Question the Political Binary, Even if Settling For the Lesser Evil

For the past several months, as soon as Bernie Sanders was out of the race, I’ve seen a lot of fear politics playing out on liberal social media turf. Any left wing voter who questions their vote, who considers an alternative to both Clinton and Trump, who even impugns Clinton too loudly is aggressively shut down by people desperately propping up the Clinton side of the election binary. The Clinton defenders--as much as some of them insist they don’t like her either or wish there weren’t this broken two-party system--are shunting the blame for her potentially losing the election onto third-party voters, rather than acknowledging Clinton’s own significant weaknesses as a candidate or the general inability of the center-left to field a candidate who truly addresses and reflects the concerns of disadvantaged and disillusioned people in this country.

This disproportionate attack on third-party voters finds a parallel in those who claim that they would love to champion stronger left-wing policies--just not now. “Third parties are a nice idea and we’d love to have something other than the Democrats and Republicans to choose from,” people say, “but this is too high-stakes an election to risk it.”

Perhaps it’s not so easy to be glib and high-minded about democracy and the importance of freely voting your conscience when a presidency as toxic and concretely dangerous as Trump’s is a possibility. This is a valid opinion, and so instead of grounding the anti-Clinton-pressure argument in the principle of democracy and voting, consider it in the context of policy and pragmatism.

Many people contend that voting third party is an impractical and harmful privilege only available to people who would not be directly and negatively affected by Trump’s horrific policies, but this argument can silence the experiences and voices of people who would also be directly and negatively impacted by Clinton’s imperialist neoliberalism. The left is not naive to the danger that Trump poses, but neither can we afford to be immune to the threat that is Clinton. Trump would be disastrous domestically, for rights and safety at home for marginalized people. And his foreign policy is...not much of a policy, as far as I can tell. But Clinton’s foreign policy promises increased US military entrenchment in regions where we only do more damage and engender more blowback, and from her talk of no-fly zones to her direct brinkmanship, she is stoking tensions with Russia to a height not witnessed, according to the New York Times of all sources, for three decades. There are practical and safety-based arguments for strongly opposing Clinton--yes, even and perhaps especially if you also vote for her. And it is a privilege in itself to express concern for the people who will suffer under Trump while ignoring the non-US people who will suffer under Clinton.

One prevalent scare tactic is the story that’s been going around since that fateful 2000 election, the story that says that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was responsible for George Bush’s (s)election as president by suctioning votes away from Al Gore.

While it is true that had 30,000-odd Democrats voted for Gore instead of Nader, Gore would have won, it is equally true that if even a small fraction of 190,000 Democrats had voted for Gore instead of George Bush, Gore would also have won. Furthermore, if people formerly incarcerated for felonies retained their voting rights in the state of Florida, Gore could also have won. It’s the same story for if there had been no butterfly ballot in Palm Beach county, deceiving people into voting for far-right candidates when they meant to support Gore.

But potential third-party voters take all of the heat, which could just as deservingly be distributed to Democrats who voted Republican or to policies that disenfranchised ex-felons and employed misleading ballots. In numbers alone, it is plainly shown that Democrats voting for Bush deprived Gore of far more votes than did Democrats voting for Nader. Yet it is people opting out of the binary electoral system who are blamed for Bush’s presidency. (Not to mention the vast ranks of Democrats who did not vote at all, who could also be credited, if we want to play that game, with Bush’s presidency.) (Not to mention either that the lament over Gore losing the election is ironic when his policies and statements are critically examined and reveal imperialist and hawkish positions on Iraq, for example. Gore would not have been Bush, but let's not kid ourselves--he was no saint either.)

Also, consider this: although Trump garners a fairly sizable percentage of the popular vote, the electoral college is likely to grant him far fewer votes--some polls indicate that he could lose the electoral college by hundreds of votes. It is not impossible that Trump will become president, but it isn’t highly likely, and the votes people cast will do relatively little to sway that, since it comes down to the Clinton-friendly electoral college in the end.

Fear is the biggest commodity the US both exports and consumes at home, and it has never done much good. As Jill Stein has said, “The politics of fear have given us everything we’ve ever been afraid of.”

We might have learned by now that the status quo is not the safe choice, that toeing the line of our binary traditional system will not produce a better or just outcome. But by refusing to think outside the boxes of Democratic and Republican, we relegate ourselves to begging for the powers that be to throw us a few more crumbs, rather than working to advance an alternative party for which protections of the rights of people and the planet are not concessions, but cornerstones.

And to those who say, “Well, I have to vote for Clinton to stop Trump, but I do want a third party!” -- well, all right: vote for Clinton, but you better be there working for that third party as she reneges on her promises. We can’t afford to keep on choosing the option that makes us less safe, that whittles away our social programs, incarcerates us, sends us to war, sends our jobs overseas, deepens inequality, and treats the public ever more as a menace to be suppressed and controlled--no matter which major party these policies trickle down from. We can’t afford to say we wish there were better options even while we strap ourselves onto the same Democratic dead horse.

In the Gulf South, people have suffered the failure of the Bush administration to help affected communities recover from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and subsequently, the Obama administration’s similar failure after the BP deep-sea oil blowout. People witnessed Bush’s $700 billion stimulus plan during the economic crisis followed by Obama’s ($800 billion), both of which bailed out industry and Wall Street while leaving people to languish. The Everyman of the United States has spent years learning that working people are eternally lodged between the proverbial rock and hard place, the two corporate parties, which have screwed people over with impunity and regardless of pseudo-populist rhetoric.

No matter who you do vote for: the real fight and the real change will come not from who you vote for to occupy the White House, but how you act afterwards, whether, knowing that neither party presented an appetizing option, you work to build an alternative you can feel confident voting for next time, or whether you fall back again into fear, defending a candidate you weren’t thrilled about because you believe still that you must throw your weight behind the lesser evil, hoping it might deign to act someday as a mediocre good.