In defense of voting for a third party presidential candidate

Holding Fast: A case study in trade policy: Maine paper mills reveal complexities of free trade

In an election year where almost nothing has gone as expected, one of the biggest surprises may be the critique of free trade that has arisen from the populist wings of both parties. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders railed against the detrimental effects of globalization in their respective primaries, and both performed far above the expectations of the party leaders who largely support the globalist agenda of free trade and open borders. Even Hillary Clinton, who in the not-too-distant past pined for a “hemispheric common market,” has hopped aboard the trade skeptic bandwagon.
While I regard these challenges to free trade orthodoxy as a largely positive development, the rhetoric surrounding the issue has unfortunately not risen above the generally depressing tenor of this election cycle. Where Trump could make good points about the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of free trade, he instead blames Clinton for her part in every bad trade deal of the past two decades and the resulting demise of America’s once-prosperous manufacturing sector.
This gives the misleading impression that Clinton and her free trade deals are responsible for the struggles of every community that has suffered from a loss in manufacturing jobs. While trade is undeniably an important factor in explaining the decline of the American economy’s manufacturing sector, the reality is far more complicated.
A good case study in the mixed costs and benefits of free trade is the Maine pulp and paper industry. For the first half of the 20th century, Maine led the nation in paper production. Today, there are only six mills with operating paper machines, and those that still make paper are doing so at a fraction of their former capacity. At first glance, this looks like the perfect example of an industry destroyed by international competition enabled by bad trade deals. But a closer look reveals a more complex picture than this “Trumpian” narrative might suggest.
On the one hand, international competition has certainly taken its toll on Maine paper mills. Earlier this year, a mill partially owned by the New York Times in Madison announced that it would be shutting down. This closure was at least somewhat due to competition coming from a mill in Nova Scotia that produces a similar paper and receives subsidies from the Canadian government. Despite the imposition of a 20 percent tariff on the mill’s exports, the depreciation of the Canadian dollar has kept the imported product cheaper than what the Madison mill could produce domestically.
But to blame the industry’s recent struggles on free trade would be to ignore other economic strains that have put pressure on Maine’s mills. One major factor is the decrease in demand for paper products prompted by the increase in the availability of e-books and digital news sources. This trend is evidently not going to reverse itself in the future, so mills that fail to adapt in some way to the shrinking market for paper products will lose out to competition from mills both foreign and domestic.
An example of a Maine mill that has effectively planned for the future is Woodland Pulp in Baileyville, which is in the process of commissioning two new paper machines. These machines will produce products such as toilet paper and paper towels, which are not quite as vulnerable to changes in demand prompted by technological improvements. And for Woodland Pulp, international markets have been a key to its survival, as the Hong Kong firm that owns it is responsible for investing millions of dollars in capital improvements at the mill.
On its surface, the Maine pulp and paper industry appears to be the perfect example of a once-prosperous American industry brought to its knees by the increased international competition brought on by free trade. But there are many factors that complicate this narrative. Technological advances and energy costs have been more decisive factors in the most recent mill closures, and while competition in international markets has certainly pushed some mills to the brink, others have stayed afloat only because of foreign investment.
The complexity of the issue unfortunately means that both sides of the debate are prone to oversimplification. The lesson we should take from the example of the Maine paper industry is that neither protectionism nor unrestricted free trade will solve the problems faced by U.S. manufacturers. The populist anger directed against free trade has its source in legitimate grievances, but real solutions require a more careful attention to the economic realities facing each industry that has been adversely affected by trade. Perhaps it is too much to ask for such attention to policy details from the candidates in this year’s election, but hope springs eternal.

Holding Fast: The perils of populism: Brexit and America's political landscape

One salient feature of this year’s electoral season has been the resurgence of populism as a potent political force. This came as a shock to many in the United States, but if we look elsewhere in the world we will find that ours is not an isolated case. Last spring, the United Kingdom (U.K.) saw a similar wave of populist resentment sweep the nation in the “Brexit” vote in which the U.K. bid an unceremonious “adieu” to the European Union (E.U.). The unexpected nature and tremendous consequences of that vote have drawn obvious comparisons to our own situation and, for that reason, it might be helpful to look to the U.K.’s handling of Brexit in considering how America moves forward from this election.
The big issue currently facing the U.K. government is how it can obey the will of the people by leaving the E.U. while also following proper constitutional procedure. A recent High Court ruling has thrown a wrench in the government’s plan to start negotiations with other E.U. nations by requiring Parliament’s approval before it can begin. It is a complicated issue. Basically, Prime Minister Theresa May had planned on negotiating the terms of Brexit under the powers of royal prerogative that give Her Majesty’s Government the power to make decisions regarding international treaties. This is how May and her cabinet intended to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and trigger the exit from the E.U. in accordance with the will of the majority of citizens.
But the court’s ruling asserted the sovereignty of Parliament over any action that would affect the rights of citizens. And because Brexit revokes certain rights granted to U.K. citizens under the 1972 European Communities Act, it is necessary for Parliament to give its approval before any negotiations take place. The government had already planned on repealing that act in Parliament, but would have only done so near the end of negotiations to finalize the formal split. In effect, this ruling has allowed Parliament to get involved at the beginning of the process, giving members of parliament a greater say regarding the terms of the U.K.’s exit.
Not many people believe that Parliament will not go through with Brexit at this point. But the ruling does raise some very interesting questions about the role of popular sovereignty not only in the U.K., but anywhere else where the will of the majority bristles against the established rule of law. It is important that constitutional norms are followed, but at the same time Parliament must do its best to respect the will of the people as it promised to do before the vote, no matter how much individual members may oppose the outcome.
The problem with the Brexit vote is that it did not really do an adequate job of expressing the will of the people regarding the terms of the exit from the E.U. The Leave campaign made some misleading promises they knew they couldn’t keep and it appears that those tasked with executing the exit are now the targets of populist resentment. In the event that Brexit doesn’t significantly affect Britain’s immigration levels or remove it from the European common market, it is precisely the politicians who made these promises that will pay the price for betraying the will of the people.
And lest we think that this is only Westminster’s problem, we should remember that the popular mandate to exit the E.U. was not really the will of the U.K. as a whole, but more like the will of England and Wales against the protestations of Scotland and Northern Ireland. In a union already strained by multiple rounds of devolution and the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, this divide makes the future of the U.K. even more uncertain. Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish nationalists are already threatening to hold another referendum should the terms of the exit be unfavorable to the parliament in Edinburgh. So in addition to a crisis of legitimacy surrounding its political institutions, the U.K. may be facing an even more pressing threat to its continued existence.
All of these issues may be specific to the U.K., but they can nonetheless serve as a warning to America, which has now seen the same populist forces wreak havoc on an election of its own. Whatever you may think of Trump’s victory, it is hard to deny the importance of the forces he has unleashed in American politics. The will of the people has triumphed over every convention that would normally have prevented this outcome. If we consider the health of democracy at the moment, we can certainly find some good and some bad. It is at once encouraging to see the will of the people prevail and also very alarming to consider its possible impact on the rule of law in this country. We would do well to consider how this has played out following the Brexit vote, and hopefully learn a thing or two about how to deal with the new realities of populism in America.

Holding Fast

In defense of voting for a third party presidential candidate

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Ryan Ward

Columnist

October 28, 2016

As Election Day approaches, the prospect of actually filling out my absentee ballot and mailing it to the city clerk becomes more and more dreadful. After this year-and-a-half-long nightmare of an election, the point is fast approaching for me to stop griping about the state of the election and choose the person who I believe is most fit to serve as President of the United States for the next four years. The problem is that I believe the only two plausible candidates are both thoroughly unfit for the job.

I will spare you my litany of complaints against each candidate and quickly sum up the reasons I will not be voting for either one. Donald Trump is an immoral man who has neither the temperament nor the mental capacity to serve as Commander-in-Chief. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has quite a track record of making big decisions in a variety of situations, but her foreign policy experience indicates that the consequences of her judgments are quite often disastrous. But at the same time, I don’t think either candidate is so terrible that I feel compelled to cast a vote for their opponent. So at the end of the day, I am left with the options of either voting for a third-party candidate or writing in one of the many people I think is more qualified than the two major-party candidates.

But in our two-party political system, such a decision is bound to be open to questioning. One objection many political commentators raise is that no matter how unsavory the options may be, it is necessary to vote for the "lesser of two evils." Trump and Clinton supporters both employ this argument and each side wants us to understand that the other candidate is obviously the greater evil. This argument gives great moral significance to the act of voting, for if one abstains from voting for the lesser evil, then he or she is culpable for the consequences should the greater evil be elected.

But this argument against voting third-party is rather short on substantive moral reasoning. It employs a consequentialist definition of morality, which basically means the moral worth of a decision is determined only by looking forward to the consequences of the action. For example, if a vote for Trump will result in an increase of economic inequality, his voters can be held morally responsible for this consequence of their vote. The problem with applying such reasoning to an election is that we cannot be certain about the actual consequences of voting for either candidate. I have a feeling that a Trump presidency would be more disastrous than a Clinton presidency, but this is no more than a feeling, for it could very well turn out to be the other way around. Whatever may happen after Election Day, there is no way to read backwards from an imagined future state to supply us with a moral imperative on how to vote in the present.

Another objection I have encountered is the more practical argument that by voting third-party I will "throw away" my vote and shirk my democratic duty to choose between the given options. In one sense this objection is more convincing, for there is certainly no chance that whoever I vote for will be the next president. But this fact does not justify the conclusion that such a vote is wasted. It may very well be the case that I do not want my vote to count for either candidate and that I would like my objections to be registered in this way. A vote for a candidate with long odds does not indicate naiveté, but is rather a conscious decision to abstain from voting for one of two unacceptable candidates. Doing so does not entail a rejection of our nation’s democratic principles, but only involves a considered judgment regarding the fitness of these particular candidates to serve as our nation’s president.

So to those of you who, like me, are not satisfied with the given options, I offer you this advice. These two objections, the one moral and the other practical, are not good reasons for you to betray your conscience and vote for a candidate who you find morally or politically unacceptable. Refusing the options given to you is not a retreat from the hard realities of politics to the moral high ground, but is a morally defensible action that is perfectly consistent with your duties as an American citizen. If you are also repulsed by the thought of voting for Clinton or Trump, I urge you to vote for whoever best fits your idea of a good president, even if that person is your favorite professor or family dog. You may not be voting for the next president, but that doesn’t make your participation in the election any less valuable.

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