The other day my pals at the Federalist ran a piece by Tully Borland, an associate professor of philosophy at Ouachita Baptist University, titled “Why Alabamans Should Vote for Roy Moore.” Mind you, that’s not “Why an Alabaman Might Vote for Moore”—this was not an explainer, or a reported piece. Borland teaches in Arkansas, so presumably it wasn’t a personal exploration of his own thinking process as an Alabama voter. No, it was an apologia making a philosophical, affirmative case for Moore, on the merits.
As you might imagine, it attracted a great deal of notice.
Borland’s arguments were . . . interesting? His very first argument was that Moore’s penchant for dating/pursuing/assaulting teenage girls is not uncommon and is perfectly justified as a mode of family-formation:
From there, Borland turned to more conventional tropes: No one is perfect, most elections are about the lesser of two evils, the Democrat in the race is an evil abortionist. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before. He concludes, “[T]here’s no shame in voting for someone with whom you disagree, no matter how significant the disagreement, as long as you do so for the right reasons. Regret in having two lousy candidates to choose from is possible without having shame in picking one you think will do less harm to the nation.”
Well.
Borland’s argument is utilitarian in the extreme: There are no angels; we deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
So let’s start with some hard realism: If you live in Alabama, your vote doesn’t matter to the outcome of a Senate election.
Here are the margins of victory for the Republican candidate in the last eight senatorial elections in Alabama:
1996: 104,785
1998: 343,405
2002: 253,683
2004: 647,182
2008: 552,992
2010: 452,812
2014: 795,606
2016: 586,395
That’s an average margin of victory of more than 467,000 votes in a state where the entire voting-age population is only 3.7 million. The odds of your vote tipping the balance one way or another are astronomically, almost asymptotically, small.
Understand this: For all the hard-headed, utilitarian talk, the decision to vote for Moore or support him from afar is just virtue signaling with almost no chance of having any real-world impact.
But let’s pretend that your vote is going to tip the election. It’s not clear that the lesser-of-two-evils argument holds, either. Borland and many others point out that Moore is pro-life, Doug Jones is pro-abortion—game, set, match. If you care about abortion, how could you not vote for Moore?
Realists should ask, “How many abortions can Moore prevent with his one Senate vote?” To have any impact, you have to imagine a scenario in which President Trump suddenly becomes a pro-life crusader and starts pushing pro-life legislation that’s just one vote shy of passing the Senate. This is highly, hilariously, unlikely.
Or maybe Sen. Moore is the deciding vote in a deadlocked Senate to confirm a conservative judge. Unlikely, but not impossible. In that case, Moore could, in a tangential way, help the pro-life cause by making it marginally easier to confirm judges who are somewhat more conservative than they would get without the extra vote. I will leave it to you to estimate how many abortions that counts for stopping.
But what if the real outcome is that Roy Moore sets back the pro-life cause for years? That’s at least as plausible an outcome. Here’s how it happens: Moore goes to the Senate and becomes an albatross for the Republican party. Democrats use him to attack vulnerable Republicans in the midst of a Democratic wave election in 2018, allowing them to take back both chambers.
Truth is, if I was making odds and thinking about nothing but abortion, I’d probably roll the dice with a pro-abortion Democrat in the Alabama seat for four years, figuring that he’d be an easy flip when the seat comes up again in 2020. The calculation being that the chances of Moore hurting the broader GOP caucus in a catastrophic way next year outweigh the chances of that one vote being make-or-break for abortion during the next four years.
Even on a moral absolute like abortion, the utilitarian rationale on voting for Moore is no better than a quadruple bank-shot that might pay off, or might come back to bite you.
I don’t mean to come across as fatalistic and anti-democratic here (though, full-disclosure, I am kind of both) so it’s important to note that there’s one thing voting changes in a meaningful way: You.
Voting is a choice, an action. The making of that choice, the taking of that action, changes who you are. If you think this is an exaggeration, have a look at the rot which infected much of the Democratic party during the Clinton years. Voting for Clinton because he was good on abortion rights turns out to have been morally disfiguring for large swaths of the party. Plenty of Democrats told themselves, “We know he’s a lech, but he’s the lesser of two evils and he’s good on choice.”
The next thing you know those same people were making excuses for perjury and trying to discredit allegations of rape and sliming the reputation of any woman who had the misfortune to come within grabbing distance of Bubba. Believe me when I tell you: That’s not what those people thought they were signing up for in 1992. But it’s the consequence of where their voting led them.
And I think you could fairly say that voting for Trump has changed the standards of a great many Republicans. In 2012, Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin made an awful remark about rape and Republican voters bailed on him in droves. Four years and a vote for Trump later and Republicans are arguing that voting for a pederast is perfectly reasonable. How will this next vote change them?
This is a serious question, because the arguments for Moore made by people like Tully Borland are maximalist ones: There is literally no limiting principle to them. If the guy on the ballot is eligible to hold office and has an R next to his name, then by the Borland principle, you have to vote for him, full stop. He could be Mark Cuban. He could John McCain. He could be David Duke.
As an exercise, try to think up a theoretical limit which would prevent you from voting for a Republican Senate candidate. It doesn’t matter which end of the scale would be the tipping point for you. Maybe our hypothetical candidate is a real, live white supremacist. Maybe he’s a pathetic tool of the globalist establishment. My point is that if there is any scenario in which you could justify sitting out an election, then the entire Tully Borland, Roy Moore, Flight 93 view of politics falls apart. Because it means that you are rejecting the maximalist view and accepting a prudential one.
And at the scale of the prudential, a guy like Tully Borland doesn’t really have anything to say except, Well, I would vote for Moore bruh. And good on him. That and $5 will get you a mochaccino. But understand then that isn’t actually an argument for why people “should” vote for Moore so much as a virtue-signaling performance piece. Someone get Tomi Lahren and her snowflake melter.
If you care about the actual impact of supporting Moore—rather than preening in public about how you want people to view you—you start by looking in the mirror and thinking about the next compromise you’ll be asked to make.
Because the only thing a vote for Moore will change is you.
