By Jordan LaPorta
It’s finally here. After over a year of endless campaigning, and a primary season that yielded us two horrendously atrocious candidates, the day of reckoning has arrived. Throughout the day, Americans across the country will go to the polls to vote for, among other things, the next President of the United States. Many people are not happy with the choices. Yet, support for the major third party candidates has rarely exceeded 10 percent nationwide.
Per usual, it appears the American people have retreated to their narrow-minded two-party focus in favor of self-righteous “pragmatism.” It has been incredibly frustrating to see see my Republican and conservative friends — who claim to care about limited government — proclaim their intention to vote for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The argument of conservative Donald Trump supporters is fairly straightforward. Hillary Clinton is merely an extension of the liberal policies enacted by President Obama, and anyone — including a populist authoritarian — is better than she is.
Support for Hillary Clinton is much more twisted and vain perspective. Establishment figures who have outright endorsed Clinton have bought into the ludicrous dialogues of “respectability politics,” and “good governance.” These people do not honestly care that the state will be enlarged under a Clinton Administration; most of them are hawks anyway. They care more about being looked upon favorably by their peers than actually doing a damn thing about big government.
For those who have cast aside the option of voting for Gary Johnson, or exercising your right to not participate in this farce, you now bear the responsibility of the direction of U.S. policy should your candidate win. Your vote is your endorsement, and it is one that will shape the course of our nation moving forward.
Both of these candidates stand for big government, albeit in different ways. By standing with either of them in the voting booth, so do you.
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote against free trade, against the free market of labor, for the coercive abuse of eminent domain, for no-fly no-buy list, and for a man with the temperament of a teenage boy.
A vote for Hillary Clinton is also a vote against free trade, against open government, against the protection of the Second Amendment, for more foreign wars, and for higher taxes to fund more inefficient government programs.
But voters constantly engage in exercises of psychological justification by convincing themselves that they are voting for “the lesser of two evils.” But the lesser of two evils is still evil.
20 years from now, I will be able to tell my children that I refused to vote for the right-wing demagogue or the liberal aristocrat. I refused to lend my personal endorsement to either figure that ran their campaign on enlarging the size and scope of government.
Will you be able to tell your children the same?