Donald Trump has put social conservatives in a dilemma

Let’s begin with the obvious. No social conservative could possibly justify voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. They are pro-abortion extremists, as Ryan Anderson shows in an article on Harris at First Things and Dan McLaughlin shows in an article on Walz at National Review. Their records on other matters of concern to social conservatives are no better. It goes without saying that they are absolutely beyond the pale.

Despite his recent betrayal of social conservatives, Donald Trump remains less bad on these issues. Indeed, his appointments to the Supreme Court made possible the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It is understandable that many social conservatives have concluded that, his faults notwithstanding, they must vote for him in order to prevent a Harris/Walz victory. The argument is a serious one. But the matter is not as straightforward as they suppose, because the problem is not merely that Trump will no longer do anything to advance the pro-life cause. It is that his victory would likely do positive harm, indeed grave and lasting damage, to the pro-life cause and to social conservatism in general.

For that reason, a case can also be made for voting for neither Harris nor Trump. Yes, a reasonable person could judge that the case for voting for him is stronger. But before drawing that conclusion, it is imperative for social conservatives carefully to weigh the costs, no less than the benefits, of supporting him. And it is imperative for those who do decide to vote for him not to simply close ranks and quietly acquiesce to his betrayal of social conservatives. They must loudly, vigorously, and persistently protest this betrayal and do everything in their power to mitigate it.

In what follows, I will first explain the nature and gravity of this betrayal. Then I will set out the relevant moral principles for deciding how to vote when faced with a choice between candidates whose positions on matters related to abortion, marriage, and the like are gravely immoral. Finally, I will discuss how these principles apply to the present case.

Trump’s threat to social conservatism

First, let’s put aside a common straw man. Trump’s pro-life critics are routinely accused of foolishly demanding that he immediately push for a national ban on abortion or some other pro-life policy proposal that is currently politically unrealistic. But I know of no one who is demanding any such thing. The critics’ concerns are very different. It is one thing simply to refrain from pursuing pro-life goals for a time. It is quite another thing to abandon those goals outright, and yet another thing to advocate policies that are positively contrary to those goals. The trouble with Trump is not that he has done the first of these things–that much would be perfectly defensible–but rather that he has done the second and the third.

Consider first his change to the Republican party platform, which not only gutted it of its longstanding pro-life language, but introduced elements positively contrary to the pro-life cause. The platform’s longstanding general principle that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed” was removed. Only “late term abortion” is explicitly opposed. Not only was support for a national ban on abortion also removed, but the new platform indicates that the matter should be left entirely to the states. The emphasis is now not on the rights of the innocent but rather on the purely procedural question of who gets to determine whether and where abortion should be legal. The new platform also adds that the party supports “policies that advance… access to… IVF.” Into the bargain, the party platform’s support for traditional marriage was also removed.

The manner in which these changes were made is an outrage. As reported in First Things, the platform process was rigged in a shockingly brazen manner so that the changes could be rammed through, with social conservatives prevented from having any input or even a chance to read the revised platform before voting on it. When asked whether the platform changes marked a move to the center on Trump’s part, his son Eric answered that his father “has always been there on those issues, to tell you the truth” and dismissively compared social conservatives’ concerns about abortion and traditional marriage to “worrying about the spot on the wall in the basement.”

It will not do to suggest, as some have, that the platform change was merely motivated by reasonable concerns over the political fallout from the Dobbs decision. For one thing, even well before Dobbs, Trump wanted to make dramatic changes to the platform that would likely anger social conservatives, but until now lacked sufficient control over the party to do so. For another thing, even if the controversy that followed Dobbs were the only consideration, Trump did not need to change the platform in the way he did. He could have let the existing platform stand while basically ignoring it, as he did in 2020. Or he could have merely softened the platform, preserving the general principle of defending the rights of the unborn while leaving it vague how or when this would be done at the federal level. Nor did he need ruthlessly to bar social conservatives from having any influence on the platform process. Nor did he need to add insult to this injury by having an OnlyFans porn model speak at the convention.

Some social conservatives have suggested that while the changes to the platform are bad, they can be reversed after Trump is elected. This is delusional. Obviously, Trump has judged that he and the GOP are now in a strong enough position politically not only to ignore social conservatives, but even to rub their faces in their loss of influence, without electoral consequences. And if he wins in November, this will confirm this judgment. There will be no incentive to restore the socially conservative elements of the platform, and every incentive not to do so, given their unpopularity.

The long-term consequences for social conservatives are bound to be disastrous. Outside the churches, social conservatism currently has no significant institutional support beyond the Republican Party. The universities, corporations, and most of the mass media are extremely hostile to it. And those media outlets that are less hostile (such as Fox News) tolerate social conservatives largely because of their political influence within the GOP. If Trump’s victory is seen as vindicating his decision to throw social conservatives under the bus, then the national GOP will be far less likely in the future even to pay lip service to their agenda, much less to advance it. Opposition to abortion and resistance to other socially liberal policies will become primarily a matter of local rather than national politics, and social conservatives will be pushed further into the cultural margins. They will gradually lose the remaining institutional support they have outside the churches (even as the churches themselves are becoming ever less friendly to them). And their ability to fight against the moral and cultural rot accelerating all around us, and to protect themselves from those who would erode their freedom to practice and promote their religious convictions, will thereby be massively reduced.

Trump has thus put social conservatives in a dilemma. If they withdraw their support from him, they risk helping get Harris elected, which would be a disaster both for them and for the country. But if they roll over and accept his transformation of the party for the sake of near-term electoral victory, they risk long-term political suicide–which would also be a disaster for them and for the country.

But in fact the situation is much worse than that. For, again, it’s not just that Trump has gotten the GOP to abandon the goals of social conservatives. It is that he endorses policies that are positively contrary to those goals. For example, when asked about whether he would block the “abortion medication” mifepristone, Trump responded: “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill. And I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it” (emphasis added). Echoing Trump, his running mate J. D. Vance has also said that he supports mifepristone “being accessible.”

Trump’s defenders might claim that he is merely acknowledging a Supreme Court decision. But as Alexandra DeSanctis has pointed out, Trump’s remarks misrepresent what happened. The court did not “approve the abortion pill.” It merely made the narrow technical determination that those who had brought a certain case lacked legal standing. There is nothing in the decision that requires anyone to support keeping the abortion pill accessible. Now, the abortion pill currently accounts for over 60% of abortions in the U.S. So, it’s not just that Trump has gotten the GOP to drop the stated goal of ending abortion. It’s that he positively supports preserving access to the means responsible for the majority of abortions in the country.

It gets worse. On the one hand, Trump says that he is in favor of letting the states decide whether to have restrictions on abortion. But he has been critical of those who have tried to enact such restrictions at the state level. For example, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning abortion after six weeks, Trump said: “I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” When the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in favor of enforcing an abortion ban, Trump complained that it “went too far.” It is worth noting that Trump ally and Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake also denounced the ban, and at one point even appeared to adopt Bill Clinton’s rhetoric to the effect that abortion should “safe, legal, and rare.”

And it gets even worse. As already noted, Trump’s new GOP platform calls for “policies that advance… access to… IVF.” He has since once again “strongly” emphasized “supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every state in America.” But it is a routine part of the process of IVF to discard unwanted embryos. Indeed, as the National Catholic Register notes, “more human embryos [are] destroyed through IVF than abortion every year.” There is no moral difference between killing embryos during abortion and doing so as part of IVF. So, once again, it is not just that Trump is refraining from advancing the pro-life cause. He positively supports a practice that murders more unborn human beings than even abortion does. And here too we similar positions taken by Trump allies, such as Senator Ted Cruz.

As the examples of Vance, Lake, and Cruz indicate, the problem is not confined to Trump himself, but is spreading through the political movement he started. He is effectively transforming the GOP into a second pro-choice party. Indeed, he is transforming it into a second socially liberal party. Since the Obergefell decision did for same-sex marriage what Roe had done for abortion, the topic of same-sex marriage has receded into the background. The transgender phenomenon has taken center stage in debates about sexual morality. But the legalization of same-sex marriage is what opened the door to it, and as I have argued elsewhere, the issues are inseparable. Once the premises by which same-sex marriage was justified were in place, it was inevitable that what we have seen over the last decade would follow.

Trump has said that he is “fine with” same-sex marriage, and, again, he removed from the GOP platform its statement of support for traditional marriage. Indeed, he has made it clear that in his vision for the Republican Party, “we are fighting for the gay community, and we are fighting and fighting hard.” The president of the LGBT organization Log Cabin Republicans has hailed the “radical and revolutionary” changes to the GOP platform as “one of the most important things that’s happened in Republican Party history,” by which Trump “has put his DNA into the party.”

Many of Trump’s defenders point to the overturning of Roe as evidence that, whatever his faults, he has done so much good for social conservatives that it is unseemly to criticize him for his lapses since. But there are several problems with this argument.

First, it was by no means a sure thing that the justices Trump appointed to the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Roe, and it is not clear that Trump himself believed they really would or even wanted them to. It has been reported that he was privately critical of state-level measures to put limits on abortion even prior to Dobbs, and that when the court’s decision was revealed he “privately told friends and advisers the ruling will be ‘bad for Republicans’” and was initially reluctant to take credit. Politics rather than principle appears always to have been his main concern. It seems that he favored talking about overturning Roe, because he judged it to be good politics, but fretted about actually overturning it because he judged that to be bad politics.

Second, the Dobbs decision, while indeed a great victory, nevertheless fell crucially short of what pro-lifers had actually long been arguing for. In order to secure a majority, the decision declined to go as far as affirming that the unborn child is a human being with the same right to life that any other innocent human being has. As Hadley Arkes has argued, this defect helped open the door to the problems the pro-life movement has faced since Dobbs.

Third, it is silly to pretend that because a politician (or anyone else) does something good, he ought to be given a pass when he does something bad. And in any event, overturning Roe was for pro-lifers never an end in itself, but only a means to the end of banning abortion. It is quite preposterous to expect them to be so thankful to Trump for providing this means that they refrain from criticizing him for doing things that are positively contrary to that end.

By no means can it be denied that Harris, Walz, and the Democratic Party in general are worse on the issues that concern social conservatives. They are more extreme on abortion and on LGBT-related matters, and a threat to the religious liberty of social conservatives. But the fact remains that a Trump victory is bound to ratify his transformation of the GOP. It will no longer be a socially conservative party, but a second and more moderate socially liberal party.

How should social conservatives vote?

Catholic moral theology provides guidelines for voters in situations like this, and because these guidelines are matters of natural law, they can also be useful to social conservatives who are not Catholic.

The first thing to emphasize is that the issues we have been discussing are the most fundamental of all political issues. The family is the basic unit of all social order, and it is grounded in marriage, which exists for the sake of the children to which it naturally gives rise. And the protection of innocent human life is the fundamental duty of government. A society that attacks the natural structure of marriage, that makes of a mother’s womb anything but the safest place in the world for a child to be, and whose governing authorities refuse to protect the most helpless of the innocent, is a society that is corrupt in its very foundations. Matters of economics, foreign policy, and the like are all of secondary importance.

Twenty years ago, in “On Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good,” Archbishop (now Cardinal) Raymond Burke set out the moral principles which Catholic theology says ought to guide voters. After discussing abortion and other threats to innocent life, and same-sex marriage, he wrote:

Among the many “social conditions” which the Catholic must take into account in voting, the above serious moral issues must be given the first consideration. The Catholic voter must seek, above every other consideration, to protect the common good by opposing these practices which attack its very foundations. Thus, in weighing all of the social conditions which pertain to the common good, we must safeguard, before all else, the good of human life and the good of marriage and the family. (Emphasis added)

Similarly, the 2002 document “The Participation of Catholics in Political Life,” issued by the CDF under then-Cardinal Ratzinger, teaches:

A well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals… When political activity comes up against moral principles that do not admit of exception, compromise or derogation, the Catholic commitment becomes more evident and laden with responsibility… This is the case with laws concerning abortion and euthanasia… Such laws must defend the basic right to life from conception to natural death. In the same way, it is necessary to recall the duty to respect and protect the rights of the human embryo. Analogously, the family needs to be safeguarded and promoted, based on monogamous marriage between a man and a woman… In no way can other forms of cohabitation be placed on the same level as marriage, nor can they receive legal recognition as such.

So crucial are these issues that some moral theologians seem to hold that any candidate who takes an immoral position on them must, accordingly, flatly be disqualified from consideration under any circumstances. For example, Fr. Matthew Habiger argues:

Can a Catholic in good conscience vote for a politician who has a clear record of supporting abortion? Or is it a sin to vote for a politician who regularly uses his public office to fund or otherwise encourage the killing of unborn children? I take the position that it is clearly a sin to vote for such a politician…

The argument can be made that voting is a very remote form of cooperation in abortion. But is it all that remote? The legislator who votes for abortion is clearly a formal accomplice, giving formal cooperation with abortion. S/he shares both in the intention of the act, and in supplying material support for the act. If I vote for such a candidate, knowing full well that he will help make available public monies for abortion, or continue its decriminalization, then I am aiding him/her…

It is not sufficient to think that, since candidate X takes the ‘right position’ on other issues such as the economy, foreign relations, defense, etc. but only goes wrong on abortion, one can in good conscience, vote for him/her. Abortion deals with the first and most basic human right, without which there is nothing left to talk about.

Cardinal Burke seems, at least at first glance, to take a similar position, when he writes:

It is sometimes impossible to avoid all cooperation with evil, as may well be true in selecting a candidate for public office. In certain circumstances, it is morally permissible for a Catholic to vote for a candidate who supports some immoral practices while opposing other immoral practices. Catholic moral teaching refers to actions of this sort as material cooperation, which is morally permissible when certain conditions are met…

But, there is no element of the common good, no morally good practice, that a candidate may promote and to which a voter may be dedicated, which could justify voting for a candidate who also endorses and supports the deliberate killing of the innocent, abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, human cloning or the recognition of a same-sex relationship as legal marriage. These elements are so fundamental to the common good that they cannot be subordinated to any other cause, no matter how good.

These arguments seem to imply that a candidate’s support for abortion or same-sex marriage are absolutely disqualifying, so that the principle of double effect cannot justify voting for such a candidate even when there is no viable alternative candidate who does not support these things.

However, that is a more stringent position than the Church and moral theologians have traditionally taken, and on closer inspection Cardinal Burke does not seem to intend it. For he goes on to say:

A Catholic may vote for a candidate who, while he supports an evil action, also supports the limitation of the evil involved, if there is no better candidate. For example, a candidate may support procured abortion in a limited number of cases but be opposed to it otherwise. In such a case, the Catholic who recognizes the immorality of all procured abortions may rightly vote for this candidate over another, more unsuitable candidate in an effort to limit the circumstances in which procured abortions would be considered legal. Here the intention of the Catholic voter, unable to find a viable candidate who would stop the evil of procured abortion by making it illegal, is to reduce the number of abortions by limiting the circumstances in which it is legal. This is not a question of choosing the lesser evil, but of limiting all the evil one is able to limit at the time…

Thus, a Catholic who is clear in his or her opposition to the moral evil of procured abortion could vote for a candidate who supports the limitation of the legality of procured abortion, even though the candidate does not oppose all use of procured abortion, if the other candidate(s) do not support the limitation of the evil of procured abortion. Of course, the end in view for the Catholic must always be the total conformity of the civil law with the moral law, that is, ultimately the total elimination of the evil of procured abortion.

Similarly, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, in a 2004 memo which emphasizes the necessity of Catholic politicians and voters to oppose abortion and euthanasia, allows that:

When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.

Naturally, among the proportionate reasons that may justify such a vote would be that the alternative viable candidates are even worse on issues like abortion and euthanasia, as Cardinal Burke says. Burke adds some further important points:

[M]aterial cooperation… is morally permissible when certain conditions are met. With respect to the question of voting, these conditions include the following: 1) there is no viable candidate who supports the moral law in its full integrity; 2) the voter opposes the immoral practices espoused by the candidate, and votes for the candidate only because of his or her promotion of morally good practices; and 3) the voter avoids giving scandal by telling anyone, who may know for whom he or she has voted, that he or she did so to advance the morally good practices the candidate supports, while remaining opposed to the immoral practices the candidate endorses and promotes.

This third condition merits special emphasis. Some who argue for voting for Trump as the less bad of two bad options have also been very critical of those who publicly criticize Trump for his betrayal of the pro-life cause and of social conservatives. Such criticism, they worry, might lose him votes. But as Burke’s remarks indicate, one problem with this attitude is that it threatens to give scandal. It “sends the message” that social conservatives put politics over principle, and that winning elections is more important to them than the ends for which they are supposed to be winning elections in the first place, such as protecting innocent life and the institution of marriage. I would add that another problem is that if politicians who take immoral positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the like are not publicly criticized for doing so, this will encourage them to continue taking these positions in the future, or even more extreme positions. Such politicians should be made to fear that they will lose votes, since nothing else is likely to deter them.

There is a further consideration. As Germain Grisez points out in his treatment of the ethics of voting in Volume 2 of The Way of the Lord Jesus:

Since politics is an ongoing process, votes can have important political effects even when not decisive. The size of the vote by which a candidate wins often affects the candidate’s power while in office. Hence, it usually is worthwhile to use one’s vote to widen the margin by which a good candidate wins or narrow the margin by which a bad one wins. Moreover, the size of a losing candidate’s vote often determines whether he or she will again be nominated or run for the same office or another one. From this perspective, too, it often is worthwhile to use one’s vote for a good candidate or against a bad one. (p. 870)

Here is one way this consideration is relevant to the question at hand. Suppose Trump not only won the election, but won by a wide margin, or won without losing a significant number of socially conservative voters. This would encourage the GOP in the future to maintain Trump’s changes to the party and continue its trajectory in a more socially liberal direction. But suppose instead that Trump won by a very narrow margin, or won but lost many socially conservative voters in the process, or lost because many socially conservative voters defected. That would encourage the GOP to reverse course, and move back in a more socially conservative direction lest it permanently alienate a major part of its traditional voter base.

I have been emphasizing abortion and same-sex marriage, but obviously there are other important issues too. On inflation, crime, immigration, appointing judges, and so on, Harris is in my opinion manifestly far worse than Trump. Indeed, the Democrats in general are in my view now so extremely irresponsible on these matters that voting for them is unimaginable even apart from their depraved views on abortion, marriage, transgenderism, and related issues. It is important to acknowledge, however, that even if he is not as bad as the Democrats, Trump too has grave deficiencies even apart from his betrayal of social conservatives. The most serious of these is his attempt, after the 2020 election, to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to set aside Electoral College votes from states Trump contested–something Pence had no authority to do. This was a very grave affront to the rule of law, and should have been sufficient to prevent Republican voters from ever nominating him again.

But they did nominate him, so the question is what to do now, in light of the principles I’ve just been setting out. The first thing to say is that, though other issues are of course important, competing candidates’ positions on matters such as abortion and marriage are most important. For Catholics and others committed to a natural law approach to politics, comparing candidates’ positions on these matters is the first and most fundamental step in determining how to vote, and only after that should other issues be considered. And as I have already said, the fact that Harris and Walz are worse than Trump on these issues suffices to disqualify them, by the criteria of Catholic moral theology I’ve been discussing. The question is not whether to vote for Trump or Harris–no one should vote for Harris. The question is whether to vote for Trump or instead to vote for neither of the major candidates (by voting for a third party candidate, or for a write-in candidate, or by leaving this part of the ballot blank).

The argument for voting for Trump is that Harris and the Democrats would do far more damage to the country, not least in the respects social conservatives most care about. The argument for sitting the election out is that the GOP must be punished–either by losing or by only narrowly winning–for moving in a socially liberal direction, since its doing so will do enormous damage to the country in the long run unless the loss of votes convinces the party to reverse course.

These are in my opinion both powerful arguments. And together they imply that the least bad result would be one where Trump wins, but only narrowly, and in particular in such a way that it is manifest that the GOP will in future lose the votes of social conservatives (and thus lose elections) if it does not reverse the socially liberal direction Trump has taken it in. Unfortunately, the individual voter cannot guarantee this result, because he can control only how he votes, not how others vote. He can’t ensure that Trump gets just enough votes narrowly to win, but loses enough votes to punish the GOP for its betrayal of social conservatives.

But there are nevertheless some general considerations to guide socially conservative voters here. One of them is that those who reside in states that Trump will definitely not win anyway should not vote for him, but either abstain or vote for some other conservative candidate as a protest. For example, I live in California (which Trump will definitely lose anyway) and I will not vote for him, but will instead, as a protest, cast a write-in vote for Ron DeSantis (who in my opinion was clearly the candidate GOP primary voters should have chosen–though that is neither here nor there for present purposes). I have also publicly been very critical of Trump’s betrayal of social conservatives, and have tried to do what I can in my capacity as a writer to encourage others to make their displeasure known.

Meanwhile, socially conservative voters in swing states could, by the criteria set out by Ratzinger and Burke, justify voting for Trump as the less bad of two bad candidates. But a condition on their doing so is that they must neither approve of nor keep silent about Trump’s betrayal of the unborn and of social conservatives. They must make their disapproval publicly known in whatever way they are able, so as to avoid scandal and pressure the GOP to reverse the socially liberal course Trump is putting it on.

The aim of this strategy is, again, to prevent the grave damage that Harris would do to the country, while at the same time preventing the long-term grave damage that would be done to the country by having both major parties become pro-choice and socially liberal. Trump’s winning is necessary for the first, and his winning only narrowly and in the face of strong social conservative resistance is necessary for the second.

That, anyway, is my considered opinion. I welcome constructive criticism. But I ask my fellow social conservatives who disagree with me seriously to consider the gravity of the situation Trump has put us in, and the imperative not to let partisan passions overwhelm reason and charity when debating what to do about it. Thomas More, patron saint of statesmen, pray for us.

(Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on Dr. Feser’s blog in a slightly different form and is reprinted here with the author’s kind permission.)

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