Reject Third Parties in 2024 - American Reformer

Evangelicals Should Think Twice Before Voting for the American Solidarity Party in the Presidential Election

Evangelicals who say they won’t vote for Donald Trump are looking for a principled third-party option. Eschewing the GOP over the recent changes to its platform or a long-standing aversion to Trump, these evangelicals seem to be flocking to the American Solidarity Party (ASP), the party Rod Dreher ended up voting for in 2020 despite saying he’d be voting for Trump throughout most of that year.

For 2024, ASP is currently listed on the ballot in Arkansas and Hawaii (the party was on the ballot in eight states in 2020), and has write-in status in an additional 10 states. In 2020, its ticket of retired teacher Brian Carroll and Amar Patel, currently ASP’s National Committee Chair, received a little over 42,000 votes—for comparison, Republicans and Democrats received north of 158,00,000 combined votes.

ASP was founded in 2011 on the example of the Christian democratic parties in Europe and Latin America. Such parties tend to support a generous welfare state, strong unions, and various forms of economic redistribution. On social and moral issues, they can be more right-wing. Christianity Today’s Daniel Silliman summed up the twin theological pillars that prop up ASP: Catholic social teaching and neo-Calvinist political theology.

ASP’s platform includes some worthwhile planks. They stand for marriage, prohibiting the transing of kids, protecting life in the womb, banning abortion and porn, repealing the Patriot Act and abolishing the unaccountable FISA Court, using antitrust laws to break up monopolies, and a far more limited foreign policy than the adventurism that’s become orthodoxy for both parties in recent decades.

However, ASP’s platform has some serious drawbacks. The social justice section—the number two principle listed at ASP’s website—mirrors Black Lives Matter talking points. The party, we are told, supports “efforts to address systemic and historic injustices, including long-standing racial injustice, in a way that confronts inequalities that disparage innate personal dignity.”

On immigration, ASP supports a pathway to citizenship for “Dreamers” (there are an estimated three and half million in the United States) and a “generous policy of asylum for refugees.” These immigration policies are based on ASP’s claim that the Bible’s “admonition to welcome the stranger creates an obligation to migrants and refugees seeking entry to our country.” But this is vague Christianese that evangelical elites have often deployed in their efforts, per Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale, to lobby for mass immigration policies that have done serious damage to the internal cohesion and sovereignty of the United States. The “welcome the stranger” Jesus juke wrongly pits the civil realm against the spiritual realm, a false dichotomy that ends up working to upend the former.

While ASP stands for protecting human life from the moment of conception, they oppose the death penalty, which is questionable considering the teachings of Scripture in both Genesis 9 and Exodus 21:14 (“But if a man willfully attacks another to kill him by cunning, you shall take him from my altar, that he may die”). Also, their calls for instituting universal health care, a national firearms background check, and reparations are disastrous policies.

Turning to social media, ASP’s rhetoric is very comfortable with the reigning consensus morality. They celebrated the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. by calling “all people to ensure his demand for racial and economic equality may finally be realized.” This is the same King who demanded equal outcomes for whites and blacks in nearly every conceivable way. ASP celebrated Earth Day with a quote from Pope Francis’s papal encyclical, Laudato si’. On International Women’s Day (IWD), ASP called for celebrating “with people from across the globe the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.” They included the hashtag #PressforProgress in the post, a theme that IWD defined as fostering a “‘gender parity mindset’ via progressive action.” All this rhetoric is the antithesis of a proper right-wing politics.

While no party platform is perfect, Christians who are interested in voting for the ASP presidential ticket need to reckon with these many deficiencies. And they need to be sure that the ASP candidates have the courage, toughness, and charisma to take on a hostile ruling class that has seemingly every advantage. Abstract policies are meaningless without candidates who possess the many necessary qualities that the offices of president and vice president require.

Looking at the success of third parties in America, ASP will surely not succeed in 2024. No third-party candidate has won a presidential election in U.S. history—in fact, none have come close to pulling it off. George Wallace was the last third-party candidate to get electoral votes, receiving 46 in the 1968 election. Texas billionaire Ross Perot garnered nearly 20 million votes in the 1992 election without receiving a single electoral vote. In the sui generis 1912 election, Teddy Roosevelt came in second place, receiving 88 electoral votes and 3.5 million votes as the candidate for the Progressive Party—but he was a popular former president. In a further challenge to third parties, Pew Research Center found that in an examination of six presidential contests, third-party candidates finished the race less popular than when they entered.

With that being said, ASP party officials have admitted that they aren’t trying to win at the presidential level. Brian Carroll, ASP’s presidential candidate in 2020, said during an interview that he hopes ASP can create a constituency large enough that either the Democrats or Republicans “might try to steal those votes by speaking to the issues” they care about. In a pro-ASP piece in 2016 at First Things, David McPherson wrote, “The ASP should thus be understood as seeking primarily to build up a cultural movement, which ideally will come to have political influence.” As laudable as this might be in principle, to siphon off votes in a presidential election at this stage in American history is a bad strategic move. ASP might be able to shave off just enough votes that Trump could lose in November, a major blow to pro-life hopes as Barack Obama’s handpicked nominee Kamala Harris is an abortion extremist.

Matthew Walther has contended that the best strategy for ASP is to run candidates “for local or state office on the party ticket and later seek to be nominated as either Republicans or Democrats—depending upon which is more electorally advantageous—in national elections.” (I would add that it’s impossible for a Christian to run as a Democrat now or in the near future.) Walther points to two former members of the Democratic Socialists of America, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, as evidence that this plan can have success. Both women ended up running as Democrats in 2018 and have since become stalwarts of the progressive wing in Congress, helping guide the party further to the Left.

Even with the recent changes to the Republican Party platform, serious, irreconcilable differences exist between the parties. It is simply incorrect that, as Matthew Martens has claimed, the two candidates and their parties represent comparable evils. And it is not at all obvious how Martens’s citation of Charles Spurgeon’s oft-cited quote, “Of two evils, choose neither,” applies to the 2024 election. (In the original context, Spurgeon was writing about the false choice between “doctrinal error” and “an un-Christian spirit.”) The Democrats stand against natural revelation itself and, as David Azerrad recently noted at the National Conservatism conference, views straight white Christian men as their chief enemy. While Republicans are far from perfect, the elevation of people like J.D. Vance should give some hope that the party is finally heading in the right direction after a string of disastrous decades.

Evangelicals should also begin thinking about the theory of voting that underlies how they choose candidates. Stephen Wolfe helpfully explains at Mere Orthodoxy that a vote should be understood as “a matter of assessing likely consequences.” He continues: Christians must think through how a candidate would act in office “by applying weighted factors given the time, place, and set of circumstance and the existing political institutions.” Since either Trump or Harris will win the 2024 election, the political choice is between those two candidates.

Like the 2016 and 2020 elections, every election until the ruling cartel is broken up and removed from power is critical. While evangelicals could reasonably vote for third-party candidates in 1992, they no longer have that luxury. The stakes are extremely high, and the country is on the brink. At the presidential level, votes should not be wasted on quixotic schemes. The country is too important to be sacrificed on the altar of imprudence.

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