In any political community, large-scale corruption, major upheavals, and revolutionary violence never come out of the blue. They come first by a succession of little sins: a mistakenly unconstitutional facet of new law, a willful bit of bad dicta in a judge’s ruling, a lazy executive who fails to ensure his bureaucratic underlings give due process with just and requisite speed. The small violations of the laws and habits of one’s political community stack and build to a crescendo of chaos, violence, and sudden, often barbaric, change. Concern for small political abuses, to avoid large ones, is sneeringly mocked as “the paranoid style of politics,” when it is, in fact, faithfulness in the little things, as the Good Book says. As President John Adams put it in his inaugural address, “we should [n]ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” So in this moment of crisis, let us consider the careful details of our own ethic of voting.
Most voter guides put the heaviest emphasis on the accidents of our election duties and not on the substance. “Vote!” they all say unanimously. And that’s fine. But there is today, in our discussions about the ethics and duties of voting, a kind of negligent drift toward the exterior sign (“Vote!”) and away from the interior substance of that vote, namely the duty to choose an officer among the candidates put forth for election. The vote is the means, but the end, the duty, is truly to pick an officer for the office.
Concerning elections, a certain casual nominalism, so to speak, can set in among us otherwise conscientious citizens. We can focus on the word “vote,” and forget the duty it bespeaks. This little corruption is subtle and easy to miss. It most often takes the beguiling form of moralistic protest voting, write-ins, or conscientious abstention. It looks like virtue—“I did my duty: I voted”—but it is merely the outward show of the substance of our duty to pick an officer. By resting in the false comfort to our conscience that we voted, we can think that we’ve discharged our duty, set a good example of dutiful voting for others to follow, and set a high standard for candidates in the future by withholding our vote from both of the two top choices for office. And we can grow falsely satisfied simply because we employed the means, voting. But means without a full and earnest attempt to achieve the end is, alas, a working definition of hypocrisy, or, perhaps, a description of how, little by little, one becomes a hypocrite, even with initially good but erroneous intentions. That is, it seems that the duties of citizens in an election demand a great deal of labor from us to avoid the perplexity of conscience that would have us fail to select a good candidate or, as is often the case, fail to discern the candidate whom we deem to be the lesser of two evils.
Spluttering objections, no doubt, abound. “What if there are three viable candidates?” Well, in the end, our deliberations should narrow to two top picks, and thus we come to discern the lesser of two evils and pick one. “Why, then, do we have write-in options on our ballots?” Because we are not monsters who make people violate their conscience and because we know that one should never act on a perplexed or doubtful conscience. However, one should not think that the presence of doubt means one cannot make a best guess. A rightfully paralyzing doubt does not concern the judgment itself but whether the judgment can or should be made. We really are duty-bound to inform ourselves such that we can indeed make a dutiful best guess as to which candidate ought to be picked for the office, either as best or as the lesser of two evils.
“But then it will always be a race to the bottom!” No, we have primaries to raise up our choices for high office and many other means to vet candidates for lower office. Perhaps we need to be more engaged in the front end of the process if we have a conscience sensitive enough to see the decline. But when the time comes to discharge our electoral duty, it is not simply to vote, but to pick the officer who is best among the options.
“Could not my duty be to protest the bad options by abstaining altogether?” Alas, that is not how duties work. To wish to turn voting into protesting is the sort of dangerous magical thinking that has people insisting that words are violence and violence is speech. Things are what they are, and our duty is to vote to pick an officer. Our duty is not to use that occasion to teach a moral lesson. That is a utilitarian view of our duty to vote. To think that way is to turn the vote into a mere utensil of one’s own individualistic, moral agenda. Again, beware the mere appearance of virtue. Oftentimes, deeds rude and humble can hide virtue and duty, while polite and elegant acts hide beneath their aspect all manner of ignorance, negligence, and self-will.
It is a temptation, if we think our duty is merely to cast a vote, to throw up our hands in the face of these difficulties, if difficulties they truly be. But there is a reason the tradition speaks of the glamour of evil. Don’t forget the substance of your duty to vote.
Matthew Mehan is the Associate Dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C.
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