We Should Have Abandoned the Lesser of Two Evils Approach Several Elections Ago

Summary

As Spurgeon said, “Of two evils, choose neither.” American voters have not been abiding by that philosophy for, well, I don’t really know how long. But I am quite certain following the Lesser of Two Evils approach to voting is a root cause of a lot of the problems we have in Washington, and we should have abandoned it several elections ago.

Introduction

Not long before the 2012 Presidential election, I was in my dorm’s hallway doing Chemistry homework one night. A floormate of mine, David, sat down to talk to me between finishing his shower and, himself, going to bed. As part of the conversation, we talked about the upcoming election. I mentioned how Romney was perhaps the person I least wanted to be our candidate, but I had grown excited for a Romney Presidency. One reason I was excited was for the prospect of repealing Obamacare. David asked, wasn’t Obamacare based, in part on Romney’s healthcare law in Massachusetts? I responded that it was, but Romneycare was a state law, and Romney said he would repeal the federal version because he didn’t believe healthcare should be a federal issue. David, though, wasn’t convinced and declared he had no intention of supporting a candidate when he couldn’t see any significant difference between that candidate’s policies and his opponent’s policies. I didn’t agree then; for, until last year, I believed any difference at all warranted a vote because any difference could, as Eric Metaxas put it, “pull you back from the brink.” Now? I don’t know, but I have a feeling the prolonged usage of that mentality might be a big reason why things have worsened to the point the Republican nominee has 32% of Americans believing him to be “trustworthy,” yet many in Facebook friend lists still write and like comments such as the following: “Anyone who opposes Trump is doing so out of pride and ignorance at this point.” Not only do I not think Trump is the Lesser of Two Evils, a subject I’ve written about before, but I also think we should have abandoned the Lesser of Two Evils approach to voting several elections ago.

Overview of the Lesser of Two Evils Approach

The Lesser of Two Evils Approach to voting is the belief that every election in American history has to be between two candidates; so, the job of the voter is to decide which of those two candidates would make a better President and vote for that person. Sometimes the voters are excited to see their candidate become President, but often their motivation is to stop the other person from winning. To the people who use this approach, not voting or voting for a third party candidate is a huge annoyance because that is what leads to the greater evil’s being the victor. Thus, these people go on evangelistic crusades to convince as many people as possible to vote for their party’s nominee, regardless of what other people want in a President, because, after all, what other people should definitely not want above all else is for the other party’s nominee to become the President.

Figure 1 shows a graphical visualization of this approach, as seen from the perspective of a Republican (the same is true if inversed). The Democrat approaches absolute evil; so, wherever the Republican falls onto this graph is irrelevant because it will always be better than absolute evil. Although the Lesser of Two Evils mentality does not require the greater evil to approach absolute evil, I have observed that is where the rhetoric always places candidates (more on that in the next section).

Figure 1: Lesser of Two Evils Graph

 

Problems with the Lesser of Two Evils Approach

This section is to examine various fundamental problems associated with the Lesser of Two Evils approach to voting.

Overtly Hyperbolic Rhetoric

If you’re relying on the Lesser of Two Evils approach to win an election, you have to maximize the differences between your candidate and the enemy candidate. After all, voters like David won’t bother to vote for a candidate who is nearly identical to the other. So you have to do two things: fluff the “good” candidate and overemphasize how apocalyptic the result will be if the “bad” candidate wins. Evidence doesn’t matter, only propaganda. Figure 2 shows two memes from liberals and conservatives, designed to motivate their side to stop the other.

Figure 2: Hyperbolic Memes

 

 

There is little I remember about the 2004 election, and I remember nothing about the 2000 one. But I remember perfectly well the rhetoric about how the United States will be destroyed by 2012 if Obama were to be elected in 2008. And I remember how the United States will be destroyed by 2016 if Obama were to win reelection. And now I’m told the United States will be destroyed by 2020 if Clinton wins, and it’s entirely my fault because I won’t support Trump.

Let me clear, I, by no means, think the United States is better than it was eight years ago. But the nation hasn’t ended. Ted Nugent isn’t dead or in prison. The nation’s economy didn’t collapse “a year and a half, two years, three years” after Obama’s reelection like Rush Limbaugh predicted. Any number of doomsday predictions hasn’t happened, and people in my generation are sick of being misled in marketing schemes. Yes, I am quite sure the end of the nation is coming. Simple mathematics says a nation cannot maintain our deficit and debt for long before collapsing; it also says an economy cannot sustain itself when approximately 45% of its citizens do not pay taxes while those slightly more than half Americans are supporting an approximate 35.4% of Americans who are on welfare. World history says a nation cannot continue slaughtering a million innocent children each year without God’s righteous judgment. Then you throw in all the racial unrest, and the zero-thinking-policy excuse for an educational system, and the fact we’ve raised a generation of adults too overtly sensitive they take offense to the phrase “on the other hand,” and the very existence of a micro-aggression task force on Colby College’s campus in that last story, and the fact the FBI just declared the laws don’t apply to some people, and the fact Biblical morality is virtually nowhere to be found in the Church, let alone the culture as a whole, and the effects of fatherlessness, and the fact Firefly still hasn’t gotten a second season while Jersey Shore had six (okay, that last one might not be entirely relevant). Yeah, unless something changes unless a lot of somethings change, the nation will, potentially soon, collapse.

The problem is I can’t calculate how far we are from the end of the nation, and I highly doubt you can either. So what happens when the “enemy” wins the election and things aren’t as bad as you made them out to be (don’t misinterpret that as saying they’re not bad, just not as bad as I was led to believe)? It’s a lot like when that guy was certain the rapture was going to happen in May, 2011. He was certain it would happen before then, but it didn’t. So he read the Bible again and came up with the new(er) date. It still didn’t happen. The result is far more people think the Second Coming of Jesus is a joke than how many thought that before. Similarly, the more people prophesy the continually pushed back date of impending doomsday America will face, the less other people care that it has to happen at some point.

Divide

One side effect of the hyperbolic rhetoric is it further divides Americans. When one candidate is so evil you are willing to vote for a person you don’t really like in order to defeat that candidate, what must you think of a person who supports the evil candidate? If you believe the other candidate’s policies will destroy the nation within one term, how will you converse with a Facebook friend who is in favor of those policies? This isn’t to say all policies are equal, but if you’re in the Lesser of Two Evil mentality, so if you believe your fight is to keep America from going past the brink, then you’ll start to view people who are otherwise friends (to say nothing of strangers on the internet) as the enemy. I have been guilty of this, particularly during the 2012 election.

A recent Pew Research study shows a huge number of Americans vote out of fear and anger. 31% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans agreed “it would be harder to get along with a new person in their community if they belonged to the other party.” Additionally, the polarization has grown significantly over the past twenty-two years. That’s not good. To quote Oliver Queen, “The only way that we are going to return our home to greatness is to do so together—united.”

Accountability

When a candidate is guaranteed the support of millions simply for having a letter next to his name, that candidate stops having to earn support. How can Congress have a roughly 14% approval rating but a 95% reelection rate? The answer to the first part probably has something to do with the fact only 21/300 Republicans in Washington have a Conservative Review score of an A, and a mere 80/300 are actually passing with a score above 70%. So, when the vast majority of federal-level Republicans, 73% of them, fail at what Republicans are supposed to do, limit spending and conserve liberty, why do they continue to be elected? The answer is because they’re not Democrats.

By voting for people because they’re the Lesser of Two Evils, you fill Washington with Republicans who have no intention of being conservatives (yes, I’m looking at you, Roy Blunt).  And why should they intend to be constitutional? Their reelection is independent of how they actually vote because they hold an (R) by their names and that means their voting record will inherently be better than the (D)’s. To be fair, the Republicans’ scorecards are higher than the Democrats’, unless we’re talking about the 43 Republicans whose aren’t (which is more than double the number of Republicans who have A’s…). In an ideal world, they’re relatively new and will be quickly voted out because their constituents will quickly realize they’re frauds. We know the world’s not ideal because Lindsey Grahamnesty (30%) has three Democrats who score higher than he, and he’s been in Washington for 21 years. Similarly, Peter King (29%) has five Democrats above him, and he’s been in the House for 23 years. But, thanks to the Lesser of Two Evils mentality, Republican voters continue to elect people like this because they have to be not as bad for the nation as the opponent. Even if their voting record is as bad as Democrats’, they have an (R), and at least having another (R) in office makes them better.

Un-American

What are Americans’ three favorite things? Guns, bacon, and free market capitalism. What does that mean? That means Americans abhor being told what they can eat, how they can protect themselves, and what business decisions they’re allowed to make. We do what we want. If we want a product or service and don’t like the options, we either find an alternative option we do like or, in somewhat more extreme cases, we start a business to provide that product or service in a quality we would buy. So why don’t we apply this free market system to our elections?

The response is that a third party candidate could never win. Only one of the two parties has a chance at winning. Wretched’s Todd Friel compared a third party candidate to a person who wanted to save as many people from a burning house as possible but is crippled so, choosing him as your firefighting partner, would be foolish. Voting for a third party candidate, then, is wasting a vote. Why is that? Because a third party candidate cannot win, and a third party candidate cannot win because not many people vote for third party candidates, and not many people vote for third party candidates because a third party candidate cannot win, and…..

If people started thinking a third party candidate could win, then a third party candidate could win. Daniel Hannan, the soon-to-be-jobless conservative British member of the European Parliament, cannot understand why Americans are so quick to vote for something they don’t want. “The only wasted vote,” he said, “is a vote without conviction.” Is your conviction so weak it’s defined as the stopping of a candidate no matter what principles are compromised? Keep in mind, there was a period of time during World War II that Hitler’s Germany was the lesser evil when the alternative was Stalin’s USSR.

The concept of voting for the Lesser of Two Evils isn’t only un-American because it violates the American spirit; it’s un-American because it also violates our founding. George Washington warned against political parties, saying they will enable unprincipled men to “subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Alas, the Constitution did not originally allot for parties during Presidential elections. Instead, the vision was simply for men to run and for the voters to decide which one would be best, not blinded by party loyalties. It definitely wasn’t a perfect system (it gave President Adams a Vice President Jefferson from the different party with whom he had an ugly race), but the number of options that system gave certainly seems better than having a forced obligation to vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton if we despise them, simply because they represent “our” party.

Mandates Evil

The final and largest problem with giving your vote to somebody you believe to be evil so as to stop a person whom you believe to be a larger evil is you’re still giving your approval to evil. Let me say that again, if you’re voting for Donald Trump while acknowledging that he is, himself, an evil, you are giving your approval for an evil to become President. When you vote for a candidate, you are giving your mandate for every piece of that candidate’s agenda to be enacted and for that candidate to run the office as he is and how he’s promised.

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s agenda includes forcing military commanders to commit war crimes by targeting and murdering innocent women and children. It also includes the decimation of the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the First Amendment again. Most Trump supporters say we need a President who will run the country like a business, and Trump’s business managing history includes a lifetime of corruption and moral bankruptcy. I’ve already written extensively on that. In summary of his character, though, Trump showed no hesitation in calling large groups of Muslims and illegal aliens evil but said he had to wait “to do research” in order to condemn the KKK when they endorsed him. In part, that could be because he is a firm believer in the eugenics Racehorse Theory.

If you vote for him, you’re not voting to stop Clinton from enacting her corrupt agenda—you’re voting for Trump to enact his.

If you’re a Democrat, you already know the inverse is true. Clinton calls herself an early twentieth century progressive, which are the people famous for creating eugenics. Oh yeah, and she was also endorsed by a KKK Grand Dragon. If you vote for Clinton, you’re not voting to stop Trump’s corrupt agenda—you’re voting for Clinton to enact hers.

So don’t do it, either of you.

Conclusion

If a girl decides to stop going out with a complete dirtbag, despite the inevitable rough breakup, and if she stops agreeing to go out with horrible guys after that point, then she will find at some point that the quality of the average guy who asks her out will increase significantly. True, we will almost certainly lose elections when we declare we won’t vote for horrible candidates who are Republicans, but is that really a loss? Perhaps the reason we have such bad candidates in American politics is because so few people are dedicated to only voting for good ones. We should have stopped the Lesser of Two Evils approach to voting elections ago. It doesn’t work. It further divides Americans. And, even if that candidate wins, it gives consent for corrupt men to implement bad agendas. But you knew that, didn’t you? I mean, what else did you think happens when you elect a person you describe as an “evil”?

There was a prehistoric era in American politics called 1980 when Christians came together, called themselves the Moral Majority, and declared they would only support a candidate if that candidate held a Biblical worldview and strong character. They were Christians first, conservatives second, and Republicans third (I actually wrote this hours before Mike Pence gave his speech). Today, I’m told I’m supposed to elect a Republican regardless of whether or not he’s a conservative. And Biblical morality has no bearing on elections because “we’re electing a President, not a pastor.” So, effectively, I’m supposed to be a Republican first, conservative second, and Christian third, the opposite of what the Christian Right leaders thought it should be. I move we go back to the 1980 plan. I will not vote for a candidate I believe to be evil. I realize the only person with whom I will agree completely is myself, but the existence of disagreements does not make someone else “evil.” I encourage everyone else, as well, to, after doing your homework on a candidate, decide if you would be happy with that person as President, within a reasonable degree of error. If, objectively, the answer is no, then choose somebody who would make you proud. If you truly believe an option to be evil, choose a different one. If you choose to help elect an evil, that’s on you. Remember, the books of Kings and Chronicles clearly shows God doesn’t grade on a curve when it comes to wicked rulers. Evil is evil. Never is it written, “This king was evil, but at least he was the lesser evil. Because of that, God held back His judgment. If his brother, the greater evil, became king, it would all be over.” That didn’t happen.

If you choose to ignore everything I’ve written (and, let’s be real, if you already disagree, you’re not about to change your mind. No one really does that, like, ever), please, at least, don’t disparage those who do “vote their conscience.” Stop calling us “ignorant” and “prideful” and “arrogant” simply because we don’t want to have an evil in power, regardless of what letter is by the President’s name. We’re only doing what we believe in, and that’s all any of us can do. That’s all any of us should do.