The agonizing literalness of Lesser-Evilism
The agonizing literalness of Lesser-Evilism
At risk of beating the dead horse…
These god damn liberals keep harping over how Joe Biden is the “lesser evil” compared to Donald Trump, necessitating that we go out and vote for him come November lest our flawless democratic system give way to fascism. “Something something incrementalism purity test push him left do you want Trump to win???”
In 2020, it could be feasibly argued, if poorly, that Joe Biden was, in fact, the “lesser evil.” Donald Trump was the president, and Joe Biden was not. Given the dual assumption that Donald Trump was a “substandard” president and that Biden would likely be at least “standard” quality, this made some sense. But the cards are on the table now. All of our most fearful suspicions about a Biden presidency have been utterly validated, and that’s not even counting all the atrocities people scarcely imagined him committing or lacked the capacity to predict altogether. He is more evil than we could have possibly known.
All these same libs are now in a bind. Apparently, Biden HAS to be the Democratic ticket, so he HAS to be elected president, because otherwise Trump would win, and that would be bad, wouldn’t it? The only problem is that Biden, the Anointed One, quite literally has no redeeming qualities. So what do you do to convince people to vote for Biden in spite of literally every crime he has committed and every promise he neglected to fulfill?
The most popular strategy is seemingly to just insist, with zero supporting evidence or even reasoning, that Trump’s America is just an objectively worse version of Biden’s America. Everything will be worse under Trump. Everything. Yes, Biden has failed in almost every respect and has actively worked against what he promised to his constituents, and yes, nothing has improved under Biden and in fact almost everything has generally become worse, but Trump will do all those bad things even harder! So you have to vote for Biden. Or you’re making the world worse. You fascist.
At risk of being the Russian troll living inside everyone’s walls, can we take a moment to appreciate the degree to which the discourse has degenerated? “Vote for the lesser evil” used to mean that we were expected to make “compromises” with politicians we didn’t completely agree with or even took some issues with to avoid aggressive fragmentation within the Democratic Party, a sacrosanct institution representing all that is good in the world. This is perhaps the first election I’ve ever seen where we are not even being promised marginal progress. We are not even being offered different poisons to pick. The same toxic politics of the fascist right have been watered down by the “adults in the room,” and we are expected to not only drink but be thankful it’s not even more concentrated than it is.
Vote Biden 2024: It could be worse!
I can take it a step further and make a coherent argument for why a second trump term would've been better for leftist organising in the US. It's a bit of a speculative hot take, but there's some evidence to it.
If you look at the state of mainstream liberal discourse in the United States prior to the 2020 election, we had a fairly mainstream movement that had formed challenging the police state, we had constant admonitions of the states inhumane migrant policies ("kids in cages"), we had daily critiques from the liberal media of the state's actions against protestors, and the second biden won, it all disappeared.
Immigrants didn't stop being in cages, in fact a bunch of them are trapped without food, water, or bathrooms between the border fences right now, nobody cares. The entire state has shifted further right than ever before on immigration, abortion is gone, LGBTQ stuff isn't doing well, the country is supporting a genocide, and the "defund the police" thing is long dead and buried.
Meanwhile, the familes in my city that lost their loved ones to the cops are still standing their with their brother's face on a shirt wondering where all the #BLM people went.
So I think there is an argument that can be made that everybody goes out to brunch during the democrats turn, and it leads to more and more atrocities occuring and just never being challenged, whereas at least under trump, these things were called out and at least in the public conscience.
Trump forces the libs to at least pretend they're on our side, and it drives a few of them to our side for real too
I was thinking along similar lines. Liberals were terrified when Trump was in office. Under Biden, they seem mostly terrified of Trump being in office again. In spite of the material differences between the two presidencies being not that substantial; I say not that substantial in the meaning that most US presidents are not that substantially different. They do a handful of things differently, but they all continue the same colonial/imperialist agenda.
The only substantial difference I see between the two is that the brand of rightism behind Trump seems to want to formalize a totalitarian state. This is where, and I am open to disagreement if anyone thinks I'm falling for liberal narratives here, that the argument of similarity to the formation of nazi germany has some legitimacy. But the part liberals don't get is that the US is already obscenely, systematically and systemically awful and has been for the entirety of its existence. It arguably can be worse, but it's not as though the formation of a different brand of fascism is the end of a people's democracy; it would be more like finally taking the mask off in full, shredding the thin veneer of "freedom" that the US clings to in its constitutional fetishizing and branding. The more immediate harm that could arguably occur from such is serious, but liberals also have a tendency to drastically misunderstand and downplay the harm that is already occurring now and has been occurring throughout US history.
But because they downplay, misunderstand, and trivialize, liberals' fear of Trump more resembles fear of a specter than fear of deteriorating conditions of safety and security for regular people, which are happening regardless of who is in office and which have been preceded by a variety of horrific conditions already.
I honestly can't tell about the stuff regarding trump and wanting to formalise like the fascist state and whatever like "threaten democracy" thing the libs say.
it's very hard to know imo what actual threat exists there. like I mean I guess the guy could try to stay in power too long, but I'm not really sure what materially that would do? I think the people who are really gonna pay the cost for this stuff are immigrants and I think they'll pay the cost regardless of who's in power based on bidens very open insane shift to the right on that. obviously like foreign policy is shit anyways, the palestinians are gonna pay the price no matter what.
in terms of issues like LGBTQ rights, women's rights, other minority rights, that's all measurably worse across the country than it was in 2020, and I honestly think the public is tired of hearing about it. Americans "across the aisle" seem to have plenty of anti immigrant sentiment tho.
I guess what I mean is that like, if trump stays in power for a decade, we're all still gonna go to our wage worker jobs, struggle to afford housing and healthcare, immigrants will be locked up and the cops will be racist murderers so, like what does it even matter.
I do kinda hope that getting rid of the illusion of choice might help radicalise people idk. I usually do vote in some elections especially locally but tbh after the genocide and all this shit I just threw the thing away this year, I'm done with all of it
The only substantial difference I see between the two is that the brand of rightism behind Trump seems to want to formalize a totalitarian state.
Even there, I'd argue that the Democrats, "centrists," and faux-left have done more than Trump ever did in actually transitioning the US in such a direction, all in the name of avoiding the scary orange man and various hyped-up "threats to democracy" like... the peaceful development of China and the global south, actual leftists and anti-war/anti-genocide sentiment, TikTok, and the increasingly mainstream demands for of any sort of accountability, transparency, or economic reform.
Other than that, I agree, the "substantial" difference between Trump and the liberals, is that Trump says nastier things about those he targets- and he actually stirs up hate against the LGBT community, Muslims, immigrants, etc. in this sense. Trump is the demagogue, and the liberals are the backstabbing politicians whose sole selling point is that they won't engage in the same level of demagoguery. But they're both clearly, willfully totalitarian, equally with a promise of violence and the tyranny of capital- the liberals are (outside of the LGBT community and bodily autonomy for women- major issues, granted) every bit as bad, and certainly willing to stir up anti-Chinese, anti-Palestinian, etc. hate. And ultimately- apart from the LGBT community and womens' rights as mentioned above- both are warmongers; both will crack down on the border and exploit migrants all the same; both are guaranteed to further rollback Americans' rights (or perhaps more accurately, "privileges," considering how easily and frequently they are taken away) and in the Democrats' case, when they get to it, they tend to receive little mainstream pushback even when their actions are far worse than that of the American "right"- because they've positioned themselves as the (false) "left" side of things, and they're "as good as it gets" and the "compromise" party, and people are told they just have to just deal with it and all the other bullshit "lesser evil" reasonings and excuses they promote.
If you just compare their administrations in terms of their material effect, Biden has objectively been more evil than Trump. He has started more wars, is responsible for magnitudes more death, has overseen further strengthening of the police state, and has gifted even more working-class wealth to the billionaire class.
The lesson to draw is that no matter who is president, Amerikkka will continue to accelerate into fascism and barbarism.
Let's be real, people that advocate for "lesser evil" benefit materially from the wicked shit that they perpetuate abroad.
Do they? It seems to me that the average Biden voter has literally nothing to gain from the genocide in Gaza. I have to wonder if their primary concern is to avoid enduring the humiliation of a second Trump term.
Sorry, I don't mean to treat this forum as my personal opinion blog. I'm just trying to feel out what's going on. Everything, politics especially, increasingly feels bizarre and arbitrary. All of this used to have the veneer of professionalism. It definitely used to make sense. It was never true, but it at least had one unified narrative. I'm just wondering if anyone else is noticing this.
Yes, this is a major inflection point in history. I think this sums it up reasonably well.
Everything will be worse under Trump
I'm pretty sure that everything will be worse four years from now regardless of whose in charge - and if it's Trump you better believe the libs are going to be ten times as annoying blaming the inevitable crumbling of their system on the people not voting for them hard enough (which is why they need to move further right, of course).
Blame the left fpr not voting move farther right tp get the moderates look shocked and get angry when the left doesn't vote agian
i started a new job a month ago and on my 3rd day the CEO and a coworker had a giggle session about Trump possibly winning the election, and then the CEO said something like he just can't imagine it happening again
i asked why not and he thought i was joking
i said i see almost 0 difference between the two
then he realized i was serious, stopped laughing, and walked away
he doesn't talk about politics now unless he has a big group of libs around him
It is strange to contend with for sure. People are actually facing up to an ongoing genocide and using language like (and I am not exaggerating here based on what I've seen) "Trump would make it a thousand times worse." It is a claim that has no grounding in a reality that we can contend with. Genocide is about as bad as you can get. There is no "turbo genocide."
What that kind of language tells me is that the people peddling it either: 1) don't believe there is a genocide going on or 2) don't care very much that it's happening because it doesn't affect them personally.
I don't know how else one could arrive at such an absurd position. I expect revulsion, disgust, outrage, at what is being backed by the US state and in spite of the horror, it is heartening how many people seem to get that aspect of it (I will take the positives where I can find them). But when it comes to the liberals who somehow bypass all of that and say "but Trump," I do not trust their understanding of the world or their capability to empathize. I find it difficult to see them as substantially different from reactionaries who fear scapegoated specters.
Very true, and I do wonder if part of the problem lies in their failure to conceive of political action beyond electoralism, even when it's as simple as withholding their votes. They have way too much faith in the system and not enough faith in themselves. That's assuming they do, in fact, care and want things to change like they claim they do.
I'm listening to age of Napoleon and am reminded of the period right after Oct 6 1789 where the liberals and bourgeoise were drafting the new constitution and celebrating unity at the feast of the federation, pledging oaths of unity and loyalty and stuff before the thing was even drafted. The liberals were happy with the reforms, but the working poor were disappointed they didn't go far enough, and the church thought they had gone too far. There were different factions within French society with completely different visions of the future. The narrator makes a point that these differences can't be papered over with oaths or fancy rhetoric, they have to be fought out, either with politics or violence.
This is where the us is at the moment imo only the political avenue has been completely closed off. It's not a matter of if but a matter of when, unless something meaningfully changes with our electoral system. Like redrafting the constitution level of change. Of course only violence would force this anyway.
In this context the election is truly meaningless and of course one can't help but find the whole thing tiresome. It is just delaying the inevitable, it literally doesn't matter
RevLeft just did an excellent episode on Marx's analysis of both Napoleon's and their relevancy to the current state of the US
Nice. Age of Napoleon has a short ep with matt christman as a guest covering that but it was only 30 mins so somewhat superficial, a deeper look would be very welcome, I'll have to check it out!
The western bourgeoisie has understood that whatever they do liberals will side with them, and leftists are too weak to be a threat. I can only hope it will make them fly too close to the sun
Liberalism is the ideology developed by the bourgeoise for the bourgeoise. It was born out of the bourgeois revolt against the feudal regime. And as much as people say that the word "liberal" means something else in America compared to its real meaning everywhere else, American liberals are as bourgeois as the liberals anywhere else in the world.
That's true, but, I think that it's useful to point out that liberalism is an ideology that postures as progressive contrary to blunt conservatism which is just "support whatever is the status quo".
So this idea that "we the bourgeoisie lead the charge for a better world" is idealistically supposing that the liberals would hold the bourgeoisie accountable for not upholding its liberal promises.
However the falsehood of this principle is showing in plain sight as the decline of imperialism gets more evident
As a non-USian with USian friends, who are both leftists and not, it's interesting talking to them about the election, my leftist friend is voting for Biden because they are trans and project 2025 is scaring them pretty heavily. My other two friends, one is voting for Biden because "he's not Trump" and the other is voting for Kennedy because "fuck it, it seems funny". It's weird. The election is bringing a lot of weird feelings and emotions out in the states.
voting strasser is harm reduction!
also, funny how this is still topical 4 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUdODhFDtQg
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: