As far as I'm concerned, Lesser Evilism has never left us. I can't
count the number of times I've been told that if I fail to vote for
candidate X, then I am assuring that candidate Y will get elected.
And for many years I followed that advice. As a long time Democrat, I
worked to advance the Democratic Party Platform. But one fine day I
awoke to find that the Democratic Party had exchanged me for a pot of
Wall Street gold. It did not take the Democrat Party long to spin the
Working Class off, and begin to kiss the golden hem of their new
friends, the folks who could afford to pay the Democrat Party a most
generous sum for their support.
Forget the thrashings and bashing of the major candidates. Peek
behind their mouthings and silly antics and you will see the same
commitment to their benefactors.
So to pick between Clinton and Trump will gain you nothing because
they do not represent you or your needs. There is no, "Lesser of Two
Evils" here. Either one will find ways of serving the Empire's First
Class Corporate Citizens. But we do have a positive second choice.
We can vote, or write in our vote, for any of those candidates who
advocate a change of governmental systems. Any vote against the
Establishment is a positive vote.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/21/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Taibbi writes: "The Democratic Party leaders have trained their followers
to
perceive everything in terms of one single end-game equation: If you don't
support us, you're supporting Bush/Rove/Cheney/Palin/Insert Evil Republican
Here."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: AP)
The Return of Lesser Evilism
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
21 June 16
With Trump on the other side, Democrats can be lazier than ever this
election
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote a column about Ralph Nader this
morning that uses some interesting language. Noting that it's now been 16
years since Nader ran for president and garnered enough dissenting votes to
help elect George W. Bush, he wrote (emphasis mine):
"That is enough time for Nader to confess his role in enabling one of the
most disastrous presidencies in American history, or at least to come up
with a better explanation for his decision. Instead, Nader has repeated his
same litany of evasions, most recently in an interview with Jeremy Hobson
on
WBUR, where he dismissed all criticisms of his 2000 campaign as 'fact
deprived.'"
Nader refuses to confess! What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? Fetch the
comfy chair!
It would be foolish to argue that Nader's run in 2000 didn't enable Bush's
presidency. Though there were other factors, Nader's presence on the ballot
was surely a big one.
But the career Democrats of the Beltway and their buddies in the press have
turned the Nader episode into something very like the creation story of the
Third Way political movement. And like many religious myths, it's gotten
very tiresome.
The Democratic Party leaders have trained their followers to perceive
everything in terms of one single end-game equation: If you don't support
us, you're supporting Bush/Rove/Cheney/Palin/Insert Evil Republican Here.
That the monster of the moment, Donald Trump, is a lot more monstrous than
usual will likely make this argument an even bigger part of the Democratic
Party platform going forward.
It's a sound formula for making ballot-box decisions, but the people who
push it never seem content to just use it to win elections. They're
continually trying to make an ethical argument out of it, to prove people
who defy The Equation are, whether they know it or not, morally wrong and
in
league with the other side.
Beltway Democrats seem increasingly to believe that all people who fall
within a certain broad range of liberal-ish beliefs owe their votes and
their loyalty to the Democratic Party.
That's why, as a socially liberal person who probably likes trees and
wouldn't want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, Nader's decision to take votes
from the party-blessed candidate Gore is viewed not as dissent, but as a
kind of treason.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there's no end to it. If you
think I owe you my vote because I recycle and enjoyed To Kill a
Mockingbird,
you're not going to work very hard to keep it. That's particularly true if
the only standard you think you need to worry about is not being worse than
Donald Trump, which is almost the same as no standard at all.
This is why the thinking within the Democratic Party has gotten so flabby
over the years. It increasingly seems to rejoice in its voters' lack of
real
choices, and relies on a political formula that requires little input from
anyone outside the Beltway.
It's heavily financed by corporate money, and the overwhelming majority of
its voters would never cast a vote for the nut-bar God-and-guns version of
Republicanism that's been their sole opposition for decades.
So the party gets most of its funding without having to beg for it door to
door, and it gets many of its votes by default. Except for campaign-trail
photo ops, mainstream Democrats barely need to leave Washington to stay in
business.
Still, the Democratic Leadership Council wing of the Democrats have come to
believe they've earned their status, by being the only plausible bulwark
against the Republican menace.
This sounds believable because party officials and pundits like Chait keep
describing critics of the party as far-leftists and extremists, whose
platform couldn't win a national election.
Dissenting voices like this year's version of Nader, Bernie Sanders, are
inevitably pitched as quixotic egotists who don't have the guts to do what
it takes to win. They're described as just out for 15 minutes of fame, and
maybe a few plaudits from teenagers and hippies who'll gush over their
far-out idealism.
But that characterization isn't accurate. The primary difference between
the
Nader/Sanders platform and the Gore/Clinton platform isn't rooted in
ideology at all, but money.
The former camp refuses to be funded by the Goldmans and Pfizers of the
world, while the latter camp embraces those donors. That's really all this
comes down to. There's nothing particularly radical about not taking money
from companies you think you might need to regulate someday. And there's
nothing particularly centrist or "realistic" about taking that same money.
When I think about the way the Democrats and their friends in the press
keep
telling me I owe them my vote, situations like the following come to mind.
We're in another financial crisis. The CEOs of the ten biggest banks in
America, fresh from having wrecked the economy with the latest harebrained
bubble scheme, come to the Oval Office begging for a bailout.
In that moment, to whom is my future Democratic president going to listen:
those bankers or me?
It's not going to be me, that's for sure. Am I an egotist for being annoyed
by that? And how exactly should I take being told on top of that that I
still owe this party my vote, and that I should keep my mouth shut about my
irritation if I don't want to be called a Republican-enabler?
The collapse of the Republican Party and its takeover by the nativist Trump
wing poses all sorts of problems, not the least of which being the high
likelihood that the Democrats will now get even lazier when it comes to
responding to their voters' interests. The crazier the Republicans get, the
more reflexive will be the arguments that we can't afford any criticism of
Democrats anymore, lest we invite in the Fourth Reich.
I didn't vote for Nader in 2000, and I don't have a problem with anyone
arguing this coming Election Day that we shouldn't all do whatever we can
to
keep Donald Trump out of office.
What's problematic is the way Beltway media types are forever turning
postmortems on the candidacies of people like Nader or Sanders into
parables
about the perils of voting your conscience, when what we're really talking
about is the party's unwillingness to untether itself from easy money. This
is how Chait sums up Nader (again, emphasis mine):
"Nader goes on to defend his idiosyncratic belief that people are under no
obligation to consider real-world impacts in their voting behavior. Vote
for
a third-party candidate, write in a candidate, follow your own conscience:
'I think voters in a democracy should vote for anybody they want, including
write in or even themselves. I don't believe in any kind of reprimand of
voters who stray from the two-party tyranny.'
"Why should people vote for candidates at all? Since, by definition, the
person we most closely agree with is ourselves, why not just write your own
name in every time?"
Ugh. Hey, Jonathan: Voters don't want candidates who agree with them about
everything. They just want one who isn't going to completely take them for
granted. If that's become too much to ask, maybe there's something wrong
with the Democratic Party, not people like Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Bernie Sanders. (photo: AP)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ralph-nader-bernie-sanders-lesser-
evilism-20160620http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ralph-nader-bernie
-sanders-lesser-evilism-20160620
The Return of Lesser Evilism
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
21 June 16
With Trump on the other side, Democrats can be lazier than ever this
election
onathan Chait of New York magazine wrote a column about Ralph Nader this
morning that uses some interesting language. Noting that it's now been 16
years since Nader ran for president and garnered enough dissenting votes to
help elect George W. Bush, he wrote (emphasis mine):
"That is enough time for Nader to confess his role in enabling one of the
most disastrous presidencies in American history, or at least to come up
with a better explanation for his decision. Instead, Nader has repeated his
same litany of evasions, most recently in an interview with Jeremy Hobson
on
WBUR, where he dismissed all criticisms of his 2000 campaign as 'fact
deprived.'"
Nader refuses to confess! What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? Fetch the
comfy chair!
It would be foolish to argue that Nader's run in 2000 didn't enable Bush's
presidency. Though there were other factors, Nader's presence on the ballot
was surely a big one.
But the career Democrats of the Beltway and their buddies in the press have
turned the Nader episode into something very like the creation story of the
Third Way political movement. And like many religious myths, it's gotten
very tiresome.
The Democratic Party leaders have trained their followers to perceive
everything in terms of one single end-game equation: If you don't support
us, you're supporting Bush/Rove/Cheney/Palin/Insert Evil Republican Here.
That the monster of the moment, Donald Trump, is a lot more monstrous than
usual will likely make this argument an even bigger part of the Democratic
Party platform going forward.
It's a sound formula for making ballot-box decisions, but the people who
push it never seem content to just use it to win elections. They're
continually trying to make an ethical argument out of it, to prove people
who defy The Equation are, whether they know it or not, morally wrong and
in
league with the other side.
Beltway Democrats seem increasingly to believe that all people who fall
within a certain broad range of liberal-ish beliefs owe their votes and
their loyalty to the Democratic Party.
That's why, as a socially liberal person who probably likes trees and
wouldn't want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, Nader's decision to take votes
from the party-blessed candidate Gore is viewed not as dissent, but as a
kind of treason.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there's no end to it. If you
think I owe you my vote because I recycle and enjoyed To Kill a
Mockingbird,
you're not going to work very hard to keep it. That's particularly true if
the only standard you think you need to worry about is not being worse than
Donald Trump, which is almost the same as no standard at all.
This is why the thinking within the Democratic Party has gotten so flabby
over the years. It increasingly seems to rejoice in its voters' lack of
real
choices, and relies on a political formula that requires little input from
anyone outside the Beltway.
It's heavily financed by corporate money, and the overwhelming majority of
its voters would never cast a vote for the nut-bar God-and-guns version of
Republicanism that's been their sole opposition for decades.
So the party gets most of its funding without having to beg for it door to
door, and it gets many of its votes by default. Except for campaign-trail
photo ops, mainstream Democrats barely need to leave Washington to stay in
business.
Still, the Democratic Leadership Council wing of the Democrats have come to
believe they've earned their status, by being the only plausible bulwark
against the Republican menace.
This sounds believable because party officials and pundits like Chait keep
describing critics of the party as far-leftists and extremists, whose
platform couldn't win a national election.
Dissenting voices like this year's version of Nader, Bernie Sanders, are
inevitably pitched as quixotic egotists who don't have the guts to do what
it takes to win. They're described as just out for 15 minutes of fame, and
maybe a few plaudits from teenagers and hippies who'll gush over their
far-out idealism.
But that characterization isn't accurate. The primary difference between
the
Nader/Sanders platform and the Gore/Clinton platform isn't rooted in
ideology at all, but money.
The former camp refuses to be funded by the Goldmans and Pfizers of the
world, while the latter camp embraces those donors. That's really all this
comes down to. There's nothing particularly radical about not taking money
from companies you think you might need to regulate someday. And there's
nothing particularly centrist or "realistic" about taking that same money.
When I think about the way the Democrats and their friends in the press
keep
telling me I owe them my vote, situations like the following come to mind.
We're in another financial crisis. The CEOs of the ten biggest banks in
America, fresh from having wrecked the economy with the latest harebrained
bubble scheme, come to the Oval Office begging for a bailout.
In that moment, to whom is my future Democratic president going to listen:
those bankers or me?
It's not going to be me, that's for sure. Am I an egotist for being annoyed
by that? And how exactly should I take being told on top of that that I
still owe this party my vote, and that I should keep my mouth shut about my
irritation if I don't want to be called a Republican-enabler?
The collapse of the Republican Party and its takeover by the nativist Trump
wing poses all sorts of problems, not the least of which being the high
likelihood that the Democrats will now get even lazier when it comes to
responding to their voters' interests. The crazier the Republicans get, the
more reflexive will be the arguments that we can't afford any criticism of
Democrats anymore, lest we invite in the Fourth Reich.
I didn't vote for Nader in 2000, and I don't have a problem with anyone
arguing this coming Election Day that we shouldn't all do whatever we can
to
keep Donald Trump out of office.
What's problematic is the way Beltway media types are forever turning
postmortems on the candidacies of people like Nader or Sanders into
parables
about the perils of voting your conscience, when what we're really talking
about is the party's unwillingness to untether itself from easy money. This
is how Chait sums up Nader (again, emphasis mine):
"Nader goes on to defend his idiosyncratic belief that people are under no
obligation to consider real-world impacts in their voting behavior. Vote
for
a third-party candidate, write in a candidate, follow your own conscience:
'I think voters in a democracy should vote for anybody they want, including
write in or even themselves. I don't believe in any kind of reprimand of
voters who stray from the two-party tyranny.'
"Why should people vote for candidates at all? Since, by definition, the
person we most closely agree with is ourselves, why not just write your own
name in every time?"
Ugh. Hey, Jonathan: Voters don't want candidates who agree with them about
everything. They just want one who isn't going to completely take them for
granted. If that's become too much to ask, maybe there's something wrong
with the Democratic Party, not people like Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
