I Believe in Dignity. I Voted for Trump.

I voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

I need you to understand: I don't like him. I don't like how he talks. I don't like what he represents aesthetically. I don't like the movement that's calcified around him, the flags on trucks, the persecution complex, the rallies that feel like something between a tent revival and a roast.

I believe in dignity. I believe in workers. I believe in plurality and weirdness and letting people be who they are. I've spent years writing about leaving authoritarian religion. I have more in common with my liberal friends than I will ever have with the median Trump voter.

And I voted for him anyway.

This essay is my attempt to explain why—not to convince you, but to be understood. Because I think a lot of people made this calculation quietly, and almost none of them are being honest about it in public.

The moment I knew I was going to do it, I was listening to a podcast about Ukraine.

Not a political podcast. Just two historians talking about what happens when great powers miscalculate. How wars start not from strength but from perceived weakness. How the worst catastrophes come from drift—from systems that are technically functional but lack the capacity to respond decisively when the temperature spikes.

And I thought: I don't trust Kamala Harris to handle what's coming.

That's not a policy critique. I don't know enough about missile defense systems or NATO burden-sharing to have a real opinion. It's something more instinctive than that. A sense—maybe wrong, maybe unfair—that the current administration had been sleepwalking through a decade that required sharp elbows.

I wasn't voting for Trump. I was voting against drift.

Here's what I think my liberal friends get right:

They're not naive. They're not stupid. They're running a different calculation.

Their moral architecture prioritizes harm minimization. They look at Trump and see a man who will embolden bigots, appoint judges who restrict rights, say things that make vulnerable people feel less safe in their own country. They weigh that harm—concrete, immediate, measurable—against whatever theoretical benefits might come from "strength" or "unpredictability."

And they conclude: the harm is too high. The cost is paid by people who can't afford it. Whatever geopolitical chess game you think you're playing, real people get hurt while you're playing it.

I respect that. I don't think it's wrong. I think it might be more right than my position, and I'm holding that possibility seriously.

But I weighted the variables differently.

Here's my calculus, as honestly as I can state it:

I think the world is more dangerous than the median American liberal believes. I think the next decade has a non-trivial chance of producing a major war—not because anyone wants one, but because the systems that prevent wars are degrading faster than we're repairing them.

I think the American foreign policy establishment has spent twenty years proving it doesn't know how to manage decline. Iraq. Afghanistan. The slow erosion of deterrence that let Russia think it could invade Ukraine without catastrophic consequences. The sense, globally, that America is a power that makes threats it won't back up.

And I think—this is the uncomfortable part—that sometimes you need a president who seems a little unhinged. Not because unhinged is good. But because predictable weakness is worse.

Trump is a lot of terrible things. But "predictable" isn't one of them. And in a game-theoretic sense, that unpredictability might be worth something when you're trying to prevent wars rather than win them.

This is a dark logic. I don't love that I believe it. It's the kind of reasoning that makes you feel like you've lost something—some simpler version of yourself that could just vote for the person who seems nicer.

But I think it's true. And I'd rather be honest about an ugly belief than perform a comfortable one.

There's another layer to this, one I'm still working out.

I've become suspicious of centrism as a moral good.

Not moderation. Not compromise. Those are fine. I mean the specific posture of American institutional centrism—the sense that the answer is always somewhere in the middle, that strong positions are inherently suspect, that the highest virtue is procedural calm.

A video game broke this for me, which sounds absurd but isn't. The game argues that centrism isn't neutral—it's a position that preserves existing power structures by pretending to transcend them. The centrist isn't above the fight. They're just hiding their commitments behind a pose of reasonableness.

I started seeing that pose everywhere. In the careful both-sidesing of news coverage. In the way institutions congratulate themselves for "bringing people together" while nothing changes. In the specific flavor of Democratic Party messaging that always sounds like it was drafted by a committee trying not to offend anyone.

Kamala's campaign felt like that to me. Competent. Careful. Procedurally sound. And somehow, in a way I couldn't fully articulate, insufficient to the moment.

I didn't want to vote for chaos. But I also didn't want to vote for a calm that felt like denial.

Here's what I might be wrong about:

I might be overweighting threat perception. The world might be less dangerous than I think, and I might be justifying a bad vote with apocalyptic reasoning that flatters my self-image as someone who "sees clearly."

I might be underweighting the harm Trump causes to vulnerable people. The trans kid in a red state, the immigrant family, the destabilized family in the Gaza Strip—they pay real costs for my geopolitical chess game. I don't get to abstract that away.

I might be confusing "unpredictable" with "strong." Trump might be exactly the kind of leader who blunders into catastrophe because he doesn't understand the game he's playing.

I might be wrong about all of it. I'm not writing this from certainty. I'm writing it from discomfort—the particular discomfort of having made a choice that I can't fully defend but also can't disown.

What I won't do is pretend I didn't make it.

There's a version of this where I stay quiet. Where I let my liberal friends assume I voted the way they did, because it's easier, because the social cost of honesty is higher than I want to pay.

But I've spent too much of my life inside institutions that required you to perform beliefs you didn't hold. I left a religion over this. I'm not going to build a new one out of political conformity.

The honest vote is sometimes the uncomfortable vote. The honest conversation is sometimes the one where you say: I did something you find morally suspect, and I'm not going to apologize for it, but I am going to explain it, and I'm going to stay curious about whether I was wrong.

That's where I am.

I voted for someone I don't like because I was more afraid of drift than disruption. Because I weighted civilizational risk higher than I weighted institutional norms. Because somewhere in my moral architecture—the part that's still being built, the part I don't fully understand—I decided that the cold math mattered more than the warm story.

Maybe that makes me a bad liberal. Maybe it makes me a realist who's lying to himself about his own rationalizations. Maybe the chaos unfolding will make me what Cobb warned about in Inception—an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone.

But I won't pretend I didn't make a choice.

There's a version of me that's a communist at heart—that believes in workers and dignity and the fundamental obscenity of wealth hoarding. That version exists. He writes poetry about it sometimes.

There's another version that reads balance sheets and thinks about state capacity and worries that the systems holding everything together are more fragile than anyone admits. This version watches Katniss in The Hunger Games lament that a handful of berries could bring it all down—and instead of shaking its head, it nods along with President Snow. Yes. Yes it is. The whole delicate apparatus lifted by twigs and glued by grace.

I don't know how to reconcile those two. I'm not sure I'm supposed to. Maybe the point is to hold both and let them argue, and to vote from the place where they provisionally agree.

This time, they agreed on something uncomfortable: that drift is dangerous, that competence isn't the same as capacity, and that sometimes the worse person is the better bet.

I might be wrong.

But I'm not lying.