I see it as a trolley problem.
We’ve got this train coming up to an intersection. I’m a lefty, so I don’t see either path as particularly great. Down one path, train’s gonna squish a fair number of people. Down the other path, it’s gonna squish a huge tremendous number of people.
And 156 MILLION voters have their hands on the engine and are pushing the train toward one of those tracks.
You also have your greens and libertarians, saying, “Hey, both of those tracks are bad, I can’t push toward either of them. I’m gonna push the train in this other direction! And why should the train even need to go on tracks anyway?”
To which I say, “Look, I agree, the tracks are bullshit, we should have a different system. But right now, right now , we have this failed system in front of us. You know the train only goes on the tracks, and you haven’t taken the time or effort to build a plausible alternative set of tracks, and you know for damn sure that the train’s not going to go anywhere except on one of these two tracks in front of us.”
If you don’t agree with me that one of those sets of tracks leads to a significantly worse outcome than the other–if you genuinely believe that each set of tracks has precisely equivalent outcomes–then let’s talk about that. But if you do believe that one set of tracks is worse than the other, then please, please, PLEASE join me in pushing the train toward the less-bad set.
You don’t have to approve of that set. You don’t have to feel happy about it. And when the train gets on that set, join me in trying to slow it down and interfere with it so fewer people get squished, and maybe even start building an alternative set of tracks, or what the hell, start modifying the train so it doesn’t need tracks anyway.
But right now, in this moment, we don’t have time to do that before the train gets to the intersection. All we can do is push the train onto one of those two sets. Anything else is abdicating moral power and responsibility.