The Implications of Your Vote Across Government

For John, BLUF:  The tensions are high and it seems there are a lot of Citizens who are hard over with regard to the present political scene.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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PRUDENTIAL VOTING IN BAD TIMES

Here is the sub-headline:

I am not a doomist.  There are reservoirs of goodness in the American people -- including a sense of mutual obligation I've witnessed many times during the pandemic.

From The Boston Pilot, by Columnist George Weigel, 28 October 2020.

Here is the lede plus one:

Sixty years ago, Father John Courtney Murray, SJ, published what I regard as the finest Catholic analysis of American democracy ever penned:  "We Hold These Truths -- Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition."  In recent decades, Father Murray has been accused of being an uncritical celebrant of the United States.  That unjust charge is decisively refuted by the most pungent sentence in "We Hold These Truths," which I shall cite in a moment.

In his wide-ranging book, Murray examined the deterioration of the moral and cultural foundations of American public life, a process he thought had been underway for some time.  Mainline Protestantism could no longer help buttress those foundations; its doctrinal and moral confusions were part of the problem, not the solution.  Nor could the country rely on its great centers of higher education for cultural ballast; the prestige universities, Murray wrote, had abandoned the classic philosophical and moral traditions of the West, settling comfortably into the dual ruts of pragmatism ("What's right is what works") and utilitarianism ("What's good is what's useful").  The notion that freedom was having the right to do what we ought -- meaning that genuine freedom is always tethered to truth and ordered to goodness -- was being supplanted by the thin and dangerous notion of freedom as willfulness.

What would happen, Murray asked, if those baleful tendencies won the contest for American culture?  What would happen if Americans decided that democratic self-governance was simply a matter of political and legal machinery, rather than the cultural accomplishment of a virtuous people?  If Americans decided that truth and goodness had nothing to do with politics and law?  If Americans, no longer believed that the laws we make are under the judgment of the moral law written on the human heart?  What would happen, Murray warned, was not going to be pretty:  ". . . The noble many-storeyed mansion of democracy will be dismantled, levelled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged."

I think the author has a point.  We are very divided as a people and neither side needs to feel it can crush the other under its heel.  That means strategic voting.

Regards  —  Cliff