I’ve always hated this idea that your vote is “sacred” and that you should “vote your conscience.”
Nonsense. It’s only ever been transactional and strategic. Nobody cares about your lofty ideals; only 1 of 2 candidates will be elected, and abstaining is also making a choice. Sitting out an election is your right—but there’s nothing valorous about not being able to make up your mind in a simple binary.
In most elections the only options are bad and worse. When worse is much worse, writing in your ideal candidate is especially foolish. Nobody will get your point and you make it more likely that worse gets elected.
Public life would be better if fewer people thought about politics and elections as battles between good and evil and more people thought in terms of making incremental improvements by choosing less-bad alternatives. This is unlikely to happen unless the stakes are lowered by reducing the size and power of government.
Very true. As Ackman said, ‘Unlike a marriage or a business partnership where there are effectively unlimited alternatives, in this election, we have only two viable choices.’
And this is true of most American elections.
David beat me to the Ackman’s quote.
If you want to exercise the full-range of your values in politics then get involved either early in the electoral process when the nominees are selected, say by getting a favored candidate int eh race to begin with, or by developing a pressure/lobbying group.
By the time, you get to the actual election, in the way our winner-take-all politics elections happen, it’s either one or the other. (Note in proportional electoral systems where you have many more and therefore smaller parties, the bargaining takes place after the election.)
That’s why I find the sincere Never Trumpers disheartening (as opposed to grifters like Bill Kristol). I can understand their reasons for not liking Trump, but liking is different than supporting. You take your shot with someone different in the primary and then you make the least-worse alternative.
However I think what they do is think strategically in that a Trump loss ultimately benefits them because it discredits his populism and allows a return of their own favorite brand of conservatism. See The National Review.