I Will Not Vote for Donald Trump

The Future Trajectory is More Important than the Current Situation

Anyone who’s read enough of my Notes may have seen me mention that I don’t vote—technically I have voted once, but only as a favor to someone who wanted me to do it. Left to my own devices I never have and likely never will. I could probably write a whole article on this if anyone really cared to hear it, basically it’s a vote of no confidence in the current system as a whole. Why participate in something that I consider to be fake and gay anyways? I’d literally rather sit at home and play video games.

However, I’m writing this article because even if you picked me up and put me in the voting booth this November, I still wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump. I find it most likely that I would write in a vote for Bozo the Clown; it wouldn’t be unreasonable to write in a vote for some other Republican who is less offensive, but I’d have to actually do the research to try and find one, and I can’t be bothered with that. The first reason for this is that voting is best understood as a symbolic act, not a strategic one.

In this article I’m going to go even farther than that, though. Let’s adopt a thought experiment under which my vote actually is a strategic act. Most people talk about voting in this way even though objectively it is wrong and stupid. Still, the act of bothering to vote at all sort of requires that you trick yourself into thinking that your vote matters somehow. So you will get people saying stuff like, “let’s run up the vote count to make it harder for the Democrats to cheat! That’s why we have to go vote for Trump!” However that would even work. This is one of the most obvious ways in which you can tell that voting is done for emotional reasons, not rational ones.

In my proposed thought experiment, let’s say that for some reason, I possess an extremely powerful “super-vote” that vastly improves the odds of whichever candidate I choose. My vote is not necessarily decisive on its own, let’s say perhaps Trump’s odds of winning the race without me are only 25%, but if I vote for him, his odds shoot up to 50%. Something like that. I’m not the sole decider but my vote now actually does matter in a really big way.

Even under these conditions, I think that I would refuse to vote for Donald Trump. There are multiple reasons for this but the most basic one is that I find Trump to be unacceptable to me on core values, for reasons laid out very effectively by Edward Feser. The problem is that Trump is a liberal on social values. I don’t mean this as a hyperbole; he actually appears to have the sensibilities of 90’s liberals on things like abortion and “gay marriage,” having bragged (quite correctly at the time) that he is the “most pro-gay president in America.” This is not okay.

By withholding my vote, I would seek to discipline Republicans into picking someone worth voting for next time. If you think that your vote actually matters at all, this is the correct mental model in determining how to use it, or is at least an eminently reasonable model.

But won’t Kamala Harris be even worse on my core values? Well yes, yes she will be, and no doubt I would lose even more ground on those values for the next 4 years if she were to win than if Trump were to win. However, I hold no leverage over Kamala because she’s on the other team. I’m never voting for her no matter what. My only leverage over anyone is over the candidate on my own side. By drawing my line in the sand, I take a short term defeat in order to safeguard the possibility that, long term, my preferences will get the respect I feel that they deserve.

A saying I’m fond of is that the future trajectory is more important than the current situation. If you compromise on core values even within your own faction, you can now reasonably expect that the future trajectory on those core values will only ever be downward. You have cucked out and shown the squishes on your own side that they can push you around and when the chips are down, you’ll still do as they want. The only way you might be able to change the future trajectory is by showing that you are willing to incur real costs in order to uphold your core values.

Leftists get this in a way that the right rarely if ever does. Tens of thousands of pro-Hamas protestors showed up to agitate at the DNC because they are upset that their core value is not getting the respect they feel it deserves. It does not matter to them that the Democratic party is already far more anti-Israel than the Republicans; they demand total fealty, and until they get it, they won’t be placated.

While this sort of rigid fanaticism may seem irrational at first glance, it is exactly how unpopular views are able to first earn a seat at the table, and then slowly progress until they eventually run the table. Short term sacrifices that seem self-destructive serve as proof that your bite is as real as your bark. Over the course of repeated interactions, squishes learn that if they cross you, you will go to any lengths to punish them, even if you yourself also take damage in the process. Once you’ve established this precedent it becomes rational for the squishes to play ball with you.

This is why today, no Democrat can contradict the hard left and survive their primary, while Trump can waffle and weave all over the place and still easily defeat challengers who were considerably more “based” than he is on several important issues. It is also in large part the strategy by which crazed leftists took over the culture in the first place, as has been noted by Richard Hanania. “Gay rights” activists and other wokies lost their fight for decades upon decades, but then one day all of a sudden their fanaticism paid off and they won. The more general application of this effect was explained quite well almost exactly 8 years ago by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who writes:

The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority.

Leftists weaponize this phenomenon to enforce their preferences at the mass level, but it only works for two reasons: One, the leftists are actually willing to put skin in the game. If you piss them off, they will engage in costly actions to hurt you, even if it’s troublesome for them as well (think being unfriended and “unpersoned” from social groups, being pulled into tiresome drama and petty arguments over your wrongthink, etc.). They are legitimately more interested in getting their way than in getting along with you, and they’re willing to cut ties if push comes to shove.

Two, the leftists are enforcing an ideology. The ideology may not be internally consistent, but you can predict very reliably what kinds of statements and actions will run afoul of it. For whatever reason, when it comes to Donald Trump, right-wingers seem incapable of ideological thinking. Their political principles fly out the window in service of the Great Orange Man. Part of this is that conservative voters are just less ideological in general than leftists, which is also to their detriment, but it isn’t just that.

I’ve heard many times, from people who are plenty opposed to abortion and LGBT, that we need to vote for Donald Trump for reasons such as:

1.      To “get revenge” on the left.

2.      Because we “owe it to him” after “all that he has done for us.”

3.      Because there is some kind of “loyalty” between us and Trump.

And so forth and so on. These are thought processes aimed at serving Donald Trump’s considerable ego, not at enforcing actual right-wing preferences and policies. In a serious political movement, political preferences and policies must come first. If at any point there is a clash between these things and any other consideration, political preferences and policies must always win. If this is not the case, then your movement is by definition not a fundamentally political movement, but rather something else, perhaps with some characteristics of a political movement.

When it comes to Blumpft, I have to conclude that many conservative voters are caught up in a cult of personality surrounding him. I find this unfortunate and distasteful, but I don’t see any better way to describe the mind-bending levels of solidarity that he enjoys among Republican voters.

We can again compare the defective behavior of Republicans with the much more effective behaviors shown by Democrats. The fact that leftists are able to prop up empty suits like Biden and Harris and use them as Trojan horses for their ideology is a strength, something that we should admire and possibly even seek to emulate. It demonstrates that the left has no loyalty to any particular individual; it has loyalty only to its own ideology and the pursuit of power that is necessary in order to enact that ideology.

Any particular individual only matters to them to the extent that that individual can further these goals, and once an individual outlives their usefulness, they are discarded ruthlessly and without hesitation. This is exactly how a serious political movement should behave. Imagine the unthinkable folly if the Democrats stood fast and circled their wagons around Joe Biden out of some misguided sense of personal loyalty to the old man for beating Drumpf in 2020? They’re much better than that! Given this, it doesn’t surprise me when Democrats consistently out-maneuver and defeat Republicans. Their preferences may be terrible, but they’re deadly serious about enacting them!

In light of the absolute disaster that was the 2020 election and everything that has happened since, I would probably argue that something like this is what should have been done with Donald Trump. I pray that if 2024 is yet another defeat, then hopefully people might finally come to their senses and be done with him, but who knows. Either way, this is why I refuse to give him my vote, even under the false assumption that my vote might actually do anything. I would prefer to use the leverage of that vote to enforce necessary discipline on my own side of the aisle.

Of course, if you are going to vote for Trump, as I expect most right-wingers will, then go for it. I don’t necessarily judge you for that. Each person has to decide for themselves where their red lines are and what their core values are. This is how we thread the needle between expanding our coalition vs keeping its values coherent. For me, I have decided that matters relating to family, marriage, sexuality, children, etc., are core values. I am not sure that anything could outweigh them other than perhaps direct religious interference (i.e. if one candidate was anti-family, but the other literally sought to ban Christianity and kill or imprison Christians, I might have to vote for the former at that point).

This is a fairly straightforward extrapolation from my previous writing about the stable family as the ultimate goal in life (other than serving God, of course, but here I am adhering to a goal that the secular can share in, and for the layperson the pursuit of a stable family is an inherent part of serving God; the two go together naturally). It may be acceptable for a candidate not to push the envelope on these issues depending on circumstance; for instance, I would not expect a Republican candidate to come out and run on trying to pass a national abortion ban right now.

However, it is not acceptable to me for a candidate to actively move backwards on these things and move their positions closer to those of the left. That is a precedent that simply cannot be set. If I am to take any interest in a candidate at all, it is a bare minimum requirement that they at least do not let these things get any more liberal than they already are.