Itâs just that you might never have heard of it.
Itâs the American Solidarity Party, and while itâs tiny, itâs growing. What is it? Here is an overview of the ASPâs platform from its website:
The ASP offers something different. Instead of insecurity? Dignified work. Instead of consumerism? Citizenship. Instead of isolation? Community. Instead of hate? Solidarity.
For policy, this means we build an economy centered on the needs of healthy families and neighborhoods, not big corporations or faraway bureaucracies. It means we reform zoning, land use, infrastructure, immigration, voting rights, and police. It means we end the death penalty, euthanasia, torture, abortion, and forever wars. It means we ensure everyone has access to clean water and air, healthcare, housing, and a dignified way to earn a living.
The old parties have failed us. Itâs time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
I think the recent developments coming from both major parties should encourage anyone who ever selected a party or a candidate chiefly because of their pro-life stance to take this one seriously. More than just a one-issue party, Solidarity stands for localism and for human flourishing, birth to grave. No other party even gives pretense to stand for these principles right now, and thatâs a shame.
Here’s an interview with the partyâs presidential nominee, Peter Sonski, a Catholicâwhich sort of seems shrug-worthy now, considering that up until recently, it looked like there would be a Catholic of some sort on each of the two main party tickets. Still, it seems that it is Catholics and conservative evangelicals especially who have found the policies of both the Republican and the Democratic parties so disappointing, when it comes to respecting issues of life.
True, you could say (and maybe have already as you were reading this), third-party candidates donât stand a chance of winning in the general election. You are correct. But there is more at stake here. Will it send a message to one or both parties if a significant enough minority opts out, faced with such terrible candidates? That is the hope.
In late March, conservative political theorist Matthew Franck wrote a piece in The Dispatch on âChoosing Not to Chooseâ when faced with two unacceptable candidates. His point still stands. But choosing not to choose doesnât have to mean abstaining from voting altogether. It can mean casting oneâs vote for a third-party option, showing that selecting the better of two evils is not an acceptable choice for individuals with a conscience.
This point from Franck resonates:
Eight years ago, I published an essay for Public Discourse about why I could not vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. âVote as if your ballot determines nothing whatsoeverâexcept the shape of your own character,â the piece concluded. âVote as if the public consequences of your action weigh nothing next to the private consequences. The country will go whither it will go, when all the votes are counted. What should matter the most to you is whither you will go, on and after this Novemberâs election day.â
There is nothing in what I said then that I would now retract. I rejected the idea that I, as one individual, must treat my choice as confined to the binary of Clinton versus Trump, as though the weight of the outcome were on me alone. It is frequently the case that we vote for one major-party presidential candidate principally because we are against the other oneâusually because we find âour guyâ a less than optimal choice but âthe other guyâ strongly repellent. But when we conclude that both of them are wholly unfit for office, our habitual partisan commitments, and our fond hope that the one representing âour sideâ will be normal, or guided by normal people, do not compel us to cast a vote in that direction. What we must consider, I argued, is not our role in the outcome of the election (which is negligible, and unknown to us when voting), but the effect on our conscience and character of joining our will to a bad cause.
Ms. Williams, thank you for pointing out the ASP to those who may not be familiar with it. It should not come as any surprise that I favor Christian Democratic parties â in Germany, and elsewhere.
And even more so, I commend you for featuring Matthew Franckâs essay from the Dispatch! It is a powerful piece I have gladly sent to others, and for which the recipients have been grateful.
For many of us tortured by electoral choices, Dr. Franck has set out a reasonable approach. For the past several elections I have written in one of my favorite Americans of the past, those exhibiting great leadership with humility in the most trying of times, and for me that is Grant and Lincoln. If nothing else I hope that a few poll workers will think about the virtues of those I name, and contrast them with recent candidates for office.
Matthew Franckâs essays never disappoint â whether he is writing about books worth reading, the removal of Confederate memorials, and also recently, why Trump was barred from ballots due to Section Three. (He made such a great case for the latter, drawing on impressive work by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, and mirrored by the brilliant judge, J. Michael Lustig â so itâs not easy for me to understand why the Supreme Court did not agree with these solid thinkers.)
Franck says “Vote as if your ballot determines nothing whatsoeverâexcept the shape of your own character. Vote as if the public consequences of your action weigh nothing next to the private consequences. The country will go whither it will go, when all the votes are counted. What should matter the most to you is whither you will go, on and after this Novemberâs election day.â
Try as I might, I confess I can’t quite make sense of that. It simply isn’t the case that our own sense of consicence is all that is at stake, and I don’t know why I would want to pretend that it is. We are, as it were, on a wagon train, heading west, and we have to vote which way to cross the mountains. One way is long and arduous and will get us there after a longer, much more expensive trip. The other way takes us into the mountains in winter and risks blizzards and starvation. Those are the two options. I can say, I suppose, “I want to vote for the no-bad-consequences option,” but in truth, it doesn’t exist. One set of bad consequences or the other is happening.
Likewise, “What should matter the most to you is whither you will go.” But why? I just don’t think that is true. If my vote can make the difference between x or y becoming reality for 100s of millions of people, then that far outweighs my own little path in importance. Demanding that we will only participate in the contests of this world if we can remain unsullied by compromise just doesn’t seem mature, or even loving, for that matter. I preserve a sense of my individual innocence (which might only be delusional, in fact), but it’s bought at the price of not being any help.
Theologically, this puts the prerogatives of the eschaton above the responsibilities that come with embodiment.