A parable of the lesser evil

An alien monster beamed Joe and Jim up to its spaceship, and offered them a choice—be put down on a planet with a surface temperature of 1,000 degrees or a planet with a surface temperature of 10,000 degrees.

Joe said, “Given those alternatives, I have no option but to choose the 1,000-degree planet.”

Jim said, “That’s no choice at all!  I refuse to consent to either alternative!”

Enraged, the alien monster sent them both to the 10,000-degree planet.

In the micro-seconds before he expired, Joe turned to Jim and said, “This is all your fault.”

Why limit your choice to just two parties?

In a fascist or Bolshevik dictatorship, I would be forced to vote for a single party that didn’t represent me.

Since I live in a democracy, why should I limit myself to voting for one of two parties that don’t represent me?

The Democratic presidential candidate is Hillary Clinton, who is literally a paid servant of Wall Street, who is almost certain to involve the United States in more wars and who may possibly bring on World War Three.

The Republican presidential candidate is Donald Trump, a crooked businessman who cares nothing for human rights, the Constitution or the rule of law.

So why vote for either of them?  Why not vote for a candidate who favors peace, opposes Wall Street and upholds historic Constitutional rights?

Now you may disagree.  You may think that either Clinton or Trump represents a positive good and not a lesser evil.  If you do, nothing in this post applies to you.  It is aimed at people who think they have to choose between a greater and a lesser evil.

Many liberal Democratic friends agree there is some truth in what I write about Clinton, but they see it as their duty—and my duty—to vote for Clinton.  They say that to vote for anybody but Clinton, or to refrain from voting, is the same as voting for Trump.

They have two main arguments, which I call the Nader argument and the Hitler argument, which I will address below.

The Nader argument is that people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 tipped the balance from Al Gore to George W. Bush.  So liberals and progressives should limit themselves to voting for the Democrat, no matter who, to prevent such a thing from happening again.

The Hitler argument is that Hitler came to power because the main German political parties—the Catholic Center Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party and the conservative anti-Hitler parties—were unable to bury their differences and unite against Hitler.   So liberals and progressives should bury their own convictions in the interests of stopping the supposedly Hitler-like candidate on the right.

What’s interesting about these arguments is that we all live in New York state, which is as certain to go for Hillary Clinton as anything can be.  All my presidential vote does is to express where my loyalty lies—to a political party or to my own beliefs.

Vaclav Havel, the great Czech playwright and dissident, wrote in his 1979 essay, The Power of the Powerless, about the manager of a fruit and vegetable shop under Communist rule putting a sign in his window saying, “Workers of the world, unite.”  The manager didn’t care about workers of the world uniting, and the sign wouldn’t affect whether workers of the world united or not.  What he was really doing by putting up the sign, Havel wrote, was saying: I am obedient and have the right to be left in peace.

I’m not comparing myself to somebody in a Communist country who would be persecuted for refusing to follow the party line.  The worst thing I risk is the mild disapproval of a few people.  What I am saying is that the issue is the same.  Where does my loyalty lie?

Vote for Clinton to stop Trump?

Thomas Frank, Elizabeth Warren, Noam Chomsky and others I respect intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in order to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.

I think this is an honorable position, provided that it is a one-time-only position.

The problem is that voting for bad candidates can be habit-foriming.

In defending bad policies in order to prevent worse, you risk losing sight of what good policy might be.

Lambert Strether, who posts on the naked capitalism web log, recently made a list of the things that you have to justify in order to defend Clinton.

1.  Corruption.  To protect Clinton, liberals have adopted the majority doctrine in Ctizens United: Only a quid pro quo is proof of corruption.

2.  Transparency.  To protect Clinton, liberals maintain that high government officials can, at will, privatize their communications to shield them from FOIA.

3.  Militarism.  To protect Clinton, liberals minimize her AUMF vote, ignore Libya, ignore Honduras, ignore Ukraine, and treat unwavering support for Israel as an unqualified good.

4.  Health.  To protect Clinton, liberals reject Medicare for All.

5.  Working Class.  To protect Clinton, liberals deny that there is or can be a working class electorate.  The electorate is only to be viewed through the prism of identity politics.

Two category errors follow: The “white working class” is deemed to be racist, by definition, and the non-white working class is erased.  Consequently, it’s impossible to think through the universal effects of the FIRE [financial] sector on the working class, nor its differential effects on particular working class identities.  This is not an accident.

That’s quite a platform.  And if you’re thinking the Democrat Party isn’t the Democratic Party you knew and loved, that’s not an accident either.  This has been a wonderfully clarifying primary, for which I congratulate all the players.

Source: naked capitalism

Bernie Sanders 2016 and Gene McCarthy 1968

Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has the same significance as Eugene J. McCarthy‘s in 1968.

McCarthy was a moderate Democrat from Minnesota who chose to run against incumbent Lyndon Johnson on a platform of opposition to the Vietnam War.

Eugene J. McCarthy

He didn’t have an especially distinguished record, and he wasn’t the best possible candidate.  But he was the candidate who had the nerve to run while all the other war opponents held back.   He provided an outlet for all the pent-up anti-war sentiment.

He won a plurality of the votes in the New Hampshire primary, against two slates of delegates both pledged to President Johnson.   His victory emboldened Senator Robert F. Kennedy to run, and Johnson decided not to seek re-election.

Even if Kennedy had not been assassinated, he probably would not have been able to defeat the entrenched Democratic Party organization or to prevent the nomination of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.

What McCarthy and then Kennedy did do was to open the door for a peace faction which was a continuing force in the Democratic Party independent of McCarthy himself.   I think, or at least I hope, Bernie Sanders has opened the door for a Democratic Party social justice faction that will outlive the Sanders campaign.

The enemies of the good

In politics, it is often true that—

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

If you’re not satisfied with anything less than perfection, you might forfeit the lesser good.

But we need to remember it also is true that—

The lesser evil is the enemy of the good.

If you’re always willing to accept the lesser evil, you will never get anything good.

A lesser good is good, but a lesser evil is still evil

There is a thin but important line between saying that half a loaf is better than none, and saying that the lesser evil is better than the greater evil.

Circumstances alter cases, and there are tragic situations when the lesser evil is the only choice.   But people of good will should not allow themselves to be trapped into accepting lesser-evil-ism as a general rule of life.

The best may be the enemy of the good, but the lesser evil also is the enemy of the good.

When you settle for the lesser good, you still have good.  Achieving lesser goods may bring you step-by-step to the greater good you hoped for.

When you settle for the lesser evil, you still have evil.  Accepting lesser evils will bring you step-by-step to the greater evil you feared.

Is Obama really the lesser of two evils?

Many liberals who are dissatisfied with Barack Obama intend to vote for him anyway because they think Mitt Romney is worse.  But is President Obama really the lesser of the two evils?

Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are committed to tearing up the Bill of Rights in the name of the so-called war on terror.  Both are aligned with Wall Street financiers, and to continued war overseas.  On the other hand, Obama is less extreme than Romney, probably will make better (or less bad) Supreme Court appointments and make be better on social-cultural questions that don’t threaten the wealthy and the powerful.  But none of these things make him the lesser evil.

What the Obama administration has done, which the Bush administration did not do and the Romney administration probably would not be able to do, is to destroy the liberal opposition.  Democrats in Congress defended Social Security against President Bush; they have not defended it against President Obama.  They questioned President Bush’s claim of authority to imprison and torture people on his personal say-so; they have not questioned President Obama’s claim to kill people on his personal say-so.  If President Romney started a war with Iran, I’d expect a certain number of Democrats to oppose him; if President Obama did the same thing, not so much.

Republicans in Congress have been justly criticized for partisan obstructionism, but on issues of civil liberties, waging war and protecting financiers, there is a remarkable bipartisan consensus.  I would have thought Republicans would oppose President Obama’s assertion of unilateral power to commit acts of war, target people for killing and cloak his actions in secrecy, but on these issues they are at one with the Democrats.

I expect to vote either for Jill Stein, the candidate of the Green Party, or for ex-Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, the candidate of the Libertarian Party.  It doesn’t really matter, since it is a foregone conclusion that President Obama will carry New York, but I would not vote for Obama or Romney even if New York were a battleground state.

Click on Obama May Not Even Be the Lesser Evil for a good article by Andrew Levine in Counterpunch which makes this point.