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.