What is it that turns me away from voting for Hillary Clinton? It is not the emails or the servers or the classified documents. Or the October debates or the memory of Bosnian bullets … No, my choice not to vote for Clinton is based on the fact that this country is, and always should be, a nation of the people.
Phew, I apologize — I’ve had that Charles Kuralt speech promotional video stuck in my head since week one of football season my first year at UNC. They are a good couple lines, though, don’t you think?
“What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls. Or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming ... No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is, as it was meant to be, the University of the people.”
When Opinion Editor Tyler Fleming asked me to explain my lone dissent as the rest of the editorial board endorsed Clinton, I blathered something about Supreme Court appointments, then trailed off, longing for Kuralt’s eloquence.
Here is my second try: I will not vote for Clinton because I do not think she respects the American people.
In September, she dubbed roughly 20 percent of the country “the basket of deplorables." That statement, while demonstrating this lack of respect to some degree, can be waved away as a slip-up born of frustration with vitriolic Trump supporters. My best evidence of Clinton’s lack of appreciation for the American people is her explicit preference for activist judges.
Though federal judges are appointed rather than elected, they have the power to control the lives of millions of Americans. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which overruled state laws that withheld legal benefits and status of marriage from same-sex couples, exemplified this power. With one decision (a decision Clinton vigorously supported), five justices overrode the democratic will of 13 states that had extant bans on same-sex marriage (that number does not include the 26 other states where court decisions legalized same-sex marriage before Obergefell). As reasonable, and, in many ways, as wonderful as Obergefell and other pro-gay marriage decisions were, they showed an arrogant judicial disregard for the proven beliefs of social-conservative citizen majorities. Even if those beliefs seem like bigotry, supporting judges who have and would plough over them should give us pause.
Why? Because even well-articulated, rational conclusions may not be right. If they were, then there would be little use for democracy. Expert intellectuals could give us a well-reasoned and researched political utopia. But experts — especially those who presume enough expertise to dictate a utopia — have failed often (see history of mass famines and killings in communist nations). Assuming they were mostly well-meaning, we can conclude that these expert failures occurred through a lack of knowledge.
As a democracy, we certainly should try to use the articulated data we have to limit the harm and increase the benefit of what we do to one another. However, we should also rely in part on the imperfect, unarticulated knowledge provided to us through voting, instincts, traditions, markets and organic social networks. We need this unarticulated knowledge, maybe as much as we need articulated rationality (for more on articulated and unarticulated knowledge, I suggest Thomas Sowell’s excellent "A Conflict of Visions").
