As some of you may have gathered, I don't really spend much time posting here any longer. However, I noticed Don's essay thread here when he posted it and it has caught my attention as the discussion has progressed. I want to let Don know how much I appreciate this thread, and his willingness to lay out his personal path and the reasoning that he used.
I will share some of my thoughts on the overall topic. But be forewarned, I am not an "argument addict" by nature, and I really don't have a lot of time to post on a message forum, so I most likely will not respond to any replies to this post. I will simply share my opinions, I am sure that not many will agree. So be it.
I am sure that you've all heard an expression along these lines before: "you can't argue someone out of a proposition that they didn't arrive at using reason and logic." In my view, Don has been attempting to "argue" and reason with people that are in a deep state of denial. For if you can not accept the clear fact: if Trump is not elected, then Hillary will be sworn in on January 20, 2017, then you won't be accepting much beyond that.
A bit more about that, for members here.
Some may argue that it is likely that almost half of the eligible population won't bother voting, so my one vote doesn't matter. While there is some truth to that, the eligible population of voters are NOT the people that are participating in BR (or any other right of center forums). Discounting the wide variations in philosophy and perspective, by and large the members of BR are people from the right of center population. Not all are GOP members, but they are certainly not members of the left of center population. Therefore, you are the people that the GOP candidate (whatever you may think of our recent candidates, is neither here nor there) typically and traditionally draws upon for a voter base. Because of this clear truth, it logically follows that: BR members that refuse to support and vote for Trump in the general election are, without dispute, supporting Clinton's electoral victory. Of course, this varies by state, it is more relevant to people living in some states than others. But for many of you, like it or not, your support (and potential vote) for Trump is all that is standing in the gap to prevent 0baa's 3rd and likely 4th term. Certainly not the hand that you would prefer, but in fact, the hand that you've been dealt.
Look, I am sure that many of you are in the same camp as I am (and many others across the country): I voted for McCain in 2008 in an attempt to stop 0baa, I voted for Romney in 2012 in an attempt to stop 0baa. Neither of them was my first choice during the primaries. It is just what sensible, mature people do, when they wish to attempt to stop an evil force. And now in 2016, sensible, mature people will vote for Trump in an attempt to stop HRC; regardless of who was her/his first choice during the primaries. There it is, full stop.
All of this talk of being "above it all" with a "clear conscience" or wasting a vote on a 3rd party candidate with zero hope of winning one EV, is just simply hogwash. And a lot of it is hogwash with all sorts of bizarre religiosity layered over it.
Speaking for myself as an evangelical Christian since 1989, I have a much more practical, and I believe to be more sound view of the whole "morality and my vote" issue. Here's what I believe, you may disagree:
- God wants me to be a good steward, and that includes stewardship of my role in the manmade government under which I reside.
- Part of that stewardship involves making the effort (at a minimum) to be registered to vote, and to cast a vote.
- God also always wants me to be a good steward of the intelligence and ability to reason that he chose to gift me at birth, and help me develop along the way.
- Therefore, God wants me to vote for the best possible candidate that is available to me in this very critical election.
That's the way I see, and have for quite some time. It is simple, it is not fancy, but I believe that it is based on Biblical truth. (Also included in this, but not stated, is my belief that God doesn't want me to squander my vote (poor stewardship) because I am upset and/or angry that the candidate(s) that I preferred are no longer in the running.)
And taking that a bit further, I do not believe that my vote for a candidate chains me to a running train of responsibility for any future actions of that candidate. As an example, I voted for GWB twice. I was very disappointed (to put it mildly) with some of his actions during those 2 terms (that I helped him achieve). But I have never felt "guilty" or under God's judgment for those votes. I simply used the same model that I sketched above, GWB was the best possible choice for me (and what I perceived to be my country's best interests) at the time. Simple.
And as Don has pointed out so many times, Trump is the "known, unknown" and HRC is the "known, known." And I am convinced that the vast majority of the people arguing that HRC is, or is potentially, worse than Trump, know that that simply isn't true (but it is a good excuse!). Unless they have been living under a rock somewhere, they KNOW how evil HRC is, and has been, for many decades. (Truth be told, there are probably few living humans as evil as HRC; we should count our blessings!)
And since I bothered to check in today, let me share a bit of my thinking about Trump's candidacy, in general terms.
Something that I believe causes a great deal of the anguish (and hatred) for Trump is also pretty simple. I've tried to bring it out in a few threads here before I left. Let me try to summarize it briefly now.
I will start with a few assumptions:
1. Trump loves America. (Now, he may also have an inordinate (or imprudent) amount of love for self and material things, but I don't believe that that overshadows his love of country.)
2. Trump is a smart man (even though he can not speak publicly in the manner with which most of us expect an intelligent man to speak).
3. He wants to WIN the general election.
Now, because he wants to actually WIN the general election, he had to craft a strategy to reach that goal. Because he is a smart man, he looked back at the prior elections and saw how easily the Democrats marginalized and destroyed the Republican nominee (even in the two GWB elections that he won). To anyone also looking at this recent history, it is pretty apparent how they accomplish that. Trump decided that he would NOT allow himself to be marginalized in the same way, because he wants to WIN.
He would not allow them to use hot-button social issues to defeat him before he had a chance to mount his challenge. He knew that it was likely that HRC would be the Democrat candidate, he knew that issues akin to the "war on women" would be prominent in the attack. He also knew that to win a general election in 2016 America, one must gather in a lot of the independents or "moderates" to your side (and that harsh partisan rhetoric that tickles the ears of the hardliners does nothing for that). And he also knew that there was a great deal of untapped votes (almost one half of the eligible electorate) that were available, with the right message, pushing the right buttons.
So on this basis, he crafted his message and his campaign. Because of this, it was obvious that he would not be speaking the same language that many traditional "conservatives" were attracted to hearing, especially social conservatives. I first noticed this back in July of 2015. The PP issue was in the news and Trump had recently entered the race. I listened carefully as he spoke about the issue. Was he elegant with his words? No, he never is. Did he "play to the base" and take on a 'fire and brimstone' approach? No. What he did was two-fold:
1. He spoke out against abortion. He stated quite clearly that he does not support abortion (beyond the two exceptions). He made it clear that he would NOT support funding PP to perform abortions.
2. He disarmed the left from using their typical talking points against him by saying that he believes in supporting "women's health" issues (using their language). That women's health issues were very important to him, and he would be a strong supporter of women's health issues. (Now where I believe that he went too far, is when he also said that "PP does many good things for women's health." That was a unnecessary stretch, IMO.)
At that point in time I realized what he was doing. I realized that he would be running an unorthodox campaign in an attempt to disarm the typical weapons that are deployed against a Republican presidential candidate. If you look back over the past year, you can see that he had collected a set of these (and other) issues and opinions on them, that he would unleash throughout the primaries and general election campaign. In fact, you can see clearly that he had been running a general election campaign simultaneously throughout the primaries. Another recent example of him taking an unorthodox approach for the Republican candidate is him speaking about "protecting the rights of the LGBQT community." Now, he didn't say that he would expand their rights, or create special rights, just protect their rights as citizens. Sure, he got a lot of backlash from the traditional conservative right for that. But.... he again disarmed his opponents. It will be much harder for them to slap the "he hates gays!" label on him, and make it stick.
Now I know that there are a lot of techniques and tactics that he used in the primaries to dispatch with his competitors that have left a lot of sore feelings and ill will. Do I personally approve of them all? No. Could I have done a better job? I doubt it. Because, for all of our complaints about some of his tactics, the simple fact remains that in order to WIN the general election, one has to first become a candidate in the general election. We have all acknowledged that politics is a "dirty business" for many years. Why would we expect anything different in 2015-16?
Does any of this change the fact that Trump is indeed a flawed candidate that often does a horrendous job at speaking? No.
But, at this point in the game, he remains the only one that has a chance to stop HRC. Simple. Reality.
Because no matter what high principles many clamor for day and night, unless you can WIN the general election, you will NEVER have a chance to support them as the Chief Executive and Commander in Chief.
It still remains a leap of faith to believe that Trump will stay true to his campaign policy statements. There are no guarantees in life. And perhaps it is even more of a gamble to place that faith in a man that has no depth of experience or even understanding of Constitutional governance. But again, it comes back to one of Don's main points: we KNOW what HRC will do.
Sorry for the long rant, I hope that it was at least entertaining for you, if you bothered to read this far!
