The Return of Lesser Evilism

The former camp refuses to be funded by the Goldmans and Pfizers of the world, while the latter camp embraces those donors. That’s really all this comes down to. There’s nothing particularly radical about not taking money from companies you think you might need to regulate someday. And there’s nothing particularly centrist or “realistic” about taking that same money.

When I think about the way the Democrats and their friends in the press keep telling me I owe them my vote, situations like the following come to mind. We’re in another financial crisis. The CEOs of the ten biggest banks in America, fresh from having wrecked the economy with the latest harebrained bubble scheme, come to the Oval Office begging for a bailout.

In that moment, to whom is my future Democratic president going to listen: those bankers or me?

It’s not going to be me, that’s for sure. Am I an egotist for being annoyed by that? And how exactly should I take being told on top of that that I still owe this party my vote, and that I should keep my mouth shut about my irritation if I don’t want to be called a Republican-enabler?

The collapse of the Republican Party and its takeover by the nativist Trump wing poses all sorts of problems, not the least of which being the high likelihood that the Democrats will now get even lazier when it comes to responding to their voters’ interests. The crazier the Republicans get, the more reflexive will be the arguments that we can’t afford any criticism of Democrats anymore, lest we invite in the Fourth Reich.

I didn’t vote for Nader in 2000, and I don’t have a problem with anyone arguing this coming Election Day that we shouldn’t all do whatever we can to keep Donald Trump out of office.

What’s problematic is the way Beltway media types are forever turning postmortems on the candidacies of people like Nader or Sanders into parables about the perils of voting your conscience, when what we’re really talking about is the party’s unwillingness to untether itself from easy money. This is how Chait sums up Nader (again, emphasis mine):

“Nader goes on to defend his idiosyncratic belief that people are under no obligation to consider real-world impacts in their voting behavior. Vote for a third-party candidate, write in a candidate, follow your own conscience: ‘I think voters in a democracy should vote for anybody they want, including write in or even themselves. I don’t believe in any kind of reprimand of voters who stray from the two-party tyranny.’

“Why should people vote for candidates at all? Since, by definition, the person we most closely agree with is ourselves, why not just write your own name in every time?”

Ugh. Hey, Jonathan: Voters don’t want candidates who agree with them about everything. They just want one who isn’t going to completely take them for granted. If that’s become too much to ask, maybe there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party, not people like Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders.

As of June 6th, Hillary Clinton had won nearly 13 million primary votes, while Trump had gotten some 11.5 million.