Social conservatives should not be looking for a hero on a white horse or a savior in the federal executive. If America is going to be rebuilt it will be rebuilt at the grassroots level, and that grassroots effort is actually going remarkably well. The grassroots simply need an umbrella to ward off the federal government’s ubiquitous efforts to shut them down. While the grassroots don’t absolutely require a president with a conservative social and moral agenda—we could benefit from the absence of a federally mandated sexual agenda for four years. If Trump nominates a Supreme Court justice from his recently announced list of possible candidates, signs legislation passed by a Republican Congress on pro-life and religious freedom measures, and advances policies that undo Obamacare and roll back federal regulations, we could be looking at a considerable reprieve.
Some people might think that by not voting, voting for a third party candidate, or writing in someone else entirely they are keeping their lily-white hands clean. They think of it as the “Benedict option.” These people have apparently failed to recognize that under a Clinton regime there will be no refuge in the small communities Alasdair MacIntyre calls for at the end of After Virtue, “within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive.” Such small moral and intellectual communities are the target of the leftist administration’s destructive agenda. The new dark age would be darker by far than the old.