2008 was the first election in which I was able to vote, and I wasn’t just an ideologue. I was a confirmed neoconservative, an avid reader of Irving Kristol, the Kagans, and David Frum, always looking for the middle ground between Leon Trotsky and Woodrow Wilson without ever knowing it. In retrospect, that’s not such a bad thing to be at 18. It made me want to learn about politics, particularly foreign policy, and I wouldn’t have had the sufficient context at that point in my life to be a pragmatist without becoming totally rudderless.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take back my vote for John McCain without a moment’s hesitation.
Courtney Haden wrote an eloquent, thoughtful piece in last week’s Weld advocating Barack Obama as the worthiest choice for president. He’s certainly not a perfect president, Courtney contends, but this isn’t a game of perfect choices. One of the fundamental lessons of American history—and the basis of the American philosophy, pragmatism—is that no matter how powerful your ideals, you have to compromise if you want to see progress.
My mind returns to 2008, though, and the fact that my choice, blinded by ideological and partisan desperation, would’ve put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from being leader of the free world and steward of the country. This year, my individual vote for president isn’t important in anything other than a symbolic sense; my district will go blue, my state will go red.
In light of that, I choose to vote my conscience, troubled as it is by the decision I made in 2008. And that means I won’t be voting for President Obama or Mitt Romney today.
Make no mistake: I think Obama is unquestionably the better of the two major party candidates. His healthcare plan, while not ideal—compromise, yet again, for someone so frequently demonized as an intransigent socialist—restores some notion of a safety net to our country. That’s an idea that, as that stalwart conservative Winston Churchill could tell you, is hardly new or radical, and it’s critical to national stability and hope. His planned investments in education are just as important for mitigating the bleak future of the republic.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is both a total enigma and an inveterate liar. I have a feeling that his policies would actually hew rather closely to Obama’s, but the combination of his party’s barbarous views on women’s issues and gay rights, fondness for voodoo economics, and Romney’s own sliminess strikes me as, at best, a Nixonian choice.
I self-identify as a Burkean conservative, which I admit is a rather hopeless starting point, and one fundamentally given to a sentimental ideal of the past. That said, I consider my vote to be less against Obama or Romney, and more as an (admittedly doomed) protest against the apparent direction of the country that both candidates represent: one of spending, bloating, and warring.
It’s ironic in hindsight that I was so concerned about voting against Obama, since he’s proven to be a prime example of Charles Krauthammer’s “democratic realism”—in other words, the sort of neocon who’s more Wilson than Trotsky, and who can choose his invasions a little more wisely. The most troubling aspect of Obama’s neoconservative foreign policy, especially in light of his background in civil rights law, is the use of drone warfare.
Let’s assume for the moment that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year old American citizen killed in a drone strike in October of last year, was a 100% lock to mature into a terrorist like his father, an alleged al-Qaeda propagandist killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier. Even if that were the case—tragically, due to unrestrained power, we won’t ever know—American citizens are guaranteed due process. We aren’t merely rehashing the same old questions about the death penalty here; this is the deadly face of the conflict between liberty and security, carried out in secret without even tacit approval.
One of the greatest fallacies of modern liberalism is the notion of human rights, drawn from the ether and given the authority of ether, for use as a ward against tyranny. Civil rights—developed over the course of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of years, depending on the right, and defended by courts and tradition—are the most powerful aegis of the individual, and in the last twelve years we’ve seen a terrifying lack of concern for them from our federal government. Civil rights are also the reason, along with our nation’s incredible bounty of natural resources, for the success of the American experiment, not some magical idea of exceptionalism. Discarding them in the name of necessity undermines one of the cornerstones of the American identity.
Moreover, this is a policy that flies brazenly in the face of what recent history has taught us, which is that the kind of terrorism that reportedly kills one target for every 49 civilians spawns the vengeful extremism responsible for tragedies like 9/11. In four years characterized by economic recession and domestic division, this is the signature disappointment of the Obama administration.
It’s not merely drones, of course, but rather what they represent. The republic has always been only partially democratic, but the government seems farther than ever from being accountable to its citizenry. It’s not just a matter of size—although the federal government is certainly engorged—but rather the historic levels of corruption, cynicism, and power. This isn’t solely Obama’s fault any more than it would be McCain’s in his place, but again, I’m not voting against Obama. I’m voting against (or, to look at things more optimistically, for) history.
The British economist John Maynard Keynes’ most famous quote is that “In the long run, we’re all dead,” meaning that immediate problems are more important than long-term consequences. We live, for better or for worse, in a Keynesian world, in terms of both economics and politics. I wonder now if the long run—the consequence of a century of spending, punctuated by over-reliance on credit and by ill-considered wars—has arrived, and if my generation is the one doomed to suffer for it.
If so, it’s time for someone who could realistically scale back the size and power of the federal government, someone whose plan for balancing the budget isn’t headlined by empty grandstanding like cutting NPR and PBS. It’s time for someone to end not only our military adventurism abroad—a cost in treasure we’ll bear for decades as well as a cost in blood, mental and spiritual health most people are divorced from sharing—but also our drug war. That prohibition has effectively become a war on the poor and on minorities in this country, and it’s the prime reason that we have a prison state on a par with the Soviet Gulag.
We need someone to reinvest in our crumbling infrastructure, which is one of the surest signs of our empire’s decline. We need someone to reiterate government non-interference in matters of personal privacy. We need someone to finally reduce the CIA’s influence.
In light of these wishes, I’m voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate. I’m not a Libertarian. I’ve never been one of Ron Paul’s disciples, nor an advocate of the gold standard. I strongly disagree with the philosophical underpinnings of many traditional Libertarian policies. Coming from Alabama, you can also color me skeptical of the notion of individual states as “laboratories for democracy.” In short, I hardly agree with his whole platform, but I cannot in good conscience vote for another four years of unsustainable, unaccountable, marginalizing government expansion.
It’s a sign of the times in this country, and perhaps the shape of things to come, that I must cast my lot with a doomed third-party candidate in order to vote for genuine reform. But until one of the major parties represents a future in which our communities are no longer powerless—and until those same communities begin to value local and state politics, upon which they have real influence, over federal popularity contests—this is my state of affairs.
I care very deeply about my right to vote for the judges, the representatives, and the state officials who will govern me. But as long as Alabama is a lock for a presidential candidate from one of the two major parties, I will continue to vote my conscience. And for now at least, that means I can’t bring myself to play it as it lies.