We’re offering a 4th of July 60% off flash sale on annual subs. Click here to redeem.
In the first part of this 2-parter, I wrote about my experience at the Cornel West rally in Harlem.
You should also check out some content from the archive:
-Interview with Gloria Purvis in America Magazine…kinda really important (see footnote for excerpts1).
-On the history of third parties for Catholic World Report, in which I quote friend of the pod Albert Thompson of the American Solidarity Party (see footnote2).
-on J. Cole’s political localism
-on Catholics and the 2020 third party vote
When politics fill the religious vacuum
MANY YOUNG PEOPLE have come [to the Catholic Worker] and worked with us, and they tell us after a while that they have learned a lot and are grateful to us, but they disagree with us on various matters—our pacifism, our opposition to the death penalty, our interest in small communities, and our opposition to the coercive power of the state. You people are impractical, they tell us, nice idealists, but not headed anywhere big and important. They are right. We are impractical, as one of us put it, as impractical as Calvary. There is no point in trying to make us into something we are not. We are not another community fund group, anxious to help people with some bread and butter and a cup of coffee or tea. We feed the hungry, yes; we try to shelter the homeless and give them clothes, if we have some, but there is a strong faith at work; we pray. If an outsider who comes to visit doesn't pay attention to our praying and what that means, then he'll miss the whole point of things.
-Dorothy Day
As we stated in part 1 of this piece, we all know that voting for a third party candidate is a wasted vote…that is, if we’re talking on a purely utilitarian level. But this is precisely why the third parties matter. Strict utilitarianism never turns out to be very useful. Life is defined and driven by values that transcend measurements like utility and efficiency. In the end, nothing will be useful, or even functional, when we’ve lost all sense of ideals. In this regard, a vote for the third parties is a witness to this fact. Somebody’s gotta play the prophet, the holy fool.
Yet as much as we need the holy fools who chase after impractical, unrealizable ideals to be a witness to and temper the rest of us who are “realists” (which is to say pragmatists) we surely cannot live in a society of holy fools. We need the pragmatists. I completely respect those whose conscience tells them to choose the lesser of two evils, as much as I respect those whose conscience disallows them from voting (like Dorothy Day).