Trump, Like Bush, Could Win Because Some Voters Won’t Sully Themselves Voting for the “Lesser of Two Evils”
Voting for the Green Party in 2000 gave us the Iraq war, climate change denial and Citizens United
Most people of normal intelligence, reasonably in touch with reality, consider it a simple choice: the lesser of two evils is better than the greater of two evils. But not so for advocates of the Green Party, along with various self-styled progressives who are so delighted with their insight into the corrupt nature of America’s two main parties that they have become blind to what is at stake in the coming election.
That blindness has long afflicted the Green Party, sufficiently for the party to feel comfortable entering in a de facto alliance with the Republican Party: G.O.P. attorneys have assisted the Greens in their efforts to get on the ballot in various states, and the G.O.P. obviously shares the Green Party’s hope the Greens can lure voters from Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Enough to tip the election, as they did in the year 2000? It is worth revisiting the disastrous consequences of the Green’s most “successful” campaign of this century, and to consider the evils the United States has endured because the Green Party was on the year 2000 ballot.
What have the Greens to say in response to the concern that they may play the role of “spoilers” again?
Their presidential candidate Howie Hawkins offers two answers to the fears that voting Green in 2020 could lead to a Trump victory — or an election close enough for Trumpian manipulation and violence to thwart the majority.
First, Hawkins assures us voting Green is “unlikely” to cause a Trump victory because polls indicate “Biden’s set up to win in an Electoral College landslide.” Facing the danger that would-be dictator Donald Trump may be re-elected, most of us do not find much comfort in the Greens’ assurance that the polls guarantee a Trump defeat. That was, after all, the Green Party’s line right up to Trump’s 2016 victory.
Second, the Greens ask you to vote with your heart, not your brain. “Vote for the kind of things you want,” says Hawkins. But out here in the real world, voting is not an act of self-expression nor is it like finding your true love. In an imperfect world, voting is about using your brain and deciding which candidate you would prefer to have in the White House for the next four years — Trump or Biden — because it is going to be one of them and no one else.
There’s a third argument against voting for Joe Biden: that it supposedly doesn’t much matter whether Trump or Biden wins.
That’s implicitly the position of the Green Party and explicitly the position of self-styled “progressives” like Sasam Fayazmanesh, an economics professor at Cal State Fresno, who recently argued in CounterPunch that voting for the lesser evil embodies “bizarre logic” because America’s two main parties both represent capitalism.
Fayazmanesh echoes the claims made by the Green Party’s candidate Ralph Nader in the year 2000, that the Republican candidate George W. Bush and the Democratic Al Gore were “Tweedle-dee” and “Tweedle-dum.” Fayazmanesh loftily asserts: “As far as your social position is concerned, it really does not make that much difference which evil comes to power.” Whoever wins the election, says Fayazmanesh, “it would not make much of a difference.”
Tell that to my young DACA clients whom the Trump regime may deport to a country they haven’t seen since they were small children, and to millions of other undocumented immigrants Trump is closing in on. Tell that to Black Lives Matter advocates who will face police departments encouraged to resist any restraints on racist violence with the active support of the lawless Trump government. Tell that to African-Americans facing white supremacist attacks legitimized, energized and supported by the president.
Tell that to millions of Americans who gained health insurance thanks to Obamacare, insufficient though it may seem in the eyes of Medicare-for-all advocates. Tell that to girls and women exercising the right to choose whether to bear a child. Tell that to everyone on Earth who will endure runaway global heating if a president dedicated to increasing the burning of fossil fuels holds onto power for the few remaining years humanity has before climate catastrophe becomes unstoppable.
I say these things, not because I am confident the Democratic Party is firmly committed to the strong action needed to move us toward a just and equal society and a planet fit for habitation. I say this because you have to be totally out of touch with reality not to prefer moving forward more slowly than we would wish to moving backward at break-neck speed.
An election twenty years ago teaches a painful lesson on what can happen when too many voters cannot bring themselves to vote for what they are told is merely “the lesser of two evils.” In the year 2000 presidential election between the Democrat Al Gore and the Republican George W. Bush, a significant minority of citizens was persuaded to vote for the Green Party. By voting Green, they precipitated a set of political and social disasters that afflict America to this day.
Although the Democrat Gore won a clear majority of voters nationwide in 2000, the fight for an Electoral College majority came down to Florida. Out of almost six million votes in that state, Bush prevailed, after a bitter and prolonged ballot-counting battle, by an “official” margin of 537 votes. Whether Bush really had the most votes will never be known because a rightist majority of the Supreme Court halted the recount when Bush was ahead, in what amounted to a judicial coup d’etat.
That coup would never have occurred — and Gore would have been elected president — had it not been for the Green Party’s candidate Ralph Nader. Without Nader on the ballot, the vote would not have been close enough for the Supreme Court to install George W. Bush as president.
Nader received 97,421 votes in Florida. As exit polls confirmed, including polls cited by Nader himself, a big majority of Nader’s voters would have voted for Gore if Nader had not been on the ballot. Those votes would have added up to a decisive Gore victory in Florida, and the presidency. In an effort to evade responsibility, Nader and the Greens point to other factors that made the vote so close in Florida. But whatever other factors were at work, the simple reality is that if Nader had not been on the ballot, Gore would won notwithstanding those other factors.
But for Ralph Nader, Al Gore would have been president beginning in 2001. What did that mean for our country?
Nader assured voters that the two parties “look and act the same, so it doesn’t matter which you get.” The last 20 years have taught a painful lesson on just how wrong Ralph Nader was, just how much it did matter, just how disastrous for America it was to accept the “lesser of two evils” argument.
Here are some of the greater evils we reaped because some were not willing to vote for a supposed “lesser evil.”
Climate change: In 1997, Al Gore played a key role in developing the Kyoto Protocol, which he signed on behalf of the United States. This was the first serious international effort to fight global warming. Gore sounded the warning bell early and often, and he campaigned ceaselessly to awaken the American people to the threat posed by climate change.
Bush, on the other hand, was a force for climate change denial. In March 2001 he withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, effectively destroying it. The Bush administration worked with Exxon to shape its do-nothing climate policy, tampered with and suppressed scientific findings on global warming, and tried to undermine state efforts to mitigate climate change. The G.O.P.’s stance on the issue hardened under Bush.
We can never know just how effective Gore would have been in fighting climate change had he been elected. But for eight critical years, Bush turned America in precisely the wrong direction.
The Iraq War: Now in its 17th year, this national and international catastrophe was based on the Bush administration’s lie that Iraq’s (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction were an imminent threat to America. The war caused 5,000 American deaths and led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were killed, injured or maimed. The financial cost has been more than one trillion dollars.
Bush’s false assertion Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a knowing lie. A British mission to the U.S. secretly reported to the British government in 2002, before the war began, that “the case [for war] was thin,” and “the intelligence and the facts were being fixed” to support an invasion.
Why invade Iraq? The neoconservatives around Bush had long targeted Iraq’s government for overthrow; indeed, at Bush’s very first cabinet meeting, eight months before 9/11, they discussed how to strike at Iraq. They looked for an excuse, and following al Qaeda’s attack on the twin towers, they decided this was their time — even though they knew full well Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
Overthrowing Iraq’s government was a Republican, neocon dream that the Democratic Party never bought into. Indeed, Senator Al Gore opposed the war-authorization resolution. A President Gore would never have adopted the neocon agenda for Iraq and launched the war. The greatest foreign policy catastrophe of this century, whose shock waves continue to disturb the Middle East and Europe, would never have happened.
The Right-Wing Supreme Court majority: As we now writhe with anxiety over the growing right-wing lock on the Supreme Court, we need to recall it began with George W. Bush. Bush appointed two conservatives to the high court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. But for Ralph Nader, we would have had a President Al Gore, who would have nominated two liberals. We could have had a six-three liberal court. Instead, Bush’s appointees joined three conservative judges for a five-four right-wing majority.
Even before Donald Trump solidified the reactionary judicial block, the Bush appointees were key to a number of five-four decisions that undermined our safety and our democracy. Among the worst:
District of Columbia v. Heller: The five Republican justices reversed 77 years of precedents to invent a personal constitutional right to own firearms, a daunting obstacle that hobbled efforts at gun control even as mass murderers rampaged almost weekly.
Citizens United: The five blessed and bolstered the political power of billionaires’ money and gave it a phony constitutional veneer that makes limiting their power even more difficult.
Shelby County v. Holder: The G.O.P. justices eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, precipitating an avalanche of new laws aimed at disenfranchising minority, elderly and young voters, and threatening the most important gains of the civil rights movement. Those laws have become a key part of the Republican Party’s voter suppression efforts.
Yes — what a revelation! — the Democratic Party and the Republican Party both stand for American capitalism. But it is madness to suggest there are only marginal differences between, on the one hand, Joe Biden and his likely liberal governance and, on the other hand, the corrupt, racist, sexist, heartless, authoritarian regime of Donald Trump — a regime that already bears primary responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic in America which has killed 217,000 and sickened 7.7 million Americans.
As of this writing in mid-October, the polls point sharply toward an election victory for Joe Biden. Also as of this writing, Donald Trump refuses to say he will abide by the election result and peacefully surrender power if he loses. Trump continues to promote the manifestly false claim that any G.O.P. loss can only be due to voting fraud, and Trump and the Republican Party continue to threaten to engage in voter intimidation on election day. Trump also continues to encourage armed right-wing groups that may seek to disrupt the election with violence.
Our country faces a deep crisis. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge this plain reality is abandoning the fight for democracy in America.
