Think It Out, III, or, the Obligatory Election Post

I'll start this post with a large caveat, in the form of an article which (with some reservations) I rather admired (on first reading--see: admission of reservations): https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/holding-your-nose-how-to-vote-like-a-catholic/.  The gist of the article is that Catholics are required to exercise prudence when voting.  Some of the details are a bit more iffy, but the overall message seems to me to be correct.

Having laid that out there, steel yourself for my prudential considerations when I go to vote--for president, for various ballot measures, for local and federal officials from the water board superintendent to the mayor to my senator.

I'm a conservative when I vote (actually, I am a conservative at other times as well).  That word means a great many things these days; here is how I understand it.

Political conservatism (and its polar opposite, progressivism) has at least three planes: the social/cultural, the philosophical/methodological, and the economic. 

(N.B. I am deliberately avoiding the word "liberal," which comes in such a large variety of senses today as to be nearly meaningless.  A recent quiz I took, purporting to helpfully sort Americans into no less than seven tribes, identified me as a "Traditional Liberal," I believe on the strength of the facts that I prefer polite political dialogue and like to think the best of those with whom I disagree.  It also, on the basis of these facts and the subsequent identification, incorrectly predicted the political candidates I supported.  Tl:dr, "liberal" is a broad label.)

On the social and cultural plane, conservatives favor ending abortion (which is, in some cases inarguably, the ending of human life).  Social and cultural conservatives want legal distinctions between so-called traditional families and nontraditional ones.  Social and cultural conservatives want to delay and discourage transgender operations for the young; and they want educational presentations of transgenderism to be formulated in a way that, while they do not stigmatize those experiencing transgender feelings, they also do not encourage those with other atypicalities (e.g., autism) to explain their experience, reductively, through a transgender lens.  Social and cultural conservatives want conscience protections for workers and employers who believe that providing contraception (qua contraception) is morally evil--and the same applies to participating in abortions, etc., etc.

On the philosophical plane, conservatives want diversity of opinion--ideological, religious, and philosophical--to be as important as diversity of ethnicity.  (This is were a conservative is most likely to overlap with a "traditional liberal" or libertarian, btw.)  Subsidiary to this, philosophical conservatives tend to want immigration to be conditioned by assimilation--or, to put it more simply, they think it is critically important for new immigrants to want to stay in this country and to commit to learning the history and language of this country, since these things are prerequisites for having actual conversations about important matters of politics, ideology, religion, and philosophy.  Philosophical conservatives tend to value political methodologies--like the various forms of legal originalism--that prefer to change government and society through the system found in the Constitution, rather than finagling the sense of the Constitution to achieve change.

On the economic plane, conservatives tend to be cautious about the notion that government can keep printing money without ever incurring inflation; they want a welfare state designed to help people out of welfare, and for that reason tend to prefer policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit over policies like raising minimum wage laws.  Economic conservatives also tend to think that a federal-level bureaucracy is a money-loser: rather than streamlining the redistribution of wealth, and making it more efficient, it tends to line the pockets of those who congregate in air-conditioned offices in D.C.   And economic conservatives worry about regulatory capture, and think that many regulations, while they can sometimes protect consumers, are more damaging on balance, as they can encourage monopolies, depress existing small business, and present barriers to entry for people attempting to start their own businesses.

That is actually one of the most terrifying posts I've written in some time.

And that, in and of itself, is a good reason to lay all this out there.

P.S. Thank you to the person who inspired this post.  You know who you are.