I thought I was going to read only one or two of the entries, but at lunch yesterday I wound up reading this entire symposium. The American Conservative asked a bunch of contributors to discuss, very briefly, what decision they had made regarding a vote for president (including not voting at all). (I was invited to participate in this symposium but by this point these questions have totally drained me.)
Now the point of my sharing this with you is not to have you say, “This one commentator is terrible! I disagree with him on X!” These are conservatives and libertarians of all different stripes. You can’t possibly agree with them all. What I like about this symposium is that nearly all the contributions are interesting to read, are serious and intelligent (a couple of them I rolled my eyes at, but only a couple), the answers they offer are backed up by sound logic, and you would never see such a symposium in any other “conservative” magazine, where everyone is a clone on an issue like this.
I also like the way Jeremy Beer deals with the “I have to vote for Mitt because he’s pro-life” objection. I’m sure some people missed his sarcasm, but that’s to be expected; recall Woods’s Law #3: “No matter how obvious you make a satire, someone will think you are being serious.”
