Nearly ten years ago I wrote a diary titled "Some thoughts on 'Lesser of Two Evils' voting," originally posted to DailyKos.com but preserved for posterity in a WordPress file at that point in 2016 at which DailyKos.com became an instrument of evil. In this piece, I hoped to revisit that diary and add some important reflections it left out. I can see in retrospect that I was entirely too soft on the concept. Lesser of two evils voting is the potential atrocity that everyone routinely endorses, in the same way in which people routinely voted for Paul von Hindenburg in the 1932 Presidential election in Germany. (Nine months later von Hindenburg appointed his opponent Hitler, thus revealing to the world the uselessness of certain types of lesser-evil voting.)

This week my Facebook feed is full of people bellyaching about Trump. Some of the bellyachers also complain that, instead of Trump, we need to get back to "normalcy," which can be accompanied by any death-toll one feels free to ignore. The bellyachers about Trump routinely ignore the enormous level of collusion which one sees within the daily rituals of the political class, with or without Trump. The political class in the United States is currently at a high point for such collusion, which is sometimes dolled up in political discourse as "bipartisanship." Before she donated her efforts to Joe Biden's candidacy, onetime Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar touted her ability to work with Republicans as such.

In the US political context, however, "bipartisanship" looks like "collaborationism." Lesser-evil voters do not take collaborationism seriously; in this regard they would have made good subjects of the Vichy regime which ruled a part of France between 1940 and 1942. The Vichy regime was as evil as the Nazis, because they worked with the Nazis. The point of the French collaboration at Vichy was to disguise (for obedient French) who was really in power, or who was being granted power through the power of those who represented the public faces of power. Vote Demovichy, because the Republinazis are worse. One recalls, for instance, that in Barack Obama's tenure as President the Democrats ceded all branches of the Federal government and 900+ state legislative seats to the Republicans. Such a record-setting surrender of power cannot be regarded as arbitrary or coincidental; it must, therefore, have been a result of the actions of one or more Democrats. What comes to mind first is Barack Obama's mishandling of the DNC during his tenure as President. I will unfortunately not go further in this essay with this line of reasoning; the data will have to stand for themselves.

The identity between "bipartisanship" and "collaborationism" can be seen in the fact that it's the Democrats who do it. The Republicans don't participate in bipartisanship because they are in charge; this is done in the same sense in which Hitler was allowed to insist, repeatedly, that if Franz von Papen wanted to create a coalition government with the NSDAP as a "junior" partner, it had to be with him as chancellor. For this reason Hitler was in charge even before his 30 January 1933 appointment as Chancellor. This is not to say that the Republicans are Hitler, but rather that they employ the same tactic as the one Hitler employed -- refusing bipartisanship until one is actually placed in charge.

The "lesser evil" voters ignore the extent to which politics in the United States is a team sport. Politics is typically a team sport dressed up as an individual sport; even the kings of old had to participate in teams if they were to hold their kingdoms. For our present-day politics, the key players are financiers, who do not seem to care which team they join, as evidenced by their contribution to various organizations representing both Democrats and Republicans. "Lesser evil" voters, blinded by their hatred of the so-called "greater evils," would like to ignore their implicit support for America's election financiers and the teams which they in fact lead.

The difference represented by Bernie Sanders is that of someone who assembles a team to oppose the financiers, a difference reproduced (unfortunately) in only a half-baked way by Elizabeth Warren. "Lesser evil" voting might mean voting for flawed individuals on better teams, but usually it doesn't.

My one major point in the 2010 essay was (as I said) that "If you vote “lesser of two evils,” then, your politicians are beholden to you for nothing." This is true, although I also pointed out that your politicians may spontaneously do good things for you. As I suggested in the essay, you will be voting your interests if you vote for politicians who, in some way, create some overlap between their interests and yours, even if these politicians are evil. However, the overlap of interests is not necessarily important; veals, for instance, "have an interest" in eating food and drinking milk as provided by their butchers, and slaves "had an interest" in kind treatment by their masters. Veal and slavery still necessarily involve evil. In our case the fossil fuel interests necessarily involve evil, for their stock-in-trade is making the amplification of climate change (and thus the proliferation of climate disasters) into an asset to be protected through the purchase of ALL of your favorite politicians. Our interests do not overlap with theirs, neither the fossil fuel interests nor the bought politicians' interests, regardless of how much you want to pretend that their guardian Joe Biden will otherwise do good things for you.

Lesser-evil voters do not empower themselves or others. Their justification for doing what they do involves a bad choice -- vote for the Democrat, typically, or the Republican will win. The idea of the bad choice is simple: vote for bad things, otherwise other bad things will happen. The Nazis typically presented Jews with bad choices: we will either kill X, or Y. You choose. The bad choice says: never mind the environment of coercion in which you are made to believe that your choices will have to be bad ones.

Lesser-evil voters are of necessity blind to the evil that they do. It's not an original thought to say that voting for a "lesser evil" is voting for evil. But the evil of "lesser evil" voters doesn't stop there. "Lesser evil" voters typically take the high ground in criticizing those who don't do as they do -- and this criticism is typically only levied at those who vote for better candidates than the "lesser evil" ones. Evil is thusly made into an imagined virtue. "Lesser evil" voters in the United States, for instance, typically argued in 2000 that a vote for Ralph Nader was a vote for George W. Bush. They blamed Nader for Bush's victory. What prompted this reaction was the perceived likelihood that Ralph Nader would have made a better President than Al Gore, the Democrat. Nobody cared that Al Gore lost in Florida by such a thin margin that, had a very small portion of the 200,000 Democrats who voted for George W. Bush voted instead for Gore, he would have won the election. Gore could also have won the election in Florida, and thus in the United States, had voters for the Reform or Libertarian candidates in Florida voted instead for Gore. But Reform and Libertarian candidates didn't have the perceived virtues which Nader had, so they aren't made into pariahs. Lesser-evil voting is thus a sanction against perceived good. The educational lesson taught by lesser-evil voters is clear: If you want cover against them and their collective anger, don't even pretend to do good in the world. Stay away from politics altogether, until the elections are over and the lesser-evil voters are quiet.

In short, lesser-evil voters don't take evil seriously. One thinks of lesser-evil politician Barack Obama, for instance, siding with the banks in their foreclosure crimes and heading the team which evicted Occupy while prolonging Dick Cheney's war on the world and becoming one of the most popular Presidents ever (as reflected in poll after poll). Obama's winning margin in the 2012 election, however, was contributed through a campaign of attack ads against his opponent Mitt Romney in swing states -- to be sure, through fortification of the "lesser evil" vote. Lesser-evil voters contribute to the general political drift into evil, as the Republicans used Obama's lesser-evil energy to position themselves as a greater collective evil than he was.

Without hope, there is no point in ethics, aesthetics, therapy, righteousness, or justification. Any action is as good as any other if the end result is merely going to be bad. Vote for hope. Work for hope. Live hope. Don't bother with the rest.