Why I Voted Biden

On Facebook back in September 2016, I wrote the following:

You don't have to convince me that Clinton is deeply flawed. The transfer of classified information over an unsecured email server--and the unconvincing efforts of her allies to downplay it--drives me insane. Her penchant for secrecy is downright destructive. She and her husband have used the halo of the presidency to enrich themselves far beyond what is appropriate; overpaid corporate tycoons run companies that at least add something to society. Clinton made money by giving speeches at $250,000 a pop.

But she's essentially running for Obama's third term, a continuation of what we've seen. If you're happy with Obama, you'll probably be decently happy with Clinton.

And she is not Trump, who knows nothing about anything other than what he watches on cable news; who is utterly self-obsessed; who acts out of personal pique *all the time*; who exploited birtherism to get a political profile; who barely knows the structure of government; who admires governmental exhibits of strength, even when it results in the deaths of thousands of innocent people (see: Tiananmen Square); who represents a genuine risk to global safety and stability; and who, at minimum, tolerates affiliation with this generation's white supremacist movement, and, at maximum, genuinely sympathizes with its evil worldview.

A vote is not an exercise in self-actualization; it's an exercise of genuine political power, however small. Entertaining the idea of voting third party was reasonable through the summer; after all, it was plausible that someone could catch fire, like Perot in 1992, and have a legitimate chance. But that's simply not the case; polls are clear that 80% of people are voting for Clinton or Trump.

Many of my co-partisans tried to stop this nightmare, and we failed. You don't have to do the same. If you wake up on November 9, and Trump won, what are you going to say if you voted for Johnson or Stein?

Back then, I voted McMullin. I did not have any expectation that Trump would be able to use the machinery of government to tilt the race in his favor. I lived in Oregon at the time, so a protest vote seemed safe and worthwhile.

Now Trump is president, and four years in: he is self-obsessed; he spends too much time watching cable news; he doesn't understand how the government works; he sympathizes with authoritarians and white supremacists. His maladministration has made the covid crisis much worse than it would be otherwise, culminating in Trump himself getting felled by the disease.

I do not want Trump to have a bad covid outcome; I want him to live, and thrive, for a long time. But I also want a rebuke. I want the voters of America to say, firmly, "NO," and consign Trump's version of strongman populism to the dustbin of American history. I want Trump to get interviewed and have to answer for the worst defeat in 90 years.

Of course, thanks to the Electoral College, my home state of New Jersey is not in play. I should feel safe to write in a candidate, so that I do not have to throw my support to Joe Biden. Indeed, for most of this year, I was planning to write in a principled conservative public statesman, Mitt Romney. (Who, in a better timeline, would be wrapping up his second term. Alas.)

There were 3 specific incidents in the last month that tipped the scale for me to vote Biden. I'll take them chronologically:

1. The changed CDC recommendations on testing that were promulgated while Dr. Fauci was out of commission for surgery.  This came from pressure from the Trump administration, and is absolutely destructive. We need rapid, ubiquo testing. It is the only way to make the pandemic less painful, short of a vaccine.
2. The threat from a Trump legal advisor to try to overturn the popular will via state legislatures.
3. Eric Trump suggesting that Trump would win New Jersey without voter fraud. 

All of this infuriated me, and makes me think that we genuinely need a popular vote majority for Joe Biden, and not merely a weak plurality like Hillary Clinton got in 2016. So I decided to participate in trying to get there.

The challenge here is my obligation as a Catholic.

Biden is a practicing Catholic, but he also is in favor of a legalized regime of abortion, and now federal funding for abortion (via repeal of the Hyde Amendment). The standard calculation for a Catholic in a race like this would be to vote for the Republican, and if the Republican were unfit, then to vote third-party (as I was planning to do).

Here, Jeannie Gaffigan's article in America magazine was helpful: 

I believe it will be impossible to tackle these other issues with a president who is working overtime to sow division and hatred in this county through insults, intimidation, fear and blatant racism. This venomous “us against them” mentality is trickling down, seeping into our churches and poisoning our pulpits. To a culture of life, vipers are deadly.

Quite so. In the long run, I think Trump is destructive to the entire pro-life project: he makes us look like hypocrites. Ramesh Ponnuru nailed the political dynamic, where Republicans cannot simply take the victories and continue to criticize Trump where he's wrong:

It is logically possible to approve of many things Trump has done, and even to have voted for him and to intend to vote for him again, while being clear-eyed about his grave faults. This is the transactional case for Trump that many conservatives have made. But some who made the transaction did not appreciate the full cost.

It turns out to be psychologically difficult to maintain the transactional stance. The temptation to minimize the flaws of one’s champion is too great. (It is of course also true that a politician’s opponents have the opposite temptation.) The pull of party unity is only stronger now that Trump is president — and has largely stuck with an agenda Republicans favored before he came along, while angering liberals every day.

Because our culture has defined racism as wholly unacceptable, very few people  are willing to step forward and say, “The president keeps making racist comments, but what’s more important is that he is delivering on taxes and judges and regulation.” (Kris Kobach waffled rather than say it.) The evidence of his bigotry has to be ignored, wished away, re-interpreted. If Republicans refuse to fit their standards around the president — if, like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, they occasionally condemn the bigotry — it means they were weaklings all along.

More broadly, if Christians continue to back Trump in waves, we will never make in-roads into communities that are turned off by the grossness of the political commitments. If Christianity gets tied to a political party, it will make it harder to spread the good news. We will be erecting boundaries around a faith that needs to welcome all comers. That's how I read the great commission. It requires that we keep partisan politics at arm's length in a democratic society.

Trump has to lose. I voted Biden. Lord have mercy.