Funny, or maybe just sad, that you apparently didn’t realize what a terrible example this is.
Yes, it’s quite likely Stein or Johnson would lead to less deaths and misery. However, since America has a first past the post voting system and neither major party is in danger of collapsing none of that matters. Trump or Hillary will win. If those are the issues you care about it’s obvious which candidate’s victory is preferable.
I would argue that Johnson, if he also had a Libertarian Congress, would cause the most misery of all, more than Trump.
…Were you awake in the period between 2000 and 2008? Yeah, we survived the Bush years. They also tanked America’s standing in the world, cost us trillions of dollars, left the middle east even more of a dangerous, intractable mess, and caused untold harm to the country in a great many ways. If you want to make an example of how “it’s okay that third parties play the spoiler”, that is a really fucking shitty example to make.
And even that doesn’t really do Trump justice. Bush was a standard politician with a few really bad ideas. Trump is a raving fucking lunatic whose only ideas are completely insane.
Technically, this is true. To go back to that truck analogy, Clinton would drive over 5 people. A moderate republican would be worse, probably like 7 or 8. Trump would attach a nuke to the truck and drive it into an orphanage. Better is better, and an idealistic vote for a third party is saying, “I don’t need my vote to matter, even in the slightest bit; I have no interest in helping the lesser possible evil when I can help the greater possible evil by campaigning for the impossible good!”
When you insist on all or nothing, you’ll almost always get nothing. It’s a basic fact of life. All the hand-waving sophistry about “the lesser evil is still evil” doesn’t change that basic fact.
Some people just don’t seem to get that. And I’m not aiming that at millennials. Many, maybe most, do in fact get that; and some non-millennials who are old enough to know better don’t get it.
I’m stealing this.
Am I right? Aren’t most of life’s decisions a matter of choosing the lesser evil?
No that I consider Hillary Clinton evil, by the way. “Choosing the lesser evil” is a figure of speech that usually isn’t talking about actual evils.
Is Hillary Imperfect? Of course she is. Who isn’t? But Trump is evil. So in this case, if we want to be more literal, it’s not a matter of choosing the lesser evil. It’s a matter of choosing between the imperfect and the evil.
Or, if you hesitate at calling Trump evil, then it’s a matter of choosing between the imperfect but competent, and the disastrously imperfect and incompetent.
I was going to go back through time via google and find a bunch of examples of “this election is the most important of our lives,” because it seems like every 4 years I’m told that, but it seems that WaPo already did an article about it for me. So yes, I feel that every major candidate in every major election is painted as the worst of all time, and every time I start to buy into it, only to realize like a month later, after the fever wears off, that things weren’t all that bad.
I do happen to think that, but maybe I’m just buying into the hype. I mean, there are people out there who are 100% convinced that Obama is the worst president of all time, and that Clinton would somehow be worse. Those people are clearly delusional. Partisan politics is a hell of a drug, maybe we’re all just high.
There are always hysterical people who say each new president is the worst ever.
But when’s the last time you remember a party’s nominee being opposed by every living president? Or that party’s previous nominee, from just four years earlier, giving a speech that was an absolutely scathing indictment of him?
And when’s the last time a presidential nominee had no relevant experience and so little relevant knowledge? And then just blatantly lied over and over, and when called on it doubled down by repeatedly lying and saying it was actually his opponent who was guilty of _______?
So, no, I’m sorry: this is unprecedented. (I can’t believe I’m actually having to make the case for this fact.)
Much of the confusion in these threads is due to badly wrong assessments of the comparative efficacies of possible Presidents. Pantastic, let me ask you to rank possible Presidents, as I did in the following post. If indeed you find Hillary almost as bad as Trump, we can dispense with further confusion — I’ll just walk away, pitying your ignorance.
Clinton is the worst Democratic candidate in memory. She’s got record setting unfavorable numbers, bested only by Trump himself, and she was being investigated by the FBI during prime campaign months. Both sides can accurately claim that their opponents are historically the worst ever by various measures. I think you can probably pick different measures every election to make that true.
Maybe you don’t remember Dukakis.
Personally I think any argument about “the most important election in history” needs to include the qualifier “since Lincoln”.
That said, I think Clinton vs Trump may truly be the most important (since Lincoln).
Every presidential election is important for Supreme Court purposes. And for other purposes: wars are started or avoided based on who’s president. It’s a bad idea to minimize any election, and a lot of what you’ve seen in the past is people arguing against a “it doesn’t matter which Demopublican gets elected” narrative.
But this one is different. Qualitatively so. And the responses to it are different. Just today, we have several dozen senior diplomats openly opposing Trump. This isn’t baseball as usual.
In 2012, I quietly voiced the idea that if Romney won, he’d do a lot of stuff I disagreed with, but he wouldn’t be the end of the world or anything.
Trump is so unhinged that I cannot voice that same idea now.