Written by James Wright

When you cast your ballot, what are you voting for? The hope that your candidate will work to affect climate change? End abortion? Approve a non-interventionist foreign policy? Perhaps enact a constitutional amendment to define marriage? Given that there is no candidate this season whose policies endorse a single positive response even to these four questions, how do you, as a voter, decide which issues take priority over others? If you think the question is of no importance, the power to effect long-term change with your ballot is bound up in how you prioritize certain issues.

The crux of the question is not whether one does or does not rank the voting issues in order of importance. Rather it is whether the principles by which one orders those issues are in the interest of American flourishing. A handful of historians have been attributed with the often-overlooked claim that civilizations die from internal decay before they are conquered from external enemies. If this is true, there must be some issues, which, if valued as the first things in a culture, will diminish the rate of decay more effectively than the prioritization of other issues. For example, a society that values human dignity and healthy family relationships is more stable than a society that merely values the environment. Not because the environment is of no value, but because a polluted environment that kills people slowly is not the first problem of a culture that physically destroys its unborn at 10 times that rate.

C.S. Lewis helpfully draws the felt tension. In assuming such a hierarchy of values, Lewis writes that a culture which values second things before first things will get neither first things nor second things. Second things require the support of the first things to be sustained. Thus, to value first things first is not to ignore second things, but to value both the first and the second things in their proper places. To transpose the earlier analogy, a society that seeks to reach out to the international community and be involved in efforts to sustain the environment and rescue victims of genocide must first cultivate a “culture of life” for its local body politic and the unborn, elderly and infirmed therein. Without an engine of real compassion and respect for human dignity to empower the hand that reaches out to other nations, the American offer of foreign aid is unsustainable. Mr. Lewis would be wont to tell us, “I told you so.”

Much of the failure to vote according to a right ordering of principles is due to a failure to perceive oneself as owing anything back to the society that gave one life and livelihood. Many Americans have lost interest in local projects in favor of pursuing projects abroad. The error implicit in pursuing global issues before local issues, however, is the assumption that by the time we return to the local projects, all will be in the same condition as when it was left. The benefits of a society are not static. Unless someone is at home fueling the beliefs, values and concerns that motivate the infrastructure, the infrastructure fails. Journalist Mark Steyn has commented that a government big enough to give you everything you want still is not big enough to get you to give anything back. That is to say, putting first things first means developing a vision of American flourishing aimed to support a value of human dignity and a strong local ethos or morale ⎯ a vision which gives back to, and supports the foundational core that motivates everything else. The alternative, to simply check the box for increased government regulation or whatever polices are most fashionable, without regard for the proper ordering of those policies, is a habit that is prone to stunt American progress. If this is your inclination, you should not vote at all.