By David K. Shipler
If you fear
and detest Donald Trump, as well you should, but have strong aversions to
Hillary Clinton, and if you value your vote as a statement of principle that
neither major candidate satisfies, consider this: If you rank your principles
in order of importance, the one at the top ought to be the protection of the
American democracy, as flawed as it is, against the threats from within.
The only way
to vote for that First Principle is to defeat Trump, and the only certain,
practical way to defeat Trump is to vote for Clinton. Not for Gary Johnson the
Libertarian or Jill Stein the Green, no matter how attuned their policies are
to yours. And not to stay home and abstain. Citizens who fail to vote undermine
democracy, too.
There is little need here to repeat
the litany of threats that Trump presents, and which every American who has
been paying attention already knows. To his autocratic impulse to ride
roughshod over the constitutional system of checks and balances, to sweep away
the rule of law, to foster racial and religious hatred, to invite violence
against his opponent, to inspire vigilantism at the polls, can now be added his
threat, if he wins, to jail his opponent, which he expressed in the second
debate. This is the stuff of a banana republic, not the United States of
America.
Republican leaders who were
shocked, shocked, by his frat-boy, “locker-room” boasts about committing sexual
assault against women were holding their fingers to the wind instead of to
their brains—or their hearts.
But it is an ill wind that is
strafing the country.
