IN THE PRECINCTS OF DESPITE: So, the election. As I said below, I don’t expect to persuade anyone, for a lot of reasons: my own negativity and ambivalence, my lack of importance!, the fact that it’s already 10/28–and one big thing, which is that this campaign has been mostly waged in the subjunctive tense. Challengers generally have to do that, relying on contrary-to-fact clauses: If our guy had been in charge, we wouldn’t be in this mess! But Bush’s supporters are relying heavily on the subjunctive too: If Saddam Hussein had remained in power… if the sanctions had been ended… if Kerry had been president in 2001… and none of this, of course, is verifiable.

And the candidates have been diligently turning themselves into blank projection screens onto which various groups of voters can play out their fantasies: If you think the US rushed into war without securing necessary alliances, Kerry is all about Our European Friends. If you fear a French or German veto on American foreign policy, Kerry is all about America First. Voters end up relying on instinct, speculation, templates borrowed from previous wars (WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam…), and difficult-to-articulate judgments about trust.

So, some scattered thoughts, in an attempt to at least gesture toward the reasons why, if I were registered to vote, I would vote for (growl) Bush–the man who puts the “W” in “WTF?!”

First: Why am I not registered? 1. For a long time I was not convinced that I could vote for either major-party candidate without implicating myself in serious sin.

2. I live in DC. I know where my electoral votes are going. I hadn’t thought about the idea that it would be best to vote anyway due to the post-2000 importance of the popular vote; by the time Kaus laid out that case, the registration deadline had passed.

3. I’m really lazy.

Second: problems with Bush. I’m not even going to bother with complaints about spending, or about particular programs. You can do that yourself. My two main reasons not to vote for Bush (which would mean voting third-party or not at all; there is no way I would vote for Kerry, the altar boy of the abortion lobby) are simply jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Just reasons for war, and just conduct within war.

Jus ad bellum: I supported the war in Iraq. I couldn’t tell you whether, in the long run, it will turn out to be a disaster or a damaged but important success. I do know that some of the reasons I supported the war have vanished into air: The sanctions, which helped destroy the Iraqi middle class, also seem to have worked as far as leading Hussein to destroy most of his major weaponry. Jim Henley’s constant reminder that war is a government program with bombs, and subject to the incompetence and bureaucratic information failure that prompts libertarian skepticism of government bureaucracy in general, seems to me to have proven accurate. The flight of Iraqi Christians strikes me as a terrible sign for the country’s future. It frightens me to hear people defending the administration on the matter of missing weapons materials by saying that the materials were likely shipped to Syria in the days before the war began–which is exactly what anti-war libertarians like Gene Healy warned would happen.

Some of the reasons for war still stand, of course, but they are all subjunctive reasons: the prospect of sanctions ending with Hussein still in power and able to restart his weapons programs; the prospect of Iraq in chaos, or ruled by the Bat-$#@! Crazy Sons of Saddam, after Hussein’s death; the prospect of yet more decades of lacerating sanctions and simmering war in the no-fly zones. (Yes, I think there would have been disastrous consequences to either continuing or ending the sanctions, with the former only barely preferable.)

I do think Iraq can become, in time, a more-or-less liberal more-or-less democracy, and that that transformation would be hugely important for both Iraqis and us. I do think Bush is more committed to that future than Kerry (solely because Kerry is IMO not committed to anything at all–more on this below) but I am, to put it mildly, not convinced that the Bush team has the ability to promote that future. I do think more good happens in Iraq than we see in the papers. But I don’t know how much entrepreneurial growth, how many voters, how much new and rebuilt infrastructure, makes up for all the bodies, in the minds of actual Iraqis.

Jus in bello: The two obvious words here are “Abu Ghraib.” I totally agree with those who point out that this wasn’t solely a matter of isolated depravity, but rather, a breakdown of responsibility that made depravity much more likely and much harder to stop. I realize that this war has been conducted at a far higher jus in bello standard than almost any other one I can think of–higher than WWII (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among other interesting moments), higher than the Cold War (just ask the nuns of Central America). But “Um, we created the conditions that made torture more likely, then verbally condemned it when it was revealed, then doled out a few punishments and hoped you’d forget” is pretty obviously not good enough. Moreover, any violations of right conduct in war become, implicitly, jus ad bellum failures as well: We know that war makes madness, so those who support “wars of choice” bear some responsibility for that madness even if we try to minimize it. (And yeah, that’s directed at me, too.)

So–Kerry, a.k.a. “You’re really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppie!”

There is no “there” there. I have exactly no idea what guides Kerry’s thinking on anything at all–unless “what I need to say to placate the necessary voters and interest groups” counts as a guide to thought. He is without ideas: without what Jonathan Rauch, in a good column with which I agree about 65%, called a “road.” This makes him Silly Putty in the hands of the Democratic interest groups; which, in turn, makes him unlikely to ever support a single program or policy I would approve. On the most important domestic issues, abortion and the courts (emphasis added!), he and I are of course at odds. On the most important foreign-policy issues he is a mass of contradiction, pandering, and attack without a sense of what position he’s actually defending.

Bush would have to do something fairly spectacular to get me to vote for Kerry. I’m not going to pretend that I was ever a “swing voter” in that sense. And, as I said, I can’t vote in this election anyway. But I know a lot of Catholics, and a lot of conservatives, are considering voting third-party or sitting this one out. And I hope they won’t. I don’t think Bush’s foreign-policy failures are worth a Kerry presidency. I know this is unlikely to persuade; so I will just go back to what I have been doing, which is praying, writing fiction, volunteering, and trying to bring some kind of order and hope to my life and the lives of the people I can touch.