There Is No Lesser Evil

VBNMW Democrats again claim that this is "the most important election of our lives" and voting for their shitty warmongering neoliberal candidate is essential. This is less true than ever.

For decades, Vote Blue No Matter Who (VBNMW) liberals have whined that even if we didn’t like their preferred candidate, the current election was “too important” for us to “waste our vote” on a third party candidate; we had to hold our nose and vote for whatever shitty neoliberal candidate the Democrats were putting up because we simply could not afford to allow the ultimate evil their Republican opponent represented to come to power. The left’s counterargument has long been that “the lesser evil is still evil,” and voting for them is not only condoning their immoral and often illegal acts, but passing up an opportunity to build a force for good, a third party that rejected the ultimate evil of capitalism and imperialism.

Of course, there’s ample evidence for our claim. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, and numerous smaller attacks on sovereign nations such as those on Libya and Syria began under Democratic administrations. A Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, got the US into World War I. The only world leader to use nuclear weapons was a Democrat, Harry Truman. Every war the US has been involved in has had the support of many or most Congressional Democrats, nearly unanimously in the cases of the Afghanistan and Ukraine Wars (only Barbara Lee voted against authorization of the Afghanistan intervention, and every Democrat has supported the Ukraine War). Scores of coups and coup attempts have been initiated under Democratic administrations, the latest being yet another attempt to overthrow Venezuela’s government. Though the Republicans are worse on environmental issues, the revolving door between polluting industries and the US government has been a thing regardless of the ruling party, and Obama and Biden have been the presidents most responsible for raising oil and gas production to world-leading levels. The fact that the US is the only wealthy country in the world that lacks universal health insurance and has widespread poverty is something both parties are responsible for. And the list goes on.

But I’d like to suggest that—as evidenced by Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ endorsement by Dick and Liz Cheney and hundreds of other prominent Republicans—the standard notion that Democrats are the “lesser evil” is no longer true. Of course, the VBNMW Democrats will try to convince you that there’s a vast difference between the two parties. As an illustrative example, consider one in particular, Christopher Cook, who’s been all over Jill Stein’s posts lately making such claims and whining about how horrible she is for “helping Trump win” and all that:

So how exactly did Biden, after solidly beating a pretty unpopular incumbent in 2020, wind up being the most unpopular president in my long lifetime (born in 1961), Christopher? There are so many exaggerations, omissions, or outright falsehoods in VBNMW Democrats’ claims about Biden’s “accomplishments” it’s ridiculous.

Much of the “job creation” that Democrats credit the Biden administration for involved recovery from a COVID-induced global recession. And although wages have gone up, thanks in part to a labor shortage created by mass short-term and long-term illness (COVID and long COVID), the minimum wage is still stuck on $7.25 where it’s been ever since George Bush signed a minimum wage increase bill 15 years ago. Inflation has been at levels not seen in over 40 years for the majority of Biden’s term, particularly in the realm of necessities such as food and housing. Cook, like others, has claimed that Trump was worse on COVID than Biden. I could write a whole

article just on refuting that claim, but I’ll just point out that the number of COVID deaths during Biden’s first year was virtually identical to that during Trump’s last year, despite Biden having the advantage of the vaccines, which did prevent a lot of

deaths and severe illness, even though ultimately, once the virus had undergone massive evolutionary changes and most people had not been vaccinated anytime recently, they were similar to the flu vaccines in terms of preventing infections.

And although it’s certainly the case that Trump, like other Republicans, is worse on environmental issues than Biden, Harris, or other Democrats, it’s ludicrous to claim that Biden has been good on environmental issues. There’s an unprecedented amount of oil and gas drilling and production under the Biden administration, and Biden’s environmental policy is a far cry from even AOC’s very much watered down version of the Green New Deal (a proposal written by the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins), which Harris rejects. Harris also supports fracking. And although it isn’t by itself a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, the Biden administration’s sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines was likely the largest single emission event in human history.

As for women’s rights, Biden and his Democratic predecessors passed up countless opportunities to codify Roe v Wade into law, and also botched opportunities to

appoint Supreme Court justices who supported it. After Roe v Wade was overturned, Biden promised to set up abortion providers on federal land, and never did so. The Democrats use abortion rights as a political football to get us to vote for them, but they don’t do much to promote them.

And, of course, abortion isn’t the only women’s issue. The Biden administration has attempted to eviscerate Title IX, making it about “gender” rather than sex and thus allowing males who claim to be women to not only participate in women’s sports despite males’ considerable physical advantages, but win both athletic and academic scholarships meant for women. The entirety of the Democratic Party gaslit the public about efforts by Republicans to protect women’s and girls’ sports, falsely claiming that they “banned trans people from sports,” when in fact the bans only prohibited biological males from competing in women’s/girls’ sports. They’ve also stood against protecting female-only spaces such as women’s locker rooms, rape crisis and domestic violence centers, and prisons. These positions are quite contrary to public opinion, even of Democrats and liberals, as exemplified by results from this poll from California, the most Democratic-leaning large state in the country:

On foreign policy, as has usually been the case in the past, there’s very little daylight between the two parties/candidates, a fact that VBNMW Democrats are silent on. Obviously, the issue that’s on everyone’s mind is that Israel has committed genocide with the full-fledged support of the Biden/Harris administration and the vast majority of members of both parties in Congress. Estimates of the death toll in Gaza are in the hundreds of thousands, out of a population of only 2.3 million. More than half of all the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. Basically everyone has been made refugees. Etc. The notion that Trump would somehow do worse than what Biden et al. have already done, given Israel free rein to do whatever it wants, is insane, and the notion that Harris is any more serious about a ceasefire than her boss has been is equally ludicrous. She has made it very clear that she opposes an arms embargo, and as Ilhan Omar put it recently, if the Biden administration wanted there to be a ceasefire, it’s very simple, they could simply cut off the flow of weapons.

It's also under Biden that the US proxy war against Russia began, a war that is literally supported by every single Congressional Democrat, so far. As I’ve said here in the past, this war was very much provoked and very much planned by the US, as part of an effort to “weaken Russia,” as Lloyd Austin and others have acknowledged. This war has brought us closer to a nuclear war than we’ve ever been, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. And as is always the case regardless of which party occupies the White House, there have been coup attempts, most recently in Venezuela, as well as successful coups in Pakistan and elsewhere.

One of the most patently absurd claims the Democrats have made is that “democracy is on the ballot” in this election, that it’s a referendum between their “pro-democracy” candidate Kamala Harris and “fascism” if Trump is elected. Leaving aside the obviously inherently undemocratic nature of US interference in the political affairs of other countries, the US is highly undemocratic internally as well. The US government has long engaged in substantial political repression regardless of which party controls the White House, and the US also has one of the most undemocratic electoral systems and processes of any Western country, a problem to which both major parties contribute. Discussion of both of these facets of the undemocratic nature of US politics could easily be an article in itself, so I will just give a few examples.

The long history of US political repression of peace and social justice activists and other Americans deemed worthy of suspicion spans Democratic as well as Republican administrations. The Palmer Raids and the jailing of antiwar activists who opposed World War I, including five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who campaigned for president from his prison cell, took place under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson also signed into law the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, the unconstitutional laws under which war opponents were prosecuted. The only dissenting vote on the Sedition Act in the House of Representatives was a member of the Socialist Party, Meyer London. It was Franklin Roosevelt, a supposedly progressive president, who put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II. COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program that targeted socialists and activists for surveillance, disruption, smears, and repression, including assassination in some cases, spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. From Leonard Peltier to Mumia Abu Jamal, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange, the imprisonment of American political activists on trumped-up charges has enjoyed bipartisan support, and the prosecution of the Uhuru 3 (Omali Yeshitela, Penny Hess and Jesse Neve) for allegedly being Russian agents due to their activism against the Ukraine War was initiated by Biden’s Justice Department. And since Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began, students and others protesting against it have been brutally assaulted and arrested on bogus charges, suspended from school, fired from their jobs, etc. at the behest of largely Democratic university administrators, mayors, and other politicians—who to boot have smeared the protesters, many of whom are Jewish themselves, as “antisemitic.” Finally, censorship of peace and social justice activists is rampant in social media outlets, which are largely owned and/or administered by Democrats, and those who dissent from the ruling class’ agenda are seldom allowed to appear in corporate media outlets, particularly those such as CNN or MSNBC that are partial to Democrats.

The US has arguably the most undemocratic electoral system of any Western country. The president is not elected by popular vote, but through the Electoral College, and the elected president has lost the popular vote on five occasions, most recently in 2016. The District of Columbia, which has a similar population to the smallest states, has no representation in Congress, a fate it shares with several US “territories” (colonies) such as Puerto Rico—whose residents are allowed to vote in presidential primaries but not in general elections even though they are considered US citizens. Each state has two Senators, regardless of its population, so less populous states have a disproportionate amount of power in the federal government. Democrats give lip service to granting statehood to DC, but do little to advance the cause, and oppose most other electoral reforms, including ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference rather than having to choose only one, thereby alleviating concerns voters whose first choice is a third party candidate but who strongly prefer one of the major party candidates as their second choice to essentially vote for both (with their first choice receiving more weigh) might have about being a so-called “spoiler.” Naturally, the Democrats are against it because they like being able to browbeat voters into voting for them by fearmongering about the Big Bad Wolf, the Republican candidate.

So-called “superdelegates”—delegates who are not elected by the voters—are one of many ways in which Democrats rig their presidential primaries to maximize the chances that the preferred candidate of their wing of the ruling class (e.g., Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election) will win the nomination. Media coverage overwhelmingly favors the preferred candidates of the ruling class (Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, etc.), granting them far more coverage than non-preferred candidates such as Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, or Jill Stein and engaging in smear campaigns against the latter. Both kicking registered voters off of voter registration lists on bogus grounds and rigging the vote count are tactics that Democrats and Republicans alike have often employed to rig elections. And not only are third party candidates prevented from participating in presidential debates, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein was actually arrested for merely trying to attend, as a paid audience member, one of the 2012 presidential debates. This time, the Democrats refused to even hold debates, did not list candidates other than Joe Biden on the ballot in some states, did not even hold a presidential primary in Florida, and wound up simply giving a candidate, Kamala Harris, the nomination even though she did not run in the primaries. The Democrats have also filed numerous lawsuits to keep Green Party candidates off the ballot, pushed through absurdly lofty requirements for the number of petition signatures required to get on the ballot, and even impersonated Green Party representatives in an attempt to convince voters to remove their signatures from ballot access petitions. Democrats have also manufactured dubious impeachment cases against Donald Trump in an effort to hamstring his presidency, and have filed numerous (in some cases arguably frivolous) lawsuits and criminal court cases against Donald Trump in an attempt to prevent him from running for president in 2024.

Chris Cuomo of all people brilliantly and succinctly summarized why there’s not that much difference between the two parties in a lot of areas: It’s the corporate money, stupid. Cuomo had his cameraman pan around the DNC convention venue to show all the corporate suites, which he pointed out cost a minimum of half a million dollars, and pointed out that politicians in both parties are in thrall to those wealthy special interests.

So not only does the VBNMW shitlibs’ thesis that there are huge differences between Trump and Harris not stand up to scrutiny, for reasons that we Greens have been hammering on since the 2000 Nader campaign, but this time, in my view, there are about as many ways in which Harris would be worse as there are ways in which Trump would be worse.

And the irony is that, although VBNMW shitlibs won’t tell you this, it doesn’t even matter who you vote for in all but half a dozen states, with either Harris or Trump holding double digit leads in the polls in the majority of states. VBNMW shitlibs are generally nonetheless eager to vote for Harris anyway even if they live in those states. Stupidity and dishonesty are par for the course among these folks. Don’t be like them. Help build a stronger socialist third party. Vote for Jill Stein or others who are not only against Israel’s genocide, but overall represent the greater good, not the lesser evil or, this time, an equivalent evil.