I just came across this and don’t remember seeing it posted or discussed here, so thought I’d post it:
An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting)
By John Halle and Noam Chomsky
JohnHalle.com, June 15, 2016
(Note: Professor Chomsky requests that he not be contacted with responses to this piece.)
Preamble:
Among the elements of the weak form of democracy enshrined in the constitution, presidential elections continue to pose a dilemma for the left in that any form of participation or non participation appears to impose a significant cost on our capacity to develop a serious opposition to the corporate agenda served by establishment politicians. The position outlined below is that which many regard as the most effective response to this quadrennial Hobson’s choice, namely the so-called “lesser evil” voting strategy or LEV. Simply put, LEV involves, where you can, i.e. in safe states, voting for the losing third party candidate you prefer, or not voting at all. In competitive “swing” states, where you must, one votes for the “lesser evil” Democrat.
Before fielding objections, it will be useful to make certain background stipulations with respect to the points below. The first is to note that since changes in the relevant facts require changes in tactics, proposals having to do with our relationship to the “electoral extravaganza” should be regarded as provisional. This is most relevant with respect to point 3) which some will challenge by citing the claim that Clinton’s foreign policy could pose a more serious menace than that of Trump.
In any case, while conceding as an outside possibility that Trump’s foreign policy is preferable, most of us not already convinced that that is so will need more evidence than can be aired in a discussion involving this statement. Furthermore, insofar as this is the fact of the matter, following the logic through seems to require a vote for Trump, though it’s a bit hard to know whether those making this suggestion are intending it seriously.
Another point of disagreement is not factual but involves the ethical/moral principle addressed in 1), sometimes referred to as the “politics of moral witness.” Generally associated with the religious left, secular leftists implicitly invoke it when they reject LEV on the grounds that “a lesser of two evils is still evil.” Leaving aside the obvious rejoinder that this is exactly the point of lesser evil voting-i.e. to do less evil, what needs to be challenged is the assumption that voting should be seen a form of individual self-expression rather than as an act to be judged on its likely consequences, specifically those outlined in 4). The basic moral principle at stake is simple: not only must we take responsibility for our actions, but the consequences of our actions for others are a far more important consideration than feeling good about ourselves.
While some would suggest extending the critique by noting that the politics of moral witness can become indistinguishable from narcissistic self-agrandizement, this is substantially more harsh than what was intended and harsher than what is merited. That said, those reflexively denouncing advocates of LEV on a supposed “moral” basis should consider that their footing on the high ground may not be as secure as they often take for granted to be the case.
A third criticism of LEV equates it with a passive acquiescence to the bipartisan status quo under the guise of pragmatism, usually deriving from those who have lost the appetite for radical change. It is surely the case that some of those endorsing LEV are doing so in bad faith-cynical functionaries whose objective is to promote capitulation to a system which they are invested in protecting. Others supporting LEV, however, can hardly be reasonably accused of having made their peace with the establishment. Their concern, as alluded to in 6) and 7) inheres in the awareness that frivolous and poorly considered electoral decisions impose a cost, their memories extending to the ultra-left faction of the peace movement having minimized the comparative dangers of the Nixon presidency during the 1968 elections. The result was six years of senseless death and destruction in Southeast Asia and also a predictable fracture of the left setting it up for its ultimate collapse during the backlash decades to follow.
The broader lesson to be drawn is not to shy away from confronting the dominance of the political system under the management of the two major parties. Rather, challenges to it need to be issued with a full awareness of their possible consequences. This includes the recognition that far right victories not only impose terrible suffering on the most vulnerable segments of society but also function as a powerful weapon in the hands of the establishment center, which, now in opposition can posture as the “reasonable” alternative. A Trump presidency, should it materialize, will undermine the burgeoning movement centered around the Sanders campaign, particularly if it is perceived as having minimized the dangers posed by the far right.
A more general conclusion to be derived from this recognition is that this sort of cost/benefit strategic accounting is fundamental to any politics which is serious about radical change. Those on the left who ignore it, or dismiss it as irrelevant are engaging in political fantasy and are an obstacle to, rather than ally of, the movement which now seems to be materializing.
Finally, it should be understood that the reigning doctrinal system recognizes the role presidential elections perform in diverting the left from actions which have the potential to be effective in advancing its agenda. These include developing organizations committed to extra-political means, most notably street protest, but also competing for office in potentially winnable races. The left should devote the minimum of time necessary to exercise the LEV choice then immediately return to pursuing goals which are not timed to the national electoral cycle.
*****
1) Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.
2) The exclusive consequence of the act of voting in 2016 will be (if in a contested “swing state”) to marginally increase or decrease the chance of one of the major party candidates winning.
3) One of these candidates, Trump, denies the existence of global warming, calls for increasing use of fossil fuels, dismantling of environmental regulations and refuses assistance to India and other developing nations as called for in the Paris agreement, the combination of which could, in four years, take us to a catastrophic tipping point. Trump has also pledged to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants, offered to provide for the defense of supporters who have assaulted African American protestors at his rallies, stated his “openness to using nuclear weapons”, supports a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. and regards “the police in this country as absolutely mistreated and misunderstood” while having “done an unbelievable job of keeping law and order.” Trump has also pledged to increase military spending while cutting taxes on the rich, hence shredding what remains of the social welfare “safety net” despite pretenses.
4) The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.
5) 4) should constitute sufficient basis to voting for Clinton where a vote is potentially consequential-namely, in a contested, “swing” state.
6) However, the left should also recognize that, should Trump win based on its failure to support Clinton, it will repeatedly face the accusation (based in fact), that it lacks concern for those sure to be most victimized by a Trump administration.
7) Often this charge will emanate from establishment operatives who will use it as a bad faith justification for defeating challenges to corporate hegemony either in the Democratic Party or outside of it. They will ensure that it will be widely circulated in mainstream media channels with the result that many of those who would otherwise be sympathetic to a left challenge will find it a convincing reason to maintain their ties with the political establishment rather than breaking with it, as they must.
8) Conclusion: by dismissing a “lesser evil” electoral logic and thereby increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat the left will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve.
chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website
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The voting booth is not a confessional
I think that our actions in public should be calculated, designed to move society forward. After all, our public actions influence dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of voters (if only a little bit each).
But voting for POTUS? News flash: your vote will have *zero* impact on the election. And not just because you are in MA. Electoral votes are winner take all (in the CD: NE, ME; in the state: other 49). What are the odds that the New Hampshire total comes within 1 vote or is tied? It’s zero. I mean, it’s so remarkably close to zero that you can think of it as zero. And that’s NH — a close state with a small population. And, of course, it’s pretty uncommon that an election is within 8 EVs (about 4, going all the way back).
So yeah, your public actions could have a small impact on the election. Your individual vote? Bah. The numbers don’t bear it out. I view the private vote as the ultimate act of self-expression, because it won’t impact the POTUS.
Note: for small enough elections, single votes matter!
For your consideration, let’s consider New Hampshire in 2000.
Gore received 266,348 votes.
Bush received 273,559 votes.
Nader received 22,198 votes.
I’m not bashing Nader; I merely point out that 7,212 extra votes in New Hampshire (with its four electoral votes) would have given Gore the Presidency, Florida notwithstanding.
but once you’re in the voting booth, you only get to influence one vote.
So when you, as an individual, are in that NH voting booth in the year 2000, you couldn’t act “in aggregate.” You are one person, and your vote could not have changed the results of the election.
aggregate, as Paul says. There’s no getting around that. You can’t have an aggregate without the accumulation of single votes.
It’s illogical to say single votes don’t matter because elections aren’t won by one vote. Without individual votes, there is no election.
It’s extraordinarily rare for a single vote to matter.
Groups of votes certainly do matter. The bigger the group (and the smaller the total number of voters), the more the group matters. This is why electioneering makes sense — you want to influence a group of votes. Maybe you try to reach a big group all at once (a television ad) or maybe a group of voters one at a time (door to door canvassing). Still, you’re going after a group.
When electioneering, you seek to influence a group of votes. When voting, you can only influence one vote — and one vote ain’t going to change the election. What you do at that ballot box simply won’t have any impact on what anyone else does that election day. It’s illogical to suggest that a single vote does influence an election. Groups of votes influence elections.
* Of course, for a sufficiently small election, there becomes a large enough chance of a tie or win-by-one that each individual vote really might matter. For large elections, not so.
… but it is extraordinarily rare for a single, that is to say individual, vote to be dispositive.
Individual votes would approach being more dispositive (as they are in the House and Senate) if we defined, for the electorate, such things as ‘a quorum,’ ‘supermajority,’ ‘abstentions’ or otherwise defined the validity of the final number by its relationship to the whole number of votes extant.
Right now, in our democracy, we define the largest number of votes the ‘winner,’ even if that number is a tiny fraction of the eligible electorate (and therefore that number is dwarfed by the number of ‘abstentions.’) As the number of votes cast goes to 0 each individual vote matters more, but going in the other direction, bounding the rules by tying the votes to the total number of votes, and tallying non-votes as abstentions, etc… individual votes will continue to matter.
It’s estimated nearly 200,000 Florida Democrats pulled the lever for Dubya that election. This isn’t to absolve Nader, just to point out that he was the primary scapegoat when there was really a lot of blame to go
around, starting with Gore’s anemic campaign against and tactically stupid electoral strategy. Gore-Graham probably would’ve won, and Bob Graham would’ve certainly kept us out of Iraq unlike Liebermen.
The fact is that whether you vote or not is a matter of public record. If you do not vote, both major parties will know it. So every person who doesn’t bother subtracts marginally from the influence of every identifiable demographic group to which they belong.
In any case, individual votes matter because without them your candidate cannot win. Insisting that your vote only “counts” if there is a chance the results would change if you voted the other way is deeply stupid. Democracy is a team sport — we can’t all be the one who scores the goal.
I’m not discussing whether or not showing up to pull a ballot matters — I’m arguing that the checkbox you check (if any at all) doesn’t matter. For you as an individual. Because you only have one vote, and it’s already election day, and you’re in the room, and nobody will be able to see your vote.
I didn’t write that voting doesn’t count. I wrote that your individual vote won’t change the outcome of the election. That’s just math. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go vote — I think that there are loads of good reasons to vote. The opportunity to change the outcome of the races being decided that day simply isn’t one of the reasons.
It’s why the press has always made such a big deal about Dixville Notch, democracy in action. Norman Rockwell’s painting of the blue collar guy standing up at the town meeting to make his point heard. The idea that we have to have cheerleaders to get people to vote is sad but true.
It’s an example of the prescience of the founding fathers creating a REPUBLIC which hinges on the functioning (sometimes erratic) of the electoral college. If we move towards a national democracy we’ll create more voter ennui than we already have.
important statement by Chomsky.
Thanks for posting!
Chomsky should be posted on BMG more often.
I strongly feel (and full disclosure work full time to feel) that third parties are critical checks to keep our democracy competitive in one party states such as ours, and eventually on the national level. I can respect those that want to vote for a third party candidate in Massachusetts this year, but disagree with their choice. I think Hillary Clinton is not only our best alternative to Trump, but our best choice for President period.
I also think her victory will help the work I am doing locally, since it will firmly destroy the spectre of Trump and allow the political conversation to turn local issues once again. His candidacy is an existential threat to the republic, and must be defeated. Those that are so alienated by our political system that they would rather blow it up than repair it, should be reached out to as future allies, but their candidate has to be defeated.
I certainly agree with the conclusion that voting for HRC makes the most sense. But the logic is a classic example of internalized oppression. Consider point 7:
We have to support Hillary because meanies will blame us if she loses, and use the media at their tool. Only “they,” not we, have any acess to the all-powerful media.
Thanks Noam. I feel great now.
Bill Buckley argued that we must support the most rightward electable candidate in June of 1964.
good that did!
.
did to the country!
we got Richard M. Nixon. The ’68 convention loved Reagan and Goldwater but they also really wanted to win.
“Goldwater won, it only took 16 years to count the votes” *could* easily be
“Sanders won, it only took 16 years to count the votes” when one of his supporters this cycle wins the presidency in 2032.
Another quote I remember is “the Church thinks in terms of centuries, not years” regarding the pace of change. So does the conservative movement. It thinks in terms of decades, not years. It’s about a movement of ideas and not a single candidate or campaign. It’s why they bother contesting school boards, why the wisely took over 18 state houses after Obama on the eve of decennial redistricting knowing full well the Senate and Presidency was likely out of reach. It’s why rumors of its impeding death are greatly exaggerated.
Sanders supporters need to start running for state legislatures and city councils if they want his ideas to trickle up. Ironically, it’s when he finally gave up on his perennial campaigns for US Senate to focus on being a sewer socialist mayor that he actually became a credible political force in Vermont. Too many young progressives want to be the next Obama, not enough want to be the next Rayburn or O’Neil.
I never heard that one before.
In re Chomsky’s line, “The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.”
La plus ca change: Saul Alinsky was all over this idea in 1971. In Rules for Radicals, he cites La Rouchefoucauld: “We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.” And continues: “Accompanying this rule is a parallel one– that one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of conflict.”
Alinsky was talking about the equivalent of latter-day Greens and other vote-your-conscience, the lesser-of-two-evils-is-still-evil types, in arguing that those too pure to play within the system generally have less at stake (my own formulation: don’t build your damn revolution on the backs of those least able to shoulder the burden). The opening chapters of Rules are fascinating—Alinsky, that old radical bete-noir of the establishment, actually counsel those who were gassed in Chicago ’68, who has worked for McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, and who were heartbroken and disgusted to “go home, organize, build power and at the next convention you be the delegates.”
(This seeming willingness to engage full-bore in “establishment” politics is doubly interesting in light of a NYT summary of Secretary Clinton’s thesis on Alinsky: “But the student leader split with Mr. Alinsky over a central point. He vowed to `rub raw the sores of discontent’ and compel action through agitation. This, she believed, ran counter to the notion of change within the system”).
A lot of this resonates today. E.g., I worked for and donated and behalf of Bernie. He give me a yearlong lift unlike any politician I can recall (never mind that his candidacy, never mind this entire yearlong political theatre of the absurd, was the worst thing could have happened to a third-year law student). It hurt to see it end, even if I knew very well all along how it would end. But I pivoted on a dime, and frankly, I’ve been embarrassed by a lot of the rhetoric that continues to emanate from the Bernie-or-bust camp. We lost, we lost by nearly 4 million votes, and we lost in no small part not because of DNC shenanigans but because the black vote killed us on Super Tuesday. THAT should have given us all pause—as in, ya know, maybe those already-oppressed-populations know something we don’t? Or have more skin in the game? Nah, better to play the dark conspiracy card.
Which is precisely what the pied pipers offering “alternatives” are doing. But I’m damned if I know to talk how to talk to them; I’ve largely given up.
Alinsky’s particularly harsh on those who overvalue their own chastity, for whom an utterly clean conscience is de rigeur: “To say that corrupt means corrupt the end is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when he to go bed; []he who fears corruption fears life…. In action, one does not always the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter [as trickle-up says above: “what needs to be challenged is the assumption that voting should be seen a form of individual self-expression rather than as an act to be judged on its likely consequences”] . Action is for mass salvation and not for re individuals’ salvation. [S]he who sacrifices the mass good for her personal conscience has a peculiar conception of `personal salvation’; [s]he doesn’t care enough for the people to be `corrupted’ for them.”