Why Voting For Hillary Is Morally Untenable

I contributed to a “symposium” last Friday at The American Conservative in which a wide variety of contributors were asked to lay out their voting rationales. Interestingly, I appear to have been the only correspondent whose preferred option is to refrain from voting. I want to explain my thinking in a little more detail, as I had limited space in the original item, which I’ll reproduce here:

“Not voting” is all too frequently conflated with “apathy.” It’s true that lots of people don’t vote because they are fundamentally apathetic about politics, but many choose not to vote because they perceive that course as the most rational action to advance their interests. As such, I’ve chosen to label this option “conscious abstention.” I am abstaining because I have fully-formed and reasoned arguments for doing so; you’re free to disagree with them, but please do not deny that I have them on offer.

Number one, there is just no chance in hell that I’d ever vote for the Democrat who was the single most responsible member of her party in enabling the Iraq War, the worst foreign policy catastrophe this country has undertaken since Vietnam, and the consequences of which we are still dealing with literally to this very day. Hate ISIS? You can thank the Iraq War for that problem. (Not entirely, but a large percentage of it is attributable to US folly.) Concerned about Iran’s hegemony in the region? Give thanks for the Iraq invasion. Worried about extremism of various stripes festering throughout the Middle East, spilling over into Europe, and infiltrating the minds of “lone wolves” here in the homeland? That’s more Iraq War blowback. Iraq War 3.0 is going on as we speak, as US troops engage in a combat mission in Mosul, and are sustaining casualties.

So no thank you, I’m not going to be bullied into believing the lie that Hillary is somehow the obvious moral choice. (NOTE: THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT OF TRUMP AS THE MORAL CHOICE EITHER.) I’ve made this point over and over again, and if I have to do it one more time, so be it: Hillary didn’t just vote for the war. That would be bad enough. As Senator from New York, she championed the war, and helped get reluctant liberals on board with Bush. Because she was seen as a representative of the prior Democratic administration (which had only left office less than two years earlier) her acquiescence to the war was enormously influential, and in a very real way was pivotal in allowing Bush to carry out the invasion with a “bipartisan” guise. Even then, Hillary was seen as an eventual contender for the presidency, so everything she did was scrutinized as intensely significant.

Hillary then ran the entire 2008 Democratic primary campaign as a stalwart defender of her Iraq vote; she and Bill both mocked Obama for championing his opposition to the war. Here’s a nice moment to recall from good old Bill:

And then here’s a heartwarming moment from Hillary (March 1, 2008):

(As a quick aside, remember that around this time Hillary’s paid senior campaign adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, was running around spreading birther rumors about Obama.)

Hillary refused to repudiate her Iraq War vote for the entirety of the 2008 campaign, because her political team calculated that it would be a strategic loser for her to do so. Till the bitter end, in June 2008 when she finally dropped out, Hillary defended that Iraq vote. It took her another six years to finally admit the vote was a “mistake,” when she made the disclosure in her widely-unread memoir “Hard Choices,” put out in June 2014 while she was preparing for the 2016 run. (By the way, a “mistake” is when you accidentally bump into somebody on the street or take a sip from the wrong cup, not when you help launch an illegal war.)

It’d be one thing if Hillary was legitimately remorseful about her 2002 Iraq War vote, and then her subsequent actions demonstrated that she’d truly internalized the lessons of that failure. (Recall, she did not even read the full “intelligence estimate” provided to Congress.)

So let’s say Hillary had made a sincere effort to repent for her sin of voting for the Iraq War without even reading the intelligence estimate. She’d still be disqualified from holding office in my view, but there’d at least be some mitigating points in her favor: she learned from her errors, which proves she’s open to new evidence and new ways of thinking.

But the total opposite is true.

She maintains to this day that the 2011 Libya intervention was a great smashing success, even though it’s thrown the country into chaos, imploded its civil society, and allowed ISIS to take hold. The US launched a brand new bombing mission there earlier this year that was woefully under-reported, but was a direct consequence of Hillary’s actions as Secretary of State. (BTW, Obama even appointing Hillary to be Secretary of State in the first place was one of his gravest mistakes.)

From the “Commander-in-Chief forum” on September 7:

QUESTION: Thank you. Secretary Clinton, to your point, you have had an extensive record with military intervention. How do you respond to progressives like myself who worry and have concerns that your hawkish foreign policy will continue? And what is your plan to end wasteful war campaigns in which our peers, servicewomen and men, continue to be killed and wounded?

CLINTON: Well, I assume you’re talking about Iraq, because of my vote, and you probably are talking about Libya, because of the role that I played in the administration’s decision about whether to take on Gadhafi.

CLINTON: But before I get to that, let me say very clearly: I view force as a last resort, not a first choice. I will do everything in my power to make sure that our men and women in the military are fully prepared for any challenge that they may have to face on our behalf.

But I will also be as careful as I can in making the most significant decisions any president and commander-in-chief can make about sending our men and women into harm’s way.

With respect to Libya, again, there’s no difference between my opponent and myself. He’s on record extensively supporting intervention in Libya, when Gadhafi was threatening to massacre his population. I put together a coalition that included NATO, included the Arab League, and we were able to save lives. We did not lose a single American in that action.

And I think taking that action was the right decision. Not taking it, and permitting there to be an ongoing civil war in Libya, would have been as dangerous and threatening as what we are now seeing in Syria.

How is this anything but delusional? For starters, the suggestion that there is parity between her position on Libya and Trump’s position on Libya is just absurd: she worked for months to actually implement the operation, agitated for it over the will of a reluctant Obama and Biden, and then sought to take credit for it politically when it seemed to be “going well.” Her private server emails tell us that she was aware from the outset that it was never a mere “humanitarian intervention,” despite public assurances, but a full-scale regime change scam. Trump put out a YouTube video.

Remember how she giggled about the fatal anal penetration of Gaddafi?

Am I wrong, or is that infamous sneer of hers at the very least mildly psychotic?

Then, of course, she agitated for the Afghanistan troop surge of 2009 — once again over the objections of other members of the Obama administration like Biden and Bob Gates — and got her wish. As a result of this, 2010 was the worst year on record for US casualties in Afghanistan.

She agitated for arming the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria, and was reportedly dissatisfied with Obama’s apparent reluctance to engage more forcefully in the conflict. Now those “moderate rebels” are dominated by Al Qaeda.

She supported Obama’s aborted 2013 proposal to attack Assad.

She has called for the US to arm Ukrainian forces in a yet another proxy war against Russia, once again over the objections of Obama.

She has threatened to “ring China with missile defense.”

In 2008, she threatened to “obliterate” Iran:

She has lavishly praised Netanyahu, who hates Obama but apparently loves Hillary.

She strenuously defended Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, which was funded by US tax dollars.

She hasn’t said one solitary word about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen caused by her Saudi clients, and funded by US taxpayer money. (The Clinton Foundation has taken as much as $25 million from the Saudi royal family.) I asked Hillary about Yemen in June and she ignored my question.

She demands another “No Fly Zone” in Syria even though the previous one she demanded in Libya was proven to be a ruse and an excuse for regime change. This new one would almost certainly be exponentially more catastrophic, because it would necessitate military confrontation with Russia, a nuclear armed power.

She has called for “cyber attacks” to be treated identically to attacks on US physical infrastructure. Given that her campaign has already directly blamed Russia for launching cyber attacks against the DNC and John Podesta, she would already have pretext to initiate “military responses” against Putin upon assuming office.

She has made antagonizing Russia the central theme of her campaign, baselessly calling Trump a “puppet” of Putin, and propagating noxious conspiracy theories about Kremlin subversion of the US electoral process. In doing so, she has stained the bilateral US-Russia relationship and made the possibility of nuclear confrontation much more likely.

She has allied with and praised Bush-era neoconservatives — Max Boot, Robert Kagan, and Paul Wolfowitz, etc. — rehabilitating their tarnished reputations in the process. She is extremely likely to bring some of them into her administration.

She has touted the support of her vacation partner Henry Kissinger.

She had a direct role in enabling a military coup in Honduras.

Even according to her staunchest defenders such as Matthew Yglesias, she is more solicitous of the tyrannical Gulf States than Obama. (Matthew recently deleted his tweets so I can’t find the one in question, but he said it… also, Bill recently got caught taking an unsanctioned $1 million from the government of Qatar.)

There are probably more foreign policy blunders and failures that I am forgetting, but hopefully this list is sufficiently comprehensive to demonstrate that the idea that she “learned the lessons” of Iraq is a craven, pathetic joke.

To reward this behavior with a vote is to reward the worst, most notorious kind of elite failure, and I simply won’t do it. Further, I’ll encourage others not to do it. And I’ll encourage them not to be bullied by cynical scolds who thereby accuse them of supporting Trump, which is just a brazen lie.

The United States has the most powerful military in the history of the world, and in my view voters have a special obligation to reject people who misuse its power and cause suffering abroad. Hillary personifies such misuse of power. She is unrepentant about it. The fact that the Democratic Party nominated her for president anyway (after twice nominating an Iraq War opponent) is simply disgraceful and can’t be countenanced.

We all know that both Hillary and Trump are uniquely despised by the public. Hence, discussions about for whom to vote almost invariably devolve into the question of the “the lesser of two evils” — “if you had a gun to your head, who would you vote for?” While there might be some technical philosophic value in drilling down on your preference in the pure HRC v. Trump binary, in practical terms this need not dictate how you exercise your franchise. In a free society, no one is holding a gun to your head. You are not obliged to vote for evil. (In fact there’s a reasonable case that you’re obliged to not vote for evil.)

No joke, whenever I put the “gun to your head” question to voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina, by far the most frequent answer I receive is some variation of “pull the trigger.” Thankfully in this country no armed assailants follow you into the polling place, and you are not obliged to vote under duress or with the threat of lethal force.

Even so, again, there’s some narrow philosophic value in answering the question. So I’ll answer it here. In the theoretical scenario where in order to save my life I had to pick Hillary or Trump, I’d ask the gunman to pause for a moment, pull out a coin, flip it for heads or tails, and then decide my response that way. Therefore, my endorsement of Hillary or Trump would be the product of pure randomness, not any affirmation of one over the other.

With the election being tomorrow, we’re hearing the predictable, cliched dictum that everyone must “get out and vote” — as if voting was an end unto itself. But voting isn’t inherently virtuous. The act of pressing a button on a machine or ticking a box on a form doesn’t confer any unique moral value. What confers moral value is if the outcome you help to facilitate with your vote contributes to producing an ethically-just outcome. If it doesn’t — if it helps to produce “evil,” for instance — then it can’t be said to have been ethically correct.

Consider the above advice from journalism professor Jay Rosen. He thinks journalists ought to encourage people to vote merely because the act of voting confers some moral value. But it doesn’t. What if you derive moral value from the act of not voting? Then you should do that. “GET OUT AND VOTE!” is just a vapid slogan that few have taken the time to deconstruct properly.

All this being said, I have spoken to people who for specific reasons do believe that the act of voting is inherently virtuous, and which presidential candidate they ultimately opt for is of secondary importance. For instance, some older black folks in Ohio told me a couple days ago that they feel a special obligation to vote to honor the sacrifices of their ancestors who fought and died for the right after many years of repression. I respect that view. It’s understandable that historically marginalized populations would have varying beliefs on this question.

In a huge pluralistic democracy, people can arrive at different conclusions that are mutually-contradictory but valid. My conclusion is this: do not, under any circumstances, vote for Hillary.