@Smokin Joe
Well,bubba,I ain't the one that voted for Santa.
All due respect Joe, (and that is great) it seems to me that it is you who do not seem to be willing to grant that the transcendent reality is that voting is at it's core and central nature not rightly an exercise in manifesting moral conscience.
Voting is rather intended to be primarily an exercise in strategic placement of power.
What the anti-Trump vote faction does in virtually all of these justifications posthaste, is employ a fairly common debate/trial law strategery (sic) which is to enlarge a very simple issue until it encompasses room for the insertion of a complex rationalization.
The rationalization is designed to satisfy an emotional need. In trail law, it is to satisfy the need for the jury to feel good about accepting a point and in debate or discussion (whether internal or conversational) to feel good about promoting an opinion. In this case it is making one's self feel better posthaste about doing something that part of the principle's mind and heart knows may not have been entirely justifiable from a moral perspective.
The fact is that we instinctively associate anything that we do which makes us feel better as being morally valid. It's right because it "clicks" emotionally when we do it. The more intense the positive feeling the more we tend to feel that the action was morally correct.
The objective test of moral validity is really not how great something makes us feel, (The German SS probably felt just great about forcing innocent people into gas chambers) but in whether a consistent rational thesis can be elucidated which supports an action. So far, though there have been some noble efforts by many of our fine GOPBR posters in that direction, I have not personally read anything that even comes close to success.
The naked, ugly truth of this is clear because everyone who talks about why they voted FOR Trump also talk mostly about the effect their vote had on the real external world (effects), while everyone who justifies their vote against Trump(!) talk about their feelings (internal affects) or at best, strenuously hypothetical, speculative, conjecture-based effects which may or may not be manifest.
Poetry, literature, dance, music and painting are about celebrating feelings. Voting is about warfare and achieving victory.
I do not think less of people for voting against Trump and I don't really know of a consistent moral argument which supports that attitude - those who voted against Trump had a moral and legal right to do that. What I take exception to is how some who voted against Trump try to pretend (especially to themselves) that their action had any major focus except making themselves feel better emotionally because clearly (at least to me and I think most other Trump supporters) it arguably did not.
The nature of the debate which has ensued about this election centers around that simple fact. Either the vote against Trump had significance other than how it made the people who did it feel or it did not. It seems to me that no amount of argument pro or con to that position will ever be effective because the judgment of whether or not something has "significance" has been enlarged into philosophical debates, which by definition have no conclusive, absolute answers.
So I prefer to leave it at the fact that I still respect people who voted against Trump, though many of these same people say that they do not respect me and those like me who did vote for him. The reason I respect people who voted against Trump is the same reason I respect some people who voted for Hill-O-Lies (or some other leftist swine). My respect for them has to do with the totality of their existence as U.S. citizens or permanent residents. I do not define people solely by their political perspective but by the larger effects of their overt behavior (what they do when they are not voting, which consists of about 99.99999% of the rest of their lives).
