The list I created of Important dates in history for lesser-of-two-evils voters was meant largely as an effort to name the lesser evil as an evil consequence of lesser-of-two-evils voting. I've noted that all efforts to portray Hillary Rodham Clinton as a "lesser-of-two-evils" candidate fail to give a thorough examination of the evil of the candidate they're promoting. That's what the piece is about. "Strategic voting" is a mask. Rip it off, and you get the grim reality of you get what you vote for.

In April of 1932, the Germans thought that an old and chronically-ill man with Franz von Papen in his ear would make a lesser evil to Adolf Hitler. Oh, sure, the SPD and KPD people came to no agreement, and this disqualified both of themselves from even being lesser-evils. Perhaps more votes for either of those two "lesser-evil" parties could have stopped Hitler. But maybe the grave defects of both of these parties would have prevented either the SPD or the KPD from stopping Hitler anyway, and so neither of them had a chance to be a lesser evil. As Louis Proyect suggests:

Now of course we are in a period hardly resembling the final days of the Weimar Republic. The good news is that a fascist takeover is highly unlikely since parliamentary democracy is more than adequate to keep the working class under control. The bad news, on the other hand, is that the left is so inconsequential and the trade unions so weak that there is no need for fascism.

But who knows? Another decade or so of declining wages and cop killings of Black people might precipitate the rise of a left party that has learned to avoid the reformist stupidity of the German SP and the suicidal ultra-leftism of the Stalinists.

In other words, the "lesser evil" qualities of the KPD and the SPD were not just qualities which prohibited either from doing anything to stop "greater evil" -- but rather qualities which prohibited either party from attaining significant power. Perhaps if the KPD hadn't been controlled from Moscow, or perhaps if the SPD hadn't been sellouts, there would have been a meaningful lesser-evil vote there. It was clearly possible.

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However, today we are told that omigod we have to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton because Donald Trump is a fascist y'know. It's not believable. The idea that Clinton might in fact be the "greater evil," however, isn't the only problem with Trump-phobia. The main reason that Trump-phobia isn't believable is that, whereas Hitler actually had a party, one with a long history of pitched battles with trade unionists, Trump pisses off his party, and milks publicity from a few fistfights at his rallies. I am also still waiting for the Donald Trump version of Mein Kampf to come out, and in the meantime the armchair intellects who debate among themselves as to whether Trump most clearly resembles Hitler or Mussolini continue in their self-absorption. Dear "intellects": nobody cares about your inability to recognize the difference between an actual fascist and a rich bully who plays one on TV.

I also think that, in his rich bulliness, Trump has the sort of flaw that prohibits him from taking power in any serious way. He became the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in 2016 because no Repub candidate was proposing anything better, and because he was getting a lot of free publicity from the news media. Today he still isn't running a campaign, which will itself become a fatal flaw in the election run-up. His selection of Mike Pence as his running mate appears as a belated recognition that he'll actually have to work with someone to get anything done in politics. This recognition will no doubt still be a work in progress by the end of Trump's first term, if he isn't impeached and convicted by then.

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Which brings us to the hypothesis of what Trump might do if he somehow, despite having no campaign, winds up as President. For this we might consult Stan Malinowitz, who has a piece up in Counterpunch titled The Dilemmas of Lesser-Evil Voting. Malinowitz isn't against lesser-evil voting in principle, as it turns out. He gives an example from a Colombian election. But this election is a specific case in which "voting for the lesser evil was not detracting from some better alternative that would favor long-term movement or party building." I'm sure that there are plenty of examples of ethically valid lesser evil voting in such cases. Now, as for Clinton versus Trump, well, Malinowitz thinks that:

So why not Hillary Clinton? More than anything, it´s because it’s not clear that she really is the lesser evil.

So here is Malinowitz' comparison:

Trump is clearly far worse in terms of overt racism and xenophobia and the policies that would follow from them if he were able to implement them (though not necessarily worse on structural racism), but not in his proposals for economic and social policy, where he is less neoliberal than Clinton. On foreign policy, he seems less likely to militarily intervene or invade other countries and more likely to mend relations with Russia, which is still the world´s second major nuclear power. The president of the United States is not only the leader of the nation, but the most powerful political official in the world. Those of us who want to protect Muslims in the US from Trump should also want to protect the Muslims of the world from Clinton, who is a far greater danger and is responsible for massive death and destruction mostly in the Islamic world. I don´t know of any way to measure different evils and take a balance of whether Clinton´s evils add up to more or less than Trump´s, but I do know that these are two horrible people who will do disastrous things as president, and it´s not clear that either is preferable to the other.

Of course, we don´t know what Trump would really do as president, when rhetoric turns to action – probably not all his horrible proposals, whether because he abandons them or can´t get them through Congress, and probably he would cede to domestic and foreign policy establishments in economic and foreign policies and be more mainstream than his rhetoric indicates. In other words, the differences would probably be smaller than they appear. On the other hand, Clinton is much more predictable; the horrors she would do domestically and in the world are very clear from the horrors she has actively supported or participated in during the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations. Not much of an argument to vote for her, even on practical or lesser-evil grounds.

Note, here, that Malinowitz is far more serious about looking at candidates than any garden-variety Trump-phobe. In the end, he argues that Sanders is the lesser-evil who matters and that Stein is worth voting for in light of the real dilemma of American politics. With Sanders or with Stein, you are at least voting for the possibility that you might get something you want from government in return for your vote. With Trump or Clinton, not so much.