Conversation with a Friend Who Supports Hillary

As is, I hope, clear by now I support the legitimacy of voting for Hillary to stop Trump, while at the same time noting that one does not have to vote for her if your conscience will not allow you to and while adding that if you are in a position (as I am) of being in state which will certainly vote for her, you can (as I will do) cast your vote for a third party in protest of both awful candidates.

Most of the hate mail I get comes from Trump supporters telling me I blaspheme God yadda yadda for taking seriously Ratzinger’s instruction on proportional reasoning and God is going to judge me and so forth.  But now and then I also hear from Hillary supporters who likewise chew me out for “throwing my vote away” by not casting it for Hillary.  To wit, my friend Andy (who I really like, partly because we can have really interesting fights and still stay friends).  His response my little plug for the American Solidarity Party was:

Another vanity option for the gullible voter.

Vote Dem or the Country Gets it!

Oh Rhett, I just can’t get my lovely hands dirty…

Oh, I’d get ’em dirty if I had to. But I don’t have to. Washington will go for Clinton without my help. So I choose to spend my vote in a different way. But as I say, it’s the stone in the stone soup of civic involvement. I get a lot more done through my writing than through my vote.

I get a lot more done through other things as well. Not sure what your point is. It takes no more effort to make a vote count than to throw it away.

It is not throwing my vote away to support something I agree with. It is emphatically throwing my vote away to vote against my conscience.

It’s just a waste. It’s political onanism.

I think it comes down to the fact that you and I have entirely different philosophies about the meaning and purpose of a vote. I primarily look at voting in national elections in terms of how my vote changes me, not the outcome of the election. I think the disastrous history of the prolife movement is abundant illustration of what happens when a voter keeps denying his conscience for the sake of winning power.

Votes don’t change you. Geez, c’mon! The purpose of voting is to elect candidates so that they can represent us in office. People literally *die* for this right around the world, and our own ancestors did as well. This almost dainty-like aversion to a minimal involvement in civic life is not a virtue.

Of course they do. Over 30 years, rationalizing votes for the GOP has dramatically changed the prolife movement from people who wanted to stop the assault on human life into a reliable block of voters who will defend a creature like Donald Trump for the sake of “not throwing away my vote”.

Votes are like the widow’s mite. It had no effect on the Judean economy or the Roman empire. But it had a huge effect on the Widow.

Now you’re shifting the argument. If votes don’t matter, then they don’t matter; they change neither outcomes nor yourself. You can’t have it both ways. And I think a more apt parable is the one where the guy threw away his talents by burying them.

The widow’s mite has nothing to do with voting. If anything, it proves the opposite of what your point is. She gave her all for something she believed in. You’re giving…a lot less.

Failure to vote Dem is giving a lot less? Srsly?

It’s not voting that has polluted the pro-life movement. It’s allowing the GOP to drag the pro-life movement out to sea instead of bringing the GOP back to shore.

And that has been achieved through the steady application of “Vote GOP or the baby gets it”. Now the “prolife movement ” is urgently jettisoning the last ounces of its credibility in the effort to rally the vote for this crazy swine. Because it mustn’t throw away its vote.

Everything depends on what you mean by “matters”. Your definition of a vote that matters is very different than mine.

It’s not “my definition.” It’s what it is.

No. It’s your definition. My vote matters to me deeply. That’s why I bother casting it at all.

“Vote” means a formal indication a choice of a candidate or a course of action. You can wish it meant something else, you can believe it means whatever, but it is what it is.

Correct. I would like to indicate my choice of the American Solidarity Party platform as my preferred course of action. That’s why I vote and that is why it is not “throwing away my vote” to do so.

Just don’t think you’re acting virtuous in throwing your vote away. You have personally benefitted from Obama’s time in office, yet you act as if voting in your own interest is somehow beneath you. Honestly, you benefit from people who enter the fray and get our hands dirty, but you don’t lift a finger. That ain’t a virtue.

I’m not throwing my vote away. I am, in *your* words, indicating “a choice of a candidate or a course of action.” I prefer the ASP course of action over that of both Clinton and Trump. The fact that most others do not does not mean I’m throwing my vote away. It means that I know what I want. If I were forced to do so, I would constrain the meaning of my vote to “Never Trump” and vote for Hillary in order to stop him. Since she will carry Washington without my help, I can expand the meaning of my vote, not mere to what I *don’t* want, but to what I *do* want. It is bizarre to me that you regard that as a waste.