The Lesser of Two Evils

“Vote for X because Y is Worse.” I Don’t Think So --- by John Ryder

Photo by Akshay Chauhan on Unsplash

John Ryder is a distinguished American philosopher with whom I have had many enjoyable, if sometimes intense, discussions about politics and education. After an hour or so on the phone discussing what I think will be an important question for many this Fall, I asked John to state his case so that I could share it with my friends. He very kindly sent me the following short essay, written in his characteristically clear prose.

I hope to write a rejoinder. But I’m holding back out of hope some of you will respond first, as I think his position is one that we are unlikely to hear put just this way. It also includes some of his views on present American foreign policy that are likely to be challenging for many of us. I have often thought that the narrowness of my “certainties” is less some inherent weakness in my own thinking, than the result of being surrounded by many people that think along the same lines, whose thinking too often entertains my intellectual life at a comfortable dinner party of familiar ideas.

John’s Essay:

It is fairly clear now that the presidential competition in 2024 will be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I can already hear my Democratically oriented friends, which is most of them, telling me that I should vote for Biden, no matter how much I disapprove of some of his policies, because Trump is worse. I have been listening to this claim for the better part of fifty years: I should vote for Carter because Ford is worse; for Mondale because Reagan is worse; for Dukakis because Bush is worse; for Clinton because Bush and then Dole are worse; for Gore and then Kerry because G. W. Bush is worse; for H. Clinton and then Biden because Trump is worse; and now again Biden. I have rejected this logic at every turn, and I will reject it in 2024.

First, it is not clear to me what it means to say that candidate x is worse than candidate y in general. Candidates, like people overall, are typically better or worse in this or that respect, and the respects matter. If that is right, then there is something suspicious about the claim that “x is worse than y.”

Second, with respect to Trump and Biden, I think that they are both undesirable, though for quite different reasons. I have been familiar with Trump for forty or forty-five years, and for most of that time I knew of him as a slippery and suspicious Manhattan real estate crook. In his political manifestation, he is it seems the same person he always was. In his candidacy for the president, in all three of his attempts, he is running the Big Con, a grift so audacious that the rest of us would never have imagined it possible. This, however, does not make every idea he has or every policy he endorses wrong. To infer that would be to commit the fallacy of “poisoning the well”, and I will assume that we do not want to be committing logical fallacies unnecessarily. Nonetheless, as a presidential candidate and as a president, he is in many respects, though not all, indeed pretty bad.

As for Biden, I for one cannot get past the fact that his commitment to a Cold War Russophobia is so deep and by now second nature that his inclinations and decisions are, I would argue, deadly and dangerous, not only for Ukrainians and Russians but for the rest of Europe and the world in general. Along similar lines, his nearly uncritical support of Israel, no matter how many civilians it kills, is not consistent with his presentation of himself as a lover of freedom and democracy. Consider also his extraordinary capacity not even to notice Palestinian suffering, which has characterized his entire political career, until recently when his disapproval of Israeli settlement treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank was enough to make him impose some sanctions on four individual settlers. That, so far at least, is the extent of his objections to Israeli brutality, notwithstanding the Israeli government’s legitimate responsibility to defend its citizens. More generally, Biden is committed to the long-standing idea that the US should be in charge of the world, or what he calls “American leadership.” If America is the “leader”, that makes every other country either a follower or a hostile camp, an enemy. There are many problems with this view, not least of which is that because many other countries are tired of being told that they need to follow America’s lead whenever Washington calls for obedience, for Biden to insist as he does on American leadership is exceedingly dangerous, and there is scarce evidence that he can even think differently, never mind having any awareness of the dangerous character of the way he does think.

So both candidates are pretty bad, as far as I can tell, and I can see no good reason to endorse one bad choice over another. Trump is likely to be bad for the country, and maybe the world, in a number of ways; Biden is likely to be bad for the world, and probably for the country, in a number of other ways. Perfidy for perfidy, I do not see how either candidate deserves my support, despite the unacceptability of the other.

I also have a more general concern about the presumed wisdom of voting for one bad candidate in order to keep out the other bad candidate. The net effect of this practice over time is that we keep voting for and electing bad candidates, a practice that cannot be good for the country since, on the face of it anyway, it is a form of racing to the bottom. There is something, probably many things, wrong with our political structures and practices, despite the laughable American predilection to think that ours is the best of all possible political worlds. If we continue to support bad candidates because we think that the other is worse, the chances of addressing the failures of a political system that continues to offer up bad candidates become vanishingly small. One might even argue that our responsibility as concerned citizens is not to vote for people of whom we do not approve, not now and not in the future. If we continue to vote for them, they will continue to bubble up, to win elections, and to drive us closer to the bottom.

I do not pretend to have any easy answers to this problem, and I am fairly confident that there are no easy answers. There will almost certainly be an unacceptable person in the White House come January 20, 2025, as there has been for the bulk of my life. But that likelihood is not a reason for me to be complicit in such a deplorable outcome. I will find a candidate whom I can actually support, regardless of his or her chances of success. If others who see the situation more or less as I do would do the same, then perhaps we may have a chance of slowing the downward slide. Maybe not, but the worst that will happen is that we will continue to have unacceptable presidents, which is the situation we are in anyway, and then good luck to us all.

I’d like to hear what you think.