A quick note to email subscribers: A couple of readers reported that my September 15th Links of the Month post was sent to their spam folders, apparently because of the large number of links in the post. If that was you, and you’d like to read that post, it’s here. No other articles seem to be affected. Thanks — Dave
“The Aftermath” by Midjourney AI; my own prompt
Several people recently have chastised me for discouraging Americans from voting, or, alternatively, encouraging them to vote for Jill Stein. I am sure that as the Canadian provincial and federal elections gets closer, I will get the same response when I tell people I’m voting Green in the provincial election and NDP in the federal election (neither candidate has a chance of winning), instead of voting for Trudeau’s (misnamed) Liberal party’s candidates to keep out the foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic Conservative party. As in the US, both ‘leading’ parties avidly support the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, and the beating of the drums for America’s planned wars against China and Iran.
I’ve voted ‘strategically’ before, choosing the ‘lesser of two evils’ rather than a candidate I don’t actually despise. Finally, I grew tired of the pressure to do so, and I quit. It was like getting off a bad drug.
Here’s what I now say to my (many) detractors on this issue, on both sides of the border:
The issue, as I have tried to assert elsewhere, is not simply the ‘lesser of two evils’ — it is the degree of difference between the two ‘evils’. The fact is that Trump had four years in office, and, for all his extreme and inconsistent rhetoric, did not behave significantly differently from Obama or Biden during this time. But now we’re being pressured to believe that “this time it will be different”, and that all the checks and balances in place in the US political system will magically disappear and allow him to declare himself dictator for life, torture and kill all his opponents, and introduce martial law and deer-antlered vigilante militias that Americans will then be saddled with forever. We’re also expected to believe that he will be able to overcome the staggering inertia in the US political system that is so deadening that, even with unanimous cross-party support, the country has been unable to pass, in forty years of trying, a simple piece of legislation to end the absurdity of daylight saving time.
The ‘two evils’ we’re being told are our ‘only’ choices (by the moneyed interests that control the media, the debate organizers, and social media, despite the fact there are other candidates on the ballot) are essentially indistinguishable on the issues of the genocide in Palestine and the desirability of continuing and escalating war with Russia and inciting war with China. How anyone could argue that either of them is significantly ‘less’ evil than the other is beyond me. The fact that it might (and I say might — for all their rhetoric about women’s rights, neither Obama nor Biden did anything to entrench them) be slightly easier for a woman to get an abortion in some states if Harris wins, isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference in the midst of an endless wave of absurdly-expensive and morally-corrupting global wars that shift ecological collapse and economic collapse into overdrive (and will, unless we put the brakes on, eventually and inevitably lead to the reinstatement of compulsory military service in the west as well).
Advocates of holding your nose and voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’ (because anything else is just ‘wasting your vote’) rail against voting with your heart rather than your head, which is an insult to intelligent voters who realize how corrosive it is when humans are forced, against all common sense and moral sense, to pull a lever to support one extremist war-monger over another. We become less than human when we are forced, like prisoners compelled to punish each other in order to be fed, to participate in and to support utterly inhuman and inhumane actions because it is the ‘lesser of two evils’.
Voting with our heads is what got us into this mess. Only by voting (and acting politically in more effective ways) with our hearts, and refusing to continue to go along with the dictates of an abusive, utterly broken political and economic system, can we even start to free ourselves to make the changes that both common sense and moral sense tell us are the imperatives of our time. Our instincts have evolved over a million years to guide us to do what is best for ourselves, our tribe, and our world, and we should trust them — how we feel — over the cold ‘rational’ calculus of a voting ‘choice’.
If something just feels wrong, it probably is.
So when I talk to American voters this fall, and when I vote in the coming Canadian provincial and federal elections, I recognize that my vote will count for nothing, as will the votes of those who vote for ‘third parties’ and independents in the US elections.
But I will proudly ‘waste’ my vote, because voting for someone who has pledged to end our countries’ participation in wars, coups and genocides, and to redirect our tax dollars and our energies to address the collapse of our domestic economies, the corruption and perversion of our political systems, and the absolute certainty of near-term climate and ecological collapse, just feels right to me.
And I say that with the full knowledge that the struggle to address the polycrisis — the collapse of all the interrelated systems that underlie our civilization — is most likely a hopeless struggle, probably doomed to failure, no matter who is in office.
But never, ever again will I be goaded, against everything my instincts and my heart tell me that I should do and that I should stand for, to vote for the ‘lesser of two evils’.