Don't Vote!

Not for these people, for God's sake! Not if they paid you!

NOTICE: This post is long, even for me. If you get tired, there are two “break points” marked in the article. If you’re returning from a break, here are links to where you left off:
first break point | second break point

WARNING: This post contains major spoilers for a novel published in 1979.

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In William Styron’s novel, Sophie’s Choice, Sophie Zawistowska is a Polish Catholic imprisoned at Auschwitz with her two children, a boy and a girl, both between the ages of five and ten. An S.S. officer takes an interest in Sophie while she awaits processing. Upon learning that she is a believer in Christ, he sneeringly grants her the “privilege” of a choice:

“You may keep one of your children.”

The other will be killed in the gas chamber.

Sophie insists that she cannot choose one of her children to die. The S.S. officer says that, if she refuses to choose, he will gas them both. Sophie continues to refuse. The S.S. man orders soldiers to take both children to the gas chamber. As the soldiers seize the children from her, Sophie bursts out:

Take my little girl!

Her daughter, who is adorable, is undone by this betrayal. The Nazis carry her off to the gas chamber, screaming, as her mother weeps in horror. Little Eva is gassed to death. Sophie has saved her son at the cost of her daughter.

Naturally, this destroys Sophie. After the war, she becomes a high-functioning alcoholic hedonist, abandoning herself in pleasures to numb her self-loathing and despair. She craves punishment for her choice, seeking out and standing by an increasingly abusive (and mentally ill) boyfriend. Finally, she takes cyanide and dies. It is almost impossible to imagine any other outcome. A 1982 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep dramatized the scene:

Since I knew what was coming, I watched it impassively. I only grimaced when they took the girl, and gasped a little at her scream. Then it was over, and I came back to write this post. I worked for almost a minute before the tears came and I had to stop for a little while. My girls are about that age.

Sophie is a victim here. Let’s be clear about that. She acts under the most extreme duress, fully in the power of one of the more demonic societies ever to arise on this demon-haunted Earth. She did not gas her child; she made a choice in order to save one of her children.

Yet that seems to be no comfort at all. It was not just the death of her child that destroyed Sophie. It was her participation in that death. Something about what she did seems deeply morally wrong, at least to me. Sophie herself would be the first to agree with me.

Maybe that’s just Sophie and me, though.¹ This election season, almost every single person I know has been telling me that, when faced with two evil outcomes, we should always choose the lesser of two evils, no matter what. In fact, what’s really morally questionable is if we refuse to choose the lesser evil.

I have probed right-wingers, left-wingers, and centrists about this. I have tried to find their limiting principle, the line they wouldn’t cross. “Would there be a moral obligation to vote in an election where Hitler and Stalin are the only choices?” “Okay, how about between Satan and Abaddon?”

“Kang and Kodos?”

Perhaps you, dear reader, are the exception, but, among those I’ve spoken to, I have not found any limiting principle. I have had people tell me directly that, between Hitler and Stalin, they’d choose the lesser evil.²

In other words, almost everyone I know seems to think that Sophie’s choice was not merely excusable, given the brutal circumstances and understandable human weakness. They seem to believe Sophie was actually correct.

No, that’s not quite accurate. We live in an era of high polarization! Probably half the people I know think Sophie was correct. Everyone else I know thinks Sophie should have had her son killed instead.

Cooperation With Evil

You read the title; you know what this article is about. Eventually, we are going to talk about voting, and specifically voting in the 2024 presidential election. However, you and I both probably have strong opinions about 2024. As soon as I start talking about it, everyone’s going to get real defensive, and it’s going to be hard to make any headway… so I am going to avoid mentioning 2024 for as long as I can. We’ll build the foundations first. (Don’t skip this part!³)

So let’s keep talking about Sophie’s moral dilemma.

When I come across a difficult moral problem, I usually go find out what the Catholic Church has said about it. I think that’s a good idea even if you’re not Catholic.

The Catholic Church has been around for two thousand years. It is famously systematic and exacting in its rules. Setting its mind (or changing it) takes centuries.⁴ It has dealt with every difficult moral problem you have ever thought of, and thousands of others that have never crossed your mind. Its conclusions are the ethical basis of our civilization, and it has therefore played an indirect but major role in forming your own personal moral code. (The Catholic Church is not the only reason your morality differs from pagan morality, but it’s a big one.) Even when the Catholic Church is wrong,⁵ its top thinkers (who are rather notoriously brilliant) have still probably been thinking and writing about your problem for several lifetimes, which is at least one lifetime longer than you have. What the Church and its thinkers have to say might be right, it might be wrong, but it’s certainly going to give you a better introduction to the discussion than anything you can come up with on your own.

@eigenrobot clearly reached into my drafts folder and stole this passage.

Sure enough, the Church’s theologians have a good deal to say about cooperating with evil. Let’s walk through it.

All too often, we are invited to help other people commit evil acts. Generally speaking, our basic moral duty is to refuse.⁶ We should not help other people commit evil acts. If we did, we would become responsible for those acts. Duh!

However, there are quite a few degrees of responsibility. Suppose you live in 1850s Pennsylvania. If you support universal abolition, but you buy Southern cotton in your town marketplace anyway, your purchase supports slave-powered cotton plantations and the institution of slavery, so your purchase is a form of cooperation with evil—even if Southern cotton is the only cotton for sale in your city. Likewise, suppose you see a runaway slave running past your log cabin late one night. If you leap from your bed, cry “ain’t no property escaping across my land!”, run outside, apprehend her, hold her at gunpoint, call the slave-catchers, and deliver up the runaway into their cruel hands, you have cooperated with the evil of slavery. However, this second form of cooperation is clearly much worse than the first kind. Why?

Categories of Cooperation

Content warning: this section contains frank analysis of rape.

The Catholic Church divides cooperation with evil into two fundamental types:

• Formal cooperation is where you share the intention of the evildoer. You’re at a frat party when an evildoer says, “I’m going to sexually assault that passed-out girl on the couch,” and you say, “Yeah, man, go for it!”

• Material cooperation is where you knowingly give the evildoer material aid in accomplishing his goal. The evildoer says, “I’m going to sexually assault that drunk girl on the couch,” and you say, “You don’t want to catch or spread an STD! Here’s a condom.”

Formal cooperation is pretty cut-and-dried. It exists principally in the heart, and begins in your interior consent (even reluctant consent) to the intention of the evildoer. It may be expressed explicitly (“Yeah, man, go for it!”) or implicitly (“As a Catholic, I can’t say I approve, but a man’s gotta get his rocks off somehow”), but both count.

Material cooperation is much more complex. Catholic moral theology describes material cooperation along two different spectra.⁷

Degrees of Proximity

The first spectrum is proximity. The more closely your cooperation is connected to the evil act, the more serious it is.

• At one extreme is immediate material cooperation, also known as participation. This is direct participation in the evil act.

If an evildoer tells you that he’s going to sexually assault a passed-out drunk girl, and you agree to hold her down in case she wakes up and fights back, you are now a participant in the rape. (The common legal term here is accomplice.)

If you participate because the evildoer is your friend and you want him to “have fun,” you are also formally cooperating. However, it is possible to participate in a rape without formal cooperation. Perhaps the evildoer is holding a gun to your head and, despite your protests, he says that he’ll kill you if you don’t hold the girl down. (The moral theology term for this is duress.) You reluctantly agree because you don’t want to die. When the girl wakes up and fights back, you still hold her down, but you don’t want her to be raped. This is still immediate material cooperation, but not formal cooperation.

• When you aren’t directly participating in the evil act, but your action is nevertheless closely connected to it, it is more proximate material cooperation.

Suppose the evildoer is your roommate. One day, he tells you that there is a particular girl he wants to drug and rape at a frat party tonight, but there are a lot of frat parties going on tonight. The evildoer doesn’t know which party she’s going to. He asks you, since you have a class with her. You tell the evildoer exactly where his victim is going to be, even though you know that he intends to rape her. That’s not participation, but it’s pretty close, so you are engaged in pretty proximate material cooperation. (In legal terms, you might be an accessory.)

If you tell the evildoer where she’ll be because you hate the girl and you want her to get raped, you are also formally cooperating. However, once again, material cooperation does not require formal cooperation. Maybe you only reluctantly give the evildoer the location because he’s blackmailing you and threatens to ruin your life. Maybe you don’t actually want the girl to get raped, but the evildoer offers you $100,000 for the location and your silence. Maybe the evildoer once saved your life, and you (mistakenly) feel that you owe him this favor, although you make your disapproval clear. In all these cases, you are engaged in pretty proximate material cooperation with the rape, even though you do not intend the rape.⁸

One more thing worth noting: the evildoer might succeed at the rape, but he might well fail. The doorman at the party might think the evildoer has a shady look and refuse entry. The girl might come down with the flu and stay home. The evildoer might get caught trying to drug her and get kicked out of the premises. However, even if the rape fails, you have still engaged in proximate material cooperation with rape. Morally speaking, you are just as guilty as you would have been had he succeeded.⁹

• When you aren’t directly participating in the evil act, and your action is less closely connected to it, it is more remote material cooperation.

These two terms, proximate and remote, are often used by internet poasters as though they were clear, distinct, categories separated by bright, obvious lines. They are not. These terms are relative. I will give a couple of examples to illustrate.

Suppose that you are a mechanic. A man has his car towed in and asks you to replace his car’s alternator, which has failed. While you are working on it, you overhear him talking to someone on his cell phone:

No, sorry, I’m gonna miss it tonight, but my roommate, you remember him?… Yeah, he’s coming… No, I told him where it is… But he told me straight-up that he wanted to rape that one girl, and I was all… No, man, I think he’s totally serious. He’s got a whole plan worked out. …Yeah, I don’t know, he just wanted me to make sure you had the roofies… Okay, he’ll be glad to hear it. I’m just getting his car fixed for him, then he’ll come straight over.

Oh no! You’re repairing the evildoer’s car!

You now have strong reason to believe that someone intends to use this car to facilitate a specific rape. If you finish repairing the car, then, you are cooperating with evil.

However, compared to the roommate from the last example, you are a step further removed from the rape. You fixing the evildoer’s car is not nearly as close to direct participation in the rape as that guy telling the evildoer exactly where to find her.¹⁰ If you continue fixing the car, your action is more remote than the roommate’s action.

Now stop imagining yourself as the mechanic. Suppose that you are a cashier at a hardware store. A mechanic comes in and buys a wrench. At checkout, he says, “Honestly, I was glad my wrench went missing. I need the wrench to finish this job, but what I really needed was an excuse to get out and think for a bit. I think the car I’m fixing is going to be used in a rape tonight!” If you sell the mechanic his wrench, you are cooperating with evil (by giving him a wrench to fix the car to transport the evildoer to commit the rape) but more remotely than the mechanic (who actually fixes the car).

The mechanic’s cooperation, then, is remote when compared to the roommate’s, but the mechanic’s cooperation is proximate compared to the cashier.

This chain of proximity radiates outward from the evil act, growing ever more distant from the rape in terms of time, distance, specific causation, and specific knowledge.

For instance, the landlord who rented the house to the frat ten years ago, despite their somewhat shady reputation, certainly took on the knowing risk of a rape. In a real sense, then, he cooperated with the rape, but his proximity is much more remote than the mechanic’s or even the cashier’s.

The evildoer works at a big-box mart where you, in real-life, have probably shopped, which means your money contributed to the evildoer’s wages, and the evildoer used some of those wages to buy roofies. When you shop at the big-box mart, naturally you know that, statistically, some employees will use their wages for evil. Technically, then, shopping at the big-box mart is also material cooperation with evil… but your relationship to the evil is very remote in terms of time, distance, causation, and knowledge.

Degrees of Necessity

The other way Catholic thinkers evaluate cooperation with evil is in terms of necessity. The more necessary your cooperation is to the accomplishment of the evil act, the more serious it is.

This spectrum is not as richly labeled as the spectrum of proximity.¹¹ There is simply a range from necessary to… well, unnecessary. Hey, jargon isn’t always complicated.

If the evil act certainly could not be carried out without your cooperation, your cooperation is absolutely necessary. If the evil act would certainly happen anyway, your cooperation is absolutely unnecessary. Anything uncertain lives on a spectrum between the two.

For example, if you’re the roommate, and nobody but you knows which party the girl is going to, your cooperation is mostly necessary to the rape. It’s not absolutely necessary because the evildoer might have backup plans: he might randomly choose a party and get lucky, for example. Nevertheless, your telling him which party to go to makes the rape much more likely to happen, so your cooperation is pretty necessary. On the other hand, if you have five other roommates, all of whom know the same information as you, and you think some of them are likely to tell the evildoer anyway, your cooperation is much less necessary.

The necessity of a cooperating act does not inherently have anything to do with the its proximity. Suppose you hold down the victim during the rape. If the victim wakes up and fights back, it is also necessary cooperation. If the victim is drugged so heavily that she never stirs, your cooperation is unnecessary. Either way, though, it’s immediate material cooperation.

We live in an uncertain world, so it is nearly impossible to say with certainty whether a cooperating act was necessary or not until after the fact—and, often, not even then. Our moral responsibility is based on what was reasonably foreseeable at the time we chose to cooperate.

A Moral Analysis

So far, all we have done is describe different distances between an evildoer’s evil act and various possible cooperating acts, without saying anything about whether the cooperating acts are right or wrong. It is hard for me to see anything objectionable—or even anything specifically Catholic!—about this analysis… except insofar as it is very Catholic to be this anal-retentive about categorizing things. I hope it all sounds reasonable to you. Now we turn to the Catholic tradition’s moral conclusions, which are more disputable (though, I think, still quite reasonable).

Formal cooperation, according to the Church, is always unethical. You can never positively intend an evil deed, even reluctantly.¹² Joining your will to that of the evildoer makes you fully an accomplice to his evil deed. If you are under duress, your culpability (your personal objective guilt) is lessened, but not erased, and the magnitude of the crime itself remains just as great.

Immediate material cooperation cannot be separated from implicit formal cooperation.¹³ Therefore, immediate material cooperation is always unethical. You must never directly participate in an evil act, even reluctantly. In other words, it doesn’t matter if the evildoer has a gun to your head and has already killed three people for refusing him. It doesn’t even matter if the evildoer has a gun to your child’s head. If he asks you to hold down the girl while he rapes her, your moral duty is to refuse. Few would blame you very much, under the circumstances, if you broke down and held the girl down to save your own life, but you would deserve some blame. And, in your heart of hearts, you would almost certainly know it.

After all, evil isn’t just wrong because it hurts the world. Evil hurts you, directly. A classic formula is that evil “darkens the intellect” and “binds the will.”¹⁴ Think of the worst person you know, and this becomes clear. Each time the will of a good person fails, it becomes more difficult for him to resist similar temptations in the future—binding the will. Meanwhile, his natural sense of right and wrong gradually gutters out under the weight of habit—darkening the intellect.

The evildoer (even a mere cooperating evildoer) rationalizes what he has done. He can’t really help this. Even if he knows he’ll be tempted to rationalize it, the desire to soften the edges of one’s own evil acts is almost irresistible. His whole mind is slowly warped around that rationalization. After all, if you tell an AI to draw “a perfectly ordinary man, with two human arms, two human legs, two human eyes, a human nose, and eight spider arms,” that last, bizarre instruction doesn’t fit, and warps the whole neural net; the entire image has to be restructured around that one broken concept. Evil does not fit the human pattern, and so warps our neural net the same way. Which is a long way of saying: evildoing darkens the intellect.

Yes, of course I tried out that AI thing myself. I’m not saying the spider thing isn’t cool. It just isn’t human. Right-click and open in new tab to embiggen. Prompts in footnote:

¹⁵

In addition to this genuine internal damage, there is also the evil inflicted on the world, for which you are responsible. This, too, will come back to hurt you some more, in the form of guilt and shame, whether repressed or not.

Of course, all this damage happens slower and less severely if we do evil only reluctantly, or if we are only cooperating with the evil. The Catholic position, however, is that the damage still happens, because our psychology is shaped by our actions whether we like it or not. Think of proximity to evil as proximity to the One Ring in Tolkien. (Middle-Earth is proudly ruled by Catholic moral theory.) Because Gollum acquired the Ring through murder, it corrupted him much more quickly, deeply, and completely than it did Frodo… but the Ring’s power to corrupt still harmed Frodo beyond measure.

Sophie’s Error

We can now understand where poor Sophie made her (understandable) mistake—the mistake that, in the end, killed both little Eva and Sophie herself.

Sophie never actually had a choice. The S.S. guard gave her the illusion of choice. He held 100% of the power. If Sophie had refused to pick a child, he might very well have followed through on his threat to kill them both. Then again, he might have spared one, or both. Likewise, once Sophie did choose one of her children, he might have killed both anyway, or killed the one Sophie didn’t choose. The power was always, entirely, in his hands.

The only reason the S.S. guard gave Sophie the illusion of choice was to trick Sophie into formal cooperation with the murder of her own daughter.¹⁶ In the book, it is especially clear that the guard hates Sophie for her belief in Christ, and wants to strike at her by coaxing her into the greatest blasphemy of all.

The only way you can escape this situation with your soul intact, then, is to refuse the choice. Do not pick a child. Do not trample the fumi-e. Do not play the Hunger Games. What the evildoer chooses to do, after you sit down and refuse to play his game, is his choice alone… as it always truly was.

Yes, because evil darkens the intellect, he will likely see your refusal as a hateful rebuke, a piercing light into the darkness of his cruel will. He will probably make you pay for it. Maybe others, too. But he will do it alone. You will not have killed your child. You will remain you.

“I pass the test. I shall diminish, and go into the West… and remain Galadriel.”

My parents (who taught me well) taught me this solution to Sophie’s “Choice” from a young age, and it has always seemed clearly right to me. If it seems wrong to you, perhaps my argument isn’t going to connect with you and you can skip the rest of this article—unless you’re Catholic.¹⁷

Still, not every case of cooperation with evil is literally “send one of your babies to the gas chamber.” There must be some room for cooperation, or we’d never be able to buy groceries.

The Case for Cooperation

Material cooperation that is not immediate and not formal might be justifiable, under certain circumstances. Because of the corrupting power of evil, the burden of proof always lies on the cooperator to show that cooperation is justified in a given situation, and the presumption is that you should not cooperate with evil… but there is a case to be made.

Once again, you can never do evil, not even so good may come of it. Nor may you intend evil. However, if you are intending to bring about good, you can sometimes take a neutral or good action while tolerating an evil that you foresee could arise indirectly from your morally neutral action. Indirectness is extremely important here: the good you are seeking cannot depend upon the evil, and it cannot result from the evil.¹⁸

Even then, you need a hefty justification even to tolerate the possible evil result:

1. First, there must be no reasonable way to obtain your intended good without the evil results. If there’s a way to get the good without the bad, obviously, you have to do that.

2. Second, the good must be proportionate to the evil you might be causing. “Proportionate” means that, if the evil you anticipate is quite small, then even a fairly small intended good can justify cooperation. However, if the evil is very great (like a single rape, or a single child gassed by Nazis), and your contribution to it is significant, then the good you are pursuing must be extraordinarily good—good enough to outweigh that evil.

Making this decision requires the potential cooperator to engage in a very ugly moral calculus. What would outweigh a rape? The hideousness of that question, and your natural instinct to recoil from it, is a good illustration of why Catholic moralists tend to treat cooperation with evil like it were glowing green nuclear waste that can only be handled with eleven-foot iron tongs and full-body protection.

Still, the “weight” of the evil becomes less and less as you move further and further away from the original evil act in both proximity and necessity. Let’s turn back to our examples to see how that works in practice:

The roommate (who told the evildoer which party the girl was going to) is so proximate to the rape, so necessary to its success, that he could only justify helping the evildoer if the evildoer were going to use his knowledge of the party to accomplish some good so great it would actually outweigh the rape (or very nearly so). The roommate’s contribution to the rape is too significant to be balanced out by anything less. However, I have no clear idea what good could plausibly do that, and I don’t care to contrive an example. This cooperation is so proximate, so necessary, so close to immediate cooperation, that it is probably only justifiable in theory and in off-the-wall hypotheticals, not in practice.

However, the cashier at the hardware store is several steps more distant from the rape in distance, time, causation, knowledge, and necessity. He would only contribute a small amount to the eventual rape. Therefore, he might reasonably consider that:

• selling a mechanic a wrench is morally neutral,

• refusal to sell the mechanic a wrench would violate store policy and could lead to the cashier losing his job,

• his refusal is not going to prevent the mechanic from fixing the car (because there are three other hardware stores nearby),

• the evildoer might accomplish the rape even without the car, and

• the cashier has a family to feed.

Our cashier faces a difficult moral dilemma, with no clear answer. This is a matter of prudential judgment: that is, it can only finally be resolved by the cashier weighing things up internally, in his conscience (which we can only hope is well-formed and practiced in all the virtues), perhaps with the help of trusted moral authorities, and, at last, coming to a decision. The objectively correct answer, in such complex cases, is known only by God, and people can disagree in good conscience about what it is. All things considered, I personally think the cashier ought to at least try to refuse the sale, but it’s a close call and depends greatly on specific, concrete facts that we can’t know in an abstract hypothetical.

Finally, consider a customer of the hardware store. She is very remote from the rape, and her patronage is almost totally unnecessary to the rape. She also lacks any specific knowledge of the rape; she has only that general knowledge that, if you spend money on goods and services, some people who receive the money will use it for evil. By purchasing her next socket wrench at this hardware store, this customer is, technically, cooperating with evil (by paying the store to buy wrenches that it may sell to mechanics who may use the wrenches to fix cars for rapists), but her involvement is so remote and so unnecessary to the evil, her contribution to the eventual rape so tiny and indirect, that probably the only justification she needs is “I need a new socket wrench.” The good of the socket wrench very likely outweighs her (teensy-tiny, unrecognized) contribution to the eventual rape.

The cooperator should not forget, too, that her cooperation won’t just have an effect on the world. It will have an effect on herself. Even if her cooperation is justified under the circumstances, proximity to evil always leaves scars—and those scars get bigger the more proximate and more necessary to the evil. They darken the intellect. They bind the will. As Fr. Dominic Prümmer, O.P. explained in his 1949 Handbook of Moral Theology:

…[The evil effect]—though not intended by the agent—remains a material sin, and frequently engenders a grave risk of formal sin.

I can’t (easily) prove that any of this is correct, because you can’t do proofs of ethical principles without a shared understanding of the human person, which does not exist in a pluralist society. However, this is one of those Catholic teachings that seems so common-sensical to me that I would take it with me if I ever left the Church.¹⁹

This article’s kinda long, isn’t it? If you’d like to take a break, here’s a good place to stop for the day. You can come back tomorrow and read on from here. Nobody’ll judge.

Voting Ethically

There is not a tremendous amount of material on Catholic voting ethics, and much of what does exist is sloppy, partisan hackwork designed to get you to vote a certain way.²⁰ Worse, many of the principal documents—the ones that are generally regarded as at least somewhat authoritative—tend to assume that voters are acting in a context of what I am going to call ordinary politics.

In ordinary politics, all candidates agree on the basic vision of the common good. There is complete agreement on the fundamental rights:

1. life, the single right without which all other rights are “false and illusory,”

2. liberty to develop one’s human potential,²¹ and

3. recognition of the equally infinite dignity of every human.²²

There is also broad agreement on what is needed to fully develop our human potential, and agreement that government plays some role in ensuring that everyone has those things: food, clothing, shelter, health, work, religion, education, culture, knowledge, peace, the rule of law, the right to pursue one’s vocation, the right to establish and raise a family,²³ and much else besides.²⁴

Of course, we will almost certainly disagree on how best to achieve these goals. We will have arguments, perhaps bitter ones, about which level of government is best suited to deal with an obstacle to human flourishing: federal, state, city, county, private charity, family, individual. We will disagree about levels of taxation, levels of immigration, policing methods, what time school should start in the morning, whether the city should prioritize snow plowing or walkability, and whether the country should go to war against an enemy or try to sue for peace. These disagreements will be deep. Many, many people’s lives and happiness will ride on the outcomes. Nevertheless, this is ordinary politics.

When casting a vote during a time of ordinary politics, citizens should inform themselves about the candidates, listen to respected moral authorities,²⁵ and make a prudential judgment about which candidate is more likely to do the most to advance the common good. Citizens can disagree about that decision without believing that the other side has done something evil. Opposing candidates might be fools, and they might get a lot of people hurt by accident with their foolish policies, but they aren’t evildoers, and they aren’t hurting the common good on purpose. Neither the candidates nor the voters are cooperating with evil.

It seems obvious that, under ordinary politics, every citizen ought to vote. We all have a duty to advance the common good. Under ordinary politics, voting does just that, with very little danger to one’s own soul. Therefore, the citizen generally has a duty to vote.²⁶

Under ordinary politics, then, two things are true:

1. You, as a conscientious citizen, have an obligation to vote for the candidate you judge to be better, and

2. When deciding which candidate is better, there’s rarely an objectively right or wrong answer, because all of society shares the same basic view of the common good and disagrees only about the most effective means of achieving it.

These conditions prevailed in most²⁷ of the United States throughout the middle of the twentieth century, culminating in the 1960s, the era of the “Great Consensus.” Catholics were a cornerstone of that consensus, and they became habituated to the voting mores of ordinary politics. So did nearly all Baby Boomers. They taught their children the ethos of ordinary politics, who taught their children the same.

The problem is that we have left ordinary politics far behind.

Extraordinary Politics

“Extraordinary” sounds like a big deal, right? It sounds like you should hit the alert klaxon and man your action stations. Ideally, that’s exactly what it is. There’s a crisis, the crisis ends, and normality resumes. But normality has a funny way of not resuming.

Let me tell you about something else “extraordinary” in Catholicism: the “extraordinary minister of Holy Communion.” The ordinary minister of communion in the Catholic Church is a cleric. However, during the first crushing wave of the priest shortage in 1971, the American Church requested and received special permission to allow laypeople to assist priests in ministering communion as well. Rome granted permission, then extended it to the rest of the Church in 1973. In 1983, the “extraordinary minister” was legally codified as a backup option. The priest shortage never ended. I was born in 1989. Virtually every regular Mass I’ve ever had half a dozen (or more!) “extraordinary” ministers. The crisis may simply fail to abate, and the crisis footing becomes the norm.

Something like this happened in U.S. politics during the 1840s and 1850s. Growing awareness of the horrors of slavery, combined with the Slave Power’s hardening determination to expand its reach into every corner of the United States (even free territory), catapulted slavery into the center of national politics. Gradually at first, then suddenly, every single federal election (and quite a lot of state elections) came to be about which candidate would do more to restrict slavery… or expand it.

There were other issues, of course. Everyone was desperate to maintain the veneer of ordinary politics. The most important bloc of moderate “swing” voters was really uncomfortable with slavery, but also felt, for various reasons, that it was necessary for slavery to remain legal. Those voters, especially, really did not want to have to think about slavery and really wanted politics to be about anything else. (You may know some people like this today.) Then, as now, people hated “single-issue voters,” for some reason, so they found excuses to pretend we were still in ordinary politics.

There was the great constitutional debate about Congressional funding for roads and canals; there was the dispute over annexing Cuba and the Ostend Manifesto; people were still arguing whether a Bank of the United States was a good idea. Naturally, plenty of people were mad about immigrants, who, at the time, were mostly hateful Romish papists invading New York City.

But chattel slavery was not one more ordinary-politics disagreement about how best to serve the common good. It was a direct attack on fundamental rights. It spat not only on the promises of the Declaration of Independence, but on the very idea of human liberty, equality, and dignity. Legal protection for chattel slavery was incompatible with the common good. Worse yet, this assault on fundamental rights was happening at scale. Four million souls—more than ten percent of the U.S. population—were “owned” by another human being. Even relatively “small” battles over slavery had enormous consequences for huge numbers of people. There were at least a couple hundred slaves²⁸ in Kansas during the prolonged political struggle / low-grade civil war known as “Bleeding Kansas.” Their fates, and those of many others, were decided by elected politicians.

In the 1850s, then, slavery was not a “single issue” alongside the Ostend Manifesto and currency policy. Slavery was a singular issue, one that conscientious voters rightly considered preeminent in their voting decisions. If you voted for a presidential candidate who supported Kansas’s proposed pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, you were cooperating with evil. If you voted for a presidential candidate who positively supported the Fugitive Slave Act, you were cooperating with evil.²⁹

The act of the public official who unjustly strips fundamental rights from a class of citizens is not merely cooperation with evil. It a very grave, direct evil in and of itself. Establishing a right to chattel slavery is bad enough to send a man to Hell, even if nobody takes him up on it by actually enslaving anyone. (Of course, somebody always takes him up on it.) The pro-slavery legislator enables other evildoers (a form of cooperation), but he is first and foremost an evildoer himself, no less than the rapist in our earlier examples.

Indeed, our rapist pursued the rape of only one girl. The pro-slavery legislator takes positive action to permit the rape of an entire race of girls.

So when a citizen voted for the evildoing legislator, cooperating in that evil, what moral burden did that citizen bear? Was this really bad cooperation, like holding down the rape victim? Or was it pretty justifiable cooperation, like shopping at a store that might sell wrenches unknowingly to mechanics who might fix rapists’ cars?

The Voter’s Moral Burden

Formal cooperation is, as always, right out. If you vote for a pro-Fugitive Slave Act candidate because you want to get those fugitive slaves back in chains, you are actively pro-evil and bear full blame for it. Or, suppose you are “personally opposed” to slavery, but you believe it isn’t your “place” to make that “decision” for others. You vote for the pro-slavery candidate because you oppose giving legal human rights to slaves. You are also formally cooperating in evil and bear full blame accordingly.

Let us suppose, however, that our hypothetical voter is a really good person. (Let’s call him Louie.) Louie is a (rare) supporter of complete and immediate abolition. Louie is voting for the slavery candidate, but despite those views, not because of them. Louie wants to put the slavery candidate in office for the sake of all the good things he will accomplish, like preventing recession through specie and maybe doing something about all those Catholics stealing our jobs. Louie’s cooperation is material, but not formal.

It is not immediate material cooperation, either. Louie doesn’t draft pro-slavery speeches for the slavery candidate, he doesn’t bring the bills to his desk to sign, he’s not right there directly helping the slavery candidate defend and expand slavery. Louie’s cooperation is more remote than that, since he is only voting for the slavery candidate.

How remote?

To answer, let’s go back to our examples of cooperation with rape. Remember the roommate, the mechanic, the cashier, and the hardware store customer?

Louie’s vote for a pro-slavery candidate most closely resembles the rapist’s roommate. (As a reminder, the roommate was the one who, knowing that the rapist planned to commit a rape, told the rapist exactly where to find his target.) Like the roommate, Louie is only one step removed from the lawmaker he votes for. The mechanic and the cashier were two, three, even four steps away from the rapist himself, but Louie’s support for the candidate is direct and unmediated.³⁰

The rapist sought information—the location of his target. The slavery candidate seeks authorization—the legal power to enact his policy program. Both obviously contribute substantially to the evil. When the roommate gave the rapist that information, he gave the rapist specific material aid that substantially advanced his evil objectives. When Louie gives the slavery candidate his vote, that, too, is specific material aid that advances his evil plans. That’s what a vote for a representative is: an attempt to imbue a candidate with power to act, on your behalf, with legal authority.

The voter’s cooperation with the legislator’s evil, therefore, is very proximate. It is more remote than immediate material cooperation (which is always forbidden),³¹ but it is about as close to immediate material cooperation as an act can be without actually being immediate.³²

How necessary?

Voting is a funny thing. You know how they sometimes give everyone in a firing squad a blank bullet, except for one guy, and nobody knows who? It’s a way of making each individual member of the squad feel less responsible for the execution. Voting’s a lot like that. As long as the election winner wins by more than one vote, every voter can tell himself, “Oh, phew, it wasn’t my ballot that did it.” Is it so easy? If I vote for an evildoer, is my responsibility for his evil acts diluted? Is that moral burden divided equally among every voter?³³ If the evildoer’s legislation, policies, and court appointments are responsible for a thousand slave rapes that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, but 1.6 million voters joined me in voting for him, am I only responsible for… does some division… six ten-thousandths of a rape?

No.³⁴

Remember our first rule of justifiable cooperation with evil, from a little while ago:

[T]here must be no reasonable way to obtain your intended good without the evil results. If there’s a way to get the good without the bad, obviously, you have to do that.

Louie is hoping that the slavery candidate will accomplish a great deal of good in office. Louie also knows that his specific vote isn’t going to matter, because a lot of other people are going to vote for the slavery candidate. Great! Let them! If Louie’s vote is not necessary to electing the candidate, then the good effects of the candidate winning will happen no matter what Louie does. Louie therefore has no reason to cast a vote for the candidate.

Of course, we never know in advance whether our vote is going to be necessary. Everyone has thought at least once about staying home on Election Day, and everyone has thought at least once, “Oh, no, but what if my staying home changes the outcome? What if I’m the reason Candidate X loses?” This is reasonable! In many voting contexts, it is unlikely (but plausible) that your vote could turn out to be the one on which the entire election turns. Hence the common argument among pro-voting activists: you always have to vote as though you’re casting the deciding ballot.

But this comes with a horrible moral responsibility: a vote to cooperate with evil can only be justifiable insofar as that vote is absolutely necessary. For the purposes of moral analysis, we must treat your vote as though it were absolutely necessary.

Louie faces a terrible burden. He wants the good things that the slavery candidate will accomplish, but, by voting for the slavery candidate, he would materially cooperate with evil. His material cooperation is so proximate it is nearly immediate, and it can only be regarded as absolutely necessary. If he does cast this vote, he will bear nearly full responsibility for the evil acts of the legislator once he takes office. Remember what we said earlier about the rapist’s roommate:

The roommate is so proximate to the rape, so necessary to its success, that he could only justify helping the evildoer if the evildoer were going to use his knowledge of the party to accomplish some good so great it would actually outweigh the rape (or very nearly so). The roommate’s contribution to the rape is too significant to be balanced out by anything less. However, I have no clear idea what good could plausibly do that, and I don’t care to contrive an example. This cooperation is so proximate, so necessary, so close to immediate cooperation, that it is probably only justifiable in theory and in off-the-wall hypotheticals, not in practice.

The United States Council of Catholic Bishops, in a document on voting ethics entitled Faithful Citizenship, put it this way:

35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position even on policies promoting an intrinsically evil act may reasonably decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil. [emphasis added]

You can sort of imagine “truly grave” proportionate reasons if the candidate supports relatively small violations of fundamental rights. Like, maybe Candidate Smith “just” wants to put the five worst murderers in lifelong solitary confinement, such that none of them ever sees another human being again. Maybe you could reluctantly cooperate with that cruel and unusual punishment (which attacks the human dignity of five of the worst criminals), if Candidate Smith also opposed some much more widespread and fundamental attack on human dignity—like legalized wife-beating, which killed tons of women and was still being eliminated during the 1850s.

But this reasoning will not work for Louie, who is considering voting for a pro-slavery candidate. American chattel slavery was already a direct assault on some of the most fundamental rights, and few evils were more widespread. As we said earlier about the roommate:

Making this decision requires the potential cooperator to engage in a very ugly moral calculus. What would outweigh a rape? The hideousness of that question, and your natural instinct to recoil from it, is a good illustration of why Catholic moralists tend to treat cooperation with evil like it were glowing green nuclear waste.

What would outweigh one slave? What would outweigh two hundred slaves in Kansas? What would outweigh four million slaves nationwide? Is Louie prepared to answer that? Should he be?

Should you?

Yet this still doesn’t quite plumb the depths of how bad it would be to vote for the slavery candidate. Everyone who supported chattel slavery, by definition, rejected the basic principles underlying the common good. Such a person cannot be said to have any moral character, and cannot be trusted to do the right thing for its own sake in any context, big or small. Any good such a person might do would be essentially accidental. As one writer put it, when someone takes a public stand on questions of fundamental rights,

…he reveals his underlying vision of person, morality, law, and government. Unless is office is that of a mere functionary that can be filled by anyone with technical expertise, the candidate will have to bring his wisdom to bear on the common good in the execution of that office. This vision—this wisdom, or lack thereof—is by this fact the single most important qualification for holding public office. …We voters should never pretend that these issues sometimes do not matter in an election. They always matter. [emphasis in original]

To cooperate with a pro-slavery candidate, then, even if somehow justified, would leave the scars close cooperation always leaves. It would also create an enormous danger of toppling into formal cooperation yourself, as you struggled to rationalize the evil your vote caused. All this sacrifice to put a person in office whose moral vision is so defective as to render him untrustworthy on all issues. Yet the stakes here are not the country. The stakes are your soul. As the U.S. Catholic Bishops write in Faithful Citizenship:

38. It is important to be clear that the political choices faced by citizens not only have an impact on general peace and prosperity but also may affect the individual’s salvation.

Meanwhile—somehow we never got around to mentioning this—there’s an anti-slavery guy on the ballot! His economic plan is a bit rubbish, and you think his immigration plan is very unbalanced and will cause a lot of suffering, but, fundamentally, the anti-slavery guy is trying to bring about the common good. You know that especially because he doesn’t want to enslave the Black race.

Obviously, under these circumstances, you have to vote for the anti-slavery guy. If Louie votes for the pro-slavery guy, Louie will be wrong. Louie will have sinned. Louie might not realize it. (Louie isn’t very bright.) Louie’s ignorance might reduce his personal guilt… but it doesn’t remove the sin.³⁵

Now, perhaps the anti-slavery candidate is pragmatic. He wants slavery extinct, but, recognizing the current political climate isn’t ready for abolition, he is willing to vote for compromises that help some slaves while leaving others in bondage. At least in Catholic thought, that is okay, as long as the compromises really are intended as temporary. As Pope John Paul II contended in 1995’s Evangelium Vitae, #73:

In the case of an intrinsically unjust law… [a] particular problem of conscience can arise in cases where a legislative vote would be decisive for the passage of a more restrictive law… in place of a more permissive law already passed or ready to be voted on. Such cases are not infrequent. …In a case like the one just mentioned, when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a[n intrinsically unjust] law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to [the injustice] was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.

The anti-slavery candidate is still aiming at the actual common good, unlike his opponent. His tactical compromises may or may not be prudent, but they are not evil, and you therefore do not cooperate with evil by supporting him.

Under extraordinary politics, then, two things are true:

1. Just like in ordinary politics, you, as a conscientious citizen, have an obligation to vote for the candidate you judge to be better, and

2. Unlike ordinary politics, when deciding which candidate is better, there is usually an objectively right answer, because one candidate supports the basic concept of the common good and the other is advancing an attack upon its very core. All ethical voters must ordinarily vote the same way.

If you’d like to read more about the ethics of voting in periods of what I have termed “extraordinary politics,” you’re in luck: my father was among of the foremost Catholic thinkers publishing in this niche in the 2000s. I have borrowed liberally from him without credit, but he had much more to say that I have skipped for the sake of (believe it or not) brevity. I especially commend his longest paper, How Should Catholics Vote? (2007), although the much shorter More Than a Hill of Beans (2000) had more zest. (I stole the character of “Louie” from More Than a Hill of Beans.)³⁶

However, my father’s work was shaped very strongly by the baseline assumptions of “extraordinary politics.” In 2024’s presidential race, those assumptions do not apply.

Ordinary Antipolitics

Suppose you are citizen of ancient Rome. You are voting for tribune, a public official with wide-ranging power to block or advance legislation. Both candidates have some pros and cons. You like Quintus because he promises to veto a proposed law against chariot races, and you love the chariots. However, Quintus is also proposing legislation to shift the costs of pothole repair from the aediles to local neighborhoods, which would be bad news for the bad roads in your poor neighborhood. Quintus’s opponent, Gaius, is the opposite: anti-chariot but pro-fixing-potholes. Hm, a classic decision for ordinary politics!

Except one little thing: both Quintus and Gaius support the (pretty brutal) institution of Roman slavery. Neither is running on it as a platform issue, because, unlike antebellum America, slavery is a non-issue in Rome. Everyone supports Roman slavery. (Everybody except you, anyway.³⁷) The issue is simply settled. Your tribune is unlikely to face any pressure to take up new slavery-related legislation in the coming term, either pro- or anti-slavery. He’s almost certainly not going to originate any himself, since he shares Rome’s pro-slavery sentiment. He’s probably never even thought about it very much. It’s just reflexive.

In this situation, both candidates support an ongoing legal assault on fundamental human rights, rejecting the common good. However, the assault lacks salience. It isn’t an active political issue. The actual issues on the table in the election look a whole lot like ordinary politics, while this horrifying evil lurks in the background.

Ordinary politics prevail when the nation’s fundamental values are both shared and correct. Extraordinary politics prevails when the nation’s fundamental values are not shared. Sometimes, though, a society does share its fundamental values… but those values are Garbage McEvilpants. (One could make the argument that, throughout human history, this is the most typical condition of all.)

I’m going to call this “antipolitics.” Just as antimatter looks a whole lot like ordinary matter until you look closely (and explode), antipolitics looks just like ordinary politics if you don’t look too closely. Then you notice that your whole society is built on a foundation of children’s skulls (and explode). What choice does the conscientious voter have in Omelas?

The Orville crew discovers the literal foundation of the utopian society on Kaylon One. (The Orville 2x8 “Identity, Part I”)

In a society where a great evil is both established and (for now) wholly beyond the reach of politics, refusing to cast a ballot could be a valid form of protest against the great evil. So could casting a blank ballot. Both actions would protect the voter from the harms of cooperation with evil, and are therefore presumptively preferred.

On the other hand, the fact that the great evil has no political salience arguably limits the extent to which any given legislator or voter cooperates with it. A voter in 1856 America knew that, by voting for the pro-slavery candidate, he would (at least in a small way) be helping defeat anti-slavery legislation (and court appointees) and advance pro-slavery legislation (and appointees). A voter in Rome circa 177 B.C., on the other hand, probably doesn’t expect slavery to come up at all during the tribune’s term. This, at least arguably, attenuates the tribune’s level of material cooperation with the evil of Roman slavery, which limits the voter’s material cooperation as well.

There is at least a colorable case to be made that the conscientious voter could, under these circumstances, behave as though ordinary politics prevailed. He might be able to vote for the candidate likely to inflict the least harm, or most likely to pursue other goods. Even if the candidates have rejected the common good, the voter still knows what it is, and can perhaps use the candidates instrumentally to help imperfectly achieve that good vision.

In Faithful Citizenship, the U.S. Bishops offer only one cryptic comment on the moral dilemma of voting under antipolitics:

36. When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

This is not carte blanche to vote for the “lesser evil,” no matter how much partisan Catholics (on both sides) have tried to turn it into that. In fact, when we examine this paragraph, we find a lot of nuance crammed into its sixty words.

The first thing to notice is its reference to “all candidates.” This is interesting, because this was written by bishops in the United States, which has a two-party system. Most Americans would put “both candidates” here, but the U.S. Bishops deliberately use “all candidates.” This can only be a reference to third-party candidates, something we haven’t considered at all so far in this article. The U.S. Bishops appear to believe that, if any candidate embraces all the fundamental rights, that candidate should presumptively have your vote—even if that candidate has little or no chance of actually winning. This presumption can likely be defused by sufficiently grave moral reasons under some circumstances, but that case has to be carefully built, and is liable to hinge on a tricky prudential judgment.³⁸ Until then, the presumption is that you ought to vote for the candidate who won’t make you, the voter, an accessory to murder, slavery, rape, or the like.

Given everything we’ve already discussed, this shouldn’t be a surprise. The voter’s first duty in the voting booth is not to make the tactically best choice. It’s important to try, but humans are terrible tacticians who are completely helpless at predicting the future anyway. The voter’s first duty is to protect her own soul.

However, perhaps the conscientious voter has no (good) third-party options, and lives in a state where write-in votes are not allowed (such as South Dakota). This is a true antipolitics. For such a trapped voter, the U.S. Bishops offer a choice:

The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

Once again, the presumption here is against cooperating with evil. “Not voting” is indeed an extraordinary step, but antipolitics is a situation beyond extraordinary. “Not voting” is listed first here and (unlike the other option) is given without qualification. Once again, this obviously follows from what has already been discussed. It is also the moral of “Omelas”.³⁹

Nevertheless, the idea that you might ever have the option to not vote—never mind an obligation not to vote—runs strongly counter to every Boomer moral instinct about voting. In fact, I’ve come across more than one Boomer Catholic who quotes this passage to me as evidence that I must always vote for the lesser of two evils. It’s like their eyes just skip past the first fifteen words of the bishops’ choice, because it doesn’t fit into their view of the world!

This paragraph does preserve the option to vote for a “lesser evil” evildoing candidate (at least, as long as there are no good third-party options), but this short paragraph sheds very little light on when that option should be preferred over the presumptive option of simply refusing to vote at all. Many (many) (MANY) Catholics (on all sides) have interpreted this lack of explicit guidance as permission to vote for any “lesser evil” under any circumstances.⁴⁰

However, if you have been following closely so far, you know this guidance isn’t here because it isn’t necessary. The Church’s rich teaching on cooperation with evil already supplies it. Cooperation is never required, and refusal to cooperate is usually morally praiseworthy, so “not voting at all” really should be seen as the default here. However, cooperation with evil through a vote for an evildoing candidate can be permitted—if, and only if, the voter can meet the exacting burden of proof to show that she is acting in the name of an even greater good that is likely to be obtained and which cannot be reasonably obtained by less evil means (such as by not voting).

Under antipolitics, ordinarily, this is juuuuust about possible. Because a society trapped in antipolitics has so fully embraced a violation of fundamental rights that it’s no longer salient enough to even have an organized opposition on the ballot, evildoing candidates do not (usually) have much to do with facilitating the evil, and they are not (usually) as committed to evildoing as you might expect. (They often haven’t thought about it very much. The evil is just The Way Things Are.) Since they aren’t so actively pursuing evil, the conscientious voter does not necessarily cooperate with evil when she votes for them.

Under ordinary antipolitics, then, the voter has these (very limited) obligations:

1. Since voting for any candidate would constitute cooperation with evil, the voter’s duty to vote (which is obligatory in ordinary and extraordinary politics) is suspended. Voting is only permitted if the cooperation with the evil is justified—which is hard to do, since voting is still pretty proximate and necessary material cooperation.

2. When deciding whether to vote (or for which candidate to vote), there’s often no objectively right or wrong answer, because society’s view of the common good is so uniformly deranged.

Unfortunately, we’re beyond this, too.

Extraordinary Antipolitics

Suppose Hitler and Stalin actually did face off in an election.⁴¹

At first, this might look like bog-standard antipolitics: both are super-evil dudes who are going to straight murder millions of people. Voting for either one of them would be big-time cooperation with evil.

There’s a big difference here, though. In regular antipolitics, the candidates support tremendous evil, but everyone agrees with it. The evil therefore is not salient.

By contrast, in Hitler v. Stalin: Dawn of Genocide, the two evils on offer are hotly contested. Hitler says he wants to kill all the non-Aryans. Stalin thinks that’s terrible. Stalin wants to kill the bourgeoisie instead. Hitler thinks that’s terrible. They both end up specifically running on their respective platforms. These two flavors of genocide end up highly salient.

In ordinary antipolitics, there’s a case to be made that, because the big social evil is lurking in the background with no salience, individual politicians may not be fully responsible for it, so maybe you can vote for them sometimes if the stars are just right. But Hitler v. Stalin is extraordinary antipolitics. Both parties embrace evil, but they are different evils, which they are mutually trying to inflict on a horrified populace, which makes those issues highly salient.

It’s easy to imagine how this might happen. Suppose one party is pro-slavery and the other party is anti-slavery. Normally, you would need to vote for the anti-slavery candidate. However, suppose it is revealed as an October Surprise that the anti-slavery candidate is a pedophile with multiple crimes to his name, and that one of the reasons he is running for president is so he can give himself a presidential pardon before the police close in on him. (Hi, Roy Moore!)

So now you have to choose between slavery and pedophilia. Fun! What’s the lesser evil here?

And, while we’re at it, which of your children should we send to the gas chamber? What’s the lesser evil there?

There probably is an objectively lesser evil, known only to God… but even the lesser evil is too goddamn evil for you to cooperate with it. This is not the situation that Faithful Citizenship #36 appears to be addressing. This is much closer to the situation addressed by Luke 23:20-25.

As I see it, the conscientious voter really doesn’t have much choice under extraordinary antipolitics:

• If you can vote third-party, do so.

• If not, stay home.

Do not choose a child. Do not trample the fumi-e. Do not play the Hunger Games. Do not hold down the rape victim, no matter how the evildoer threatens you. Do not hand over an innocent man to be crucified. And do not vote for either evildoer.

Here’s a second place where you can take a break, if you like. Then you can power through the rest of the article tomorrow.

Self-Diagnosis

Here are the four political configurations we have considered:

To be clear, I made up these labels. Nobody’s ever said “ordinary antipolitics” before today. Nevertheless, these configurations have all existed at one time or another, and you can see their contours in the various Catholic writings on voting going back a long time, even if the edges are blurrier than this diagram suggests.⁴²

I think this is a good rubric. It’s not Catholic doctrine, but I’ve built it with a lot of help from Catholic thinking, and I do not think you need to be Catholic to see its wisdom.

I also think there were some past years that were fairly debatable under this rubric. For example, was Mitt Romney’s clear support for first-trimester abortions severe enough to turn the 2012 election into a year of ordinary antipolitics?⁴³ If George W. Bush’s support for waterboarding had been known in 2004, would that have been a severe enough evil to turn the 2004 election into a year of extraordinary antipolitics? Did either man have moral character? These are interesting questions. There was a time when they were hot ones.⁴⁴

But this is 2024. The question is no longer interesting. The answers are too obvious.

You’ve waited patiently, so, finally, let’s take a look at our candidates!

The 2024 presidential election: like if you went on The Price is Right and the prize was two old turds and you bid negative $50 and Bob Barker said “no! the retail price of these two pieces of shit is eleventy billion dollars!” and everyone clapped and the people from Broadcast Standards & Practices walked in and also clapped while awarding the 2024 Best Picture Oscar to Gods of Egypt (2016) live on The Price is Right

Kamala Harris is an Evildoer

There are many things very wrong with Vice President Kamala Harris. Even a partial list of reasons she would be a bad president would run so long it needs to go in a footnote,⁴⁵ but I want to focus on her key policy issue, the issue she has tried to elevate to the highest possible salience: abortion.

There’s an easy way and a hard way to talk about abortion.

The hard way is to convince you that human rights begin when human life begins, at conception. This sends the dominoes falling quickly: it means abortion is (generally speaking⁴⁶) murder, which means we are killing a million innocent children a year, which means legal abortion is a bigger human rights problem than slavery, which means voting for pro-abortion rights candidate in an election where abortion is a salient issue is very proximate material cooperation with truly extraordinary evil, which means it can be justified only in contrived examples, not in reality.

The hard way is important, and the pro-life movement needs to make more of an effort to do it. However, I don’t want to leave any of you with any excuse to vote for either of these people. I am therefore taking the easy way and talking about late-term abortion.

Nearly everyone agrees that late-term abortion is wrong. Abortion, for many people, is permissible because the child within isn’t truly human yet, because she cannot survive outside the womb and acts like a “parasite” upon her mother. For many others, abortion is permissible even if the child is truly human, because her existence imposes too great a burden on her mother’s autonomy and health. However, once a child has developed sufficiently to live outside the womb, most people agree there’s no difference between killing that unborn child and killing a born baby. An unwanted viable baby could be delivered, surrendered to the state, and given up for adoption, eliminating the burden on mothers’ autonomy. Even its strongest supporters admit that late-term abortion is nearly as dangerous as childbirth (and they’re exaggerating its safety) so there’s no general health reason to prefer late-term abortion to early delivery. The only reason for elective abortion at this late stage in pregnancy, then, is to kill your child (rather than give her up). This is, plainly, a violation of their right to life.

There is a small fraction of Americans who do not share this view, but it seems safe to say that either someone is lying to them or there is something wrong with them.

Abortions of viable children are rare. At 25 weeks, a preemie’s odds of survival are above 70%, so let’s use 25 weeks as our cutoff.⁴⁷ Here’s the kind of baby we’re talking about here:

The best estimate available to me says that a little more than 0.5% of all abortions take place at or beyond 25 weeks.⁴⁸ At first, that looks like a tiny fraction. However, there were almost exactly a million abortions in the United States last year, so this “tiny fraction” is still 5,100 dead babies.

Perhaps you have heard the common lie from Democratic office-seekers who promote late-term abortion: they say something to the effect that every single late-term abortion is a tragic case where either the mother or the fetus has severe health issues.⁴⁹ However, state-level abortion-reporting data indicates that 80% of late-term abortions are not for those reasons. The limited studies we have suggest about the same, with around 80% of late-term abortions happening for approximately the usual reasons American women get elective abortions (money, coercion by the father, coercion by the family, fear of derailing one’s career, and so on). Even one of America’s leading third-trimester abortion providers agrees that “at least half” of his “patients” come without any “devastating medical diagnosis,” and are getting elective abortions. Kristin Hawkins recently showed how easy it is to schedule a 34-week abortion for any or no reason. To avoid giving you any excuses to dismiss this, we will use the most conservative possible estimate: we will say that just under half (49%) of these 5,100 late-term abortions are because either mom or baby is going to die if the pregnancy continues to term.

That still leaves 2,600 straight-up baby murders per year.

That makes late-term abortion the leading cause of death among all persons under the age of 18:

CDC Multiple Mortality data, via Lyman Stone

Do you support car seat laws for kids under 5? I do. The NHTSA estimates car seats saved 325 kids in 2017.

Meanwhile, we killed eight times that many viable infants who could have gone to loving homes.

Kamala Harris supports that.

She voted against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would have banned abortions after 20 weeks (except in cases where the mother’s life or physical health would be endangered or where the child was conceived in rape). Asked repeatedly whether she would support any limits at all, she repeatedly dodged the question. She often says that she wants to “restore the protections of Roe v. Wade,” which (as she knows very well) allowed abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason (which is how we got to “murdering 2,600 babies a year” in the first place).⁵⁰ She co-sponsored a bill in Congress to bulldoze all existing post-viability protections for the unborn—not to mention every other protection, from 24-hour waiting periods to parental notification or consent laws. Her running mate, my governor, Tim Walz, championed a law explicitly making third-trimester abortion legal in Minnesota with no term limits, no restrictions, and no alternatives.

She has never even renounced the Democrats’ 15-year battle to try to block the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. That law outlawed a particularly gruesome method of abortion where the abortionist induced labor, started the birth process, and then went into the brain with a knife once the baby was halfway out of the birth canal. (Indeed, the Democrats in general have never renounced their opposition to this bill.) After Michigan repealed its own partial-birth abortion ban law last year, Harris campaigned alongside its architects and championed their work as a model.

The Vice-President doesn’t just want to allow this, which would be crime enough in itself. Attempting to strip the right to life from every viable baby in this country is clearly an evil with a gravity and scope that rivals any other great social evil the United States has ever allowed. Just a few centuries ago, removing someone’s legal right to live was used as a form of tacit execution, and she wants to apply that penalty to all four million or so children who will enter the third trimester of pregnancy this year, including in the subset of states that have passed laws to protect those children. Egads!

But Kamala Harris also wants you to pay for it. She is a strong supporter of taxpayer-funded abortions, fighting the Hyde Amendment (the bipartisan 1980s deal that forbade taxpayer-funded abortions) tooth and nail every chance she gets and abusing executive powers to invent new “exceptions” to it at every turn.

Perhaps you are coconut-pilled, which darkens the intellect, such that you aren’t seeing just how bad this is. So, an analogy.

I find Republican responses to school shootings pretty frustrating. They condemn the killer, promise thoughts and prayers for the victims, and mumble something about having more armed teachers and better mental health care before changing the subject. Fifteen children were killed in school shootings last year alone. The Republican response is inadequate, and does not seem to me to represent the correct prudential balance to ensure the common good.

Vice-President Harris’s response to elective late-term abortion is like if J.D. Vance co-sponsored federal legislation to repeal state-level bans on school shootings, while simultaneously pushing a plan to have the federal government buy every American a gun, no questions asked. When asked how this could possibly be a healthy response to school shootings, Vance explains that these are decisions that have to be left between an incel and his gun dealer, which he doesn’t have any right to second-guess. Vance describes the shooting as a tragedy, but, when pressed, he refuses to condemn the shooter’s actions, refuses to acknowledge the lives the shooter took, and appears to consider it a “tragedy” solely because of the pain suffered by the shooter, not the victims. When really pressed, he denies that school shootings ever happen, arguing that the Sandy Hook kids were crisis actors, and calls anti-school-shooting laws a distraction from attempts to take away our Second Amendment rights. (Tim Walz did the late-term-abortion equivalent of all this in an interview yesterday.) If Vance did all this—or any of this!—I hope you would agree it would be really evil, no matter how sweet Vance’s tone of voice was while he laid out his plan, and you really couldn’t vote for him, even if it were “only” 13 kids a year or so instead of 200 times that number. Credit to Republicans: they’ve fallen short on gun violence, but they’ve never done this!

In fact, you could never trust a person who said any of these things with public power. It’s not just that you would need to keep this hypothetical Vance out of the business of gun regulation. You would need to keep him out of any legal authority whatsoever. A man who thinks school shootings are okay has such a profoundly defective view of the common good that you could never even make him dog-catcher. “Such a person,” I said earlier, “cannot be said to have any moral character, and cannot be trusted to do the right thing for its own sake in any context, big or small. Any good such a person might do would be essentially accidental.”

At this point, some protest that Harris is unlikely to actually accomplish anything on the abortion front.⁵¹ Her powers over specifically late-term abortion are fairly limited in the Oval Office.⁵² She would (probably) need control of the Senate to abolish the legislative filibuster and start passing abortion legislation, and she only has a 27% chance of achieving that right now. But remember what we said earlier about this very problem:

One more thing worth noting: the evildoer might succeed at the rape, but he might well fail. The doorman at the party might think the evildoer has a shady look and refuse entry. The girl might come down with the flu and stay home. The evildoer might get caught trying to drug her and get kicked out of the premises. However, even if the rape fails, you have still engaged in proximate material cooperation with rape. Morally speaking, you are just as guilty as you would have been had he succeeded.

Sophie only helped kill one baby, and it destroyed her. If you vote for Vice-President Harris, you are helping kill many more. The fact that you might (might!) be stopping the other guy doesn’t blot that out one bit.

Maybe Kamala is the lesser of two evils. I think that’s plausible! (More on this in the next section.) Even if she is the lesser evil, though, she is engaged in an attack on the most fundamental human rights of so many innocents. There were fewer slaves in all of Kansas.

Your free choice to make yourself an accessory in her attack would be a very proximate and (from the standpoint of trying to justify it) absolutely necessary form of cooperation. The act would hurt you, badly. Not nearly as badly as it would hurt the babies, of course, but badly nonetheless! It would bind your will and corrupt your intellect, and you would deserve it.

So just don’t do it. In the bowels of Christ, I implore you: do not vote for Kamala Harris.

Donald Trump is a Criminal

I’ve written… God only knows how many words about Donald Trump since he came down that damn escalator nine years ago. At least a couple hundred thousand. Yet, in all those words, I’m not really sure I’ve ever said it better than I did in the very first thing I ever wrote about Candidate Trump, way back in “Unflattering Assessments of Presidential Candidates, 2016”:

If you need me to explain the problems with Donald Trump, you are one of the problems.

I will not list his many shortcomings, even in a footnote. How about a song?

NPR wrote this to be mean but joke’s on them I’m an unironic fan.

However, for those of you who still don’t see him as I do, I will more profitably direct you to two articles by pro-life Catholics Edward Feser and Steven Greydanus.⁵³ Despite disagreeing with one another and with me on many points (including my main point), both make the case that it could plausibly do more harm than good to our cause if Trump were to win again. (Friendly reminder: Donald Trump is the most pro-choice Republican nominee in history.) However, since Harris is also pro-abortion, this is a prudential judgment. For my part, as with Harris, I’m going to focus on one highly salient political position of grave moral import that places Trump beyond the pale of justified support.

Now, in a sense, Trump doesn’t really have political positions. He has an ego, and he takes whatever positions in the moment support that ego.⁵⁴ The bright side of this self-centeredness is that Donald Trump is not hell-bent on stripping human rights from anyone, least of all babies. He attacks human rights only when it’s good for his ego. The dark side is that, when his ego is threatened, he is capable of anything.

Like that time he directed an insurrection to help overthrow the United States Government.

I have written a few words about that effort. There is a distressingly large minority of Americans who do not share this view of the Capitol Insurrection, but it seems safe to say that either someone is lying to them or there is something wrong with them. As a right-winger, I admit that I like to think they have mostly been lied to. If you are in that fraction, I invite you to read my old article “The President’s Insurrection,” but, since you have already read rather a lot in this article, I will summarize:

• President Trump knew, better than anyone else in the country, that he had lost the election. He nevertheless kept telling people he had won, even using specific examples that he personally knew to be false.

• President Trump knew that some of the people coming to Washington were planning violence on his behalf.

• He gave a speech that could almost be interpreted as being only accidental incitement if you ignore everything he did for the rest of the day.

• Some of his supporters did indeed attack the Capitol, and their intention was to suspend the U.S. Constitution by preventing certification of the election to allow President Trump to remain in office beyond the end of his legal term. (This is called an attempted coup. It was a really stupid coup, a doomed coup, but a coup.)

• Trump, who had a positive duty as President of the United States to take action against the insurrection, positively refused to do the two things everyone around him begged him to do: call off his forces and send reinforcements to the Capitol. He instead tried at least once to leave the White House to lead the “protesters,” giving no indication that he wanted them to stop.

• Trump knew what was happening. He watched it all live on TV and Twitter, with full information from White House staff, as the attack was declared a riot, as the riot overwhelmed Capitol defenses, and the Vice President was evacuated.

• Trump has never offered a reason for his 79 minutes of dereliction, other than the obvious: he wanted the coup to succeed.

• Trump, knowing everything going on at the Capitol, sent out a tweet against Mike Pence (who had performed his sworn duty under the Constitution) that, in this context, cannot be reasonably read as anything other than a direction to his mob to target Pence.

• Trump, knowing everything going on at the Capitol, tried to use it as leverage in an attempt to make a deal about election certification over the phone with Congressional Republicans. Let me say that again: Trump used the threat of imminent violence by forces under his effective command to try to coerce elected representatives of the United States to unconstitutionally reject certification and seize an illegal second term in office.

In the full article, I also discuss some of the defenses Trump’s supporters have offered to these uncontroverted facts, but these defense are very feeble.⁵⁵ Not a single Trump supporter has ever finished that article and even made an argument for why I am wrong. They all either go silent or (in a couple of cases) have said that they “heard other information from other sources that disagree” with mine and therefore reject my conclusions. They never share that “information” or those “sources.”⁵⁶

One of my pet peeves is abuse of the word “treason.” These days, people use “treason” to mean anything from illicit surveillance of a political rival to disagreeing with Washington’s foreign policy blob. Treason is a really specific, really powerful word, the only crime defined in the Constitution itself. Treason consists only in joining, aiding, or adhering to a foreign adversary during an active war declared by Congress, or a domestic adversary during an active violent revolt. All other crimes—even really bad ones—are not treason. There have been no treason convictions since World War II. If you remember only two diagnostic rules, remember these: it’s not lupus, and it’s not treason.

…except one time it was lupus.

…and, one time, it was treason. Donald Trump is a traitor. The United States would be entirely within its rights to punish him as a traitor. Instead, we seem on the brink of making him President again.

Perhaps the strangest part is that none of it was remotely surprising. I was surprised on the day, but that was my fault. Trump has always been someone who would obviously end democracy and install himself as dictator if it would boost his ego. He’s had Obama’s messiah complex turned up to 11 the whole time—and the Right correctly recognized Obama’s messiah complex as really dangerous at the time! Trump would like to be remembered as a benevolent king, not a tyrant, and, to that end he does make benevolent gestures. (I understand he can be quite sweet in person!) However he has always shown a lust for power, accompanied by zero visible compunctions about how he obtains it. My surprise on J6 came because I thought the officials around him would do a better job convincing Trump that this would hurt him more than it helped, but, looking back… why did I ever expect that?

And why would I expect a second Trump term to go any better? Trump will return to the White House with a long list of enemies and people he feels betrayed him, surrounded by allies he is confident won’t try to restrain him the way his last team did. Will Trump accept that he’s term-limited and stand down in 2024? If not, will J.D. Vance make the same career-ending decision to follow the Constitution that Mike Pence made? I don’t particularly want to find out!

Of course, objectively speaking, trying to overthrow our democracy is not nearly as bad as Vice-President Harris’s attitude toward unborn children. Life is a fundamental right, and democracy is not.⁵⁷ However, as we’ve seen, showing that the other candidate is worse is not enough to justify voting for this candidate. When you cast a vote for a candidate, you cooperate in the evils he has shown he will inflict on the nation.

One of the constitutive elements of the common good is the rule of law. There have to be rules, put in place for the benefit of the people, they have to be known, and they have to come from legitimate authority under those rules. Where you don’t have law, you have anarchy, and everyone suffers under anarchy. Human flourishing becomes much more difficult. Christian teaching has always been clear that Christians are to obey the rulers (Mt 20:19-20) and Catholic teaching is particularly stern about resistance without a very just cause, but you don’t have to be Catholic to see that the rule of law is necessary to the development of human potential. To directly oppose the rule of law, simply because the law gets in your way, is an attack on the common good. Someone who opposes the rule of law, when the laws are just,⁵⁸ places himself outside the realm of prudential disagreement and ordinary politics, into the realm of antipolitics.

Trump did this. That is very bad.

In fact, looking back, you’ll notice that Trump has done this every single time he thought he could get away with it, starting at the very beginning of his presidency, when he used his business interests to enrich himself with money from foreign governments (a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause), continuing through January 6, and onward into his post-presidency exposure of dangerous classified documents. He has never even renounced any of this. He insists that he and his forces on January 6 did nothing wrong. He has, irrationally, made his own treasonous behavior an election issue! So now, when you go into the ballot box and mark your paper for Donald Trump, you are both affirming his last attempt to overthrow the government and making yourself pretty proximately responsible for every future abuse of power. There will be many. It’s not like he’s hiding it. He never has.

This is even worse than it looks at first, because you could never trust a person who did these things with public power. It’s not just that you need to keep Trump away from the Oval Office. You need to keep him away from any legal authority whatsoever. A man who thinks the rule of law is for suckers and losers has such a profoundly defective view of the common good that you could never even make him dog-catcher. “Such a person,” I said earlier, “cannot be said to have any moral character, and cannot be trusted to do the right thing for its own sake in any context, big or small. Any good such a person might do would be essentially accidental.”

You are free to argue that Harris-Biden are just as bad, even worse, on the rule of law. I’m open to that argument. It may even be correct. But it’s completely irrelevant. We already know we can’t justify voting for her. The question is whether Trump is someone you can justify voting for.

Let me put it this way: if you vote for Trump, who trampled all over the Twelfth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution in his desperate attempt to cling to power, then I don’t want to hear a word from you about how the Democrats are violating the First and Second Amendments in the future. Not one word, not ever again.

However, it’s worse than that. Voting for Trump doesn’t only require you to cooperate with his evildoing, mild though it might seem in comparison to Harris on abortion. Voting for him requires you to do a little evil yourself, which is even harder to justify.

Because Trump engaged in an insurrection, Amendment XIV, Section 3 states that he is disqualified from the office of the presidency.⁵⁹ The Supreme Court has ruled that no formal legal sanction may be applied against Trump without legislation from Congress,⁶⁰ which is why Trump is still appearing on your ballot even after a court found that he had indeed engaged in insurrection. (That court’s ruling remains good law, unchallenged by any other court, including the Supreme Court.) However, it has always been my understanding, at least, that the Constitution is an agreement among us all, which binds us all. Like Article VI itself says, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. All citizens are bound to follow it. Some Americans—those who have served in the military—are further bound by solemn oaths before God to follow it.

To cast a ballot for Trump is to attempt to confer presidential legal authority upon an individual who is, according to our supreme law, ineligible for it. This is itself an attack on the rule of law. It’s not one you’re cooperating with. It’s an evil act that you are personally committing. Like formal cooperation with evil, this can never be justified. The fact that you might (might!) be stopping the other gal doesn’t blot that out one bit. You cannot do evil so that good might come of it.

Maybe Trump is the lesser of two evils. I think that’s plausible. Even if so, though, he is engaged in an attack on the fundamental underpinnings of the rule of law, and he’s asking you to help. It is an attack on all our rights, the entire common good. It would be like if a candidate came out against food. Not fatty food, not vegan food—all food.

Your free choice to make yourself an accessory in his attack would be a very proximate and (from the standpoint of trying to justify it) absolutely necessary form of cooperation. Worse, it would involve your committing an act that in itself attacked the rule of law in our country. These immoral acts would hurt you. They would bind your will and corrupt your intellect, and you would deserve it.

So just… don’t do it! This isn’t Auschwitz! Nobody’s holding a gun to your head!

Stick It Up Your Nose

We have two candidates who are opposed to the common good, not by mistake, but directly; not in small ways, but in big ways; not on a small scale, but on a grand scale; not in the background, but on the most salient, most central issues of this election.

The 2024 presidential election is a case of extraordinary antipolitics. In theory, voting for a candidate might be justified if you found a nearly certain proportionate reason that would outweigh the damage—both to the nation and to yourself—of casting a vote for one of them.⁶¹ In practice? C’mon. They’re both actively campaigning as big-time evildoers. We are free to disagree about which candidate will turn out to be the lesser evil. It’s a lively question, and I’d love to discuss your opinions. However, the question is academic, because it seems we are not free to actually vote for either candidate, even if we could clearly establish one as the lesser evil.

If you live in a battleground state,⁶² the temptation is, nevertheless, understandable. Like Sophie, you are being presented with a choice that is almost certainly illusory. If you pick a candidate, that candidate might win… or lose. (Your vote will likely have very little to do with that outcome.) The power here was always, first and foremost, in the hands of the Republican and Democratic Parties, who gave us these options and demanded you choose. Having given you this false choice, they now demand you participate. They demand that you pick a candidate. They want to coax you into making yourself responsible for the evils that their candidate has vowed to inflict. They want you to share the blame for their sins. So of course many of them get angry at you if you tell them you won’t help.

If you buckle, if you give them what they want, you won’t save the country. You will hurt yourself.

You don’t need to theorize about this. You’ve seen it. We all know someone who felt very conflicted in 2016 and 2020, but who, in the end, made the worst possible choice: they decided to vote for the lesser evil, but they picked the wrong candidate as the lesser evil.

Then you watched this person, who had been so articulate before the election about the painful and reluctant compromise they were making, start to… change. It started slow. The other side did something bad, something you expected your friend to denounce, but the denunciation never came. Well, maybe your friend was just busy. Then the other side did another bad thing, and your friend made tentative but bizarre arguments for why maybe that thing wasn’t so bad. Her heart’s clearly in the right place, but how could your good buddy make such a silly mistake? Fast-forward four years, and your friend proudly hosts a lawn sign for her “lesser evil.” She shares vile memes that caricature things she once believed with her whole heart and soul. Evils she was once willing to tolerate only as an agonized side effect have become evils in which she quietly, but clearly, is formally cooperating. She falls for the stupidest arguments, arguments you know she could once have refuted in her sleep. She went from one of the smartest people on your side to one of the dumbest people on the other.

Sin darkens the intellect. It binds the will.

Here’s the crucial thing, though: this didn’t just happen to voters who picked the other side. Those of us sitting in Camp Neither can see that it happened to plenty of people on your side, too. It may have even happened to you.⁶³

This full decay didn’t happen to everyone—thank God! Those who went in with eyes wide open, who forced themselves to fight against the tendencies to rationalize and justify, tended to suffer the least ill effects. Yet I think everyone gets hurt, in some way, by freely choosing to cooperate with evil—even to prevent what they believe is an even greater evil. This year, with Roe gone and the J6 insurrection in the books, the evils will be greater than ever. The damage to yourself will be proportionately worse. A noxious vote that you might have overcome in 2016 or 2020 could be lethal this time.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the temptation intimately. I was very, very torn in the 2016 election. I knew I would either vote for a third party I could live with, or, in order to stop Clinton, I would vote for Trump.⁶⁴ Sure, voting third-party is the functional equivalent of scribbling “NARF!” all over your ballot paper, setting it on fire, and snorting the ashes up your nose… but look at the alternative.

I deliberately went to vote very late in the day, after the earliest results had started to trickle in from Kentucky. My polling place was just across the street, so I brought my two-year-old to get her out of her mother’s hair and maybe show her what democracy looks like. When I got there, though, I waited a few minutes to think things through before I got my ballot. Then I went to the voting booth and marked my ballot. I stared at the mark I had made, realized I couldn’t live with it, and went to tell the ballot lady that I’d spoiled my ballot. She gave me another one. I went back to the booth and marked the ballot again, this time for the other choice. I stared again. I realized I couldn’t live with that, either. I stood in the booth for several minutes. A line was starting to form. Minnesotans, so they didn’t complain, they waited patiently, but I bowed out and told the lady I had—whoopsie!—mismarked my ballot again, what a goofus. Then I took a walk,⁶⁵ anxiously checking my phone for results from Kentucky. My polling place was one of those ridiculous Catholic churches built in the ‘80s that looks like a crashed alien starship. The main church was closed. The tabernacle was not visible, probably in a closet. I leaned up against the glass and prayed anyway, between chatter with my two-year-old, who had not expected this quick walk to take quite so long. I checked my phone again. Kentucky precincts trending more Trumpy than expected. Election could be close.

I was out there for almost half an hour, thinking and chattering and checking. Finally, I had to act. I came back in, took a new voting booth, and marked my ballot, with grim determination, for Donald J. Trump. I felt I had no choice. I had to pick the lesser of these two evils.

Then, still in the booth, I looked at the Kentucky results one last time. Results were trending Clinton. I squinted hard. Really hard. Might not be a close race after all. Maybe that Clinton landslide they’d been talking about really was materializing. At the very least, surely Minnesota was coming off the table. We weren’t going to be a battleground after all, I decided. The clamp on my chest relaxed. I told the ballot lady I’d spoiled another ballot and made a comment about what a knucklehead I am. She was very nice, but surely she thought I was insane. I filled out what was now my fourth ballot. I voted for a third-party candidate.⁶⁶ I stared at it. I checked Kentucky again. I turned it in.

So, in the end, in 2016, I voted third-party—but only because I had convinced myself (incorrectly!) that Minnesota would not be close. I still felt that pressure on my chest—that urgent, anxious fear that, if I didn’t actively choose one evil, an even greater evil would descend.⁶⁷ If results in early-reporting Kentucky precincts had been very slightly different, I would have done it, so I don’t think I’m free from moral injury here myself. Under the ethical framework I was using at the time, I just didn’t see any other option. I couldn’t blame you for thinking the same way today.

That experience got me thinking, though. Eight years I’ve been thinking. I still think that ethical framework was basically correct. However, I now believe it was incomplete. It was written for an era of extraordinary politics. Antipolitics was (almost) beyond its ken. Thus, when our politics transitioned to today’s furiously extraordinary antipolitics, that framework was no longer capable of coming up with the right answers. Neither were the old tired Boomer creeds about always voting, written for an era of ordinary politics. My argument today, and my plea to you, stems from the realization that we have entered a period of extraordinary antipolitics. Our extraordinary response must be to reject it wholesale.

Don’t vote. Not for these candidates. Others, sure, if you can. (Snort those ashes up your nose!) Vote for candidates down-ballot, of course.⁶⁸ But not for these.

This year, America has chosen to attempt moral suicide. It is agony to watch. The greatest country on Earth is in real trouble. When this ends—if it ends—she is going to need your help getting back on its feet.

Today, however, as America puts the gun to her head and spins the chamber, the only thing you can do—the only thing you must do—is refuse to help her pull the trigger.

Update 13 Oct 2024: This article has been updated. See footnotes 16 and 68 for details.

1. Like Lily Sloane, I never read it.

2. This particular individual was, I believe, “lean Hitler.” However, I have heard enough second-hand accounts of other, similar, conversations to know that it could be a close race!

3. Not even if you’re a fancy-pants Catholic expert and you think you know what I’m going to say! Sure, we’ll do Ligouri, we’ll do Faithful Citizenship, we’ll give a friendly wave to Diuturnum, but the devil’s in the details, in more ways than one, and I am probably going to argue that something you have long believed about Catholic voting ethics is quite wrong.

4. We faithfully await the Holy See’s decision in the matter of the De Auxiliis controversy, which has now been pending for 430 years (and counting).

On the one hand, bummer; on the other hand, can you even imagine the victory party the Molinists are gonna throw when they finally win?

5. This happens sometimes. Not on issues that the Church claims to have defined “infallibly” (at least, not in my opinion), but there’s plenty of cases where the Church collectively formed a fairly strong (but not definitive) opinion about something, then later retreated from that opinion. The limbo of infants comes to mind.

6. Whether and to what extent we have a positive duty to actively oppose evildoing is a separate question, although it is closely related and governed by many of the same principles. Not everyone is required to be St. Maximilian Kolbe (who was killed in agony by the Nazis for speaking out against them), but everyone is ordinarily obligated to intervene (at least by calling the police) if they happen to see a child beating happening just outside their window. There are principles for discerning one’s obligation to intervene, but they are beyond the scope of this article.

7. It is worth noting that every Catholic who writes about cooperation with evil explains it slightly differently.

The foundational text for most modern discussion of cooperation is St. Alphonsus Ligouri’s Theologia moralis (2, §63-ish), but there are slight variations in how modern writers interpret it. Even then, the modern writer might not favor Ligouri’s version over, say, St. Thomas Aquinas’s. Even if he does, he might still add insights not available in Ligouri’s time.

However, the biggest reason modern writers explain cooperation with evil slightly differently is almost always because they are trying to compress a complicated moral theory into layman’s terms before the laymen get bored and leave to do something interesting, like read about Canadian income tax.

What follows, then, is my explanation of the Catholic moral tradition on cooperation with evil. For other versions, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (Note that many of those links are repeated elsewhere in this article.)

If anything distinguishes my explanation, it is the fact that I openly label the spectrum of proximity a “spectrum.” Most others talk about material cooperation like it’s a set of discrete categories separated by bright lines… and then, inevitably, they treat it in practice like a spectrum.

This is unsurprising; in my opinion, the most persistent and pernicious habit in Catholic intellectual life is to try to put absolutely everything in discrete categories separated by bright lines. For example, the so-called “state of grace” is almost invariably presented as a binary on/off switch, but in actual practice it almost invariably functions much more like a spectrum. (By reputation, this is one area where the Eastern Orthodox appear to have a bit of a leg up on us.)

8. What if you don’t even know? Suppose the evildoer asks you for information about the party, but tricks you into thinking that he only wants to ask the girl out on a date. Or suppose you take a nap, happen to mutter the party’s location in a dream, and the evildoer overhears you. In this case, your cooperation is genuinely involuntary. Since we can only be morally responsible for voluntary acts, a person who cooperates in this way bears no moral responsibility for the rape.

Still, there’s not-knowing and there’s not-knowing. Sometimes, you have an inkling. Sometimes, you have a full-blown suspicion. Sometimes you know full well what’s going on, but you and the evildoer go through the motions to establish plausible deniability. That may work in a civil courtroom! It does not work to evade moral responsibility. The more confident you are about the true intentions of the evildoer, the greater your responsibility for his subsequent actions.

9. There is some nuance here. Suppose you learned from a reliable source that the girl had in fact come down with the flu and almost certainly would not make it to the party. You therefore accept the evildoer’s offer of $100,000 for the party’s location. You figure she almost certainly won’t be there, so the evildoer is almost certain to fail at raping her, so why shouldn’t you make some money in the meantime? You have college debts; no harm no foul, right? This is still pretty proximate material cooperation in rape, but the lower likelihood of success means your responsibility is reduced.

Of course, nothing is certain in this world, which is why you’d still better not do this. Suppose your reliable source misheard which girl you were asking about, or suppose it isn’t really the flu but a simple upset tummy that passes in an hour, and the girl does make it to the party, and the evildoer successfully uses the information you gave him to rape her. You’d better believe you are still culpable for that rape! The fact that you sincerely didn’t expect it to happen reduces your responsibility, but certainly does not eliminate it. Your culpability in this situation is exactly the same as it would have been if the girl actually had stayed home and the rape failed.

10. …not to mention setting up a meeting with a drug dealer and getting his car fixed!

11. In fact, the spectrum of necessity is often combined directly into the spectrum of proximity. A sober example is in this document about Catholic medical professionals cooperating with an abortion. A deranged example is in the top reply to this reddit post about… well, I’ll let you click it to find out. In this simplified schema, a cooperating act is judged more proximate to the evil act the more necessary it is to the evil act’s accomplishment. This is a fairly good heuristic and a good way to explain the basic categories in most situations. I like both those examples.

However, proximity and necessity are separable, and there are times when they need to be pried apart or you will get nonsense results. For example, suppose you are a soldier and your commanding officer, a brute, starts torturing a prisoner of war with electrical shocks. He assigns you to throw the breaker whenever he signals. This is the most immediate sort of material cooperation. However, it is not necessary material cooperation. If you refuse, your C.O. will just order somebody else to do it (and you’ll be shot for disobeying an order), so the evil act will be carried out regardless of what you do. If you conflate proximity and necessity, you might incoherently judge that throwing the circuit breaker is fairly remote material cooperation. It ain’t!

12. One area where Catholic ethicists depart from most current moral theorists is in our absolute commitment to this principle. For Catholics, you may never perform an objectively evil act, not even to achieve a greater good. If the entire world will fall into the sea, and all come to ruin and darkness, but for the torture of a single innocent child, buy scuba gear and underwater flashlights, because you must not torture that child.

Of course, we have the advantage of being able to say, “We’ll leave the consequences in God’s hands.” Not everyone has that escape hatch from fiat iustitia ruat caelum, which perhaps makes it harder to accept our absolutism about personal ethics.

13. There is some technical dispute about whether immediate material cooperation actually is a mode of formal cooperation or whether it is merely morally equivalent to formal cooperation, but it cashes out to the same thing in terms of personal guilt.

14. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa, II-I Q85 A3, argued that sin has four effects, not two. These are (somewhat leadenly) translated into English as “ignorance, malice, weakness, and concupiscence.”

• Ignorance corresponds to “darkening of the intellect.”

• Malice corresponds to “binding the will”: evil tends to make you want more evil.

• Weakness (“ennervation” might be better) describes the way evil erodes one’s determination to do great things (what Plato called thymos).

• Concupiscence is probably better translated as “lust,” but not simply sexual lust. It includes disordered lusts for all lower pleasures—food, music, outrage, money, and so on. Here, it refers to the way evil disorders our passions. Think of the pornography user who gets bored looking at naked people and seeks out more and more hardcore material—things that would once have shocked and offended his conscience—in pursuit of the pleasure.

I like this more detailed breakdown, but concupiscence and weakness can be seen as part of “binding the will,” so I’ve opted for the simpler formula in this article.

15. Left image, positive prompt: a perfectly ordinary human man standing in a park, with two human legs, two human eyes, a human nose, and two human arms, score_9, score_8_up, score_7_up, score_6_up, derpibooru_p_95, <lora:add-detail-xl:1>, <lora:xl_more_art-full_v1:1>

Right image, positive prompt: a perfectly ordinary human man standing in a park, with two human legs, two human eyes, a human nose, (eight arms:1.3), (arachnid arms:1.3), score_9, score_8_up, score_7_up, score_6_up, derpibooru_p_95, <lora:add-detail-xl:1>, <lora:xl_more_art-full_v1:1>

I had to add the heavy weights to the arachnid arms because, when I tried to just type “eight spider arms,” the model simply refused to draw it. It drew me a third human arm, but, for the most part, it (correctly) recognized that “eight spider arms” didn’t fit and tried to ignore it, until I forced the issue. I actually generated two other images off this prompt, but my save failed because log.csv was open at the time.

Shared negative prompt: score_6, score_5, score_4, derpibooru_p_low, lowres, bad anatomy, bad hands, text, cropped, worst quality, low quality, jpeg artifacts, signature, watermark, username, blurry, artist name, mosaic censoring, twitter username, logo, limited palette, monochrome, (Blurred poorly drawn eyes), (out of frame), (bad quality eyes), (asymmetric eyes), long neck, elongated neck, blurred eyes, undetailed eyes, ugly face, blurred, grainy, cut off, oversharpened, sign, amateur, extra limbs, dull colours, boring, lacklustre, bad art, text, abominations, more than 2 legs, more than 2 hand, fused hands, bad proportions,colorless, glitch, bad face, distorted face, messed up eyes, deformed, extra limb, extra finger, bad hands, broken finger, black and white,

Model/settings: PonyDiffusionV6, DPM++ 2M, 1024x1024, 26 steps, 2 clip, CFG 7

16. Update 13 October 2024: The original version of this article stated that Sophie’s cooperation was immediate material cooperation, rather than formal cooperation.

My thinking was that Sophie’s consent was the matter of her cooperation. However, this was obviously an error. Consent is the essence of formal cooperation. What I was having trouble seeing was the possibility of reluctant formal cooperation, although, obviously, when you think about it, it’s pretty easy to come up with a thousand examples of reluctant formal cooperation.

Of course, I only figured this out with help, so here are some acknowledgements:

My father, reading the piece for the first time, sent me an email at 7:20 AM the morning the article came out:

I haven't gotten past the section entitled Sophie's Error yet, but there is a mistake here. Sophie's choice is not material cooperation at all. She has absolutely no material with which to cooperate. She is not making it possible, or easier, for the guard to kill the other one. Her action is pure formal cooperation. She says to the guard: Kill this one. She may be doing it with the intention of saving the other one, but it is still formal cooperation: I choose this act, with this object. (The object of the act, as opposed to the circumstances, further end, and consequences of the act, is another important piece of the moral puzzle.)

I read this later that morning and grimaced. He was right! A little later in the morning,

Matt Mortellaro

left an excellent comment pointing out all the ways it couldn’t possibly be immediate material cooperation.

I delayed publishing this correction only so I could read over the rest of the article and make sure I didn’t rest anything else on the claim that Sophie’s cooperation was immediate material cooperation. I didn’t find anything. As I noted in Footnote 13, formal and immediate material cooperation are darned tricky to separate in the first place, so it is perhaps unsurprising that misclassifying one as the other would have few downstream effects on my argument.

17. If you’re Catholic, you’re stuck, because, on a Catholic anthropology, I’m right whether it feels right to you or not—at least to this point.

18. That is, you cannot simply say, “Oh, yes, I am blowing up this federal civilian office building in a terrorist attack, but that’s not my intention. My intention is to bring about the workers’ utopia of the future!” Your intention is not simply an element of your psychology that you can redirect at a whim. Your intention is, first and foremost, a description of your action and the immediate ends toward which it is directed.

A good way to test whether the evil you foresee is truly indirect and unintended is to ask yourself: if, by some chance (or miracle), the foreseen evil does not come about, will the action I am taking still achieve the good I sought?

Note this well, because it is the only thing that keeps this principle from turning into a license to do anything for the sake of a “greater good”! If not for this indirectness principle, Dr. Hippocrates Noah, who planned to exterminate the world’s population except for a few hundred specially-chosen geniuses in order to repopulate the world as a utopia, could have (arguably) justified his genocide by saying that the massacre of everyone else in the world was simply a “foreseen but unintended side effect” of his glorious utopian plan.

The official name for this principle is the “principle of double effect.” The cooperation-with-evil context is only one place the principle of double effect applies, but explaining double effect would be a whole ‘nother treatise. You may know Double Effect from its most famous work: a discussion of abortion and double effect by philosopher Philippa Foot led pro-abortion philosopher J.J. Thomson to write a white-hot critique of the validity of double effect. That critique is known today as the Trolley Problem. (Foot did “invent” it by using it in an example, but Thomson is the one who problematized it.)

19. …unless whatever pushed me out of Catholicism also led me to abandon my theory of ethics and turn into an ethical nihilist (do as ye will, and who cares if anyone else gets hurt).

Note that, if I ever turn into an ethical nihilist, I probably won’t tell you, because it is generally to my advantage if you believe in ethical rules that I consider non-binding—especially if I can figure out a way to break the ethical rules without you finding out. Only stupid ethical nihilists out themselves. I suspect that rather a lot of powerful people in our society are ethical nihilists who figured this out a very long time ago.

I also doubt that the Catholic theory of cooperation with evil fits into a San Francisco-style rationalist utilitarianism, because they tend (I think?) to specifically reject the idea that lack of proximity attenuates moral responsibility in any way. That’s, like, Peter Singer’s whole thing, right? I mention this only because I know some readers are rationalist utilitarians who are probably finding this whole exercise unimpressive!

20. Unlike this article. Hopefully.

21. The Catholic Church is especially (and understandably) concerned with the liberty of conscience and religion.

22. The Catechism of 1992 states these fundamental rights directly at #1907, but the fundamental rights of life, dignity, and (especially religious) liberty are a common theme in Vatican documents throughout the twentieth century (during which both rights were often tested). Eager to convince non-Catholics that life, liberty, and dignity, are fundamental, Vatican human rights documents, between about 1950 and 2000, sometimes seemed more likely to quote the U.N.’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights than the Bible!

23. The rights of families are so important that they are often considered fundamental, alongside the life, liberty, and dignity of individuals. They are undoubtedly considered fundamental to society, and therefore deserve special prominence in decisions about society, like the decisions made in the voting booth. See, for example, John Paul II, Centesimus annus #39 and Christifideles laici #40; John XXIII’s Pacem in terris #16; the Second Vatican Council’s, Gaudium et spes #48 and its Apostolicam actuositatem #11.

But you don’t need the Catholic Church to teach you family is important. That’s why they wrote The Incredibles.

24. This list is cobbled together from the Catechism of 1992, #1908, Gaudium et Spes, #26, and Pacem in Terris #46. I didn’t even exhaust those lists, much less the full universe of things that contribute to human flourishing. (Friends! Green space! Good reputation! The list of things we ought to have goes on and on.)

25. These moral authorities will have something to say, and we ought to pay them heed. As the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops put it in their voting guide, Faithful Citizenship:

Prudential judgment is also needed in applying moral principles to specific policy choices in areas such as armed conflict, housing, health care, immigration, and others. This does not mean that all choices are equally valid, or that our guidance and that of other Church leaders is just another political opinion or policy preference among many others. Rather, we urge Catholics to listen carefully to the Church’s teachers when we apply Catholic social teaching to specific proposals and situations. The judgments and recommendations that we make as bishops on such specific issues do not carry the same moral authority as statements of universal moral teachings. Nevertheless, the Church’s guidance on these matters is an essential resource for Catholics as they determine whether their own moral judgments are consistent with the Gospel and with Catholic teaching. (Faithful Citizenship, #33)

Ordinary politics is not a moral free-for-all where all choices are equally valid. Usually, though, because a society during ordinary politics honestly shares mostly the same goals, most political choices are at least defensible.

26. As the Catechism of 1992 explains:

It is the duty of citizens to contribute along with the civil authorities to the good of society in a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom. The love and service of one's country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity. Submission to legitimate authorities and service of the common good require citizens to fulfill their roles in the life of the political community.

Submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one's country: “Pay to all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.” (Rom 13:7) […]

—The Catholic Catechism of 1992, §2239-2240

This obligation is not absolute, however. As the older 1949 Baltimore Catechism put it:

A citizen shows a sincere interest in his country’s welfare by voting honestly and without selfish motives, by paying just taxes, and by defending his country’s rights when necessary. Citizens should exercise the right to vote. This is a moral obligation when the common good of the state or the good of religion, especially in serious matters, can be promoted.

…It would be sinful to cast a ballot for one who, in the judgment of the voters [sic], would do grave public harm. [emphasis added]

—The Revised Baltimore Catechism of 1949, §246

These are pretty important qualifications!

Perhaps you object: Well, they rewrote that for the Catechism of 1992! Those aren’t the rules anymore!

That’s a mistake. The Catechism of 1992 was a summary of the tradition, not a revision to it. However, the Catechism of 1992 tried to cover a huge amount of ground, which meant it often had to summarize complicated moral positions in just a couple of sentences. For example, I spent nearly 4,000 words explaining Catholic teaching on cooperation with evil. The Catechism of 1992 tried to do it in 40. It is no surprise that the Catechism lost a great deal of nuance in both cases.

27. The obvious exception here is the Jim Crow South, where segregation was both a grave violation of the common good and highly salient to local voters, among whom it became a matter of great controversy.

However, pretty much everyone else in the country—both Republicans and Democrats—agreed that segregation was bad. They slowly crushed it, while continuing to engage in ordinary political disputes between themselves. They moved too slowly, but that’s beside my point.

My point is: in the United States, outside the South, the middle decades of the twentieth century were some of the most ordinary politics you can imagine.

28. Without investigating closely, I suspect the number was higher. Turn-of-the-century books tended to downplay the prevalence and horror of slavery, and there were 33 slaves, as early as 1855, in Kansas census district 16 alone.

29. We will deal with those who hated the Fugitive Slave Law, accepting it only as a horrifying but necessary compromise, presently.

30. You could argue, as I attempted eight years ago, that the voter is two steps removed from specifically presidential candidates, since the voter technically votes for presidential electors. However, since I wrote those articles, the Supreme Court’s decision in Chiafalo v. Washington (2020) has reduced the electors in nearly every state to merely mechanical proxies. This does not provide any moral “insulation” between the voter and the candidate for whom he votes.

31. In other words, it is “remote” cooperation only in the strictest sense, because all mediate material cooperation is remote, relative to immediate cooperation.

I mention this because I think this is how we must understand then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s widely-debated postscript to his July 2004 letter to Cardinal McCarrick (popularly known as Worthiness to Receive Communion):

[N.B. A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.]

He cannot be denying that voting is proximate material cooperation, because Cardinal Ratzinger understood better than most that the stripping of the rights of the unborn is evil in itself, even if not accompanied by abortion. Many smart people have interpreted “remote” here much less strictly, but I think this is not only a mistaken interpretation of the moral law, but that it makes Pope Benedict look like a stupid hypocrite.

With that proviso, there’s no contradiction between anything I say in this article and anything Papa Benny said in that letter.

32. Suppose we set aside the evildoing of the legislator for a moment and instead consider the proximity between Louie’s vote and the actual slaveowners who will use the legislator’s authorization to perpetrate their terrible crimes. When we do this same analysis, it turns out that, even with that one extra step of remoteness, Louie’s vote is still pretty damn proximate! (And I do mean “damn.”)

33. A likelier formula here would apportion blame to each voter based on the size of the winning margin, something like: [ each voter’s % of moral responsibility = 1 / (votes for winning candidate - votes for losing candidate) ], but that’s getting a bit fancy since I’m about to point out that this is (1) irrelevant and (2) wrong anyway.

34. Even if the answer here were “yes,” it still wouldn’t make it any easier to justify the vote.

Remember that, in order to justify cooperating with evil, you must be pursuing a good big enough to outweigh the evil.

“Well, that’s great!” Louie says. “I’m voting to prevent national recession! The slavery candidate’s economic policies will prevent 13,000 Americans from falling into poverty! 0.000625 slave rapes is still way too many rapes, but 13,000 Americans’ financial health is worth it! I’m helping more than twenty million times as many people as I’m harming! That’s a proportionate good! My vote is justified!”

This is a very common response. You will hear this response even today.

The problem is obvious, though, if you think about it. If your moral responsibility for the candidate’s evil is diluted by the candidate’s other voters, your moral responsibility for the candidate’s good is also diluted—to exactly the same extent. The “voter dilution” principle would be worthless to building a case for voting for an evildoing candidate, even if it were valid.

35. As usual, the institutional Catholic Church failed to live up to its own moral theories during this period. Although voting for a pro-slavery candidate clearly could not be justified, the American bishops’ teaching on chattel slavery around the time of the Civil War was muddled and worldly, as it usually is. Although there were many bright spots of bold witness, the hierarchy as a whole often sought the acceptance of its contemporaries and advantage from evil. In doing so, it earned the shame of centuries.

This is inevitable. Why were slaveowners allowed to receive the Eucharist? The same reason President Biden is allowed to receive the Eucharist today: moral cowardice. One of my favorite historical ironies is that the people who are angriest about the former are the most likely to defend the latter, proving just how difficult it is to live up to one’s ideals in a culture that opposes them.

36. Since you’re probably wondering: no, Dr. Heaney has not read this article. He is aware of my conclusion, but not my argument. You should not assume that he agrees with either. In fact, I wrote this article, in part, to persuade him on a few points where I know we currently disagree. P.S. Hi, dad!

37. Also, many of the slaves themselves are rather opposed, but they’re mostly “barbarians,” so their opinions don’t count.

38. In How Should Catholics Vote? (p568), my father sketched an analogy between voting for imperfect legislation and imperfect candidates. As St. John Paul II said in the passage of Evangelium Vitae quoted earlier, a legislator can vote for imperfect legislation that only limits evil when perfect legislation (which would eliminate the evil) is politically impossible. Likewise, Dr. Heaney contends, we should be able to vote for an evildoing candidate who would at least limit the evil if the morally fit candidate is, politically speaking, a dead duck.

The analogy is imperfect, of course, and deserves further development. In particular, I think it needs to account for the fact that an anti-evil legislator voting for a proposal to limit evil is not cooperating with evil, while an anti-evil voter voting for a pro-evil legislator who may limit evil is cooperating with evil. That might very well be justifiable under some circumstances—I sure hope so! I voted for Romney!—but it isn’t a free lunch, either. It was certainly easier to imagine in 2006 than it is today. A little more on this later.

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

39. Walking away from the voting booth is not quite so extreme as walking away from an evil country, nor is it quite so admirable.

Yet those who have spent time voting third-party year after year will recognize that sense of “walking ahead into the darkness… towards a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness,” knowing “[i]t is possible that it does not exist.”

40. It seems that even Pope Francis thinks this, based on some recent comments of his, but Pope Francis is rather notorious, at this point, for making comments without doing the reading first. Fortunately, my aim in this article is to mine Catholic thought for its wisdom on voting ethics, not to engage in a fideist harmonization of it with every off-the-cuff utterance by a prominent Catholic.

41. Since both fascists and communists tend to eliminate elections as soon as they take power, and since both fascism and communism arose largely in Europe’s multiparty parliamentary systems, direct electoral confrontations between fascists and communists are rare. Elections where there was no viable centrist third-party option are even rarer. Still, something similar to this played out in the 1936 Spanish elections, the 1924 Italian elections, and in the 1932 German elections (with Hitler as Hitler and the vile Ernst Thälmann filling in for Stalin).

42. See footnote 7 on “the most pernicious habit in Catholic intellectual life”!

43. In fact, a lot of Catholic writing about voting in the early 2000s dealt with problems that could be understood, in my framework, as problems of ordinary antipolitics.

Could Catholics vote for George W. Bush (in 2000) given his opposition to including the children of rape in laws protecting the unborn—exceptions that huge supermajorities of American voters supported? Dr. Nathan Schlueter argued yes, in a 2001 First Things article that has some interesting resonances with mine, especially on this point, which seems to describe ordinary antipolitics:

“But,” the Judie Brown party might ask, “by protecting the ‘right to kill’ by law in those cases, isn’t Bush cooperating with evil in an illicit way?” It depends. Bush did not create the situation we presently live in. It was handed to him. Thus he must deal with circumstances as they are given. Those circumstances are such that there is virtually no protection for the unborn. In this case he would not be protecting the right to kill the unborn in limited cases, but would be preventing the killing of the unborn in all but those cases. If we were living in a time before Roe v. Wade, the situation might be different.

Twenty-three years later, I think this article is quite good, and I agree with its conclusion. (And, yes, even though he works at Hillsdale, Schleuter is one of ours. Unfortunately, Schlueter’s later work on voting shed some of the nuance of his 2001 article and thus, in my view, missed the mark.)

Similar questions bubbled in Catholic discourse throughout the 2000s: Could Catholics vote for John McCain (2008) given his support for embryo-destructive stem-cell research? That was iffier, given the issue’s then-recent salience, but the arguments were made. Could Catholics support a candidate who supports in vitro fertilization, given a society where IVF support is through the roof?

These are all, to greater or lesser extents, problems of ordinary antipolitics: candidates who accept evils that the entire society has already embraced, and the difficulties of cooperating with them.

44. The debate over waterboarding ran off and on in online Catholic spaces from about 2009-2012. It was partially memorialized by a New York Times article: “Defender of Waterboarding Hears from Critics” (gift link; 27 Feb 2010 A19). I distinctly remember reading some articulate defenders of waterboarding (who argued that it was not torture), but I can’t find any of them now, so maybe I imagined them. For my part, I was finally persuaded when I watched a pro-waterboarding journalist get waterboarded on YouTube, leading him to immediately recant his position and declare that waterboarding was torture.

And, of course, Alasdair MacIntyre denounced voting in American presidential elections way back in 2004. Although I like MacIntyre a lot, and I’ve obviously become more sympathetic to his conclusion, I thought his argument was bad at the time and I still think it’s bad today. He’s the Hans Blix of refusing to vote: famously right but for bad reasons.

45. She’s a phony who says anything she thinks she needs to say to win votes. She supported the Biden Administration’s massive fiscal stimulus that (in large part) triggered our last episode of inflation. She shares her boss’s open contempt for the rule of law, demonstrated in the administration’s gleeful abuse of standing rules to pass “executive actions” that fly in the face of federal law while evading judicial review (e.g. eviction moratoria, vaccine mandates, voiding student loans), and in her own support for the wildly, insanely, completely, obviously, flagrantly lawless attempt to enforce the ERA as if it had been ratified. (The ERA died decades ago.)

She appears to genuinely believe that disagreement with her constitutes “misinformation” or “hate speech” which ought to be censored—even though her campaign spreads plenty of misinformation, even though I remember when the government accused people like me of spreading “misinformation” and tried to get social media to crack down on us for daring to say that we thought masks might help slow the spread of covid, back before the Biden government started actually cracking down on other (true) covid claims. Indeed, it’s beyond me how anyone could trust institutions to identify “misinformation” when we’re living in the blasted-out epistemological crater of the Biden-Harris censorship campaign against the (true) Hunter Biden laptop story and her administration’s insistence that anyone who questioned the fitness of President Biden was spreading “cheapfakes.”

Speaking of which: Harris was a leading co-conspirator in the years-long campaign to deceive the American people about President Joe Biden’s capacity to hold office. Remember, Biden is still president, with all the responsibilities thereof, because Vice President Harris has refused to admit that his disability renders him unable to hold office!

Sprinkle on the Biden-Harris Administration’s wholly unconvincing foreign policy record, its determination to devastate our current constitutional arrangement by packing the courts, and its abject failure on border control (which led them, finally but silently, to reinstate Trump-era policies they had once denounced as inhuman), and you have ample reason to believe that the Harris Presidency would be a bad time.

46. There are several conflicting definitions of “abortion.” Some definitions consider miscarriages and removals of already-dead children from the uterus to be forms of “abortion.” That obviously isn’t murder, and no law prohibits them. There are also cases where the child is killed (either directly or indirectly) in order to save the mother. The details vary, but these, too, are not necessarily murder, and they are universally allowed by all anti-abortion laws.

47. At just 21 weeks, preemies are “periviable.” Their survival chance, when treated, is close to 25%. Using the 21 weeks figure would be much easier for us in terms of data collection, because of how abortion data is reported (more on this in the next footnote). However, I suspect that some of you reading this think that babies who have less than even odds of survival still don’t “count” as human and so killing them isn’t murder. I don’t want to give you any excuses to ignore this, so I am counting only abortions after 25 weeks.

On the other hand, if a nearly-25% survival rate is enough to make those periviables human and autonomous in your eyes, the 13,000 abortions at 21+ weeks are all the more horrifying.

48. This is a very difficult number to come up with, for a couple of reasons. First, for whatever reason, abortion vital statistics reporting standardized on reporting all abortions at or beyond 21 weeks in the aggregate.

There’s a comfortable amount of data about abortions at 21+ weeks. According to the CDC, about 1.3% of abortions fall into that bucket. (Although it’s probably more of a stainless steel pail.) This is broadly consistent with state-level data, like data from Arizona, but some states especially lax abortion laws see higher numbers, like New York (2%). Others see lower numbers—especially in the states where elective late-term abortionists were long since regulated into moving away.

The second problem with documenting late-term abortions is the lack of data. Even though Roe allowed late-term abortions, red states largely managed to find ways to backdoor-regulate it out of existence, and then they banned it post-Dobbs, so there isn’t a lot of data on it. Blue states that do allow late-term abortion, in turn, tend to have very rudimentary reporting on it. Democrats have long opposed publishing vital statistics on abortion, because it allows people like me to tell people like you that people like them are killing several thousand viable babies per year.

California stopped reporting its abortion figures to the CDC way back in the ‘90s. My governor, Tim Walz, repealed Minnesota’s born-alive-after-abortion reporting law the same day he repealed the born-alive infants protection law, so the murders-by-medical-neglect his law enabled will be illegible to the public. We had detailed reports on covid deaths in every state and city, but Kamala Harris is right now campaigning against abortion vital records reporting, scaremongering it as “part of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda.”

Luckily, Colorado published detailed post-viability abortion figures in 2021 and 2022. In 2023, they started paring back those reports, but it’s too late. We already gained a clear insight into the week-by-week post-viability abortion breakdown from one of America’s meccas for late-term abortion.

In Colorado in 2021, 1.5% of all abortions took place at 21+ weeks. In 2022, it was 3.4%.

Of those late-term abortions, in 2021, 35.3% happened at 25+ weeks. In 2022, it was 47.4%. The average between those two years (admittedly not a great sample size!) is 41.3%.

If, nationally, 1.3% of total abortions are at 21+ weeks, and 41% of those are at 25+ weeks, the total share of abortions performed after 25+ weeks nationally is (1.3%*41%)= 0.54%.

I would love a bigger sample size here, because two years of data from one state—a state that may not even be representative—just isn’t very much lot to go on, but I could not find any other state that provided detailed figures past viability. I have heard estimates of post-viability abortion rates as low as 0.2% and as high as 0.6%.

49. For example, see the letter to the editor quoted here.

50. Roe is often presented as though it allowed limits after viability. That is, indeed, what the Roe Court wanted you to believe about Roe, because it sounded all moderate and balanced. It did not actually do that, though, because Roe required “exceptions” even after viability for “health,” and a companion decision released on the same day, Doe v. Bolton, defined “health” so broadly that it simply meant “preference.”

Roe also failed to define “viability” clearly, leading late-term abortionists to interpret viability… flexibly. Late-term abortionist Walter Hern, for example, once articulated the principle that the viability of a fetus is determined, not by gestational age, but “by a woman’s willingness to carry it.”

51. In past elections, people who identified as pro-life but who were nevertheless determined to vote for Democrats would often try to say something like, “Well, that’s really for the Supreme Court to decide, not the President.” This excuse, at least, is now gone. Abortion policy is now squarely in the realm of things the executive will have to decide directly.

52. Her powers over earlier abortions are much broader, given the Mexico City Policy, Rust v. Sullivan, control over the FDA’s regulatory decisions for the abortion drug, and the ability to suspend enforcement of anti-abortion laws she dislikes, such as Comstock. If you care at all about the lives of pre-viable humans, yes, she will violently fight against their rights and thousands will die who would not die under a Republican administration.

53. aka

SDG

, lately of Decent Films. I admit, my knees reflexively jerked when he cited, even with qualifications, that terrible misleading chart about Democratic presidencies reducing abortions (which I’ve debunked before), but his two pieces are, overall, worth considering, even in the spots where they are (in my view) very wrong. (I hope he rightly takes it as high praise that I think his thinking is lucid enough to be worth reading even though parts are wrong!)

54. I suspect most politicians do this, but Trump is unusually obvious.

55. No, it does not matter for Trump that most of the J6’ers were peaceful / invited into the building, because Trump clearly cooperated with the violent insurrectionists who forced their way in.

No, it does not matter that Trump half-heartedly agreed to a limited National Guard deployment three days earlier, because what actually happened in that meeting does not look nearly as good for Trump as he claims, nor does it cancel out what he actually did on the day.

No, it does not matter that Joe Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice has treated the J6’ers grossly unfairly compared to the George Floyd rioters, because it doesn’t change the fact that Trump engaged in an insurrection; it only reinforces our view that Biden and Harris are even more unworthy of a vote than we previously believed.

No, it does not matter if Trump himself convinced himself to believe his own election lies (although I don’t for a second believe that he did that), because it was what the Catholic moralists call affected ignorance; it tends to increase, rather than decreases, culpability.

No, it does not matter to Trump that some of the George Floyd rioters also did an insurrection. That’s true, but it just means they’re also guilty. It doesn’t make Trump innocent.

No, it doesn’t even matter to Trump if the insurrection had been instigated by a bunch of CIA plants on orders from Joe Biden (although… I’m pretty sure it wasn’t). If that were true, it would make Biden and the CIA plants guilty of insurrection as well, but it would not make Trump innocent!

But more, on most of these subjects, in the article.

56. There is one exception to this. I have one friend who read what I had to say about Donald Trump’s insurrection, who told me that he had different information from different sources, and who did share those sources with me.

That’s my QAnon friend, who I’ll call “Ron.” Ron thinks President Trump is currently acting as commander-in-chief, that Joe Biden has been dead since early 2021 and is currently being portrayed by an actor, that Washington, D.C. has been all but abandoned, and that the final operation against the satanic pedophile ring running the world will shortly be brought to a close. Ron is certain this close will involve Donald J. Trump’s triumphant return to power (no election required, since, secretly backed by the military, he is already legally serving his second term), mass executions of the sex traffickers, and a return to hard currency backed by precious metals. Ron insists that all polls are fake. He responds to my arguments about how Oklahoma’s election results prove Biden didn’t win by fraud by insisting that I’m naive for believing that any numbers in the 2020 election, including those reported by red states, are true.

I disagree with Ron about a great deal, but he has always practiced good information hygiene with me in the sense that he is very willing to share his sources and doesn’t run from an argument. I’ve looked at a lot of those sources. I have not found them persuasive, but at least Ron included them.

So I think it is probably possible to doubt that President Trump committed an insurrection if you accept all the premises of QAnon. Otherwise, you are probably stuck either believing it or evading it.

57. The right to life is the single most fundamental right, without which all other rights are “false and illusory.”

The right to a democracy… doesn’t exist at all, because the Catholic Church, at least, does not consider democracy a right.

Democracy (for Catholics, anyway) is an instrumental good. That means we do think it is good, but only because it is useful. Compared to the other options, democracy tends to do a better job establishing fundamental rights and the common good. That’s the goal: the flourishing of human beings. If democracy leads to human flourishing, great! If a constitutional monarchy or aristocracy does it better in a particular time or place, then we should adopt the system that serves the people best. The good of the people should always come first.

I mention this because several pro-life arguments for Harris (including ones by Catholics who should know better) invert this. They treat democracy as not just an inherent good (which is a mistake) but as, in some sense, a good as fundamental as life. This is obviously wrong.

To be sure, I find democracy extremely useful. I love democracy. I love the liberal order on which it is built. I don’t expect any system to best it in my lifetime or any other.

But supporting or opposing democracy is very much a prudential matter of ordinary politics, on which good people can disagree.

Now, as I’m about to explain after this footnote, although we don’t have a right to democracy, we do have a right to a rule of law. However, even that right plays second fiddle to the right to life.

Pope St. John Paul II once described human rights as a series of concentric circles. The right to life is the most central right, followed by the other fundamental rights, followed by the many, many goods that support those fundamentals—one of which is the rule of law. As I am about to argue, the rule of law is still really important, important enough to disqualify Donald Trump, but placing it on equal footing with the right to life gets it backwards. The law was made for man, not man for the law.

58. Just in case this needs saying: every law Donald Trump tried to break or cast aside was a just law. Some were wise, some were foolish, some were abused, but none was unjust. That’s a high bar.

59. …at least until Congress agrees by a two-thirds vote of both houses to lift this disqualification. Congress has not so agreed and never will; way too many Democrats believe he’s guilty, for the very sound reason that he is guilty.

60. I’ve written about that decision, of course. Last month, Michael Stokes Paulsen and William Baude posted their analysis, which is worth reading as well.

61. …and found some way to avoid committing evil in casting a vote for Trump, in violation of the Constitution’s qualifications.

62. I will define battleground states very generously as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Maine District 2, Nebraska District 2, Minnesota, Texas, or Florida.

If you don’t live in one of these states, saying that your presidential vote matters is like saying that your screaming at the referees made a difference to the basketball game—even though you were home watching the game on television. It’s not, strictly speaking, impossible, since it is possible that a rip in space-time could open up and your angry words at the referee might drift through the portal directly into the referee’s ears, and lead him to change his behavior. Or your screaming could, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, set off a complex series of weather events that leads to a hurricane that nearly kills the referee which causes the referee to get religion and change his behavior in time for your team’s appearance at the tournament in March. However, these outcomes are so unlikely that you should not factor them into your decision-making, especially if you are also harming your own soul in the process (for example, by screaming abusively, or wrathfully).

So if you’re in a non-battleground state and still thinking about voting for one of these candidates… what’s wrong with you? How is this even a question? You would clearly harm yourself by voting for Trump or Harris, and you would gain nothing at all in return. You’d be committing self-harm out of… what? Pure tribal catharsis? FOMO?

Non-battleground residents have been given a tremendous gift: freedom from responsibility for the outcome. How dare you squander that gift?

63. When I wrote that example of a person who had become corrupted, I had two specific real-life friends in mind—one who is now a red hat, the other a coconut.

64. People who have been reading De Civ for a decade might be going, “Wait, weren’t you going to vote the slate?” Yes, you’re correct. I just didn’t want to explain “voting the slate” to our newer readers. What I actually technically did when I filled out ballots “for Trump” in this story was mark my ballot’s Trump line for the Republican slate of electors. (I did continue to fight for slate-voters post-election, as I’d vowed.)

65. Here, I wonder whether memory has played a small trick on me. The walk definitely happened, but how did I leave the room with a ballot paper? I’ve been an election judge now, and I’m fairly sure that’s illegal. Did the ballot lady give me back my ballot receipt? Did I simply not know the law and nobody caught me because the polling place was so busy? I don’t know. It’s possible, then, that I took this walk before I cast my first two votes, but that’s not how I remember it.

66. Specifically, I voted for the American Solidarity Party’s write-in candidate. This is a “Christian Democracy” third party whose long-term electoral prospects are, if anything, less than zero. However, their party animal is a pelican, which is cool.

Their candidate in 2016, Mike Maturen, was not really prepared for the responsibilities of the presidential office, but, since he had both halves of his brain and a functioning conscience, he was still the best option available. The ASP’s 2024 candidate, Peter Sonski, is similar, and, full disclosure, I will be voting for him, even though his running mate is named Lauren and cares about education, which makes me worry about Case Orange.

If the ASP’s vision of the common good does not fit yours, there are probably other third-party options available that would fit you better. Or you could write-in a non-candidate. Or you could leave the presidential line blank, while voting the rest of your ballot. You have options. Just not the two options the Republican and Democratic Parties want you to obsess over.

67. In 2020, I made the same choice, for the same, narrow reason: Minnesota was not in play, and any universe where it was in play was a universe where Trump already had 270 electoral votes. (This proved correct.) I voted third-party in 2020, but very likely would have voted for Trump if circumstances had been slightly different.

In fact, November of 2020 was when my regard for Trump was very near its height: he had not done the deliberately evil things he’d promised on the campaign trail in 2016, he had kept promises I had expected him to break, and his coterie had mostly managed to keep his worst impulses in check. His presidency had accumulated an unimpressive but more-or-less conservative record, with a mixed policy record on covid. Looking back, it seems to me reasonably possible that voting for Trump in 2020, before his insurrection, might very well have been a valid moral option, at least in a battleground state. Only voting for Biden could be definitively ruled out.

I made occasional comments to that effect back around the time of the 2020 election. However, I deliberately avoided taking any strong stands or writing any long articles about it. You see, by 2020, I was sure that the ethical framework I was using to vote was in some way defective, but I hadn’t yet figured out the alternative. It didn’t seem urgent because Minnesota was not in play, so I kept my mouth shut and kept thinking.

Perhaps my improving opinion of Trump at the time is why I was foolishly surprised by what he did after he lost the election.

68. Note: This sentence was added to the body of the article on 13 October, as a correction, because comments requested it. I obviously did not mean to send the message that you shouldn’t vote at all. I assumed that was clear enough that it didn’t need to be stated. Comments assured me that it did need to be stated. Now it’s stated.

If you are fortunate enough to live in some small town somewhere with shared values untouched by national political issues, and you have a city council or mayoral election on the ballot this year… that might actually be ordinary politics, and you therefore you have a moral obligation to vote.

On the other hand, there may be some down-ballot races where you shouldn’t vote, either. My Minnesota has a U.S. Senate race between late-term abortion fan Amy Klobuchar and apparent anti-Semite (?) Royce White. I haven’t researched this race enough to be certain how I am voting in it, but I have a fair suspicion I’ll be writing myself in. Some of you may be in similar down-ballot binds. Hopefully the first two-thirds of this article provides you with the tools you need to make decisions in those races as well.