Would You Kill This Girl to Save Two others?
If you still plan to vote for Biden, I want to know the answer.
The demonic argument of voting for the “lesser evil”
Most of my relatives and friends in the US find themselves in an unfortunate situation: they have no one “good” to vote for.
Yes, there are some people I know who are huge Trump fans and will gladly vote for him come November, and there are some who are — believe it or not — true Biden fans who have drunk the Kool-Aid about how progressive and righteous he is, and plan to vote enthusiastically (if blindly) for Genocide Joe .
That said, most people I know realise that they are facing a Hobson’s choice — AGAIN. And once more they will need to cast a vote for the “least worse option” lest humanity face extinction or some such thing.
Lesser evil voting is killing us
The problem with voting for the lesser evil is that, at the end of the day, you are still voting for EVIL. This then leads to a gradual but inexorable shift towards Evil in general.
The Uni-Party depends on lesser evil voting
Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of lesser evil voting is the fact that the two major American political parties depend on this argument to win elections.
Over the years, that sliver of daylight that separates the two parties has become vanishingly small. But that’s OK — a sliver, it seems, is enough to convince people to vote for you.
Each party knows that in order to win, they just need to be only slightly better than the other party in order to win. Because, as many devotees of the lesser evil strategy will tell you, being even just “a little bit better” — whether it be on questions like abortion or LGBTQ rights — is enough.
The Democrats are the guilty ones
As pundits like Chris Hedges and Thomas Frank have shown, the Democrats, more so than the GOP, are the ones who have built their entire modern party on the principle of lesser evil voting. This was what Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was all about.
As Robert Dreyfuss explained in The American Prospect:
“…28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC’s executive council, including Aetna, AT&T, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC’s executive council is none other than Koch Industries, the privately held, Kansas-based oil company whose namesake family members are avatars of the far right, having helped to found archconservative institutions like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy.
So there you have it. The Clintons were part of the “New Democrat” movement that was funded by Corporate America, including the Koch Brothers.
As Chris Hedges explains, Bill Clinton and the DLC transformed American politics:
“What you really got was the transformation of the Democratic party into the Republican party. The Republican party was pushed so far to the right that it just became insane”.
That insanity is represented in the graphic above as the red extension to the political spectrum.
Case in point: the Abortion issue
The abortion issue is a perfect example of how both sides of the political duopoly can use the same issue to “rally their base” — in other words, to give each side a reason to vote for “the lesser evil”.
For decades, starting with the Clintons, liberals would vote for Democrats in order to “protect a woman’s right to choose” even though the Democrats were just like the Republicans on economics and workers’ issues.
It was just enough to tip the scales for many liberals.
For their part, the GOP candidates always promised to appoint judges to the Supreme Court who would vote to “overturn Roe v. Wade”, the 1972 SCOTUS decision that made abortion on demand a civil right for US women.
That was enough to convince Christian fundamentalists and misogynist conservatives to vote for Republicans.
Well, what happened? The abortion issue came back and “bit the Democrats in the ass”. For decades, they refused to codify the Roe v. Wade decision into actual law, so a woman’s right to choose abortion was always hanging by a judicial thread. And that thread broke in 2022, when the Supreme Court, packed with conservatives appointed by Donald Trump, finally, after 50 years, voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The Democrats, in a panic, have had to find a substitute issue, something to scare liberals with. That something now appears to be Donald Trump himself.
Indeed, the Democratic Party and its minions in the mainstream media are in full on propaganda mode, telling everyone day in and day out that a new Trump Presidency, with its “radical MAGA” horde, will endanger not just the USA but the entire world.
A perfect storm for Lesser Evil Voting
The 2024 Presidential election in the United States is shaping up to be the most perfect example ever of an electoral contest based 100% on the theory of lesser evil voting.
To begin with, the Democrats are fielding a very weak candidate in Joe Biden. He has recently had his mental faculties officially challenged by his own Justice Department, which decided that he could not stabnd trial for charges of mishandling secret documents because he is an “elderly man with a poor memory”:
The report from Special Counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating Biden’s handling of classified material, offers a jarring portrait of the president’s acuity. Biden, 81, is described forgetting when his term as vice president ended, the general timeframe in which his son Beau died from cancer, and the details of critical foreign policy debates during the Obama administration.
Can “Genocide Joe” still be a lesser evil?
Aside from his mental failings, Biden is also facing a backlash from traditional Democratic support groups over his “unqualified support” for Israel.
Young people, Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans in critical swing states like Michigan have vowed not to vote for Biden because he is widely viewed as complicit in the genocide currently being perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinians.
In order to push Biden over the winner’s line, the Democrats and the media will literally have to portray Trump as a doomsday figure, one whose victory will lead to “armageddon or worse”.
Says the media: “hold my beer”
The media is certainly stepping up to the task.
Trump is being prosecuted by Biden’s Justice Department for a growing list of crimes, but above all he is being charged with inciting insurrection and the violent overthrow of the American government. And for this, it seems the media cannot over-stress the danger he presents:
In fact, the danger Trump presents goes far beyond the confines of the USA — he is a threat to the entire world and its “rules based order”:
So, the strategy seems to be one of “going negative”. The Democrats and their supporters in the media have apparently given up on trying to convince people that Biden is a worthwhile and viable candidate in his own right.
Rather, the Democrats are basing their success completely on the demonisation of Donald Trump and the LESSER EVIL VOTING he will engender among thge Democrats’ base.
Here’s how the lesser evil argument sounds
I now go back to my original question for Biden voters. You must agree that Biden is a despicable racist, a genocidal lunatic who is anti-worker (remember the railway strike?) and also a rapist and possibly a child molester.
He is undeniably an evil man.
“Yes”, you say, “Biden is evil, but Trump is MORE evil”.
OK. So how about this: unlike Trump, Biden is mentally incapacitated, which almost certainly means that his election would lead to the White House — and the country — being led by dark forces beyond the control of the people. Call it the “Deep State” or the “Permanent State” or — to use Obama’s term — “The National Security Blob”.
No matter what you call these people, they will be running things, and they will undoubtedly lead us into dangerous confrontations with other countries, and possibly also WWIII,
Hell, they are already doing it!
“Yes”, you say, “but Trump is even more dangerous, and he will empower the evil Putin and put our NATO allies and the whole world in danger”.
It is almost a religious dogma.
The cold calculus of the Lesser Evil Voters
People who consciously vote for the Lesser Evil do so from a position of righteousness.
They know they are voting for Evil, but they maintain that theirs is the “adult” position, that the very future of the planet depends on them making the cold, hard, but ultimately virtuous decision.
In short, they are willing to do an evil thing in order to prevent a Greater Evil.
And yet, these cold, hard, realists reject voting for a third party candidate that offer a more sane, more just, more progressive platform that is more in line with their own values than that of Biden.
The evil truth about Lesser Evil voting
Most of the people I know who plan to vote for Biden as “the lesser evil” live in states where Biden is almost sure to win — California, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, etc.
And yet, when I suggest that they vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, they all scoff.
“That is throwing away your vote”, they say.
These are highly educated people, who consider themselves to be very intelligent, and yet they pretend to have no understanding of how the American political system works.
They all live in states that are “deep blue” and will swing for the Democratic candidate no matter what. If they were to vote for the Green Party candidate or even the Republican candidate, it would have as much effect as a sparrow’s fart in a wind storm.
A “virtuous act”
These people must vote for the lesser evil because it makes them feel better about themselves. Voting for the genocidal, racist, rapist maniac Biden is a virtuous act, a statement that expresses their hatred and disdain for the abomination that is Donald Trump.
Hypocrisy and lies, liberal style
I maintain that the argument that liberals use to defend lesser evil voting is a pack of LIES. They claim to be the adults, the hard-hearted, clear-eyed realists that are willing to “hold their nose” and vote for someone they know to be evil so that they can defeat a greater evil.
I say bullshit.The fact is that for these Liberals, it is more important to vote against something than to vote for something.
They have become so used to the “necessity” of lesser evil voting that they can no longer imagine a positive voting experience.
In fact, they consider it the height of self-indulgence, a sort of immature, child-like naiveté to vote based on a desire to effect change. Votin gfor a Green New Deal, voting for peace, for an end to the Military Insdustrial Complex, these are things that simply cannot happen.
Rather, they believe that it is always more important to use your vote to STOP FASCISM.
Killing the girl
I now return to my original question. If you are voting for Biden to prevent Trump from being President because you feel that Trump would be a far more destructive President, if you aere willing to vote for an evil man in order to block an even more evil man, then I ask you: would you be willing to shoot this girl in the head if doing so would prevent two other girls from being killed?
Would you be willing to go against everything you were ever taught about right and wrong, about killing, about sin, about morality, in order to prevent what MIGHT be an even greater immorality?
If your answer is yes, then good for you: you are at least true to your stated self-description of the clear-eyed, calculating realist.
If, however, you would NOT kill this girl to prevent the deaths of two others, then you must admit that you yourself have a certain morality that will not allow you to be a killer.
What this all means
If you want to vote for Biden over Trump, and you live in a “safe” state like New York or California, then you are not “holding the line” against MAGA culture. You are NOT defending liberal values.
You are making a statement for your own ends, and nothing more. You are not making a cold, calculating “adult” decision to do what is necessary.
You are simply virtue signalling.
#End