Biden vs. Trump: A mediation on the lesser of two evils

Now that Bernie is out, should a Bernie supporter go to Biden?

Since Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders supporters face a dilemma: Either they swallow their pride and vote for Joe Biden in the name of the greater good, or they do anything else, which will inevitably favor Trump.

Commentators in the MSM and blue check marks on Twitter tend to dismiss the Bernie Or Busters as unreasonable. But in order to justify the Biden vote, they sometimes use unsound arguments. Their main one is basically utilitarian, often summarized by the phrase lesser of two evils. In this article, I won’t go into politicking per say, and I won’t try to rationalize the BernieOrBust position. In fine, I hope that the pro-Biden argument becomes more sophisticated than harm reduction.

Table of Contents

The stakes are high

The basic principle, “lesser of two evils”

Attacking the premises

How many choices do we actually have ?

Stalin vs Hitler

What are your values ?

Choosing under uncertainty

Taking the sum

Conclusion

Footnotes

The stakes are high

You heard it, didn’t you, the hypnotic phrase

“This is the most important election of our lifetimes.”

repeated over and over again every election cycle. Paradoxically, regardless of the outcome of the election, life goes on. Is this one any different? For a Bernie enthusiast, this election is crucial precisely for this reason: Progress has been steady or even declining in the past 40 years, so it is definitely time to try something different. In order to argue the seriousness of this election, we need to point out how different the outcomes will be between a Biden versus Trump presidency. I won’t bother making the case for voting in general, since a Bernie supporter is already convinced of electoralism as a means to power.

Moving forward, let’s assume that the stakes are high enough to morally compel everyone (including Bernie supporters) to participate.

The basic principle, “lesser of two evils”

The principle of harm mitigation in of itself sounds reasonable. We use it everyday without conscious thought. But as we dig deeper, we soon realize that it is at best a useful heuristic, at worst never applicable directly. Let’s take a step back and examine why we are talking about harm mitigation in the first place. Why not just maximize what’s good? Well, these two concepts may appear equivalent at first, but they are not in this particular context. For Bernie’s supporters, the senator and his platform represented what’s good. But since he’s gone, they face 2 worse alternatives namely Joe Biden and Donald Trump; and because Joe Biden is less “evil” than his nemesis across many dimensions, Sanders’ supporters should vote for him. By in large, this long syllogism seems self-evident.

However, even if you accept harm reduction as a principle, it is still debatable whether we can apply it here. Some even reject it entirely¹. In order to avoid any unnecessary discussion about the validity of this principle, let’s use a rudimentary version of it. Suppose you just learned that you have advanced lung cancer, and your physician proposes one of these two choices: Either chemotherapy, which will enable you to survive one more year, or you can forgo treatment and hopefully live for half a year. Anyone remotely familiar with cancer knows that there is a trade-off between quality of life against survival. I will nonetheless ignore this nuance going forward. Throughout this article I will use this analogy as a reference point in order to compare it to the election’s dilemma.

Attacking the premises

In this part, I will try to deconstruct the moral imperative for choosing the lesser of two evils in the November election purely on philosophical grounds.

How many choices do we actually have ?

In our cancer analogy, the patient had only two choices. The situation of course was overly simplified to suit our purpose. Having fixed the goal of recovery in mind, he has many possible paths to achieve that goal. Instead of going over countless options, the patient did refer to an expert (the doctor) who reduced the landscape of possible treatments to exactly two viable ones. Another way of bypassing the expert is to consult the scientific literature on the effectiveness of each treatment, and then to choose the most successful one. This transposes relatively well to the November election. Aside from Trump or Biden, people can potentially vote green or libertarian. Voters make the same calculation as our aforementioned patient; they typically eliminate candidates with low winning chances. So the more pertinent question is: How many viable choices do we actually have ? In a similar fashion to the patient, voters usually turn to media experts, with a major difference. Winning chances at an election and a treatment success rate are completely different animals. On the one hand, scientists conduct randomized control trials with large samples. On the other hand, commentators just use various indicators, mainly polling data, to declare who is a serious candidate at a particular time. This is deeply flawed. You must keep in mind that the electoral landscape is by no means static². In other words, electoral politics can’t be summarized by the cliche of saying the person with most votes wins, at least not until the finish line. Contrast this realization to the amount of assurance a well-dressed MSM Pundit portrays as he declares which candidate is “electable”. I would argue that our doctor will display a lot less motivated reasoning than the journalist who is often in a fog of predictability. For Bernie supporters, these questions are still relevant. Moving forward, I will group their options into 4 baskets: Trump, Biden, 3rd party, Abstention/blank vote.

Stalin vs Hitler

This provocative headline is simply pushing the same heuristic in an extreme situation. What would any of us do faced with a similar choice? Intuitively, we know that these two figures are evil. While Hitler methodically attempted to eradicate an entire group of people on racial grounds, Stalin killed more people overall. Both are evil, yet very different. In order to quantify their differences, we can start by enumerating their different policies.We will end up with 2 long lists called vectors in technical jargon. The trick is to squash this multidimensional vector into an axis of good vs evil. Of course, voters do all these steps subconsciously, or maybe delegate this task to the expert class.

At some point, this moral calculus becomes so unbearable that people simply refuse to play the game. The same moral consideration animated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Upon hearing that they were going to be sent to death camps, residents of the ghetto self-organized to form an armed resistance, knowing full well that the odds are not in their favor. In our little cancer analogy, the situation would be something like the treatment causing blindness with a life expectancy of 29 days or just avoiding treatment with 30 days left to live. I suspect this phenomenon occurs if and only if the two choices are relatively close to one another but off the charts in terms of absolute harm. Now the question is, could we apply this to Trump vs Biden?

For a student it may be lazy to avoid answering the test question, but a voter can always work outside the bounds of the ballot. A vote is first and foremost a means to end, and if you are confident enough to use other means for the same goal it can in theory be bypassed. It is however arguably better to do both at the same time.

What are your values ?

The previous example leads us to a more fundamental question. At the core of this dilemma lies the question of how we measure what’s bad. In other words, what moral system we use to view the world and value different actions. It is obvious that two different people having two different moral systems might end up with contradictory answers. For now, let’s stick with Bernie voters. Ideologically Biden is closer to them than Trump. For starters, Biden is a Democrat, and even if they argue that his platform doesn’t go far enough on certain issues, Trump is to their opposite on those same issues. Based on this alone, I anticipate more of them going to Biden than Trump. If the goal is simply to get Trump out of office, then Biden is the obvious choice after Sanders dropped out.

Choosing under uncertainty

Contrary to the choices given by the doctor, the impact of our vote is much more uncertain. After all, we are comparing future rewards to current ones. Even worse, the scale of the decision is huge (the US over 4 years), with ramifications all around the world and in the years to come. If we want to talk about this rationally, we generally look at a candidate’s record and promises in order to guess what will his presidency look like. The problem is that these guesses are very hard to compute. Take for example the left-leaning measures that the Trump administration is somewhat pushing for amid the COVID 19 pandemic. To put it bluntly, no voter had in mind the possibility of this pandemic when he voted in 2016, nor they weighted Trump’s response versus Hillary’s. The events may be random, but the political response to them is certainly not and may deviate from the president’s proclaimed views. The predictions get harder and harder as we examine higher order effects. Take for example US foreign policy in Syria under President Obama. In order to destabilize the Syrian government, the CIA in conjunction with Saudi Arabia trained and armed Syrian rebels. It later turns out that these people have ties to Al Qaeda. This realization invites us to select the most expandable candidate to deal with the new situations as opposed to the ones portraying good intentions and a fake sense of control.

Taking the sum

A more refined negative utilitarian view is to minimize harm not just at every instant but the accumulated harm in the long run. We can think of it as a weighted sum of many past and future major decisions and our goal is to minimize it with our choices. If you adopt this perspective, then it entails that for example voting the lesser of two evils in a row is not necessarily the best strategy to reduce the overall harm. In hindsight, the combination {more,more,less,more,less}maybe better than {less,less,less,less,less}. This counter-intuitive fact stems fundamentally from the opacity of the future. Even worse, due to the sequential nature of the votes, each one affects the next, but in non-linear ways. For example, it is clear that the Overton window has shifted to the right, especially on social issues (gay rights, civil rights …), it is arguable nevertheless that the country has shifted right on other issues. The problem is, since we don’t have the benefit of hindsight, we can’t really apply it at a specific time. One last point, a malignant actor(s) knowing the predisposition of a voter to reduce single consecutive shares rather than the sum, could use this information to his benefit. Take the example of the French presidential elections, a 2-round system.In 40 years, every time a moderate or left candidate faces the right-wing (National front) candidate, the former wins. The phenomenon is so well understood that it becomes a meme in dissident circles: “Faire barrage au front national” (which basically means to block the national front).