I'm a non-voter precisely because I'm engaged with policy and culture

I will not make a binary choice between wealth redistribution, climate alarmism and militant identity politics on the one hand, and cowards, nuts and sycophants on the other

In my city and state, municipal elections are happening today.

From my time reporting on local government for a local media company, I’ve come to know a lot of the players in both parties in my own city and county. To a person, they’re thoughtful, smart folks with a concept of the common good that, while in some particulars differs from mine, is probably about as laudable as can be asked for in 2023. Whoever wins the council seats and the mayoral seat, we won’t be in bad hands, comparatively speaking.

Up the road 40 miles, in our state capital, which is one of America’s largest cities, the atmosphere is a bit more rancorous. That’s because, like all US cities with Democratic mayors, its crime rate is through the roof and citizens in neighborhoods from sketchy to upscale are fed up.

Still, there are so many layers of consideration underneath the question of who wins these offices that it’s not going to make an appreciable difference.

Let’s look at that capital city. The Republican mayoral challenger’s ads effectively frame the core issue of the election, and, in ads and interviews, the challenger strikes me as a decent guy who has some worthwhile proposals for turning things around.

But whether he wins or loses, the point being made in the ads supporting his opponent, the incumbent Democratic mayor, will be part of the public record, available for Democrats to bring up whenever it’s convenient. That point is the Republican’s support for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

This is the predicament I wrote about last week in a piece for The Freemen New-Letter’s Daily Saucer. It’s entitled “The Conflation Problem,” and I make this point:

[A certain kind of] enthusiasm has led a lamentable number of right-of-center figures to succumb to the temptation to see "the times" as calling for the core's situational tweaking. We've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine. 

This provides a ready-made heyday for the left to conflate these positions—and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another—with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources have made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.

The next step is for the left to oh-so-cordially invite conservatives to consider the question: "Don't you think this presents you with an opportunity to reassess this whole conservative enterprise you've been so solidly behind most of your adult life?”

I’d wager that it doesn’t. There are still so many voices—The Freemen News-letter, among them—as well as National Review and The Dispatch (and my Substack Precipice) that did not swallow the Kool-Aid and are still capable of extracting Trumpist sludge from immutable verities.

But impressionable ordinary Americans, particularly the younger ones coming out of an "educational" system that has left them woefully ungrounded in a comprehension of the West's unique blessings for humankind, are vulnerable to a low-taxes-and-traditional-marriage-equals-election-denialism formulation as they prepare for the coming election cycle.

If he wins, the Republican will have to deal with being thus tainted.

Now, let’s take a look at my own, smaller city. The lay of the land is nearly the opposite of that to the north. A Republican is sure to win the mayoralty, and the council makeup will be a party-affiliation mix. But they’re all interchangeable parts in a uniparty environment. The zeal for public-private partnerships will continue, local government will continue to unquestioningly take state and federal money for various kinds of projects, and the city will proceed with economic-development initiatives on the understanding that jobs added are mainly going to be of a manufacturing nature that keep the populace employed but don’t attract the visionaries who know where the centers of real influence are. Most to the point, local government will continue to join with the business, education, journalistic, healthcare and arts communities to make sure the subjects get their minds right regarding diversity and net zero. City Hall plaza will always be a welcoming space for “anti-hate” rallies every time some national incident involves a pet demographic being transgressed against.

So it’s in no danger of a Trumpist takeover, but it certainly will not be hospitable to a truly conservative voice.

The counter-argument from both left and right to this state of affairs is that we have to go with what we have in front of us. In our two-party representative democracy, stands on the issues of the day, as well as broader visions of what a properly ordered society looks like get distilled to binary sets of choices on ballots, they say.

To which my response is this: Doesn’t there come a point at which we’re so unable to stomach either of the choices that we bow out?

I began this process in 2016, when I wrote in Evan McMullen as my presidential choice, voting Republican down-ballot. I stayed home for the 2018 midterms, and in 2020 wrote in Ben Sasse and again voted Republican for other offices. In 2022, I again stayed home, as I’m going to today, as well as a year from now.

I refuse to concede that my only choices are between wealth redistribution, climate alarmism and militant identity politics on the one hand, and cowards, nuts and sycophants on the other.

Have you been following Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York? Yesterday, he responded to specific questions about values of his real estate properties, and financial-statement filings with his characteristic infantile bombast. Judge Engoron finally gave up on trying to get him to behave like a coherent grownup, letting him bloviate for the courtroom and the world to see.

Yet this abysmal excuse for a human being leads Biden in the 2024 battleground states. And he continues to blow the doors off all other Republican comers.

There’s been some low-level buzz about Nikki Haley lately, and she was indeed an excellent UN ambassador and a respectable Republican governor of South Carolina.

But weeks after January 6, 2021, she made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago.

Deal breaker.

I will not vote for anybody for anything who has demonstrated that kind of awful judgement.

But I will also not vote for anybody in a party that is

• unwilling to face the fact that the nation’s debt and deficit problem is due to the entitlement programs being awash in unfunded liabilities

• has prioritized DEI initiatives in the military at the expense of a focus on recruiting actually fit fighters, ensuring sufficient ammunition for US security interests, and guidance from a robust vision of a safe world where Western principles prevail

• interferes with the free market by imposing the phasing out of normal-people energy forms

• does not send a clear signal of US support for Israel to do what Israel needs to do to destroy Hamas.

• that is fine with the obliteration of notions of sexuality and marriage held by all cultures everywhere until the last fifteen years.

If those are my choices, I feel that the only way I can express love and hope for America, as well as act upon what my heart of hearts says is the godly way to proceed is to refuse them.

I am utterly certain that I am not contributing to the country’s continued slide into chaos by doing so.

Quite the contrary, I am doing my very small part to arrest that slide.