Why Voting For The Lesser Evil Is Strategic Imbecility

Lesser evilism is usually the product of rationalization, the comforting lies that liberals and democrats love to tell themselves, and not strategic thinking.

There is a case to be made for the influence that third parties had in the early years of the 20th century. Socialist, Progressive, Farmer-Labor parties, in particular, pushed some parts of the Democratic Party towards more humane policies. Notice the past tense. I don’t believe that equivalent influence today is possible because of ballot access laws and the ruthless intent of the uniparty to squash serious attempts to weaken their duopoly. The system is completely stuck, and dissolution will come before renewal.

(Note: the only case that I can see contradicting the above is if a Normal-looking decabillionaire, as good at PR as Musk (himself ineligible), were to start his own party and throw a few billion into the effort. Younger readers might not know this, but for a short while in 1992 Ross Perot led both Clinton and old Bush in the polls. Perot ended up with 19% of the popular vote, but he imploded during the summer either because of a character fault or a warning from the blob.)

Running on “I’m the lesser evil” may work in the short term. But as stupid as Humans are we aren’t so stupid we don’t in some form recognize that you’re calling yourself evil. The result is you are seen as not only evil but inauthentic, dishonest, and manipulative. That is a far worse public image then being just Evil.

Other politicians say we’re in the Middle East to promote “peace and democracy.” Trump said “control of the oil”. Other politicians say we need to limit immigration for “security”. Trump said “Mexicans are rapists”
This is what people mean when they say they like Trump because he “tells it like it is” . In a contest between two evils, the one who doesn’t treat you like a child by pretending to be good has some appeal.

Trump is the authentic Republican who won’t pretend to be compassionate. Maybe the best candidate against him would be a Democrat who isn’t a corporate, pro-war, anti-poor shrill pretending to be otherwise.

Ian, I couldn’t disagree more.

There has never really been a choice between even ‘mostly good’ and evil. There are only degrees of badness in life—we either don’t eat, and starve to death, or we eat, and our very metabolism eventually causes damage to our DNA that results in aging and death.

Joe Biden is by my experience *the best president of my adult life*. I know that’s not saying much, as I count that from Reagan forwards, but that is the truth. All the rest have been horrible. And I say this as someone who voted for Nader in 1996, in 2000, and voted Green in 2012 and 2016, and as someone who swore he wouldn’t vote for Biden and only did because of the danger of Trump represents (and yeah, fascism staring you in the face gets one to do that). But Biden has been far better than I expected (yes, I agree with you on Gaza, but Trump would be just as bad, as would most other candidates or past presidents). Moreover, I don’t label Biden as “incompetent”; in fact, given what he did get through despite razor-thin margins in Congress and despite having two bought-and-paid for senators to deal with (Manchin, Sinema) is actually quite impressive. Biden not only didn’t have FDR’s congressional majorities, he didn’t have either Clinton’s nor Obama’s (of course, the latter two conspired against “real Democrats” to block or weaken legislation; Obama with the ACA is the prime example).

Let me offer a bit of contrary advice: Don’t be stupid. By that, I mean “stupid” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s definition of the term:

https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/

Bonhoeffer’s idea is to divide humanity up into four blocs:

a) intelligent people, who make their lives better, and who also improve the lives of everyone around them and the world at large;

b) helpless people (or ‘victims’) who help others but to the point of suffering themselves

c) “bandits” or evil people, who make their own lives better but at the expense of everyone else,

d) “stupid people” who make everyone’s lives worse, including their own. Stupid people are the most dangerous, as they not only enable evil people, they won’t be stopped even by the consequences of their own actions to themselves. At least an evil person doesn’t want to be hurt himself, so threats or penalties that would do so deter him, but that consequence doesn’t stop the stupid.

And while in politics, “stupid” is often (and correctly) applied to MAGA types, we have our share of leftists/progressives act that way.

Let me give you an example from my boyhood: the election of 1968, Nixon-Humphrey.

Anti-war types, who were angered over the war in Vietnam at an otherwise progressive president (unthinkably so in our day) called him a baby-killer and either worked against or sat out voting for Humphrey, even after Humphrey came out against the war. Nixon only made vague promises of some secret “peace with honor” solution but anyone with half a brain knew that for many of Nixon’s supporters, “peace with honor’ meant some sort of military victory, not an end to the war.

Did the anti-war faction get what they wanted? Hell no. Instead, they got more war. Eventually the war did wind down, but not the way they wanted nor as soon. Having been to Vietnam and having visited Sơm My (My Lai), I can understand their anger. You say 25,000 Palestinians have been killed so far? We killed an estimated 250,000 South Vietnamese civilians alone–some by indiscriminate firepower, some up close and personal (after My Lai we found at least five more similar-sized mass murders). That’s neither counting North Vietnamese civilian dead nor the military dead on both NVA/NLF and ARVN. But their choice was stupid; that Nixon would both continue the war and enlarge it was all-too-predictable, given his voter base. Their best hope was that Humphrey would win, as they would have greater leverage.

Meanwhile, a good many Archie Bunker hard-hats bolted the Democratic party in 1968 to vote for Nixon (future Reagan Democrats). They did so largely due to racial issues, also to uppity women, and other culture war issues. What did these get in return? Oh, they would get declining wages and benefits and worse lives. No politician in the country was more pro-labor than Humphrey. But these voted for Nixon. (This also shows the screed that “Democrats abandoned the white working class!” to be false”, they may have, but only long after the white working class defected from Democrats. McGovern too was far more pro-labor than any Republican, and most Democrats today, but that didn’t mean he got their votes either).

Both groups acted stupidly. They voted for emotional reasons and anger and against their own best interests and goals. I would argue the reason WHY the “evil trend” you describe started is that progressives too have been voting stupid. The vast majority of elections in my life, even the ones I have endorsed with the most enthusiasm, involved choosing some form of lesser evil. There have been no exceptions; I have found no entirely good candidate or party.

By contrast, a big reason why, say, we may soon have a nation-wide abortion ban, is that their voters consistently went to the polls and voted for candidates who were imperfect in their eyes but pushed the narrative further in their direction. You must remember that for most Rs, abortion was the issue they wanted to keep around to get voters to the polls, but really didn’t want to enact (and indeed, R politicians would crack jokes about the “Jesus nuts” after they had meetings with them and heard them out). But eventually they got what they wanted.

Our system rewards consistency, patience, and shifting the Overton Window. Any step in the opposite direction is not some prelude to a glorious, better, future, but a step backwards because the Overton Window will shift backwards correspondingly (the Overton Window of 1968 was so much father leftwards than anything of my adult life to be inconceivable today…and that future was taken away by the 1968 election). The old leadership is about to run out, and Biden is clearly the better of the two olds (both in substance and cognitive capacity) than Trump. Younger people will take over soon, and I’d rather have the younger types in Biden’s trail than those in Trump’s.

Insofar as Gaza, I do lament it, and I do agree on the facts with you. But Biden is in a similar situation on Gaza politically as Humphrey was in 1968. While Trump’s supporters are not fazed by the idea of ethnic cleansing or genocide against the Palestinians, some 50 % of Democratic voters (mostly young) want a policy more favorable to the Palestinians. However, some 20 % of Democrats want a policy more favorable to Israel (!!!), and Biden can’t afford to lose either group in the 2024 election. But it’s unquestionably true that even on Gaza, even though I agree with you on the essentials, but Biden is much more likely to be moved to doing better than will Trump; if nothing else, in his own self-interest.

In fact, the very reason the October 7th attack occurred was due to Trump’s policy of giving Bibi pretty much everything he wanted, and Hamas’s attack had the intention of blowing up the Abraham accords. Like Al-Qaeda and Sept 11th, this attack was meant to make Israel overreact in such a barbaric fashion that no Islamic country would be able to tie itself closer to Israel.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/10/trump-israel-gaza-war/

The Abraham Accords was an attempt to have “peace” by completely isolating the Palestinians, leaving them with no friends and at Bibi’s mercy. And although Trump doesn’t much care for Bibi personally, his evangelical voters still want their interpretation of Bible prophecy to be made true, and have no qualms about killing “brown people” (even though Palestinians aren’t that brown, technically) and Muslims.

I don’t think federal voting, whether for lesser evils, third parties, ballot spoiling or whatever, is a very important part of doing politics for progressive or radical individuals in the United States today. Probably the single most important thing would be to join a union or try to start one. In some cities, municipal politics are worth pursuing. If you’re in or near Atlanta, Georgia it may be worth agitating against Cop City. There are ballot initiatives worth pursuing. There are community building organizations. Maybe the DSA. Heck, even joining your typical street protest, as largely pointless as that is, is still more relevant than presidential voting.

But, if you’re going to do it, you should at least frame the issue well. In voting, the question of lesser evilism is a question of tactics versus strategy (side note: It only arises when there is no proportional representation). Voting for the lesser evil is a tactical decision to try for a limited gain right now, sacrificing the strategic aim of promoting potentially much greater gains farther in the future. Now, that means that in a way, voting for the lesser evil is inherently shortsighted. But that doesn’t mean it’s always the wrong decision; if tactical goals are pressing enough, they can outweigh strategic goals, particularly if those strategic goals are uncompelling, either because they are poorly defined or very unlikely to succeed in any case. There’s no point sacrificing tactics for strategy if the strategy will fail anyway.

In the present day United States, you can make a pretty strong case that there are no strategic purposes that can be advanced by a federal vote. Useful third parties are doomed to failure by the institutional blockades in their way, and by the money-drenched nature of the system (including the media). Voting for them at the national level is therefore futile; spoiling the ballot even more so.

There might potentially be ways to create useful institutional change in the US. There is some room for radical politics at the local level, as we’ve seen in Seattle with Kshama Sawant. Potentially, a strategy could be to create a political party that would contest for power at a municipal level and then, with a municipal base, at the state level. Because of the weirdly piecemeal nature of US electoral rules, once in power at the state level it could remove the roadblocks for political participation by non-RepubliCrat parties, and potentially institute proportional representation at the state level and even for congressional seats within that state. If it could achieve that in multiple states, that might move issues of electoral reform higher on the national agenda. It could also legislate serious curbs on money in politics in that state. Chances are the Supreme court would overrule that, but that would, again, raise the profile of those issues. This is one possible strategy; I won’t claim it’s the only possible such strategy. But straight runs for national office by third parties under the current rules are not a strategy.

And of course that’s a long term strategy requiring a lot of organization. For an individual right now, more important as I say to join a union etc.–basically, promote any organization you can find which has the potential to create political pressure or direct change in favour of real people.

Probably this is too abstract a formulation, but I will try anyway.

In politics, I think it is important to try to tell the truth, meaning not your own personal truth so much as the objective truth. Democratic deliberation as a process of political decision-making seeks to resolve conflict with rules derived from shared, abstract principles and that requires shared acceptance of a shared, objective reality to work well. Facts have to matter more than power. Conflicting interests and contrasting points of view will result in contested story-telling, but narratives have to be tested against facts and discarded even by their advocates when disproven by conflict with facts.

None of that means I am willing to believe there exists a tribe of truth-tellers I can join to fight the liars of some other tribe. That is not fundamentally a democratic politics; it devolves quickly and simply to a contest of power and will not end well. A commitment to truth-telling in democratic politics means being willing to share facts and be governed by principle in the light of facts, which means being willing to yield.

American politics (and probably western politics generally) is starved of facts. But, not short of dubious narratives and “conspiracy theories”. Professional politics is well-financed, providing employment to political operatives and pundits willing to engage in shameless manipulation of electorates, activities only enhanced when the absence of trustworthy, prudent, well-informed voices escalate the cognitive costs of figuring out what the hell is going on out there.

It is too little recognized that all persuasive political story-telling takes the form not of logical proof but rather of hypnotic trance induction. I won’t digress on any implication other than that overcoming the manipulation involved feels a lot like waking up, because it involves coming out of a kind of trance.

I am sure like a lot of people I feel like genocide as fact ought to be a wake up call.