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November 2008
Vol. 22, No. 10
Voters' Guide
The Case for McCain
Choosing among those who seek the presidency is not necessarily an easy task for the intelligent libertarian. Liberty's editors do their best to help.
Stephen Cox is a professor at UC San Diego. His most recent book is The New Testament and Literature.
My message is simple: Vote Republican, because whatever you may say against McCain (and it will probably be true), Obama is much worse.
I’m not going to list all the debits and credits of either McCain or Obama — or Barr, the Libertarian Party nominee. Readers of Liberty have covered this territory already. My major purpose is to examine the fallacies that lead good people either to vote only for candidates who express their highest moral aspirations or to refuse to vote at all.
Let’s consider the second matter first. To many people, the argument for not voting appears invincible. A single vote almost never decides an election; therefore, why vote? This logic evidently appeals to a large proportion of the populace, the proportion that doesn’t turn up at the polls.
But the issue isn’t as easy as it looks. Think about all the things you do, and believe in doing, despite the fact that they have little or no practical effect. When strangers on a plane interrupt you with inane small talk, you treat them civilly, even though you’ll never see them again. When you have the chance to jump the queue at the checkout stand, you resist the temptation, even when there’s no significant chance that anyone will retaliate against you if you don’t. When you’re paying a one-time visit to Nome, you still tip the waiter.
Why do we do things like that? Because we’re voting, in effect, for a world where everybody does things like that, a world in which life is somewhat better instead of somewhat worse. We don’t imagine that other people will necessarily follow our example. We hope they will, but we probably won’t know whether they do or not. But if we and people like us didn’t do what we do, the world would be a pretty miserable place. The ignorant, uncaring, and uncivil would simply take over.
Now, to come a little closer to actual politics: Have you ever entered an argument that you knew you’d lose, in the sense that you knew you wouldn’t convince the other parties? I’ll bet you have. It’s part of being human; it’s part of being who you are, and showing it. And do you ever take a few minutes to participate in telephone polls? I’ll bet you do that, too. Admittedly, it makes little or no practical difference that when somebody calls me up I take a few minutes to state my view, thus raising the percentage of Americans who want smaller government by a decimal point or less; but that just means that I wish more libertarians were willing to take part in those surveys. If they were, politicians would take us a lot more seriously. But if none of us responded, they would be sure to write us off completely.
Yet actual voting, you may say, is different. It isn’t just a statement of views; it’s part of the process by which officials are installed and policies are imposed. If you insist on taking part in this process, don’t you have a responsibility to vote for the candidate who is closest to your own views — to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate, not the Republican or the Democrat? How can you spend all your waking life denouncing the actions of the two major parties, then haul off and cast your vote for one of them?
Those are good questions. They bring us back to the first fallacious idea I mentioned, the notion that you have a duty not to vote for anyone with whom you have a principled disagreement. Many libertarians take this position, refusing to give their “moral sanction” to anyone except a candidate of the Libertarian Party (should one of these candidates be found sufficiently pure). They assume that to vote for a Republican or a Democrat is to make oneself responsible for every rotten thing that person may do in office.
This, I believe, is nonsense — well-intended nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.
Do you seriously believe that the function of voting in a presidential election is to decide every act and policy of the U.S. government? Do you really imagine that we are living in the kind of social democracy in which nothing happens unless it appears on the ballot? Of course you don’t. Then what do you think the function of voting is?
Clearly, it’s to select a single winner out of a long list of candidates. If I thought the Libertarian candidate had a decent chance to win, I would vote Libertarian. But I still wouldn’t consider myself morally responsible for anything, anything at all, that Bob Barr did as president.
It’s fair to say that to most libertarians, this will look like a sad attempt to relieve myself of guilt. Why shouldn’t you feel responsible? they’ll ask. You voted for him!
But no, I reply, I am not responsible. In strict terms, I didn’t even vote for him. I voted against his opponents. Isabel Paterson was right when she argued, in “The God of the Machine,” that the proper function of voting is to say No, I don’t want So and So. It’s impossible to vote for all the things that a candidate may do in office, with any reasonable expectation that this is what he will do. What’s clear is that one can vote against the candidates from whom one expects still worse things. When they lose, they no longer have the ability to do any of those things.
And this, by the way, is what political moralists urge you to do when they say you should vote Libertarian, or not vote at all. They want you to say No to the Republicans and the Democrats. The problem is that, except if they get very lucky, these moralists don’t actually manage to exclude the worst of the great-party candidates. They just identify themselves as members of the great company of people whose views can be written off.
This year, it’s conceivable that Obama may gain a state, and thus win the election, if there’s an outpouring of antiwar conservative and libertarian votes for Barr. I doubt that will happen, because my humble opinion is that most voters agree with me and vote for one of the major-party candidates, trying to exclude the worse one from the presidency. But now we’ve returned to the only real political issue: Would you rather exclude Obama or McCain? That’s what the presidential election will decide. To say “I’d rather exclude them both” is like answering a survey question, “Would you rather (A) have lower taxes; or (B) have higher taxes,” by saying, “Not applicable: I’d rather have no taxes.” Of course you would. So would I. But that isn’t the question. The question in the 2008 election is simply: Which candidate will be excluded, Obama or McCain?
I say, exclude Obama.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons for excluding McCain. Unlike Obama, he’s a (qualified) supporter of our strange adventure in Iraq. And he’s a desperate lunatic about “campaign finance reform,” having learned nothing from the failure of the McCain-Feingold Act. Like Bush, he’s a jerk and an obscurantist about illegal immigration. And he’s a crabby old guy. I don’t like him. Actually, I detest him.
But now let’s talk about what Obama is. The worst thing is that he has “charisma,” which is something you get when The New York Times says you have it. With no more intellectual or experiential qualifications than those sufficient to become a corrupt Chicago alderman, he considers himself a great moral and spiritual leader, and he has been accepted as such by millions of deluded followers. There is nothing more dangerous than the cult of the Messiah, and that’s what the Obama movement is. This alone is sufficient reason to vote against Obama, by voting for McCain.
And the list of reasons goes on and on: Obama’s glad embrace of black nationalist “liberation” (i.e., neocommunist) theology, until the nature of his church was miraculously revealed; his willingness to lie about his background and associations, many of which can be justified by his followers only on the basis of his cynical willingness to cadge support from nuts and demagogues; his life (and the life of his influential spouse), spent in the service of racial preferences; his slanderous description of people who vote against him as bitter folk who cling like mollusks to their guns and their religion and their “antipathy to people who aren’t like them”; his amorphous political positions, each one dedicated to the proposition that he must be president, for whatever reasons he wants to dream up (if he’s an antiwar candidate, God help the cause of pacifism); and finally, and most egregiously, the pompous condescension that he manifests in every moment of his public being.
It’s remarkable that Hillary Clinton, who was filled higher with hubris than any other person on the political scene, lost a great deal of it when she found herself slipping beneath Obama’s tires. Contrary to all expectations, she learned from her experience. She acknowledged (some) mistakes. She talked without condescension to people who weren’t her followers — to people who actually disagreed with her. But when Obama was in danger of losing, during the Reverend Wright affair, what did he learn? He learned to blame one revered friend after another for his mistake of associating with them. He went so far as to suggest that his grandmother was a racist. He cultivated his habit of finding coyly disingenuous ways of putting the verbal knife into other people. And soon he was Himself again, radiating his rightness in every possible respect.
It was an amazing performance, and it did not bode well for the republic, should this star-struck nonentity be elected president. You thought Bill Clinton was bad? He at least had a sense of humor. Often he knew that he was gaming the people. But Obama doesn’t have a clue about himself.
Yet the greatest problem about voting Democratic, even when the Democratic candidate isn’t a little Napoleon, is always that Democratic presidencies bring to Washington tens of thousands of counselors, bureaucrats, judges, and social action profiteers, an invading force that is always even farther to the big-government left than their boss, who at least had to be elected by the nation as a whole. The greatest problem with voting Republican is that Republican presidencies bring to Washington tens of thousands of stumblebums who haven’t a clue about how to reduce the size of government, or even to govern intelligently. Is there a clearer political choice? The worst you can say about the Republicans — and this is very bad indeed — is that they behave like Democrats. The best you can say — and it’s not very good, but it is important — is that they are not Democrats. Occasionally they nominate a Justice Thomas. Occasionally they lower taxes. Occasionally they raise speed limits, abolish conscription, or defend the 2nd Amendment. And they never nominate a Messiah.
It’s very unfortunate, but in one way or another we all end up voting for either the Republican or the Democrat. If you refuse to vote for the lesser of the two evils, you’ll do nothing to exclude the greater of the two evils. Is that really what you want to do?
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