“Elections have consequences,” then-president Barack Obama reminded House Minority Whip Eric Cantor in 2009. Obama was correct. Elections do have consequences.

On the other hand, those consequences aren’t necessarily predictable.  As an old saw concerning the 1964 presidential election went, “I was told that if I voted for Goldwater we’d end up in a war in Vietnam. And I did vote for Goldwater. And we did end up in a war in Vietnam.”

As the 2022 midterm campaigns heat up, we’ll no doubt find ourselves subjected to the usual “MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION IN HISTORY! GET OUT AND VOTE!” campaigns. Not to mention the “dirty hands” counter-argument from some radicals that voting is immoral because it props up a bad system: If you vote you have no grounds for complaint; since you willingly participated in that system, the outcomes are on you, not on non-voters.

Yes, elections have consequences. Your vote, on the other hand, mostly doesn’t.

First of all, the chance that your vote will materially affect the outcome of any election of significant size — for example, that your vote will be the one vote that puts your presidential candidate over the top in Florida, or that Florida will then cast the decisive electoral votes, let alone both —  is almost nil. You’re more likely to buy the single winning Powerball ticket for a record-high jackpot.

Secondly, even were that to happen, it’s unlikely that you’d get the results you expected from the victory of the candidate you chose.

Voting is a weird variant of the “Trolley Problem,” an ethical thought experiment: An evildoer has tied three people to one set of trolley tracks, and one person to another set. You’re at the lever controlling which set of tracks the trolley goes down. If you throw the lever, the trolley kills the one person. If you don’t, it kills the three people.

In the voting version of the “Trolley Problem,” your options are:

To throw the lever to the left (vote Democratic).

To throw the lever to the right (vote Republican).

To put a sticky note on the lever (bearing the name of a third party or independent candidate).

Or to do nothing.

As to outcomes, you have no idea how many people are tied to which set of tracks, or how many of them will be killed or injured, or in what ways.

And you also know that there are millions of other voters/levers and that what you do with YOUR lever is unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome.

There’s no particularly compelling argument for or against voting. We should just treat voting as what it actually is.

So, what is voting?

Voting is speech.

It’s a statement of your beliefs.

Ditto non-voting, if done with intent to express unwillingness to affirm the system’s legitimacy.

Voting is neither a moral duty nor a moral crime.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you must, or mustn’t, vote. That decision is, and should be recognized as, a matter of personal preference.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The boilerplate Republican response to last Thursday’s prime-time, televised hearing  of the US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol runs something like this:

It wasn’t really a “hearing.” It was a campaign infomercial for the Democratic Party and the anti-Trump wing of the GOP. Its goal was partially to save the Democrats’ bacon in the November midterms, and partially to protect the two Republican members of the committee from pro-Trump primary challengers, by leaning into the narrative of, essentially, an attempted coup d’etat by the disgraced former president.

I’m inclined to agree with that assessment. If truth in advertising laws applied to Congress, the committee’s name would use the word “exploit” rather than “investigate.” Politics being politics, it’s always safest to assume ulterior motives.

An intention to exploit the facts, however, does not change those facts. And the facts are these:

Donald Trump attempted to, and conspired with others to, overthrow the government of the United States.

Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

Trump knew he lost the presidential election. His attorney general told him, in no uncertain terms, that claims to the contrary were “bullshit.” His legal proxies withdrew every court challenge in which they were accorded standing and invited to present evidence, because they knew they had no such evidence. Not a single investigation or audit — not even fake stunt “audits” such as the one in Arizona — produced any evidence of fraud sufficient to have changed the results.

And yet Trump both privately and publicly asked figures ranging from Georgia’s secretary of state to his own vice-president to steal the election for him.

Trump’s campaign recruited fake electors and urged them to “complete secrecy” pending attempts to fraudulently replace the real electors so that he could steal the election.

Trump publicly addressed a mob he had scammed into believing he won the election, inciting them to march on the Capitol to help him steal the election.

One need not like the uses those facts are being put to as a condition of acknowledging that they are, in fact, facts.

Who’s to blame for those facts being put to these uses?

Donald Trump.

Nobody forced him to lie about the election’s outcome.

Nobody forced him to conspire with others to steal the election.

Nobody forced him to whip a mob into a frenzy.

His choices produced predictable consequences.

If Trump had any desire to honestly address the committee’s exploitation of his actions, he could just quote  Richard Nixon’s 1977 characterization of Watergate:  “I gave them a sword and they stuck it in and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I’d been in their position I’d have done the same thing.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

As an op-ed writer, I’m a slave to the news cycle. That means that whenever one or more mass shootings heat up the topic of “gun control,” I tend to weigh in. And my usual take these days, as opposed to arguing about the Second Amendment, etc., is to simply note that a significant percentage of the more than 100 million Americans who own more than 400 million guns would just say “no” to giving up those guns, and make their “no” vote stick.

The usual retort to that position is pretty simple, and best summed up by a reply op-ed from Rob Kall, publisher of OpEdNews.com.

Disclaimer: Rob often disagrees with me. Rob also publishes most of my columns whether he agrees with them or not. I love Rob and I love OpEdNews, and urge you to check it out. This column is NOT intended as a slam on  Rob or on the site. But since it gives me material to work with:

“If, as Knapp appears to predict, people decide to break the law, and use their weapons to fight police, then they are terrorists and they should be arrested or killed. … If they resist, arrest them. If they shoot, give them a chance to surrender, then blow up their homes. Have the military do it with a missile fired by a fighter jet or helicopter. It won’t take many houses being blown up to persuade people to give up their AR-15s and related weapons.”

A related observation from Twitter user AbiSpeaks:

“[T]he Federal government can obliterate your entire block. Even if you buy the killingest killing machine you can find anywhere, you’re bringing a water gun to a tanks-and-laser-sighted-bombs fight.”

My reply to that tweet:

“The federal government was able to obliterate entire blocks in Afghanistan, but that didn’t stop them from getting their asses kicked by farmers with 60-year-old AKs and 100-year-old Mosin-Nagants.”

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think a government war on America’s gun owners would be anything like Afghanistan.

I think it would be far worse,  for both the government and for Americans, gun owners and non-gun-owners alike.

Only 2,448 members of the US armed forces died in Afghanistan.  The approach Rob suggests would likely produce at least Vietnam-level casualties (58,281 dead) … and an outcome similar to both those wars.

“Enemy” and civilian casualties were much higher than US military casualties in both wars. And that would likely be true of this one as well.

I have difficulty believing that Rob, and people who think like Rob, would be happy with tens of thousands of American cops and soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of American civilians, dead — and at the end of the carnage, more guns on the streets than before.

I prefer to believe that Rob, and people who think like Rob, just haven’t thought this through very carefully.

Because, make no mistake about this, what Rob is calling for is civil war.

I hope we can all agree that that would be a bad thing.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY