By Aly Kamadia, Editor-In-Chief, iDose
With ‘election day’ racing closer, I thought I would take out a few moments to answer some important questions that iDose readers have sent to us in the past few days.
Before reading this Q&A, I would strongly urge you to read my piece from last week if you haven’t already: Not Voting for Joe Biden is Insane.
And one more thing: Vote, and make sure your family and friends do too. Every voice matters!
Q: I hate Donald Trump. But I dislike Joe Biden. What’s wrong with refusing to vote for either, as a sort of protest to the system?
Because on planet Earth, by not voting for Joe Biden, you are increasing President Trump’s chances to win.
As I discussed in my piece last week, increasing Trump’s likelihood of winning elevates the existential threat of climate change, to the extent that organized human life is seriously threatened.
A Trump victory increases the likelihood of re-electing an administration that simply doesn’t care about Covid-19. Going down the current path could lead to more Americans needlessly being killed from the pandemic than the total number of Americans who sacrificed their lives while fighting against Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany.
These two reasons, independent in themselves, are more than sufficient to make the case for Biden – at least insofar as you’re committed to unfashionable ideals such as ‘logic’ and ‘rationailty’.
And if the existential threat to humanity and horrific numbers of preventable Covid-19 deaths aren’t enough, think about the very institution of American democracy.
Trump is a special president not least because he’s the first one in contemporary American history who would readily turn the United States into an authoritarian ‘democracy’. And he’s willing to do so precisely at the moment when, say in the past four years, American democracy has been harshly assaulted. The fact that the Supreme Court is now stacked with hardcore right-wing judges is a timely example.
So I would flip the question right back: What sort of rational voter would want to empower such an evil maniac?
A handful of people on the so-called ‘left’ are making the case that if they keep voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’, corporate Democrats (who make up much of the party) will never listen to them. Isn’t voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’ a bad strategy in 2020?
I’ve heard some people making this absurd argument. It amounts to utter stupidity within the context of the current 2020 election.
First, it’s worth questioning the framing of the query, namely, voting based on the ‘lesser of two evils’ part.
One of the two evil men finds himself excited to accelerate the existential threat of environmental catastrophe, doesn’t mind if Covid-19 kills more Americans than Hitler and Nazi Germany did, and is hugging the arms of creeping authoritarianism. This evil character is eager to keep dismantling American democracy, as he has for the past four years, so long as it suits his pathological self-interest. Moreover, he refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election. His name is Donald Trump.
On these existential and fundamental issues, the other ‘evil’ man has proposed (imperfect) policy that at least views climate change as an existential threat, has shown plenty of evidence that he is serious about fighting Covid-19, and would never in a million years want to destroy American democracy. His name is Joe Biden.
It’s preposterous to compare these two people as if they occupy the same universe, thus we ought to reject the framing of the question of ‘two evils’.
Second, it has been breathtaking to see how much of the public still believes that the only time for political change is once every four years when they go out to vote. Stopping the maniac (Trump) from presiding for another four years in the White House does not negatively impact progressive Democrats (as an example of ‘leftists’) from pursuing change throughout a Biden presidency.
In fact, achieving progressive change under the alternative, Trump, is not only impossible, but he’s pushing harder in the opposite direction (e.g. climate change, dismantling democracy etc.). With Biden, at least there are real chances to get things done, even if they’re far from ideal.
Finally, I’ve heard less than a handful of commentators talk about the need for a second Trump term, so that magically, its consequences will force Americans to elect the ideal progressive Democrat in 2024.
These sort of comments implicitly assume a theory of political change – one that I’ve never encountered in any of the relevant scholarly literature (any readers can feel free to point me to it, if it exists, which is highly doubtful). Moreover, not only do these comments rely heavily on some fictional theory of political change, but they rely on it so much that they are claiming it as a basis for re-electing a maniac who is dedicated to pure destruction.
Are you saying that voting for Biden will produce the sort of change America needs?
Absolutely not.
In fact, iDose readers will recall that in the beginning of the Democratic primaries, I wrote a number of articles that made it clear that my fingers were crossed for Elizabeth Warren. On numerous occasions, I noted that Warren and Sanders were the only candidates promising some of the systemic change that the US so desperately needs.
So while it’s insane not to vote for Biden, because that would empower an evil man who is pursuing unprecedented destruction, it doesn’t follow that the sane vote (i.e. Biden) is ideal, or even close to it.
Consider the realm of foreign policy. The respected and intellectual former Secretary of Defense (under both Bush and Obama), Robert Gates, claimed in his memoir (2014) that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
In a recent essay featured in these very pages, the President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Andrew Bacevich, claimed that:
“Biden will increase the Pentagon budget, keep U.S. troops in the Middle East, and get tough with China. The United States will reain the world’s number-one arms merchant, accelerate efforts to militarize outer space, and continue the ongoing modernization of the entire U.S. nuclear strike force. Biden will stack his team with CFR notables looking for jobs on the “inside.”
“Above all, Biden will recite with practiced sincerity the mantras of American exceptionalism as a summons to exercise global leadership.”
Thus there are serious questions from many angles that we can ask about what a Biden foreign policy would look like.
Moreover, the eminent Canadian scholar Henry Giroux, in a piece we feature this week, reminds us never to lose focus of the very conditions that made a Trump presidency possible, which were planted long before Trump’s emergence (for another example, see a piece we featured by the 22nd Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich).
No serious person is under the delusion that voting for Biden will automatically result in the serious change that America needs.
But, as I’ve said before, Trump is the devil without a brain, and he has got to go.
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Aly Kamadia is Editor-In-Chief of iDose. To read selected articles by Kamadia, click here.
