The 2012 "Election" thread

[8bitagent]

Is there anything even worth discussing for this election cycle? Mittens is this years Dole 96/Mccain 08. End of story(least Im guessing)

[justdrew]

yes, this. and I suggest you refuse to believe our elections are meaningless. WHO would most want you to think so? I guarantee you he could win, and it would make a big difference.

Bain Capital Launched with Death Squad Money
2012 08 12 Democracy Now

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing new scrutiny over revelations he founded the private equity firm Bain Capital with investments from Central American elites linked to death squads in El Salvador. After initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in 1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40 percent of Bain’s start-up money. Some investors had extensive ties to the death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of deaths in El Salvador during the 1980s. We’re joined by Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim, who connects the dots in his latest story, "Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads." "There’s no possible way that anybody in 1984 could check out these families — which was the term that [Romney’s campaign] used — and come away convinced that this money was clean," Grim says.

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/10/romneys_death_squad_ties_bain_launched

[elfismiles]

Wow! This certainly gives an even weirder spin to the Bain/Bane Batman Midnight Movie Massacre...

yes, this. and I suggest you refuse to believe our elections are meaningless. WHO would most want you to think so? I guarantee you he could win, and it would make a big difference.

Bain Capital Launched with Death Squad Money
2012 08 12 Democracy Now

[kelley]

honestly, if stories like these mattered wouldn't the last thirty years of electoral politics in the US have gone a bit differently?

if the board of directors of this state want romney as their CEO, he'll get the gig. we don't sit on that board.

i wouldn't say 'it doesn't matter', but rather, 'it matters little'. i'm afraid it really is that simple.

[lupercal]

^ hi kelley, it matters a lot, much more than mainstream or alternative (Chomsky et al) media would like you to think. For example, Romney's new veep wants to privatize Medicare like bushler wanted to privatize social security, Romney has promised to bomb bomb Iran, etc. And realistically there are probably a thousand ways your life is less miserable under Obama-Biden than under the last reich, including airport searches, even if the TSA has been cleverly retooled as an Obama liability like the wars he didn't start.

Anyway Paul Ryan = game over for MittBane, as far as I can tell. He might have picked up Ryan's district in WI but otherwise he basically put a male Palin on his ticket and probably finished off both their political careers, for several reasons, mainly because they're both stooges. Here's the NYT which for once I agree with:

Mr. Ryan’s controversial budget, which polls poorly, will obviously get much more attention than it had previously. The fate of the presidential race and the fate of Congressional races may become more closely tied together. Mr. Obama will no longer have to stretch to evoke the specter of Congress and its 15 percent approval rating. With Mr. Ryan on the opposing ticket, he will be running against a flesh-and-blood embodiment of it.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.co ... e-of-ryan/

If he wanted a Santorum he should have picked him and made history as the worst ticket ever, but instead he'll just lose like McCain and Dole. At least that's how it looks a.t.m.

[Luther Blissett]

There are at-odds factions within the existing power structure, consisting of real individuals and groups of people, each with their own desires and emotions and motives. There can and will be slight differences in outcome, but they will continue to be blown by the winds of money power, ideological power, militant power, and zealotry power. It just do happens that there is a confluence of benefit resulting from a pretty singular direction, and we mostly understand and recognize that.

[Luther Blissett]

On a more physical level, maybe the bones that we've been thrown, like spoken support for equality, can be analog for the bones that a Paul Ryan could throw: continued subjugation of blacks and Latinos, continuation of the war on drugs, killing foreigners, etc. The current is largely the same, but small emotional eddies form to enforce cultural divisions and keeping the working and non-working poor and middle classes fighting along imaginary boundaries.

The main difference being that the Overton Window ensures that the desires of the left are largely lip service.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Damn, Nate Silver can f'ing write. Thanks for that link, lupercal.

[ninakat]

Bonfire of the Vanities: Robert Parry and the Red Mist of Partisanship
Tuesday, 07 August 2012

Over the decades, Robert Parry has done yeoman service in exposing the vast criminality of the American state. From the foul bloodwork of American power in Central America to the treasonous machinations of the Iran-Contra scheme to the long, corrupt, murderous history of the Bush crime family, Parry has broken many important stories and brought much "lost history" -- the title of his best book -- to light. I have drawn on his work frequently, and learned a great deal from it.

Therefore it is extremely dispiriting to read his recent bitter blasts (here and here) at any and all of those "on the left" who might even contemplate refusing to support Barack Obama for re-election. Such people, he tells us, are vain, preening perfectionists who care more for their own self-righteousness than the fate of the world. Indeed, "leftists" who have refused to support the Democratic candidate -- no matter who he is, no matter what he has done -- are complicit, we’re told, in all the atrocities perpetrated by Republican presidents since 1968.

(Apparently, no Democratic president has ever perpetrated any atrocities; they are just "imperfect" politicians who might sometimes "do some rotten things" but always "fewer rotten things than the other guy.")

Parry believes he is preaching a tough, gritty doctrine of "moral ambiguity." What he is in fact advocating is the bleakest moral nihilism. To Parry, the structure of American power -- the corrupt, corporatized, militarized system built and sustained by both major parties -- cannot be challenged. Not even passively, not even internally, for Parry scorns those who simply refuse to vote almost as harshly as those who commit the unpardonable sin: voting for a third party. No, if you do not take an active role in supporting this brutal engine of war and injustice by voting for a Democrat, then it is you who are immoral.

You must support this system. It is the only moral choice. What’s more, to be truly moral, to acquit yourself of the charge of vanity and frivolity, to escape complicity in government crimes, you must support the Democrat. If the Democratic president orders the "extrajudicial" murder of American citizens, you must support him. If he chairs death squad meetings in the White House every week, checking off names of men to be murdered without charge or trial, you must support him. If he commits mass murder with robot drones on defenseless villages around the world, you must support him. If he imprisons and prosecutes whistleblowers and investigative journalists more than any other president in history, you must support him. If he cages and abuses and tortures a young soldier who sought only to stop atrocities and save the nation’s honor, you must support him. If he "surges" a pointless war of aggression and occupation in a ravaged land and expands that war into the territory of a supposed ally, you must support him. If he sends troops and special ops and drones and assassins into country after country, fomenting wars, bankrolling militias, and engineering coups, you must support him. If he throws open the nation's coastal waters to rampant drilling by the profiteers who are devouring and despoiling the earth, you must support him. If he declares his eagerness to do what no Republican president has ever dared to do -- slash Social Security and Medicare -- you must support him.

For Robert Parry, blinded by the red mist of partisanship, there is literally nothing -- nothing -- that a Democratic candidate can do to forfeit the support of "the left." He can even kill a 16-year-old American boy -- kill him, rip him to shreds with a missile fired by a coddled coward thousands of miles away -- and you must support him. And, again, if you do not support him, if you do not support all this, then you are the problem. You are enabling evil.

Given this wildly askew moral compass, what would Parry make of that great American refusenik, Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay taxes to support a deadly militarist adventure in Mexico and the government-sanctioned system of slavery, and whose thoughts on civil disobedience and disengagement with evil inspired Tolstoy and Gandhi? Thoreau said: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

What would Parry say to that? “Enough of your vain moral posturing, Thoreau. Forget the Mexican War; get out there and support James K. Polk. He’s a Democrat, for god’s sake! Do you want someone worse to get in there? It’s a disgrace not to associate yourself with this government!”

II.
Parry’s “logic” is breathtakingly, heartbreakingly faulty. Perhaps that’s not surprising; after all, partisanship is the sworn enemy of logic, of objective reasoning, of clear thinking. But what is surprising, given Parry’s decades of deep-delving in the mines of politics and history, is how wrong he is on the “savvy” realpolitik he espouses, and his wanton misreading of history.

Parry rails against the “left” for not giving enough support to the Democrats in elections of 1968, 1980 and 2000. If these fastidious perfectionists hadn’t tried to “punish” the “imperfect” Democratic candidates in the those crucial years, the nation and the world would have been spared much suffering, we are told.

Well, maybe so, maybe not. This kind of ahistorical speculation is pointless in the extreme. If Hitler had been run over by a Vienna streetcar in 1919, then perhaps the world would have been a better place; or perhaps someone even worse would have come along. You can’t unring the bell of historical events – or tell what other tunes might have chimed in their place.

But even on a surface level, Parry’s analysis fails. He seems to think that the “left’s” desertion of the Democrats in 1968 gave the presidency to Richard Nixon and prolonged the Vietnam War. It was not the “left” that abandoned the Democrats that year; it was the millions of ordinary Americans who had only four years before given Lyndon Johnson the biggest electoral mandate in history up to that time. If every leftist in the country had stayed home (and of course the overwhelming majority of them did not, and almost all of them voted for Hubert H. Humphrey), the Democrats still would have lost. Parry, astonishingly, forgets the presence of George Wallace in the race (and race is the operative word here). Wallace’s pro-segregation campaign took five states from the Democrats’ formerly “solid South” and won 10 million votes, almost all of them from Democratic constituencies. Even if every “leftist” had been burning with fervor for HHH, no Democrat could have survived such a blow to the party’s base.

What’s more, the real abandonment of the party that year came not from disaffected leftists, but from the Democrat’s own leader: LBJ, who simply dumped the party, and the presidency, out of hurt feelings at being challenged in the primaries. He didn’t stand up and fight for his social programs and Civil Rights measures, he didn’t end the war (which Parry tells us he was “seriously” contemplating – and which he could have done with a snap of his fingers). Nor did he give more than the most tepid support to Humphrey until the very end of the campaign, when he knew it was too late. He just quit and walked away, with the nation reeling in turmoil from the war he had escalated, and from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. If any one person could be said to have given us Richard Nixon, it was LBJ.

Parry also seems to think that if Jimmy Carter had not been “abandoned” by “leftists" in 1980, in his second term he would have not kept supporting the Afghan religious extremists he himself had loosed on the Soviets (to the world’s everlasting betterment, as we see each day around us). Or that Carter would not have continued supporting murderous Latin American dictatorships and surrogate wars in Africa as he had done throughout his term. Or that he wouldn’t have continued the massive arms build-up he had launched, or continued saber-rattling at the Soviets, or proclaiming the American right to launch pre-emptive war if anyone threatened the vicious tyrants in the Middle East who supplied us with oil. And so on and on. (For more, see here.)

But neither was Carter abandoned by ‘leftists’ to any significant degree. He too lost the votes of millions of ordinary Americans who had supported him four years previously. The third-party “spoiler,” Republican-turned-Independent John Anderson, ended up with less than 7 percent of the vote, with polls showing his meager numbers of supporters split equally between Democrats and Republicans. Carter lost primarily because of a poor economy (not helped by his avowedly conservative economic policies), his own tepid ineptitude, and because of the Iran hostage crisis -- which occurred after his boneheaded mismanagement of the American reaction to the Iranian revolution, including his decision to allow the ousted Shah into the United States, and other measures which aided the revolution’s most radical elements and undercut the secular moderates at every turn. (A practice that has been faithfully followed by every American president since.)

As for 2000, Gore actually won that election, of course, which moots Parry’s point about leftist lethargy robbing worthy Dems of the big brass ring. Of course, the corrupt system that Parry urges us to preserve by continuing to legitimize its perpetrators with our votes did take the presidency away from Gore – or rather, Gore meekly allowed them to take it without pursuing the constitutional challenge he could have made in Congress. And even though my family’s tenuous connection to Gore goes back a long way – I first met him when my father introduced the young Congressional candidate around our town during his first run for elective office, and my cousin once worked as his press aide – I have to say that Gore, as Bill Clinton’s very active vice president, had his hand in a number of activities that might conceivably make even the most acquiescent “leftist” hesitate just a teeny bit. But let’s let his distant cousin, Gore Vidal, tell it (from The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001):

“In order to be re-elected in 1996, the Clinton-Gore administration adopted a series of right-wing Republican, even protofascist, programs, with lots more prisons, death penalties, harassment of the poor, cries of terrorism, and implicitly, control by government over the citizenry.”

Gore’s tenure at the top also saw the stripping of the financial controls on high finance – a surrender of Democratic (not to mention democratic) principles that ushered in the casino royale that led to the current – and increasingly permanent – economic crisis. And there was also the little matter of the deaths of at least 500,000 children from the US-UK sanctions on Iraq. (And half a million – a vast mountain of child corpses – is just what the Clinton-Gore administration were happy to admit to on national television, to show how tough and savvy they were. The real figure is certainly much higher.)

Would Gore, who didn’t flinch at amassing that mountain of corpses, have launched a war against Iraq, as Bush – who, again, was given the presidency not by “leftists” but by a corrupt Supreme Court rife with partisan (and financial) conflicts of interest – did? Who knows? But we do know that it was the Clinton-Gore administration that signed bills formally committing the United States to “regime change” in Iraq. And Gore did pick the fanatical neo-con warmonger Joe Lieberman as his VP nominee. Gore had always aligned himself with the “Scoop Jackson” militarist wing of the party, unlike this father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr., who sacrificed his political career by publicly opposing the Vietnam War. Vidal again:

Alone, I believe, among the usually war-minded Southern legislators, Albert Sr. spoke out against the long idiocy of the Vietnam War. Essentially, populists don’t like foreign wars, particularly in lands that they know nothing of and for no demonstrable goals. For exercising good judgment, Albert Sr. was defeated in 1970 by an opponent who used the familiar line that he was ‘out of touch with the voters of Tennessee. If this was true, the voters, supremely misled by three administrations, were seriously out of touch with reality. ….

The classic Gores are against foreign military adventures. It was here that Al Jr. broke with tradition when he was one of only ten Democratic senators to support George [H.W.] Bush’s Persian Gulf caper [in 1991]; before that, he had approved Reagan’s Grenada invasion and Libyan strikes.

Gore also went to the Vietnam War his father had opposed – albeit just for a short resume-building, non-combat tour as a military journalist.

None of this is to exonerate the Republicans of the monstrous crimes they have most assuredly committed –and/or continued – during their turns at the top of the bipartisan helter-skelter. It is simply to note what the historical record clearly shows: first, that lack of ‘leftist’ support did not cost the Democrats the presidency in any of these years. And second, that the Democrats’ own crimes and atrocities and follies are part and parcel of a system of corporatist/militarist rule that has become so abominable that no one can without disgrace be associated with it. To see this clearly and say it plainly is not “vanity” or “perfectionism.” It is reality. And to deny this, distort it, and denounce those who no longer wish to legitimize it with their votes is not a courageous grappling with “moral ambiguity;” it is a self-infliction of moral blindness.

III.
And I think this is Parry’s main problem: he still doesn’t see – or can’t quite believe – what is going on right in front of his eyes. He thinks we have some kind of normal politics in some kind of normal nation. He can’t seem to grasp that a bipartisan system that has wrought the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children and a million more Iraqis in a war of aggression; that has killed countless thousands of Afghans in a pointless, atrocity-ridden, deeply corrupt occupation; that operates a global death squad – out of the White House, directed by the president himself; that kidnaps and tortures innocent people and then protects the torturers; that prosecutes truth-tellers and investigative reporters – like Robert Parry – who expose state crimes; that gorges its wealthy, greedy, above-the-law elites with tax cuts and bailouts and war profits and privileges without end while sharpening its bipartisan knives to gut the last, frayed remnants of the social safety net, is a system that has gone far beyond “moral ambiguity” and “imperfection” and “lesser evilism.” It is itself a product and producer of evil.


Parry says there are no viable alternative parties to this double-headed beast. And he is right. He says there are no popular movements out there right now “that can significantly alter government policies strictly through civil disobedience or via protests in the streets.” And he is right. Therefore what is left to us, at the present moment, in this election, but the power of refusal? (Whether this is exercised by “throwing your vote away” on a third party or absenting yourself entirely from the legitimization and normalization of imperial monstrosity.) Where is the dishonor, the vanity in such a stance, in refusing to accept and affirm mass murder, repression, corruption and injustice in an implacable system that offers no other choices?

Would Parry have told Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Boris Pasternak or Josef Brodsky or other Soviet dissidents that they should not have disassociated themselves from the implacable system they confronted? “You should join the Party, Aleksandr, you must work within the system. That’s the only way we’ll see real change.” Perhaps Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst of the White Rose should have stifled their concerns about the “imperfections” of the German government and sought the path of “lesser evilism” instead, working to advance, say, Albert Speer or Herman Goring or some other figure who might have “done some rotten things” but “fewer rotten things than the other guy.”

Yes, I know the United States in 2012 is not the USSR or Hitler’s Germany. And Parry would doubtless say, “Of course they were right to disassociate themselves from such monstrous systems.” But where do you draw the line? How much evil is acceptable? Is there a certain number of victims that a system must reach before one is allowed to disengage from it honorably and morally? To murder six million in death camps or millions in purges is obviously unacceptable; but to kill 500,000 children – is that OK? A million innocent people in a war of aggression – is that beyond the pale? Or can you work with that, can you accommodate that, should you swallow these mountains of dead, washing them down with a big swig of moral ambiguity?

Romney might well prove to be a “worse” president than Obama. (Although Parry does not address the realpolitik argument that a Romney victory would likely wake the ‘left’ from its slumber and cause it to oppose heinous crimes and vicious policies – aggressive war, murder programs, safety net slashing – that it is now happily supporting because a Democrat is doing them.) But that is not the issue. The issue is whether or not one gives legitimacy and justification to a brutal and unjust system by actively supporting and empowering it – and thus perpetuating its bipartisan evils far into the future.

Robert Parry says we should do this. He says: if you don’t support one murderer, the other murderer (or rather, would-be murderer, since Obama has actually directed death squads and drone attacks that have killed hundreds of innocent people, including American children, while Romney is still just hoping to do so) might be worse. To choose one murderer over another murderer is the only moral choice open to us, Parry says. To refuse to cooperate with evil – as Tolstoy did, as Solzhenitsyn did, as Sophie Scholl, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King did – is pointless, perfectionist, vain. That’s what Robert Parry evidently believes.

But with all due respect to Parry and his valuable body of work, I disagree. On this, I will take my stand with Thoreau. I refuse to give this evil my assent.

[justdrew]

hate to go into this again but, the fact remains we would have avoided Bush entirely had Florida Nader voters just held their nose and voted for Gore. Then gone right back to agitating. Instead they felt they had to make an empty symbolic gesture, while right-wing voters have no problem voting for the republican, this forces democratic Presidents to make horrible political decisions (See Obama) in order to have ANY chance of winning, because they know they can't count on a wide base.

I'd rather we had some sort of ranked choice voting, but in the absence of that we have no moral choice but to vote for the lesser of evils. It sucks, but it's the game we're stuck with for now.

We've all seen how the "center" has been pushed to the right. It COULD have been pushed to the left had "all hands on deck" been voting for Democrats. and the quality of those democrats would have been increasing rather than decreasing.

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

Is Making a Protest Vote in Presidential Elections a Vanity Choice?
August 3, 2012 | Consortium News / By Robert Parry

My recent article, “The Vanity of Perfectionism,” has stirred up some anger, in part, because of my choice of the word “vanity” to describe some behavior that I have witnessed on the American Left in people who sit out presidential elections or cast ballots for third-party candidates who have no chance of winning.

So, let me explain what I was driving at. The central point of the article was that Americans, especially on the Left, need to get realistic about elections and stop using them as opportunities to express disappointment, anger or even personal morality. Through elections, Americans are the only ones who can select our national leaders, albeit in a limited fashion.

The rest of the world’s people have no say in who’s going to run the most powerful nation on earth. Only we can, at least to the extent permitted in the age of Citizens United. The main thing we can still do is stop the more dangerous major-party candidate from gaining control of the executive powers of the United States, including the commander-in-chief authority and the nuclear codes, not small things.

So, when we treat elections as if they are our moment to express ourselves, rather than to mitigate the damage that a U.S. president might inflict on the world, we are behaving selfishly, in my view. That’s why I used the word “vanity.” U.S. elections should not be primarily about us.

U.S. elections should really be about others – those people who are likely to feel the brunt of American power – Iraqis and Iranians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, Vietnamese and Cambodians, Palestinians and Syrians, etc., etc. Elections also should be about future generations and the environment.

Whether we like it or not, the choice this year looks to be between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. People were free to run in the primaries to challenge these guys and, indeed, Romney faced a fairly large field of Republicans whom he defeated. Progressives could have challenged Obama but basically chose not to.

I believe it is now the duty of American voters to assess these two candidates and decide which one is likely to inflict less harm on the planet and its people. One of them might even do some good. We can hope.

If you do your research and decide that Romney is that guy, then vote for him. If it’s Obama, vote for him. (Before you make your decision, I would recommend that you read Romney’s book, No Apology, a full-throated neocon manifesto, which he claims that he wrote himself.)

In my view, everything else that Americans do – throwing away their votes on third parties or sitting out the election – are acts of vanity. Maybe it’s moralistic vanity or intellectual vanity or some other kind of vanity, but it is vanity. It has no realistic effect other than to make the person feel good.

I’ve known people who say they have always voted for Ralph Nader or some other third-party candidate. Thus, they say, they are not responsible for whatever the United States does to other countries. But that attitude, too, is vanity.

Instead of doing something practical to mitigate the harm that the U.S. does in the world – by voting for the person who might be less likely to overuse the U.S. military or who might restrain the emission of greenhouse gases – these folks sit on the sidelines basking in their perfection. They won’t make a call.

The hard decision is to support the imperfect candidate who has a real chance to win and who surely will do some rotten things but likely fewer rotten things than the other guy – and might even make some improvements.

I know that doesn’t “feel” as satisfying. One has to enter a morally ambiguous world. But that it is the world where many innocent people can be saved from horrible deaths (though not all) and where possibly actions can be taken to ensure that future generations are left a planet that is still habitable or at least with the worst effects of global warming avoided.

Has That Technique Ever Worked?

Though the choice of the word “vanity” may have been the most controversial part of my article, the bulk of it addressed another issue. Has the Left’s recurring practice of rejecting flawed Democratic candidates actually done any good? Was it preferable for Richard Nixon to defeat Hubert Humphrey; Ronald Reagan to beat Jimmy Carter; and George W. Bush to elbow past Al Gore to the White House?

If the Left’s tendency to punish these imperfect Democrats for their transgressions had led to some positive result, then the argument could be made that more than vanity was involved here, that the effect of causing some Democrats to lose was to make later Democrats more progressive and thus more favorable to the Left. Or maybe that the Left is on its way to building a viable third party that can win nationally.

But any examination of those three case studies – Elections 1968, 1980 and 2000 – would lead to a conclusion that whatever practical goals that some on the Left had in mind were not advanced by the Democratic defeat. The Democrats did not become more progressive, rather they shifted more to the center.

All three Republican presidents – Nixon, Reagan and Bush-43 – extended or started wars that their Democratic rivals might have ended or avoided. Those elections – plus congressional outcomes in 1980, 1994 and 2010 – also bolstered the Right and helped consolidate anti-progressive attitudes on domestic and foreign policies.

More than four decades after 1968 and a dozen years after 2000, there is still no left-wing third party that can do more than play the role of spoiler.

Yet, if there has been no positive practical result from these electoral tactics in the past – and there is no reasonable expectation for the future – then what’s the point of repeating them? There’s the old saying that one definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

Nor, by the way, is there a popular movement that can significantly alter government policies strictly through civil disobedience or via protests in the streets – with all due respect to Occupy Wall Street. So, what’s up here?

The only explanation that I can come up with for throwing away a vote on a third-party candidate or not voting for “the lesser evil” is that such a choice represents a personal expression of anger or disappointment. And I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s right to feel those emotions. Given the recent history, it’s hard not to.

But – when some lives can be saved, when some wars can be averted and when the planet can possibly be spared from ecological destruction – the true moral imperative, in my view, is to engage in the imperfect process of voting for the major-party candidate who seems more likely than the other one to do those things.

To ignore that imperative, I’m sorry to say, is an act of vanity.

The Vanity of Perfectionism
by Robert Parry | July 28, 2012 - 11:44am

Some Americans view elections as a time to express their disappointment or even their anger at the shortcomings of the major party candidates closest to their own positions, a tendency particularly noticeable on the Left. In recent decades, this behavior has contributed to a string of Democratic defeats at the presidential level – Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Al Gore in 2000 – as well as key setbacks in Congress in 1980, 1994 and 2010.

And, with its disproportionate prevalence on the American Left, this voting pattern now threatens to cost Barack Obama a second term. Some on the Left feel no compunction about aiding in Obama’s defeat even if it means installing Mitt Romney, an unabashed one-percenter in the White House.

Romney also would likely be accompanied by a Republican-controlled Congress with a mandate to complete the dismantling of the New Deal at home and, abroad, to extend the Afghan War and possibly start a new war with Iran. So the question is: should politics be an expression of your feelings or your expectation of consequences?

For the past 40-plus years, this “lesser-evil” debate has been fought primarily on the Left in America. By contrast, the Right tends to challenge Republican candidates in primaries but then lines up behind the party nominees whoever they are.

Progressives have shown less determination to fight for control of the Democratic Party, preferring instead to vote for third-party candidates or simply express their displeasure by sitting out November elections.

While brushing aside alarms about the dangers from the Republicans, many progressives instead focus on the failures and misdeeds of the Democrats. Humphrey was too slow in opposing the Vietnam War; Carter shifted too much to the center; Gore supported the NAFTA trade agreement and military intervention in Yugoslavia; and Obama continued prosecuting the “war on terror” (albeit by a different name and in a more targeted fashion) and didn’t do enough to enact progressive priorities.

Much Worse?

While there is surely merit in all these complaints, the other side of the debate would note – from a progressive perspective — that the Republican alternative is often worse, sometimes much worse.

Indeed, one way to view this question is to ask: What might the world look like if the “lesser-evil” Democrat had prevailed in those earlier elections? What if Richard Nixon had lost in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1980, and George W. Bush in 2000? Would Americans and the people of the planet be better off?

We now know, for instance, that in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson was serious about negotiating an end to the Vietnam War and was closing in on that objective. The evidence is also overwhelming that Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s back to sabotage the peace talks, denying Vice President Humphrey a last-minute boost and enabling Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory.

Nixon then continued the Vietnam War for four more years, while infusing U.S. politics with his paranoid win-at-all-cost poison.

Though many progressives in 1968 may have felt justified in expressing their anger at Johnson and Humphrey by boycotting the Democratic campaign, the practical effect of that behavior was to turn the U.S. government over to a dangerous individual, Nixon, whose policies not only extended the unimaginable horror across Southeast Asia but helped overthrow Chile’s democratic government in 1973 and unleashed a spasm of right-wing terror across Latin America.

For all his faults on the Vietnam War, Humphrey would have supported Johnson’s efforts to bring the war to a close quickly and would have worked to refocus the U.S. government on domestic priorities, like poverty and racism. Humphrey had long been a stalwart for civil rights and economic fairness. The United States also would have been spared the Watergate scandal and the ugly way it changed American politics.

Anger at Carter

In 1980, many progressives were angry with President Carter for shifting the Democratic Party toward the center, a trend that prompted a primary challenge from Sen. Edward Kennedy.

After defeating Kennedy, Carter had trouble rallying the Left behind him heading into the fall election against Ronald Reagan (whose campaign apparently had learned some of Nixon’s old tricks and undercut Carter’s efforts to negotiate freedom for 52 Americans held hostage in Iran).

It was common to think then – and it is conventional wisdom now – that Carter was an inept president who lacked a grand vision and over-emphasized issues like alternative energy, human rights, arms control with the Soviets, and peace in the Middle East.

In retrospect, however, a Carter second term could have proved crucial in weaning Americans from their dependence on fossil fuels, restraining right-wing repression in Latin America and elsewhere, pushing nuclear non-proliferation, and pressuring Israel to reach a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

In 1980, the anti-Carter intensity on the Right was driven by those same priorities. Carter was a threat to Big Oil which wanted nothing to do with alternative energy, a threat to Cold Warriors who wanted to heat up international tensions (though the Soviet Union was in a steep decline), and a threat to the Likud’s strategy of blocking a Palestinian state by moving more and more Jewish settlers onto the West Bank.

The election of Ronald Reagan – along with the Republican victory in the Senate – sent the United States off on a very different course than the one Carter had charted.

Reagan more than halved the top marginal income tax rate for the rich; he expanded the military budget even as the Soviets were seeking detente; he created a gigantic federal deficit; he smashed unions; he slashed federal regulations, including on financial institutions; he gutted Carter’s programs for alternative energy and reversed environmental policies; he collaborated with death squads across Latin America and in Africa; he vastly expanded U.S. support for Islamic fundamentalists fighting a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan; he looked the other way as Pakistan developed a nuclear bomb; and he put Middle East peace on the backburner as Israel bolstered the West Bank settlements and invaded Lebanon.

Ronald Reagan also imposed a new orthodoxy on the way journalists, scholars and politicians could talk about the United States. Whereas the 1970s offered a brief window for looking back honestly at the many wrongful acts committed by the U.S. government, the 1980s saw an enforced “patriotism” that frowned on – as Reagan’s UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick put it – those who would “blame America first.” Critical voices were marginalized, controversialized and effectively silenced.

While it’s impossible to chart alternative histories precisely, it is safe to say that many of America’s problems were made worse by Reagan’s presidency.

He began the systematic savaging of the Great Middle Class, widening the gap between the rich and everyone else; he sharply increased the national debt; he pushed the deregulation frenzy on Wall Street; he continued America’s dependence on fossil fuels and disdained environmental safeguards; he alienated Washington from much of the Western Hemisphere by supporting state terror across Central America; he transformed Afghanistan into a home for Islamic terrorism; he permitted nuclear proliferation in South Asia; he allowed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to fester.

It is perhaps a commentary on how Reagan neutered the U.S. press corps and duped the American people that he is remembered as one of the greatest U.S. presidents. To this day, almost no one in Washington’s mainstream dares to speak critically about the real effect that Reagan’s presidency had on the country and the world.

Bush v. Gore

In 2000, the United States was at another crossroads. Eight years under President Bill Clinton had addressed some of the problems left behind by 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

For instance, by slightly raising the top marginal tax rate on the rich, restraining spending and riding the wave of the new Internet economy, Clinton had succeeded in eliminating the federal deficit. By the end of Clinton’s presidency – with employment expanding and poverty shrinking – government budget estimates foresaw the complete elimination of the national debt.

But Clinton had upset the American Left by continuing many of the tough-guy policies from the Reagan-Bush-41 era. Clinton kept in place harsh sanctions against Iraq and intervened militarily in sectarian clashes in the old Yugoslavia. He also had worked with Republicans to limit welfare, to expand trade agreements and to loosen more regulations on the banking system.

So, when his Vice President Al Gore faced off against Texas Gov. George W. Bush, some on the Left decided it was time to teach those “triangulating” Democrats a lesson. However, instead of challenging Gore for the Democratic Party nomination – in the way that the Right has reshaped the Republican Party – these progressives supported Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and ignored warnings that this strategy might doom Gore’s election chances.

Nader encouraged this result by telling young and impressionable voters that Gore was “Tweedle-dee” to Bush’s “Tweedle-dum.” Nader ran on the slogan, “not a dime’s worth of difference” between Bush and Gore. On the Left, many activists appeared persuaded that there really were no meaningful distinctions between Bush and Gore.

However, in retrospect, there were key differences. Experienced on the world stage, Gore was alert to the terror threat from al-Qaeda, while Bush pooh-poohed the danger. He blew off a CIA warning in August 2001 and then sat dumbstruck in a second-grade classroom reading “The Pet Goat” on 9/11 when two hijacked commercial jets struck the Twin Towers in New York and another headed toward the Pentagon.

Bush then followed the advice of neoconservative advisers – rushing through a retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan and letting al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden slip away – so the U.S. military could move on to invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The Iraq invasion and resulting chaos led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – and ironically helped al-Qaeda establish a foothold in the Sunni areas of Iraq. Meanwhile, Bush’s neglect of the Afghan conflict allowed al-Qaeda’s allies, the Taliban, to stage a comeback there.

If Gore had been president, it’s very possible 9/11 never would have happened and – even if it did – Gore would have almost surely responded in a less blunderbuss way. Gore also had a strong record for respecting the constitutional rights of Americans and the principles of international law, while Bush treated both as inconveniencies to be ignored or overridden.

Bush also enacted more tax cuts weighted toward the wealthy, blowing a huge hole in the federal budget and hollowing out more of the middle class. Bush appointed two more right-wing justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, key votes in the 2010 Citizens United case, which opened the floodgates to special interest spending to buy elections.

But perhaps most significantly, Gore cared about the looming existential crisis of global warming, while Bush treated the issue with disdain, thus contributing to the hostility now expressed by right-wingers who depict the science on climate change as a myth and as part of some grand socialist conspiracy.

If the planet continues toward climate devastation – with ice caps melting, sea levels rising and droughts disrupting food supplies – a key turning point will have been the presidency of George W. Bush, rather than the presidency of Al Gore.

While many institutions and individuals share the blame for installing Bush in the White House, part of the responsibility must fall on the Green Party and Ralph Nader, who helped Bush get close enough to steal Florida’s electoral votes and thus the presidency. The bitter irony is that the one major mark that the American Green Party may have on history is enabling an anti-environmental president to put the world on course for ecological destruction.

Yes, I know Nader and the Green Party deny all responsibility for this catastrophe; they point their fingers at everybody else including Al Gore. But their arguments are sophistry. The truth is they ignored many timely warnings about the danger that ultimately came to pass; they knew they were playing chicken with the planet; their reckless words (about “Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee” and “not a dime’s worth of difference”) were unsafe at any speed.

Obama’s Reelection?

Which brings us to 2012 and what many on the Left insist is another meaningless election between two politicians whose only differences are cosmetic. We are told again that it doesn’t matter whether President Obama gets a second term or if Mitt Romney and the Tea-Party Republicans take full control of the U.S. government.

We’re told that elections simply don’t matter, even if these right-wing Republicans will likely gut what’s left of the New Deal and the Great Society; will further concentrate wealth at the top; will free Wall Street from even the modest burden of the Dodd-Frank regulations; will drive more middle-class families into poverty; will let thousands of Americans die prematurely without health care; will put neocons firmly back in charge of U.S. foreign policy with plans to extend the Afghan War and start possible new wars in Syria and Iran.

After all, Barack Obama has not been perfect on these issues. He has blood on his own hands. He has made many compromises. He is far from the socialist that some Tea Partiers claim he is. I’m often told by progressives that they are “disappointed” in Obama as if their feelings are the most important part of this equation.

It does seem that some on the Left will only be satisfied with perfection. They act more like critics whose job is to find fault with a politician than as participants in a political process. “Obama should have done this; Obama should have done that.”

Indeed, some behave as if what’s truly important is that they be recognized as staking out the “perfect” – the most uncompromising – position, regardless of how impractical that stance might be or what harmful side effects it might have.

This vanity of perfectionism sometimes takes precedence even if it may help empower an unstable or incompetent U.S. leader who would implement horribly destructive policies that could kill millions.

What some on the Left fail to grasp is that who is elected President of the United States – even with the deep gradations of gray among the major-party choices – can mean life or death to people around the planet, even life or death for the planet itself.

So, this choice over how to vote should not be a decision based upon personal feelings or one’s flattering desire for a perfect self-image. The American people are hiring the person who will be entrusted with the nuclear codes, who will have the power to start wars, who will decide whether to take action on global warming.

Real people in other countries live or die by such U.S. decisions. Even if some Americans feel that voting for some imperfect candidate is too degrading, too compromising, the decision can have devastating consequences for others.

Yes, there is an element of triage here, since neither Obama nor Romney would be a pacifist. Some people will die regardless of who’s elected, but there can be an order of magnitude difference. There is a distinction between targeted killings of al-Qaeda operatives (even with “collateral” deaths of people in the vicinity) and the mass slaughter inflicted by fullscale war.

At minimum, it would seem to be the duty of American voters to minimize the damage that their country might inflict on people in faraway lands. Even if perfection is not an option, one of the choices is likely to cause fewer deaths and wreak less havoc than the other. It may be impossible to know the future but history can be some guide.

While this responsibility to mitigate harm to the world may seem unsatisfying to Americans who yearn for something much closer to moral purity – and who don’t want to sully their consciences with such moral relativism – this lesser-evilism does have a profoundly moral basis.

Just stop and ask: as imperfect as Humphrey, Carter and Gore were, would the world be in a better place if they had been elected in 1968, 1980 and 2000, respectively.

Would there likely be fewer people living in poverty in the United States or dying without health care? Would American politics be more democratic and less corrupt than it is today? Would the environment be less endangered? Would science and reason be disparaged the way they are today?

Would a lot of innocent Vietnamese, Cambodians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Afghans, Iraqis and people from many other countries be alive today? Might they have escaped horrible deaths, rapes and maiming? While no one can say for sure, you can make a reasonable guess.

So, in the end, what’s more important? What’s more moral? The vanity of perfectionism when perfection is not an option or doing the imperfect thing to save some innocent lives – and maybe save the planet?

[kelley]

we also could have avoided bush entirely if gore had shown some fucking balls, and demanded what was his. ripping the nation to shreds twelve years ago might have actually accomplished something.

[justdrew]

we also could have avoided bush entirely if gore had shown some fucking balls, and demanded what was his. ripping the nation to shreds twelve years ago might have actually accomplished something.

yeah, Gore took bad advice, I agree it should have been a bloody fight if need be, counting the under-votes was all that was needed. but he didn't KNOW that then, and meanwhile every voice of the bullshit mainstream media shouting to concede. We don't know even now how it would have gone down, and what was he supposed to do? How could he compel corrupt republican Florida officials to do their jobs honestly? He couldn't. All he could have done was instigate street fights that would have decided nothing. Maybe if he'd had smarter lawyers from day one.

[jingofever]

Romney would pay less than 1% in taxes under Ryan plan.

[justdrew]

I'll trust this guys political analysis a bit more than "some guy" named chris floyd.



detail

[StarmanSkye]

There's more that's deeply wrong with the 'vote for lesser of two evils' that can easily be discussed in a condensed 20 pages of critical analysis. But chief among the arguments against such a calculated guesstimate of 'lesser harm' that is entirely subjective and ignores the harsh reality that the 2-face/single party charade of American faux-democracy disguises deeply-buried parapolitical & rogue interests that the votes can't properly anticipate or know. At best, as Parry himself acknoweldges, its all a matter of 'possibility' that he claims should demand our full participation, abandoningn our moral imperative within a genuine citizen-ruled society to ONLY vote for a a candidate who represents our interests. His lesser-of-two-evils is itself the moral abdication and betrayal that he insists is ours for not fully supporting a democratic president we revile & despise, who DOES NOT reflect our interests. Nothing could be more straightforward than that.

Frankly, I'm flabbergasted & astounded at Parry's inelegant conceits. From a deeply-principled, courageous scholar and champion for critical thinking whose work has ripped the facade off the serial liesm frauds, abuses, treachery, venality, brutality & hypoctrisy off American foreign policy, I can only hypothesize that as a political strategist Parry's thinking is dangerously flawed & inconsistent with the obloigations we have to vote our conscience. Among the things Parry overlooks is the absolute FACT that American politics is a rigged game in which the master strategists are banking on being able to manipulate the popular & electoral vote to the absolute degree they do, in part BECAUSE they appeal to the flawed-thinking rationale of lesser-evil voting. So Parry is advocating we GO ALONG with this corrupt, anti-democratic, compromised system which will end up perpetuating it indefinitely, inexorably making more and greater abuses inevitable. HOW can we possibly impact the broken, unrepresentative system by continuing to act as if it actually works?

I'm REALLY, Really disappointed in Parry's thesis here.

Like Thoreau, I too will NOT lend my support to a candidate and system I despise, which I have absolutrely NO confidence in or respect for. To do otherwise would be to mock the democratic ideals of citizen-rule in a state that honours our universal civil and human rights, and which requires us foremost to be true to ourselves.

In a similiar kind of 2nd guessing 'possibility' that Parry champions, perhaps one or two decades of refusing to participate in corrupt elections where the candidates are hand-selected for us by elite corporate, military & financial interests will precipitate the crisis needed for radical change -- THEN we might have a real chance to revise the system and make it accountable to REAL citizen-representative candidates of moral integrity, vision & understanding -- so in the long run, the MAJOR changes that are needed to end wasteful, exploitive wars of priveleged ruling-elite advantage, to provide equitable just and compassionate reforms, and help heal our ravaged ecosphere, quite possibly WILL become reality and prevent the very crises and travesties that Parry is hopeful our lesser-evil voting might only minimize.

Problem is, Parry's prescription has less long-shot chance of really making a difference than the political crisis of a voting-strike would -- at least, that's how I see it. So to be true to my principles, I CANNOT pretend to know which among two fake candidates will do less damage in the long run. The simple choice is the clear one -- support someone you can believe in -- or else our broken democracy will NEVER be anything but a sham to enable the corporate-plutocracy to continue in even worse, less responsible, more destructive ways to our shame and misery.