A lot of the “lesser of two evils” piety overlooks the fact that politics in the U.S. starts with a bunch of contenders and eventually narrows the field down to two people.
It’s a fact that in 2008, despite the outcry by supporters of Hillary, Obama did get more primary votes, and more delegates, than she did. It’s also a fact that in 2016, Hillary did get more primary votes, and more delegates, than Bernie, despite the hurt feelings of the Bernie Bros. And in 2020 Biden did get more primary votes than all the other Democratic challengers combined.
So the people have had many opportunities to vote for a “better” candidate. As it worked out, the people’s choice of a better candidate may not agree with mine or yours. Which leaves us with the lesser of two evils.
2024 marked the 14th time I voted in a presidential election. In most of those elections, the candidate I supported in the primary did not end up being the eventual nominee. But I voted for the nominee anyway, because I knew damn well that the nominee from the other party would be worse for the country, and therefore worse for me.
It is paywalled, but the part I could read seems more applicable to the UK where there are two parties who for example are anti-trans in practice, just with different flavors. Not to mention it is likely that an (as shitty if not moreso) 3rd party might actually usurp both of them by the time the next election rolls around.
In the US the parties are not close at all and I would accuse someone who made that claim of adolescent nihilism. If for no other reason, the most consequential supreme court decisions on abortion, voting rights, gun control, etc. have reliably split based on which party nominated them.
Avoiding name calling in favour of more useful and subtle arguments is the point of the article. Given that 1/3 of Americans typically do not vote in presidential elections, it may be worth investigating some of the reasons for their decision. One may be the perception that politicians from either party seem to resemble each other more than they resemble the electorate. This may include the failure of Democrats to shape the Supreme Court when they had the chance.
I feel that political candidates are not the place to look for political change. I feel that if you want to affect political change in a democratic system, you need to go out and educate people on what the change is and why they should support it.
Then, if you’re able to build up enough public support for the change you seek, the politicians will join the cause and you can elect them to turn your ideas into programs.
From a perspective of convincing someone, especially someone who doesn’t follow politics very closely, I think calling them wrong isn’t a good way to go about it.
However the idea that the parties are very close to each other in America is just wrong. We’re on a forum where people who are very interested in a subject talk about it seriously, and it is seriously wrong. There will likely be a future election where I phone bank again, and when I do I won’t just tell people they’re wrong or that they don’t have an adult view of politics, but we’re here in a forum where people sign up to have their perspectives challenged and complaining that challenging someone’s perspective is why people feel too insulted to engage is weaksauce.
If I were a democrat in a leadership position I would push the party to do things like eliminating the filibuster, passing legislation in opposition to things the supreme court has ruled on, using aggressive tactics reminiscent of the Trump administration to use pressure to get compliance to executive policy that is progressive, and even packing the court if necessary. However I am not in a leadership position. I am aware that while the democrats don’t act with the level of alarm when in power that I would, they do get to appoint judges when vacancies pop up and when they do the judges they pick are night and day in terms of both economic and social progressivism in comparison to the judges their opponents pick. People who follow US politics should know this and if they don’t they need to grow up.
Although I agree with your prescription, you’ve missed a subtlety in @Kropotkin’s writing.
The two parties do not resemble each other; certainly not in policy. But neither do either party’s real positions or real spokespeople resemble the electorate.
From the perspective of a large portion of the politically disaffected and economically disadvantaged electorate, they both appear distantly irrelevant. Differently irrelevant, but irrelevant nevertheless.
I think any individual voter has every right to think this, however the electorate as a whole wants way more things than can be represented by two parties. The real solution would be a multiparty system, but barring that it isn’t really possible for the parties to represent the wide array of views of the public.
I also think the Democrats suffered in 2024 in part because they saw that the public, especially in a few key swing states was more in line with Trump on tarrifs than with the Clinton and Obama-era Democrats who suppored free trade, so they triangulated and came a lot closer to Trump’s America-first agenda on that front. The voters gave them no rewards for trying to more closely represent their views on trade, and instead blamed them for inflation that was in part exacerbated by barriers to trade.
This is a hugely important point. Supreme Court nominations, long the argument of last resort for supporting the Democrats as the lesser of two evils, may be far down the list of what many people need and want to see changed in their day to day lives.
FTR, I have permanently injured my septum from decades of holding my nose and voting for the lesser evil. I see nothing problematic in voting for the lesser of two evils AND pointing out the very real problems with that. Heck, the Wobblies used to insist “we will fight for higher pay and shorter hours but that will not stop us from presenting much more radical critiques and solutions.”
I do think it is a problem when Democrats, for example, say, “our political agenda goes only this far and no farther–vote for us!” and radicals who insist there is no value in reform. They could and should complement each other. Why they don’t is an interesting question.
Is it possible that much of “the public” was not much concerned with tariffs at all but desperately concerned with securing good jobs? Given that presidential elections are more about selling the sizzle than the steak, Trump, though wrong and lying about what he would do, used tariffs to position himself as caring about jobs and having a simple solution. The Democrats could then be cast as offering no solutions and not caring.
“Adolescent nihilism” isn’t name-calling. Neither of those words is a name. They’re both perfectly descriptive words that just happen not to footsie around with a pretense of civility.
You want to talk about problematic words? Look at the reliance on weasel-wording in the rest of your post. “may be worth investigationg”. “One may be the perception”. “This may include”. This is quite a weaselly way to smuggle in assertions without the work of supporting them. Those are example of problematic words.
It’s because many of them simply don’t understand how the government works, and if someone doesn’t understand how the government works, then they also won’t understand the importance of voting. Let’s look at an example:
Can you specifically point to what “chance” you’re talking about? I’m having trouble thinking of a time in recent memory when the Democrats had the numbers to confirm their favored nominee and did not act to shape the Supreme Court, but evidently you have an example in mind.
They were concerned with indulging their bigotry and their malignance. Americans have as a group always put hurting people above their own self interest. Always.
Well yes, but that’s because much of the public is so ignorant that they believed Trump when he told them that tariffs are a tax paid by other countries, which is a lie. Tariffs are ultimately paid by the consumer.
Yes, the Dems made the mistake of taking the public’s views on trade seriously. They previously offered the solution of investing in domestic jobs programs and promoting free trade as a net benefit for workers and consumers. Voters came out against the TPP and voted in Trump on anti-trade policies. So the democrats chose to view the public as wanting that option and offered public investment into jobs in addition to keeping tariffs in place. It turns out the public actually wants jobs and low prices (the exact thing that the Obama-era policies were designed to promote) and doesn’t care that the policies they themselves asked for led to higher prices.
There are a lot of voters who don’t care about the supreme court, but they do care about union rights that the supreme court has weakened. Or they don’t care about the supreme court but they do want there to be fish where they go fishing. The list goes on. I think the Democrats have made tons of mistakes, not least of which is attempting to ride the sentiment of the day and coming off as believing in nothing as a result, and not understanding how to message to people who aren’t as plugged in as they are in American politics. However it is also true that people’s views of voting not mattering or the parties being more or less the same are based in ignorance.
Let me say only that my attempt at civility is not a pretence, however unseemly you may find it. It is meant to help relax the hardened positions on both sides to attempt to find some way forward in a debate I have observed and taken part in, from virtually every position, for more than 50 years.
The Republican and Democratic parties are not close in the rhetoric (and have become more polarized in the last forty years) but in actual policies have not differed nearly as much as that rhetoric would suggest. Indeed, presidential administrations that you would think to be polar opposites by their sloganeering—George H.W. Bush versus Clinton, George W. Bush versus Barack Obama—were in many ways a direct continuations of large swaths of policy, and often in ways that were not what they sold to or benefitted their constituents.
To a certain extent that is because of the inertia of government; W. Bush committed the country to invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and despite pledges to extract us, Obama continued and even ‘surged’ troops on the ground under the guidance of military advisers who essentially recommended continuation of strategies that already weren’t working. Obama also continued and even expanded drone warfare and extrajudicial killing, and of course the detention of ‘enemy combatants’ in the military run Guantanamo Bay (ostensibly because the Congress wouldn’t approve the shutdown of the camp and transfer of detainees to US penal custody, but in reality because nobody could figure out how to disposition people who were taken through ‘extraordinary rendition’, held in custody without due process, and for which the US government often had little or no evidence of crimes or attack that could be presented in a court of law).
On the corporate and regulation policies the continuities between administrations goes back to the Clinton-era deregulation (one of the political agendas with true bipartisan support), and even Obama’s signature regulation, the Affordable Care Act a.k.a. ‘Obamacare’ was literally a Republican plan warmed over which Republicans then ‘opposed’ with just enough vigor to make it seem like they were against it but permitting enough ‘defectors’ to let it pass so they could undermine it later. In immigration, the political parties have actually flipped sides since the Reagan era with the Democratic administrations being more pro-immigration but in fact there has been no real push for reform and expulsions of undocumented immigrants has progressed in number regardless of what party controlled the White House and Congress. The US foreign trade policy has been consistently one of offshoring manufacturing jobs for cheap labor and the securing of global supply chains for everything from automotive parts to hamburgers regardless of what this did to the American lower (and encroaching up on middle) class and undermining labor protections for the jobs that remain.
You can point to abortion (which went from being an issue where both parties had internal divisions to one that became aligned along party boundaries), gun control, LGBTQ+ issues, public versus subsidized private (charter school) education, et cetera but these are all part and parcel of the ‘culture wars’ that the GOP under Newt Gingrich’s tutelage have become signature political issues that energize the base and get ‘dark money’ support even though the majority of Americans across political alignments are in broad agreement about them.
Donald Trump is the first president in going on three generations that has actually made serious deviations from established policy, in his first term by turning hard right and with just-barely-shrouded corruption and obvious nepotism, and in this current regime that has turned far right and naked graft and malfeasance. But this is also dragging Democrats rightward and toward their own undermining of democratic norms just to ‘keep up’. Everytime somebody argues that we need a ‘Democratic Joe Rogen’, that we should ‘pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices’, or gerrymander the shit out of the couple of states where that might actually benefit the Democratic party, a little more flame goes out of the lamp of democratic ideals and norms. In essence, the Democrats have now become ‘classical (Reagan) conservatives’, and the GOP has become a far right party with a vocal (if not majority) contingent of theocratic fascists who are driving the narrative.
But nobody is offering a serious alternative on the opposing side, and save for a few lone voice nobody within the Democratic party is arguing for any kind of progressivism or achieving more than just maintaining the status quo. And neither of the political parties is really serving the needs of their constituents nor actually doing anything other than superficial sideshow efforts to confront the multiple existential crises that we are facing as a nation and industrial society as a whole. Politics and the discussion of it has become so much arranging of deck chairs while the ship is grinding into an iceberg and the ruptured hull is taking on water, with political leaders on both sides saying that the ship is too big to sink.
The problem with that is that the parties are the voice that people hear. You can “go out and educate people” all you like but everything you will see in the increasingly corporatized media will be what party leaders authorize, and everything that actually gets discussed and put up for a vote will be what each party regards as a priority, which per the above is mostly the same policies regardless of which party is currently advocating them. Getting “the politicians [to] join your cause” is largely an effort of getting the party leadership to even allow that to be heard, and if you are a squeaky wheel within the party that is saying things they don’t like they’ll back other candidates against you as the DNC has with Katie Porter because the last thing the Democratic party wants is a screechy single mom with a whiteboard and a sheet of facts holding CEOs accountable for fleecing their voters. It upsets the ‘apple cart’ of campaign financing, and nobody in power really wants to fix that.
With respect to the issue of the o.p., at least in regard to an aspirant autocrat like Donald Trump and especially the people behind him who are continuing in their goal of dismantling the administrative state and wholesale elimination of protections of civil rights by the day, that “choosing the lesser evil” is the pragmatic choice, and even if you don’t like the probably reality that Kamala Harris would continue US polity toward Israel and Palestine (maybe making stronger statements and threatening to withhold weapon shipments if Israel doesn’t allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip) it wouldn’t be worse than what Trump vowed and has actually done. But that makes politics just a holding action with the Democratic party again slip-sliding rightward in an unavailing effort to capture ‘undecided’ voters while completely abandoning the progressive wing of support.
For someone who looks back on decades of slow and inconsistent but seemingly inexorable progress toward a more representative democracy, social, scientific, and technological progress, to see the backsliding of the last few decades, and especially since the 11 September 2001 attacks where American went from being (or at least being largely perceived) as a beacon of freedom and democracy to a frightened wild animal spastically lashing out at everything while continuing to get mired in a tar pit of its own making, none of this looks optimistic. Voting for a mainstream Democrat is basically asking for the slower death of drowning in a filling bog than being crucified in the name of unworkable autarky and ‘nationalist’ racial persecution.
Maybe that’s because presidents are not dictators (as much as certain presidents might wish they were), and therefore different administrations don’t have carte blanche to shape the country exactly as they will.
Obama still had to deal with Republicans in Congress, and Bush still had to deal with Democrats.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when people bring up this point. Am I the only one who remembers that the major point of contention was whether healthcare should be handled on a state by state basis, like Romney’s plan and his home state, versus the Democrats’ proposal for a nationwide plan? Obama’s plan was not a Republican plan because Republicans would never have taken it nationwide. How is that super important difference something we just gloss over with a claim that Obamacare was a “Republican plan”?
And wasn’t Obama pushing for a public option? If Democrats wanted a public option, and tried to get it, but failed, that’s hardly evidence that they are indistinguishable from Republicans.
I can understand pointing out Romney’s plan in an argument with a republican where you’re trying to convince him to support Obamacare despite being the Republican. I cannot understand using this argument to try and claim that Democrats and Republicans are the same.
The Republicans wouldn’t have taken it to New Hampshire. Romney was also a (by GOP standards) liberal governor of the most liberal state which also has had a veto-proof majority in the statehouse for decades. Romney even vetoed parts of Massachusetts’s healthcare reform and was overrided by the legislature.
Well, the inconvenient facts won’t allow us to do that:
Republican Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island was the point man. The bill he introduced, Health Equity and Access Reform Today, (yes, that spells HEART) had a list of 20 co-sponsors that was a who’s who of Republican leadership. There was Minority Leader Bob Dole, R- Kan., Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and many others. There also were two Democratic co-sponsors.
Among other features, the Chafee bill included:
** An individual mandate;*
** Creation of purchasing pools;*
** Standardized benefits;*
** Vouchers for the poor to buy insurance;*
“You would find a great deal of similarity to provisions in the Affordable Care Act,” Sheila Burke, Dole’s chief of staff in 1993, told PunditFact via email. “The guys were way ahead of the times!! Different crowd, different time, suffice it to say.”
The HEART bill was not word for word the same, and in particular it did not expand Medicare or provide government subsidies but the ACA was in essence the same concept of a market-supported quasi-universal health insurance mandate versus the prior approach under Clinton (‘Hillarycare’ as it was derisively described) of a fully subsidized insurance plan for those without insurance through employers with price controls on medical costs. That the HEART bill had broad opposition among conservative members of the GOP doesn’t negate the fact that it had wide support among then-more moderate Republicans as an alternative to ‘Hillarycare’.