Category: religion

The Intersection of Politics and Philosophy

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September 21, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

Last November, I first introduced Abel and Cain as a narrative device to explore two sides of an issue (Substack, Innocent Investor). I hope readers have enjoyed some of the arguments, whether you agreed with them or not. I often found it difficult to adhere to the discipline of reaching for arguments and reasoning that I did not agree with. Could it be that there was a bias in my thinking? Perish the thought! The boys are going fishing for a while as I analyze opposing perspectives in a more traditional format.

In politics, we contrast progressive and conservative ideologies. In philosophy, we contrast subjective and objective viewpoints. Let’s combine these two axes of comparison and look at some intersections. What does it mean to be conservative and subjective? Someone like Adam Smith might fit that description. The free market was an emerging consensus of individuals and businesses trying to satisfy their needs. He believed that this exchange, despite its flaws, would improve the general welfare of society.

What about progressive and subjective? Progressives want to manage the agenda in schools to instill the “correct” social attitudes in children, to steer their subjective experience along a progressive ideology. In his recently published book The Progress Trap, Ben Cobley (2025) writes that schools manage their reading lists and curricula to ‘decolonize’ the subject matter students are exposed to. Books that tell a historical narrative from the viewpoint of the colonizing nations are removed from the curricula. Is this a version of Fahrenheit 451?

Conservatives act to implant their ideology in the subjective experience of the population. In 2022, Florida passed the “Florida Parental Rights in Education Act.” After amendments in 2023, the policy required the removal of books with any gay character in them from K-12 school libraries (Source). Like the progressives, conservatives want to instill the “correct” attitudes in children.

Can conservative and progressives agree on what are the “correct” attitudes? It seems unlikely. In the preface to his book, Cobley identifies one cause of the policy failures and disagreements we have. We assume “that we are right and good and can only cause good to occur in the world, while our opponents can only cause bad” (p. vii). He notes that progressives rely on social science as their authority. They see the world in a mechanistic way of cause and effect, oppressors and victims. Arnold Kling (2017) has written about the three languages of politics and echoes the same point. Conservatives rely on cultural and religious traditions as an objective authority. In Kling’s typology conservatives view the world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism.

Is there a middle ground, an alternative authority that might resolve their differences? People form groups based on an allegiance to an authority, and group allegiances are not easily changed. There are several methods to effect change, some directed toward the subjective, others employing a more objective approach.

Subjective methods use persuasion to get others to change their authority allegiance. These include essays, videos, and debates that appeal to rationale as well as emotion. A more negative type of persuasion is ridicule, often used to silence opposition rather than convert opinion. Activist groups on both the right and left organize ridicule campaigns on social media to attack unwanted behavior and opinions.

In an objective approach, interest groups win control of civil institutions to exert change by legislation or policy. The Florida law mentioned above is an example of civil force by conservative groups. On the left we see mandates of diversity, equity and inclusion training in college curriculums. Copley writes that progressives have a “comforting illusion that things will inevitably get better so long as they and their allies are in control of things” (p. vii). Conservatives have a similar illusion but a different goal, the preservation of civil and moral order.

Critical to any human society are its resources. Progressives promote policies and investments that preserve the environment. The costs, both in terms of money and convenience, are a small price to pay for the benefits of a healthy ecosystem. The resources that conservatives care about are cultural and religious. These are the glue, the connections that evolve between members of a society. If preserving the environment means the sacrifice of these community connections, then conservatives would rather preserve those connections rather than the environment.

In a large multicultural democracy like ours, groups compete to design or control those institutions which shape the subjective experience of people in society. Since children are so impressionable, school curricula can become a battleground for ideologies.

Beginning in the 19th century, schools in states and local districts have struggled to control the religious traditions of students in their charge. A Wikipedia article has a history of the conflict over school prayer (Source). Since the 16th century, Protestants and Catholics have quarreled over Christian text and doctrine. Today, the Catholics include the Apocrypha, early Christian writings, in their Biblical canon. Most Protestants do not. Catholic doctrine holds that God inspired the authors of the Bible. Some Protestant sects believe that the Bible is the literal word of God.

Naturally, these two religious denominations brought their disputes into the schoolroom. Ending the practice of prayer in schools came not from a Christian denomination but a Jewish family disturbed that their son was forced to pray in a Christian manner. In Engel v Vitale (1962), the Supreme Court ruled that publicly funded schools must not promote any particular religion. They based their decision on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that prohibited the federal government from favoring a particular religion (Source). The Fourteenth Amendment extended those prohibitions to the state governments as well. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University writes that it is “one of the most unpopular decisions in Supreme Court history” (Source). Numerous attempts to amend the constitution have failed to reach the required two-thirds majorities in Congress. Lastly could the current conservative court overturn that decision? In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), it allowed private prayer in public places, but it has reaffirmed that 1962 precedent prohibiting state-sponsored religious practice.

Is this the familiar battle between science and religion or between secularists and religiously affiliated? According to Pew Research, 70% of Americans are religiously affiliated and 90% of those affiliated are Christian (Source). In the battle between Christian sects for control of the classroom, Christians have lost the battle to secularists. Could the many Christian sects join together, agree on some central canon, then pass an amendment to the Constitution? Agreement over religious doctrine is a tall hurdle and amending the Constitution is particularly difficult.

In addition to persuasion, ridicule and civil regulations, governments can enforce ideologies through police force. In the former Soviet Union, the KGB suppressed unwanted thought by arrest and exile to the Gulag. In Nazi Germany, neighbors were encouraged to “rat” on their neighbors if they suspected any anti-Nazi opinion or behavior. In the three decades following World War 2, Red Guards in Maoist China punished their citizens for incorrect thinking by beatings and re-education in labor camps. Today, the citizens of North Korea are brutally tortured for expressing disloyalty to the Kim family who rules the nation.

What drives human beings to replicate their ideologies? While they may lack substance, they promote social cohesion among the followers, and endow the leaders with economic benefits. In his book The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson (2012) described a critical aspect of human societies, their eusociality. First coined in the 1960s to describe bee colonies, Wilson expanded the term to describe the ability of human beings to build multigenerational societies and cultures. Biological organisms evolve through discrete or sporadic genetic mutations that provide an adaptive advantage. The evolution of ideologies is not discrete, but a continuous adaptation to social, cultural and political pressures.

In E. O. Wilson’s analysis, human societies evolve through the conflict between group cooperation and individual competition. Individuals struggle within each group to define the group’s shared values and outlook. As I’ve shown above, there is also individual cooperation within each group to win the competition between groups for control of a society’s institutions. The tension between the individual and the collective, the subjective experience and the objective shared environment, drives change in any human society.

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Photo by Dimmis Vart on Unsplash

Cobley, B. (2025). The progress trap: The modern left and the false authority of history. Polity Press. Available from Amazon

Kling, A. (2017). The three languages of politics: Talking across the political divides (Rev. ed.). Cato Institute. Available from https://www.cato.org/three-languages-of-politics

Wilson, E. O. (2012). The social conquest of earth. Liveright Publishing.

Conflicting Principles

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May 11, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

This is part of a series on persistent problems. The conversations are voiced by Abel, a Wilsonian with a faith that government can ameliorate social and economic injustices to improve society’s welfare, and Cain, who believes that individual autonomy, the free market and the price system promote the greatest good.

Abel looked across the restaurant at a family seated around several tables. “I wonder why the kid is dressed in white.”

Cain turned to look. “Oh, yeah. First Communion, maybe? I think it’s that time of year.”

Abel spread some honey on his toast. “Last week, we were talking about charter schools. A few days later, I was listening to a Supreme Court case about a charter school in Oklahoma” (Source).

Cain asked, “What do you mean listen to?”

Abel replied, “Lawyers for both sides argue their case in front of the Supreme Court and the justices ask them questions. ‘Oral arguments,’ it’s called (Source).”

Cain nodded. “I know about oral arguments. I didn’t know they were broadcast.”

Abel finished chewing. “They started that in the pandemic, I think. If you subscribe to the Oyez podcast, you can listen to it a day or two after the argument. Their web site has a lot on past court cases (Source). There’s also a link on the Supreme Court’s web site where we can listen to them live (Source).”

Cain asked, “So what was the case about?”

Abel said, “Oklahoma has a state charter board that approves or denies applications to become charter schools. A few years ago, the state board approved an application for a Catholic charter school named St. Isidore, allowing them to freely follow their religious beliefs.”

Cain interrupted, “Wait. I thought charter schools were publicly funded by taxpayer dollars. What about separation of church and state?’

Abel nodded. “That’s what the state attorney general wondered.”

Cain asked, “A Democrat? I thought Oklahoma was fairly red.”

Abel shook his head. “No, a Republican. The AG’s office brought the case to the state’s Supreme Court, arguing that the charter should be nullified. The court agreed. Both the school and the state’s chartering board brought the case before the federal Supreme Court, where the two cases got joined together.”

Cain raised his eyebrows in mock drama. “So one state agency, the AG, is pitted against another state agency, the charter board.”

Abel laughed. “And there’s some political machinations on the court.”

Cain twirled an imaginary moustache. “Politics on the Supreme Court? Surely, you jest, my man!”

Abel smiled. “Justice Barrett, one of the conservative justices, recused herself from the case so there are just eight justices, a five to three split between conservatives and liberals. If the three liberal justices can bring Chief Justice Roberts to their side, the decision would result in a 4-4 tie, which would let the Oklahoma Supreme Court decision stand.”

Cain asked, “So what are the issues both sides are fighting over?”

Abel put his coffee cup down. “Before I get to that, let me get back to the politics. So the justices direct their questions to the lawyers for either side, but the questions are designed to bring up points that the conservatives and liberals think are important to their argument.”

Cain replied, “Indirectly steering the debate as the justices hope to sway Roberts.”

Abel smiled. “Yeah. So the liberals focus on the establishment clause in the First Amendment that prevents the government from favoring one religion over another.”

Cain looked puzzled. “I thought charter schools were private.”

Abel replied, “They are, but they are publicly funded, and they have to follow the same rules as other public schools. They can’t choose which students they admit.”

Cain interrupted, “We talked about that last week. The schools are not supposed to do that. Some states are rather lax in how they enforce that rule.”

Abel nodded. “Good reminder. The school has to get approval for their curriculum, and the state closely monitors the school to make sure that it meets the state’s requirements. The state may even have a representative on the charter school’s board. Plus, the state can close the school down. Even though the school is private, the state has a lot of control.”

Cain said, “Reminds me of the debate over independent contractor status. If XYZ company hires someone to do a job, and XYZ has substantial direction and control of how that person performs the work, then that person is an employee, not an independent contractor. XYZ company has to pay employer taxes for whatever money they pay that person.”

Abel nodded. “That’s a good point. It’s the familiar ‘if it quacks like a duck’ argument. So the plaintiffs for the state chartering board and St. Isidore, the charter school, stressed the private ownership of the school, religious freedom and free expression. The respondents, the AG’s office, focused on the control that the state has over St. Isidore and that control makes them an extension of state legitimacy and power.”

Cain looked surprised. “I agree with the AG’s office.”

Abel replied, “I think it’s a case of which precedent do you think should carry the most weight. The conservative justices focused on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment (Source). A charter school must meet minimum curriculum requirements. One of the lawyers said the state even specifies that dangling participles must be taught in English class. But the school can have a focus like science, the arts, or on Chinese language skills, offering some language immersion classes.

Cain interrupted, “That shows how much control the state has. So what was the counter argument from the conservative justices?

Abel replied, “I think it was Kavanaugh who expressed concern about equal treatment. Each charter school can have a different focus, but if a school has a religious focus, that’s unconstitutional?”

Cain tilted his head slightly. “Ok, good point. An American history teacher at St. Isidore could stress Christian principles as fundamental ideas to the founders who wrote the Constitution. If that teacher cited some Bible verses to illustrate those principles, is that legal? The teacher is paid with public taxpayer dollars. Is the government promoting one religion over another?”

Abel argued, “Michael Klarman wrote a book on the founding called Framer’s Coup. At the beginning of the introduction, he cites Madison and Benjamin Rush referring to an ‘Almighty hand’ or the ‘hand of God’ (Source).”

Cain looked skeptical. “Yeah, but they weren’t referring to a specific religion, or even a broad category like Christianity.”

Abel said, “Should a school teacher in a publicly funded institution cite any religion? If the Supreme Court decides that the state can charter religious schools, where does it stop? What if a teacher cited the Koran as embodying the founding principles of the American Constitution?”

Cain smirked. “Not a lot of Muslims in Oklahoma. I could see where Catholics and Protestants would get into a war over this issue. Catholic teaching would stress the Federalist view of government at the founding. More centralized and authoritarian, the one championed by Hamilton. Protestant teaching would stress the anti-Federalist view associated with Jefferson. Decentralized power, more autonomy at the local level.”

Abel argued, “But both of those views could be taught without referencing back to the Bible or the Koran. Religious traditions provoke too much dissent and violence. The founders wanted to stress constitutional principles that bound the thirteen colonies together, not tore them apart. The European powers were already trying to do that. In Federalist #10, Madison noted the conflict of political factions with differing regional interests (Source). He hoped that the Constitution would balance the tension between national and local interests.”

Cain nodded. “Getting back to the issues involved, you’re saying it’s the First against the Fourteenth? The conservative justices and the Catholic charter school use the 14th Amendment to justify their opinion. Liberal justices and the state’s AG office base their arguments on the 1st Amendment.”

Abel smiled. “It’s more complicated. The conservative justices also focused on the free exercise clause in the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has long struggled with the balance between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause (Source). An individual’s free exercise cannot conflict with state interests like public safety and health. As long as a school meets the curriculum requirements, it has satisfied other state interests. Is it not entitled to express its views? If other charter schools can focus on climate change and environmental science, why can’t a school express its religious views?”

Cain sighed. “So the First and the Fourteenth Amendments are bound together in a way.”

Abel nodded. “Remember that in 2015’s Obergefell case, a conservative court decided that same sex couples had a right to marry (Source). Equal protection. That decision angered some conservative religious groups. The conservative justices seem to favor that combination of equal protection and free exercise over a state’s interest in remaining religiously neutral. I think Alito mentioned the Masterpiece Cake Shop case.”

Cain replied, “Yeah, the owner of the shop didn’t want to make a custom cake for a gay couple’s wedding. Against his religious beliefs, he said. The state said he had to serve the public and couldn’t discriminate against a customer because of his religious beliefs. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed. The federal Supreme Court overruled and said that a custom made cake was a form of expression protected under the First Amendment (Source).”

Abel argued, “Yeah, but the state did not fund the cake shop with taxpayer dollars. Alito sees only the context that will support his judicial instincts. He wrote the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, reasoning that the Constitution did not give a woman a right to an abortion because it was not deeply rooted in American tradition (Source). His ‘reasoning’ conveniently left out the fact that the Constitution as written in the 18th and 19th centuries gave women few rights. They were subservient to men. That’s the bubble of reason that Alito lives in.”

Cain sighed. “Well, remember that he’s writing the majority opinion, so its not just his reasoning.”

Abel shook his head. “Basing decisions on ‘history and tradition’ is flawed. It invites the justices to pick and choose only the history and tradition that supports their biases.”

Cain laughed. “Boy, we could spend a few days on that topic. I do think that the conservative justices are opening a can of worms on this one. If they are going to allow states to charter publicly funded religious schools, some state charter board is going to discriminate against a particular religion. The board will cover their tracks for sure, claiming that the applicant did not meet the state’s curriculum requirements. The applicant will file a lawsuit, claiming religious discrimination. This is an activist court issuing decisions based on unclear reasoning.”

Abel interrupted, “Unclear reasoning. You are being generous.”

Cain shrugged. “The lower courts don’t know how to apply that reasoning. Inevitably, more cases will come to the court, and it will clarify its reasoning.”

Abel smirked. “This court will be dominated by this kind of thinking for decades to come. Anyway, let’s move on from court stuff. Last week, we were talking about problems in education. One of the problems we didn’t discuss is the expectations of parents. Mom and dad might expect school instruction for their child to have the same elements as when they went to school. Like multiplication tables in grammar school or some in high school who had to memorize a poem by Shakespeare.”

Cain nodded. “Well, I thought it was reassuring that they are still teaching dangling participles. There was much more focus on rote learning when we were going to school.”

Abel continued, “That rote learning helped kids learn some basic job skills, like how to make change. Today, some might argue that kids rely on the cash register or the computer to do the math for them so why should kids learn basic math skills? I’d argue that, without those basic skills like percentages and such, kids will become easy prey when they grow up. People can dazzle them with fancy figures that they can’t follow and sell them financial products that hurt rather than help them.”

Cain laughed. “They will ask ChatGPT for financial advice, I suppose. They’ll become like the society in the movie ‘Wall-E’ where they are totally reliant on machines for everything. But what kid thinks about investments? That’s far in the future.”

Abel argued, “Maybe at a very young age, you’re right. A month from now is a long time in a young kid’s mind. But there have been good experiments with high schoolers managing stock portfolios.”

Cain replied, “Goes to show that incentives matter. In the search for YouTube subscribers, a kid will rip a favorite album and upload it to YouTube, complete with notes and navigation to each track in the album. The kid will see little money for all that effort because the recording artist will monetize any ad revenue, but just the prospect of getting more subscribers gets the kid to spend that time and effort. We need to apply those lessons to school learning.”

Abel looked doubtful. “Look, there’s stages in brain development. At the risk of herding kids to learn the same thing at the same time, we can’t be teaching calculus to sixth graders.”

Cain argued, “We had our daughter in Montessori school for a few years. She was in a classroom with kids of different ages. She was about seven and heard about fractions, told the teacher she wanted to learn about them and the teacher had one of the older girls show her fractions. We need more innovative teaching methods, not rigid curriculum.”

Abel shook his head. “Some kids really struggle with fractions and decimals and need to be taught by someone with more experience. You know, someone who knows different approaches to help them understand. The fault of ‘new math’ when it was taught in the 1970s and 80s was trying to teach kids about rules and how they affect relationships between numbers. It was too abstract for a lot of kids.”

Cain was equivocal. “Well, there were also kids who were good at memorizing. They had memorized that three-eighths was less than a half without really understanding the concept. I remember one kid in fourth grade, I think. To add two fractions, he cross multiplied them even when they had the same base.”

Abel cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

Cain replied, “Like two-fourths plus one-fourth. He didn’t need to find a common denominator and cross multiply because the two fractions already have the same base, which is four. The kid had found that the cross-multiplication procedure got the right answer, so he used that all the time.”

Abel looked puzzled. “What if the problem involved adding a whole number and a fraction, like four plus a half.”

Cain smiled. “He would convert the whole number to a fraction, like make four into a fraction of four over 1, then go through his procedure. He was so resistant when I tried to show him any method that was quicker. ‘I might get the wrong answer,’ he told me.”

Abel lifted an eyebrow. “You know, I’ll bet a lot of people carry that approach into their adulthood. They resist change, new methods of doing things, or new arguments. If we looked closely, we’d probably see that same rigid approach at parent-teacher conferences and city council meetings.”

Cain laughed. “Or on the Supreme Court. Using the same kind of reasoning in two cases that have critical differences. Some justices ignore the different principles involved, brushing the differences aside as unimportant.”

Abel smiled. “Different species of animal tend to follow a well-worn path in the forest, even if there has been some change to the landscape and there is an easier path down to the river, for instance. Do they take the easier path? No. They use the same rule.”

Cain asked, “How do we teach kids that different rules apply in different circumstances? That’s what English and math are all about. That’s the importance of learning a foreign language. We become aware that other languages have different rules than our native language. It makes us more aware of the rules that structure our native language.”

Abel asked, “So what about a public school teaching comparative religions? The kids would learn that each religion has different beliefs, customs and rules for interpreting our relationship with the infinite, our own mortality, and the society around us. Could a public school teach both Islam and Catholicism?”

Cain looked puzzled. “What about the Jewish faith? Or Evangelical beliefs? A good background in comparative religions is a lot to ask of a 4th grade teacher. I still think that the state needs to steer clear of funding religious instruction.”

Abel sighed. “I think this decision will be important. Last week, you mentioned that a third of Rochester’s public schools are charter. One of the lawyers arguing at the Supreme Court mentioned that all of New Orleans public schools are charter (Source). The state, as a whole, has only 11% charter schools, but it’s a growing constituency (Source).”

Cain laid his napkin on the table next to his plate. “Sometimes I think that these problems persist because we hold onto conflicting principles. We want schools to be like a Swiss army knife, a multi-tool that addresses several problems and we can’t agree on priorities. We want people to be housed but we want to preserve the character of our neighborhoods and that makes it difficult to build affordable housing. We want the state to stay out of religion, but we want to preserve free speech and religious freedom.”

Abel nodded. “Maybe that’s the most persistent problem of all. It’s like we’re sitting on a wagon being pulled by two horses and we have no reins to guide the horses. Hey, I see you’re ready to go. Maybe we could talk about that next week.”

Cain laughed as he stood. “I like that horse analogy. My treat this week. See you next week.”

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Image by ChatGPT in response to the prompt: “draw an image of two ghosts styled like Casper the Ghost getting ready to have a boxing match.”

Election Reflections

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August 28, 2016

Let’s pay a visit to an earnest voter…

The Labor Day weekend was a week away and the election campaigns would swing into full gear following the holiday. He had a hard time deciding what to do with his vote in November.  His mom used to make it easy, voting the party ticket no matter what. He heard someone say that they would write in Reagan’s name this election. He told himself that he was more conscientious than that so he reviewed some of the issues.

Climate Change

He thought that climate change was at least partially caused by human activity, so he decided he should probably vote Democratic this election. Republicans were climate deniers, weren’t they?  Hell, some Republicans denied evolution.  Michele Bachmann had announced that she wasn’t running for re-election for her House seat. He thought that she should be put out to pasture where she could do the least harm.  He had read a climate scientist writing that it didn’t matter much anymore, that human activity had already flipped the switch.  Sure, we might be able to make a few small improvements, some amelioration of the damage, but it wasn’t worth arguing with others who preferred to think that climate change was as real as Santa Claus.  What was that song by Chris Rea?  The Road To Hell

White House Short-timers

Obama had a few months left in his second term.  Was he hoping that Iran didn’t do something crazy in the meantime?  Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said (Interview with David Axelrod) that the worst day in an election campaign is the best day working in the White House. Everyday some part of everything that happens in the world came into the White House so the stream of problems was constant.

September was coming up.  Did Obama say a little prayer that there would be no financial crisis like the one that beset former Prez Bush in September 2008?  Bush’s body language in those last few months of his second term screamed out that he wanted to be gone from the flood of problems coming across his desk.  Bush had turned out to be a big government Republican with dramatic big government solutions to the financial crisis.  He had flooded Iraq with lots of cash in 2003.  Then he had wanted $700 billion from Congress.  His Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, had famously handed the Congress a scrap of paper, the most concise emergency bailout plan ever devised.  Hank could have written it on a piece of toilet paper in the men’s room.  $700B!

Rock-em-sock-em big government robot fights for justice

Democrats had been proposing big government solutions to society’s problems for as long as he could remember.  Solutions that cost a lot of money and produced meager or mixed results.  Was it bad execution of a good solution or was it the wrong solution?   The Dems were good at blaming someone or something else when their programs didn’t work very well.  Human greed, Republicans, selfishness, and poverty were the usual suspects.

Republicans blamed most problems on government regulators, Democrats, high taxes, and a loss of Christian values.  Republicans believed that a progressive income tax, the taking of money from one person and giving it to another, was a violation of a person’s property rights.  He agreed with that so maybe he should vote Republican.  But then most Republicans wanted to take away a woman’s right to choose what happened inside of her own body.  That was also a violation of a woman’s property rights, a God given right to privacy. So which property rights should he hope to protect with his vote?  Neither party cared much for the Constitution, that was for sure.

Social mores

At heart he was a classic liberal, or what is now called a moderate Libertarian. Gay marriage, fine.  If transgender people wanted to use the sex of bathroom that they identified with, fine.  His granddaughter had said she didn’t care if some transgender boy wanted to use the bathroom. The stalls had doors.  Dems seemed more libertarian on social issues, but very autocratic on economic issues.  Why couldn’t the Dems or Republicans be libertarian on both social and economic issues?  Because then one of them would be the Libertarian Party, he thought ruefully.  The anti-government anarchists had taken over the Libertarian Party several decades earlier.  Maybe it was time for the moderates to take it back?

Taxes

He didn’t think that politicians in Washington should be using the tax code to correct what they perceived as inequities in society.  It was the Republicans in 2003 who had stopped the practice of penalizing married couples through the tax code.  A Democratic House and Senate had put that one into place in 1971 (1998 article) but it was Nixon, a Republican, who signed the legislation.  Democrats could justify any tax.

The Hammer of God

He didn’t think Bible thumping politicians should be telling us how to live our lives. He was with the Dems on this one.  No, God wasn’t dead.  He was kept alive by politicians who used Him as a rhetorical weapon against the other party. Running for his first term in Congress, Abraham Lincoln, a Whig, had endured accusations that he was not a religious man (Sandburg’s Lincoln bio).  The Whigs had morphed into the Republican Party during the 1850s and now it was the Republicans who used religion as a cudgel against Democrats.  (Obama warning in 2012 race)  Apparently, only Republicans knew God’s will and how to implement it here on earth.  How could he vote for a party that was so conceited and arrogant?

Obamacare

But he also thought that the Federal government had no constitutional right to be telling people that they had to buy health insurance.  Each party wanted to take away people’s rights and freedoms.  As a small employer for several decades, he had often wished that health insurance wasn’t tied to employment. Bigger companies could offer more favorable benefits to good employee prospects, and it was tough to compete with that. Despite his preference for private solutions to societal problems, he wished that there was a program like Medicare for all or no tax write offs for health care benefits.  One or the other.  A public option had been a part of Obama’s 2008 platform (Politifact) but he had not been a particularly strong leader on this one and had encountered resistance from the members of his own party.  The result was Obamacare, a rough draft legislative hodge-podge that was more typical of a preliminary committee product, not a final piece of law.  Democrats just sucked at crafting economic legislation yet, in an ironic twist, they tended to see most of society’s problems as economic ones.  Obama had got his health care legislation passed only to see it used against the Democratic Party in the important census election of 2010, when the Dems lost a large lead and control of the House. Bill Clinton had tried to pass a health care bill in 1993 and lost Democratic control of the Congress to the Republicans in the 1994 election.  The Dems had apparently not learned their lesson.

Security

He couldn’t decide who was going to best keep the country safe.  Republicans seemed to think that Mexicans threatened each American family somehow.  Not all Mexicans, he understood, just illegal Mexicans.  For years, hundreds of thousands of students and visitors had come to the U.S., then overstayed their visas and remained in the U.S. illegally.  According to Republicans, all those other illegals weren’t a problem. Just Mexicans.   The Donald would build a wall.  In 2006, a Republican Congress had approved funds for Homeland Security to build more fences along the southern border.  Neither Democrat or Republican Congresses had been able to move the fence building further along toward actual construction.  Having once solved the problem of building a skating rink in Central Park, the Donald thought that he – and only he – could get this fence thing going.  He wished the Donald good luck in herding 535 fat cats in Congress toward any one project.  As the top Fat Cat, maybe the Donald could make it work.

Crazy vs Experience

Nah, he thought, the Donald was too crazy and inexperienced. Most Presidents were either one or the other, but not both, except for Bill Clinton.  Clinton had been crazy enough to have sex with an intern in the Oval Office and inexperienced enough to propose a universal health care plan.  He had won the Presidency with the lowest popular vote in the country’s history yet Clinton had thought he had some clear mandate. Even strong Democratic control of both the House and Senate could not help him and within two years, Clinton certainly contributed to the loss of  both the House and Senate to the Republicans.

Split the vote

Several decades ago a co-worker had shared his personal voting system.  “Split your ticket in the hope that the government stays split,” the guy had said.  That way the politicians could do the least harm.  Maybe that’s what he would do this election.  His congressional vote didn’t matter.  Few Congressional districts were contested in the general election and his district had voted Democratic for more than forty years.  Republicans would likely keep the House anyway.  Democrats might just take the Senate so he should vote Democratic to make it more likely.  That would help split the Congress.  That still left his vote for President.

Supreme Court

Over and over again he had heard that this Presidential election was a vote for the direction of the Supreme Court for the next decade or more.  His secret hope was that the Court would remain at eight members. If there was no clear majority on the Court then there should be no precedence set in Constitutional law.

Libertarian?

Maybe he should vote for the Libertarian Candidate, Gary Johnson?  Johnson seemed neither inexperienced or crazy other than the fact that anyone who runs as a third party candidate in this country must be crazy.  If the Dems took the Senate, they could simply block any nominee to the court and keep the Court at 8 members.  He could tell himself that a Libertarian vote was a combined nod to both the Democrat and Republican parties.  It would not be first time that he had split his vote but it had been quite some time since it did it in the hopes of a split government.

Baseball

Having resolved all those election issues, he turned his attention to the World Series schedule.  If the series went to seven games, the last game would be played on November 4th, at the height of pre-election coverage and just a few days before the election. (Schedule) If the Cubs were in the World Series for the first time since 1945, the attention of many voters might easily be diverted to the historic match up.  Let’s say the Cubs won the series for the first time since 1908 and let’s imagine that the series went to seven games, with the final game played on Friday, the 4th. KC Royals’ fans had celebrated their 2015 series extra inning win over the Mets just two days after the final game.  He could imagine that millions of Chicago residents and former residents would be there to celebrate the event on Sunday perhaps and the festivities rolling into Monday.  Although Illinois was usually a solid vote for the Democratic Presidential contender, he imagined the possibility that thousands of Illinois voters, distracted by the post-Series events, didn’t vote in Tuesday’s election.  Like Florida in 2000, the results turned on the votes of a few in Illinois and Donald Trump won the Presidency because the Cubs won the series.  Nah, he thought, sounds too much like a bad movie script.

Next week: a troubling long term trend that will hurt many investors