It’s a little weird the way both desperation and resignation can seemingly coexist in one and the same American voter. Yet this seems to be exactly how I’d characterize many of the people I have talked to (and sympathized with) these past months. 

Likewise, certain political actions seem to express both of these attitudes at once. The one I have in mind seems to be the one everyone else has in mind too, judging by the anonymous mass texts I have been receiving in droves every day for the past three weeks: abstention from voting. 

Americans are fond of voting. We’d like to think of ourselves that way, anyway. Father Ted Hesburgh of Notre Dame once rather (in)famously called voting a “civic sacrament”. Theological objections to this characterization aside, he at least articulated well (consciously or not) the mythos that surrounds voting and indicates its importance. It’s hard to imagine, as an adult, slapping a sticker on my chest to indicate that I’ve done anything of mild goodness and importance (“I paid my phone bill!”, “I brought my own bag to the grocer!”). But we do this for voting.

Nor, for the record, do I find this emphasis on voting strictly speaking irrational (for those of you who can sense a plucky contrarian argument coming). As a Catholic, I am in fact obligated to listen to the current Catechism of the Catholic Church when it tells me that “[s]ubmission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one’s country.” (CCC §2240) As a man, I am by nature a political animal, and living under a (rather odd) democratic regime means that voting is an expression, in some sense, of my fundamental orientation towards participating in my society. 

There is, however, an existing tradition of concern for the common good being precisely what turns one away from voting, or at least, towards voting for a third party. The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote back in 2004 in a short but influential essay (entitled “The Only Vote Worth Casting in November”) that “[w]hen offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives.” The essay (worth reading in full), in a similarly striking fashion, concludes by saying that “a vote cast is not only a vote for a particular candidate, it is also a vote cast for a system that presents us only with unacceptable alternatives. The way to vote against the system is not to vote.”

My job in this essay is not to assess whether MacIntyre’s argument holds in any particular case. (For context, he was writing about the Bush/Kerry presidential election, and who knows? Perhaps the reader will decide that our own times present us with more stately politicians, more reasoned debate, and more altruistic political visions than the ones presented back then.) But it strikes me as an argument that indeed will be entirely sound in certain political situations, and it is therefore worth taking note of.

Suppose we lived in a society in which there were powerful incentives (you can think of these incentives however you like—as originating from inexplicable nefarious forces, or conspiratorial groups, or just as an inherent vice of human society) for political leaders to be evil. But suppose the society was a deeply democratic republic (like ours) comprised of, by and large, people who desired a good society. Does evil (let’s call it Evil) have a hope here? 

Certainly. All that is needed is for a two-party system to become ascendant, and then dominant (which tends to happen at one time or another), and a system for promotion of Evil will fall naturally into place. Both parties will be trying to answer the call to be Evil, and also to gain power, and will find that, as long as they are roughly matching their opponents’ movements toward Evil (or staying just slightly behind), they can retain comfortable odds at gaining power while sliding towards the Evil extreme. It is a comfortable thing to know, for those who are Evil, that you can guarantee votes from all sorts of people for 98% of your Evil agenda, as long as your opponent is at, or can be represented as, 99% Evil. The whole process must be more gradual than that, of course, so that it is less perceptible to the voting public, but that is, in the end, the tendency. 

We are very fortunate to live in a society in which this cannot happen, for some reason or another that I am sure will come to me. 

Of course, the little scenario described above is not exactly trenchant analysis. Americans already love complaining about the two-party system, probably even more than they (are supposed to) love voting. Voting third-party, however, still attracts a fair amount of ridicule, and why shouldn’t it? You are going through the trouble of voting when you know with total certainty that your candidate is not going to win; at least those who abstain entirely are wasting one less sheet of paper. 

Like most kinds of problems involving collective action, it’s more complicated than that. Downs’ Paradox is the observation that for any vote, third-party or otherwise, the expected impact of voting is exceeded by the costs (of driving to the polls, of the pen you use to fill out the ballot, and so on). As certain as the third-party voter is that their candidate won’t win, virtually just as certain can the mainstream voter be that the vote they cast will not be the pivotal one. Any emphasis on the moral imperative to vote viewed in this light almost feels like a campaign to get people to make sure that any unused pennies sitting around their house get donated to charity; surely there is incredible parvity of matter, to borrow the Scholastic term, at stake here.

Of course, my hope in writing these words is that everybody on the other side will read them and decide not to vote; I certainly value my own side voting (even if irrationally) and handing me the victory. Counterintuitive analyses of individual actions aside, we vote in part because it gives us evidence and hope that those who are like us are voting the same way. Enough of those like-minded voters, and the difference may in fact mean victory or loss.

But this same line of argument is also available to third-party voters: they, too, are hoping for enough like-minded people to join them to make the impossible possible; they, too, are counting on collective action to be the only way forward (in their case, the only way forward out of a two-party quagmire). If I disagree with them and their vote, then, it can only be a difference arising from perception of degree, of the exact location of particular political thresholds. I cannot condemn them outright.

Much of the time, the difference between voting and not voting (or voting third-party) is simply framed as an instantiation of a deeper difference between idealism, and good ol’-fashioned pragmatism. There are fantasists, and then there are realists. There are those who care about principles, and there are those who care about results. 

This is not to say that all those who advocate for holding your nose and casting a “lesser-of-two-evils” ballot are closet utilitarians or anything like that—everyone can agree that it is important to care about consequences! Insofar as I am worried that voting has been treated as overly sacrosanct, I even admire a clinical, pragmatic approach in various ways. 

But people who, in other domains, will tout the advantages of clinging to inviolable ideals, of worrying about justice before outcomes, often seem to not worry about whether the same sorts of arguments apply to voting. What are the dangers of cooperation with evil? Among other things, it directly affects the soul; it often creates a kind of complacency or even fondness for things which initially it rightly found repellent. What is the inevitable fruit of moral compromise? More and more compromise, much more than might have been bargained for at the outset. Does a person gain or lose power when it becomes known that they can be bought? Generally, and unsurprisingly, it is a loss. 

Perhaps this kind of thinking does not apply, or applies only tangentially, to voting. Perhaps it is indicated to try to be as shrewd as the serpent (for Evil certainly is), to be canny about calculating the minimization of harm, to gripe and grouse and then to vote red or blue anyway. But if the above paragraph does seem to match trends in the political culture at large; if current approaches seem to only correlate with things becoming worse, and worse, and worse; if there exist certain trajectories so bleak that nearly everyone is tempted to look for certain powerful, arcane and malign influences; if a just man cannot be found in the city—well, then, maybe it’s time to start looking elsewhere after all.