Regarding the coming 2018 US midterm election — two dueling essays — for and against lesser evil voting

26 October 2018

Perhaps you detest both American political parties

What (then) to do for the 2018 midterms?

Nick Pemberton (against lesser evil voting) and Chris Wright (for it) have just published essays on the subject.

The two confront each other's perspectives. Both are potentially persuasive. However, given the American condition, one seems to have an edge.

The takeaways

In mid-October this year, Nick Pemberton recommended against lesser evil voting. He supported the merit of ideologically pure alternative vote casting.

He afterward responded to Chris Wright's demolishing critique the following way — here sifted for clarity:

For lesser evil voting to remain legitimate, there has to be a difference between the two parties.

[T]here are outcomes to be achieved by candidates running without corporate money.

Either they win outright or they become enough of a threat to the corporate parties that they have to adopt some of their platforms.

Neither of these things will happen under the lesser evil voting philosophy. The third party doesn’t have to win to have an impact, but they have to be a legitimate threat.

Undermining them before they become this is just sabotage. A vote for the lesser evil is a vote for corporate power.

Third parties are failing because they are in the middle ground.

However, the question remains: how do we get leverage in a lesser evil system?

Does the current system present options against fascism, or does it only provide roads to it?

As long as left-wing populist movements are undermined by the Democrats, right-wing fascist populist movements will overtake the country.

From Wright's reality-constrained perspective, Pemberton's political take is wishful nonsense:

If you think letting the House or Senate remain in Republican hands is a price worth paying for voting for an ideologically “correct” candidate who has no chance of winning, so be it.

But I’d bet a lot of immigrants who are finding it much harder to get a visa now than under Obama would disagree with you.

As would, perhaps, quite a few environmental activists who are now desperately working overtime to prevent Ryan Zinke’s Department of the Interior from stripping yet another national park or monument of federal protection.

When (semi-)fascism is appearing on the horizon or is already in power, the imperative is to build a united front against fascism.

The Communist Party in the period of the Popular Front was right about this. It’s time to apply the hard-won lessons of the past.

A key point that both missed — candidate quality

I agree with Chris Wright that obviously weak third party candidates are useless. But he makes only the numerical vote-getting argument.

Let's add another. Organizational competence, even it is only aimed at achieving disagreeable objectives.

Political and leadership ability matter to the nation's survival. Existing American third party candidates usually lack both. If elected, they are likely to be spiritlessly rolled under by the Deep State. A result not unlike what is going on now. It is difficult to see political or philosophical progress in that. Or a message that accords with the third parties' claimed progressivism.

In illustration, in 2016, following reasoning like Pemberton's, I looked closely at alternative party candidates.

The Green Party's presidential candidate, physician Jill Stein, turned out to be naive, ignorant and often unrealistic in her views. She was not a viable candidate for leadership of the necessary magnitude.

The Libertarian candidate, likeable former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, was worse. He demonstrated himself to be a flagrant ignoramus, flying a reality-ignoring and chaotic disorder-inviting flag.

Elimination of my state's lesser third party candidates proceeded similarly down the line. Almost all were well-meaning naifs with poorly thought out political philosophies. Reality would have chewed them up within their first weeks in office. Where would that have gotten us?

More important, with regard to Pemberton's ideologically-based perspective, how would one interpret a vote for someone who cannot (reasonably) articulate workable opposition?

The United States' main party alternatives are thus, most often, dregs. A fact which, I suspect, motivates Chris Wright's voluble irritation with Nick Pemberton's idealistic take.

Necessary work

If Americans are serious about "exterminating" some of the corporatist-run mass that runs the United States, we have to foster a noticeably competent movement against it. Something with enough adherents to make elections competitive.

Until a workable competition blooms, we are throwing protest votes away in trying to elect destined losers. Losers in both senses of the word.

Wright's point about (competent) Ralph Nader's siphoning effect in 2000 Florida is correct. Nader's presence lost what would have been a Democrat-favoring election to Republican candidate Bush. A vote for Nader was, in its low numbers effect, a baby wail for sense. A pity. Nader was that rarity, an alternative someone who could have gotten things done. Had a movement already existed to carry him high, the nation would have been better off.

My point here is that a genuinely progressive movement — however leftward we define it — must be built between elections.

The necessary level of political involvement required for that is, American history mostly tells us, abhorrent. We avoid doing it.

And, therefore, we continue to argue about the merits for voting for either the Republican Party of the Anti-Christ or the Democratic Party of the Slightly Lesser Beelzebub.

An illustrating metaphor — wrapped in a hat

Let's start this section with guns — and end with pussy hats.

I use those examples to demonstrate liberals' consistently vacuous ineffectualness.

First, gun violence. The anti-gun upsurge berates the NRA for its resistance to arguably sensible gun laws. There's a lot of highly justified, soul-touching wailing involved.

But, even with its legitimate moral righteousness, I see almost no competitively proportioned political money coming forth from the anti-gun group.

And almost no meaningful effort to build the head-smashing political clout that one needs to be taken seriously in United States' money-owned political system.

In consequence, realists are prompted to ask:

In the absence of a new constitution-constructing convention, whose fault is it (really) that anti-gunists get no political traction?

Let's expand this finger-pointing with a metaphorical pun. Pink pussy hats.

Remember how women marched in protest of the crassly misogynist Donald Trump's election to the presidency in 2017 and again in March 2018?

Did we really think that occasionally wearing pussy hats was going to make a historically observable difference to anything?

The knitted hat example is even more telling than those marches' politically ineffectual occasionalness. Liberals cannot even agree about the merits of their chosen protest symbol:

[W]hen marchers take to the streets in cities from Lansing to Las Vegas, there could be fewer pink pussyhats in the crowds.

The reason:

The sentiment that the pink pussyhat excludes and is offensive to transgender women and gender nonbinary people who don't have typical female genitalia and to women of color because their genitals are more likely to be brown than pink.

"I personally won’t wear one because if it hurts even a few people's feelings, then I don't feel like it’s unifying," said Phoebe Hopps, founder and president of Women's March Michigan and organizer of anniversary marches Jan. 21 in Lansing and Marquette.

We are, one can infer from this, too narrow-minded and too self-absorbed to focus on:

a broadly shared resistance to evil,

as opposed to

Big-Picture-wasting, sole focus infatuation with narrower aspects of a shared humanity.

Perhaps a representatively multi-colored hat with a supplementary mini or maxi-phallus?

One cannot craft a better metaphor (than this) for the American liberal wing's self-destructively stupid ineffectualness.

Left to "those" people, ain't nothing gonna happen. An observation, I think, that supports both Pemberton and Wright's conflicting views.

Really — what can one do with brain-dead, brain-washed, argumentative sheep?

The moral? — In 2018, liberals, lesser evil it . . .

Or resolve to get off our whiny butts.

PeteFree.com

Regarding the coming 2018 US midterm election — two dueling essays — for and against lesser evil voting