Generally, I vote in primaries for candidates I agree with, then vote in general elections to defeat maga republicans. I don’t think there’s an alternative to that that I can deliver.
There are plenty of things that can be done in addition to voting against maga relublicans i.e. organizing, protesting, trying to persuade people of my views etc. However these aren’t alternatives - they are completely irrespective of voting.
As someone who thinks there is no alternative to voting against authoritarian conservatives the burden is not on me to come up with something. The burden is on people who agree with the threat posed by those conservatives but think some alternative besides voting is the answer. When they neither vote to stop the magas nor provide an alternative then I’m going to blame them for that.
They’d probably be in the same shape if Harris was elected, with the only difference being that Netanyahu wouldn’t be showing Harris a letter where he nominated her for the Nobel Peace Price.
Like it or not, the electorate is full of ‘single issue voters’ whose views have to be considered in the calculus of elections. A two-party system ensures that their views will never be represented in the mainstream.
And when they win, they conclude that they’ve found the ‘sweet spot’ in being ‘moderate(ly conservative)’ and stay there even when their voters made it clear that they’ve made compromises to put them in office. The Democratic National Committee, the organizing group behind fundraising for Democratic candidates at all levels, has become a moribund body that is stuck in keeping everything the same even as the country changes; it pushed Barack. Obama’s “Hope and Change” as long as he didn’t really change anything about corporate oversight or curtail military spending, and it pimped Hillary Clinton to the forefront and actively recruited celebrities to talk her up despite her broad unpopularity and dismissive manner toward anyone who was not toeing the party line or who wasn’t a big money donor. It has also tried to quash what should be mainstream Democrats like Liz Warren and Katie Holmes for being uppity broads who wouldn’t stay in their lane when it came to criticizing corporate malfeasance and predatory business practices. If the party isn’t activelly confronted by existential threats it won’t change at all.
It’s a long way from “this system hurts people” to “let’s burn it down.” Building constructive alternatives now and thinking about the real issues we face as communities is what I’m suggesting. Voting for or against the major parties may–or may not–help with that. This is a question we may well consider when deciding the morality of voting for the lesser evil, and the answers are often more interesting than the simple choice we are offered.
I’m more inspired by the words attributed to Eduardo Galeano than “get out the vote” campaigns: “Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.”
Or to paraphrase Eugene Debs, it may be better to fight for what we want and take longer to get it than to fight for what we don’t want–and get that.
The two approaches–the utopian ones here and the practical pragmatic ones of some in this thread do not have to be antagonistic, and it is often the practical pragmatic ones who create the conflict.
As an American, I am pretty much forced to be represented by a Republican or a Democrat. In a multi-party system, there is a chance that I can elect someone that more closely matches my views than those two parties. It also forces compromise if there is no majority in the legislative branch.
“The system” of federalized constitutional government has changed pretty radically in the last 250 years to the tune of 17 amendments (beyond the Bill of Rights) in ways that the Founders wouldn’t have imagined and most would not agree with including the abolition of chattel slavery, acquiring and granting statehood to the middle swath of the North American continent and couple of exclaves, expanding the voting franchise to women and Native Americans, prohibiting and then allowing the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages, giving the federal government the power to levy income tax, applying term limits to the office of President, et cetera. Some of those changes hadn’t been very good or well-thought out (especially the expansion of executive authority and the establishment of a virtually unaccountable surveillance state) but most of then are broadly regarded as positive, even by self-identified ‘conservatives’.
You’re presuming that the goal is to make things better and solve problems. That’s the goal for some people - specifically, those who try to wield political power in order to accomplish desired results. You know - politicians.
For others, the goal is to perpetually critique power (often to a large, devoted, and lucrative audience). These people will turn on anyone, even anyone aligned with them, who actually takes the sort of actions they’re theoretically agitating for. A good example of this is the way that the DSA have completely turned on AOC, branding her a “lib”. Of course, the DSA isn’t the only group that acts this way, but they’re among the most blatant.
I had the fortune it misfortune as a child (3rd grade) to write an essay on a historical “hero”. With the materials and information available to me, at that moment in time, I chose Christopher Columbus.
Suffice it to say that it was a fast fall from there.
I don’t know how many people learn the lesson but I’d argue that anyone that studies history should learn that the whole idea of heroes is flawed. Ultimately, all you can get is lessons, not supermen.
And the same with politics. These are all, at the end of the day, just people and those people are limited to the society that they were born into, the limits of the role that they’re elected into it, and the simply frailty of the human condition.
But I wouldn’t say that there’s only harm minimization.
Someone could still, genuinely, seem like a good candidate. I don’t know that it’s very common, but I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t ever happen.
And I also don’t believe that it does any good to vote, if neither candidate has sufficient merits. Like, if you’re tasked to hire a new doctor for a hospital, and the two people that show up are an untreatable schizophrenic with no medical experience nor knowledge beset by constant hallucinations of being under the control of aliens OR a guy who likewise has no medical training but did almost go to jail as a serial killer, well…maybe the schizophrenic is a safer bet but you’re probably better to choose neither.
While it may be that your local election system will reward a person with a job if even 1 vote is cast for them and 0 for the other guy, in a county of millions, that still at least signals that the voters have recognized the lack of quality, and that there’s an opportunity for pretty much anyone better to come and compete during the next election. (Obviously, it would be better if there were a lower confidence cutoff, but that’s a separate question.)
But, if everyone checks a box for every race then there’s no such heuristic and no driving force among the candidates except to be less worse than the other guy.
Even when there’s only two candidates in a ballot, there are three options. You can and should vote for no one if no one is fit to hold the job.
You might say that, in the short term, having a kid stick his finger into the hole in the dyke is the right answer.
And sure, once you’re to that point, that may be true. But how did you get to the point where using a child as a guard against massive scale loss of life is what’s necessary? Through the consistent and tunnel visioned focus on the short term.
At some point you have to stop moving from child fingers, to bubble gum, to trying to blow the waters back with hand grenades to accept that you simply failed the mission, long back, long ago. Progressively silly stop-gap solutions just isn’t the answer. Get the people out of the way and let the water destroy everything. Focus on how to build back better and, on the day you’ve got the new dam in place, remember the importance of the long view with things like good old boring upkeep and maintenance.
If a politician is bad enough, there comes the day where you have to give them the rope to hang themselves.
Here’s the thing though; if we extrapolate your example to the real-world, it was more like "You have a critically ill family member, and you have one choice between two and only two people to treat them, or else they die. One’s a new age faith healer who proposes using crystals, and the other’s a sexist, borderline alcoholic veterinarian.
Neither’s a particularly good choice in normal circumstances, but if a choice has to be made or your family member dies, better to choose the one who’s a medical professional of sorts, even if neither one is anywhere near optimal.
Not voting doesn’t mean no one will get elected. For this analogy to work, a new doctor must be hired regardless of whether you pick the schizophrenic or the hallucinator.
I think it is just a matter of ratios. 152M people selecting from 2 (or 20) national candidates means no one is happy. As elections are smaller, the ratios are better and the ‘lesser of two evils’ complaint goes away. For example: In Illinois ~13M people choose from ~2 Senatorial candidates for each of 2 positions. It is a much better ratio and I don’t hear the ‘lesser of two evils’ much.
Add in the fact that Senate elections, like Parliamentary, are regional rather than national so there is a higher chance of ‘agreement’ among the voters. This is one of the (many) strengths of a parliamentary democracy over a national presidential election.
There is definitely a contingent of people that want to throw a grenade into the system and see what comes out. I remember people expressing this in post-poll interviews back in 2016.
I maintain that there is a much larger contingent that just wants to be entertained – and Trump and MAGA entertain them. People are addicted to the dopamine hits from their feeds. Policy is hard and gotchas are easy.
This is the root-cause of the issue in the US. In Nov 2023, 77M people still wanted what Trump was selling. The counter move was to focus on controlling Congress, but that won’t be enough any more.