Three Reasons for Conservatives to Vote for Hillary Clinton

Conservatives should enthusiastically vote for the Democratic candidate. An alternative to Donald Trump, Clinton personifies some of conservatism’s core values.

The first reason is prudence. “Prudence is … the first in rank of the virtues political and moral,” as Edmund Burke, the father of British conservatism, would say. At the same time that French revolutionaries were getting drunk off the idea of a new society “free” of traditions and based purely on reason, Burke argued that it wasn’t worth risking society’s pre-existing peace and prosperity in the name of a revolution whose consequences seemed dubious.

In the U.S. election, Trump is the “experimental” candidate, a revolutionary who blasts into tirades that excite the people. Hillary is the alternative who wants to maintain order, continuity and stability, things that conservatives have taught us to appreciate.

The second reason: Trump flaunts himself in a very Latin American manner, portraying himself as the redeemer, the enlightened one and the nation’s savior. He thus does harm to conservatism’s most elegant principle: skepticism — that feeling of mistrust in the face of perfection, the perfect society and the model politician.

I know; Hillary’s discourse is a bit to the left, going contrary to globalization. She only speaks this way, however, because voters want to hear it. She believes in it much less than Trump, who, for his part, is just as far to the left in economic terms as Dilma Rousseff was.

The third and most important conservative rationale is that Hillary is completely boring; not even she can stand how uninteresting she is. If Burke would allow me to say, tedium is the highest of all political virtues. A politician’s ability to wreak havoc on the world is much greater than his or her ability to make it better. Boring politicians, however, are much less apt to cause destruction than those who seduce crowds of people. The more tedious, predictable and committed to stability that a politician is, the more he or she should excite conservatives.