I voted for Biden in 2020. This was despite the fact that he is one of the main architects of modern American slavery through his crime bill which made the US the nation with the highest proportion of its own citizens imprisoned by far, who are quite literally slaves according to our constitution. This was despite him participating in the lies which caused us to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis in our pursuit of blowing up Halliburton’s stock value and taking control of large parts of the oil trade. This was despite his support of the neoliberal consensus which has lead to the deterioration of the economic, social, and physical health of the average American while the wealthiest’s share of the economy continues to grow meaninglessly. In fact, it was relatively easy for me to vote for Biden because the person he was running against was Trump who demonstrated worse tendencies on all of the above (while actually softening some prison laws, still fostered the increased social acceptability of acting according to blatant racism so I can’t even give him credit here) and more. According to my utilitarian principles, the evil choice I made was morally superior to the evil choice I did not make. Recent events have me re-considering this motivation.
To be clear, my opinion of Trump has not changed. Under Trump, I am sure I will be more likely to lose my loved ones or even my own life, although I am personally less at risk than his main targets. I am also sure that his influence would at least maintain if not increase the atrocities committed by the Likud-lead Isreali government with whom he has a strong relationship. Christian Nationalism is extraordinarily dangerous and if some of their desires are pushed through there’s really no telling the extent of future horrors we may have to deal with. If Project 2025 has a certain degree of success we may consider any pretense of democracy to be nullified. If I were only considering the immediate consequences of my decision, I would still support Genocide Joe.
I phrased that last sentence like that intentionally and it is the inspiration for this essay. The lesser of two evils in this case is now facilitating a genocide and I think that’s significant. In 2020 I didn’t think I had a red line which would cause me to allow a greater evil, and within the last few months I’m coming to find that I do have a red line I have to consider in and of itself and that line is genocide.
This is what I find particularly frustrating when I try to engage this topic in good faith, even among Biden supporters who are lucid about recognizing what is clearly happening before their eyes with their implicit support. Yes, they tell me, there is a lot they don’t like about Biden but he is the better choice. There is some equivalence implied here. Biden is guilty of a lot of things like union busting, failure to support a public option despite promises, the continuation of many unfair border policies, and oh yeah genocide too. I really want to emphasize that we are talking about the categorization and systematic elimination of a group of people from their homes which could not be happening as it is now happening without the economic and political support of the Biden administration. This is now among the issues we are telling Democrats we are ok with or not ok with via the use of the only political currency left to us being our votes.
“Vote Blue No Matter Who” is a phrase that made me sick the first time I heard it and I have only grown to detest it more, especially since I acted according to it it through my actions in 2020. Recently I realized that this is less of a call to action and more of a threat. More explicitly, this phrase can be understood as “Vote for our candidate or the Republicans will fuck you up.” We better pay up or they can’t be responsible for what happens to us. Like other organizations who make threats like this, by paying up we are supporting them in what they do even if it’s under duress. As long as their heavy, the Republican party, is out there fucking people up the Democrats have license do anything as long as it’s not as bad. The DNC made a hard right-wing shift with Clinton and have been moving right since then, just not as far as the Republicans have. This is where damage control has gotten us. Democrats have pushed through so many boundaries and now we’re at genocide. Now the promise is, “You better support our genocide, or the Republicans will make it worse and fuck you up too.”
What is going to happen if we tell the Democrats that even though they are facilitating a genocide, we’re still going to pay up? What is the message the DNC will read from that? What precedent is going to be set? Are we going to be safer now that genocide will be seen as something we can compromise on? Do we really believe that Trump is the worst threat they can make, or that the lesser of two evils couldn’t eventually be worse than Trump? Do we really think by making this compromise here, on top of all the compromises we’ve made over the last few decades, that after this time everything will suddenly change and we can start talking about making average peoples’ lives better for once?
I can’t responsibly ask these questions without recognizing that the threat is very real. I am not an accelerationist and I do not desire the further deterioration of our society in hopes of a positive outcome through violent revolution. I do not want to have to risk imprisonment and death to resist government persecution. I recognize that a breakdown of democracy and subsequent shift to political violence would only advantage those most equipped for and skilled in the use of violence, whose society of nails would be governed by hammers.
It seems to me that failing to support the Democrats this cycle puts us at greater immediate risk of the above, and that is shocking enough to bring most reasonable people under control. The thing is though, I think that by leaving genocide on the table for anyone across the Overton window of elected officials to consider as a socially acceptable tool is a far greater risk in the long term.
I think that by making genocide just another issue of managing how much we can tolerate among the two sides, making it something that is tolerable under some circumstances, or especially encouraging the thinking that the charge of genocide is conditional on the political expediency of it victims, we are ultimately normalizing the general idea that genocide is an acceptable tool for elected officials across our “political spectrum” of right wing and big tent(right wing, centrist, some left wing) to support or even employ in the worst case as long as they call it something else regardless of international law. If this is ok, what is the next boundary the Democrats will push? I want to stop digging the hole we’re in now, suffer the consequences, and deal with Democrats who at least understand they will not get elected if they facilitate genocide. Honestly I’d like one day to not have to make the least evil choice and have the opportunity to support something after the DNC primary, and it doesn’t seem like damage control is leading us in that direction at all but away from it.
In practical immediate terms, Trump is hated outside of his base and has demonstrated that his endorsement is poison to politicians who are not himself more often than not. He is dangerous, but inspires so much more opposition to himself and his ideas than any other candidate I can think of. I even think that Trump’s genocide is going to be received very differently than Biden’s genocide since Trump will be far less tactful and far more honest about his motivations. The worst case scenario is possible under Trump and I don’t think it’s ok to dismiss that, but it is by no means a guarantee that Trump is the one to lead average Americans into fascism. It is a fucking frightening risk allowing a greater evil through inaction, but I think it’s the actual least bad option this time.
I’m open to being challenged on or discuss anything I’ve said here in good faith. I’m also open to rage-induced teardowns of the ideas I’ve proposed here as long as those teardowns are against my ideas and not against me as a person or others who are sympathetic to these ideas. I understand that this is an extremely charged topic and would like to encourage honest conversation as long as it doesn’t bleed into abuse which won’t help anyone.
Edit: Whew, that was some important discussion. I hope it was clear that my intention was to clarify my thinking and explore different perspectives on my argument rather than me judging others for coming to different conclusions or trying to convince everyone I am sure I am absolutely correct. Importantly, I realized this entire argument is secondary. What is important now is direct action. Depending on the degree of success we have with disrupting this sick order, this whole conversation could become moot and that is my strongest desire. See y’all on the street.
in my mind voting in our current system is just pretty straightforward utilitarian calculus (and can’t be anything else): you should vote for the option which will do the least harm and has the highest probability of winning. even if you, say, accept that Biden and Trump are equal on I/P, that just means you should look to other issues on which they are distinct–and they are distinct on basically every other issue in a way that clearly suggests Biden to be the best choice you can make here.
take just the Autocracy Tracker, which makes it unambiguous that Trump, if he wins, is planning a sweeping authoritarian wave of deportations, purges, restrictions of civil rights, and repression of minority groups and ideological groups he disagrees with. much of this is, in a sense, already happening here and already a form of genocide against some groups (trans people most prominently–it is now de facto illegal to be trans and legal to bring harm to trans people in large portions of the US). a Trump win will probably ensure there is no safe place for such groups in this country anymore.
on a moral level: i am just not sympathetic to the idea that voting for Biden constitutes blood on your hands in a meaningful way. i think if you accept this line of argumentation, you would ultimately have to bite the bullet that this could also be said of paying taxes[1]–and i certainly don’t begrudge people for paying their taxes even as this lines the pocket of the war machine, so then why should judge them for voting? in general: by virtue of existing within a state, you will always be complicit to some degree in the crimes of that state, regardless of what you do to extricate yourself from supporting them. so i just don’t think that abstention from voting or voting for a more morally defensible alternative actually cleans your hands of the blood being perceived here.
separately, and more pragmatically: there is no compelling third party with anywhere near a possibility of winning or even scoring a “symbolic victory.” a vote for a leftist third party right now is, in a real sense, a vote wasted–because these parties are incompetent, fractured, and full of people who are not serious candidates. even with the Green Party (by far the most electorally advanced of them) nobody has ever trembled at their influence and in practice they mostly seem to exist to waste a lot of the money given to them on quixotic presidential candidates. imo: any actual movement challenging the power–your DSAs, for example–is going to be built from the ground up and not imposed through the presidency, and is only going to use electoralism as one of its several political arms.
arguably, it’s even more true of paying taxes than of voting: votes may make no difference in whether something happens or not, but taxes actively make them possible ↩︎
This is such an important perspective that often seems ignored in these discussions. There is such a wide nuance to being an American and our participation, be it taxes or voting. It’s always seemed clear to me that at bare minimum voting for the lesser evil is the first step down the path of doing the right thing as a citizen. However I also would say that I do somewhat feel this to Trump voters, but I would say that’s more about the intent. I would hazard the assumption that if you’re voting for Trump again it’s likely because you have been pushed to have hate in your heart, not because his foreign policy is just so stellar. Whereas if you’re voting for Biden the intent is likely to not have the other guy.
OP’s post is a very good conversation of exactly this. “I won’t support a genocide, so I won’t vote!” That’s awesome, but by not participating you are inherently accepting to the default winner - your bare minimum participation of voting could have had an affect which you abstained from. In a hypothetical landslide of 1 vote for Trump, suddenly voting has a lot of power. By the way, some of our votes in the last 8 years have been down to barely triple digit breaks - legitimately 1 small town voting could have swayed the results in that towns favor. Voting matters quite a bit.
Given our current circumstances, in regards to deciding a vote for the lesser evil, I personally see a former president who placed as many restrictions as possible on specific citizens while relieving as many restrictions as possible on (mostly specific) corporations, and who had been all too happy to engage with the wrong sorts of International Relations, belligerently ignoring allies and goading more dangerous countries. I also see a current President who is historically known for not making the best decisions for the people, while also having a lot of policy that specifically is (or at least tries to… or at bare minimum says he’ll try to even if he won’t which should go without saying for sooo many Presidents).
Which by the way, yes, I would rather have a President who says he is for ____ rights but maybe doesn’t always have policies that fully align with that. As opposed to a president who says he is actively against those same rights, and actively promotes harm to certain demographics… Damn right. Send yourself back in time 10-15 years, try to remember the general public perception from 2008 to 2014. We were calmer citizens because we had a rational leader who wasn’t spewing hate speech at every turn. Of course other factors had an effect, media exacerbation and whatever else, but that wouldn’t have been the case had we had literally any other President.
And that’s the whole thing of it - if you don’t vote, the voter has no power (giving it to the rest of the voters). If you do vote, the voter has very little power. At. Bare. Minimum. If you are a voter who canvases in your area, you have made a much larger difference - you have gone above and beyond the bare minimum. And who knows, maybe you just happened to live in the town that changed your swing states results. The thing is, the bare minimum should be much more than just voting. Just voting is how we got here in the first place. Just voting isn’t ever going to change anything, because just voting alone doesn’t rally people together under a united ideal.
All this to say - I personally do not think that it is wrong to take what power you have to vote for “fascism in 50 years” as some have recently started to say about Democrats. It’s not wrong to vote this way when the alternative is fascism in 4 years. Futhermore, I think it’s also admitting that doing the absolute bare minimum just isn’t entirely effective.
As U.S. citizens, voting is what we have to do at the bare minimum. We should all be out actively campaigning in our local elections specifically to encourage, inform, and expand our collective understanding of politics. This works two-fold, because as we become more engaged @Kwakigra@beehaw.org we become much more observant. As you say, if Dems are on a path to evil, isn’t the solution for all of us to get as possibly involved as we can? At a certain point, we would be the Dems playing the game.
I say this as someone who has written to my California representatives about many things and having gotten response letters basically calling me an idiot for me expressing my wishes for him to reconsider his position, and why the evil things he’s supporting are actually a good thing. It’s obviously not easy, we’re fighting against 2 generations of propaganda and a media mogul. Some say that we are too far gone, though I don’t believe in that sort of defeatism.
We have many steps that we need to take in order to be set on the right path again. It should start with revitalizing the nations public education system, with a stronger focus on a healthy life-work balance. The fact that basic things about the U.S. system aren’t taught anymore has been a huge setback. I’m young, I didn’t have any sort of homeroom or home ec, it took until my senior year in High School to even learn about how we do our taxes (and it did nothing). These classes were supplemented with “extra critical thinking”, which has clearly failed, something that can be seen by reading just about any comment about a piece of media online. Home Economics, Time Management, and Critical Thinking all meld to make life at home manageable and enjoyable. From working with schools it’s been clear to see what I went through growing up has gotten even worse, especially with Covid putting all of the students on screens and a significant portion of them hardly even learning during that time at all.
Catch up our nations students and we’ll be well on our way back to civility. Fighting against the anti-education crowd and having homeschooling be far, far, far more rigorous than it currently is - state dependent I’m certain but the 3 I’ve lived in, CA, OR, and WI, holy shit they are awful. Homeschoolings seems to have almost become co-opted by the anti- crowds, I’ve regrettably only had 1 good encounter over the last 10 years and it was because the school remained open during Covid, to which the parents said screw that we’re homeschooling. As opposed to homeschooling because they’d have to get a vaccine otherwise, or because the schools “agenda”…
Anyway, I’ve said far too much and gotten pretty off topic. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to say anything about this and it’s clearly been pent up, otherwise I’d have wrapped this up many paragraphs ago.
I am also primarily a utilitarian thinker. What has me considering the deontological position on this specifically is that, for utilitarian purposes, I have voted to allow our entire federal government to continue to drift right. When choosing the lesser of the two evils every time I did, I think I failed to consider that my permissiveness would embolden the lesser of the two evils to become increasingly evil as they were aware I wasn’t voting for them but against their opponent. I gave them license though my voting behavior to move to the right as much as they wanted and be financially rewarded for doing so because they knew they would always have my vote as long as they weren’t as bad as their opponents. This genocide is a red flag to me that since I have been voting to avoid immediate consequences, the ultimate consequence is that some of those consequences I was afraid of are now guaranteed from both options to varying degrees. The more I have rewarded the Democrats with my vote which they need to be elected, the only thing they need from me, they have no incentive whatsoever to do anything but what benefits themselves just as long as what they do isn’t as bad as what the Republicans would do. Average people aren’t funding their campaigns, we are only handing our votes over to them because their opponents are worse, despite both of them becoming worse all the time.
When I talk about whether to grant or withhold my vote to my only actual option, it’s a matter of currency and power rather than morality. I have found that if I always grant my vote regardless of the behavior of who receives my vote, they know they have license to do the things they were doing when I voted for them and no reason whatsoever to change course according to what I would like to see and not see, such as a genocide.
You are absolutely right that there isn’t an option for president outside blue and red. Our system isn’t built for it. Blue knows I’m not suicidal and can’t vote for Red, so the question becomes whether or not I will tolerate them becoming worse every cycle as long as during each cycle their candidate isn’t as bad as their opponent who is also getting worse every cycle. The option is whether to support Blue regardless of what we do and watch the system deteriorate, or demonstrate to blue that there are limits to how far right they can move regardless of who they’re up against with the hope that at least one side will stop getting worse because there are still consequences.
The reason I want to stop this cycle is survival. I think we are guaranteed to drift into explicit oligarchy as long as both sides are allowed to continue moving rightward. Every election since 2010 has been worse than the one before it, and I don’t think there’s a reason that would change after this cycle. The Republicans are going to try to capture the appeal of Trump even though they haven’t yet, and the right wing runs on delusion so they aren’t accountable to anything. All they have to worry about is telling lies that people strongly want to believe. The Democrats have to contend with reality and in my view are party far more likely to react to something that happened here in real life so they have better chances at being elected in the future.
I will easily concede that this is awful timing. Trump is a massive threat as you described. If I thought he would be highly successful in everything you mentioned, I would not consider doing what I’ve been advocating for. Even though I know him to be incompetent and without much support outside his base for anything he wants to do, any amount of success he has will be a problem. The primary reason I see fit to act as I described is because I predict the 2028 election will be between someone who is to the right of Biden vs someone who is to the right of Trump, and every future election it will be more and more difficult to change course from where we’re headed. All future elections could be about how appealing Republican lies are vs how many people don’t want them elected and are willing to vote for anything else.
i guess my problem is, if you acknowledge this possibility: does it not logically follow that, likewise, allowing someone running as an open fascist to win might have the same or worse impact as you’re trying to avoid? because i would personally consider the argument “if Trump wins, fascism will be given a greenlight” more likely than the argument “if Biden wins, genocide will be given a greenlight” for a variety of reasons, and i would consider it more harmful if it occurred too. that’s for a few reasons: the overall shift in the party has been to the left and i think that’s far more likely to continue than a shift to the right; there’s a flourishing left-critical tendency within the Democratic Party; the overall American left the strongest it’s been in a long time, etc.
but i think most immediately it’s because i would contest the logical validity of the second argument at all. the contemporary US is a post settler-colonial society and most of its land area was acquired through genocidal processes given sanctity by the legal system. to me Biden is neither establishing a new norm nor deviating from an old one—he’s just a part of a long-normalized string of presidents like this.[1] in my mind trying to break the cycle by punishing him might be cathartic but will be politically fruitless and unlikely to produce the introspection you’re seeking. by contrast: i would argue we have not really had a fascist president—authoritarian, racist, white supremacist, truly evil? probably yes, but not fascist[2]—and so Trump winning would be a catastrophic normalization of that political tendency which we’ve to this point avoided. it would have extreme ramifications both domestically and globally, especially for the left.
and i will reiterate that i believe it entirely likely that you’re going to get a larger, more sweeping genocide from Trump and his followers than is happening in Palestine if he is given the power to do that. (it’s also obvious he’s going to continue that one based on his positioning since October 7.) we’re already seeing efforts in places like Arizona to make it de facto legal to murder undesirables like undocumented immigrants–the dehumanization needed for widespread killing to begin is clearly high in some parts of the Republican Party. in all of this space, i just don’t see very many compelling arguments for why the utilitarian perspective of harm reduction should be discarded here.
indeed i think you could charge nearly every president since the US’s inception as being complicit in or directly responsible for at least one genocide. ↩︎
i also have a hard time fitting most contemporary presidents into these categories in terms of governance even though i think these descriptors are accurate for most of them. i think Reagan is probably the most explicit offender in this regard, but even so i think it’s obvious there is a lot of distance in outcome between how he governed and how Trump has/wants to. ↩︎
I think part of your premise here is flawed; the median Democratic lawmaker has drifted left in the past few decades quite significantly, as blue dog democrats and moderates have been slowly replaced. The Biden administration is also, in terms of supported and enacted policies, slightly to the left of the Obama administration and considerably to the left of Clinton.
I struggle to think of any issue where the Democratic Party of today is further to the right than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
That shift has happened for a large number of reasons, but one of them has been support from progressive voters replacing, in many areas, the electoral need to pander to center-right voters.
The overall country’s drift to the right has been largely driven by GOP electoral victories and the ramifications of those (like the three Supreme Court justices Trump appointed).
I half agree with you. Yes, even if I do not vote for Biden I am certainly complicit in part for his actions, at least so long as I am not in open rebellion against the government. I am, by simple merit of enjoying the privileges afforded me as an American, complicit in it. It’s a passive complicity.
But when you move into taking actions that actively support the evil, you are no longer passively complicit, you are actively so, and I think there is a real material difference, rhetorically, morally, and practically (though even passive complicity is wrong).
If we know, as we do, that Biden will continue to support Israel’s genocide, and still vote for him, how can we un-hypocritically fault anyone else who supports a genocidal leader so long as they can claim some other worse person waiting in the wings?
If we place our own innocent lives above the lives of equally-innocent people in other countries (since none here would be advocating voting for Biden if it was some sub-group of Americans he supported the genocide of, as Trump does), how can we think ourselves better than Republicans? “The only moral genocide is my genocide”, as it were. The genocide of Americans is non-negotiable, rightfully, but apparently the genocide of Palestinians must be ‘contextualized’ properly (and in this case, lose out to our own internal political interests).
On a practical level, we are absolutely hemorrhaging any remaining shreds of international credibility, for a leader who was supposed to be the “return of US world leadership”. We are finding ourselves more and more isolated by the day, which is exactly what Trump and the rest of the isolationist GOPers want as well. Whatever quiet political leverage we on the Left gained from Trump being a worldwide laughing stock (and if you know any Trumpers, you know that no matter how much they pretend otherwise, they do feel anger about that ridicule), has now been matched by Biden being a worldwide figure of shame and frustration. Our closest allies are rebuking us over our inability to even just step aside and allow the rest of the world to pressure Israel into a ceasefire. Biden may have actually succeeded in undermining US hegemony in a way that Trump could only have dreamed of.
I am not claiming to have an answer that fixes this. I don’t think there is any way to extricate ourselves cleanly from the very circumstances of our country’s origins and its continuing imperialism and settler-colonialism. We’re stuck with this collective guilt, until the day this government ceases to exist. If you choose to treat that guilt as the simple “cost of doing business” of living as an American, and vote for Biden, that’s fine. But for me, I cannot accept active complicity in Biden’s reelection without eschewing my own personal moral redlines. Everyone has to draw their own lines. Maybe some would torture one man to save the lives of many, and that’s certainly Utilitarian, but don’t condemn the persons who wouldn’t, lest we lose sight of the heinousness of the act itself.
To my mind, this rhetoric pushing Biden over abstention as the only moral action
risksis taking us down a pathway of moral relativism in which even genocide can be excused under the right circumstances, and that’s not a path I will walk.i think this is already addressed in my comment: even if you don’t vote for Biden, you are complicit by virtue of paying taxes. the Palestinian children we’re murdering probably don’t care very much if you do or don’t vote, given that your vote is largely meaningless in what we do–your taxes are another matter, and directly finance our shipments of aid and weapons to Israel. accordingly i consider taxes to be a far more active contribution than any vote can be in this space, and i think if everybody was truly principled on this matter they would also abstain from paying them. since they don’t, i think they’ve already made such a moral compromise that it would be very silly to impugn voting for Biden.
Yes, I acknowledged the guilt we all collectively share for living in America and not actively and violently dismantling it, but that also doesn’t mean we should actively go along with it when we have the very simple ability not to. If I attempt to destroy the government , I will be killed. If I don’t pay taxes, I will go to prison. If I don’t vote for a president who will perpetuate a genocide, I won’t.
It is, in many ways literally, the least I can do.
They are unaware of me as an individual, sure, but I guarantee you they wish we’d all stop voting for presidents who kill them and their families.
i guess i’m sort of obliged to ask: why are these undesirable outcomes if your moral system is just? i find this a weird objection to make unless you fall into one of the following three camps:
If I believed that either my failure to pay taxes, or my individual revolutionary actions, could have any chance of ending the genocide in Palestine, I would absolutely agree with you.
If the probability of success of those actions was not 0%, there may be an argument that the impact outweighs the unlikelihood of success. But you and I both know otherwise.
My belief that opposing the genocide in Palestine is necessary, does not assert that I must simply take whatever random actions someone throws out there, especially when the only real and logical outcome is self-harm, without helping Palestinians.
i mean i just don’t find this argument particularly convincing. i think biting this bullet would improperly impugn the vast majority of protests and forms of protest—because most of them are unsuccessful and will never be successful. likewise, i think “chance of influencing an outcome for the better” is just one variable you should consider in a moral act, because trying to weigh whether you should do something or not on that basis just invites a whole host of other problems.
If your express and only goal in a marching in a protest is to directly bring about some immediate policy change based on empathy or sympathy from politicians, then yes, stop protesting right now, you’re wasting your time. But generally the goal of most protests is to make an implicit threat that if ignored, other actions will follow (whether it be voting a certain way, boycotting, or other direct actions). The more people who participate in making that threat, the more effective it is.
People who organize protests attempt to plan for actions and times and places that maximize their impact, because 5,000 people standing in a field at midnight is not as effective as 5,000 people standing on a bridge in rush hour. They would tell you that the field at midnight is likely to have 0% chance of achieving any impact, which is why you don’t see that happen, as where you do see bridge obstructions during rush hour.
Of course it is not the only metric, but it can and must be heavily considered. All risk calculation looks at impact and likelihood as the 2 key factors. If Impact is High, but Likelihood is None, there is no chance of that outcome, and the outcome can be safely ignored.