…On your own head, that is. A.k.a. cutting off your nose to spite your face. According to Bill Bennett on today’s NRO, that’s what disgruntled conservatives will be doing if they stay home on election day.

Speaking as a disgruntled (or, at least, as P.G. Wodehouse would have said, far from gruntled) conservative, I am receptive to Bill’s argument. The dire things he warns of–foam-flecked lefties in charge of key congressional committees, more social engineers on the SCOTUS, etc.–are dire indeed. And one must always guard against letting the pettily personal (“How dare they ignore what **I** want!”) from ruling one’s public decisions.

The only case for staying home is the one that says “the worse, the better.” This case is, though, a nontrivial one.

It is in the nature of U.S. politics to be dominated by two huge parties. If both parties favor the same things (ever more public spending, open borders, federally-imposed PC, increased regulation of everything), with the only difference being a somewhat slower approach by one party versus a somewhat faster approach by the other; or if the parties favor things that, while different, are equally foolish (unilateral “nation-building” vs. multilateral UN-olatry); then it is perfectly rational to say: “I shall do what I can, with my vote, to register disapproval of this bipartisan harmony.”

When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in 1939, Evelyn Waugh exulted that the enemy was at last “out in the open, huge and hideous.” Perhaps we should give the American people a taste of the Left in power, huge and hideous. Perhaps then they will turn decisively to the Right. Reagan followed Carter, remember.