote.
The greatest impact of our vote, then, is not its effect on the world, but its effect on *ourselves.* When we vote for a candidate who endorses evil, our action endorses, authorizes, and enables that evil. When we participate in evil, it corrupts us. True, when we vote, we participate in evil at a substantial remove, which lessens the damage, often for basically good motives, which lessens the damage further. However, the last seven years have made me far more paranoid than I used to be about the extent of that damage.
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[CONTINUED FROM ABOVE]
No doubt you have had the same experience that I've had more than once: a friend of mine in 2016 would very reluctantly, after expressing many reservations, cast a vote for Trump. By Inauguration Day, that friend would be posting "Trump has a point about X"-style articles and disputing anti-Trump fact checks. By midterms, that friend would no longer express any compunction about Trump. By the 2020 election, that friend would own a red hat.
However, I have seen the same phenomenon in the other direction. My friends who, very reluctantly, after expressing many reservations, cast a vote for Hillary (or Biden). By Inauguration Day, that friend would be disputing pro-Trump fact checks. By midterms, that friend would openly question whether Republican presidents actually do anything to help the unborn. (They do.) By the next election, that friend would recognize that the REAL enemies of the good are not actually the party who enthusiastically murders children, but (let me quickly check Mark Shea's Twitter for a random quote), "the MAGA racist 'prolife' cult of death and its raw nihilism."
Not everyone who cast a vote for a major-party candidate in 2016 or 2020 went insane (and I don't know how you voted, but I certainly don't think you're insane), but I was surprised to see that almost all did suffer *some* damage of this type, as their minds raced to heal the pain of cognitive dissonance over morally collaborating with someone whom they knew to be evil.
There *might* be limited circumstances in which we would cast a vote for a candidate who supports some intrinsic evil, if we were very careful to guard our souls against damage, if the good to be achieved were very clear and very straightforward, *and* if the evil were somehow peripheral to the campaign. (For example, an otherwise-perfect candidate might say that he'd respond to a ticking-bomb interrogation by employing torture... but ticking-bomb scenarios are extremely rare, and the candidate would almost certainly never actually face one. This would be peripheral.)
But there are certainly also cases where the correct answer is to simply not vote. If Candidate Chuck's main platform is that he wants to gas all the Jews, even without legal authorization, whereas Candidate Eve also wants to gas all the Jews but would only do so by pursuing legal authority from Congress to establish concentration camps, it is objectively correct to say that Candidate Eve is the "better" candidate. But the evil in which they are both asking you to participate in is so great that you can hardly cast a vote for Eve on the grounds that you support the "rule of law" -- at least, not without suffering like 8d12 psychic damage to your soul. The profound evil of gassing the Jews, or even *attempting* to gas the Jews, even just *asking Congress* to please let you gas the Jews, is unthinkably great. You have no moral option in this scenario but to vote third-party -- or, if no third-party candidate is available, not to vote at all.
In a Trump-Biden rematch, we cannot say that the good to be achieved in either case is at all clear. We certainly cannot call the evils peripheral. Fueled by his successful midterm abortion strategy, Biden is running more openly and enthusiastically on abortion than any Democratic candidate in history. Trump, of course, is still yelling about 2020 to anyone who'll listen. These profound evils are at the very hearts of their campaigns; they are among the first things I'm signing up for when I cast my ballot for one of them. And I, for one, am not nearly confident enough in my own personal holiness to be sure of protecting my soul from the effects of voluntarily cooperating with either of these evil men.
I put it to you, then, that the situation we face is much closer to the "everyone wants to gas Jews" end of the spectrum than the "pro-life candidate is pro-torture under certain circumstances" end. I put it to you that we have reached the point where the benefit of your casting a vote for the lesser evil now *unambiguously* outweighs the cost.
There's just no plausible good reason to endorse, authorize, and enable either of these candidates... and therefore, as I see it, no excuse for those who do. Thus, voting for either is a sin.
(Because the evil Biden pursues is less than the evil Trump pursues, and pertains to an issue less inherently weighty, I think a Trump vote is probably a lesser sin, at least to someone who hasn't taken an oath to the Constitution -- but a lesser sin is still a long way from okay.)
Finally, by way of a final warning against trying to weigh up the consequences and vote for one of these two jokers anyway, my fifth reason is their character.
When we vote, we aren't voting simply or maybe even primarily for the set of policies a candidate endorses. We are voting for the candidate to exercise his virtues on behalf of the common good. Once in office, that candidate will face circumstances we cannot possibly predict in advance. The 2000 election was mostly about education policy and the budget surplus, but the 2001-2004 presidential term ended up being (very urgently) about terrorism and foreign policy. When we vote, we try to give power to someone who is fundamentally trying to pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful, and who has enough wisdom and prudence to muddle forward in its general direction under conditions nobody can imagine on election night.
I trust I don't need to argue here that Trump's relationship to beauty, goodness, and (above all) truth is fundamentally disordered.
But Biden, too, is deeply disordered on this score. In rejecting the single most fundamental human right -- even human *recognition* -- to a broad class of human beings, he demonstrates that, whatever it is he is committed to, *it is not the common good*. His choices may occasionally intersect with the choices of a good ruler (as may Trump's, for that matter), but the framework in which he makes those decisions does not. When he makes a good decision, it is by accident. If you put someone like Biden (or Trump) in power, sure, you might get lucky--but you really can't count on it. Someone who takes Biden's views on abortion (or Trump's views on the Constitution) cannot ethically be supported for any office, not even dog-catcher, because their views are too deeply cut off from the source of wisdom and goodness for them to serve as wise leaders under any circumstance.
"The 2024 election: friends don't let friends cast votes!" (TM James Heaney all rights reserved)
(As I said at the top, this is a little rough around the edges, and I reserve the right to sharpen my arguments in response to your feedback before November voting gets going.)
James,
I appreciate your thinking about the choice we will likely face in 2024. Your caution about identifying with who you vote for, is well taken. I have seen peopple who only reluctantly supported Donald Trump in 2016, go "all in" for Trump in 2020. I agree that how you vote, has the potential to change your mind and heart. That's part of our current problem -- being too "invested" in your candidate. I will strive to avoid that.
Now, let's talk about that loyalty oath. Not only is that oath taken by the military and by civilian officials and employees. It is part of <a href="https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learn-about-citizenship/the-naturalization-interview-and-test/naturalization-oath-of-allegiance-to-the-united-states-of-america">the oath that naturalized citizens take</a>. If naturalized citizens are required to take the loyalty oath, do we expect anything less from natural-born citizens?
It seems clear that defending the Constitution is a core duty of every American citizen, not necessariy requiring military service, but a duty to be carried out in every citizen's circumstances and state of life. That would include you, whether or not you have ever taken the oath, as well as myself. And it definitely applies to the most important act ordinary citizens normally do: casting a vote to choose our elected leaders charged with implementing and upholding the Constitution.
And the order represented by the Constitution, establishing our system of government, with the orderly regulation and transition of power, along with the basic functions of rule of law, maintenance of national defense and public order, is a precious thing. That we in America have maintained that for most of our history is a great accomplishment. The one time that broke down was the Civil War, which resulted in 600,000 deaths, immense destruction of property and social disruption and unrest that persists down to the present. There is plenty of world hiatory, from the history of Rome to the history of countries like France, Germany and Russia that serve as examples when systems of government break down. Germany is especially instructive, as Hitler took power, not by overthrowing the government by force, but through elections in an atmosphere of political polarization, turmoil and violence. (Trump is no Hitler, but some similarities are worrisome).
As for your points about Biden, a second biden term is not without risks for the pro-life cause. But the current trend in the abortion wars are in state level referenda. I write this the night after Ohio voters passed an expansive abortion right into the state constitution, following similar votes in Michinga and several other states last year, and more abortion measures planned in other states next year. I am not overly worried about national legislation.
Abortion laws (along with the redefinition of marriage) do undermine the rule of law, but subtly -- not in the same league with attempts, accompanies to overturn the election.
Finally, as I alluded to already, I believe that voting for a candidate, as opposed to a ballot issue, is a prudential measure, not sinful as long as the choice is made with a non-sinful motivation and carried out with due diligence.
Feel free to use me as a guinea pig for your follow-on posts.
Looks like my attempt at a hyperlink in the above comment failed -- oh well.
With respect to the value of civil order, St. Paul commanded followers in Christ (Romans 13:1-6) to submit to the civil authorities, paying them taxes, respect and honor. And these authorities, up to the Roman Caesar, sinned far worse than any pro-abortion American President, sanctioning not jut abortion, but infanticide and ultimately execution of Christians for their belief in Christ.
I disagree with you that natural born citizens should be equally held to an Oath to the Constitution as we hold military or holders of public office. Primarily, because of the highly relevant mitigating circumstance of not realizing that they were ever under such an Oath, nor (in many cases) ever learning/realizing what it would mean to make such an Oath. I do not mean to say this so as to denigrate the need to protect the Constitution. I merely mean to point out that many civilians are invincibly ignorant on the matter.