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jill stein
A Note on the 'Lesser of Two Evils' Voting Argument in 2024
Why people, and radicals in particular, fail to grasp the reasoning behind this argument is truly mind-boggling.
Sep 10, 2024
One of the most bewildering reactions on the part of certain segments of the U.S. left (whatever that means these days) is that every time there is a crucial election, and the voice of reason dictates casting a ballot in a direction which will help the most to keep out of public office the most extreme, and often enough the positively nuts, candidate in the race, is to scream that this is a case of “the lesser of two evils” thinking and to imply in turn that the one making such an argument is, somehow, a sellout.
Noam Chomsky, of all people, has been the recipient of such brainless reactions for much of his life as he has repeatedly made the argument that voting for a third-party or independent candidate in a swing state would accomplish nothing but increase the possibility of the most extreme and positively nuts candidate winning the election.
Why people, and radicals in particular, fail to grasp the reasoning behind such an argument is truly mind-boggling. Either they don’t understand the nature of U.S. politics, with its winner-take-all election system, or they are simply wrapped up in the “feel-good” factor in politics to even notice such subtleties. But since even a fairly bright elementary student would most likely be able to understand the difference between a winner-take-all election system and proportional representation, it would be logical to conclude that what we have here is nothing less than a display of the politics of feeling good, which basically translates to acting in whatever manner makes one feel good, politically speaking, regardless of the consequences of those actions.
Now, one might say that when the Comintern adopted Stalin’s thinking in the 1920s that “social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” and proceeded later to lump together Hitler’s Nazi party and the German Social Democratic Party that it was doing so out of conviction that the capitalist world was teetering on the brink of collapse and that the communists would inevitably emerge as the victorious party.
But what is the excuse of the tiny segment of U.S. self-professed radicals who fail to see that in order to advance the program of socialism we must first defeat Trump at the ballot box? Incidentally, this also happens to be the official stance of the Communist Party USA. Yet, one can already hear the argument that U.S. communists must have also fallen victims of the picking a lesser of two evils mental attitude. However, in numerous conversations I've had with radicals (leftists, anarchists, and communists) across Europe, their own thinking was also in line with the reasoning of the Communist Party USA—namely, that priority number one of U.S. progressive voters should be to defeat wannabe dictator Donald Trump in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Can this be done by voting in a swing state for someone like Cornel West or Jill Stein when these candidates have zero chance of winning? My chances of being attacked and killed by a shark, which are estimated to be one in 3.75 million, are far greater than either of these two candidates making it to the White House in November 2024.
Oh, but I forgot! Such realizations hardly matter in comparison to how good it might make one feel by voting for a candidate outside of the two existing parties. Who cares if the candidate who would love to turn the U.S. into an autocracy wins the election? The other candidate is simply the lesser of two evils, which is like saying that it makes no difference to live under a political regime that is inadequate in realizing the ideals of a decent society and one that is bent on a process of societal fasticization.
Still, there is something even more bewildering with the lesser-of-two evils dictum that is thrown around by small segments of the left. Generally speaking, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, there have been two doctrines about voting: the official doctrine, “which holds that politics consists of showing up every few years, pushing a lever, then going back to one’s private pursuits,” and the “left doctrine.” For the latter, “politics consists in constant direct popular engagement in public affairs, including a wide variety of activism on many fronts. Occasionally an event comes up in the formal political arena called an ‘election….’ It’s at most a brief departure from political engagement.”
The third doctrine about voting, which is the “lesser of two evils” principle, has appeared on the political scene rather recently and, as Chomsky highlighted, is “now consuming much debate on the left.” The debate, he went to say, “also falls within the official doctrine, with its laser-like focus on elections.”
Most leftists, radicals and communists know fully well what the Democratic Party represents. Moreover, the recently held Democratic National Convention, with its pathetic effort to reclaim the mantle of "freedom” in a simultaneous display of militaristic jingoism, gave us ample warnings of what lies ahead. It takes no political genius to see that Kamala Harris is yet another centrist and wholly opportunistic Democrat who will change her tune as the circumstances dictate. Or, as the British political philosopher John Gray aptly put it, to recognize that she has “been abruptly transformed by compliant media from a vice-president commonly acknowledged to be barely competent into an uplifting national leader.”
Leftists, radicals and communists living in capitalist societies know that elections are hardly the stuff of political participation that will turn things around. Only grassroots activism can bring about meaningful change. But whenever elections come up, and proportional representation is not in the picture, we hold our nose and vote for the lesser-known threat to what is left of the democracy we have. And then we go back to real activism in order to change society and the world for the better.
It's not complicated.
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Voting for President Is Not an Exercise in Personal Expression
Whatever flaws you may see in Joe Biden, he is the only actual alternative to Trump’s reign.
Nov 26, 2023
Many Americans are unhappy about the likely 2024 choice being offered them for president—Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. But two third party alternatives surfaced recently: Jill Stein of the Green Party and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who appears to be seeking the “No Labels Party” nomination.
They join two other non-major-party candidates, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and left-wing intellectual and activist Cornell West.
These candidates appear to offer voters a broad menu of political ideologies and beliefs from which to choose—from Kennedy’s contention that Americans are enslaved by vaccination record-keeping to Manchin’s claimed centrism to West’s plans for abolishing poverty and Stein’s condemnation of corporate-dominated politics.
Voting for Nader, the candidate who appeared to have stronger liberal credentials, proved to have far-reaching consequences—but the opposite of what most Green Party voters would likely have desired.
One thing that is not on the third-party menu is an opportunity to vote for someone who could actually become president. There isn’t a ghost of a chance Jill Stein, Joe Manchin, Robert F. Kennedy, or Cornell West will be elected.
Nonetheless, their campaigns could have a powerful impact: helping elect Donald Trump. The Green Party achieved an equivalent disaster before.
In 2000, the Green Party fielded a candidate, Ralph Nader, against Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. In what turned out to be a remarkably close election, the result turned on Florida.
Nader received 97,488 votes in the state, votes that otherwise would have tilted strongly in favor of Gore: In his book, Crashing the Party, Nader acknowledges that 13% more of his voters would have gone for Gore than for Bush. These 12,700 votes would have given Gore an indisputable victory.
Instead, the vote was close enough for a right-wing Supreme Court to be in a position to halt the voting when Bush was only 537 votes ahead, bestowing Florida—and the presidency—on Bush.
How did voting for the Green Party work out?
Foreign Policy: The neocons around Bush had long targeted Iraq for overthrow. Following 9/11, they lied us into an invasion that led to 4,500 dead American soldiers, more than 165,000 dead Iraqi civilians, and a Middle East in the chaos that spawned ISIS.
Climate change: In Al Gore, we could have had a president in 2001 who really understood the climate threat. Instead, we had the pro-oil Bush presidency, initiating nearly two decades of political stagnation on the emerging climate crisis.
Democracy and Constitutional Rights: Bush got to appoint two right-wing Supreme Court justices, who joined three other Republican Justices to give us the 5-4 decision in the money-rules-all Citizens United case. The two Bush justices were also part of 5-4 majorities in cases that (1). invented a personal constitutional right to own firearms, and (2). eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, precipitating an avalanche of laws disenfranchising large numbers of minority, elderly, and youth voters.
Voting for Nader, the candidate who appeared to have stronger liberal credentials, proved to have far-reaching consequences—but the opposite of what most Green Party voters would likely have desired.
Third party candidates regularly tell us we’re entitled to express our own views in voting. But voting for president is not an exercise in personal expression and it is not like seeking your true love or dream candidate. Voting is what you do to effect the best outcome for your country among the real possibilities.
The GOP has ceased to be a normal party that respects majority rule and the rule of law, and Donald Trump has made clear his intentions of dismantling our democracy. Whatever flaws you may see in Joe Biden, he is the only actual alternative to Trump’s reign.
It’s as simple as this: If you vote for supposed “progressives” Jill Stein or Cornell West, you’re reducing the votes needed to stop Trump.
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Clinton, Stein, Gabbard, and the Deconstruction of RussiaGate
A friendly reminder: The United States has a long-g-g-g history of interfering in its own elections and hardly needs Russia's help.
Oct 24, 2019
Oh, how the simplistic certainty resonates.
Russsiagate, recently stoked by Hillary Clinton, comes saturated in ironies, which are usually media-invisible.
The Democrats' winning-but-nonetheless-losing presidential candidate of 2016 loosed some pent-up fury at democracy the other day, as well as annoyance with those who challenge the sacred status quo of the American governing process, when she tried to re-marginalize Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein, along with the generic concept of, good Lord, third parties.
Gabbard, a low-polling 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and an outspoken critic of American militarism, is, Clinton said, likely being groomed as a third-party candidate -- you know, a spoiler, a total and utter nuisance to the official candidate -- by . . . who else? . . . the Russians! And Stein, the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2016, who therefore grabbed a small percentage of progressive votes that rightfully belonged to Clinton, was a "Russian asset."
While Clinton has mostly received negative publicity for these stupid assertions, their crowning oversimplification has remained essentially unchallenged. In case you're not aware of it, let me repeat it for you now: Russia is bad.
What also goes without saying, of course, is that we're good and do good things in the world, righting wrongs wherever they occur; and unlike Russia, we have free elections and respect the opinions of our citizens. But Russia, which, back in the Cold War era, when it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was an ever-present nuclear threat, has now embraced a new tactic to bring America down: buying ads on Facebook and unleashing social media trolls to "influence" our elections. Is there no end to its villainy?
My sarcasm isn't meant to suggest that the opposite is true: Russia good, America bad. It's simply my exasperation at the groupthink still present in so much of the news flow: the hardening of certain allegations and assumptions into "fact" at the same time that other relevant data is totally dismissed and forgotten. This results in the creation of pseudo-facts, i.e., simplistic certainties, that then turn into the building blocks of our national news. Russian election interference -- its unleashing of hackers and trolls into our social media -- is one such pseudo-fact, which, however strange to the extent that it's real, must be put into a much larger context.
Here's some of that context:
A. The evil Russian trolls who hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee, giving those emails to WikiLeaks, which then posted some 20,000 of them online, were doing the work the of the free press. The hacked emails exposed the fact that the DNC, which was allegedly neutral about who became the party's candidate (this was the choice of Democratic primary voters), was committed to making sure Clinton was the candidate, not Bernie Sanders, whose grass-roots campaign was threatening to upend her. The U.S. media not only failed to uncover this, but fairly quickly helped turn the entire affair into a matter of Russian election interference, not the DNC's desperate attempt to make sure the party's own voters didn't select the "wrong" candidate."
B. The United States has a long-g-g-g history of interfering in its own elections and hardly needs Russia's help. Furthermore, the alleged Russian interference was fairly minimal: "an infinitesimal, barely detectable fraction of the messaging that Americans were inundated with officially by the campaigns," as Glenn Greenwald pointed out. The Russian posts had an absurdly minimal impact compared to that of the "dark money and super PACs," i.e., the corporate forces at work, making sure their interests remained in power.
C. And then there's the Electoral College, which gave the presidency to Trump without any Russian collusion. This farcical middle finger at the popular vote is part of America's legacy of racism. ". . . to protect their interests in a nation where they were being rapidly outnumbered, Southerners got an Electoral College that included a '3/5ths clause,'" Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman point out in The Strip and Flip Disaster of America's Stolen Elections. "Slaves (who could not vote themselves) were counted for 3/5ths of a vote for president and in establishing congressional districts." And of course the American racist tradition, which maintained Jim Crow laws for a century, continues to suppress votes as best it can, including minimizing the number of polling places in non-white areas. Surely all this is worth mentioning when election interference comes up.
D. The United States also has a sordid history of interfering (to put it mildly) with elections beyond its own borders. Some infamous examples, pointed out several years ago in the Washington Post, include: ousting Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953; the CIA's removal of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954; the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1961; and the toppling and violent death of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. Not to leave the Russians out, however, the Post pointed out that the two adversaries, the good guys and the commies, "intervened in 117 elections around the world from 1946 to 2000 -- an average of once in every nine competitive elections."
We topple democratically elected leaders and wage wars well beyond "the will of the people." It's not Russian interests that are the problem here, but domestic corporate and military interests, which could easily see democracy itself as a terrible inconvenience to their plans When antiwar voices begin getting dismissed as Russian assets, this looks like an early step on a pathway to hell.
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