Realism Trumps Idealism: Voting for the Lesser of Two Evils
Today is Election Day in the U.S., and as good a time as any I guess to comment on the odd state of politics in this country. This morning I found myself trying to motivate my 18 year old daughter to vote. Obviously I’d like her to listen to my advice on how to vote, but I’m really more concerned that she learns both to value the right to vote and to take her duty to participate in the process seriously.
She says that she really isn’t interested in politics and so doesn’t know who to vote for. I can’t really blame her; the fact is, politics attracts a lot of goofball or even downright nasty people.
And that’s really the point that began crystallizing in my thoughts this morning as we talked. As voters, our main goal must be to play defense, not offense, to keep the really bad folks from gaining the reins of power.
Every generation seems to produce a new crop of political idealists who think they can solve a bunch of the world’s problems through politics. Of course, in my generation this was the “Christian right”, which swept Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980. A lot of these folks got disillusioned early on, when Reagan appointed moderates or liberals to many posts (such as the Dept. of Education, which he had vowed to abolish) and kept a hands-off management style that let them work against his stated agenda.
My church seems to have a fair assortment of folks like this, some of whom apparently don’t even vote any more. I guess anyone could understand their disillusionment with politics, but I think we need to grasp that it’s much more important to vote against a bad candidate than to find a good one to vote for. Nearly all candidates will disappoint, but then we shouldn’t be expecting so much out of government to begin with.
When I was a child, it seemed that whenever someone was asked who they were voting for, the standard answer was “for the lesser of two evils”. I never much liked that answer, but everyone understood that was pretty much the way it was with politics.
As David Kuo’s recent book Tempting Faith
Actually, if you look at the way the recent national elections have turned out, the Republicans’ closing the gap in the weeks leading up to the vote can probably be explained by this way of thinking. Before the election, people are dissatisfied and generally unhappy a lot of times with the folks in power, because they usually are disappointed in various ways. However, as Election Day nears, they start thinking more in terms of whether the alternative would be any better, and if the other party’s candidate(s) look worse, will move back toward the incumbents.
In 2004, I think the courts were the issue that really drove a lot of conservatives and moderates to end up voting Republican, as concerns have continued to grow that the judiciary is getting out of control. Osama’s message just weeks before the election also likely encouraged a lot of folks to vote for Bush. This year, while Osama has, notably, remained very quiet, the driving issue for a lot of folks, the perceived “greater of two evils”, is keeping very liberal Democrats from gaining control of Congress and its committees.
John Kerry’s recent remarks have added fuel to the fire by rekindling concerns of Democrats being weak on defense and unsupportive of the military.
It’s clear that a lot of folks are upset with the Republicans’ leadership of recent years. I guess most liberals and moderates are mainly upset with Bush, who certainly hasn’t listened enough, but I think most conservative Republicans are almost as upset with the Republican Congress, which has failed to fulfill two of its primary duties: providing a check on the Executive Branch and controlling spending.
In my view, the bigger failure has been with Congress, not Bush, because Congress has largely abdicated its responsibilities. This is why we haven’t, as I’ve noted before, had a real debate about our strategy and long-term goals with Iraq and the war on terror. The Republicans in Congress have pretty much given in to Bush on foreign policy, when it’s clearly not his area of strength. At the same time, spending has been out of control.
Nevertheless, while it’s clear a lot of conservative Republicans are fed up, the Democrats have clung so far to the left that the thought of their running things is genuinely scary to a lot of folks.
The problem seems to be that the Democrats remain beholden to the most liberal part of their base, so that they refuse to consider, for example, even quite modest restrictions on abortion. They seem unwilling to sincerely acknowledge even the most general, widely-held concerns about the erosion of moral values.
In what is an amazing revelation if true, Kuo asserts in his book that Tipper Gore, after championing one of the few family values efforts the Democrats have mustered, had to go to Hollywood, when her husband was nominated for President, and repent for her (bi-partisan) campaign to put warning labels on music whose lyrics advocate killing cops and other nasty stuff.
If this is the real Democratic Party, one that must kow-tow to the most extreme members of NARAL or the Hollywood elite, then they really don’t deserve to run this country. Maybe this isn’t the case, but the Democrats certainly could do a lot better job of making themselves a mainstream party, because there’s a lot of us, no matter how frustrated we are with the Republicans, who really don’t have anyone else to vote for, but certainly have a clear notion of who we’re voting against.
There’s an interesting postscript to my daughter’s voting. I had tried to get her to go the week before to early vote, but she wasn’t feeling well that day, so we went Tuesday evening (yes, after everyone was off of work). Of course, there was a long line, about 30 minutes as it turned out, but having gotten that far, she didn’t want to throw in the towel.
After getting processed she joined the line and promptly pulls out her cell phone. Though she was going to vote the way I suggested in one key race, she didn’t know who else to vote for, but knew what to do: she called a friend of hers, 15 years old, and asked him!
I thought how ironic that was, with all the polling, the targeted ads, the deep analysis and “science” that political hacks put into their campaigns these days, and here she was voting based on the advice of someone who wasn’t even on their radar screen, three years too young to vote!
Oh, by the way, I think she’ll be much more agreeable to go the early voting route next time.
Comment by Gordon — December 18, 2006 @ 3:47 am
Some comments of mine on Drima’s blog The Sudanese Thinker discuss further how the political situation in the U.S., which is more complex than mere “gridlock”, has been making it difficult for us to achieve a balanced foreign policy:
http://www.sudanesethinker.com/#comment-5959
and
http://www.sudanesethinker.com/#comment-6026 .
Comment by Gordon R. Vaughan — March 10, 2007 @ 6:48 pm
Gary North has written an interesting counterpoint to this strategy of voting for the lesser of two evils, saying it often backfires if the “more evil” candidate is ineffectual, while the “sufficiently evil” candidate (my terms) is able to get the middle to cooperate and actually pass legislation:
The Lesser of Two Evils Rarely Is
“The lesser of two evils, because he or she is not widely perceived as being consistently evil, can gain cooperation from the uncommitted middle. Meanwhile, he or she receives reduced opposition from the ideological hard core on the other side of the issues.”
He gives several examples, including the election of Jim Wright as House Majority Leader, Nixon vs. Humphrey, and Bush vs. Gore:
“If Al Gore had been elected in 2000, we would not have the Iraq war today. We would have had an insufferable bore in the White House, but not the Patriot Act.”
Comment by Gordon R. Vaughan — July 13, 2007 @ 2:04 am