Alasdair MacIntyre Joins the Not-Voting Camp in Slouching Toward Gomorrah
October 26, 2004
This is just sad. Depressing. As the media reports on Rehnquist's cancer, the cop-outs continue among prominent members of the thoughtful, unembedded, non-neoconservative Christian...right? middle? muddle? Come on people, can't you at least muster a vote for Ralph Nader?If the GOP thinks like Republican pollster Neil Newhouse that "Anybody who is sophisticated enough to worry about the makeup of the Supreme Court has already decided whom they're going to vote for,'' they are mistaken. Quite some time ago it became unfashionable in much of the more politically ambivalent Christian intelligentsia to be a "single-issue voter." In other words, as a rule, infanticide, euthanasia, and other meddling around with the definition of human life are simply not significant enough as "issues" to determine how one votes. This sort of attitude is based on an assumption that at some deep level, the culture war has been lost. In reality, the game is still underway, and I've never noticed the pro-infanticide Left objecting to single-issue voters on their side. They are not missing any opportunities now either.
Sadly, a delusional, narcissistic politics that refuses to deal with the dirty reality of the game as it is being played is endemic to the academic world, including its branded "Christian" subculture. The vast majority of Christian academics in my acquaintance who possess the intelligence to understand the stakes involved in this presidential election are unable to get past their understandable dislike of the President and either wish not to vote or have decided to back Kerry.
At heart I think these poor, shiftless people have long been alienated from and disdainful of the rank-and-file of the American religious right. President Bush typifies all that is wrong with that culture. The Christian intellectual cannot see past this image. He is not moved by even the simple pragmatic question of "How will a Kerry victory better advance a culture of life?" And yet the Christian intellectual does not have any real political influence or organization. He is not agitating for the creation of a Christian Democratic party or something else along those lines. He is not thinking about supporting Bush and then working to amplify dissenting kinds of conservative voices. He is simply, willfully, refusing to see and support the lesser evil. Be assured that if Kerry wins and the inevitable damage is done, the identity of the turncoats will be remembered.
Maybe there is something to be said for the fundamentalist "Christian worldview" activists and others who think their colleges and scholars have gone soft. However ignorantly these critics may express their views, their fundamental intuition is correct: the Democrats represent a profound commitment to the advancement of the culture of death. As complicit as the Republicans may be in that same culture, we cannot abandon the only available ship for an island of utopian integrity. I take heart in my confidence that the betrayal of the intellectuals is largely irrelevant to election outcomes because the rank and file of religious conservatives have the horse-sense to stay the course.
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