The early voting ballots for Nevada finally came in the mail this week.
Thank goodness. Now we can finally start getting this over with.
In my previous ballot analysis for 2016, I’d gone over reasons why I ended up voting for Gary Johnson for President but Democrats for most of the other races. In this election I’m just going to go ahead and vote Democrat for all the races. Even though Libertarians are actually in some of them. This is a tough decision.
I have already stated that in the short term it may be necessary to vote in Democrats strictly to tip the balance back, but in the long term that won’t be enough. I had also said during the 2016 elections that the main goal in voting third-party is not so much to make Democrats lose as to make the Republican candidate come in third. In Electoral College terms, if you’re going to be a “spoiler” then you want to aim to spoiling the greater of two evils, whichever you perceive that to be. Liberals will never forgive Libertarians who voted for Gary Johnson, since third-party votes in 2016 were enough to swing the election in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and even conservative North Carolina. By the same token, if the Electoral College means that the president is elected on a state-by-state basis, I could only vote for president with regard for how my state would go rather than the national vote total, and as it turned out, the number of people in Nevada who voted for Johnson was enough to keep Donald Trump from getting that state, and it was also enough to keep him from getting Colorado, New Mexico and even Minnesota. This is why I refuse to apologize for voting Johnson in the first place. But at the same time, I did vote nearly all Democrats down ballot in 2016, because I did know that the vote in those cases had a direct effect on the result that it didn’t have in the Electoral College system, and I knew that the margins were close enough to matter. I can still support going Libertarian in the current circumstances if the result for a non-presidential election will end up causing the Republican to come in third. According to the most recent polls in FiveThirtyEight, that may be the case in New Mexico, but then Gary Johnson has name recognition in his home state. I don’t know how things play elsewhere, but as a rule, the polls are too close to let Republicans have a chance.
What it really comes down to is that the Republican Party needs to die.
What we have seen in the last few months, especially with Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, simply demonstrates why “conservatism” is a barren label, not just because the nominal conservative party once defined by Christian traditionalism, “economic libertarianism” and muscular patriotism is willing to twist itself to please a womanizing tariff addict and Putin bitch, but because when the premises of modern government have more to do with FDR and LBJ than Jefferson and Hamilton, the real conservatives are the mainstream liberals trying to preserve that system.
In her dissent to Janus, Elena Kagan actually said that the court were “black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.” Now, I remember when that was the conservative position on the Supreme Court. Before they were in charge, of course.
But still, here we are. And with the Supreme Court back in focus, it actually starts to clear up why Trump has such cultish loyalty among Republicans, and why even the so-called “NeverTrump” Republicans are not really willing to stick their necks out against him. It isn’t cowardice. It’s priorities. Some of this is because there are “conservatives” who really don’t have a sense of morality. But at core, the fact is that we are dealing with two totally different views on what constitutes morality.
Knowing that, how does a liberal expect to persuade a conservative to vote Democrat this year?
Well, that’s the thing, I’m not sure any liberals have asked conservatives face-to-face to switch allegiance. But let me imagine if a “NeverTrump” conservative came up to one.
Conservative: Why should I vote for Democrats in November?
Liberal: To put a check on Donald Trump.
Conservative: Let me ask: Do you think that life begins at conception and that therefore abortion is always murder?
Liberal: NO.
Conservative: Do you think the Second Amendment should be defended?
Liberal: Not really.
Conservative: Do you think the government should force every citizen to pay for private medical insurance that they may not need or want?
Liberal: If that’s what it takes to get everyone insured.
Conservative: Then why should I vote to strengthen your party at my party’s expense? What do we have in common?
Liberal: We both want to stop Trump.
Conservative: Yeah, I don’t like Trump much at all. But from what I’ve seen, he’s more willing to deal with me than you are.
Of course, that is my imagination. When one position is that abortion is always murder, there is no negotiation or “meeting halfway.” But otherwise, it used to be possible for politicians to negotiate in the abstract and on practical levels. Now negotiation is entirely internal.
There seems to be a Devil’s bargain (almost literally) on the part of right-wingers with the current Administration, where they go along with its various abuses in exchange for the pro-business policies (and pro-business judges) they want. Of course these are the same people who accurately point out that Democrats ignored the creeping powers of government and the executive branch as long as the executive promoted the “progressive” policies that they wanted. Right-wingers point out that the same people tagging “metoo” now were praising Harvey Weinstein for contributing to Democrats in 2016. And the Right were pointing out in 1998 that Democrats would defend the indefensible just for the sake of keeping Bill Clinton in power. Which is why they ought to know better. The fact that they don’t (or act like they don’t) is a big part of the problem.
And it needs to be stressed that this goes beyond Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama’s last Supreme Court pick before the 2016 Republican presidential nomination was confirmed. The Affordable Care Act got absolutely no Republican votes. It would be one thing for Republicans to be obstructionist if Republicans had something better to replace Democratic “progressive” politics with, but as we saw when they got the majority, obstruction is all they have, and it was all they could do to pass the tax cut that they did, promising that it would be paid for by growth, and blanking out the point that growth depends on the average consumer having more money, which isn’t going to happen when most of the monetary gains go to the upper percentile and the average guy with a paycheck gets maybe $20 extra.
That in itself betrays the bad-faith premise of the Republican Party, because they wouldn’t have to resort to force and deception if their programs actually benefited the majority. Were that the case, they would be trying to get more voters, rather than appealing only to the most hard-core Republicans mostly on cultural grievances. In the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan won 49 of 50 states. In 2016, Donald Trump won Democratic “firewall” states only by a few thousand votes. This is the difference between actually having a popular mandate and running only on hate.
Put another way, if the only way you can get pro-business or culturally conservative policy is to thwart the majority in a democratic republic, you’ve already lost. Rather than trying to convert more people to your side, like Reagan did or even George W. Bush sometimes did, modern Republicans, especially since Obama, are only trying to force things through their own clique because that’s all they have and they won’t try for anything better.
That’s why Jeff Flake will hem and haw about principles and “conscience” and vote with Republicans anyway. That’s why “pro-choice” Susan Collins made a big production about weighing her options on Brett Kavanaugh and voted for him anyway, knowing that he will vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, except maybe if she shares the suspicion of cynical conservatives that Kavanaugh will vote to uphold Roe precisely because his reputation would cause too much blowback if he did otherwise. Again, on strictly pragmatic terms this may make sense. Why would you go against Republicans if the alternative is to let Democrats win?
Well, what doth it profit a man to gain the world yet lose his own soul?
Over the last two weeks, as the nauseating details of Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance are revealed, it becomes more clear that the government of Saudi Arabia assassinated a dissident with the approval of the Trump Administration. This only highlights atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen and elsewhere that were allowed to occur even before Trump got in office. Now, for all the Republicans protesting Saudi actions, what makes anybody think that a Republican Congress will actually call Trump to account on this?
And how much longer will Republicans be able to keep up the stonewalling, and what will the results be for their brand when, NOT if, they lose the majority? At this point, the only way to stop that is to counter changing demographics with attempts to demoralize the electorate, or actually grow the government for the specific purpose of preventing people from voting, or using existing agencies to stop people from getting to the polls.
So much for freedom and small government.
This is what it comes down to for me. If right-wingers are afraid of what the Left will do with power, or “conscientious” conservatives are leery of supporting Trump (yet tacitly do so anyway) they should consider that not only does the Party of Trump magnify all the vices and corruption of the Democrats, they do so with no redeeming factors. Such benefits that Republicans create not only accrue to the already well-heeled, even those people are endangered by Trump’s erratic policies on trade, which will only be exacerbated if he fumbles foreign policy. And the only way the current state of affairs to continue is for Republicans to pursue policies that are not only counter-majoritarian but anti-majoritarian. And while counter-majoritarian policies can often protect freedom, deliberately acting against the majority in all cases makes it that much less possible to correct an erroneous course, and endangers the freedom that libertarians and conservatives seek to preserve.
And in the long run, if Democrats do once again become dominant, it will be because Republicans present themselves as the guardians of traditional American government and capitalism, but their actions undermine both. If “free market” capitalism means using government force to gin the rules to benefit the already rich and powerful while killing upward mobility, that does more to promote socialism than anything the timid Democratic establishment is doing. If Republicans destroy the comity, traditions and rules of Congress, they will have no protections when Democrats have the upper hand. They by their actions are creating the very situation they claim to fear. As I keep saying, the worst case scenario is that the Party of Trump really will turn America into a one-party state – that one party being the Democrats.
If one wants to preserve freedom, there are two choices. You can do what Republicans did in the early 60s with Goldwater, Reagan and Buckley and build up an intellectual tradition that can sustain itself and grow from a minority (and anybody who thinks that the political environment is hostile to the Right now doesn’t know much about the 60s). Or you can focus on a demographic that is only motivated by grievance and try to enforce a situation where only their votes matter. The Republican party made its choice after 2012 when they rejected the “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s campaign telling them to acknowledge women and the non-white demographics of America and build common ground to grow the party. That choice is becoming increasingly untenable. I went Libertarian because for one thing, it has no choice but to appeal beyond its current confines if it wants to go anywhere, and again, the Right has actually gone through worse. However, the Republic as a whole has not. I need to support a party that actually can promote an alternative to “progressive” Democrat thinking. The Libertarians can still do this. The Republicans are far too stained for that. And ultimately they are the short-term reason that the government is a threat to freedom now.
I am not terribly happy about only voting for Democrats, but I am becoming convinced that if Republicans stay in charge, I may not get to vote for anyone besides the government party again.
Next time, I want to go over the various Nevada ballot initiatives for 2018.