Why the Lesser-Evil Argument for Biden Sounds Hollow
May 29, 2020
It is evident that neither candidate is actually going to do anything
substantive to save us from ecological catastrophe, writes Jonathan Cook.
San Diego skyline against the smoke at sunrise, Oct. 23, 2007. (Kat Miner,
CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By JonathanCook
Jonathan-Cook.net
We are entering the final stages of the election to decide who will head the
most powerful nation on Earth. That inevitably means the progressive and
dissident left in the U.S. are again being deluged with arguments to vote
for the lesser-evil candidate.
It has become such a standard left argument at election time that lesser
evil voting even has its own acronym: LEV. Anyone who opposes Donald Trump's
re-election come November must set aside their concerns about - and if
necessary their principles against - voting for the other main candidate on
offer for U.S. president.
According to LEV, it is profoundly irresponsible and unethical for anyone on
the left either to refuse to vote in November or to vote for a third,
no-hope candidate because it risks aiding a Trump victory. Instead the left
must cast a ballot - however uncomfortably - for the lesser evil candidate,
which means Joe Biden, the former vice president and presumptive Democratic
challenger.
This column is not going to make an argument for or against lesser evil
voting, either in general or in the coming election. Everyone on the left
must dig deep into their conscience and make a decision based on their
assessment of how relatively evil Biden and Trump are, and whether that evil
will be minimized by voting for Biden.
What I want to do instead is address why lesser evil arguments are sounding
increasingly shrill and hollow to many on the left who fought so hard to
earn Senator Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination rather than Biden, but
were once again stymied by the fervent opposition of the Democratic party
leadership. These are the people chiefly targeted in the current round of
lesser evil arguments.
If the proponents of LEV are going to succeed in persuading the Bernie left
to turn out for Biden, in order to stop Trump, they are going to need to
address the concerns of the Sanders' camp much more clearly and articulately
than they have done so far.
Don't Wrestle with Pigs
One thing that is clear already is that the appeal of lesser-evil voting is
becoming increasingly generational. Older leftists think it is self-evident
that within an evil system you vote for the lesser evil candidate because
small political differences can have big impacts, whether on domestic issues
like social security, or on wars abroad, or on the future of the planet.
Their approach towards younger voters on the left who are not immediately
impressed by this logic has often been to shame and insult them, labelling
them as selfish, ideological purists or exemplars of white privilege. They
have also indulged in what looks to many younger voters suspiciously like
emotional blackmail, comparing Trump to Mussolini or Hitler.
To the younger left, things look a little more complex and paradoxical. They
tend to see lesser-evil voting as an example of the chicken-and-egg problem.
After all, given that the older left has been trotting out the lesser evil
argument for decades, it looks suspiciously like LEV may have actually
contributed to the entrenchment of an evil political system that made
Trump's election possible. Are the proponents of lesser-evil voting not
creating the very conditions for political alienation that they then tout as
a way to address the product - Trump - of that very political alienation?
If the U.S. has a cynical political system, deeply corrupted by money,
younger voters wonder whether adding to that cynicism - with the left always
voting for one of two evil candidates - can actually ever change the system
or simply reinforces it. The older left has failed politically. But might
one of the reasons be that for decades it has acted so cynically? Younger
voters want to break with cynical politics. If the left is ever going to
start looking more attractive, they argue, it needs to stop engaging
cynically with a cynical system.
George Bernard Shaw's maxim comes to mind: "Never wrestle with pigs. You
both get dirty and the pig likes it."
Walmart or Costco?
Former Vice President Joe Biden, at left; U.S. President Donald Trump, at
right.
Very much related to this is the concern that decades of voting for evil
Democratic candidates mean the progressive left has not just failed to hold
the line politically, election by election, but has actively lost ground,
especially relative to the biggest problem facing humanity - the imminent
end of most life on the planet. The clock is ticking fast, and it is evident
that neither candidate is actually going to do anything substantive to save
us from ecological catastrophe. The system is entirely owned and controlled
by a plutocratic class, addicted to the expansion of its own wealth, even at
the cost of our species' survival.
Lesser evilism focuses on the candidates' relative merits and depravities.
But younger voters increasingly see that as misdirection. The two evil
candidates reflect the depravities of the same evil plutocratic system. On
this view, the candidates' marginal differences are nothing more than
exercises in marketing. Debating their merits in relation to the
fundamental, existential questions facing us at the moment makes as much
sense to younger voters as arguing whether Walmart or Costco offer a more
ethical model of consumption.
Meanwhile, the two candidates on offer in this election are probably the
most deficient and incompetent in U.S. history: one is a fire-breathing,
posturing, delusional narcissist; the other the dried-out husk of a once
smooth-talking, delusional narcissist. Each is proof that the evil system
they are there to obscure has grown so sclerotic, so debased, that it can no
longer produce credible salesmen.
Echoing the Establishment
The candidates' qualities aside, the system sinks into ever greater
depravity for reasons that seem obvious to the younger left: because the
power-establishment knows that, however evil the two candidates on offer
are, as long as one is ever so slightly less evil than the other it will be
able to adduce mock-ethical arguments to strong-arm the left into
legitimizing its evil system. To younger voters, when the left's veterans
make the lesser evil argument, they repeat precisely the arguments the evil
system wants echoing. It is not a great look.
The power-establishment knows that it can drag the system towards greater
evil - towards more corporate greed, towards more horrifying global wars,
towards more planetary destruction - and still the left will be expected to
consent to the system as long as one candidate is slightly less evil. All
the system has to do is offer a candidate who can market him or herself as
less evil than the other candidate.
What the lesser-evil argument has achieved over the past 40 years - entirely
predictably - is the gradual shift in the center of political gravity ever
further rightwards, towards unconcealed rule by the corporate class, towards
Donald Trump.
Left Defeatism
The credibility of the older left's lesser evil voting strategy is being
severely tested right at this moment - and is being found disastrously
wanting. With Biden the presumptive Democratic candidate, now is the time
when the progressive left ought to be leveraging its electoral clout to get
Sanders and his political allies positions inside a future Biden
administration. This is the moment when the Sanders camp ought to be able to
parlay their substantial voting bloc into influence over who is chosen as
Biden's vice-president and his senior cabinet ministers, as well as over the
main planks of Biden's platform.
But rather than seize this historic moment, the older left - including,
tragically, Sanders himself - are using this period primarily to undermine
the progressive left, by bullying them into submission to the Biden campaign
whatever it decides to do.
This is a major reason the LEV strategy looks so discredited to the younger
left. They know Biden has little chance of winning without their support.
This should be the moment to play their hand with a poker-face, extracting
as much as they can from Biden. But the older left is already throwing the
left's hand down, demanding at this critical juncture that the left get
behind Biden, when Biden has offered nothing at all to the progressive left.
In these circumstances, lesser evil voting looks a lot like simple
defeatism. It actually makes the older left, not the younger left, look like
the selfish, privileged ones. They backed Sanders, and when he lost the
nomination campaign they simply gave up mid-fight, as they have done decade
after decade, putting the struggle off to another day. They behave as if
there is all the time in the world (which may seem true to those who are in
their twilight years). But the urgency of the deadline for radical change -
maybe only a few years away - is hard for the younger left to ignore.
Trump the New Hitler?
Lesser-evil proponents have traditionally made their case based on an
assumption of modest differences between the two candidates - typically, one
is marginally better on inequality and welfare issues. But with Trump, the
stakes, it is said, have been raised considerably. Some supporters of LEV
argue that Trump is a new Hitler. As a result, everything - including
abandoning one's political principles - must be done to stop him.
There is, as already noted, the problem that, if Trump really is Hitler,
then it looks very much like decades of lesser evil voting may have
contributed to the entrenchment of an evil system that produced this new
Hitler. But there is a further difficulty.
If everything must be done to stop Trump, the progressive left finds itself
vulnerable to exactly the same kind of bogus "resistance" politics that so
discredited the liberal-left and has actually strengthened Trump rather than
undermined him. If progressives and dissidents need to join the effort to do
anything and everything to stop Trump, then why not also get on board with
the next entirely evidence-free scandal against him, the next "Russiagate?"
In fact, if Trump is Hitler and must be stopped at all costs, how is the
progressive left supposed to distinguish itself from the ridiculous,
political energy-sapping, self-sabotaging posturing of the liberal-left? The
danger is the progressive left gets subsumed within the phony,
Democratic-loyalist left rather than leading the left by example into a more
effective politics of real resistance.
Bernie Sanders introducing legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to
$15 an hour, April 2017. (Sen. Bernie Sanders, Wikimedia Commons)
Refining the Struggle
There is a final, consciousness-raising issue for younger leftists to
consider when deciding whether to reject entirely the evil U.S. system, even
if it risks allowing Trump another four years. Many younger leftists wonder
exactly what kind of evil system they live under and how they should best
respond to it. Refusing to vote for one of the two evil candidates may be
the only way they can decide for sure.
One possibility is that the U.S. is a deeply flawed democratic system, but
still accountable to voters. If that is right, then withholding their
consent from an evil Democratic candidate may finally serve as a corrective
to the endless rightward shift of the political system towards greater evil.
If Sanders' supporters reject voting for Biden, Biden is unlikely to win the
election. The deeply corrupt Democratic party leadership will then be forced
into crisis. If it really wishes to win, it will have to accommodate the
left meaningfully to win back its support.
Had the left chosen this course 30 years ago, rather than listening to calls
to vote for the lesser evil candidate, they wonder, might the Democratic
Party have ever reached the nadir of foisting a cognitively challenged and
morally compromised candidate like Biden on the party's supporters?
If U.S. democracy still functions, might the Democratic leadership faced
with a real rebellion by the left be forced gradually to concede ground to a
leftist political agenda, creating a genuine ideological contest between the
two parties?
Labour Threw an Election
The other possibility is that the U.S. system lost its democratic features
in all but name some time ago, and is instead a straightforward plutocracy
serving a wealth-elite. The two parties pretend to compete for votes only to
make the electorate think it is still in charge.
If the U.S. is a plutocracy, the political system will be largely
indifferent as to whether the left is prepared to vote for Biden or not.
Because in a two-party plutocracy, both parties represent the same interests
- the corporate elite's. They are simply branded differently to delude
voters into thinking the system is democratic.
Younger voters have increasing reasons to suspect that the latter assessment
is right. They can, for instance, look across the Atlantic to the recent
experience of the UK, which has a similar two-party system.
An internal report leaked last month revealed that Labour Party bosses -
Britain's version of the Democratic National Committee - intentionally threw
the 2017 general election to stop the party's then leader, Jeremy Corbyn,
from winning power against an increasingly far-right Conservative Party. The
party bureaucrats felt compelled to sabotage their own candidate after they
had failed two years earlier to prevent Labour members from electing Corbyn
- the U.K.'s version of Sanders - as leader.
In other words, the permanent bureaucracy of the supposedly leftwing Labour
Party felt it had more in common with the ultra-rightwing Conservatives than
with its own democratic socialist leader.
Is the Democratic Party machine, which has now twice done everything in its
power to stop Sanders, a democratic socialist, becoming the party's
presidential candidate, really so different from the U.K. Labour Party
machine?
Bogus Political Fights
If the U.S. is really a two-party plutocracy, the Democratic leadership will
do everything it can to stop a candidate (Sanders) who might threaten
plutocratic rule, even if that means installing a weak and incompetent
candidate (Biden) who risks losing to an ostensible opponent (Trump). In
this kind of system, voters' attention must be channeled into bogus
political fights over barely distinguishable candidates rather than a real
struggle over ideology.
Does that not sum up rather precisely what we have watched unfold over the
last six months in the U.S.?
So for young leftists, not voting for Biden may help to resolve their own
uncertainty about whether the U.S. system is redeemable or not. It is the
step they feel they need to take to educate themselves and their peers on
whether their energies should be directed chiefly at fighting the Democratic
Establishment or abandoning the system entirely and taking to the streets.
The problem with lesser-evil voting for them is that rather than clarify the
next course of action it simply obfuscates. It leaves it unclear whether the
political pendulum can be made to swing back towards the left or whether the
system needs to be destroyed entirely.
The lesser evil argument rests on the false assumption that we are not
already in a time of revolution - if not a political revolution, certainly
an ecological one. The planet is about to throw up our house of cards, our
civilization, and violently reorder it for us.
In these circumstances, the left faces a very difficult choice indeed:
between risking a delayed response by putting a better face on humanity's
plight by installing the slightly less evil candidate, and facing the
present and the future directly, in all its terrifying, enervating
depravity, in an almost-certainly violent struggle to take back into our own
hands our fate as a species.
Which is the better course? There are no easy answers. To argue otherwise,
as too many proponents of lesser evil voting do, may ultimately prove to be
the more foolish option.