Presidential Election 2016—Shall we Compromise?

Recently in a discussion among friends we were lamenting on the suitability of the two candidates approved of by the two major political parties. I submitted my conclusion that I would not vote for either candidate because each one so violated my conscience with their arrogant, overreaching personalities and positions on the proper role of government that I could not give my approval. 

 

I was quickly met with the counter-point that I had to vote for one because by abstaining I was, in effect, giving my vote to the less desirable of the candidates.  I should ‘compromise,’ they said, and support the lesser of two evils.

I reject that argument as well.  Here are my reasons:

A unilateral voluntary concession to any evil (or any degree of evil) makes me a party to it.  It would be a betrayal of moral principles that I acknowledge are higher than any candidate’s unguided reactions to challenges or crises or to their specious promises which disregard or repudiate foundational Constitutional protections for the person and guidance for the government. 

In any ‘compromise’ between good and evil it is only evil that can profit.

One must speak up (by voice or by ballot box choice or abstention—which is a principle-guided choice) in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil. In my mind, there can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil. To do so would be violating my integrity. 

I cannot surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights to the pseudo-principle of the government’s unlimited arbitrary power which both of these candidates clearly seek.   Once individual rights protected under law are eroded, (or given, which the government has no right to give) government power expands and the individual is further subordinated. 

 

I do not put myself into the camps of either major political party, both of which for this coming election and in the primaries leading to it voted in candidates to represent them who have forgotten the proper function of government.  I’m afraid that those who voted for these two candidates in the primaries and rejected, in my opinion, better candidates, will get what they asked for and our nation will suffer for that choice

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 According to the Declaration of Independence, one of our nation’s two most important foundational documents, “to secure these [individual] rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  This means that the government, especially the President alone, is not the ruler, but the servant or the agent of the citizens. (Do either of these candidates project themselves as ‘servants’?) It means that the government has no rights as such except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for specific purposes such as specifically enumerated in the Constitution (which limits government power) and the Bill of Rights.

   

 A vote for either major candidate in this election is a vote to accelerate the downfall of this nation.  It is falling fast enough without my help. I want nothing to do with it.