I don’t know why I feel a need to justify my vote, but I do. Maybe it’s because I feel like a bit of a sellout. Maybe it’s because it’s a point of contention among us here at glibs, and I highly respect people on both sides of the argument. Maybe it’s because I’m a narcissistic asshole who likes to pontificate on the regular, and y’all are the only ones who let me do it. I mean, I have two articles that are currently supposed to be written as continuations of prior articles, and yet here I am writing about my vote like any of this matters.

I’ve been pretty transparent about the internal conflict I’ve had between voting Trump and not voting this cycle. However, I don’t think I’ve gotten into the nitty gritty of why.

I voted for Trump, and I voted for him both on principle and on pragmatism. I didn’t vote in 2016, but I felt compelled to vote this time.

If you had told me in 2016 or 2018 or even January that I’d vote for Trump, I would say that I must’ve compromised on my principles and voted purely as a defensive move against a looming leftist threat. That’s not wrong, but that’s not the full story.

My Voting Priorities

I see 4 tiers of voting priorities. Tier 1 is the set of issues where opposition is fatal to their contention for my vote. I may abide some compromise, but if you line up on the wrong side of the issue, it doesn’t matter how many good things you do, you cannot earn my vote. Tier 2 is the set of issues where they are important, but being on the wrong side doesn’t mean it’s a forgone conclusion that I won’t vote for you. Stack up enough alignment on other T1 and T2 issues, and you can win me over. Tier 3 are the issues where any one issue isn’t very persuasive one way or another, but when they’re bundled together (“law & order”, “global trade”) they can be persuasive. Tier 4 are issues where I have an opinion, but they’re not particularly important or urgent to me. A lot of these suffer from “impossibly in the current political climate”.

I’ll not create a full list of voting priorities, but I’ll share my top tier

Tier 1

• Pro-Life

• Gun Rights

• Religious Liberty

• Constitutional Originalism

As should be apparent, there’s no possible way that I could ever vote Democrat. They align directly against basically all of my highest priority voting issues. Neither the Republicans nor the Libertarians are perfectly aligned with me on these issues, either. However, neither of them are directly opposite my opinion on any of these issues, with the possible exception of the LPs view on abortion.

The primary lens though which I have been processing the election is my faith. I know that, despite the rhetoric about “most important ever”, events will occur as they are supposed to. As such, there’s a hard cap on my “give a shit’. Sometimes it’s easy to get sucked in as I see principles based in big-T Truth being dismantled and discarded, but people suck and putting your faith in people, especially large groups of people, is folly. From that point of view, I may as well stay home and keep my mind on more important things.

My faith also compels me to affirm justice and resist injustice. Unfortunately, it’s not so clear cut in politics. People like to frame it as “team stupid versus team evil”. Team evil is about right for the postmodern leftists, but I don’t think the Republicans are stupid. They’re “team identity crisis”. Sometimes they embrace virtue, sometimes they play identity politics. They’re what happens when a religious sect tries to play in the secular world… the straight laced kid who tries too hard to fit in with the punks. On the other hand, the Libertarian Party is clearly team protest vote.

Setting aside team evil as a non-starter, how do I best affirm justice and resist injustice? Well, what injustice exists in our society? Beyond the tier 1 issues above, cultural Marxism is a huge concern of mine. Woke culture and inclusion & diversity have  become a daily distraction in my profession, despite having nothing to do with my day job. My wife genuinely fears misstepping and mentioning her opinions on social media after seeing people’s lives and livelihoods attacked. Add in a perception rippling through the evangelical Christian community that the left is becoming openly hostile to us, and resistance against cultural Marxism is becoming a higher and higher priority. That’s where the Libertarian Party falls down as a protest vote. A protest vote, without the pragmatic aspect, needs to be closer to that aspirational goal of “affirming justice”, which the LP does not do. Their mewling critiques of the left are something I’ve written about here in the past, and I think that their sagging foundation of so called principles puts them in a poor position to critique the left. Jo showed this a few times when she accepted the left’s premise and then quibbled with the progressives about how much jackboot to use when solving the manufactured problem designed to slow march us to totalitarianism. A Libertarian party that supports BLM, assumes the legitimacy and urgency of climate change, and forces people to bake the cake is not a party that will be getting my protest vote.

That leaves me with two choices. Vote Republican or don’t vote.

More accurately, Vote Trump or don’t vote. It’s an important distinction because voting Trump has a different set of pros and cons compared to a generic Republican. I wouldn’t have bothered voting if a Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W Bush type Republican was on the ballot. Not enough affirming justice. Not enough resisting injustice.

Why vote for Trump, if I wouldn’t vote for any regular cycle republican? Because he is the most effective person since Reagan at resisting injustice. He got some of the most corrupt, evil human beings on the planet so riled up that they attempted and failed at a coup, attempted and failed at removing him from office, spent every day for 4 years wailing and gnashing their teeth, and tore off every mask of moderation and decency and bared their fetid souls.

It’s going to sound ridiculous, but I’m reminded of Jesus when he expelled demons. He could pick them out of a crowd, expose them, and force them to do His will. Trump isn’t Jesus by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, he appears to be a despicable human being. However, he has that ability to identify, expose and manipulate his opponents with ease. Given how much of a clear and present danger the left has made itself in the past 4 years, I don’t want to pass on the opportunity to chip away at their hegemony.

When it came down to it, I voted for Trump because he makes a whole lot of evil people squirm uncomfortably, and we’re not going to have another candidate evoke that response for a generation, at least. It wasn’t a vote for “affirming justice”, it was a vote to resist the tidal wave of injustice that we are forced to face as a country. My expectations are low. Just make the right people keep hating you Mr. President. You don’t have to be a good person to resist the evil people.