Voting is one of the great privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. The vote represents the compact a country’s people hold with its government to follow the agreed upon constitutionally ordained mandates, laws, security, and strategic investments. It is the pat on the back for positive performance, the weedwacker for removing governmental congestion,troubled concepts and inadequate or corrupted leaders. The great arsenal of democracy is the ballot box, converting the performance chart into measurable, digestible time frames that allow an engaged citizenry to control their future.
The zenith of the American voting process is the vote for the Presidency. Every four years, the country puts its prospective leaders through an onerous process that vets each prospect’s capacity to articulate a vision, respond and modify to others’ criticisms, and engage and hold the attention of a majority of Americans who see the future as they do. Its an intense process, and it should work at a level of outcome worthy of the great democracy it serves.
Yet, for years, the process has appeared significantly out of sync with the voter, and has time and time again positioned candidates that seem incomplete or unworthy, and that leave the voter with a choice of selecting the lesser of two evils. Progressively, the Presidential vote has come to voting against someone we feel will be damaging to our future, rather for someone who positively represents our views and our vision. For the past thirty years, this has been particularly an unsavory process for the conservative or libertarian voter. The Republican Party, positioned to represent the world of the individual initiative and limited government, has put forth candidates who are further and further removed from this philosophical pact. It has demanded the conservative go into the booth, hold his or her nose, and vote against the other party rather than for the republican candidate, to protect a rapidly diminishing societal compact with those two pillars the party claims to be fundamental.
This year, the wheels have completely come off the wagon. Short of a radical change in events, the two party nominees will be Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Clown against the Criminal, and a huge segment of the Republican Party’s base are left with the impossible choice of voting for intolerable options, or abdicating their responsibility as the ground troops of democracy and staying out of the Presidential vote all together.
The Republican Party is wholly responsible for this approaching debacle. Every four years, the process of selecting candidates has leached out the more principled conservative candidates on the premise that a principled conservative could not possibly appeal to the greater population. The Voter got Bush instead of Kemp, Dole instead of Graham, Bush instead of Forbes, McCain instead of Romney, and Romney instead of Perry. Each time, the consensus candidate either significantly let down their conservative base of support once elected (in case of the Bushes), or got clobbered by the ideologically purer democratic alternative in the general election. On multiple occasions, the base got back of the floor and organized off year election victories and with the exception of 1994, had their elected legislators turn their back on the ideological struggle and give in to the statist Borg.
2016 was going to be different. This was to be the year in which the executive election ideology would match the legislative thrust, and the conservative voter could go into the booth and positively pull the lever for our version of an ideologically pure candidate. Perry, Jindal, Walker, Rubio, Cruz, Fiorina. All are gone or nearly so, and the man left standing is Donald Trump, the anti-ideologue whose base instincts would fit securely into the Democrat Party’s vision of leading society through correct beliefs rather than correct facts if he had determined to run under his life long party, rather than his recent epiphany that he must be a Republican. Certainly a surprise to his children, who didn’t even have time to change their party allegiance in order to vote in the “other” party’s primary in New York for their father.
Instead the party of individual initiative and limited government will be represented by the very candidate who has publicly declared these concepts an anathema to him. The result has been a sense of doom and withdrawal that are normally foreign to the conservative voter, usually the most committed and engaged supporter of the constitutional process. One can vote for Trump and pretend that what one believes doesn’t matter in governance, or stay out of the election and allow Clinton to be rewarded for a life of insolent behavior, statist, collective ideology, and lousy performance. Peggy Noonan in her Wall Street Journal editorial of April 28, 2016, refers to this sullen recognition of what she calls the Moment, when the lack of an out is expressed as a psychological wounding. The Republican Party,clumsily looking to expand its appeal rather than firm up its convictions, set up the primary process so that an outside demagogue could parley minority anger into a majority delegate position. The Party is now desperately attempting to imply the conservative voter must once again “hold their nose” and vote to prevent a supposed worse outcome, or risk the shuttering of the party.
The final defenders of the Ramparts are being labeled the NeverTrump clique and are being set up to either be a hypocrite to their principles, or permit a final closing of the door of a vision of a country once uniformly seen as a place of opportunity, self responsibility, and societally moral relations. Well, a stark future awaits, and unless something unexpected happens, it is not clear a way out of Peggy Noonan’s Moment can be formed out of the madness.
A difficult, tumultuous summer and fall looms.