Tactics are principles: on ‘voting your conscience’

Every four years, the same conversation repeats itself: whether to vote tactically, for the ‘lesser evil,’ for the person who doesn’t represent your values but can at least be a bulwark against someone even worse. You saw this at the RNC, with Ted Cruz pointedly saying ‘vote your conscience,’ rather than endorsing Trump. You see it on the left, with a lot of speculation about Jill Stein and the Green Party.

But a missing element from many of these conversations is a precise specification of what it actually means to ‘vote your conscience’ and why it is accepted that tactics and conscience are in contradiction. This is a serious lacuna, and one with real consequences for the way in which we think about politics.

To illustrate the point, let me start by saying that I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton. Sure, I disagree with her on a fair number of policy questions, and am far closer to the Green Party’s platform. But platforms aren’t the only representation of ‘values.’

Underneath the policy choices are a broader set of principles that are at least equally important. For me, those include values like: respect, empathy, nuance, commitment, self-sacrifice, love, compassion, intelligence, judgment.

Does Hillary Clinton perfectly align with my values on all these fronts? Of course not. But Jill Stein sure doesn’t either.

Stein’s tendency to regard monumental differences as rounding errors might make her a decent theoretical physicist, but suggests a kind of willful ignorance to facts that would be catastrophic in a president. Her inability to grasp the *reasons* for third party marginalization suggests a total lack of familiarity with the text and history of the US Constitution. And her insistence that the consequences of all actions (a quixotic third party campaign, the anti-vax movement, etc.) must be sublimated beneath an all-encompassing critique of capital suggests a mind uninterested in nuance, and untethered from a complicated world where few choices are purely good or purely evil.

In fact (on these points at least), I might go so far as to say that there’s barely a ‘dime’s worth of difference’ between her and Trump.

Others may disagree with this characterization, and that’s fine. You may regard Stein’s tactical assessment as reasonable, or regard Clinton’s political commitments as so extreme as to push her beyond the pale. But these are not ‘principles’ in some abstract, hermetically-sealed sense. They are differing judgments about the balance between motive and consequence, differing assessments about how to negotiate with evil.

In a universe defined by entropy, every choice exposes us to loss. We build pockets of stability, systems to sustain us. We engage our creative spirits to construct liveable worlds to share with one another. But it’s always against a backdrop of chaos. There are no decisions without risk, no acts so pure that they inflict no pain, no conscience that is fully clean. There is only the question of how we learn to live with the evil that we produce, how we try to minimize it, what meaning we can give to the sacrifices we are forced to undertake.

This is not a flaw of our electoral system; it’s a feature of the human condition.

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