On Holding My Nose and Voting for Trump

In the last election, my vote was -- and could realistically only be -- symbolic. I lived in deep blue Maryland and cast the following protest vote: straight Republican except for President, from which I abstained.

My vote matters a great deal more this time around, since I live in Florida, where both parties are competitive. In fact, I cast it in early voting last week in case illness kept me at home. It was for Trump and Republicans across the board this time. I am no fan of the President, as any search of my blog can demonstrate; the best I can say is that his heart is arguably in the right place on many issues.

Indeed, the title of a recent piece by Mark da Cunha in Capitalism Magazine suggests a better characterization of how I voted: I voted against the Democrats.

I did this for two major reasons: First, if media polling has been anywhere close to accurate, we are in dire danger of the Democrats controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress.

This prospect would be alarming enough without the pandemic or the anger about Amy Barrett's confirmation to the Supreme Court, and for at least three reasons, any of which would ordinarily make a Presidential ticket all but unacceptable on its own:

I, too, wish people voted more thoughtfully, but doing this is not possible. (Image by Jose M., via Unsplash, license.)

1. Biden has voiced support for a ban on fracking, which has helped America achieve energy independence. He is also sympathetic to the Green New Deal, which his running mate and likely successor co-sponsored with Bernie Sanders.
2. Both members of the Democratic ticket support nationalizing the horrendous, job-killing AB-5 contracting ban that California's one-party state has passed and will not entertain repealing, despite its vast unpopularity and despite that state's very high pandemic unemployment rate. And again, Kamala Harris has co-sponsored a national version of this law -- which also endangers the franchising business model -- with Bernie Sanders.
3. Biden plans to further the march towards fully socialized medicine that he started when he helped pass ObamaCare.

And since the pandemic started, you can add severely weakening law enforcement and the threat of a national coronavirus "lockdown" to the mix.

But that's not all. The confirmation of Amy Barrett to the Supreme Court has given the obviously power-hungry Democrats an excuse to consider "packing" the Supreme Court, making it little better than a rubber stamp for the Democrats and admitting the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico into the union for the obvious purpose of adding four perpetually Democratic seats to the Senate.

If any one of the above reasons would make the Democrats unacceptable, so would any combination or all, and that's without the party openly discussing how to make one-party rule permanent.

And this leads to my essential reason for voting the way I have, and advising others to do the same. It includes the concern, voiced so well by da Cunha that:

[T]he Democrats will sweep everything, and the academics in American Universities and their rioting offspring in the streets will determine policy.

On a deeper level, I see the political situation as similar to the way it was in 2012, which Leonard Peikoff summarized as the "non-entity," pragmatist Romney vs. the "anti-entity," nihilist Obama. In my words, I see in Donald Trump someone I can't trust. But in Biden/Harris I see someone I do trust: to enact policies -- especially on energy and effectively restructuring the federal government -- that, if they aren't intended to pose an existential threat to our republic, they might as well be.

I do not deny that Donald Trump has been an immediate-term disaster as President, especially in terms of his mishandling of the pandemic. And the religious right indeed poses a great long-term threat to the country.

But I regard the Democrats -- as we can see in miniature in California and in preview in the protracted so-called "lockdowns" of Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo -- as such a dire immediate threat that I like America's odds better with the current President in charge for four more years, as exhausting as he is, and as difficult as his influence on the Republican Party will make the future fight for liberty.

-- CAV