Hillary’s Cakewalk to Blow

I am (along with a long list of Left U.S. writers and activists) on record against Lesser Evil voting (LEV) in general and in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. The standard LEV counsel from left intellectuals seems particularly ill-advised this election cycle. The Republican presumptive Donald Trump is, yes, a revolting white-nationalist and arch-misogynist who denies the existence of human generated climate change and has encouraged racist violence at his rallies. He promises to deport millions of Mexican migrants, close the borders to Muslims, and build a giant Nativist wall on the nation’s southern border “and make Mexico pay for it.” He says he wants to adopt torture as a public policy. He advocates using nuclear missiles against Islamist terrorists in the Middle East, and even calls for the killing of their families. His persona and language drip with violence, abuse, and flippant, sociopathic idiocy. Madness!

All of that would be quite a bit scarier if Trump wasn’t wildly unpopular, bizarre, and too hopelessly narcissistic to function as a serious presidential candidate. He is shunned by many atop his new “party” (if that’s what the Republicans even are anymore), which is in historic disarray at the national level. I’ve already seen my first political advertisement in which an incumbent Republican – U.S. Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) – declares early opposition to Trump.

Hillary Clinton is the approved ruling class presidential candidate. She has received the open or tacit endorsement even of many elite Republicans who cannot stomach the ridiculous Donald. She’s out-fundraising Trump by significant margin, a reflection of her sumptuous backing by the financial elite.

The nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire want a third Clinton term and they will have it. Trump is no Ronald Reagan 1980. He’s more like the reckless Barry Goldwater 1964, a right-wing nut who (among other ridiculous statements) said that the United States would be better off if the nation’s entire east coast floated out to sea (Goldwater also advocated the use of “low-yield” nuclear weapons in Vietnam and Europe and called for making Social Security “voluntary”).

Trump’s going to get clobbered regardless of what United States leftists do or don’t do in voting booths in contested states next November. I’m not sure he cares. Speaking in Scotland on the day of the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, Trump mused that Britain leaving the European Union would benefit his Turnberry golf resort and said that running a nation is a lot like running a golf course.

Does anyone seriously believe the American ruling class will let this loose-lipped/loose-cannon clown move his reality television show into the White House? The nation’s remarkably class conscious bipartisan domestic and imperial power elite surely knows that such an event would have calamitous consequences both for the domestic legitimacy of authority and for Brand USA abroad.

It’s Mrs. Clinton’s and the DNC’s imperial and plutocratic cakewalk to blow. Obama and others in the ruling class surely aren’t going to let Hillary’s email scandal put Trump in the Commander-in-Chief spot. It’s on her and her campaign if she somehow fails to seal the deal. The notion that a relatively small group of left progressives in contested states who couldn’t hold their noses and mark ballots for yet another fake-progressive right-wing Democrat will be responsible for Trump’s (very unlikely) triumph is pretty hard to take seriously.

Corporate-Financial Queen of Imperial Chaos

For her part, Mrs. Clinton (who supported Goldwater during her final year of high school) is about as fanatically right wing, corporatist and military-imperialist as a Democrat can be. That’s saying a lot in an era when the whole party system has moved well to the right of the population (thanks in some part to the dedicated corporate neoliberalism and “humanitarian” imperialism of the hyper-mendacious Clintons in the last quarter of the last century.) Few sentient leftists familiar with Mrs. Clinton’s atrocious, power-serving record (which is easily accessible in two handy volumes: Doug Henwood, My Turn [OR Books, 2015] and Diana Johnstone, Queen of Chaos [AK Books, 2015]) are going to have much luck trying to talk their hand into marking a ballot for this monstrous ruling class agent. (This is especially true when the “greater evil” put up under the name of the Republican Party is as unelectable as the preposterous Trump.)

Some leftists lecture fellow progressives in contested states on how a President Trump’s crimes will be on those progressives’ moral hands if they fail to do their nose-holding LEV duty and Trump somehow slithers into the Oval Office. But turnabout is fair play. Will lefties who hold their noses to vote for Hillary on LEV grounds take moral responsibility for the many crimes and outrages she is certain to commit against fellow human beings and the environment – the common good – when she becomes president? LEV leftists may not want to hear that but it’s a fair question.

One argument on the LEV left is that Trump represents a greater threat than Hillary does of precipitating nuclear war and of accelerating climate change. Maybe Trump does. Or maybe he doesn’t. Nobody really knows since Trump has no policy record and seems willing to say anything he wants to from one moment to the next. he longstanding arch-imperialist Hillary seems considerably more aggressive than Trump towards nuclear Russia. She appears to be more likely than the Donald to sign off on the Trans Pacific Partnership, an arch-global-corporatist measure designed among other things to hamstring governmental efforts to reign in the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

A Lesser Evil is an Evil

All that said, I see no reason to engage in the quadrennial intra-leftist bloodletting over what to do or not do in the latest major party presidential extravaganza. We are saddled with a painfully narrow, constricting, and corporate-dominated elections and party system and political culture that stands well to the right of the American working class majority of people. The binary choices on offer (with all due respect for the third party candidates I always vote for) are both terrible but it’s only natural that people who participate in the process are going to try to make some calculation as to which of two is least awful. And it’s absurd to argue that leftists who tell other leftists to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate as the Lesser Evil in a contested state are swooning for that candidate. How does one “swoon” for Hillary or Obama when one describes Hillary or Obama as “evil” and even accompanies one’s tactical voting advice with statements of abject contempt for Hillary or Obama? Say you’ve been driving for hours one evening without having eaten dinner and you pull into a town to find that the only two restaurants still open there are both filthy, greasy-spoon diners. Leaving aside the arguably superior option of eating at neither restaurant, you will hardly swoon over the one you resign yourself to dining at. Anti-LEV leftists may not like to hear this but it’s a fair analogy.

The Politics of Changing Electoral Politics

Why do we focus so little on the politics of changing the rules of U.S. electoral politics compared to how much we focus on the fleeting voting decision? As Greg Wilpert rightly argues, the standard once-every-4-years intra-left debate on whether and how to participate in the presidential election “tends to appear to assume that the US is actually a democratic country…[and] that our participation in the electoral system could actually make a real difference…It sometimes seems to me,” Wilpert adds, “that every four years progressives spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, and money on the presidential race, which usually leads nowhere, instead of focusing more on making sure that the political system becomes something that might one day deserve the designation ‘democracy.’” The current reigning U.S. political system is an openly oligarchic institutional plutocracy, something that is widely acknowledged even outside left circles.

The specific electoral and party system changes required to make U.S. elections worthy of passionate citizen engagement and the notion of popular government are well known. “We need,” Wilpert writes, “to address issues such as: the influence of money on political campaigns, the lack of any proportionality in representation (first past the post system), gerrymandering, inequality in representation (that small states have about 40 times the weight in the Senate as a large state, and three times in a presidential election), lack of access to mass media in campaigns, etc.” Yes: imagine the introduction of an elections and party system aligned with the notion of popular sovereignty (the U.S. Founders’ worst nightmare, by the way). A Democracy Amendment to the U.S. Constitution anyone?

Popular Movement Politics Beyond the Election Cycle

Here’s another consideration that should make leftists think twice about engaging in their quadrennial bloodletting: electoral politics once every four years is only one small part of the politics that ought to matter most to serious left activists. Listen to the nation’s top left intellectual Noam Chomsky speaking to Abby Martin on teleSur English last fall:

“Take, say, the Bernie Sanders campaign, which I think is important, impressive. He’s doing good and courageous things. He’s organizing a lot of people. That campaign ought to be directed to sustaining a popular movement that will use the election as a kind of an incentive and then go on, and unfortunately it’s not. When the election’s over, the movement is going to die. And that’s a serious error…The only thing that’s going to ever bring about any meaningful change is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don’t pay attention to the election cycle. It’s an extravaganza every four years. You have to be involved in it, so fine. We’ll be involved in it, but then we go on. If that were done, you could get major changes.”

Now, I don’t (sorry) really share Chomsky’s notion that there was all that much noble or courageous about Bernie Sanders and his campaign. And while I always vote (third party left), I don’t really agree that “you have to be involved” in the quadrennial extravaganza (sorry again). Non-voting is all too understandable and widespread given the terrible nature of the choices on offer and the broader, arch-authoritarian U.S. elections and party system. Of course more than half the population regularly engages in a passive and private de facto boycott of the debasing, narrow-spectrum, populace-marginalizing electoral spectacles.

Still, I wholeheartedly share Chomsky’s call for people to participate in the deeper and more meaningful and substantive politics of popular movement-building and direct action beneath the masters’ mass marketed-big money-major party-major media-candidate-centered election carnivals. For all my intense dislike of the Democratic Party and its parade of loathsome, power-serving, and fake-progressive politicos, and (I admit) of U.S. electoral politics, I’ll still take (A) a progressive who practices LEV once every four years but who understands that voting in elections is a relatively minor matter compared to the far more urgent politics of day-to-day grassroots movement-building over (B) a third party politico who privileges electoral politics over grassroots movement-building and direct action…who thinks that politics is all about voting. Give me A over B for every day other than election days.

Agreement Greater Than Disagreement

So, okay, I disagree with some of my fellow leftists on LEV, on the duty of voting, and even (for reasons I’ve discussed at length and won’t repeat here) on Sanders But just how big a sticking point do these differences of opinion really have to be? I agree with most LEV leftists on things that matter more: on the need for new and powerful social movements first and foremost; on the need for major electoral and party system reforms (overhauls really); on the need for single-payer health insurance; on the needs for for the re-legalization of union organizing, for a militant new labor movement, for major green jobs programs and a rapid and comprehensive transformation to clean energy (a transition from fossil fuels to water, wind and solar); on the need to tear down the massive Pentagon System and implement a vast social and environment peace dividend; and on numerous other shared issues and programs; on the evil, injustice, and unsustainability of capitalism, I also understand all too well that the Republican Party and Donald Trump are horrific and evil and that leftists have good reasons to fear the prospect of a Trump presidency (and to have feared a McCain presidency in 2008, a Romney presidency in 2012, a Bush II presidency in 2000 and 2004 and so on). To repeat, I think fellow leftists should be able to advance the LEV argument without being absurdly shamed by other lefties as sell-outs or dupes (or whatever needless term of abuse is hurled at them by others on the Left).

Different Reasons to Passively Prefer Hillary

Barring some kind of wildly unlikely scenario (perhaps the combination of a hard-to-imagine Hillary email indictment and a terrible homeland terror attack made to Nativist, white nationalist order), Mrs. Clinton will be installed as the nation’s 45th president next January, with no help from me in the more presidentially blue than red (but technically contested) state of Iowa this fall. Hillary’s likely ascendancy to the office she has so long and perversely craved is (despite my likely vote for Jill Stein or some other Left candidate) “okay” with me for three basic reasons. First, the presence of a Democrat in the nominal top U.S. job is always usefully instructive for young workers and citizens. It helps re-demonstrate to young folks the bipartisan nature of the American plutocracy and Empire. Those people and others need to see and experience how the intolerable misery, oppression, and ecocide imposed by capitalism and its evil twin imperialism live on when Democrats hold the White House. It helps put some real-life and real- time meat on the bones of the Left’s timeworn but persistently accurate observation that the two reigning U.S. parties are “two wings of the same [corporate, financial, and imperial] bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904) – and on the notion that the Democrats too are evil (something that LEV leftists acknowledge with their very word choices).

Second, the presence of a Republican in the White House tends to fuel the toxic illusion among progressives and others that the main problem in the country is that the wrong party holds executive power and that popular activist energy must be directed primarily at fixing that by electing a Democrat. (In other words, if McCain had won in 2008, we wouldn’t have gotten the briefly remarkable Occupy Movement but rather a big Get the Vote out for Barack or Hillary movement in 2011. It’s the same perhaps for Fight for $15 and Black Lives Matter if Mitt Romney had won in 2012.) That tends to work against the popular movement-building that Chomsky identifies (correctly in my opinion) as the most relevant politics. Look what happened to the antiwar movement during the second George W. Bush administration: the fade out began well before Obama’s election and as the build-up to the 2008 elections took hold. A Trump presidency (highly unlikely) would no doubt spark an upsurge of street protests in the U.S. but it would also provide a perfect lightning rod for the fake-progressive Democratic Party’s capture of popular militancy and the channeling of that energy into the hopelessly compromised corporate and imperial confines of that party. It needs to sink in once and for all with progressives and liberals that everything still stinks in America when the Democrats hold the White House. And it’s kind of hard for that to sink in when noxious Republicans like Dubya and the Donald hold the White House.

There is, yes, I know, the nauseating problem of Democrats in the White House functioning to stifle social movements and especially peace activism (the antiwar movement may never recover from the Orwellian Obama experience). But here’s more good news about a Hillary presidency and my third reason for not too loudly bemoaning the coming coronation of the sickening corporatist and arch-imperial Queen of Chaos (an event that is very likely to happen no matter what I or any other ZNet reader or writer says or does). Not all Democratic presidents are equally good at shutting progressive activism down. Given her long record as a deceitful ruling class operative and her remarkable lack of charisma and charm, Hillary Clinton will have considerably less capacity to deceive and bamboozle progressive and young workers and citizens than the novel Brand Obama enjoyed in 2007-08 and then Bill Clinton did in 1991 and 1992.

If the race tightens up and Trump seems to have a real chance and my contested state vote becomes potentially more relevant, is there a chance that I would think about voting “for” Mrs. Clinton next November? Yes, perhaps… a very small chance. But if I do end up being forced into that ugly ballot box corner, which seems incredibly unlikely, it will be about the three points I just made, not about LEV.

All that aside, given the war that capital is waging on livable ecology and the common good, it really doesn’t matter all that much which side of the quadrennial LEV debate you back if we don’t get our act together to form “ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don’t pay attention to the election cycle.” It’s (eco-)”socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” at the current stage of capitalist and state-sponsored ecocide. “The uncomfortable truth,” Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 15 years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.” Do what you want in or out of a ballot box in a contested (or “safe”) state next November 8th. It’s a secret ballot, after all. It’s you own business. But however you choose, and however strong your nose-pins are. if you agree with me and Meszaros, then we are comrades.

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)