So! How ‘Bout Those Primaries?

With Trump, every once in a while, behind the orange face, I smell fear. More surprised by anyone else by how far his campaign has gone, Trump now fears that he’s one black swan event away from actually having to govern the country, something he knows due to insider information about his own grandiose business failures better than anyone else that he simply cannot do. He can be like poor bloke’s vision of a rich guy, but that’s it. He’s too intellectually scattered and emotionally volatile to actually govern something complex. It’s obvious to us, but he knows this more deeply than we do. He has a profound sense of his inadequacy. He needs to talk about how smart he is, how many words he has, how many friends he has, how many people love him, how the polls have him leading and how big his penis is. You can smell the fear on the guy.

You did better than me. I thought Scott Walker was the likely nominee last year, and then he promptly went and sank his own campaign before he even reached the first caucus.

You havbe to at least understand the rise of Mussolini, if not Hitler, to understand Trump. Also, Trump exhibits symptoms of sleep deprivation (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-bulkeley-phd/donald-trump-the-sleep-de_b_9413588.html).

What made her think that somebody getting killed at a Trump rally would be a problem for him?

RNB – While I think you’re right that Trump is afraid he can’t handle the job, I don’t think he really needs to worry.

He is running for Spokesmodel.

Kurt Vonnegut said that the President has a toy steering wheel, like that which used to be attached to the glove compartment on the passenger side for the small child who in, those benighted days long ago, was allowed to sit in the front. The opening sequences for the Simpsons shows, or did show, Maggie honking the horn of such a device.

While Trump gets all the press, one of the most interesting things about this election cycle is how totally all of the “acceptable to the GOP party elites” candidates were rejected by the voters. Walker, Jeb!, Rubio…they didn’t just lose, they were stomped and humiliated. It makes you wonder what this means for the GOP going forward.

Rubio made a game effort to out-crazy Trump (e.g. his insistence that Obama was deliverately working to weaken the US and strengthen our enemies), but in the end it wasn’t enough. It says something about the state of the Republican Party that its establishment offers up to the base someone like Rubio as the serious, reasonable alternative to Trump.

Also, too, at least Chris Christie finally performed a public service, with his murder / suicide act which probably ended Rubio’s Presidential aspirations for good.

Maybe the GOP will meet its well-deserved end finally.

But I’ll bet “our” triangulating Wall St. Dems will bring them back from the brink. Again. And the richest will keep getting richer.
~

10: “But then he drops the name of Carl Icahn only”

Really, who cares?

Phil @13 — Thanks, that’s quite helpful.

@13 Yes most interesting. ad personam laws to protect Trump from a highly unusual twelve straight years of IRS audits:)
@18 just hoping people had some juicy stuff about Carl Icahn, corporate raider. He has famously said “Some people get rich studying artificial intelligence. Me, I make my money studying natural stupidity.” Trump has gotten over $1 bn of free advertising for his brand exactly because he did not underestimate how stupid the American people are.

I keep hoping someone will ask Christie if he expects a Cabinet post in a Trump administration, so he can answer “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

My prognostications are equally bad; I expected the race to come down to Paul vs Walker.

>Trump now fears that he’s one black swan event away from actually having to govern the country

> Another big story is how the Republican elites are strategizing to remove Trump at the Convention.

It does seem to me that the Republican elites could save a lot of trouble for themselves by having a quick whip round and offering Trump the proceeds if he goes away. Walking away with a headline figure like a billion dollars has to be a win for him; a truly legendary big deal. He might hope to loot more from the presidency, but it would be a bit harder to boast about how much, and he might even end up in jail at the end of it.

Paying Trump to withdraw is not obviously illegal, and is clearly in the interests of all parties who have a say.

@RNB 1&2 I don’t see fear so much in the intellectually scattered behavior as much as I see an ADD style personality. I’m disappointed the regular press hasn’t picked this up. Are they so lazy as to never review a transcript of a speech, or so clueless as to be unable to understand what a logical argument should look like? It is sad for democracy. In the USA.

Don’t feel bad about the bet. I thought the winner might come from the Govenors and Senators allstars and I expected that Trump would be one who neglected to build a ground game. Turned out he did; and it was Rubio of all people who thought he (Rubio) would just be anointed and people would therefore automatically vote for him.

@30. Overdetermination. Fear of inadequacy+sleep deprivation+ADD=Donald Trump. I really don’t see the point of not piling on here.

Ann Coulter for VP, then!

JQ @33
One thing ‘special’ about Trump is his breaking of the norms of campaign discourse to ridicule and launch ad hominems at opponents: Kasich “is a baby,” Cruz “is a liar,” “little Marco,” etc. This is not totally new, of course, but Trump took it to a new level, I think.

When Rubio tried to do this vs. Trump, it didn’t work for him. Perhaps it was just too late and came off as looking desperate. Rubio did have good moments vs. Trump in one late debate when he pressed him, e.g., on his health-care non-policy, but again, it didn’t seem to make much difference.

I think Rubio came off on the whole as too staged, programmed, not quite spontaneous enough — whereas Trump is the embodiment of what at least looks like spontaneity. Kasich and Cruz also managed to carve out personae, so to speak, but Rubio seemed all over the place, unable to settle on a consistent tone and message, beyond the ‘twenty-first-century conservatism’ thing, which turned out to be thin gruel. I’m not a true campaign junkie, so take these impressions for what they’re worth…

The usual pattern in American politics is that a more or less well-organized faction runs a Presidential candidate. In 2000, both Gore & Bush were surrounded by deep assemblies of their respective Party’s “Presidential parties”, the several thousand who are actively seeking executive or judicial office and are willing to expend time and money to get their guy elected, in order to realize power thru patronage. The senior leadership of these Presidential parties of people competing in national politics are often former office holders if not currently in office and they find ways to network. There are farm teams at the state level and among Congressional staffs, hoping to rise. In the old days, white shoe law firms provided perches for out-of-office politicoes, as did prestige universities; now hedge funds and big banks offer shelter and the insurance policy of personal wealth. (HRC herself traded futures, supposedly, from a cozy desk provided by Tyson’s, back in the day before G-S was paying six-figure speaking fees.)

When the electoral and / or fund-raising and / or ideological coalition undergirding a Party shifts radically, altering significantly the customary means of assembling a winning campaign, these factional “presidential parties” within the Party can fall apart. Maybe, the chances of winning in a particular year seem too remote to motivate those seeking office to a maximum short-term effort, but maybe it isn’t clear how to reconcile growing conflicts among traditional bases of support until some creative politician or operative finds a formula — then a faction of patronage seekers and policy entrepreneurs assembles.

Bill Clinton’s genius back in the 1990s was assembling all the necessary elements from the remnants of the fractured New Deal coalition, within himself at the center, alongside an emergent anti-Bush, anti-Reagan reaction. The third-way politics of gently corrupt DLC policy combined with white southern Bubba talk to squeeze out a plurality, and he assembled around himself an assortment of patronage-seekers. The most notorious in subsequent history was Rubin, because in the light of subsequent events he seems to prefigure the GFC, but at the time was much more benign.

I sketch this dynamic frame just to move the analysis away from individual personalities.

The crackup of the Republican Party presidential campaign is a very strange phenomenon, and would bear some speculative inquiry. Jeb¡ clearly had the backing of an establishment patronage faction, raised a great deal of money and went nowhere. The Party apparatus — the RNC — thought a long-running reality teevee show would be a good idea. Among these cynical operatives, the key to electoral success is manipulation by marketing: assembling a favorable demo you can sell to advertisers, so to speak. These people recognize capturing a healthy slice of the Hispanic vote as a clear path to a Republican Presidential electoral majority — a lot of Hispanics are religious, socially conservative, economically aspirational and racially “white” (let’s not even try to parse that). Jeb! Ted and Marco all had an angle on this path to expanding the Republican electoral base.

The Republican Party apparatus at the State level and Congressionally is much stronger than the Democratic Party, which is also a bit odd, since in some ways the Republican Presidential vote is shaped like that of a regional Southern Party. The raft of dictatorial Daddy governors elected in 2010 (patriarchy, Val!), the success of hardball voter suppression and Congressional gerrymandering all seem to indicate a Party that has some internal discipline, if nothing else. And, a corresponding weakness in the Democratic Party.

Traditionally, in American politics, because the Parties had such weak ideologies, Congressional gerrymandering did not work against the national Parties, per se; the local Party would just morph in whatever direction was necessary to adapt. The 2010 gerrymandering did work, indicating a weakness in Dem’s ideological adaptiveness. And, now the Republicans have stumbled badly at the national level, in their ideological (if that is even the right word for their racist, sexist signalling) adaptiveness.

Hispanic support was key to Obama’s electoral support, but taking it away has proven a bridge too far. In the Democratic Party, a revival of economic populism has run aground on shoals of anti-racism and neoliberal corruption.

Speaking of politico, how could this be “trumped” for craziness?
http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/trump-foreign-policy-adviser-220853

@b wilder
I sketch this dynamic frame just to move the analysis away from individual personalities.

When it comes to presidential politics, I think both structural forces, however one chooses to analyze them, and individual personalities are important. An attempt at a complete explanation would include both.

@ r gathmann
glancing at Rubio’s wikipedia entry earlier today, I saw that he said he had $100,000 in student-loan debt after finishing college (U Fla) and law school (U of Miami) — most of it presumably from law school. So if there was a ‘sugardaddy’ (which I assume from yr comment), the real largesse apparently did not click in until somewhat later…(?)

@RNB
You know, he’s suspended his campaign. We don’t have to talk about Rubio, anymore.

We don’t have to talk about any of this — HRC, Trump, Kasich, Sanders, Carl Icahn, “the respective parties’ ‘presidential parties'”, none of it.

42, so you have never heard of Norman Braman, without whom Rubio would have to face one of Florida’s notorious mortgage courts? Oh, you are missing one of the joys of welfarehood for the rightwing righteous!
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/us/politics/marco-rubio-finances-debt-loans-credit.html
Don’t you think we could all use a little Norman Braman in our lives?

Rubio’s charisma and evident presidential timber cannot fail, they can only be failed.

I agree with phenomenal cat: we really need to hear from Belle about this madness. (On the other hand, if the CT mgmt declared an eight-month moratorium on election-related posts, I wouldn’t be entirely displeased.)

Not yet mentioned here, but Duncan Black (and he is not alone in suggesting this) is spot-on today with
” … it is fun to watch the institutional right stamp its feet and pretend they won’t support Trump in the Fall. They all will. Every one of them.”

I’ve also been thinking trump is running to protect himself from coming legal troubles. Bankruptcy springs to mind… I don’t know anything about how that would work though.

At this stage betting on who will win the primaries is a mugs game. More interesting bets are

1. When will trump form a militia?
2. Who will be the alternative candidate they force through at the convention?

I’m guessing mid April for 1, and mittens for 2. Not willing to bet though!

LFC. Yes, I agree, of course. Political biography, based on systematic research, can be enormously insightful and informative: man and his times and all that. But, though play-by-play in real time can be fun for some, it is not as reliably informative. The politician is building a deliberately seductive public persona, and a whole cottage industry goes to work drowning out sensible assessments. How many times did Dowd repeat the story of Romney’s dog on the car roof?

We can look back at FDR’s experience with polio and imagine its effect on his character. And, we can look back at the way he managed his image with the help of a sympathetic press corps, despite the hostility of publishers. Wonderfully complex and curious light on human experience. Sinking his personal fortune into a Georgia

But, can we know what parts of Clinton’s biography to take seriously? Was the Children’s Defense Fund youthful idealism or foresightful resume padding?

Speaking of Maureen Dowd, she’s known Trump for decades, she says, going to parties where he was, riding in his private plane. Her recent column on him may have some insights:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opinion/sunday/chickens-home-to-roost.html

Layman that militia idea sank very quickly i think but its popularity is the clue. Also trump is gonna need a militia to deport 12 million Mexicans against the will of congress. Hence my April guess – he just needs a bit more plausible violence at rallies, but he needs it to form early enough to play a role at the convention.

Or he’s not actually a fascist! We’ll see which Italian arsehole politician he most closely resembles!

Yes yes Paul Ryan, bring out the Blank eyed Granny Starver! That way lies victory, surely…

@44 I do think we have to talk about Kasich.

No, we do not have to talk about Kasich. Though his revival of the Favorite Son gambit is mildly interesting. Social mobility has notoriously plummeted, but has geographic mobility as well? Enough to un-nationalize Presidential politics?

@64 I guess you’re right. We probably don’t have to talk about Kasich despite his impressive <45% showing in the state of which he is the Governor. My bad.

Or that the interests controlling both Parties are so monolithic and / or dissipated that no dissenting Power wants to sponsor a candidate or a real contest? Is it really just celebrity spokesmodel talent search?

fumata bianca? I love it!

Amy Walter at Charlie Cook is pretty good:
http://cookpolitical.com/story/9370

The case for HRC as a risk has been made from her own lips if you would only listen.

@74 at least you did not say in her emails if I only could read them.

Atrios had this post, March 10: “Both the Donald and Bernie get shit for supposedly not having appropriate “foreign policy teams.” The Foreign Policy Community in DC is really where the Very Serious People live. They’re the deep state, and if you say the wrong thing Fred Hiatt will let them plant an op-ed about how unserious you are. They’re the nexus of the security state, the military industrial complex, and international oligarchs. Big War, Big Finance, Big Exploitation, Big Tax Avoidance, Big Assholes.

“Not saying that one should be ignorant about foreign affairs, just that one should not take advice from the Very Serious People who for some reason are in charge of dispensing it. Not clear they know anything about anything anyway.”

One of the refreshing things about the Republican nomination contest with Donald in it has been that it helped people see that ALL the Republicans were crazy, ignorant and mean. No one offered even the semblance of sober judgment. Donald, at least, in his stream of consciousness at least blabbered arguably sensible admissions — trade policy has hurt most people, endless war for no good result is bad.

The Democrats will try to paint Trump as a loose cannon, and that seems right enough to me. It isn’t specific utterances that disqualify Donald, but the incoherence of the whole package of contradictory and silly soundbites.

The problem is the standard of serious foreign policy the Dems will hold up for admiration.

RNB @ 77

Perhaps in the super-secret for-banksters-only speeches you were too poor and ill-connected to hear.

@79 Trump is not anti-war. He has pledged to deploy at least 30K more soldiers in Iraq supposedly on the basis of advice from a general who was probably drinking champagne in a bubble bath at a Trump resort (just like Beck once imagined Storming Norman Schwarzkopf); otherwise it’s hard to imagine how Trump came to speak to any general. Trump wants to bring back torture; he wants to kill innocent family members. He wants to rip up the deal with Iran. No, he’s not an isolationist or a pacifist. He’s a highly erratic, bombastic nut job. And no Hillary Clinton is not more of a risk.

@81 Yeah, I think that it’s safe to assume that for a quarter million she told him what they wanted to hear: they did a great job suckering the world into recycling their savings through America’s great financial institutions (or something like that). And then she shared stories that the bankers who are also suckers with money to burn thought might give them some heads-up on risks in foreign markets. We pretty much know what happened.

Well sure Wall Street gives the Democrats money so at a moment of crisis they won’t get nationalized but bailed out. Because we are not Sweden. It worked with Obama.

Lee A. Arnold@69

Entering that page you linked to is like waking up in a neoliberal matrix where you discover that the world is not what you thought it was but a bunch of robo- quants and drones with their spreadsheets and algorithms analyzing what to buy, sell, short, and hedge in preparation for the apocalypse (“Grexit” is followed by a euro zone break-up. Threat=15. Because: banks would suffer huge losses in their sovereign bond portfolios). There is no need for revolutionaries to have to figure out how to defeat the system (The UK votes to leave the EU. Threat=8. Because: position as a leading global financial services hub and leading proponent of trade and services liberalisation would be imperiled), it’s all there, all the possible threats to the global neoliberal consensus, (Donald Trump wins the US presidential election. Threat=12. Because: would undermine the coherence of domestic and foreign policymaking) quantified, analyzed, and ordered from most to least threatening (Beset by external and internal pressures, the EU begins to fracture. Threat=15. Because: would harm growth in the world’s largest single trading block). It’s evil, I tell you, evil. (The rising threat of jihadi terrorism destabilises the global economy. Threat=12. Because: dent consumer and business confidence, threaten to end the five-year bull run on the US and European stockmarkets).

Why did Trump elevate to such a high position Corey Lewandowski when he should have known that he would never take a bullet for him? Beat up a journalist, yes; but no way does he take a bullet for him.

RNB @ 83

I agree Trump is not committed to an anti-war position, or a neo-isolationist position. I don’t think he’s committed to anything other than his own brand. Erratic, bombastic — I agree. I am with you, bro.

On everything except the comparison with Clinton. I am opposed to that as a method.

Assess Clinton on the basis of what we know about Clinton. There is a long, murderous record there. Trump has no record as an officeholder — we simply do not know much with him, about how he acts or cooperates in an official capacity. And, what we do know about Trump sheds no light on Clinton.

Clinton is not an isolationist or a pacifist, either. But, what is she? Her remarks on the deal with Iran — “distrust and verify” — have been belligerent, even provocative vis a vis the Iranians. Her record in Libya seems to indicate questionable judgment, and the outcome of her policy was catastrophic. Moreover, she does not seem to realize she made serious, consequential errors. In both Ukraine and Libya, there are indications of short-sighted opportunism and ill-considered idealism.

Clinton is conventional, rather than bombastic and erratic, but conventional has been a series of enormously costly, bloody and inconclusive interventions. Not her fault exactly as she hasn’t been dictator of the world these long years, but also not met with her critique or opposition. That she is conventional is evidence that she is dangerous. That she confesses no error, no urgent desire to reform this deep state become runaway train, no vision for a better course — this should concern us.

I do not see the merit in shutting down consideration of the dubious merits of U.S. foreign policy with facile comparisons of Clinton’s serious mien to Trump’s style in stump speeches. Even if you feel you have to hold your nose and vote for Miss Lesser Evil, shouldn’t we acknowledge the evil? And, have doubts about whether we really know which would really prove less evil in consequence?

It is fine to be against torture. I am against torture. Did Obama end torture or just redefine it, do a better job of hiding it? That is the problem with lesser evil comparisons: what you get in the end are not clear reforms, but finer distinctions, and a country where no one knows anything about what policy choice is made, or the consequences of political choices. And, established elites are never held responsible.

Meanwhile, some other primaries.

Sorry to see people I like snarking at each other. I think Bruce’s comments are generally among the best in any given thread. I think he underestimates the threat of Trump, but it’s true that on policy all the Republican candidates are awful. Trump just brings that extra odor of mob violence to the ticket. Everyone else dog whistles about this or that group. Trump just comes out and says the horribly bigoted things openly, but that is worse.

The ugliness of HRC seems pretty self- evident. What sane liberal brags about her friendship with Kissinger? She ‘s one of those Democrats who thinks you show your foreign policy seriousness by your willingness to bomb. She’s hypocritical on human rights, feigning outrage over Qaddaffi’s killings and justifying Netanyahu’s, and saying nothing about the American support for Saudi war crimes in Yemen. This is all pretty normal for mainstream Democrats. Sanders is only a little better, though in his case I think it’s more because he isn’ that interested in foreign affairs. Also, if he criticizes Obama his meager chances shrink even more.

Trump is much worse than you are admitting (that is, if you are a Latino or Muslim or look like either or perhaps both; he has also proposed the most regressive taxation of all) and there is more difference than you are admitting between Clinton and Trump or Cruz in regards to international cooperation on climate change, diplomacy with Iran , the Geneva Conventions, the bombing of civilians in Syria and elsewhere, the acceptance of refugees, and willingness to engage in arms reduction negotiations. What Obama’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Netanyahu are worth exploring at this point. The differences between Clinton and Sanders on these questions pales in comparison to Clinton’s differences with either Trump or Cruz on these issues. This is not only my opinion but Noam Chomsky’s as well. And really have today’s Kissinger critics added anything to what Chomsky wrote decades ago?

@98

“It’s just that this meta-stuff is wearing me out. Just say, and just say why voting or nonvoting is justified if it is as it seems it will be Trump vs. Clinton.”

Vote your conscience: Jill Stein, Green Party. Especially if you live in a place that’s already sure to go either of the two other ways. But then, even if you don’t, why not go Green? There’s a bigger chance anyway than Americans like to admit that your vote will be stolen, lost, miscounted or otherwise invalidated.

So you’re basically saying I shouldn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton. Thanks, got it.

Most probably I will vote for Jill Stein, a Green.

I am not sure why the lesser evil dilemma mesmerizes so many. I vote as a duty, but with no illusion regarding either numerical significance or existential consequences of the act.

Less mad than sad that my dream of decision-making by way of consensus in the comments section of Crooked Timber is dying a bitter death. But you know those tough guys who, tied to the mast, won’t sacrifice their principles even as they hear what sound to them as pathetic cries from “injured” minorities and women; well those guys, many of them older and enjoying pensions for which young immigrants are paying, are going to have to deal with what sounds to them like shrill calls and barks for the next eight years from President Hillary Clinton. You have to feel sorry for them even if you think they are mad, faustusnotes.

Hillary Clinton would make a fine President. You can vote for her, and vote your conscience simultaneously. Trump has been preaching the need for a strongman in the US, at least since he publicly admired the Chinese authorities for their crackdown at Tiananman Square, and I think it’s long past the time we can laugh it off with, “He’s only just sayin’ it.”

I think a genuine topic for a Crooked Timber thread is whether some people on either left or right will ever rise above the level of being controlled by their emotions and the usual childhood intellectual absolutism that is entrained.

Well, if the choice finally comes down to two or three then it is highly unlikely that one of them fully aligns with your priorities.

Politics is compromising and that compromising starts when individuals cast their votes. It’s frustrating but sure beats being at the whim of a know-it-all.

Trump’s success probably lies at his ability to portray himself exactly as how a lot of voters see themselves (as know-it-all’s).

bruce wilder,

“I agree Trump is not committed to an anti-war position, or a neo-isolationist position. I don’t think he’s committed to anything other than his own brand. Erratic, bombastic — I agree. I am with you, bro.

On everything except the comparison with Clinton. I am opposed to that as a method.”

You must find elections generally a terrible ethical dilemma if you are opposed to comparison as a method. I can’t think how you choose between the candidates without using comparison as a method… maybe drawing straws?

Lupita #69: “Entering that page you linked to is like waking up in a neoliberal matrix where you discover that the world is not what you thought it was but a bunch of robo- quants and drones with their spreadsheets and algorithms analyzing what to buy, sell, short, and hedge in preparation for the apocalypse”

Like.

Of course, there’s always… “The Case for John Kasich” (1-min. pseudo-ad)
https://politicalwire.com/2016/03/17/the-case-for-john-kasich-2/

Consumatopia #118: “I think it is far more likely that deciding to vote for Clinton would turn me into a worse person”

How would this happen?

It’s extremely unlikely that any soldier’s effort will be crucial to a war. They still punish deserters.

“How would this happen?”

I went into this but deleted it. Maybe most people here can maintain a distinction in their psyche between “I’m voting for Clinton because she’s less evil” and “I’m voting for Clinton because she’s good.” But, to me, eight months of telling myself (and only myself, since there is no way in god damn hell I could ever bring myself to ask someone else to vote for Clinton) that I’m voting for the neoliberal warmonger who’s promising to do even more “stupid shit” than Obama just so we can keep the much worse (yes, I understand he’s worse!) racist warmonger out of office just sounds too exhausting. That she’s surrounded by a media environment that’s constantly trying to convince us that war and plutocracy are good multiplies that fatigue about tenfold.

To put it another way, I’ve watched so many of Clinton’s supporters take up the mantle of every lie our corrupt establishment tells them. Why should I think that if I became a Clinton supporter I wouldn’t be just as bad as they are?

“They still punish deserters.”

They’re the ones asking me for help. They’re not in a position to punish me.

“When that happens regrets will be the least of your worries.”

There won’t be any regrets on my part, because the fault will lie with the people who voted for Trump and people who nominated the terrible candidate who (in this hypothetical) lost to Trump. If Clinton loses Clinton is to blame.

It sounds like voting for Jill Steil will make you feel marginally better – but only if the vote has no effect, otherwise you’ll probably feel worse. I know many 2000 Nader voters felt bad about their decision, and that is not scapegoating, just a fact.

I think your reasoning isn’t totally baseless. There is a measure of psychic satisfaction to be derived from being able to say “I didn’t vote for her, and see was I right!” But I would like to see evidence (or even a plausible argument) that this kind of reasoning leads to better political outcomes.

Consumatopia #123: “Maybe most people here can maintain a distinction… just sounds too exhausting.”

Oh I’m sure you can maintain the distinction just fine, and I don’t understand the source of the exhaustion.

For me to take your position, I would have to believe: 1. that I am better a better person than Hillary Clinton; 2. that I would have done anything very differently about life-or-death matters if I had been in her shoes (say, in making Sec. State decisions about the Middle East, and I have none of the inside details); and 3. that, if I were a politician, I would not have acted as say, Henwood’s book portrays her.

To which I answer, I really don’t know.

Beyond that, the questions are about the least harmful policies in a “neoliberal” world, while larger forces both within and beyond our control push us towards another (hopefully) much better configuration. In the US, at this time, the Democrats are still out far ahead on those policy details.

It seems to me that those who warn of the dangers of “lesser-evilism” rely upon two premises: A. that you will pollute (or now, exhaust) yourself and others; and B. that a better world is possible if, and only if, you vote against the continuation of the present one. I think these are psychologically and philosophically ludicrous. It’s exactly the sentiment that propels the purity of the extreme right, and now the Trump voters, in a way.

I voted for Sanders in our primary, and will vote for whoever is the Democratic nominee in the general election. I’ll have to hold my nose to do it, but I’ve done that before.

Not that it will matter. As a resident of Arizona, my vote never counts in the general election. Still, I can’t really understand the argument to stay home or cast your vote for someone else.

I don’t see what is so difficult about voting for a candidate one despises and saying so loudly.

I am voting for Clinton in November if she is the nominee because the Republicans are considerably worse. Clinton is merely bad in the manner that many Democrats are and I agree with those who say that voting for people like this can change you, but only if you let it. So yes, I’ve seen numerous examples of people defending Clinton or Obama when they were at their worst. That is their choice. That’s why I am praising Bruce– I disagree with his voting strategy, but I also disagree with people who either whitewash Clinton’s record or think that during election season it is childish to complain about the Democrats.

This, btw, is a great argument for much shorter campaign seasons. We cut out that period of time where people can only hold one thought in their head and everything else is subordinated to who they will or will not vote for.

Yes Layman, how DARE we think there should be more than two viable political parties in the U.S. Long live the dynastic duopoly!

@Lyle, read the damned polls. If a third party candidate actually has a chance of winning, then by all means go for it. Otherwise, use your vote to defeat the worst outcome.

@Layman

And help to perpetuate the supposedly immortal Evil of Two Lessers? No thanks. Long-term change is long-term, and I’d rather take part in that.

@Layman, as I recall HRC voted in favor of the war in Iraq. And Afganistan. And Libya. And is arguing for more intervention in Syria. What shitty outcome is she preventing? It certainly isn’t war in the ME.

@123: “There won’t be any regrets on my part, because the fault will lie with the people who voted for Trump and people who nominated the terrible candidate who (in this hypothetical) lost to Trump. If Clinton loses Clinton is to blame.”

I think this is worth reiterating, because it’s exactly right in spirit. It’s not exactly true in letter, since these discussions always fail to distinguish causal and moral responsibility, and fail to note that we can be morally responsible even if not causally so.

Imagine hypothetically that the Nader critics were correct to claim his voters made the difference, then Nader voters would be causally responsible in some degree for Gore’s loss. But their causal responsibility isn’t necessarily moral: the primary moral responsibility belongs first to Bush supporters and second to the weaknesses of Gore and his campaign.

Having said that, there are *non-causal* ways of being morally responsible, as I suggest in my previous post. If I vote third party in the expectation or hope that other voters will save me from Trump, I don’t cause Trump’s victory but I’m partly morally responsible for it. I can be to blame for not voting for Clinton, even if I’m not to blame for her loss.

Thank goodness for Faustusnotes, says what I would have liked to say, only better.

By the way, a crushing defeat for Trump is different from a virtual tie and will have different consequences on the future direction and strategy of the two parties

“Blaming those who vote for a viable candidate on the left”

Nader was polling somewhere around 3%. Viable? Good grief.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_U.S._Presidential_elections#United_States_presidential_election.2C_2000

“How bout I ask a Libyan instead, about how your preference for the somewhat-less-wingnut of the two wingnut parties is working out?”

Hey, I’ll take the blame for that. I voted for Obama, and I’ve got some moral responsibility for his actions. If you think there’s someone I could have voted for which would have produced a better outcome, make your case. Counterfactuals are hard, but is there anyone who thinks Presdent Al Gore invades Iraq? Anyone?

“This election is the most important in modern history and possibly civilization and you wanna throw it away because….”

While I appreciate the sentiment, it seems like every election someone proclaims its THE MOST IMPORTANT because of some reason and they four years later we always seem to have another one that somehow, staggeringly against all odds, is yet more important.

Isn’t it maybe the case that electing the most powerful leader of the singularly most powerful country on the planet is always important and isn’t something that should be reduced to petty psychoanalysis and lesser evil game theory?

Use your brain and process at the above primate-level you are capable of, the answers to how to vote become blazingly obvious in all but the rare cases where there are actually two really good candidates running.

P.S. Not meant as a jab at Faustnotes – with whom I broadly agree.

Except that elections actually happen, and people get elected through some magical process in which votes are counted. Presidentially you might be a drop in the bucket in the vote total, but in Florida that one time each and every vote really really mattered.

Except that not every vote was counted. Not only was the count stopped in order to ensure a Bush win, tens of thousands of voters were scrubbed from voting roles and otherwise prevented from voting, a problem that continues today. But sure, keep blaming Nader voters. I can see how, for some reason, that makes you feel better.

If the 3% of the voters who voted for Nader as some kind of grand gesture had voted for Gore, he wins Florida handily. Right?

If Gore had been saying half the things that Nader was, almost no one would have voted for Nader. Right?

“Grand gesture”? How condescendingly, tellingly presumptuous of you.

@ TM, I don’t really want to blame them either, but I do actually want them to regret what they did, so that they are less likely to do the same asinine thing again. I’ve done plenty of things I shouldn’t have, and I regret them, and so I try not to make those kind of mistakes again. That’s the function of guilt and regret. So,when people cry out for blame, by not regretting their mistakes, then blame them.

@Lyle, what was your reason for voting for Nader again? It can’t be ‘viable candidate’, that’s absurd given the polling. So, what was it, if not a grand gesture?

@Plume, I’m having a bit of difficulty following this. If some Nader voters had voted for Bush instead, then they’d be to blame for Bush. If some Nader voters had stayed home instead, they’d be to blame for Bush. If some Nader voters had voted for Gore instead, they’re to blame for not voting for Gore. So, who are the Nader voters who aren’t to blame for their Nader vote again?

Anon is making the most sense here. Vote lesser evil if it matters , but if you go third party you are depending on others to save us from Trump. However, that can be okay if you’re not self righteous about it.

The self- righteousness is what sticks out on both sides– ever since Nader we’ve had people who get angrier about this subject than they seem to get about anything else. Blaming Nader voters for Iraq, for instance, while Clinton voted for Iraq. Which is why I think Clinton voters should keep a certain perspective on who to blame for hundreds of thousands of deaths– personally, I put much more blame on the Democrat with her vaunted foreign policy expertise than on Nader voters in Florida. On the other side people grandly proclaim they will never vote for the Democrat. Fine. What difference will their non vote made? If it makes any difference at all, it makes a Republican victory infinitesimally more likely.

“Not caring about the actual political outcome because your personal satisfaction is more important, that is an attitude I can’t follow.”

Yes, people should care about the outcome. But that’s not the point. The context here is your vote doesn’t matter towards the outcome, you hope the lesser evil triumphs, but you’re deciding to not vote for some other reason. (Doesn’t really matter what). The question is whether youre ethically deficient for not voting, not whether you’re a grand strategist, and if you are responsible for some negative outcome that follows. In most cases (ie except the rare case where your non vote decides the election ) you are neither responsible or ethically wrong because your act has zero consequences.
Of course, I am not an ethicist.

In most cases (ie except the rare case where your non vote decides the election ) you are neither responsible or ethically wrong because your act has zero consequences.

That votes are counted means there’s a quantifiable non-zero ethical culpability.

Commentators on these threads tend to way overestimate the impact of a vote by one person.

Oh yeah, it’s a teeny influence on a presidential count, but it’s not a hard thing to vote. What other people like to ignore in arguing for non-voting is that there are a lot of people further down the ticket and they need votes too. Your influence on those people is bigger and it’s not like Republicans have failed to notice that local government can be easily taken over by a bloc of motivated voters.

No. It’s not false. At all. No one gets to blame Nader voters for voting their conscience. Not in a democratic society. They didn’t vote for Bush. They didn’t vote Republican. They voted for someone they believed was superior to both Gore or Bush. As is their right in a supposedly free society.

You’re mistaking a right for a smart decision. Of course they can be blamed, and I get to do that. It’s my right!

One can blame — if we’re going to put party above conscience — the 308,000 Democrats who sold out their own party to vote for Bush, and the 52% of Democrats who stayed home. Those Democrats actually voted straight up for Bush. They were directly responsible for his victory in Florida. Directly. One can’t blame voters who voted for neither of the corporate parties. Sorry. That’s just bullshit.

I can blame those guys too! Except according to you I can’t.

“What other people like to ignore in arguing for non-voting is that there are a lot of people further down the ticket and they need votes too. ”

If I vote for Jill Stein I’d still vote for Democrats downticket.

Layman @158,

“Plume, I’m having a bit of difficulty following this. If some Nader voters had voted for Bush instead, then they’d be to blame for Bush. If some Nader voters had stayed home instead, they’d be to blame for Bush. If some Nader voters had voted for Gore instead, they’re to blame for not voting for Gore. So, who are the Nader voters who aren’t to blame for their Nader vote again?”

It’s not rocket science. Nader peeled away all of 24,000 potential — but obviously not certain — votes from Gore. Gore couldn’t even convince 308,000 Democrats NOT to vote for Bush.

It’s one thing to choose the superior candidate to the two corrupt, war-mongering, anti-worker, anti-environment, pro-capitalism-at-any-cost parties . . . . At least they can rest easy that they honestly chose the best candidate and party (Green). But Democrats who voted for Bush? Are you seriously trying to say Nader voters should feel guilty when all it would have taken is 270 voters from those 308,000 Democrats to vote Gore instead of Bush? Seriously?

I don’t think electoral politics in a representative democracy is about “compromise”. I think it is about rotation in office. Voting is an alternative to revolution, a check on the political power of elites in a hierarchical political economy. Those elected to office will engage in deliberation and compromise in the course of making and executing policy choices. Overall, though, the point of the architecture of a liberal representative democracy, with separation of powers and separation of private from public spheres, rights of the individual and all that, is to legitimate conflicts of interest in a complex, hierarchical system and to provide a means by which the general public can hold those in power responsible.

Elections, with the possibility of rotation in office, are the ultimate foundation for a complex, hierarchical political system in which rational deliberation in policy choice and the supervision of hierarchy can hold its own against elite self-serving corruption, cruelty and stupidity.

TM: “In this country, given the institutional two-party framework that won’t change any time soon, the only sane political strategy is to keep Reps out of office at all levels (which means voting for unattractive “lesser evil” Dem candidates), and to put progressive pressure on the Dems by all means (*). “

What is it the wag said about insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result? A two-party system without rotation in office is a broken system; if you can only vote for the candidates of one party, and those candidates are chosen by a narrow class of corporate executives and plutocrats, well . . . it is hard to see what channels for “progressive pressure” are left. All the pressure is downward, to conform, to hypnotize one’s self with ritual comparisons to the greater evil, a greater evil offered by the same controlling elite, in a deliberately designed “heads you lose, tails we win” dilemma.

I am not making a point about the constitutional wisdom per se of a two-party system. I am making a point about the deep corruption of a political system, and the need to step away from the processes that co-opt us into legitimizing what is not legitimate, what is seriously dysfunctional. Voting for Jill Stein will not make me “feel pure”; it will be an admission of powerlessness.

I can argue that, since I live in California, which Clinton will carry in the general election with certainty, that my dissenting vote is a gesture toward applying “progressive pressure”. In the unlikely event several million join me in California’s general election, Clinton would still win California’s electoral college vote, but our voting behavior would send a signal, as they say, that might plausibly affect Clinton’s political calculations and policy behavior in a positive way. Beautiful dreams, I guess. Voting for her would do absolutely nothing to alter her behavior in office.

If Sanders were the Democratic nominee, I would vote for him. Not because I agree with him on some litany of issues, but because he understands the basic problem: the need to mobilize a mass movement against a corrupt and increasingly oppressive and dysfunctional elite, aka the need for “a revolution”. That’s what voting is properly for: to provide a check on elites. It can be a signal to dissenting elite factions that mass support is available. It can be a threat or a signal of mass dissatisfaction. And, it can just be routine rotation in office, which keeps the corruption of power down to a dull roar. It can be a wave election that enables a more or less radical and adaptive change in the course of policy. It can be voting out a prosecutor, who won’t charge police for wantonly killing unarmed persons.

To me, Clinton is that prosecutor who will not charge murderous police, only on a higher plane and a larger scale with greater scope. She says attacking Wall Street won’t do anything to overcome sexism or racism. True enough, I guess.

Continuing the exclusive domination of government at the highest levels by banksters, or the operatives of the military-industrial complex cum security state, isn’t going to overcome sexism or racism, either. What it will do is take us further down the road of an increasingly authoritarian state, and even a corporate neo-feudalism. The economic consequences, as the distribution of income and risk shifts to favor the giant corporations and the super-wealthy, are already abundantly clear, I think. But, maybe not clear to some.

Framing electoral politics around making hierarchy work for the whole society (as opposed to only a narrow elite of the society’s “owners” and their hired cadre of overseers) is different from the politics of transforming social consciousness. I am not sure I see the utility in making those different frames into platforms of opposing propositions or political organizing.

@ Plume, apparently it is rocket science, at least for you. Nader voters did not vote for Gore. If Nader wasn’t on the ballot, and they stayed home instead, they would not have voted for Gore. If Nader wasn’t on the ballot, and they voted for Bush instead, they still would not have voted for Gore. Their votes made the difference in the outcome, in any scenario. They have moral culpability for the outcome. Lots of other people do, too, but they do as well. It was a mistake, and they should admit that it was a mistake.

Any voting decision – even the decision not to vote at all – is an exercise in lesser-evilism. There are no perfect candidates, and you’re always trying to choose who you think is the least imperfect. If you decide not to vote, you’re making a decision that abstaining from the choice is less bad than making the choice from the options you have. If you make a protest vote for a candidate who can’t possibly win, you’re choosing the lesser of what you see as variably bad choices.

A long, long time ago, in my youth, I voted for Anderson, who could not possibly win, and who I knew could not possibly win. I was making a grand gesture, and it was stupid. I’m morally responsible for Reagan, just as much as the people who voted for him are. I won’t do that sort of stupid shit again.

And if there’s an ethical responsibility on the non voter then there (afaict) is also one on the berater of the non voter if that strategy (berating the non voter into compliance) is counterproductive (which it might well be)

Sure, I’ll buy that. And as many people will note from now until whenever Hillary is a belligerent when it comes to blowing people up for her perceived American interests. Yet I still want people to vote for her over the guy who wants to brag about war crimes, torture, and generally rounding up people who look funny. So all in all I kinda suck. My apologies.

Layman #148: “Counterfactuals are hard, but is there anyone who thinks President Al Gore invades Iraq? Anyone?”

Certainly. Wikipedia:

The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 is a United States Congressional statement of policy stating that “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq…” It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

The reasons why the US and any sane person would want to get rid of Saddam are easy to imagine. He was a vicious scumbag, and he was royally screwing-up any possibility of moderation from surrounding regimes.

It is harder to imagine Sen. Hillary Clinton opposing this policy 4 years later. Of course she has since said her vote was a “mistake” which is as much admission as has been heard from any politician (and more than most).

Gore delivered a speech on his views in September 2002, and they are not entirely black & white:
https://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/gore/gore092302sp.html

@Layman 177,

“They have moral culpability for the outcome. Lots of other people do, too, but they do as well. It was a mistake, and they should admit that it was a mistake.”

Complete, utter bullshit. They have zero reason to feel regret. Zero. And it wasn’t a mistake. It’s always the right thing to do to vote your conscience in a free society. Always. We have just one vote. It’s not our job to make the various scenarios/strategies work for the two corrupt corporate parties. It’s not our job to make sure it all works out as planned by the oligarchs and plutocrats. Seriously. Eff that.

Bush won by 537 votes in Florida. Gore didn’t contest an election that close, which boggles the mind, especially given Jeb as governor. But that’s another story. The key is 308,000 Democrats — get that? 308,000 Democrats voted directly for Bush. They placed their one and only vote with Bush. Nader voters, OTOH, voted against Bush just as much as those who voted for Gore. Nader voters AND Gore voters voted against Bush. Bush voters . . . . obviously decided to elect him.

Again, you’re blaming the wrong people and you have no case.

geo @180,

Also well said. All of it.

Yes, Layman’s “moral culpability” part answered as well:

“So all of you who denied Nader your vote have a measurable responsibility for the two-party duopoly that is strangling American political life.”

and

“Bush was a fool; Gore was a hack; how, really, can you blame someone who wanted, for once, to support someone worth supporting?”

President Gore invading Iraq is certainly plausible, imo.

Geo, argument 1 is just dumb. A political decision you make must necessarily carry no responsibility? Pull the other one. 2 is interesting, yet worked out the same, right? It didn’t happen. 3 is something everyone should agree with.

The above are merely logical answers to the critics. But there is also a certain emotional incomprehension — sheer unsportingness — involved in blaming people who voted for by far the most qualified candidate ever to campaign in an American presidential election, someone who has done more to strengthen American democracy and defend Americans’ health and safety than anyone else in the second half of the twentieth century. Bush was a fool; Gore was a hack; how, really, can you blame someone who wanted, for once, to support someone worth supporting?

How could I blame someone for wanting that? I don’t have a fantasy Gore presidency in which he wants what I want, and I’ve blamed him for suckiness upthread. I confess I didn’t see his opponent being quite as catastrophic as he worked out to be, yet he was. The act was dumb, the sentiment certainly wasn’t (although Nader really is a shithead).

Layman,

Btw, if you voted your conscience when you pulled the lever for Anderson, you did the right thing and should feel no regrets. Your one vote is precious — to you. But, paradoxically, it carries no power, in and of itself, to change elections. None. It’s the proverbial drop in the ocean. And because of our electoral college, tens of millions of votes are actually quite meaningless, if you live in a red state and vote blue, for example.

You didn’t help elect Reagan. Reagan would still have won if you had stayed home or voted for Carter. It wouldn’t have mattered. Now you’d have reason to doubt yourself if you had pulled the lever for Reagan. But you didn’t. You voted against Reagan just as much as anyone who voted for Carter.

Same with anyone who voted for Nader. They, too, voted against Bush — and Gore. They and you have no reason to regret a thing.

Geo @ 183, I’m sorry to say that comes off as mostly nonsense. This is what I get from it:

1) because a vote is one among millions and can’t change the outcome, no one has moral culpability for their vote

2) except a Nader vote, which is also one among millions and can’t change the outcome, is a moral choice, and those who didn’t cast their vote that way have moral culpability for their vote

3) the system is corrupt, and non-Nader voters didn’t change it

(1) is nonsense, (2) directly contradicts the premise of (1), and (3) is irrelevant to the question of the impact of Nader votes, and the question of responsibility for them, and ignores that Nader-voters didn’t change the system either.

@Plume, I’m amazed to learn that our electoral system counts not just votes for a candidate, but also votes against a candidate. If a candidate gets more votes against than votes for, does s/he lose despite getting a plurality of all votes cast in a state? Has anyone told the people?

Everyone who didn’t vote for Al Gore helped Bush get elected. It doesn’t matter how (not voting, voting for Bush, voting for someone else), or why they did that, the effect is the same. Worse, they’re probably to blame for making Al Gore fat.

Does the plausible existence of a lot of people on the other side having this same argument but in reverse–people for who the GOP nominee will be the lesser evil–change the way we should feel about this situation? Trump is all but promising to sabotage the GOP if anyone buy him is the nominee, and #NeverTrump isn’t quite dead yet. No matter who the GOP nominates, there’s probably going to be a lot more Republicans dissatisfied with their nominee than Democrats. In which case, LesserEvilism would help Republicans more than it helps Democrats, right?

No if having to vote for the lesser evil becomes a moral obligation that raises voter turnout, then Democrats win top to bottom in a landslide.

Worse, they’re probably to blame for making Al Gore fat.

That’s what really gets my goat about the whole sorry affair…

What is the difference between an educated American who knows Clinton is a neoliberal warmonger yet thinks she is the lesser evil and an uneducated American who thinks Trump is a loudmouthed clown but, what the hell, let’s see how the elite reacts if we poke it with a stick by electing him? Many have written that Trump and his supporters are sexist, racist morons, but what about what Trump supporters think of Clinton supporters, that they are soulless, greedy traitors?

I see both the American educated and uneducated classes as equally hopeless and desperate, yet this thread only reflects what educated people think since one has to know how to express oneself clearly in writing in order to participate. That is, we have a very striking class bias going on here.

Layman @195,

“Plume, I’m amazed to learn that our electoral system counts not just votes for a candidate, but also votes against a candidate. If a candidate gets more votes against than votes for, does s/he lose despite getting a plurality of all votes cast in a state? Has anyone told the people?”

So where did you learn this? Not here. No one in this thread said anything remotely like the above. Good snark is based on truth, not straw men, Layman. You’re not very good at snark.

As for all of your silly talk of “moral culpability.” You support the Democratic Party, right? You’re a Democrat, I assume. And our capitalist system? You support that, too, right? The hierarchical structures in place? You’re cool with them, also, right? They all have the blood of tens of millions on their hands. Right now, in 2016, this is ongoing.

But you want Nader voters to feel guilty about their essentially meaningless vote, which you’ve fetishized beyond recognition? You want people to feel guilty for voting outside those two warmongering, death to the planet parties? Really?

And, yes, the GOP is worse, which is why it is perfectly understandable, rational and logical, from a moral point of view, not to vote for either of them. With both parties being despicable in their actions, going back two centuries for one, and almost as long for the other, the only really “moral” thing to do is end support for either of them.

Beyond all of that . . . . tell me, Layman, how was a voter to know, in November of 2000, what Bush would end up doing? How could they predict that 9/11 would happen, that Bush would exploit it, get us into two insane wars, commit all kinds of war crimes and so on? No one predicted that back in November of 2000. The book on Bush at the time was that he was an amiable eff up, a good-time Charlie who would likely be one and done like his father. Instead, 9/11 happened and the rest is (odious) history. But since no one at the time could have known he would become one of the worst presidents in American history, your “moral culpability” shtick is pure nonsense. Voting for him in 2004? That’s a different story.

March 2016 “Trump the MOSTEST EVILIST EVAH!!!! http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/democrats-donald-trump-alarm-220910

March 2016 “Dems face huge enthusiasm gap” http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/03/01/analysis-super-tuesday-trump-takeover-feelthebern-clinton-cruz-rubio-sanders/81143962/

“In every contest leading up to Super Tuesday, Democratic turnout has been way down while Republican turnout was way up…In South Carolina, 367,000 people voted in the Democratic primary, a 30% decline from the party’s last contested primary, in 2008. But 603,000 Republicans voted in the Republican primary, a 20% increase from the last contested GOP contest, in 2012. In Nevada’s Republican caucuses, 34,000 people supported Trump. That’s more than the entire GOP turnout four years ago.”

Gee, I wonder if this there’s any connection between Trump-Hitler and the prospect of more of the same only worse. Talk about yer politiks of fear. Meanwhile, HRC is busily trying to co-opt Trump’s message – now she’s going to save us from China (wtf? with neo-liberalism and globalization?).

As I said before, the DNC ought to be on their knees thanking Bernie. Just imagine how vapid and lifeless the Dem alternative would look without all those energized young Sanders’s supporters, and by that – I mean to Dems!

Squint hard, tilt your head to the side and HRC looks like Bernie and Donald.

You betcha!

Layman @193:

No, you’ve overlooked an important difference between the two votes. Votes in an American presidential election are not additive. We do not have a system of proportional representation. It is possible to lose a large majority of popular votes and win a majority of electoral votes. Moreover, each state’s electoral votes are themselves not proportionally allotted but are allotted by winner-take-all. In order for one vote to decide an election, one state must hold the balance of electoral votes and the popular vote in that one state must be decided by exactly one vote. Likelihood: infinitesimal.

On the other hand, votes count one by one toward a given percentage of the electorate. Roughly 105 million votes were cast in the 2000 election; 5 percent of those is 5.25 million votes, so the chance your vote might determine whether a third party is funded is 1 in 5 million — not large, but not infinitesimal.

In neither case (or any similar case) is a person morally bound to regulate his/her choices by remote or negligible probabilities of this sort.

Really, if all the bellyaching devoted to blaming Nader and his supporters since 2000 had been devoted to some more useful (though, of course, more difficult) goal, such as actually making American electoral arrangements minimally rational, the Electoral College, the Senate, etc., and other atrocities might now be history.

“President Gore invading Iraq is certainly plausible, imo.” Ronan @187

Without a doubt it’s plausible. The neocon infiltration of the security/diplomacy D.C. establishment was already a fait accompli. Whether a Gore admin. would have been quite so infested with Wolfowitz/John Bolton types is another question, but their power and influence and willingness to work across party “lines” at that time is undoubted– see Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland today.

Maybe the Iraq fubar happens or maybe it doesn’t with Gore, but it’s always taken a special kind of precious to assume that all would have been well had Gore won. The collective fear, psychosis, and anger gripping the U.S. after 9/11 was immense– was literally a perfect environment for the neocons to advance their agenda. And, let’s face it, Gore never showed any sign of being some sort of inverse liberal mirror-reflection of Andrew Jackson, in possession of a titanium spine, capable of withstanding the (public) panic-fear and (neocon) pressure. Who knows, maybe he would have risen to the occasion. But I doubt it and doubt even more that his administration taken as a whole would have.

And this is the point, which some in these rolling debates acknowledge but don’t really get: too many of our institutions are fundamentally corrupted and actively working against the general health and welfare of Americans– never mind the rest of the world.
So vote as you will, but this or that figurehead is not likely to sway the greater balance in one direction or another very much. Change will have to come from within, below, and from the outside. The Sanders and Trump (nasty as it is) phenomena reveal that the potential is there and growing.

But there’s a big advantage to not voting: I no longer have to sit through boring jury duty.

(That was a joke. In actuality all I have to do is say “I’m an anarchist, and I plan to vote innocent no matter what the facts are for any victimless crime” and no more jury duty for me.)

Having had close although not direct experience of how Nader treated his workers, I did not vote for Nader back when I was still voting. His post-election performance, I think, supports that decision.

For the people insisting that my vote is important I’ll say this. I plan not to vote. Therefore, it is morally incumbent on you, by the same logic that you’re using, to make up for my missing vote. I may be to blame, but you also will be to blame, morally, if you don’t take the fairly minimal effort that it would take to get one of the huge number of people who will not bother voting to the polls and make up for my missing vote.

OK so we are agreed it would have been crazy to vote for Bush had there been a good chance that Gore was more unlikely to start a war against Iraq that would cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, tens of thousands of American lives and catastrophic injuries, and over five trillion dollars (Stiglitz and Bilme). You are just saying that if anything Gore was more likely to have started the war against Iraq and it took extraordinary circumstances like a master’s thesis on the possibility of WMD in Iraq to push party boy W. to war. Got it.

“And, let’s face it, Gore never showed any sign of being some sort of inverse liberal mirror-reflection of Andrew Jackson, in possession of a titanium spine, capable of withstanding the (public) panic-fear and (neocon) pressure. ”

phenomenal cat, you may not be aware that a only minority of Americans supported the Iraq invasion, and those that did, did so only after a long campaign of disinformation about Iraq, Iraq’s alleged role in 9/11, and Iraq’s alleged WMD programs. There was little public clamor for war, and what little there was was ginned up. It would be an unjustified smear of some magnitude to claim, without any evidence at all, that someone else (Gore?) would similarly lie about these matters to the public. Absent the disinformation, what would be the source of this pressure?

@geo 180

I guess nobody has responsibility for anything. Infinitesimal chance that what you said will change anybody’s mind. Infinitesimal chance that stiffing the waitperson will cause a child to starve. Infinitesimal chance selling what I have to give to the poor will leave anybody better off in the end.

In a community, it works the other way: you’re responsible for everything, whether you can personally change it or not (and you could keep THAT [pointing] child from starving). But “this is not a home, this is an apartment”. An apart-ment, get it?

@31: The importance of rebuilding the party at state and local levels is a subject that she has raised more than once and she has worked hard at fundraising for the DNC. I think the task is well within her capabilities, and it’s an area where she can definitely improve on her old boss’ record.

I don’t think she will be any worse in regard to Wall Street than Obama, not a large statement. Depending on the makeup of the Congress, she may have enough on her hands just trying to defend Dodd-Frank. She is a hawk and deplorably so, but my perhaps overoptimistic hope is that she can use her reputation for hawkishness productively – at least she won’t feel pressured to bomb something straightaway in order to prove her martial bona fides.

I live in a safely blue state and will likely vote for Sanders in the primary to keep HRC on her toes. But if it were close I wouldn’t hesitate to vote for her and will do so in the general, while hoping she can stay away from unforced errors like praising Ron and Nancy for their record on AIDS. (Jesus.)

I guess it is “tribal” of me to mention it, but I do look forward to the possibility of seeing a liberal Democratic woman taking the oath of office and will be especially pleased for old warriors like Steinem and RBG and the other feminists of their generation, because they’ll have lived to see it.

With regard to Clinton’s commitment to her work on children’s rights, see this from Garry Wills back in ‘92:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/03/05/hr-clintons-case/

“It isn’t specific utterances that disqualify Donald,”

I think this one alone would do it for me. And it’s hardly the worst out there, as we all know:

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Back in 2007, I argued against someone from Australia who said a majority of Americans supported the invasion. I told him, no way. That’s just Fox News nonsense. He and I got into a heated argument about it. Though, ironically, we were both antiwar.

Turns out he was correct.

Seventy-Two Percent of Americans Support War Against Iraq

Layman @222,

I understand it perfectly. You’re putting words in people’s mouths here, continuously. Please stop.

Plume@223,

I believe that there was an immediate spike of support after the war started and troops were already on the ground. The poll you link to is dated as a few days after the beginning of the invasion. I think that support was much more tepid during the run up, but I’d have to do some google searching to find proof.

Temporary Name,

That’s easy to see now. But in November of 2000? Um, not so much.

That said, again, people who voted for Nader did not vote for Bush/Cheney, by definition. They didn’t want Bush to win, or they would have voted for him, like those 308,000 Democrats.

I think Layman and others here are confusing “morality” with “pragmatics and strategery,” and they’re doing so with classic 20/20 hindsight. To me, the obviously “moral” thing to do, when it comes to voting, is to vote your conscience. Voting strategically is a completely different matter. Chomsky, for instance, suggests voting strategically, while from a moral point of view, he believes both parties are despicable — as do I.

It’s really none of our business how someone votes, and instead of trying to blame third-party voters for the abject failures of the Democrats to make their own case, perhaps they should ask what is it about the Dems that turns off so many left-wing voters in the first place.

They need to earn our votes. We don’t owe then one damn thing.

@ novakant, give a real world example of a choice you made that couldn’t be boiled down to a case of lesser-evilism. I’ll wait.

Brett Bellmore, your narrative @ 227 tracks with how I remember things happening at the time.

However, I’ve seen enough of these types of threads to know that it isn’t enough to believe that Nader cost Gore the election, or that Bush stole the election in Florida. You have to believe that Nader cost Gore the election AND that Gore beat Bush in Florida and Bush stole it to satisfy some people.

So no, its really not that important.

“give a real world example of a choice you made that couldn’t be boiled down to a case of lesser-evilism.”

No idea what is being asked here, but I like to bring up this example in these types of discussions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_presidential_election,_1932

#221 I think we’ve had a good preview of the Clinton foreign policy when she was at State. The massive arm sales to the Saudis, the drive by devastation of Libya, the provocative stance taken in Ukraine. Obama’s foreign policy, in my opinion, has been much better since she left – I can’t imagine the deal with Iran on Clinton’s watch.

My hope is, however, that she will be hemmed in by a more lefty Dem. congress. She’ll do harm, but not as much as she would have if Sanders hadn’t run, and if the Dem establishment hadn’t woken up to the fact that, by an amazing percentage, the coming generation can’t stand the old neo-liberal line on domestic and foreign policy.

That’s my hope. Really, I don’t see the upside of Clinton succeeding Obama, but I do see limits to the downside.

That’s easy to see now. But in November of 2000? Um, not so much.

Yes it was, in fact, really easy to see. That’s why I mentioned him, where he came from, his people, and his party’s platform. And again this is not to say Gore was fabulous: he was not. It was still a simple matter to go to your polling place and do a thing that you insist is meaningless anyway.

They need to earn our votes. We don’t owe then one damn thing.

Well really, fuck Nader and Bush and Gore. What do you owe yourself and your loved ones? “I dreamed this dream for us but instead we got a catastrophe. You’re welcome.”

The Temporary Name,

So you want to blame 24,000 Nader voters for something they couldn’t possible know would occur, going in? Who knew Bush would win by 537 votes? Who knew that the election would all come down to Florida? Who knew that it would be so close that Jeb’s rigging of the election, purging hundreds of thousands of votes, would bear fruit? Who knew that despite the massive number of voting irregularities, Gore would cave in and not demand a recount? Who knew that 308,000 DEMOCRATS would vote for Bush? — and if you want to blame anyone, they’re the people to blame, not Nader voters. Nader voters obviously didn’t vote for Bush.

Think about it:

308,000 DEMOCRATS voted for Bush
Tell me now how 24,000 NADER voters are responsible for his election theft.

And, again, only with perfect 20/20 hindsight could you even begin to make this a “moral” issue. Without intentionality, it makes no sense to accuse any Nader voters of anything. Without 20/20 hindsight, even intentionality is meaningless in this case.

Each person would have to know, going in, that their vote for Nader would hand the election to Bush. And no one knew that, obviously.

If the evil many can live with is a neoliberal warmonger, then fear not, that is what you will get. If you don’t like that option, too bad, that is what you’ll get anyway. The global elite has all this under control and is very experienced at removing non-compliant heads of state very swiftly and without violence.

If Trump wins, he can be removed from power just like Berlusconi was. This is how it works: Trump starts behaving erratically in a non-neoliberal way, like building walls, deporting foreign workers, and slapping on tariffs. Right on cue, investors lose confidence, bond vigilantes get all panicky, rating agencies downgrade the US, Wall Street collapses, the dollar depreciates, and bears and inflation run amok.

Then, dear Ms. Lagarde and a group of very elegant and serious bankers kindly offer to bail out the country in exchange of implementing certain measures. Problem is, they do not trust Trump to implement them, him being so erratic. So Trump steps down, just like Berlusconi, and lets a nice, comforting, pragmatic, efficient, reliable person take over. Someone like Clinton, for example. This story also has its Greek version, in which anti-neoliberal Tsipras suddenly recognized the virtue of bowing to the inevitable and was permitted to stay in power.

So I wouldn’t worry. You all will get your least evil option. You see, it is the only option.

medrawt @ 237, you put words in my mouth beautifully. Thanks, you said it much more clearly than I would have.

PS – Would someone who knows please address Brett @227? Is that really what happened in Florida?

medrawt @ : maybe cool it with moralizing about how people willing to vote for HRC really feel about America bombing Pakistani weddings.

And no, Nader’s current views about an independent candidacy by Bloomberg are completely irrelevant to judging whether one was justified in believing in 2000, on the basis of his 40-year career up to then, whether he was then by far the best candidate for president.

@ Geo

“Not quite. If a single person’s choice has an infinitesimal probability of producing some outcome, then that choice carries an infinitesimal moral responsibility for producing that outcome.”

That doesn’t sound unreasonable, until you understand that this would mean that a person who voted for Bush, with the intent of helping Bush be elected, had almost no moral responsibility for that choice. That’s an absurd outcome, so there’s something wrong with your formulation.

Also, not to be picky, this is what you wrote in 180: “Hence, since the 2000 election was not decided by one vote, no individual bears any responsibility for it. ANY responsibility.”

Not an infinitesimal responsibility, no responsibility at all. I trust you understand my objection. I agree that there can be degrees of moral culpability, and would certainly agree that those who voted for Bush bear more blame than those who voted for Nader, and I’ve said that.

“You can’t simultaneously claim that the public support for war would have pushed….”

Point is there was always a significant part of the population supportive, plus there was a lot of path dependance in Iraq policy, plus a group of relatively apolitical policy advisors pushing for similar goals, plus the same geopolitical concerns, plus similar elite views on regional policy, plus a similar willingness to use force (if admittedly for different goals), plus broad enough support in both parties for regime change( which could be rallied depending on who was making the decision) all of this = a plausible chance of a gore war

geo –

Well, I personally haven’t done any of said moralizing ( … on this thread). I think the arguments for voting for Nader in a contested state are nonsense – while I would characterize them uncharitably, I probably wouldn’t say “making a moral choice for evil” – but I lost my stamina for having the discussion at length 10 years ago and haven’t recovered it.

However, I think Nader’s Bloomberg-curiosity and the reasons he indicates for it, as well as his campaign in 2004, as well as oh just about everything he’s said or done that caught my attention since November 2000, says a lot about the sort of politician he would be, and the sort of person he is, and I am left satisfied that he doesn’t play a bigger role in our politics. To sum up: I think Nader is more obsessed with opposing the two party power structure than he is with championing any particular political agenda. (This is something I think happens to many people who build an identity around speaking truth to power; eventually they turn rancid and lose coherence.) Perhaps the experience of 2000 affected him, but based on some things I’ve read about his campaign I suspect perhaps not. I’m genuinely curious what people actually involved in organizing for the Green Party think about his efforts then and now; he surely raised the party’s national profile, but I’m curious whether it’s believed that he was a net positive for local organizing, whether people were frustrated about where he directed his energies, etc.

(At the bottom) Majority support since gulf 1 with relatively minor fluctuations before the war began triggering larger support (though the argument doesn’t rest on the public pushing then into war, just there existing a significantly large part of the pop receptive to regime change )

http://www.gallup.com/poll/8074/iraq-war-triggers-major-rally-effect.aspx

(At the bottom)

At the bottom it’s kind of a shitty country right?

Temporary name. I don’t personally mean to imply that. It’s a human condition not solely an American one

Geo is right about the absurd moralizing.

You’d still have miles and miles to go to make your case against people who voted for Nader, but you’d at least have to start with this. You at least have to establish intentionality — which no one had done yet. That is obviously a key component in any discussion where “moral culpability” is apportioned:

1. That they knowingly voted for Nader in order to get Bush elected. Of course, if they had wanted Bush elected, they would have voted for Bush in the first place
2. That they knowingly colluded with large numbers of other Nader voters to swing the tide to Bush.
3. That they knew before hand that the election would come down to Florida, to just 537 votes, and that 308,000 Democrats would vote for the other team, or that 52% of the Democratic rank and file would stay home.
4. That they knew before hand that Jeb would help pave the way for a Bush family victory, via cheating. That they knew before hand about all the election day hanging chadcanery.
5. That they knew before hand that the above would take place, that Gore would fold like a bad suit and not ask for a recount, and that the Supreme Court would stop the ongoing state recounts, thus handing the election to Bush
6. And that knowing all the above, they knew we’d have a 9/11, which would enable the neocon takeover and that “tide of evil” mentioned earlier. Because without 9/11, chances are Bush is one and done, goes back to his ranch to clear sagebrush with little to show for it.

Da Bears just missed making the playoffs in 20__. They have 8 wins and 7 losses but are still in the hunt for a wildcard spot, going into the final Sunday. The last game comes down to the final seconds. They’re down by two points, 35-33. A field goal wins it for them and they get into the playoffs.

The kicker misses, and their season is over.

The fans blame everything on the kicker. He is the scapegoat, gets death threats and they all but run him out of town. None of these fans stops to think about what led to the previous seven losses, or that their defense allowed 35 points in their final game, or that their offense couldn’t score a touchdown to seal the victory at the end. It’s all on the kicker.

On the Iraq War, I recall writing a letter to a friend within a week of 9/11 explaining why I thought one result would be an intervention to overthrow Saddam. I was not advocating for that outcome, just summarizing the mood of the country as I saw it. Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine had fertile ground. In the course of events, the country began to sober pretty fast and Bush & Co had to do a lot of lying to get their desired result, which they did with remarkable cynicism and carelessness.

That Americans generally thought removing Saddam Hussein from power would be a sensible policy is not something I personally think is blameworthy.

What is morally ugly, to my mind, is the negligence with which that policy was pursued and implemented.

Proposing to depose Saddam was like proposing to excise a cancerous vital organ by surgery. Cutting someone open and removing a vital organ may be an extreme, though risky move, even if the cancer is painful and dangerous. Doing the surgery with dirty hands, using a rusty knife, and with no adequate plan to aid recovery — that was deeply immoral.

That the U.S. held so few to account and so feebly is what makes me think the US is a shitty country.

Re gore and iraq – i seriously doubt the attacks on 9/11 would have happened under gore. BushS incompetance was the necessary condition for that. On this point, im with trump.

@TM — #NotAllAmericans

Quite a good essay on the (ir)rationality of voting:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n19/david-runciman/why-not-eat-an-eclair

“That the U.S. held so few to account and so feebly is what makes me think the US is a shitty country.”

My main reason for holding this view – the NTSC video standard – is now no longer salient

273 point taken.

268 Nice rant, for a change.

Plume I don’t need 20/20 hindsight to know that gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq and was serious about climate change because he said so and in case you haven’t noticed politicians tend to act on their statements, which is why all this trump = Clinton prevarication is so terrifyingly, inanely stupid. He’s going to deport 12 million people and torture a bunch of others and burn down a few countries, you don’t need 20/20 foresight or whatever the mysterious magical soothsaying equivalent of guessing what someone intends from their stated statements is because he wrote the whole lot down and repeats it every two days to that rabble of people you see on the news who will determine the fate of the entire world if you don’t vote right.

I also don’t need 20/20 hindsight to know that throwing your vote away is throwing your vote away because when you throw your vote away that’s what you do. And contra the weird economics theorizing from ronan, every vote counts so yes the 24000 people who voted Nader made sure their vote didn’t protect Iraq. And yes those 308000 democrats should amputate their voting arm in shame but do what? We’re not talking about them were talking about the people in this thread who said they won’t vote Clinton because in the magical mystery election in their head trump is sane and Clinton is not.

And yes how you people vote is my business because 1) you made it an issue by stating publicly I a comment thread what you would do and 2) you’re American, so every time one of you swings a lever in your weird voting booths it affects everyone in the rest of the world. If you have any sense of responsibility at all you will vote for all of us, not your own pure virginal fee fees.

If Nader voters voted for him over Gore because they wanted to break the two party system, they’re not just morally culpable for Bush. They’re morally culpable for an unforgivably poor understanding of the US electoral process. Take a poli sci 101 class already. Winner take all systems can’t stably support three parties.

http://trumpdonald.org/

@284,

“faustusnotes, you should take a timeout. You’re raging at people who agree with you about the damage the U.S. has done and want it to stop. Ain’t nobody here “justifying letting a fascist in.””

Exactly. In fact, those who vote Green Party are far more likely to be antiwar than regular Dems. They’re far more likely to be opposed to the things Trump wants to do and Bush did. Because we leftists haven’t drunk the corporate koolaid, and we know the Dems are every bit the warmongers the Republicans are.

Dems tend to be less bellicose in speech, but their record doesn’t accord with that, at all. Obama, for instance, escalated in Afghanistan and added several new fronts in the “GWOT.” And while the Dems generally don’t succumb to Republican demands to be PC and call everything under the sun a terrorist attack — except when white Christians do it — they’ve still engaged in at least as many bomb strikes with civilian casualties as a result — likely far more.

In short, between the two parties, at least when it comes to war, surveillance, law and order, etc. there isn’t a preferred “moral” choice to make. Both parties are despicable in their actions. Voting for the Greens (or DSA, or the socialist party) is the only “moral” choice, given that reality.

I accept that evidence existed prior to Bush’s election that he would be massively worse than Gore, but I think a non-specialist layperson could be forgiven for missing it. That’s especially true in the foreign policy realm, with Albright asking Powell “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”.

We may never have a three party system, but it shouldn’t shock anyone if someday those two parties aren’t the Republicans and Democrats. That day could come very soon now.

I still don’t buy the whole premise of obligatory lesser-evilism. If you say I’m obligated to vote for the lesser evil, do you also think that I have to pick a side in every fight in which one side is clearly more evil than the other? Like if there are two drug cartels fighting for control of my neighborhood, am I morally obligated to support the less evil of the two cartels?

I said I thought that voting for Clinton might make me a worse person, but the truth goes much further than that–I would be far better person, and probably do much more good for the world, if I never paid any attention to politics at all. I just wish I could take back all the time and energy I wasted staring into this abyss.

Also, although up above I kind of endorsed the idea that your vote only matters if it’s the marginal one that changes the election, I think the truth is much more complicated. On one level I agree with what anon@138 said about free-riding. But voting and elections aren’t the only kind of collective responsibility. We’re about to have a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump showdown for the fate of the country. How the hell did we get here? I mean, if you told me in 2005 that Hillary Clinton would be our nominee, I would assume you were just making a sick joke–how could we nominate someone who (at the time) was still defending her Iraq war vote as a good idea? At some point, everything looks so crazy that I start wondering if my own participation in this farce is what enables the insanity–if, in the end, I bear exactly the same kind of collective responsibility for the system’s madness that I do for the outcome of an election.

It’s not unlikely that we might have a recession sometime in the next four years. Does anyone expect politics to be less insane in 2020 than it is now?

A thought experiment. Let’s say there is no GOP candidate running. It’s just the Green Party against the Dems. Your vote won’t even help any Republicans win down ballot. The race is just between Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. No one else. Just those two. You don’t have to vote strategically at all. There are only those two women running for president and there are no coat-tails to worry about.

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/

http://www.jill2016.com/plan

Who do you vote for?

Consumatopia @258 — There needn’t be one mechanism. All that I would tentatively say is:

(1) The primary thing isn’t crazy: there are obviously famous recent cases of challenges from the left (which, admittedly, worked out badly—but no preordained reason future ones need also); and by comparison, why the Trump faction, so to speak, failed to get “their” candidate in 2012, they managed to do a lot of damage in congressional and other races. So I’m not sure the disanalogy is as sharp as you seem to think.

(2) I’d note that Obama backtracked on Keystone and only managed to get TPA through with overwhelming Republican support. Whatever the causes of this (there was more than one obviously), when Obama tried to move right, on key occasions he was successfully blocked or at least opposed by the Democratic party. I don’t see why this would change under a Clinton presidency.

Which also leads me to think that the party is really actually somewhat different now. Not least, the congressional caucus is much more reliably liberal. But look, if you’re inclined to agree with kidneystones, this might not be a very fruitful exchange.

Holey moley what hath Holbo wrought with this OP?

Though I’m glad to have asked what people will/won’t for.

Recent-vintage comments.

Plume, aren’t counterfactuals best assessed by near-worlds? All near-worlds to this actual one contain messiness–my own state of Wisconsin is crucial on the down-ballot stuff. Any move toward Hillary (or Sanders in another more remote world) is for me more important for that than my interest in national issues. My near-world counterfactuals heighten my admitted self-interest.

Faustusnotes: I resonate with your vibrations.

And I’d point out that The Simpsons predicted a Trump Presidency

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/simpsons-writer-who-predicted-trump-876295

Hillary ain’t Lisa Simpson, but she actually understands something about the world even if she is corrupted by it as well. Trump is merely corrupted. I’ll take some intellect over that anytime in my near-world counter-futures.

I don’t agree with (or, to be honest, fully understand) everything kidneystones says, and I’m not saying it would be impossible for leftists/progressives to push the party in a different direction–they should definitely keep trying.

But on the other side we have a set of party institutions that doesn’t particular like Sanders-style populism, we might see an influx of Clinton Republicans (i.e. anti-Trump Republicans) into the party’s voting base, and young people’s (entirely justified!) enthusiasm for defeating Trump might distract them from their long term dissatisfaction with the party establishment.

I think Clinton foreign policy will be dramatically worse than we have at present–if anything, the party is worse on these issues than it was ten years ago. On domestic policy, it’s not so much that I think Clinton will make things worse (except perhaps continuing to negotiate new trade deals) as that she would work to neutralize any movement to the left. But if Clinton really wanted to shift economics to the right, she would probably get away with it.

Gah. …they’ve already done it…

(Sorry for multiple posts.)

Temporary Name @289: He really did want the Democrats to lose

In that case, this passage from the same article is kind of interesting:

“ On a cell phone in the car as he traveled through New England, Nader made calls to union leaders, telling them, as he later repeated to an audience of elderly residents at a retirement home in Maine: “Go to the Democrats and say, ‘You cannot win without us. You’ve struck us down on NAFTA, you’ve struck us down on the WTO, you strike us down on trade with China, and you’re going to lose our support.’”

“The Democrats need labor, he explains. “You need to say, ‘Our steel and auto workers are going to stay home, just like they did in ’94, when the Republicans won the House,’ and then add the following: ‘We are seriously considering publicly endorsing the Nader candidacy.’ Who do you think will blink first?”

Suppose a union leader did this, and the Democratic Leadership Council replied, in effect: “Screw you. Where are you going to go?” (Come to think of it, this may very well have happened.) What should the union leader have done in that case? And doesn’t that advice suggest that what Nader actually cared about was not getting elected but urging people to assert themselves politically — in other words, to start behaving like democratic citizens?

And what did you think of this passage:

““Think of the farmers in East Texas who in the late nineteenth century started the populist, progressive farmer revolt against the big banks and railroads,” he says. “They had nothing but their hearts, their minds and their feet. Do you think they gave up?” Think what it was like for the early abolitionists, he says, or for the suffragists, or the workers who formed the trade union movement. Conditions today are hardly any worse.”

What flaw do you see in the reasoning here?

And how about this passage:

“The problem is we progressives sit around the table, and we have such a brilliant diagnosis of the problem. The appetizer comes, and we’re still diagnosing. The entree comes, and we’re still diagnosing. The carrot cake comes, and we’re diagnosing. What are we going to do? That’s what we’re here for, right?”

Doesn’t this remind you that, unlike Nader, what the Democratic leadership wants is that you vote for them every two years and then go back to sleep, leaving the “doing” to them?

Thanks for linking to the article. I’d say it made a very strong case for voting Nader.

js. @297,

Just speaking for myself. I cast my vote for the candidate who best represents my own political philosophy. I don’t feel one iota of need to be “strategic.” That’s just not my job. I don’t see that as the duty of any citizen, but if others want to vote that way, more power to them. It’s their call. Their right. Just as it’s my right to vote solely on the basis of closest philosophical fit. But I categorically reject anyone telling me I have to vote for X or it’s the end of the world. Or I have to vote for them to avoid “moral culpability.” I absolutely, 1000%, reject that nonsense.

So it doesn’t have to be, necessarily, “third party,” but it does have to be as close as possible to my view of how things should be . . . . though I also realize full well that in America those beliefs are not widely shared. Jill Stein, for instance, is pretty far away from them, too. She’s just a lot closer than any Dem, and no Republican comes within light years.

If the Democratic Party is taken over by space aliens, and they stop being warmongers, stop their support for capitalism and empire, stop their acceptance of the status quo ante in general . . . . and move decidedly in the direction of left-populism, full on democracy and anticapitalism, become antiwar, anti-empire, anti-hierarchies, etc. etc . . . . I’d vote for them. Hell, I’d vote for Republicans if they had that kind of road to Damascus conversion.

But that’s not likely to ever happen in my lifetime, and I fear that both corporate parties will help make this planet uninhabitable soon enough. And that’s where I also think Faustusnotes get things so wrong. The Dems, too, are helping burn up the planet. They talk a good game, but they’ve done next to nothing about it, and as long as they support capitalism (and its spread), this planet is headed toward the uninhabitable. Democrats or Republicans in power matters not.

Well, back now to the third party candidate who really did throw an election: Ross Perot. I don’t see how Clinton would have defeated George Herbert without the massive help of Ross. Whose party members now are fixing to have the GOP party all by themselves. Now, I like that irony!

I love how people can’t even acknowledge that there might be non-lesser-than-two-evils reasons to vote for Clinton (or whichever Dem candidate)—even if you’re not on board with all their likely policies.

Or that no one (except Plume, who still failed to answer the question) wants to touch the question I posed @297.

“Also while we are Talking About Things That Actually Are, your conscience is not an Actual Thing.”

I guess I should thank Faustusnotes for crystalizing exactly what I find so objectionable about lesser evilism–the crude, reductionist materialism that seems to be at the heart of the whole thing. If my conscience is not a thing, then the Voter’s Paradox is inescapable and it’s no longer rational to vote.

Maybe everything is so fucked up now because we’ve been voting (and, yes, purchasing/consuming) as if our conscience was not an Actual Thing for all these years now. I don’t think you’re gonna save a world this broken through materialism alone.

Unless you’re some kind of dualist, you have to admit that any belief encoded in our brains that alters our behavior is an Actual Thing. Conscience is as real as habit and culture. My crude, yet plausible, hypothesis is that if you’re in the habit of doing or rationalizing bad things, or if the people around you are doing bad things, you’re more likely to commit more misdeeds. Maybe that’s wrong, but at some point you have to ask why everything keeps getting worse even as I keep dutifully showing up twice a year to pull the lever to make things get worse more slowly.

You’re probably not going to win the election if you have to depend solely on voters who accept the proposition that “your conscience is not an Actual Thing”. That’s probably not one you want to put on a bumper sticker. As much as I don’t like Clinton, you would have a MUCH easier time convincing me to vote for her than you would convincing me of the truth of your broader philosophical claim.

No one touched the question because it’s the wrong question. If your vote has no practical significance, then your non-vote or third party vote has no practical significance either.

You assume things I wouldn’t grant, at least at the start of an argument. So this is a straightforward petitio. In any case, you’ll be happy to know that my argument wouldn’t touch your position at all (or that of monarchists, militant revolutionary Marxists, etc.)

Let it also be noted that I have no moral claims—neither asserted nor implied any obligation to vote or to vote one way or another.

Oh, good god! It’s just a collective action problem (at least if you want to preserve a democratic state). The utilitarian argument and the conscience argument are both wildly idiotic.

(Plume, sorry, but you really don’t understand the question.)

Interesting, by the way. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/trump-voters-are-not-angry-about-economy-really

double negative corrected. Um my hypothesis is that if you won’t even take the step beyond kvetching on social media to vote to keep a very dangerous demagogue out of office who would eliminate space for extra parliamentary politics (note the thuggishness towards the press and protestors), then you really are someone suffering from such learned helplessness that you are no help to yourself or others.

Thanks for linking to the article. I’d say it made a very strong case for voting Nader.

A: Bill sold us bad dope!
B: That sucks!
A: What do you wanna do now?
B: Let’s call Bill and see if he’s got dope.

Good article about the Nader myth, from the Daily Kos.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/6/1260721/-The-Nader-Myth

In Florida, CNN’s exit polling showed Nader taking the same amount of votes from both Republicans and Democrats: 1 percent. Nader also took 4 percent of the independent vote.
…
Had Nader not run, Bush would have won by more in Florida. CNN’s exit poll showed Bush at 49 percent and Gore at 47 percent, with 2 percent not voting in a hypothetical Nader-less Florida race.

And lest someone think DK is even remotely pro-Nader, try to get posters there to take responsibility as Democrats for the loss in 2000 and watch your posts get flagged and quickly hidden. They hate that, or the mention of any third party candidates.

In the article, a link to Michael Moore is a 404. I found it here:

http://explorepdx.com/2000_11_17.html

And the people who didn’t show up to vote for Gore because Barbara Ehrenreich and others were selling the false equivalence between Bush and Gore? And that is the question today–those telling us today that there is no difference between the so-called war mongers, so one should stay home or vote Stein. A position criticized by chief apologist Chomsky as I pointed out above. But honestly 14 of the 18 people who believe this false equivalence are in this comments section. It’s not a position that Bernie Sanders has for example.

Thanks, Js.

Much appreciated.

RNB: “Let me put it this way. Say you are an actual activist. ”

I’m beginning to appreciate RNB’s perfect non-arguments. Yes, an actual activist would see a grave problem and then head enthusiastically to the voting booth to fix it. Normally, this activist would organize non-violent protests, but this time they’d vote, because they are serious about radical politics.

Again I am happy to let your reply stand, RP. No response from me beyond this.

This thread is amazing because I have gone from being quite annoyed to an almost naive bemusement that people (#notallpeople) just don’t understand collective action problems at all.

(Also, an addendum to some of my above posts: If I bought the argument (as I used to!) that tactical voting—i.e. voting for a third-party candidate to send a “signal” to a major party so as to make it move in one direction or other—if I thought tactical voting worked, I would be all for it. Hell, I used to be all for it! i just think there’s zero evidence this sort of thing actually works. (I’m willing to be (re-)convinced otherwise!) In any case, the argument at least makes sense. Beyond that, all the arguments I’m seeing amount to rediscovering the free rider problem and pretending it’s a deep insight. Hooray!)

Yes, lots of people seriously believe that their conscience is at stake in the voting process, to the extent that it can be sullied by making a morally compromised choice. I happen to think that they’re wrong, but in the absence of changing many people’s minds about that, we have to pretend they’re right, in just the same way that presidential candidates operate inside a rhetorical context that pretends they have a different set of powers than they actually have.

In the meantime, I’m pretty sure js. @325 has the right idea: “I can’t stress this enough: I care a lot less about candidates—vs. say the party”. I’ll vote for a dead dog if it’s on the Democratic ticket. I know, my wretchedly compromised sense of morality. I’m typing this on an Apple device. I grew up in New England as the Moderate New England Republican was starting to wither and die, and couldn’t help but observe that these socially liberal iconoclasts who were Republicans because they wanted to be responsible stewards of your tax dollars rarely voted their conscience when the chips were down and the Whip came calling. This contributed to my conviction that I should use my votes to put as many Democrats in Washington as possible.

But the Democrats! They’re so disappointing. But about 65% of what I want in a political party I find in the Dems, and the missing 35% isn’t in the GOP, it’s with people who aren’t going to get elected to the White House (or more than one or two seats in Congress) before I retire. So I decide that I’m tossing in my allegiance with a flawed team, for two reasons:

(1) there are only two teams currently capable of winning in a big way, so I want to make sure the team I’m 65% pleased with wins as much as possible over the team I’m 0% pleased with.

(2) the funny thing about political parties is you can push them around a bit. There’s basically two ways to do this. One is deny them your vote and make them move to chase you. The other is give them your vote and make them move to keep you. I think both work in the abstract. I think for people who are way out to the left of the Democratic mainstream, the former has not worked very well (perhaps because too few people can be persuaded to try it), and I suspect the latter will work better. And even if it doesn’t, see (1).

I also subscribe to a pair of propositions: the parties are fairly well sorted right now (hence the death of the Moderate New England Republican), and the structure of US politics is always going to slouch towards a two-party system. Trump might be in the process of cracking that first proposition wide open; I’m not sure about that. The second proposition doesn’t require, that the two parties be the Dems and the GOP – but that’s who they are right now, and voting for small potatoes presidential candidates, or withholding your vote, will have zero effect on that. Working and organizing and building a political party – whether it be the Greens, or somebody else, or even a more powerfully progressive wing of Democrats – will. Get city councilmen elected, and mayors, and state representatives, and district attorneys, into office all over America. Then a Green Party (or a Progressive Party, or a You Won’t Have To Hold Your Nose With Us! Party) can start putting up serious national-level candidates beyond the occasional iconoclast. It’s an uphill battle, and my personal opinion is that between two possible uphill battles the one where you do that inside the Democratic party rather than outside of it will be easier; Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not eternal. Either way, in 2016, voting for Jill Stein will do nothing to change the fact that either a D or an R is going to be in the White House in 2017, and I care enough about the oh so pitiful difference between the parties to act accordingly. If you don’t, so much the better for your conscience, but I wonder what country you’re looking at.

geo @ 335

I would NOT vote for Clinton. I consider Clinton’s policies to be “evil”, that’s why I wouldn’t vote for her – so there.

Let me ask the lesser evilists this in return:

Are there any boundaries, red lines, taboos which would prevent you from voting for the “lesser evil”? Or will you always support the less evil candidate no matter how evil and extreme their policies might be?

331: “Voting should change who you are as a person.”

336: “Legitimizing it [the political system] by participation is the greater evil.”

It is always interesting in these discussions how on the one hand your vote doesn’t matter anyway, and at the same time it is such a hugely important metaphysical act that it should never be sullied by mere pragmatism. Re the second argument, have you at least noticed that your evil political system is doing just fine without being “legitimized” by high electoral participation? In fact it’s one of the lowest participation rates in the world, especially in off year elections, and the poor, minorities and the young are dramatically less likely to vote. But sure, it’s just a matter of time until the system goes away for lack of legitimization.

Lesser evilists like to see themselves as pragmatic and strategic political actors – but they are obviously nothing of the kind.

If you want to achieve political goals you need some sort of leverage, but the whole concept of lesser evilism argues that you should give up any leverage you might have and surrender your vote no matter what the policies.

The gay vote, the black vote, the women’s vote, the Hispanic vote, the Jewish vote … – the leverage of these groups lies in withholding their votes, that is their power and policies are adjusted to at least give them the feeling that they are being heard. Why shouldn’t, say, anti-war or left-wing voters have the right to do the same: influence policy by threatening to withhold their vote.

TM @ 342
Recycling is just another misguided exercise in lesser evilism, serving only to legitimize the system and delay the inevitable demise of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions.

Weight of its own rubbish, more like

novakant –

if the Democratic nominee were agitating for backward movement in the expansion of rights and tolerance to some slice of the population, for a xenophobic attitude towards the “different” or “outsiders,” or encouraging the kind of internal violence that Trump is encouraging, I would withhold my vote. If the Democratic nominee exhibited a level of bellicosity in foreign policy that I believed would outstrip a Republican administration’s, that would give me pause (but in our actual current context, this would be a pretty hard thing to convince me was the case).

If I perceived the distinction between the parties on the issues where I think they are importantly different was fading due to rightward movement by the Democrats, or the party started finding new platforms to stake out which I found actively repellent, my calculus would likely change.

I should note that I name myself as engaging in “lesser evilism” half as a concession to the terms of the conversation and half as a cynical reflection of my belief that everyone in this conversation partakes of evil as an inevitable byproduct of living in our society. I do not perceive the Democrats en masse (or Clinton in particular), despite their flaws (and hers), to be “an evil” who cause me to hold my nose and vote. They’re just not my ideal preference.

Rich Puchalsky –

Do you vote (or think it’s non-ridiculous to vote) in local elections? I don’t know where you live, but will you vote (or have you voted) for lower level offices up until you reach the point where you think your vote is essentially meaningless and/or the candidates become to repellent? One of my cynical/pragmatic reasons for wanting other people to vote in presidential elections is that, even though I think this is rather misguided, people (especially leftish kind of people) seem to get a lot more excited about voting for President than they do about Governors and state representatives and school boards … and I think those things matter a lot in a day to day fashion (and get closer to the thinly sliced point at which saying “ah, your vote doesn’t matter” might actually affect the outcome).

346: Tell me again, what are we fighting about the last few hundred comments? Actually, strike that, let’s not start the whole thing again ;-)

As an aside, as is well known, US presidentials are currently decided in a handful of states and the rest really don’t matter objectively. But in elections for governor, US Senate and others, every vote actually does count (supposing they are counted). Yet, turnout is much higher for president, even in non battleground states, than in off-year elections that matter a great deal. Dumb.

350, I know you are but what am i

@338, what bemuses me is that, with secret ballots and without mandatory voting, appealing to other people’s consciences is the only tool you have left to overcome the collective action problem of voting. Voting is either a matter of conscience, or it’s irrational.

I’m not pretending I’ve found any deep insight, I’m just noting that some of you are getting really basic stuff wrong ;-)

Novakant–I’m a lesser of two evils voter who agrees with you about the evils of the Democrats. To answer your question, I am going to go Godwin and say that I think it was right to support Stalin against Hitler. It boils down to this–as bad as the Democrats are, the Republicans are worse and would kill more people. Third party voting won’t do any good unless a third party can win. I used to think it could pressure the Dems to move left– in practice, one thing 2000 showed me was that it turned a bunch of otherwise liberal people into hippy punchers who in many cases would react by praising the Democrats and pointing out where the Dems were better and downplaying or denying all the ways they were terrible. You don’t pressure the Dems to move left with third party support- you encourage Democrats to pledge their undying loyalty and push them into whitewashing the record of their party. I might think this is a dumb reaction, but it’s how people react,and you get nowhere trying to argue with people who blame Nader voters more than they blame Clinton for the Iraq War. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that reaction ( it’s happened again in this thread) and people who are furious with Nader voters on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of dead virtually never show the same outrage towards the Democratic politicians who supported the war. If anything, they might even try to defend the vote and say it was all Bush’s fault or as Paul Krugman did, excuse it on the grounds that it was a crazy time. OTOH, if you give up on third parties and don’t suggest voting for them, then you can sometimes have a sensible conversation about how the Democrats are wrong on a particular issue. You will still encounter partisan Democrats who deny anything could possibly be wrong with any decision their Leader has made, but those people are hopeless.

Third parties can’t accomplish much in the US, unless a fourth party arises at the same time. If both the Democrats and the Republicans split, then maybe a Green Party would have a chance.

It’s sad and funny how all this evil lesserism automatically assumes that Mrs Clinton is the lesser.

“Hillary has now joined Sanders in calling Trump a pathological liar. She deserves credit for that; good for her. Her point would be more convincing, however, if she were not such a clumsy liar herself.”

“Could Hillary Clinton be Worse Than Trump?”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/18/could-hillary-clinton-be-worse-than-trump/

Again, all of this presupposes each individual voter has perfect information at the ready — perfect double secret hidden information about the future, in fact.

To vote “strategically” in the sense asked for in this thread requires perfect foresight.

In Florida, for instance, if Nader doesn’t run, Bush likely wins with a slightly bigger margin. If Buchanan decides not to run, Bush wins by an even larger margin. Florida, unlike my state, had numerous people running outside Dem/GOP. Notice that even the smallest vote getter received enough votes to swing the election, as it turned out:

FLORIDA Presidential Results
Precincts Reporting:

100%
Al Gore, Dem
2,910,192
48.8%

George W. Bush, GOP
2,910,492
48.8%

Pat Buchanan, RP
17,472
0.3%

Ralph Nader, Grn
97,422
1.6%

Harry Browne, Lib
16,401
0.3%

John Hagelin, NLP
2,273
0%

James Harris, SWP
588
0%

David McReynolds, Soc
618
0%
Monica
Moorehead, Workers World
1,805
0%

Howard Phillips, CST
1,370
0%
_______________

My state went red in 2000. No vote for the blue team counted. They were all wasted, because, electoral college.

‘To vote “strategically” in the sense asked for in this thread requires perfect foresight.’

Florida voters had access to perfect foresight. Before the election, every voter in Florida knew, or could have known, that the winner in Florida would be either Gore or Bush, and that the contest would be close. Strategic voting means, in that circumstance, cast your vote for the least bad alternative, because any other vote could help the worst alternative win. It’s not that hard to figure out. If you voted with some other motivation, fine, that’s your right, but this bit about not having perfect foresight is just nonsense.

No, Layman @364,

No one in Florida could possibly have known that 537 votes would separate the two; that 308,000 Democrats would turn on their party and vote for Bush; that 52% of Democrats would just stay home; that all of those running outside the duopoly would bring in enough votes, each, to potentially change such a close election. No one knew, going in, that there would be day-long voting irregularities; that Gore would roll over and play dead and not contest an obviously corrupt election; that the Supreme Court would stop the recount . . . . . or that that “tide of evil” would occur under Bush.

It’s beyond idiocy to bash Nader voters now, or in 2001, or 2003, or whenever. They. Had. No. Idea. How. Things. Would. Turn. Out. Period. End of story. You can’t vote “strategically” when no one at the time knew the election would come down to 537 votes in Florida, and Gore wimping out, etc. etc.

The entire thing is absurd, and I’ve given you more than enough evidence to prove its absurdity. Just the 308,000 Democrats who voted for Bush is enough to end the silly season of abusing Nader voters. Just that. Throw in those exit polls that told us if Nader didn’t run, Bush would win by even larger amounts, and it’s just beyond ridiculous to keep hammering away at them.

Plume’s first law of blame: Blame is a unitary entity, indivisible. It can only be wholly accorded to one party or group, never apportioned to multiple parties or groups. By way of example, those who burn coal cannot be blamed for greenhouse gas emissions, because of the existence e.g. of those who burn wood, those who drive cars, and cow flatulence.

“The gay vote, the black vote, the women’s vote, the Hispanic vote, the Jewish vote … – the leverage of these groups lies in withholding their votes, that is their power and policies are adjusted to at least give them the feeling that they are being heard. ”

For the gay community, I don’t think that’s how this works, or rather, it’s not all that’s going on. We also raise money, work for campaigns, lobby the candidate, work for the candidate (awesome combo: lobbying your buddy who is a staffer — much easier), speak on behalf of the candidate, and help in many other ways. Those are the carrots.

We also condemn loudly, complain, give less money, support other candidates in primaries, and — if necessary — withhold our vote. These are the sticks. We use both.

This is a large part of why the LGBT community has been so successful politically. We work within the existing power structure of the Democratic Party. Thirty years ago it was hostile and unresponsive, but through a mix of activism (e.g. ACT-UP), lobbying, money, and persistence, we’ve made a real and substantive difference in how we are treated by Democratic candidates. I don’t think we would’ve been so successful if we’d just condemned the party for its homophobia and walked away.

I’ll try to state what I mean without reflexive irony or sarcasm, although wow is that difficult.

1. Assuming that we’re talking about the U.S. — at any rate, that’s what this thread is about — around 40% of people who could vote do not vote. Here’s a study with some typologies.

2. None of these typologies really fit people who comment on or read comments on CT. We are a tiny fragment of a fragment. You will not find any meaningful number of convincible nonvoters here.

3. There are well-known ways — technologies, let’s say — for “turning out the vote”, i.e. getting people who would not actually vote to the polls. These draw from that huge 40% pool.

4. Anyone who reads or comments on CT would probably make a good vote-turner-outer, assuming that they live in the U.S. Education, middle class income, jobs that allow flex time — people here have significantly more personal resources than the average.

5. Activists know this. They’ve already made their decisions, long before this point. If you’re a habitual nonviolent-protest-organizer, you may not be into electoral activism at all. You justify this by saying that your protests have some effect, perhaps more effect. If you’re an electoral activist, vice versa. Whatever: activists habitually do what their energy allows, and do not rely on formal gestures like their single votes.

6. If people here were saying “How many people have you turned out?” “Well, how many have *you* turned out?” and arguing over what degree of activity was sufficient, then there might be some point to this oneuppersonship. As it is, there is none. Voting is a nearly meaningless gesture: the least that you can do.

7. The people who purport to find great responsibility and self-importance in telling people that they have to vote are generally looking, to put the most sympathetic possible interpretation on it, to reassure themselves that our system could still work somehow if only everyone did their part. Less sympathetic explanations include the usual posturing and side-taking.

8. I live in Massachusetts, and my vote will not matter. Therefore I’ve decided that the only way to get any symbolic use out of my vote is to go around telling people that I won’t use it. You can decide for yourself how much of this in a principled attempt to get people to start thinking about the mechanisms of the state and how much is simple trolling of people who I find annoying and self-important.

Plume @ “You haven’t apportioned blame at all.”

This is a falsehood.

Layman @ 254: “I agree that there can be degrees of moral culpability, and would certainly agree that those who voted for Bush bear more blame than those who voted for Nader, and I’ve said that.”

Layman @ 196: “Everyone who didn’t vote for Al Gore helped Bush get elected. It doesn’t matter how (not voting, voting for Bush, voting for someone else), or why they did that, the effect is the same.”

Layman @ 178: “They have moral culpability for the outcome. Lots of other people do, too, but they do as well.”

Layman @ 134: “Blaming Nader voters doesn’t exclude blaming other factors as well.”

Some of these posts were direct responses to you. Have you no shame?

Plume @ 370

I don’t mean to put words in your mouth. I’m simply trying to understand your argument about blame. As I read it, you say the existence of other people who voted for Bush absolve those who voted for Nader of any blame for Bush’s win. The point of my post was to highlight the possibility that more than one group might share in the blame. Is that not so?

Layman @373,

Forgive me for missing those caveats, given that the central organizing principle of your posts was to blame Nader voters and hold them morally accountable for Bush’s win — which I still find absolutely absurd, even if you distribute that among various factions. It’s still absurd to hold ANY voters morally culpable for what Bush would later do. You can make a decent argument in 2004, but not in 2000.

Tell ya what. I’ll give you that rather weak “apportioning” argument — though I reserve my own caveats, etc. etc. But you accused me of doing something I’ve been fighting all along — blaming all of this on one group. I’ve done the opposite, so your bizarre “plume’s first law of blame” is ridiculous. Have you no shame, Layman?

Bottom line for me: A single voter bears zero “moral culpability” for the actions of politicians down the road. Zero. That’s on the politician, and the system, and capitalism, which you support. You support the duopoly which keeps thrusting us into war after war after war. You support the capitalist system which keeps calling for those wars. You support the blindly competitive economic/political empire that guarantees that this “tide of evil” remains in place, regardless of which party is in office.

It’s beyond absurd to hold ANY Nader voter “morally culpable” for the sins of the duopoly which you support, and which you demand must be fed vote after vote after vote. If anyone is “morally culpable” as a voter — and I think the entire concept of that is cray cray — it’s the folks who keep voting Republican or Democrat, not those of us who want all hierarchies gone, including the duopoly.

Layman @375,

“As I read it, you say the existence of other people who voted for Bush absolve those who voted for Nader of any blame for Bush’s win. The point of my post was to highlight the possibility that more than one group might share in the blame. Is that not so?”

We’re cross-posting at the moment, so I hope I answered this above. But if not . . . .

I don’t get your insistent desire to “blame” voters in 2000 for Bush at all — rather than Bush himself. Or Cheney. Or American Empire. Or capitalism. I just flat out reject the entire idea. But if I play along with your blame-game desire, I can’t possibly agree to the notion that someone who doesn’t vote for Bush can be tagged “morally culpable” for his victory. It’s simply NOT the duty of ANY voter to make sure he or she votes strategically to effect the outcome in favor of the duopoly, if they’ve chosen, up front, not to vote for that duopoly. It’s not their job to play by the duopoly’s rules, which they’ve rejected.

They made the choice, in a supposedly free society, to vote outside the two-party atrocity. They chose to do so. Sorry, but if one or the other of the two parties “wins,” it’s not their problem and they’re not subject to any “blame.” They did their part to end the atrocity. It failed. Move on.

“But you accused me of doing something I’ve been fighting all along — blaming all of this on one group. ”

I did not. In fact, I accused you of refusing to blame anyone, in part because doing so would require blame to be apportioned. That was the gist of my post.

You’ve misread me quite badly here, repeatedly. My response to Geo did not mean what you insist it meant. I’m sure I worded it badly, for which I apologized, and Geo seemed to accept that, but apparently you don’t. When I articulate what seem to me to be the logical consequences of a view, that is not an effort to put words in other people’s mouths, and the right sort of response to to point out where I have erred in my reasoning or misunderstood the original point.

To be as clear as I can, every person who did not vote for Gore helped Bush to win, whether they intended that outcome or not, and regardless of what form their not-voting-for-Gore took. This strikes me as so obvious a statement of fact that I can hardly believe we’re debating it. Can we at least agree on that?

Jake, Layman, Temporary Name, et al:

J’accuse! You (and most other Americans) are responsible for not electing Nader. If not for your misguided votes for someone else, we could have had a more progressive tax system, a drastically scaled-down military, public financing of elections, single-payer health insurance, increased Social Security payments, an enlightened Supreme Court, and an EPA, FDA, NLRB, etc. headed by people determined to fulfill rather than thwart their regulatory mission.

Do you deny it?

Geo @383,

Was writing my response before seeing yours. Yep. Exactly. The tables can be easily turned on those accusing third party voters of enabling subsequent horrors. Anyone demanding that votes should have gone to Gore, should think about a country not being governed by either of the corporate puppet parties. Those who voted for Gore or Bush prevented a far better outcome, outside the established duopoly. Those who will vote for Hillary or Trump will be doing the same.

Plume: “If you’re talking in purely mathematical terms — not in terms of “morality” — and cumulatively, and with 20/20 hindsight, sure. That’s how the math works en masse. ”

I’ll take this as provisional agreement with the premise, and snip out the bits where you put words in my mouth.

If we agree that those people, the ones who didn’t vote for Gore, however they did that, and for whatever reasons, helped Bush to win, whether they intended that or not, can we now consider whether any of them have any responsibility for the outcome? Or do you believe that none of them have any responsibility for the outcome?

Layman @386: Very well, I’ll grant you partial absolution (assuming you lived in Florida in November 2000 and sincerely believe the state might be won or lost by one vote). But that doesn’t let your fellow non-Nader voters off the hook.

What if they held an election and nobody came?

Suzanne,

It was a very rough scene. But I remembered it in this case for the idea of just not wanting the insanity to continue. Googling a bit about the scene, there seems a lot of noise regarding whether or not it was a real slap from Pacino, and about Diane Keaton’s reaction. I skeptical about what I’ve skimmed online, but, apparently, some audience members cheered the slap, which is revolting in and of itself. 1974. Would hope we’ve advanced enough in the last 42 years not to do that.

I like this:

“When I vote in the presidential election, my individual vote doesn’t mean anything, but the fact that I’m participating in a peaceful transition of power in a genuine if deeply flawed democracy does. ”

I had a momentary sense of real joy when Obama was elected in 2008, watching the returns, watching Obama and his family walk out on the stage together for the first time as First Family, thinking about it as you mention above. I don’t always have this strong anger toward the two parties and what I know they’ve actually done. When I’m not actually thinking about that history, I’m honestly amazed at the process.

As in, it’s complex. Very, very complex.

Congress is about as democratic as stuff gets, but two-year terms mean those guys spend all their time raising money for elections. The presidential election is a cruel joke, the senate should be destroyed.

The 2000 election also had this (forgotten, it seeems?)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Lett-Simmons#Faithless_elector

Plume: “and you probably want to do this to prevent votes going to Jill Stein in November.”

Can you really be the one who wants to accuse me of putting words in other people’s mouths? Are you capable of no self-reflection at all?

Layman @398,

“For the purpose of total clarity, to you mean to say that no single voter bears any personal responsibility for the consequences of their choice? Ever?”

Yes. That’s what I’m saying. It’s one vote. Just one. And that one voter has no ability to get anyone elected. None. Zero. Zip. It’s literally impossible for one vote to get someone in our system elected. It’s physically and mathematically impossible, even if the election comes down to just one vote. You still have to count all of them, together, so no one vote is decisive. You still have to go back to every other state before Florida, which was only “decisive” in a fictional way, because it was near the end of the line. See my little analogy of Da Bears (268) for a somewhat related scenario.

But beyond that, and much more importantly, no voter has the ability to tell a president what to do, when, how, where, etc. etc. And no voter knows what they will do before they do it. Voting for someone like Bush in 2004, after we had seen the horrible things he had already done — that’s a different story in part. But even there, that voter still can’t make Bush do anything he doesn’t want to do, so “moral culpability” is still on Bush, not the voter. And that voter is just a drop in the ocean even then. No one vote is ever “decisive.”

Do I wish no one had voted for Bush, including those 308,000 Democrats in Florida? Certainly. But that’s also a different story. It’s not on Nader voters in any way, shape or form.

Layman: Have you no shame?
Plume (as Layman speculates): No.

Plume :”Yes. That’s what I’m saying. It’s one vote. Just one. And that one voter has no ability to get anyone elected. None. Zero. Zip. It’s literally impossible for one vote to get someone in our system elected.”

Do you mean to say that a personal choice, made by one person, which cannot in and of itself change the outcome, has no moral weight at all? None, zero, zip?

Layman @405,

“Do you mean to say that a personal choice, made by one person, which cannot in and of itself change the outcome, has no moral weight at all? None, zero, zip?”

No. That’s not what I mean. We’re talking just about voting. And, as I understand the debate, voting in 2000, voting for Nader in 2000, voting for Nader in Florida in the year 2000. Because this, supposedly, handed the election to Bush — it didn’t — which then means Nader voters are “morally culpable” for what came after he was elected.

I may be misreading you, but it sure looks like you’re trying to move the goal posts in order to make your original point stick. Can we keep them where they were at the beginning?

“I may be misreading you, but it sure looks like you’re trying to move the goal posts in order to make your original point stick. Can we keep them where they were at the beginning?”

I don’t mean to be moving the goalposts. I’m just trying to understand what you think about the moral responsibility of a vote. It sounds from your objection as if you think at least sometimes, though not necessarily always, votes carry no responsibility. Or perhaps you mean votes never carry responsibility but other kinds of choices do? If you would explain what you mean, clearly, then I will know.

Suzanne: “When I vote in the presidential election, my individual vote doesn’t mean anything, but the fact that I’m participating in a peaceful transition of power in a genuine if deeply flawed democracy does. “

Well, this sense that you’re participating in something larger is just as “real” as someone’s conscience is. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t real. But someone else’s feeling that by not voting they are not participating in something they have objections to is just as real.

those lecturers on the evils of lesser evilism should listen to themselves and ask: perhaps we should make the evil lesser. Instead of bitching about the Democratic party, perhaps the way to do it is to join the GOP – or at least in the South, where its grip on the politics is pretty solid. Why let the evangelicals have all the fun? Trump has shown that a party can be seized from within, bless his toupeed head. If we are really going to make a “collective action” decision, at least in a place like south carolina or texas, then the hot spot is the GOP, and not the opposing loser party, the Dems. The Southern republican didn’t make a warm spits worth of difference between 1865 and 1965 – but conservatives just went to the Democratic party and fought for it. Texas politics is exemplary: you had both the democratic John birchers and the democratic Ralph yarboroughs.
Yet, I have never seen a discussion of what is obvious if we apply the logic of polysci to the south: the thing to do is to migrate into the Republican party and give it a liberal side.
I don’t think this will ever happen, however. Because what is ignored in rational choice political science is the very reasons that make us political: our allegiances, our self image, the rhetorics we have intoxicated ourselves with.

“the global elite will do the same to Trump if he starts messing around with neoliberalism”

I think you might be forgetting the “lesser evilism” of the ruling class: fascism always beats socialism hands down

@411: It’s true that my warm fuzzies, on those occasions when I feel that way (doesn’t happen at every election, believe me) are only meaningful for me. It’s also true that I live in a country that’s probably too big for ideal democracy and is also an empire with all that designation implies. But when people do/don’t go to the voting booth, the implications and consequences are all too real.

@393: One of my favorite multicultural moments was on veep night at the 2000 Democratic convention. As Joe Lieberman and his wife waved to the crowds, you could see African-Americans, hearty white union guys, Asian-Americans, people with turbans and scarves, you name it – all waving signs reading “Hadassah!”

Funny how the entire establishment bangs on about how important it is to vote and how they wished everyone would when if they wanted that to happen they could make it really painless – send everyone a postal vote. Could it be that they don’t actually mean it? Could this even be true of middle-class do-gooders who say the same thing?

Is there any task other than voting in which people are as harangued for inaction as much as they are for not voting the way you want? That might be the real disconnect here–I just don’t think anyone is obligated to vote, period. Or, at most, it’s way, way, way down the list of almost everyone’s unfulfilled moral obligations.

I just don’t think anyone is obligated to vote, period.

I agree, and I for one have not said or implied otherwise. (But then, I take the idea of an obligation rather seriously.)

@423 It’s a fair question. Is there anything that has the same dynamics as voting, i.e. whichever side gets more people to show up wins, so not supporting your side is half as bad as voting for the other side?

Consider: Republicans spend a lot of time and effort preventing people who might otherwise vote Democratic from voting. They must believe that this helps their political cause. Doesn’t it give you pause to voluntarily do something that shady Republican political operatives try to coerce others into doing?

In USA Presidential elections the voting turnout has never been over 90%. With the lowest being in the 40%s — 48.9% in 1924, 1996 was another low of 49%, and so was 1920 at 49.2%.

1840 was the first year voting turnout was at or above 80%, 1860 was 81.2%, 1876 was 81.8%. 1876 was the last time voting turn out was at or above 80% at Presidential elections.

White men got the vote in 1856, white women got the vote in 1920, and Native Americans in 1924, and African Americans and others in 1965.

In 1920 41.2% of eligible voters turned out. In 1952 turnout reached above 60% at 61.6%, in the 1960s voting turnout was above 60% at all three Presidential elections.

After the 1960s voting turn out never reached 60% again, ranging from a low of 50.3% in 2000 to a high of 57.8% in 2008.

Very briefly checked in on Chris Matthews this evening, when somehow multiple basketball games went to simultaneous commercial.

The point of topic was whether Clinton should pick a Republican as a running mate, to capture ‘moderate’ Republican voters rejecting Trump. Secondary topic was which Republican; Marco Rubio(!) was suggested.

I agree with faustusnotes and others that it is important for Americans to think globally when voting. With global warming now predicted to reach 1.5C by about 2020, the time to prevent runaway climate change is very limited. The election of a Republican president seems likely to have dangerous consequences for the whole world. Therefore it seems those people on this thread saying that you should vote Democrat even if you have to hold your nose to do so are right.

However from an outsider’s perspective, it does seem there’s also some key things that you (American voters on CT) could unite on rather than just fighting amongst yourselves. Your voting system seems a complete sham – disgraceful for a nation that aspires to be democratic. The first two steps seem to be
– Polling places at times and locations that are convenient for people
– Preferential voting so votes for candidates outside the two major parties aren’t wasted.

Those are two basic steps forward. Surely you could unite around those and work for them, so that in future you are not required to vote for a corrupt system or else waste your vote?

@ Val, at least one of the two parties relies on voter suppression to achieve electoral success. Why would they ever agree on more convenient voting conditions?

LFC, I didn’t Russia was more democratic – that was Ze Kraggash. I don’t think either of them are at all democratic but I really wouldn’t know how to compare them. (If someone told me that a fish was ‘furry’ and I replied sarcastically that ‘you might as well say that about a fish’, I don’t think that would mean I thought that fish and lizards are equally furry or that lizards are more furry than fish. Both claims strike me as ideologically motivated nonsense.)

e it seems those people on this thread saying that you should vote Democrat even if you have to hold your nose to do so are righ

I think it would require a bit more than holding your nose. Drinking or drugging yourself unconscious, then embarking on several years of therapy to combat the feelings of self-loathing might do it

“what serious, definite policies on this issue does Hilary Clinton have?”

I was looking up policies, and I discovered my favourite candidate for President in 2016 — Martin O’Malley. Except he is sadly not running any more. I never heard of him before, but he had the best climate change policy of any candidate.

Why wasn’t anyone American on Crooked Timber saying how Martin O’Malley would make a good President? He was better on climate change than either Clinton or Sanders:

“Unveiled last week in an op-ed for USA Today, the plan calls for the U.S. to move entirely to clean energy within 35 years.

It also aims to double energy efficiency in the next 15 years, create a Clean Energy Jobs Corps to retrofit buildings, modernize the energy grid, end fossil fuel subsidies, and extend tax credits for solar and wind power.

Some of these are policies already championed by Obama, but O’Malley still goes further, by wanting to adopt a “zero-tolerance policy” for methane from natural gas production and to expand carbon regulation to other major sources (presumably meaning agriculture and industry, which account for 9 and 21 percent of domestic emissions, respectively); and he says he’d deny new permits for offshore drilling and in Alaska.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/122227/omalley-exploits-clinton-and-sanders-shared-weakness

@ 416

“those lecturers on the evils of lesser evilism should listen to themselves and ask: perhaps we should make the evil lesser. Instead of bitching about the Democratic party, perhaps the way to do it is to join the GOP – or at least in the South, where its grip on the politics is pretty solid.”

Why not go the whole hog and join the Republicans, thereby ameliorating the malevolence of the ‘most evil’ party? ‘Entryism’ hasn’t usually been a very successful tactic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militant_(Trotskyist_group)

Okay, I’m trolling now. Gonna to try and find something less boring to do. As you were.

I’d put my house on it that the Democrat policies on climate change are better than the Republican ones, whoever is the candidate. (That’s a lot more than 5 cents I might add).

I am going to ask my university archives if they want to archive everything about me getting put in songs, film clips, three books, visual artwork, and promotional materials since I was 19 by a circle of artists none of whom I know personally who never asked me.

Maybe if they archive Crooked Timber threads a historian will write a masters thesis on you Engels. I don’t know why you’d like to be a historical character, I think it’s a great imposition myself. Look at how unhappy bob McManus was just getting a short review on lawyers guns and money.

ZM, I’ll bear that in mind.

dr ngo: “For anyone still following this thread who does not read Slacktivist, may I recommend: It’s Not About You”

Why? I mean, why recommend it? I read a shot away in and promptly ran aground on statements like “It’s the difference between voting as taking responsibility and voting as preserving purity by avoiding complicity. The former is our obligation — legally as well as ethically. ” Wait, this article is evidently about U.S. voting. Voting, “as taking responsibility” or otherwise, is not a legal obligation in the U.S. Is being condescended to supposed to become better when it’s accompanied by outright falsehoods?

The article has, near the beginning: “We have a long history of circular firing squads and of giving in to the tendency to blur the line between standing on non-negotiable principle versus a narcissistic focus on our personal purity — of imagining that our politics consists mainly of voting, and that our voting should be an expression of tribal or ethical identity.” But, of course, that is what the author is doing. They are thinking that politics consists mainly of voting, and they are using it to reinforce an ethical identity. The rest of the article is largely an anecdote about how the author didn’t vote because they were into narcissistic politics, and later on they got it out of their system and voted the right way. But they are still just as much of a narcissist as before, since their focus sis on their nearly meaningless personal vote and what it says about that.

This did make me remember why I don’t read Slacktivist, so there is that.

Plume @ 420

Thanks for making the effort to spell this out.

“To me, for a choice to have moral weight, the chooser must have a strong degree of intentionality and some degree of foreknowledge regarding outcomes.”

It strikes me that there are many elections that match this criteria. You mentioned earlier that you thought votes for Bush in 2004 might carry more moral weight, presumably because voters could know better what sort of person Bush was.

But there are many elections where we have a good idea who the candidate is – they have a record, after all, and they’ve spent a lot of time telling us what they plan to do. Trump is a good example, he’s made a number of statements about what he’d do which offer insight into his character, if you take his words at face value.

And there are many elections where everyone knows the outcome will be close, particularly in a handful of states; so those people are aware that their own vote is more likely to be determinative of the outcome.

So it seems to me that sometimes elections meet your criteria. Would you agree to that?

Rich, you have a social obligation to vote, legally mandated or not. This obligation should be codified in law, because legal codification sanctions and makes clear social rules , but in a sadly large number of countries voting is still mistakenly seen as a right or privilege rather than an obligation. It’s no surprise that lots of people from such countries don’t understand this simple fact.

Voting is not and should not be a choice or worse still a privilege exercised by people lucky enough to be able to duck out on a Tuesday and pull a lever. It’s a fundamental obligation. People who don’t discharge this obligation are lazy and selfish, and even worse are those people who don’t discharge this obligation and then complain that no party represents them. Why should clintknor Obama care to change their policies for people too lazy and irresponsible to vote ? People who have no respect for basic social norms hardly deserve social consideration, do they?

@Ze K
As I say, I haven’t read the bk in question, so perhaps I shd postpone a response until I have (if ever). But it does seem to me that the existence of multiple parties is only one of several indications of how ‘democratic’ (or ‘polyarchic’ or whatever) a system is. I understand that you see probably 95 percent of what is produced in Western pol sci depts (and the soc-sci academy in general) as “self-serving western propaganda.” You are of course entitled to that view. Since, however, it’s likely that at least 90 percent or so of the people who produce this alleged propaganda do not read CT comment threads, your opinion is not reaching the ears or eyes of those directly responsible for that propaganda.

@Ze K

But since it’s not completely subservient to the US elites, it can’t, by definition, be called ‘democratic’

The same thing happened to Hugo Chávez.

I read slacktivist and I thought that post was a particularly good example of what I complained about earlier. Repeating myself, if it is important to win votes, why would you insult people who vote differently? Why would you go out of your way to attribute the worst possible motivation to their actions? Wouldn’t you try to meet them halfway, acknowledge their legitimate concerns, and then explain to them why their theory of voting is wrong? And speaking of that, isn’t there also something wrong with telling the Democrats that you will vote for them no matter what, so long as the Republicans are worse? Doesn’t that give the Democrats an incentive to do what many of them want to do anyway, which is take the left votes for granted, and then move right?

A whole string of rhetorical questions there and with obvious answers, but I’ll answer a few anyway. Fred Clark’s post has been written in some form about a million times since 2000 — it’s ritualistic and it has little to do with trying to persuade people and everything to do with posturing, tribal flag waving and making oneself feel better. But it does serve a purpose with people like me. Reading that kind of crap– my first encounter with the genre was a piece by Eric Alterman– made me realize that there are people who get angrier about how to vote than they do about any of the actual issues, unless a Republican can be blamed. Which again is why someone of this sort will be enraged by Nader voters and blame them for Iraq and then turn around and defend Clinton’s record with no sense of cognitive dissonance. If you do point to an issue where a Democrat is bad, they will either point to how the Republican is worse, point to some other topic where there is a clear difference, or worst of all, defend the policy because their beloved Leader supports it. It is bizarre to me, but one has to take this into account and it’s part of why I think third parties are a total waste of time. They not only don’t put pressure on Democrats, they actually make the problem worse because they stir up reactions like Clark’s. And no amount of discussion will change this.

468 – that was a weird post in Slacktivist. So, if Dole had been elected over Clinton, it would have been an overwhelming catastrophe? Why, Dole would have abolished Glass Steagall, deregulated the futures industry, and signed off on a massive deregulation and dangerous recomposition of the mortgage market, would he? Thank heaven we missed that!

Layman @469,

I think I’ve explained my position in depth, and I don’t think you’ve reciprocated. For instance, I truly can’t even fathom your insistence that an individual’s vote makes one “morally culpable” for the actions taken by that politician in the future. I tried. I really did. But I just can’t begin to imagine how anyone could process things that way. Honestly, it’s as if you live in an alternative universe to mine . . . . and I say that knowing — or at least guessing — that many more people would agree with your take than mine. Perhaps millions more. But that still doesn’t help my understanding of your position.

That said, I much prefer your overall attempts to persuade via the Socratic method than someone like faustusnotes, who goes full on voting scold and just comes off as unhinged in my view. The Socratic method is preferable to scolding . . . . and it at least carries some small chance of changing minds. His/her way causes further alienation . . . as if their actual purpose is to drive people away from voting at all.

I have the same reaction to Hillary scolds, with their pathetic “Berniesplaining” memes. Yeah, that’s the way to get people to vote for one’s candidate. Call them sexist and racist for having the nerve to support someone else. Yep. That will change hearts and minds!!

Plume @ 472

“For instance, I truly can’t even fathom your insistence that an individual’s vote makes one “morally culpable” for the actions taken by that politician in the future. ”

To me, it seems perfectly obvious. If Trump says he’ll kill the children of terrorists, and I vote for Trump knowing he says that, and Trump wins, and Trump kills the children of terrorists, how can I not bear some of the blame? Did I not act to empower his act? Or would you say that, because I couldn’t be sure he would actually do it, and I couldn’t be sure how other people were going to vote, and because my vote wasn’t the deciding vote, I’m blameless?

What I find interesting about the Slacktivist post is not it in itself, but the fact that so many people can recommend pieces like it and find them compelling when they are obviously so poorly argued. I think it’s time to face up to the fact that voting is primarily a magical ritual, a reaffirmation that our society works, and that the undoubtedly real benefits that it has for people are the same kind of benefits that some societies get when the yearly fertility ritual (or whatever) is done. And of course you just can’t have people dissing the fertility ritual and still have it be as effective as a ritual.

People who don’t discharge this obligation are lazy and selfish

And people who don’t work are lazy and feckless. people who don’t serve in the army are cowards and traitors, people who protest or strike are violent and dangerous…

And of course there’s a special place on hell for women who prefer social democracy to neoliberal capitalism and endless war

Layman @474,

By radically inflating the importance of the act of voting, and making it a matter of “moral culpability,” you place yourself in a trap with no escape. As BW notes in 475, if you vote for Hillary, instead of Trump, or against Trump, you vote for someone with a history of supporting deadly strikes against civilian targets. You vote for someone who rarely met a war she did not like, a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, a recipient of gobs of Wall Street cash and a supporter of the neoliberal status quo. Using your own logic, you shouldn’t vote for Hillary or Trump. You should either stay home or vote for Jill Stein — or some other leftist alternative. Stein has the least chance of the three to commit acts of barbarism, at least if we go by her history and her platform.

Your own belief system, regarding the importance and moral weight of the vote, should make it impossible for you to vote Democratic or Republican.

@393: One of my favorite multicultural moments was on veep night at the 2000 Democratic convention. As Joe Lieberman and his wife waved to the crowds, you could see African-Americans, hearty white union guys, Asian-Americans, people with turbans and scarves, you name it – all waving signs reading “Hadassah!”

Another genuine if deeply flawed democracy – heart-warming…

Plume @ 480: “By radically inflating the importance of the act of voting, and making it a matter of “moral culpability,” you place yourself in a trap with no escape.”

By answering in this way, you avoid a direct response to the question I asked you @ 474.

We are social beings so there will always be some need for collective organising. If you’re going to use voting as a method, you should try to make it fair.

In the US, you clearly have a system that makes it difficult to vote, and forces people to choose between two main parties or else waste their vote. As far as I can see, you can’t do anything to change that before your next Presidential election, but you could start working towards it as a longer term goal.

Of course I see that some of the Marxists here would consider voting in a capitalist system a false goal anyway, but you could see giving people valid voting choices beyond the two main capitalist parties as a step on the road to socialism. Getting some form of preferential voting system would at least allow you to have a stronger Greens party.

Kidneystones, the fact that it’s valuable to possess a right doesn’t seem to entail that it’s important cute a given individual to exercise it. Compare: the right to remain silent, the right for women or gay men to serve in the military, the right to practise a religion, etc

Layman @484,

“By answering in this way, you avoid a direct response to the question I asked you @ 474.”

Wrong. I haven’t avoided anything. I reject your premise, and I’m not sure how many other ways I can put this. I don’t see a single voter as being “morally culpable” for the actions of politicians. I don’t. Sorry. You can keep rewording it and trying different angles, but that won’t change.

That said, you avoided dealing with the point I raised — which, of course, has been the history of our dialogue. ;>)

Unlike me, you actually do believe your vote carries moral weight. So if you really do believe this, how on earth could you vote for Hillary or Trump, given the former’s history in government and the latter’s rhetoric?

@487 Hi engels. Don’t know what got into with your whining about being misunderstood and maligned – a username like that is a kaka-magnet. Good to see back in fighting trim.

Agreed. BUT – sneering at the right to vote insults every person denied that right – which unhappily turns out to be an extremely large and significant number of people today. Many of these are children of parents who have never had the right to vote, and who are themselves raising children who may never know the freedom.

Not quite slavery, but too damn close to be acceptable anywhere today. We may not be able to convince others that democracy is best, but that doesn’t mean we should pretend the alternatives are remotely plausible alternatives.

Cheers!

“Can you please explain why you rule that out?”

I have done so, repeatedly. I can read a poll, and I know the other candidates can’t possibly win, and a vote for them is effectively identical to a vote for the worst major party candidate, because any vote not cast for the lesser evil aids the greater evil.

Can you please try to exercise some good faith? You might not agree with my reasoning, but it is false to say I haven’t offered it.

Now, can I have a clear answer to the question I asked you in 474?

Jake @495,

No.

sneering at the right to vote insults every person denied that right

At the risk of ‘whining about being misunderstood’ I don’t think I did ever “sneer… at the right to vote’ but at the idea that people who don’t vote are being irresponsible or selfish

A little context: before the last election there was a lot if this from Milifans, who actually persuaded Russell Brand (not exactly a political hero but an influential figure) to drop his ‘don’t vote’ line at eleventh hour. IMO this was a mistake. I’ve often not voted in the past and don’t regret it. I voted for Corbyn and will vote Labour if he’s leader but this is a political choice, not a moral duty.

(PS. As ‘Marxist’-bashing cranks up again my gut feeling is that this is traditionally a position one associates more with anarchism then Marxism….)

498 Fair enough. I live in Asia. Democracy isn’t widely practiced in many nations there. Droll remarks about it not being practiced in the west either are fine, for what it’s worth. You’re not going to convince many that you’re serious citing a millionaire former hooker as political exemplar, imnsho.

Just sayin’

“And I’ve already given you direct answers to your question, a dozen times now. No. You are not responsible for what Trump or any other politician does in office.”

Fair enough. I’ll drop the subject – if you’re compelled to reach this conclusion in order to defend voting for Nader, that’s on you.

plume @496
Hmm. Do you think that there is anyone in the US who prefers Hillary Clinton to Jill Stein if no one else was running?

Layman @502,

“Fair enough. I’ll drop the subject – if you’re compelled to reach this conclusion in order to defend voting for Nader, that’s on you.”

No one needs to defend voting for Nader. No one. Given the other candidates in the race, it was the “moral” thing to do — if we have to insert that word in the mix. The people who do need to defend themselves, however, are those who keep voting for the duopoly, from which all hell breaks out. The parties in power through our endless wars, our mass incarceration, our genocide of Native Americans, our slavery, our Jim Crow laws, our illegal coups, and our state-sanctioned oppression of women, minorities, workers, the earth, etc. etc. . . . . were/are Republicans and Democrats, not Greens, or Socialists, or Communists, or Left-Anarchists, etc. etc.

I know it’s asking too much of you, Layman, because you refuse to think outside the two-party box. But you should at least consider who has been at the helm when all of this shit happens in America and to the world. It aint the Greens or any other alternative to the Duopoly. It’s Democrats and Republicans. And you know that going in.

Usually, if I am responsible for x and x turns out very, very badly, I am liable to face various sorts of consequences, I can (usually) be held at fault in one or more concrete ways

This probably isn’t likely to improve the quality of the debate but fyi Osama bin Laden had some famous opinions on American and British voters’ collective responsibility for US and UK policy and the consequences they faced as a result. NB I don’t endorse them

js. @507
The negative consequences for this responsibility are minor for sure. People will think and maybe say bad things about you. They’ll ask you to repent. In extreme cases they may try to retaliate somehow.

Seems fairly minor as consequences go yet some people really want to avoid it.

Js. perhaps you’d agree that the notion of holding voters responsible for the governments they vote for needn’t be ‘anaemic and inconsequential’ then?

Val 438: “Is part of the problem that people have lowered expectations?”

Bingo.

I love you too, TM

And speaking of that, isn’t there also something wrong with telling the Democrats that you will vote for them no matter what, so long as the Republicans are worse? Doesn’t that give the Democrats an incentive to do what many of them want to do anyway, which is take the left votes for granted, and then move right?

I think you could be onto something.

The people writing in this thread are collectively committing a grave injustice. What does one have to write in order to be criticized for “sneering” at democracy here? I ask you, people, does #462 not count?

Or perhaps I see the problem. It’s like being a pacifist and criticizing war. Even the most ardent warophile will pause for the ritual “I respect pacifists very much, but they are very much in the minority” before going back to plans for new and improved bombing.

I also dislike puppies and kittens.

@517. You could break out your pocket calculator.

Rest assured I’ll continue to do my tiny part to lower the general tenor.

So little time, so many to disappoint.

The responsibility thing is kind of problematic though. Usually, if I am responsible for x and x turns out very, very badly, I am liable to face various sorts of consequences, I can (usually) be held at fault in one or more concrete ways. I am having trouble seeing how this would apply if individuals are responsible for the actions of the people they voted into office. It seems like an oddly anemic and inconsequential notion of responsibility.

Fwiw I don’t thinkt his is right anyway. The idea that moral responsibility requires some legal system of punishment for severe failure seems implausible to me on its face. About the analysis of moral responsibility I know next to nothing but according to SEP mainstream philosophical approaches fall into two categories: ‘accountability’ (is the agent an appropriate candidate for reactive attitudes, such as resentment) and ‘attributibility’ (does the agent’s action disclose her evaluative judgments) views. I can’t see anything problematic about voting under either of these – can you? Or did you have something else in mind?

engels @525 — Look, I chose my words carefully. I didn’t say “moral responsibility”; I said “responsibility”. And I said “responsibility” because the people on this thread that I was responding to were saying that voters bear (some) “responsibility” (not “moral responsibility”) for the actions of elected officials that they helped put into office by voting for them. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that view is crazy; I do think that under existing circumstances, it’s wrong.

(And surely, the sense of “responsibility” at issue here is that of accountability—it’s the only one that allows invocations of blame, and if you read the comments where this is at issue, “responsibility” is invariably tied to “blame”.)

What I do think is that under better (though not necessarily “ideal”) forms of democratic government, citizens (again, choosing my words carefully) would be responsible, at least in some significant measure, for the actions of the government. But under actually existing democracy, so to speak, I think it’s, well, unfair to hold individuals responsible (morally or otherwise) for the actions of governments.

OK. I realize I need to retract a bit of @527. This bit:

I said “responsibility” because the people on this thread that I was responding to were saying that voters bear (some) “responsibility” (not “moral responsibility”)

They were saying “moral responsibility” and conceptual cognates left and right. I don’t think this changes the rest of what I was saying.

js. @524
TM @517 — What poli sci? I feel like this thread could actually use a bit of poli sci (not that I am political scientist).

I took TM’s remark, rightly or wrongly, to be a dig at my reference upthread to Levitsky & Way, both of whom are political scientists. It was on a side pt however, not connected to the main argument about voting.

On that a more pertinent poli sci — or political theory — reference might be Richard Tuck’s bk on free riding. FTR, I have only glanced at it (a long time ago) and I have not read Levitsky & Way’s bk on competitive authoritarianism (though I am slightly acquainted w Levitsky). When all else fails, drop names. ;)

And it’s moral or social responsibility is the only thing that makes sense here; no one is suggesting that if someone votes for a politician who bans abortions that you have a legal obligation to adopt unwanted babies.

Well, sure. But that’s not the kind of problem I had in mind. And I’m also not sure what “moral or social responsibility” is supposed to mean here. The basic problem, as I see it, is this:

I think, and for the sake of argument I’m going to assume you agree, that GWB and others in his administration are guilty of war crimes. (Democratic presidents too, yes, so adapt this as you please.) If you (the general “you”) want to say that voters for a (presidential) candidate are in some measure responsible for the actions of that president’s administration, then it is really not at all clear to me how you block the inference that voters for GWB are in the aggregate responsible for war crimes, with all that that implies. But I think that in our actually existing form of government (in the US), there’s simply not enough accountability for elected officials to their electors to allow that inference. (Sorry if that’s a little obscure; it’s late and I was already hoping to be watching some ’40s Hollywood.)

LFC — Ah, thanks! I did also mention “collective action problems” upthread. I should read more about free riding at some point, am oddly fascinated by it.

js @533 –

War crimes are a legal construct, not moral or social. So yeah, it doesn’t make sense to try to squeeze all Americans into the witness stand in the Hague or whatever. But people who helped put GWB in office should feel some responsibility for his administration.

Now what should one do if they feel like they’ve violated a moral responsibility? Acknowledge that they fucked up, feel guilty, try not to do it again, make amends if feasible, do penance if not. Right?

Are these reasonable things to ask of people who voted for GWB or otherwise helped put him in office? It doesn’t seem like much to ask for.

> War crimes are a legal construct, not moral or social.

The distinction was meant to show that the inability to meaningfully prosecute an entire nation for war crimes (do you agree that this is impossible?) doesn’t mean that the nation has no moral responsibility for them.

…And the other thing is: if we take democratic legitimacy seriously (as this view seems to require), I don’t think the people who voted against or didn’t vote at all should get off so easily.

I don’t think the people who voted against or didn’t vote at all should get off so easily.

This is totally correct. I think that there’s a range of responsibilities; some people quit their job to go door-to-door against Bush in a swing state they didn’t live in, some people voted for Al Gore, some people didn’t find the energy to vote because they had more pressing personal issues to deal with, some people didn’t vote because they didn’t see a difference between Bush and Gore, and some people thought that Bush would be dramatically worse than Gore but voted for Nader anyway because they didn’t want to compromise their principles.

I think foreign affairs is the most difficult here, because neither citizens or office holders would appear to have responsibilities to foreign jurisdictions and their citizens, but maybe these responsibilities are invoked through membership of international bodies like the UN and the Commonwealth

Re all the responsibility back and forth: do you see now that maybe it would have helped to focus on political outcomes (and perhaps how we can get better ones) rather than fighting over who is to blame?

(Perhaps – I think this is a complicated issue and as with other CT threads don’t really understand the righteous abuse it is provoking on both sides)

TM @550,

Yes. That is what should happen. Voter scolds are missing the forest and the trees.

. . . .

Another factor here: My guess is most of the voter scolds voted for Gore in 2000. So their post-election, blame-game crusade seems incredibly self-serving — to add to their sense of holier than thouness, etc. etc. . OTOH, I defend Nader voters in Florida, but have never been a resident in that state, and my own state negated all Gore votes, because, electoral college. None counted, effectively. I didn’t vote for Bush in 2000 or 2004. But a Gore vote wouldn’t have meant a thing in my state. It was as if no one voted for Gore there.

But the real issue to me, aside from the absurdity of holding individual voters responsible for the future actions of politicians (who couldn’t care less about them), is the perpetuation of the duopoly. Anyone who believes that voting entails “moral culpability” shouldn’t be voting for either Democrats or Republicans, strategically or not. The record of the Democrats has been almost as abysmal as the Republicans, for decades, and you don’t fight right-wing idiocy by offering up kinder, gentler right-wing idiocy, which has been their norm since the 1960s. The only way to fight right-wing idiocy is with left-wing sanity and good sense. You don’t get that with the Democratic Party. You have to go outside of it for that.

I always (mis)use statistics to think about how important my vote is.

According to the statistics of polls, about 1 in 1000 people will vote like me. Therefore if I don’t vote all my other 1 in 1000 voters like me won’t vote, if I vote for X all the other 1 in 1000 voters like me will vote for X, and if I vote for Y all the other 1 in 1000 voters like me will vote for Y.

This comforts me about how important my vote is, even if it is a misuse of statistics.

The gist of the ‘no moral responsibility for my vote’ argument seems to be that voting is an act or decision which is somehow different than any other act or decision. Perhaps this is so, but I haven’t seen an argument yet which explains clearly why it is so. The strongest arguments I’ve seen are 1) that a voter is a snowflake in a blizzard, what possible difference could one snowflake make?, and 2) that the voter can’t know the outcome of the vote, ‘outcome’ meaning anything from result of the election to the actions of the elected.

I don’t find either of these particularly convincing. Even if we accept the premises (more on that later), we would not grant either as a reason for a moral pass if you joined a violent mob, e.g. what difference could one more person have made, and how could I have known those people would be hurt? There are plenty of good examples one can bring up where we would not accept either of them as a moral defense.

And we shouldn’t accept them as premises anyway. Neither 1 nor 2 even consistently describe the circumstances. Often polls show us a very close election (so we know our own vote is especially important to the outcome), and we cast that vote precisely to impact the outcome. Often politicians running for office promise to do a thing and, when elected, try to do that thing. So we cast our vote with an intent (among others) of achieving that thing.

Most of those arguing that the vote is meaningless paradoxically offer up a meaning or motivation for their own votes. They voted in order to achieve what was, to them, some higher good purpose. Their vote could result in funding for a third party. Their vote could deliver a message of dissatisfaction to one or both parties. Their vote could serve as an example to others, building support for change. Their vote could destroy the system.

So, while they argue that no vote is morally consequential, they cast their own vote because they thought it was consequential. They cast it with the intent of creating an outcome, and if they had created that outcome (e.g. Green Party gets federal election funding) they would no doubt take pride in that vote, which is to say, they would gain satisfaction from achieving their desired result and believe their action to have been both consequential and right. If anything, they seem to feel their action was right regardless of whether they achieved the outcome they wanted. I can’t separate their sense of satisfaction with their vote from the idea they feel their vote to have been right, which is to say, moral.

They don’t really seem to believe that their vote was a random, meaningless, inconsequential act. They didn’t toss a coin to make their choice, which, if every vote is an inconsequential, meaningless stab in the dark, is the only sensible thing to do. They articulate an argument for why they did what they did, what they hoped to achieve. Make of that what you will.

“voted for Bush” ie. in 2004

Layman @559,

“I don’t find either of these particularly convincing. Even if we accept the premises (more on that later), we would not grant either as a reason for a moral pass if you joined a violent mob, e.g. what difference could one more person have made, and how could I have known those people would be hurt? There are plenty of good examples one can bring up where we would not accept either of them as a moral defense.”

Again, like Engels, you pose an example of direct action/inaction, in which the people involved can clearly see the impact of their actions. If one joins a violent mob, he or she sees the effects right away. It isn’t about remote possibilities out of their control and unknown to them at the time. They see other people in that violent mob beating people, setting things on fire, and it’s more than apparent that others could be directly hurt or even killed. Joining a violent mob means, at the very least, one is accepting violent conditions in the here and now.

An individual vote, for first-time presidents? Though, if you do vote for Democrats or Republicans, you know going in that both parties carry the banner of American Empire, so there will be blood is a given. But you refuse to admit that part into your argument, right?

Boiled down, your argument depends upon reading back into November of 2000 the events that transpired in 2001 or later. It all rests on 20/20 hindsight and the rather convenient absence of what a Gore alternative might have entailed. As has already been mentioned, the voter in 2000 had no way of actually knowing who would be better or worse. It is absolutely impossible to know. Though I highly doubt it, Gore could have caused far more harm to far more people than Bush, and those who voted for Bush likely thought in those terms. From where I sit, your argument rests on the absurd premise that people in November of 2000 should have known what Bush would do, as a first-time president, before it even happened . . . . and you luckily don’t have to deal with the alternative . . . . that Gore could have been worse.

Beyond all of that, you don’t seem willing to acknowledge that it’s not just a matter of “the lesser evil.” If you vote for the duopoly at all, Democrat or Republican, it’s a perpetuation of “evil” in some form, because both parties have been at the helm for pretty much all of it — with rare exceptions for short-lived parties, etc. They both have that history, jointly held. Not just one of the two. Both. The Greens, Americans socialists or communists, left-anarchists, etc. etc. . . . . they don’t share that burden of guilt. They have never held power in America. The duopoly obviously has. If there is “moral culpability” to be delegated here, it’s for people who perpetuate the duopoly, not for those who vote to stop the insanity.

Layman @564,

You don’t have a case to rest. My response is to your insistence that there is “moral culpability” involved. As in, I am arguing (in that case) using your own premise, which I’ve already said I reject absolutely.

IOW, even if we allow for your premise, even if we go with it for a walk, we see, after just a few steps how ridiculous it is. And you won’t even acknowledge how it all backfires for you. And it does.

Oh, well. I tried.

I think this is a complicated issue

I agree.

Plume – this “it is absolutely impossible to know” stuff is a dishonest cop-out.

It was absolutely impossible for GWB to know that the Iraqi people wouldn’t rise up and greet him as their liberator. It was impossible for GWB to know that a bunch of random Heritage Foundation interns would fuck up the running of the country. When Henry II said “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest” it was impossible for him to know that someone would actually kill Thomas Becket. When someone votes for Jill Stein it’s impossible for them to know that 200 million other Americans aren’t going to vote for her also.

Yet anyone who honestly thinks about the situation would realize that these are the likely outcomes.

“You’re actually trying to put people who voted Third Party in 2000 on the same (“moral responsibility”) level as Bush.”

This yet another falsehood. No one has said this.

@ Geo

“For one thing, in a winner-take-all election that is decided by more than one vote, one’s own vote has no impact whatever.”

I don’t agree that this is the case. Every vote counts toward the winning tally, and every non-vote counts toward the winning margin, whether the non-vote is wasted on a non-viable candidate or simply not cast at all. Given that, this:

“For another thing, no “very close election” with a hundred million voters has ever been decided by one vote, and the chance that it would be remains, as far as I can see, infinitesimal. ”

…is I think moot.

If you can articulate a reason for voting for Nader in 2000 (e.g. “I wanted to achieve federal funding for the Green Party”) then you thought your vote had the power to make that so. Else, why bother with reasons or voting at all? Further, if you believed that your vote had potential consequences for the good, then you believe any vote can at least potentially have consequences for good and, obviously, bad. Once there, the argument against lesser-evilism becomes hard to maintain. I take Rich P’s point that, in a state where the outcome is not really in doubt, there is no downside to lodging a protest vote (or non-vote), but that was not the case in Florida in 2000.

I’ll add that I didn’t bring this topic up, and I don’t believe I’ve ever engaged in an argument about Nader voters before. It’s not something I’ve spent any time lamenting. I just think the arguments I’ve seen put forward here in defense of that vote aren’t very convincing, I’m surprised to find that people don’t regret that vote at all, and I’m astonished that their defense is that votes are meaningless.

Layman: I think moot
Well, I think schmoot!

I didn’t bring this topic up
You are exonerated.

Plume, my apologies for not writing in a perfectly clear manner. I’m not saying Nader voters are equivalent to GWB; or even that Bush voters are morally equivalent to GWB. They’re obviously not.

I do say that claiming lack of 100% certainty beforehand absolves one of all moral responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions is an argument used by supporters of GWB to justify their actions. And it’s bullshit.

ZM @547 — I’m sympathetic to this view, but it’s worth noting that in the US context, that’s going to seem like a rather demanding notion of responsibility to a lot of people (esp. (3)).

geo @572,

Good advice acknowledged and appreciated. Will do my best, etc.

Layman @571,

Jake apologized for the lack of clarity which made it seem he was indeed equating the two. I have told no falsehoods here.

@ Plume, that’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that you put words in his mouth, attributing it him things he didn’t say. As you have with me, multiple times in this thread. You repeatedly ignore what people say in favor of arguing against what you pretend they said. And, it seems you rarely (if ever) take responsibility for it, which is something of a theme. All of which is to say, I think you’re guilty of bad faith here, and I’m not really interested in discussing it with his further. That said, pointing out your bad faith is not discussing with you, and I’m happy to go on doing that when I see it, until you give it up.

Layman @583,

That’s so funny. You’re describing your own actions here to a T, not mine. Not mine at all.

So, feel free to point out your own bad faith and hypocrisy again and again, and if it makes you feel better to pin your own “issues” on me, go for it. For what it’s worth, you’re only making yourself look foolish.

But, as the young kids used to say, whatever.

Jake @587,

Your post is filled with so much that truly baffles, I don’t know where to start. Your premise is so wildly false, it boggles the imagination.

And this again? You’re trying to equate support for Third Parties with Bush war crimes. Sheesh! And then:

— “This is exactly the mindset used to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

Where on earth are you getting this from? What mindset? Please provide exact quotes in context. What on earth are you even talking about?

—- “And when it all goes horribly wrong the originators will come up with stories about how it’s not their fault and who could have known and we had to try, leaving the rest of us to clean up the pieces.”

Given that we’ve never, ever had a leftist president, or a leftist party in power, and that all the shit that hit the fan from the Civil War to the present happened under Republican and Democratic auspices, I think you really, really need to rethink your premise — and your wildly misplaced alarmism. For nearly two centuries, it’s been the Democrats and Republicans in DC, and we’ve had to “clean up the pieces” of their disastrous governance, world without end. And you, apparently, don’t see this as a problem.

@ 546 I read your short post carefully. I’m sorry to inform you that you failed to construct even one sentence that isn’t provably false. But because that kind of consistency is an accomplishment of sorts, I’ll break a personal rule and address your ‘point’, as you call it. If you’re talking about Afghanistan ‘Malala,’ you cannot conflate the response to democratic policies foisted at gunpoint by the corrupt US puppet government with universal suffrage, granted or won. So, I’ll stand on my point that nations with universal suffrage do not choose to become fascist. This really is good-bye. Which leads to…

@ 549 Never totally wrong (see above), your gaff is to seize on a detail and then insist or imply that if one part of an argument is provably false, we can and should ignore the entire offending comment. In this case, however, you’re calling me out on the universal suffrage argument. Fair enough. Only one country name needs to be on the list to ‘win’ – I’ll concede the Weimar Republic, happily. We can discuss why Weimar is a special case after you triumphantly whip out your long list of nations that have earned/won universal suffrage, and rejected universal suffrage for fascism. I can’t think of one.

GWB and his people disagreed; they thought that they could depose him and the Iraqi people would greet us as liberators and democracy would bloom across the country.

That is what they said, or others said they said. It is not fact or history.

I personally believe they were lying. Better to be believed stupid than evil, and liberals since the Enlightenment pretty much stopped believing in evil, and love to call their enemies stupid, even as they are getting their asses whupped.

The long con demands you never go off-message. This is why you watch what people do, and even better what happens. Historical materialism doesn’t really require agency.

ks, your comment about countries with universal suffrage never becoming fascist was obviously wrong. I didn’t get the impression that that claim was a “detail”, but if you will, why don’t you restate your argument without including obviously wrong claims.

Jake @589,

Thanks. That was your most revealing post to date.

It’s pretty clear now that you believe these two things stem from “the same mindset.”

1. Peacefully voting for a third party candidate, in a legal, open election — who, btw, ran on an antiwar platform. If that person wins, a peaceful transfer of power will take place to the person who ran on an antiwar platform.

2. The unprovoked military invasion and occupation of Iraq, which led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and some five thousand American soldiers.

“Peacefully voting for a third party candidate, in a legal, open election — who, btw, ran on an antiwar platform. If that person wins, a peaceful transfer of power will take place to the person who ran on an antiwar platform.”

Also, too, ponies!

@591. Nope. Limited suffrage and easy to check, btw. but your a lot braver than TM.

@ 594. TM substantiate your claim or retract it. It’s that simple. You’re the one claiming I’m wrong. So, prove me wrong. Just pick any three countries that enjoyed universal suffrage and became fascist. Or just one. Maybe some of your pals can help you out. Or, you can just run away from your charge and accuse me of being ‘irrational’ for demanding ‘proof.’ As if.

The only facet of this discussion that’s becoming blindingly obvious, btw, is you appear to be completely full of shit on the topic of fascism and universal suffrage in addition to being too nutless to admit it.

A Stein administration imposed on us by an Iraqi invasion ordered by Saddam Hussein would be worse than a Clinton administration, especially given that Saddam , being dead, would have to be a zombie.

So there’s that. Stein is incredibly unlikely to win an election for President in the current US , so it’s hard to imagine what would happen next and I thought it better to go with the more plausible zombie apocalypse theory.

Donald @602: I agree with you about the clear and present danger of an Iraqi invasion, led by a zombie Saddam and employing weapons of mass destruction. But why would he impose a puppet Stein administration rather than, say, a Kristol administration? After all, if Stalin had successfully invaded the US, he would have sent I.F. Stone to a concentration camp in the Nevada desert but would definitely have found much use for J. Edgar Hoover.

@600:
Look, there aren’t that many examles of properly fascist governments. One very prominent one clearly got to power in a country with universal suffrage. Italy pretty clearly also had universal male suffrage. Austria was not properly fascist and operated a sort of self-coup, but again, there are pretty few examples of “proper” fascism.
How about you stop defending an indefensible point?

With notably rare exceptions, no country with universal suffrage turned fascist.

Looking at JS’s link reminded me of the immortal internet meme ” I am aware of all internet traditions.” I just want to correct the record on something misreported here–

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-am-aware-of-all-internet-traditions

I am the “Donald” that helpfully explained the meaning of ” shorter so and so” and there bye elicited the response that achieved immortality. It’s a pretty small claim to fame, but as my one indirect and lasting contribution to culture, I insist on what credit is due me.

Bob @ 595

Weber: politics arises from competition between men over “women, cattle, slaves [and] scarce land”.

The difference is that Weber thought that was an essential, a-historical fact about the nature of society, whereas I am saying it was the result of historical processes and that those historical processes underly the situation we find ourselves in today. There may not have been many societies which were peaceful and cooperative and in which women and men were equal, but there do appear to have been some.

So I am suggesting we could disrupt the situation by getting equal representation of women in power, and then we might be able to move towards peace and cooperation. As I’m saying, it’s counter-intuitive, and TBH if I was an American I probably couldn’t justify supporting Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders on these grounds myself, but it is still worth supporting women in principle.

Empirically, societies which have a higher proportion of women in public life have taken more action on climate change, for example (Ergas and York 2012)

I don’t know, or care, what “agency” means

@geo — Are you inclined to hold people responsible for their actions—people like, say Kissinger or Rumsfeld or Albright? (I mean look, I know that you know what “agency” means. I’m just sort of curious.)

geo @ 613
I hastened to add the phrase in parentheses, sure that that would prevent misunderstanding. Sigh …

I found the phrase in parentheses totally mystifying :)

Plume @ 615

I thought someone might think I had it backwards. The point of my comment is that I don’t think I do have it backwards and I am asking you to consider the possibility that I don’t have it backwards, rather than just tell me I have it backwards.

Can you imagine a possible world in which women are equally represented at all levels of power and the economic system actually changes, because men have to do 50% of the caring and unpaid work, so it can no longer be taken for granted? I would rather change the mainstream economic system first, but it may be easier to do that when unpaid and caring work is no longer invisible to most male economists.

RP @611
I work with some libertarians who use argument styles uncannily similar to Plume. In their case they attributed their difficulty seeing nuance and understanding why other people thought the way they did to an underlying condition. Recognizing that it wasn’t really under their control made it easier for everyone to peacefully co-exist.

Val @618,

I’ve definitely considered the possibility, and did so long before we met on the Internet. Nothing personal when I say I think you’re wrong, and nothing gender-specific. It’s just a conclusion I’ve reached over the course of the last few decades, and I think I’m right. Could I be wrong about this? Definitely. Most definitely. But I don’t think I am.

Tragically, I fear neither of us will live to see our views put to the test. I foresee a very long struggle ahead for both the fight against patriarchy and racism, as well as capitalism. And in my darker moments, I see our environmental crisis doing us (humanity) in before we get the chance to resolve either. My guess is I’ll be long gone, regardless.

@622
Yeah well, I obviously have a very strong belief that if we could get equality between men and women we could also ultimately get a more peaceful, fairer, more sustainable world. I don’t know if I’m right either, but what have we got to lose (except male privilege)?

Sorry Plume, Rich asked a reasonable question and I thought he deserved an answer.

js @614: I’m sorry, js, historical materialism is a fascinating subject, but I simply haven’t the time or stamina for what would necessarily be an extended discussion. I would, though, be very interested to hear mcmanus on the subject of individual responsibility. To hold his feet to the fire, ask him to explain why he thinks (if he does, as I do) that Kissinger and Rumsfeld should be cast into the lowest of dungeons.

Val @616: What I meant is that “agency” seems to me a pretentious and superfluous term, useful only for doing critical theory, an activity I abhor.

geo @ 628
well do you think ‘individual responsibility’ is also a pretentious and superfluous term? Because you could substitute ‘individual responsibility’ in Bob’s statement above and it might not sound as ‘critical theory-ish’ but it would still have a very similar meaning.

geo @628 — Humbly, if someone says “historical materialism doesn’t really require agency”, the notion of agency has to be independent of the concept of historical materialism and all that it might entail. Point being, you don’t need to talk about historical materialism to talk about agency.

js (and Val): Bob’s comment @592, which I commended, was:

“GWB and his people disagreed; they thought that they could depose him and the Iraqi people would greet us as liberators and democracy would bloom across the country.
“That is what they said, or others said they said. It is not fact or history.
“I personally believe they were lying. Better to be believed stupid than evil, and liberals since the Enlightenment pretty much stopped believing in evil, and love to call their enemies stupid, even as they are getting their asses whupped.
” The long con demands you never go off-message. This is why you watch what people do, and even better what happens. Historical materialism doesn’t really require agency.”

All but a few words of Bob’s comment have to do with arguing against the idea that the Bush administration had any interest in promoting democracy in Iraq (or anywhere). That’s what I was agreeing with. Alas, I couldn’t resist slipping in a dig at Bob’s suggestion that one needed to invoke historical materialism or any other theory to motivate his very sensible observation. Bob is occasionally given to lofty theoretical flights and barbarous theoretical jargon, and I was gently and amicably mocking him. Sorry it turned out to be a red herring.

635: both. Actually, from my slight and unprofessional acquaintance with Rorty, Davidson, and Quine, I’m not sure it’s possible to distinguish “theory” rigorously from commonplace activities like explanation, speculation, imagining, etc. But leaving those knotty questions aside (and resolving not to be tempted into uninformed philosophical smoke-blowing about them), yes, I like (speaking very broadly) scientific theories, as well as some of Hume and Adam Smith the moral theorists, JS Mill the democratic theorist, Marx the (anti-)economic theorist, William James the theorist of religion, Freud and Winnicott the psychological theorists, Chomsky the linguistic theorist, C. Wright Mills the sociological theorist, Simone de Beauvoir the feminist theorist, William Empson the literary theorist, and lots of other theorists and theories. I generally don’t like post-structuralist theory and post-modernism generally, which I do NOT think is pernicious nonsense but rather just more trouble than it’s worth and a distraction from practical literary criticism and practical political activism.

In short, I really have nothing interesting to say about theory. I simply like the theories I like and don’t like the ones I don’t like.

Good night, dear Val et al. In this latitude, it’s the wee hours of the morning.

“I am the “Donald” that helpfully explained the meaning of ” shorter so and so” and there bye elicited the response that achieved immortality. ”

I, of course, was aware of that. I am aware of so much.

“over social demorats”

Val 03.21.16 at 3:38 am @ 629:
‘By the same token, the fact that people embodied as women make up less than 20% of the US legislature is both a form and a result of oppression. It is not calling them ‘women’ that is the oppression.‘

On the contrary, inventing, defining and naming categories, grading them, and forcing some into one and others into another, is crucial to setting up and maintaining a system of oppression. In a truly egalitarian social order, such distinctions would fall out of use and eventually out of the language; for instance, the inability to get pregnant or the emotional burden of excess testosterone might be seen as an unfortunate disability, but hardly one that could not be overcome or compensated for. It certainly would not be a prerequisite for higher office, income, or social status.

With a class system and its invidious categorizations remaining in place, however, we have seen that an existing oppressive system like that of the United States does not have a problem with reconfiguring itself so as to loosen some categories and tighten others while maintaining its central purposes. Americans elected a ‘Black man’ to their highest office and started to talk about a ‘post-racial society’. We have seen how that came out.

Hillary Clinton gets to Donald Trump’s right on Israel
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/03/21/hillary-clinton-gets-to-donald-trumps-right-on-israel/?tid=ss_tw

..or curt dismissals as a conspiracy theorist if you were less fortunate

Moderation? SRSLY?

And Geo asked above why I might want Bush & Cheney in prison…

…mostly I think in order to “sharpen the contradictions” Bush and Cheney facing the gallows for Iraq would likely have incited the Republican Party to Civil War.

I no longer have any faith at all in reformism, melioration, incremental improvement, “justice” under the current system, although I don’t necessarily disapprove or obstruct some palliatives. Marx is misinterpreted, opiums of the people do provide essential relief.

Food for thought:

The “1 per cent feminism” you criticise in Lean Out often focuses on issues that affect women in elite positions, such as equal representation in corporate management or at the top level of politics. Is there any evidence that such a focus can improve the lives of working and middle class women

Not really, partly because the women are so few and far between. For there to be a knock-on effect for women lower down the social ladder the few at the top would need to enact some pretty bold policies. What often happens instead is that women are scrutinised far more than men, especially in hiring decisions, and become focused on proving themselves, often by assimilating the macho culture at the top, rather than subverting it.

Where things have changed, such as in the Swedish public sector, it’s due to a concerted decision to address gender equality in every part of the recruitment process, so women and men are represented in every part of the public sector, from top to bottom. That came from political will to change the entire culture, rather than a slow, trickle-down shift that relies on a few individual women breaking through to the top…

@584: Thank you, Plume. I didn’t think you were referring specifically to me, but I suppose I did strike a bit of a scolding note previously.

@424: If higher turnout resulted in turning out HRC, then that would be how the cookie crumbled. The Trump phenomenon is certainly pulling in lots of voters to the polling booths, and if such a trend gave us President Trump that would not be a Good Thing. However, in general higher turnout favors progressive candidates, which is why the GOP is working so energetically at voter suppression these days.

“when I wrote my rant above”

JanieM @647 — I think the thing that people generally leave out is: if you’re typing on a normally sized phone (I wouldn’t know about tablets), predictive text (i.e. the dreaded “spellchecker”) is actually rather useful—when it’s not on, I at least really, really miss it.

On the other hand, if anyone has spellchecker in whatever form turned on when they’re typing on an actual keyboard, I’d worry.

@js. Thanks for the explanation! That makes sense, actually. One of these days I’ll get a smartphone, and then I’ll see for myself. If it’s anything like Word 2013, I’ll probably throw it in the river first chance I get. :-)

For the record, I can just spout it, I am not a Nietzschean, and identify with neither victors or vanquished.

Just arguing with the argument that the inferiority of slaves were the cause or justification of slavery. Almost anybody could be an ancient slave, your “inferiority” was demonstrated by your enslavement. It was a brute fact, a matter of fate.

Or an openly constructed social status system, as in Tokugawa Japan. Why do Samurai have these privileges and these restrictions? Because we say so.

It was the Early Modern ideas of universalism, equality, and natural right that demanded a moral or scientific justification of status.

@ 659
I agree with what you are saying in your first paragraph, but you miss my point that recognising that women are embodied differently than men is not in itself oppressive and that on the contrary, treating men as the norm is oppressive for women.

In your second para, the two things you are talking about are not contradictory, they are part of the same thing. Men were treated as normative and thus also as superior, both in patriarchal monotheistic religious thought (God – man in god’s image – women and the lower races serving man) and in modern enlightenment thought (man – rational, of the mind, in control – women and the lower races – of the body, subordinate).

As I’ve indicated, this applies to ‘white men’ as the dominant ruling group. As for what Bob has said about Nietzsche, it either confirms my theory that N was Just Wrong, or else Bob has got it mixed up, as you suggest.

Gerda Lerner in her work on patriarchy, suggested that male rulers learnt from their subjugation of women how you could persuade people that they were other and inferior so that they accepted their own subjugation, and then they (male rulers) subsequently used that knowledge to persuade enslaved men similarly (to internalise their own inferiority). Prior to that, they had tended to kill all the conquered men. That’s a pretty crude summary, but something like that.

I wanted to reply even though this thread is probably ending, because I found our conversation interesting, but I really need to stop spending so much time on CT, so may not reply in future. Anyway, thanks, see you in the future maybe.