Voting for the Lesser Evil is Easier Said Than Done

(Shutterstock)

Let me head off at least some possible outrage from the title: when I say "evil," I mean real-world harm. This includes both from intended and unintended consequences. So if you want to argue that of course Donald Trump and the Republicans are more evil morally speaking than Kamala Harris and the Democrats, that's fine, but it's not what I'm trying to dispute here. That being noted, I'll proceed.

Every four years, there's an argument among what passes for the left in the United States: whether to vote for the Democratic nominee or not. It's one I've weighed in on previously, and that I've seen rehashed about a million times on Twitter(-Now-X). Obviously, people who actually like and are enthusiastic about the Democrats have a vested interest in saying that you should vote for them, which is fine. But there are plenty of people who don't like the Democrats, or will at least acknowledge there are reasons not to like them, and still advocate for supporting them as the "lesser evil."

This makes intuitive sense: someone is going to win the election, and it is, realistically, going to be either the Democrat or Republican. You can choose not to vote for either one, but one will still end up winning either way and you'll be forced to live with the consequences thereof. So why not choose the one that's less odious, hold your nose, and vote for them? That way, you can at least reduce the chance that the worse of the two options wins, right?

There are a number of responses to this, many of which I'll say aren't particularly convincing. For instance, a common refrain is that the lesser evil is still evil. That may be true, but they're also lesser — which seems important. If I had to choose which disease to be infected with, naturally I'd pick the one that's supposed to be milder. "They're both diseases" isn't a convincing argument against that.

There's also the argument that, by voting for the Democrats, you're thereby endorsing whatever bad things they may do while in office — and even endorsing the whole, lousy system that sticks us with the choice between two bad parties. I don't find either of these arguments very convincing, either. It makes sense to view voting on an exclusively tactical level. It's not a declaration of love or approval, it's just a way to make it marginally more likely that the candidate you're voting for wins. And given that a large portion of the electorate sits out every election, it's not like not voting has shown any success as a way to disrupt the status quo.

So, why am I skeptical of lesser-evil voting? Is it because I think the Democrats' policies are as bad as the Republicans'? No — if I were in the unfortunate situation of choosing either the Democrats or Republicans to be given permanent power over the US government, I suppose I would have to pick the Democrats. The case for preferring a more socially liberal party that favors more generous (if still fair too stingy) social programs seems pretty clear, even if there are a million things about that party that range from disappointing to genuinely indefensible.

But there's something I think usually ends up under-discussed in these debates. We don't get to choose who's going to have power forever, we get to choose who will have power for a few years. And the reality is, the knock-on effects of that choice aren't that easy to predict! Sure, we can have at least some idea of what the next four years might look like. But what about after that? Since the end of World War II, American politics has been sort of pendular: with only one exception (Reagan's two terms and George H.W. Bush's one), no party has held the White House for longer than eight consecutive years. Whichever party wins the presidency tends to lose seats in Congress two years later. The presidents who have suffered the worst first-term midterm losses have usually gone on to get reelected. Americans vote in one party, get sick of them after a while, then try the other one. Rinse and repeat.

Let's look at some concrete examples here. In 1976, Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford and the Democrats took the White House. But after four years of malaise, he lost to Ronald Reagan — a decidedly more conservative Republican than Ford. John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon, narrowly, in 1960. But then he got assassinated in an event that traumatized the nation, and LBJ came into office and escalated the war in Vietnam, and the New Deal coalition fractured, and in 1968 the Democrats lost the White House to... Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992, but his victory ended up indirectly giving us the Democratic nominees (Al Gore and Hillary Clinton) whose uninspiring campaigns would allow George W. Bush and Donald Trump to win the presidency. Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012, but ended up playing a major role in getting Hillary Clinton the nomination in 2016 and in handing the presidency to Trump.  

In any of these instances, we don't know what might have happened had things gone another way. Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been worse. But if that's all you can say, that's not exactly a resounding argument for voting for the Democrats! Look at where we are right now, even. Four years ago, it was the most important thing in the world to beat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden so we could stop fascism. We did it. Now... it's the most important thing in the world to beat Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris so we can stop fascism. What happens after that? History tells us the odds aren't good for a third Democratic term in a row. But even if they pull that off, the pendulum will swing back the other way. Who will end up being the president after Harris? An even older, more unhinged Donald Trump? One of his sons? A Nazi Twitch streamer? Or will the GOP revert to a more "respectable" conservatism, like we had before. You know, the kind that gave us the Iraq War, and Guantanamo Bay, and union-busting, and Reaganomics...

This is not go full Rust Cohle and say that time is a flat circle or whatever. I'm not arguing that it never makes sense to vote for a Democrat. If Bernie Sanders had gotten the nomination four years ago, I still think it would have made sense to vote for him. It could have completely backfired, but there was a chance he might have actually broken us out of the stasis we seem to be in. If you elect someone who really shifts the so-called Overton window — the way FDR did (for the better) and Reagan did (for the worse) — that has long-lasting effects by pushing both parties to adjust their positions. The next Republican after FDR, Eisenhower, accepted the New Deal. The next Democratic president after Reagan, Clinton, continued deregulation and gutted welfare. (Obviously, this wasn't just because FDR or Reagan won in either case. There were deeper structural forces at work in society. But the existence of those is just another argument against the importance of one party winning any particular election.)

I guess if Kamala Harris seems like a modern-day FDR or a liberal answer to Reagan, that's all the more reason to vote for her. But that's not what I'm seeing, personally. I think Biden and the Democratic Party have moved somewhat away from the neoliberalism of the Clinton and Obama presidencies (mostly out of necessity — Democrats have been bleeding support from blue collar voters, and the young voters they need are deeply disillusioned with the status quo). But there's not much to be excited for. Harris is busily scurrying away from past left-leaning positions she took, and the Democrats are clearly tacking right on immigration. They're also markedly worse on foreign policy, overall, than during the Obama years. In 2008, it might have been genuinely plausible to think Obama could be a pivotal figure in the way FDR and Reagan were. Thinking that about Kamala Harris in 2024 is just wishcasting. 

Lesser-evil voting, I should note, also has a real long-term vulnerability: if one party knows they can count on your votes as long as the other one is worse, they have a pretty strong incentive to make sure the other party is worse. This hasn't gone unnoticed! In both this election cycle and the last one, Democratic groups have actually spent money to boost MAGA-aligned Republicans in their primary races, on the theory that they'll be more beatable in the general election. Not great!

I've been careful to make a general argument here, which means until now I've not brought up Gaza. But that does undeniably complicate things even more. Sorry, but "the other guy also supports it" doesn't really cut it as a justification for voting for a candidate who explicitly intends to keep enabling a genocide. I genuinely, sincerely do not know what to do with a "progressive" party that looks at the horror show in Gaza and decides the thing to do is keep sending weapons to Israel. I mean... Jesus Christ. Are we really going to send the message that that's acceptable? Israel's been lurching further and further right for years, and what it's doing in Gaza will not be the last act of mass murder it commits against the Palestinians if it's allowed to. It'd be nice to have one party that has an actual incentive to stop them from trying to exterminate entire civilian populations. If Kamala Harris wins without making some major concession to left-wing critics of Biden's Israel policy, I'm more than a little concerned that incentive won't exist. On the other hand, though, if Harris does come out in favor of an arms embargo, I would readily advocate voting for her over Trump, regardless of what other shortcomings she might have.

One of the most predictable rejoinders to any argument against voting Democrat is that the person making it is privileged, and the argument comes from a place of privilege. I personally hate privilege discourse (at this point enough forms of “privilege” have been identified that probably every person on Earth is a member of at least one “privileged” group, which doesn’t make much sense to me), but if that’s the framing you want to use, then any discussion for or against voting Democrat takes place in the context of privilege. The people most likely to be killed by American bombs get absolutely zero say in who the next president will be. Vote however you want and make whatever arguments you want, but the ability to do so makes you privileged in a way that Gazans, for instance, aren’t — and being angrier at people who won’t vote Democrat than you are at the Democrats for the way they’ve wielded power is the ultimate sign of privilege.

None of this is really intended as an argument to persuade anyone else not to vote Democratic, or an attack on anyone who chooses to do so. I sincerely don’t care how other people vote, and I dislike vote-shaming no matter which way it goes (I personally have been on the receiving end of it both from liberals who think I should vote Democratic and leftists who think I shouldn’t, in different elections). But if we have to have this discussion every four years, we might as well be honest with ourselves about it.

Kamala Harris’ VP Pick Is the Best We Could Have Hoped For

(Joe Lamberti/AP Photo)

As I’m writing, the news just broke earlier this morning that Kamala Harris is picking Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. This is good news! A big part of why it’s good news, perhaps the primary reason even, is because it means we avoided the most likely alternative: Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who has analogized pro-Palestine protestors to the KKK and supported punishing companies that boycott Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank. That he was one of the top two contenders is… not great. Nor is the fact that, reportedly, it was Shapiro’s personal ambition that ultimately cost him a spot on the ticket, rather than his virulently anti-Palestinian record. But whatever the case, Shapiro will not be on the ticket and Walz will, and that’s a win.

Branko Marcetic of Jacobin did, I think, a pretty good job covering what Walz has done as governor, and why he’s a solid choice for VP. With the help of Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature, some genuinely significant reforms have been made in Minnesota: universal free school meals, free public college tuition for families making under $80,000 a year, the most generous child tax credit in the country, major investments in education and child care, a ban on noncompete clauses in worker contracts, and paid family and medical leave, among other measures. Even with a divided state legislature, Walz managed to get through “one of the toughest wage theft laws in the country[.]” It’s not a very high bar, but from what I’ve gathered Walz may genuinely be one of the best, if not the single best, sitting governor in the country. Additionally, Walz has a greater personal familiarity with China than many other US politicians, and has emphasized the importance of US-China cooperation on issues like climate change — a positive contrast with a lot of the anti-China rhetoric coming from both parties.

He also seems closer to being a normal guy than most politicians at the national level. He is the first person to be on a Democratic presidential ticket without having attended law school since Jimmy Carter, for instance. He was a high school geography teacher and football coach before he got into politics. He doesn’t even own stock. Photos of him at the state fair, for instance, don’t feel like the desperate attempts of one of the They Live aliens to appear normal, which is more than can be said for many other politicians. 

This does appear to be a much better choice than Obama made in 2008, for instance, when he “balanced the ticket” by choosing Joe Biden — an establishment politician with a heinous record which he has since added considerably to. Balancing her image as a California liberal, Harris managed to pick someone who both has a sort of heartland appeal and isn’t some utterly depressing concession to the party’s “moderate” establishment. 

But if Tim Walz is the best we could have realistically hoped for, that’s still a testament to the shortcomings of the Democratic Party. Returning to Marcetic’s article, he notes:

To be sure, there were limits to his progressivism. Walz, proud of having never used his veto, first deployed it… for the most ignominious of reasons: to kill a minimum wage and worker protection bill for Uber and Lyft drivers, and halt a separate pair of bills giving nurses a say in staffing levels (which was watered down to a student loan forgiveness measure for nurses) and creating a health care affordability board that could penalize providers and insurers for too-high costs. Walz vetoed both after businesses threatened to pull out or withdraw investment from the state.

Despite significant action on climate, Walz’s approval of the Line 3 oil pipeline and tolerance toward pollution by farmers have earned him criticism from environmental groups. And, as governor when the murder of George Floyd occurred, he presided over a heavy-handed response to protests and ultimately enacted only limited police reforms before pouring more money into police departments. Back when he served in Congress, Walz also introduced a resolution calling for the government to quickly relinquish its ownership interests in GM and Chrysler (acquired as part of the auto bailout) and to not “unduly intercede” in any of the companies’ management decisions, staking out a firmly pro-capitalist, anti-socialist stance on the issue. 

Walz was, in fact, a relatively moderate congressman who shifted leftward after becoming governor. That he did so is good, of course, but it does raise the question of whether that stance will last once he’s out of Minnesota state politics and back in D.C. Minnesota, it’s worth noting, has the longest ongoing streak of voting for the Democrat in presidential elections, and is the only state Ronald Reagan failed to carry both times. So not exactly a microcosm of American politics as a whole.

It is hard not to reminisce back to a time that was just four and a half years ago but feels, politically, like a different era completely. In late 2019 and early 2020, the left’s (apparently realistic) hope was that Bernie Sanders would be the Democratic nominee. Now, less than half a decade later, it’s a victory when the number two spot on the ticket goes to a politician who, whatever his merits, is hardly a part of the Bernie Sanders/Squad wing of the Democratic Party. 

It would also be remiss to not bring up Israel/Palestine here. Walz has certainly struck a more conciliatory tone than Josh Shapiro, praising the uncommitted vote movement during the Democratic primaries as “civically engaged.” But neither he nor Harris has said anything to indicate they would represent some major break with Biden’s policies. It should be the most basic moral litmus test imaginable at this point to take the position that Bernie Sanders has (belatedly) taken: an end to arms transfers to Israel while the slaughter in Gaza continues. But it’s a test the Democratic presidential ticket has yet to pass. And I’m not holding my breath. 

With all the good vibes and enthusiasm going on around the Democratic ticket right now, it’s also hard not to think back to 2008 and how that ended up turning out. Depending on whether you’re a liberal or someone further left (like me), you’ll probably lay the blame in different ways. But pretty much all of us can agree that Hope and Change didn’t quite pan out how we were dreaming of. 

The fact that Harris picked Walz over Shapiro is good. If it signals that the era of Clinton-Obama neoliberalism is over, that’s even better. But let’s not let the desperation for some good news in the world of politics tee things up for more disappointment and heartbreak.

Do We Really Have to Exaggerate How Bad Trump Is?

(Doug Mills/The New York Times, edited by me)

The latest Trump micro-scandal* centers, as usual, on a stupid thing he said. Addressing “beautiful Christians” during a speech in Florida, he said: “[G]et out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it any more… in four years, you don't have to vote again.” The reaction was swift and predictable: everyone from random posters on X-formerly-Twitter to the Harris campaign agreed this was a “vow to end democracy.” The actual context, in my reading, makes that far from clear (and in fact unlikely). The bit in question came as Trump was talking about the importance of winning the election to “save America,” and Trump concluded: “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote [in four years].” 

So, really, this was another typical bit of Trump bullshit: “I’ll fix everything so good you won’t even have to worry about voting again, just get out and do it this once!” A ridiculous thing to promise, obviously, but not exactly a declaration that he’ll be installing himself as president-for-life. It’s easy to grant this while admitting Trump and the movement behind him are bad for democracy and that Trump himself has no fondness for the rules and norms of the democratic process. But if you say what I just said, you’re liable to be scolded for whitewashing Trump’s comments, trying to twist them into something less alarming than they are. This is not up for debate. Trump said he would end democracy, because he is a dangerous fascist who will destroy the constitution. You are obligated to be Terrified.

So my question is, simply, why do we have to keep doing this? A few months ago it was the “bloodbath” comment — in context, plainly about what would supposedly happen to the economy if Biden was reelected but predictably framed instead as a threat of actual violence. Before that it was how he said he’d be a dictator on day one (an obviously trollish, typically incoherent remark about how he’d “only” be a dictator for the first day so we could drill and build the wall, or something). The narrative has completely calcified at this point: Trump has promised he will rule as a tyrant and abolish elections if he wins. If we fuck this up, it’s all over. Our Democracy Is At Stake. 

The thing is, Trump was president for four years and didn’t transform America into the Fourth Reich. The typical response to that reality is that this time is different. How? I’m not sure if it’s just been memory-holed at this point, but he actually made many extravagant, often disturbing, promises during the 2016 campaign and didn’t follow through while in office. He said he would build a 1,000-mile border wall and make Mexico pay for it. He said he would deport every single undocumented immigrant. He said he would shut down mosques. He said he would put in place libel laws that would let him retaliate against negative press coverage. He said he would bring back the country’s manufacturing sector. He said he would lock up Hillary Clinton. None of that happened. So why the histrionics about everything he says now? Why the need to take his words out of context so they sound scarier than they actually are?

The most coherent response I’ve seen to this is that this time, Trump will be surrounded by people loyal to him, so there won’t be any check on his authoritarian ambitions. But overthrowing American democracy and installing fascism would also require a certain degree of competence and organizational skill. So far the one person Trump has picked for his prospective second administration is J.D. Vance, who… doesn’t exactly strike me a modern-day Heinrich Himmler. Given how Trump’s campaign is currently floundering, it also seems obvious they didn’t plan for Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee despite the fact it was the most obvious contingency they could have anticipated. Not exactly a high degree of competence! Trump is a dumb, lazy narcissist, and the people most loyal to him tend to be somewhat less than brilliant tacticians.

If you’re a convinced Democratic partisan and you’re still reading at this point, you’re likely seething at the way I’m soft-pedaling how bad Trump is. But the thing is, I think Trump is plenty bad! There are a lot of good reasons not to want him to return to power! Maybe instead of arguing that this time Trump would institute actual fascism and it will be So Much Worse than his first presidency, we could talk more about the things he actually did during that presidency. This would include:

• Signing an expensive tax law that gave a massive handout to the wealthy
• Pulling out of the Paris climate accords and rolling back a litany of environmental protections 
• Appointing three of the Supreme Court justices responsible for killing Roe v. Wade
• Starting a trade war with China that hurt the economy and failed to stop offshoring 
• Deregulating the banking industry 
• Instituting a cruel and punitive family separation policy at the border

All of these things are bad! They are also generally not popular, which might explain in part why Trump had a consistently sub-par approval rating throughout his presidency. A second Trump presidency could certainly be worse, but even if it’s more of the same, that’s bad enough. So why exaggerate and engage in wild speculation when you could just point to the undeniable realities here?

It would be one thing if the fevered anti-Trump rhetoric scared people away from voting for him (still not a good thing, given that dishonesty is generally wrong, but at least a pragmatic one). But I don’t think it has that effect. Right or wrong, I think the average normie American can’t imagine things changing all that much from one president to another. So warning that Trump is going to transform the country into Nazi America rings false. And, worse, if they notice that Trump’s statements are getting taken out of context, it sort of undermines all the criticism of Trump for his habitual lying (“look, everybody does it!”).

The same, by the way, goes for the much-discussed Project 2025. I haven’t read the project’s 920-page policy document, but I’m guessing you and most people talking about it haven’t either. From what I can gather it’s basically a super-conservative wishlist: ultra-Reaganite economic policies, reactionary social policies, and a reorganization of the executive branch to make it easier for a Republican president to carry out his agenda. That all sucks! But what it doesn’t amount to is a plan to make The Handmaid’s Tale a reality, or a modern-day Mein Kampf. Nor do we have to pretend that Trump is actually going to carry out every part of a plan he’s explicitly distanced himself from, and that includes (among other things) criminalizing porn.

So, whence cometh the need to exaggerate how bad this all is when the facts are bad enough? I don’t think it speaks to either sincere confusion or cynical dishonesty on the part of most people doing it. What I think it really speaks to is how much we’re all craving a sense of greater purpose. It’s hard to look at the state of the world and have much optimism about the future. So, if there’s not much good to hope for, we might as well exaggerate the scale of the bad that we’re fighting against. Blowing this election up into a world-historic battle against the forces of evil is certainly more psychologically satisfying than admitting it’s a choice between two strains of the same depressing ideology — one that flatly refuses to envision a world beyond profits, and big corporations, and American empire, and competition with China, and arbitrary inequalities enforced by violence. 

To that extent, it’s understandable to build Trump and the Republicans up into a movement that threatens to bring Christian Fascism to America, rather than just more of the same depressing shit we’ve all had enough of. But as someone whose own ideology is diametrically opposed to the GOP’s, it’s still become completely exhausting — largely because it often serves as an excuse to try and browbeat the left into voting for whoever has a D next to their name this time. But more important than its being tiresome, it’s not productive, and it’s not healthy. When one side has lost all touch with reality, it doesn’t help anything for the other to follow suit.

*In the time since I started writing this post, the micro-scandal in question has already been arguably succeeded by one over Trump saying Kamala Harris “became” a Black person. As noted, he says a lot of stupid shit!

This Is (Almost) The End Biden’s Political Career Deserves

(Drew Angerer/Getty via the New Yorker)

On July 21st, Joe Biden finally acknowledged what a majority of Americans have known for years: he is too old to be president for another term. Had he sooner recognized that being an octogenarian with a consistently lousy approval rating made him a poor candidate, there could have been an actual primary to determine his successor. As it is, the odds seem to be on Kamala Harris being more or less handed the nomination, rubber-stamped by the party insiders at August’s Democratic National Convention. 

Biden stepping down puts his own party in an unprecedented, and hardly desirable, position. It was a decision that came only after a terrible debate performance, public calls for Biden to drop out by many Democratic politicians, and polling that consistently showed him well behind Trump, both nationally and in key swing states. All of that makes it particularly rich that a number of liberal commentators have praised it as some selfless act of political heroism. If the Democrats lose to Trump in November — as well they might — no single person will be more to blame than Joe Biden.

It’s a fitting end to an awful career: a defeated, embittered Biden with his approval rating in the thirties, forced to step down by his own party because he’s too unpopular and too inarticulate for them to take a chance on. The first incumbent president since LBJ not to run for a second term. The only more appropriate end would have been for Biden to stay in and lose, cementing his legacy as an unpopular one-termer whose ego brought Donald Trump back to power. But as much as Biden might deserve that, the rest of us don’t deserve the havoc of another Trump term — though, again, we might still get it anyway. 

Why do I render such a harsh judgment on Joe Biden, of all people? Let’s count the reasons. Biden’s national political career started in the Senate, where he served for decades. His record there was so long and abominable that a list of his Greatest Hits should suffice. There was the time he led the liberal opposition to desegregation busing, working with ardent racist James Eastland to do so. Or when he supported tough-on-crime legislation to the right of what the Reagan administration wanted. Or when he helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Or when, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, he not only supported the Iraq War but invited a slate of witnesses whose rampant falsehoods helped justify it. Or the disgusting bankruptcy bill he helped foist on us, making it more difficult for people drowning in debt (including medical debt) to discharge it. 

Biden had presidential aspirations from early on. He first ran in the campaign for the 1988 election but self-sabotaged when he got caught plagiarizing a campaign speech and telling blatant lies about his life and academic record. Incidentally, this sort of reckless dishonesty and outright stupidity is a consistent throughline in Biden’s life, from the time he failed a class in law school for plagiarism to the plentiful, easily disproven lies he’s told in recent years. He ran again in 2008 and flopped again, but got enough attention to end up getting tapped by Obama to be the half of the ticket that wouldn’t scare racist whites away. That, of course, paved the way to his 2020 bid — which nearly ended in another failure, and would have if the Democratic Establishment hadn’t been desperate to keep Bernie Sanders from the nomination.

Then we come to Biden’s presidency. As I noted before, he is probably, on economic policy, the best president of my lifetime, or even since the end of the New Deal era. It says little either way, and one shouldn’t overstate Biden’s differences from his predecessors. We didn’t get a 15-dollar-an-hour minimum wage. We didn’t get a public health insurance option. We didn’t get $10,000 apiece in student loan forgiveness — the clumsy, means-tested way Biden went about it gave the courts plenty of time to block the program before a single cent was forgiven. The liberal narrative has been that the economy is doing swimmingly, but most people disagree, and there are plenty of indicators to show that the working class isn’t thriving. “Better” is something, but it still isn’t good enough.

And, of course, Biden’s active assistance in Israel’s genocidal violence against Gaza overshadows the rest of his middling presidency at this point. Spitting in the face of many of the young voters, left-leaning voters, Muslim voters, and Arab voters who helped put him in the White House, Biden has spent the better part of a year providing material assistance and diplomatic cover for a hard-right government to carry out mass murder. The Lancet estimates, conservatively, that the death toll from the violence so far may end being 186,000 or more. To add insult to injury, Biden has let himself be used and humiliated by Benjamin Netanyahu, who clearly favors Trump in the upcoming election. Biden’s role in the Gaza genocide is more shameful than anything from the Obama or even Trump years. 

And so, now that he has announced he won’t run for reelection, we see Biden’s horrific political career drawing to a close. He is an exemplary case of the Banality of Evil — a man who, through a combination of ego, careerism, and stupidity, has helped unleash untold suffering across his country and the world. In a better world, instead of a debate stage, he and Donald Trump might have shared a cell.

SCOTUS' Presidential Immunity Ruling Punches a Hole Through Democrat's Favorite Excuse to Do Nothing

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite via The Orange County Register)

In case you weren’t already aware, the Supreme Court recently ruled on Trump v. United States (the case charging Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election). Trump’s team had argued that he had absolute immunity for any official acts as president, while the government argued that he had no such immunity. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, landed in between, stating that “the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” and “at least presumptive[]” immunity for all official acts. Roberts elaborates:

At a minimum, the President must therefore be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 754.

I have to agree with much of the chattering class here that this ruling is Not Good. Presidents have long enjoyed a sort of de facto immunity (consider how many charges Reagan faced for Iran-Contra or that George W. Bush faced for… everything). Codifying it like this is not a positive development. Given the actions of American presidents current and past, the thought that they might be “apprehensive that criminal penalties may befall” them and the prospect of “prosecutions of ex-Presidents… becom[ing] routine” strike me as appealing, rather than something to avoid. But that’s one reason I’ll probably never be on the Supreme Court.

Still, this is what the court ruled. And much as we may dislike it, I can think of one interesting effect of this ruling: it punches a huge hole in one of the Democrats’ favorite excuses to do nothing. When a Democratic president fails to deliver results, the typical line is that it’s someone else’s fault. Don’t think the Affordable Care Act went far enough? Don’t blame Obama, blame Congress. Mad that Biden hasn’t erased your student loan debt? He tried, blame the Supreme Court. These excuses are already unconvincing, if one really wants to get into the details. But this ruling makes them even flimsier.

Faced with crises like climate change and runaway inequality, the president could just… do something. Don’t wait on Congress, where good ideas go to die. Don’t let the courts get in your way. Just act. The Supreme Court just said that you’re permanently and absolutely immune from prosecution for any acts that fall within the core and exclusive powers of the presidency, which would include orders as Commander-in-Chief of the military. Even when we get outside of those core, exclusive powers, you still enjoy at least presumptive immunity for all official acts. Seems like something to take advantage of!

Say you, the president, do something your opponents don’t like. What are they going to do? Impeach you? As long as you’ve got 34 senators in your corner, impeachment means nothing. The last president who got impeached is currently leading in the polls for this November’s election. What if the courts block you? Ignore them—it’s been done before. Judicial review isn’t actually in the constitution anywhere. 

Or, hey, if climate change and economic exploitation don’t strike you as urgent enough to merit this approach, how about Saving Democracy? We keep hearing that democracy is on the brink, that if this election goes the wrong way we could plunge into fascism. I’ve made it clear I think this is overblown. But if you don’t, what excuse can you make for Biden not to take full advantage of the power the Supreme Court just handed him? That it would set a bad precedent? The whole reason Trump is supposed to be so scary is that he doesn't care about precedents! We’re already hearing about how, should he win again, he’s sure to abuse his authority even more with the license the Supreme Court has given him. 

So what else is there? The concern that the voters won’t like it? I have a feeling that if the president, say, unilaterally issued a new round of relief checks, they might find it in their hearts to forgive that abuse of executive authority. Aside from that, the only reason to hold back is for fear of provoking an actual coup. That’s something to consider, but it would still seem to allow for a pretty substantial degree of latitude. 

The president enjoys a pretty sweeping set of emergency powers he can invoke at any time (Trump did so to redirect funding to his border wall). The fact Biden hasn’t taken greater advantage of these already is indefensible, but now there’s even less excuse. If all of this sounds unprecedented, well, I was under the impression we were living through unprecedented times. So, seriously, put up or shut up. 

The US Lacks a Serious, Functional Political Party

UPI Photos via The Hill

Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 28, 2024

The tweet above was obviously meant to rally support behind Biden after his performance in June’s debate (“dismal” is maybe the adjective I’ve seen used to describe it most often). But for me, it has a different effect. Obama’s reference to his own underwhelming performance in his first debate with Mitt Romney launches me into a sort of Proustian reverie. The year is 2012, Breaking Bad is still in its original run, dubstep is the big musical trend, and we have two remarkably normal choices in the presidential election.

Obama vs. Romney was such a normal, Serious presidential election it’s hard to believe it was that recent. There were plenty of antics in the GOP primary, from Rick Perry forgetting which agencies he wanted to abolish to pizza magnate Herman Cain’s brief stint as frontrunner. But ultimately the Republicans ended up with Romney, the strait-laced, Mormon former governor. He had been sort of a centrist during his governorship in Massachusetts, but had tacked more to the right and chosen arch-fiscal conservative Paul Ryan as his running mate. But there was nothing bizarre or outlandish about the ticket. You could hate Romney and Ryan’s politics, or even hate them as people — and I did both — but on paper they were perfectly reasonable candidates for a serious conservative party to pick.

On the other hand, you had Obama, the incumbent. His presidency had hardly lived up to the hype Candidate Obama generated in 2008, as the banks got bailouts and Bush’s War on Terror rolled on. But it was easy to overlook some of that as Obama shifted back into campaign mode, singing the right notes when it came to economic issues. His gaffe-prone vice president Joe Biden was not much of a factor, except when he managed to mop the floor with Ryan in the vice presidential debate. 

None of this is to say that things were good back then, or even better, really. There’s an accelerationist sort of case to be made that it’s better to have candidates as unappealing and outrageous as the system they represent. But the point is, once you got past the circus that was the GOP primary, both parties did a pretty good job of appearing Serious and Functional. That was the last presidential election, to date, where that was the case.

At first, it looked like the unseriousness and fundamental dysfunction would be a Republican problem. While the party was successfully hijacked in 2016 by Trump and his supporters (who were, in reality, the Republican base all along), the Democrats stuck with a candidate who was far from outlandish. Hillary Clinton was unpopular precisely because she was everything bad that people associate with politicians: an insider, close with Big Business and Wall Street, willing to say one thing in private and another in public. She lost for the same reasons that Mitt Romney lost four years before: both were so “normal,” politician-wise, they were uninspiring and even alienating.

But four years later, the Democrats took a big step toward their own form of unseriousness. In the face of Bernie Sanders’ surge of support and the failure of every other centrist in the race to gain real traction, the establishment lined up behind Biden — despite the fact he had looked to be dead in the water after Iowa and New Hampshire, and had doddered and rambled his way through pretty much every debate performance he’d had. He would have almost certainly lost (in the Electoral College if not the popular vote) had it not been for COVID.

And now, here we are. One candidate is a twice-impeached ex-president and convicted fraudster. The other is an octogenarian with an approval rating in the thirties and obvious signs of cognitive decline. Why the Democrats didn’t ditch Biden matters little. Whether it was because no one could convince him to step aside or because they really felt there was no better alternative, it does not speak well of the Democratic Party’s competence. Even if, after bombing at the first debate, Biden does step aside, that hardly shows that the Democrats have got it together. And, until proven otherwise, I expect our choice in November to be between the white collar criminal reality TV host and the unpopular, frequently incoherent geriatric. And, of course, RFK, Jr. — an antivaxxer with the voice of a goblin and a literally worm-eaten brain.

Again, this isn’t about policy. It’s about the fact that even before you get into questions of policy it should be obvious these are two terrible candidates. Even if you love Biden’s policies, his age and obvious cognitive limits at this point should clearly disqualify him from another term in the White House. Trump was an absurd candidate even in 2016, but at this point the only reason it isn’t flabbergasting that he’ll be the GOP nominee again is that this is the third consecutive time it’s happened. I cannot emphasize enough that, before you even get into The Issues, it should be overwhelmingly clear that neither of these people is a remotely reasonable pick for Leader of the World’s Sole Superpower.

As noted, one could argue this is all for the better, in some sense. Obama spent his eight years in office helping Wall Street reap record profits and blowing brown people to bits with remote-controlled death machines. Romney thought all that was good but wished taxes on the rich were even lower and that we could escalate tensions with Russia and China (one wish he would certainly get, in time). Both were horrible, and the real difference now is that our candidates are more obviously bad choices. Transparency is a virtue of sorts.

But, speaking subjectively, this does not feel good. The debate had some surreally funny moments, such as the golf argument the two got into. But most of it gave me the same feeling I might get watching No Country for Old Men in a room slowly filling up with carbon monoxide — a sort of existential despair mixed with disorientation and nausea. This election is a sight that’s impossible to look away from. But I’d certainly like to.

If Trump and the GOP Are Fascist, This Election Probably Doesn’t Matter Much

 

(CNN)

The debate over whether Donald Trump is a literal fascist has been going on for close to a decade now. It’s one I’ve weighed in on a few times, at first (back in 2015) to argue that he is, then in greater length about half a decade ago, concluding that he’s not a fascist in the academic sense but is in a more casual sense (but that it still may be wise to avoid using that label). I don’t really have any new arguments to make on that front: I still largely agree with what I wrote in 2019.

What I want to discuss here is a particular argument that’s been made with seemingly greater vigor in every election where Trump is on the ballot: that he is, indeed, a fascist, and therefore it’s absolutely crucial to defeat him in this election. If we grant the premise of this argument, it does seem superficially convincing. Fascism is, in fact, very bad — certainly worse than the squishy centrist liberalism the Democrats represent — and it is accordingly very important to keep it from ascending to power. So you should vote for the Democrat, given that they’re the only candidate with a realistic shot of beating the fascist. QED.

The thing is, I think that even if you grant the premise of this argument, the conclusion doesn’t actually follow. In fact, I would argue for the exact opposite conclusion: the outcome of this presidential election (and the last two) probably matters little in the long term and voting Democrat is largely futile if Trump is, indeed, at the head of a genuine fascist movement. 

Calling Trump a fascist is almost by definition to analogize him and his supporters to the major fascist movements of interwar Europe: Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and (debatably) Franco in Spain. So it makes sense to look back the history of these fascist movements and try to take some lessons there. But here’s the thing: people in each of those countries did elect non-fascist (or even anti-fascist) political parties, and it didn’t prevent fascism’s rise to power! 

In the last election before Mussolini marched on Rome, his coalition came in third place and got less than a fifth of the votes cast. When Hitler ran for president of Germany in 1932, he lost soundly, and in Germany’s last free election before World War II the Nazis actually lost seats and ended up with a smaller presence in the Bundestag than the two leading left-wing parties. And in the Spanish election preceding Franco’s coup and the civil war, the left-wing Popular Front came out on top. In each case, the fascists still ended up coming to power. Not shockingly, losing elections didn’t stop the fascists! Franco and Mussolini staged coups and Hitler managed to worm his way into power through political maneuvering that exploited the rivalry between previous chancellors Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. 

One of the centerpieces in the argument that a second Trump term will be worse and more destructive than the first is that he’s assembled a core of operatives who are both competent and loyal enough to put all of his worst plans into effect. But if that’s true, why wouldn’t he use that same cabal to find a non-electoral path to power, like the fascist leaders of old? We’ve spent years hearing about how close we came to… something (I’m never quite sure what) on January 6, 2021. If that “coup attempt” (as it’s been branded) was nearly successful and Trump is now bigger and badder than ever, why would an election loss stop him? 

You could criticize this argument for being defeatist, which is fair enough. So let me qualify it a bit. If you’re voting for Biden just as a dilatory measure, hoping it will buy us some time to implement a long-term plan to keep the fascists at bay, ok. But then what’s the long-term plan? The people most likely to be using this “Trump-is-fascist-so-vote-blue-no-matter-who” argument are (not surprisingly) also pretty likely to argue that Biden’s actually doing an ok job and the Democrats are good already. So what’s your plan, then? If three and a half years of Biden has somehow left us with an even more dangerous, fascist Trump who’s neck and neck with him in national polling, why will four more years of Biden prevent the fascists from coming to power? Sorry to break this one to you, but a broadly unpopular centrist president whose own supporters mostly don’t like him that much sounds like exactly the sort of leader a fascist coup would overthrow. 

As noted, I do not think Trump’s a fascist. I think his brand of racist, socially reactionary conservatism is pretty noxious, but I’m not concerned about this being the last presidential election we ever have (we should be so lucky). However, if I were, my focus probably wouldn’t be on yelling at people online who say they’re not going to vote for Biden. You can blame purity test leftists or the New York Times or Russia for his unpopularity, but even if you’re right, whining isn’t actually a political strategy! And if you really think that the fascists are this close to power in the United States, “vote blue no matter who” really doesn’t cut it as a political strategy, either.

I personally have no intention of voting for Biden. For one thing, I live in a state that Trump carried easily in both 2016 and 2020, and which he’s quite likely to win again, therefore (because of the electoral college) making a vote for Biden totally inconsequential. But even if I lived in a more competitive state I wouldn’t be planning on voting for him. Disgust with his unflagging support of Israel as they decimate Gaza is a strong reason not to, but I also just think Biden’s brand of establishment liberalism has no ability to actually fix problems like climate change and economic inequality, and that (based on election patterns post-WWII) if Biden wins this election some Republican — maybe Trump, maybe someone worse — will win the White House in 2028. 

That being said, I do think there are reasonable arguments you can make in favor of voting for Biden even if they don’t ultimately convince me. It is true that Trump would be as bad or worse on pretty much every issue, certainly including Israel-Palestine, and that on economics Biden probably has the (unimpressive) distinction of being the best president of my lifetime. 

I also think that there’s an argument to be made that the outlook for American democracy, such as it is, is pretty bleak (this argument I happen to wholeheartedly agree with). But Trump is not a fascist who will install himself as president-for-life, and if he were, re-electing Biden would be completely insufficient to stop him. So let’s maybe just take it down a few notches. 

Time Has Proven the Critics Wrong About the Ending of "There Will Be Blood"

(Paramount Vantage via thecinemaarchives.com)

In late 2007, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature-length film premiered: a sprawling, 158-minute epic set during the California oil boom, loosely adapting the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. There Will Be Blood won widespread acclaim for its direction and the performances of leads Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, with Day-Lewis ultimately garnering multiple awards for his portrayal of oil prospector Daniel Plainview. But there was one aspect of the film that earned less than universal appreciation: its finale. Pardon the blatant laziness here but I’m just going to crib a few quotes from Wikipedia’s “reception” section in its article on the movie:

“The scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano ultimately degenerate into a ridiculous burlesque.” (Mick LaSalle in The San Francisco Chronicle)

“There Will Be Blood is not perfect, and in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp.” (Roger Ebert)

“[The final scene] marks the moment when 'There Will Be Blood' stops being a masterpiece and starts being a really good movie. What was grand becomes petty, then overwrought.” (Carla Meyer in the Sacramento Bee)

“[The ending] might not be the very worst scene in the history of recent Oscar-garlanded cinema… but it's perhaps the one most inflated with its own delusional self-importance.“ (Peter Walker in a 2014 blog post in the Guardian looking back on the film)

For those unfamiliar with the movie or just in need of a refresher, I’ll review what actually happens at the end and some necessary background leading up to it (spoilers are inevitable here but also this movie is old enough to drive a car).

Throughout the film, Daniel Plainview has an antagonistic relationship with the less-than-subtly named preacher Eli Sunday (Dano). Plainview purchases the Sunday family’s farm and the area around it (with the exception of William Bandy’s ranch) but reneges on promises to donate money to Eli’s church and let him bless the oil well before drilling began. Later, Bandy agrees to let Plainview’s oil pipeline cross his property on the condition that Plainview repents in Sunday’s church, which offers Sunday the opportunity to humiliate and publicly shame Plainview for his treatment of his deaf son. 

Years later, immediately after Plainview has a final falling out with his now-adult son, Sunday shows up at his mansion as he’s sulking, drunk, in his private bowling alley. Bandy has died, and Sunday offers up the mineral rights to his ranch — the last piece of land in that area left untapped. Before he accepts the offer, Plainview forces Sunday to loudly proclaim that God isn’t real and that he, Eli Sunday, is a false prophet. After Sunday duly completes this self-abasing ritual, Plainview reveals the kicker: he doesn’t want or need the Bandy ranch anymore.

(NB: It’s going to be a little hard to do justice to this final scene in text, but here goes. Or you can just watch it and skip ahead in this blog post a bit). With obvious Schadenfreude, Plainview explains to Sunday that the oil reservoir under the Bandy property has been drained by all the drilling he’s already done on the surrounding land. He then mocks Eli as being just the “afterbirth” to his financially successful twin brother Paul. Sunday, candidly admitting his own desperation, pleads for Plainview to take the lease. Then, in a moment that predictably spawned a million memes and cultural references, a gleeful Daniel Plainview tauntingly compares the situation to if Eli Sunday had a milkshake while Plainview had a straw long enough to reach across the room, summarizing the result thusly: “I… drink… your… milkshake! SRRRRP! I drink it up!”

Like a cat with a mouse, Plainview chases Sunday around the bowling alley, throwing balls that he narrowly dodges. Mockingly (or maybe in a moment of sincere mania), Plainview declares that he is “the Third Revelation… who the Lord has chosen!” Realizing the danger he’s in, Sunday pleads with Plainview to recognize that the two of them are “brothers.” Plainview is unmoved. In a final coup de grace, he clobbers his nemesis to death with a bowling pin. When his butler arrives, Plainview — sitting next to Sunday’s body — tells him simply, “I’m finished.” 

It’s not hard to see why Serious Critics weren’t overly fond of all of this. It is, undoubtedly, over-the-top to the point of being comedic — slapsticky, even. The film’s strange sense of humor (if that’s indeed what it is) makes a few earlier appearances, but Daniel Day-Lewis bellowing about milkshakes and engaging in Tom and Jerry-style antics with Paul Dano is certainly more starkly absurd than anything else in the movie. 

But let’s review what just happened here. Plainview forces Eli Sunday to recant everything he believes in (even if only in front of an empty room), taunts him like a schoolyard bully, toys with him like a predator with its prey, then brutally murders him. This all comes after Plainview has spitefully destroyed his relationship with his only son. It’s an explosive fit of jouissance, to be Lacanian about it: by the end, Sunday may be dead, but Plainview — disheveled, drunk, and caught literally red-handed in the act of murder — seems to have destroyed himself and his own life as well in this act of libidinal violence.  

At first blush, the moral of the story might seem to be the old cliche about how money isn’t everything or something along those lines: if only Daniel Plainview had recognized his relationship with his son was more important and appreciated the spiritual values Eli Sunday preached, he wouldn’t have ended up bitter, alone, and covered in blood in the bowling alley of his cavernous mansion. But this doesn’t really work. Plainview goes out of his way to break off his relationship with his son, even when the latter seems to want them to reconcile. And bashing Eli Sunday’s brains in had nothing to do with money or profit. Plainview could have easily had his cake and eaten it too: patched up his relationship with his now-grown kid and sent Sunday away to deal with his own financial problems, all without losing a cent. Money didn’t drive him to this. So what did?

The answer to that becomes clearer when we understand the system Plainview represents — not simply in an allegorical sense but also the system that he acts as an agent of throughout the story. Daniel Plainview is the archetypal American Capitalist — literally sucking value (in the form of crude oil) out of the world itself and turning it into his own personal fortune through the magic of the marketplace. That in itself is not some groundbreaking insight on my part, of course. The RottenTomatoes consensus for There Will Be Blood describes it as a “sparse and sprawling epic about the underhanded ‘heroes’ of capitalism”.

On the surface, this line of thought might even make it tempting to agree with Carla Meyer, that “the story was so much richer before [the final scenes] – back when it wasn't personal, just business.” But, of course, the idea that there’s some clear line of demarcation between “business” and “personal” is one of those fictions of the capitalist system — a rule that it sets and then constantly violates. 

Daniel Plainview, in fact, consistently violates ostensible tenets of the capitalist order: he attempts to deceive the Sundays by claiming he wants their property for quail hunting, and then fails to pay money that he owes Eli. So much for the sanctity of contract and the prohibition on fraud — two supposed cornerstones of the free market. And, of course, he manages to get the oil out from under the Bandy tract without even bothering to acquire mineral rights for it — legally, perhaps, but in a way that seems to clearly violate the spirit of property ownership if not the letter of it (after all, he himself notoriously analogizes it to stealing Eli Sunday’s milkshake from across the room).

I suppose a True Free Markets™ type libertarian might argue this means Plainview doesn’t really represent capitalism, or rather only represents a corrupted version of it. But if we understand capitalism as a system that is constantly breaking its own rules (wage theft, for instance, dwarfs other forms of robbery), we can see that the corruption is embedded in the system itself. Plainview represents capitalism (particularly in its unvarnished, American form) precisely because he breaks the rules. 

Which brings us back to jouissance. A psychoanalytic term, Encyclopedia Britannica explains it as “an excessive and simultaneously painful kind of enjoyment derived from transgressing the superego’s own prohibitions” — in other words, from breaking your own rules. Capitalism is engaged in a constant game of jouissance then, of transgressing its own prohibitions to extract that extra bit of value — even if it comes with a cost. 

Capitalism is often conceived as a sort of profit-driven machine, devoid of heart or soul. Supporters might call that efficiency, while critics might call it bloodlessness. But Anderson’s film shows us, to the contrary, that There Will Be Blood — not just blood spilt, but all sorts of blood: bad blood, hot blood, cold blood, and in every case, red blood. Which is to say that capitalism is not (only) cold, calculated, and profit-focused. It is also inherently libidinal, driven forward by countless Daniel Plainviews, each with their own god complexes, ambitions, manias, and revenge fantasies.

Eli Sunday, religious charlatan that he may be, does not fit into this capitalist system. His focus on community and heavenly bliss beyond this material world doesn’t jive with the ethic of capitalism (there’s a reason why arch-capitalist Ayn Rand was so hard on religion). His last words, pleading with Plainview to see that the two of them are brothers, show that up to the end he has failed to internalize the worldview of the emerging industrial order. There is no use for a Brotherhood of Man in the marketplace, anymore than the bond between father and son means anything (as we’ve just seen in the previous scene). So Sunday must go, but not before he’s forced to admit that the only god is Mammon. All that is solid melts to air, all that is holy is profaned.

Sunday seals his fate by revealing both weakness and an inability to adapt. Whatever sins he thinks he is confessing to in the exchange that ends with his death, these are the ones that matter. Daniel Plainview, meanwhile, has amassed as great a fortune as he could have dreamt of and drained the Sundays’ property of every drop of crude oil it once stored. The only thing left for him is to engage in an another, final act of destruction, even after it has ceased to be creative. The Daniel Plainview that murders Eli Sunday is the capitalist id, finally untethered completely from its superego: both terrifyingly egomaniacal and cartoonishly over the top, breathtakingly amoral and comedically absurd. Not that we’d ever see anything like this in real life.

(nbcnews.com)

(Side note: this is also why the liberal critiques of Trump fall so flat. You can’t disown the personification of American capitalism while still defending the system itself.)

Did Paul Thomas Anderson have all of this in mind when he made There Will Be Blood? I don’t know. Probably not, but that’s not the point. You don’t need a Lacanian analysis of capitalism to realize there’s something animalistic at its core, no matter how nicely it may be dressed up on the outside.

The same (ultimately self-)destructive tendencies of capitalism are at work all around us. The threat of climate change (both for business and for humanity) hasn’t kept oil from being pumped out of the ground, nor has runaway inequality been stopped in spite of the long-term problems it poses for an economy based on consumer spending. Marx predicted that it would become harder to make money the further capitalism progressed, and history has borne that out. But the appetite of the capitalist beast shows no signs of ebbing. Eventually, destruction — libidinal, gratuitous, and spectacular — will be the only thing left. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bowling pin smashing a human head — forever.

(via Pinterest)

 

Stop Calling Issues "Complicated" As If That Label Means Anything

Take a look at this:

 

It's very doubtful that just by glancing at this calculus problem you're going to know the answer to it. In fact, if you never learned calculus (or, like me, your last calc class was long enough ago that this stuff once again looks like a foreign language to you), you might not even know where to start with it. I think it would be fair enough to describe a problem like this as "complicated." Nonetheless, it does have a right answer (I know because the book I copied it from lists one). 

I'm sure by now you can see where I'm going with this. While the analogy between calculus and social/political issues isn't a perfect one, I think the basic principle still stands: an issue's being "complicated" does not mean it has no right or wrong answer. This might seem obvious, but I think it's worth saying explicitly because "this issue is so complicated" is one of the most popular dodges that I hear (generally from liberals or centrist types) when one wants to avoid coming down clearly on one side or the other. But that's all it is — a dodge.

The big issue this excuse is applied to at the moment is, of course, Israel-Palestine (I don't want to delve too deep into that issue here and my feelings about it shouldn't be hard to guess). But I've heard it applied to plenty of other stuff over the years: NSA spying, drone strikes, even gay marriage back in the day. To some extent, I can forgive it if it's just an excuse for a personal lack of opinion: "I don't really understand this issue that well so I don't want to take a side here." But what's worse is how often it's used to imply that no one could possibly understand the issue well enough to have an unambivalent opinion, that anyone who does must ipso facto actually be the truly ignorant one, and that the way to be genuinely enlightened on said issue is to, Socrates-like, proclaim that the only thing you know is that you know nothing (aside from the fact that this issue is just so complicated). Other times, "it's complicated" is just invoked as a sort of moral fig leaf, serving to dress up one's (controversial but generally status quo-affirming) position as being the mature, sane one to arrive at once you really process all the nuances.

Not for the first time, Matt Yglesias give us an exemplary version of a typical centrist-liberal practice taken to its smuggest possible version:

Crafting a durable peace between Israel and the Palestinians seems like it would be hard. pic.twitter.com/z7WVXxz1N0

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 2, 2024

I've got about 3,000 words on the Palestinian Right of Return and I think the conclusion is going to be "in summary, the Israel/Palestine conflict is difficult to solve."

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 15, 2023

I think part of the appeal of Israel-Palestine is precisely the intractability — you don’t need to ask questions like “is throwing around ‘genocide’ rhetoric bringing us closer or further from a peaceful resolution?” because nobody thinks a peaceful resolution is possible.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 12, 2024

Me and the shy Biden voter fam, stuck between inflation truthers and the “genocide joe” psychos. https://t.co/VfhnLRnSCC

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 8, 2023

If you’re annoyed that coverage of protest tactics is crowding out coverage of the thing your protest was meant to draw attention to, that seems like a poorly organized protest.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 24, 2024

These five tweets do a great job of capturing the entire mindset I'm criticizing here: note how effortlessly we slide from "gee guys this just seems like a real conundrum to me!" to psychoanalyzing the people who refuse to accept the so-called "intractability" of the issue (actually they're so focused on this issue because it's impossible to solve) to talking about them as crazy idiots who are so stupid they can't even do a good job of fighting for their own cause (which is also stupid). While contributing literally nothing of value to the conversation and, by his own admission, getting us zero percent closer to even knowing how to resolve Israel-Palestine, Matt's still able to congratulate himself simply for seeing how dumb everyone else is (because they, unlike him, fail to grasp how complicated this issue really is).

Of course, with Israel-Palestine or any other issue involving millions of people, there are going to be genuine complexities and difficulties. Personally, I wouldn't relish the idea of being appointed to a committee tasked with devising the best practical resolution to the conflict. But the thing is, you don't actually have to have the perfect solution to anything in order to recognize that (1) it is a problem and (2) the current approach to it is not good enough. What's the perfect balance, in the digital age, between protecting individual privacy and using surveillance to prevent terrorism and other crimes? I don't know, but I don't think it's widespread warrantless spying carried out by a government with a history of persecuting "subversives" like Martin Luther King. 

It is actually totally possible to be aware of the complexities (real or imagined) of a situation without becoming totally befuddled and unable to take an unapologetic stance one way or the other. For instance, I'm aware that there was a UN partition plan in 1947 that would have created both a Jewish and an Arab state, but was rejected by Arab leaders. I'm also aware that Yasser Arafat rejected the Israeli offer (supposedly for a Palestinian state) at the 2000 Camp David summit. (I'm also aware of the reasons these events are actually far different than they've been made out to be.) Somehow, that doesn't make tens of thousands of dead Palestinians more palatable to me. 

On this issue and every other one where the "it's complicated" dodge/cover is used, what I really wish is that the people using it would just be more honest. If this isn't an important issue to you, and therefore you wish everyone would just shut up about it, admit that. If you don't want to take a side because you're afraid of offending someone, or because your real loyalty is to a specific politician or party rather than to a set of principles, admit that. Or if you are taking a position that's going to make a lot of people mad, just do it without patting yourself on the back for understanding this "complicated" issue better than your opponents do. I'd respect someone who did any of those things much more than if they used the old, worn-out "this is just so complicated" excuse to try to undermine any moral certainty that can exist about said issue. But to take things back to calculus, I do wish I'd had that response as an option in my high school Calc AB class. It would have definitely saved some time and headaches.