Some arguments I made on Obama's behalf, even though I had serious
reservations about him.
Sam Smith
- The lesser of two evils is a lesser evil.
- Voting for a third party candidate may be a fine moral choice but it will
clearly fail. There have been only five third party presidential campaigns
since Abraham Lincoln that made it into double digits – and only two of them
were on the left. The major beneficiary of voting Green, therefore, would be my
own sense of self-righteousness. But politics is not religion. That’s not a
confessional you enter, but a voting booth. You take part in it not to save
your soul but to help yourself and others a bit.
- Helping Trump win is not helping others.
- When you put your personal morality above the lives of others, you risk
making the same mistake constantly used to justify war, namely assuming that
the dead will not have died in vain. Nobody, however, checks with most of them
first.
- Presidential campaigns are too late to change the game. Liberals have done
little to make Biden better and Greens have spent too much effort on
presidential races and not enough on building a grass roots movement. You change
politicians between elections not during them. And third parties do it by
working at the grassroots.
- There is a born-again strain in progressive and liberal politics in which
the emphasis is more on personal honor rather than collective progress. This
doesn’t help collective progress all that much, especially if you seek honor
mainly on election day.
- An alternative approach is that of the Quakers. I went to a Quaker high
school run by a Friends meeting that in 1688 issued one of the first American
declarations against slavery. Yet it is also where I heard the story about the
pacifist Quaker woman being robbed at home, pointing a gun at the thief and
saying, “I do not intend to shoot thee but thee is standing where my gun is
going off.” Quakers know they are not perfect and rank persistence over
perfection. As the Germantown Friends meeting explains it, “it is love, giving
and self-sacrifice that overcomes evil. But in all these areas there is also an
absence of dogmatism and finality, for an important corollary of the Quaker
belief in direct revelation is that God continues to speak, not that God once
spoke and assured final truth.. . The human vessel is imperfect, and our
capacity to comprehend God's will is partial.”
- With this approach, or its secular version, you leave can the
self-centered world of born again politics or religion and enter a morality
based on trying harder the next time. And you view other imperfect humans not
as stupid, illiberal scum but as people to reach and help.
- Presidential elections come only once about every 1,460 days. Vote how you
wish and I will do the same, but remember: it’s what we’ve done for the past
1,460 days and what we will do in the next 1,460 days that will really matter
in the end
4 comments:
You are not alone: leftist luminaries, including Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich and Michael Albert ignore the lessons of history and support the 'lesser evil'. Their open letter (truthdig.com, 24 January) states '... real solutions require Trump out of office. Real solutions will become far more probable with Sanders or Warren in office...'. Zizek agrees: '..US political life to be radically reinvented.. Sanders is to be unconditionally supported' (rt.com, 11 February). The Sanders - now Biden - 'meantime' must be a capitalist meantime and is no responsibility of those who seek to replace it with a better system. The establishment of socialism depends on a majority of us withdrawing our support of capitalism. It becomes practicable only to the extent that socialist ideas are accepted, and it will become a reality when action in line with those ideas is taken. Supporting Biden or any leader amounts to trying to patch up capitalism, the existence of which is the cause of the problems we all want to solve.
Endorse Biden?
Since the "Global War on Terror" began, 200,000 children have died.
How many more children must die before we renounce "lesser of two evil" choices in American politics.
Tell me how Biden is the lesser of two evils, when Biden takes Larry Summers on as a top campaign adviser. Biden is taking on the worst disaster capitalists possible for his campaign, people who will enthusiastically drive American workers to ruin. There is no lesser of two evils here, the choice for voters is "damned if you do damned, if you don't."
Any lesser of two evils argument needs to start with two competent, viable candidates. Joe Biden does not qualify for the office due to his obvious degenerated mental condition. Therefore he doesn't quality to be a candidate.
However, he is being put forward, least of all by his own wife, but also by the Democratic party, who, one can only assume, will tell him what to say and who will act for him, since he is incapable of doing things for himself. They should be ashamed and indicted for this blatant and unconscionable action.
So under the lesser of two evils scenario, that leaves us with voting for either (A) an evil or (B) an unknown cadre of puppet masters, which might actually be more evil than (A). Because we don't know who they are, they can't be interrogated, debated or held accountable for their puppet's actions, so we don't know whether they are in fact, the lesser.
Please reframe your lesser of two evil arguments to address the real scenario we are facing.
Also, basing any perception or assertion that President Trump is an actual evil, should be an opinion that is derived from some other source than any of the lame-stream news with anti-Trump axes to grind. These include The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC. Sorry if that's all most people can rely on, but they are useless as a source of unbiased news.
Again, Joe Biden has yet to achieve the status of being worthy of fitting into a lesser of two evils equation. Anyone - anyone - endorsing or pushing him forward as a competent candidate is to be shamed and ignored. He simply can't get my vote, not because he might be the lesser of two evils, but because he doesn't deserve any consideration due to his condition. Look, it may be too bad that that's the way he is, but to blunder on presenting him to the country as otherwise marks anyone doing it as a knave or a dupe.
Also, the policies he is repeating and therefore calling his own, are not the lesser of two evils. They are the basis of the reason we got Donald Trump elected in the first place. No support or consideration for the working people of the country, only crumbs for them, if any.
The Green Party has a good percentage of state ballot lines for President and I hear Jessie Ventura is expressing an interest in running on their ticket. Might be interesting to see where all the disillusioned progressive voters come home to roost.
Thanks, Tom
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