If the far right started sitting out of elections because they didn’t think eRepubs were sufficiently right-wing, I don’t think the Repubs would tack hard right to win them back. On the contrary, I think they would push more to the center.
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If you assume the conclusion that Biden is at best slightly less evil than Trump then it’s easy to argue that there’s no point in voting for him.
I happen to think Biden will be significantly better on most issues from healthcare to immigration to abortion. When you add ancillary matters like gerrymandering, the supreme court, congressional makeup, or disaster prep, the choice becomes a slam dunk.
Of course how much can and will be accomplished is always up for debate and depends on many factors aside from the presidency.
Once you characterize everyone other than your favorite candidate as evil, you’ve removed the need to think in terms of degree. Like someone brought up Obama, is Obama a LoTE who there would be no reason to vote for if he was running versus Trump? Would there or would there not be meaningful differences if Obama was president right now?
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Right. The OP’s final paragraph changes the topic. If Biden isn’t really any different than Trump, then the argument isn’t about whether it’s better to choose the lesser of two evils.
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Consider the Tea Party. The threat of getting primaried surely accelerated the GOP’s rightward drift. It’s not clear that a similar strategy is open to the left; if it is, lay on.
This characterisation is offered by adherents of the LoTE argument, IOW, the very people who insist that you must vote for the LoTE.
It’s not about whether there’s no difference, it’s about whether the difference is enough to persuade someone to hold their nose one more time. Part of my case is the claim that each successive act of nose-holding makes the smell worse, if you get me, and we’ve been through quite a few cycles, so I don’t see it as a problem for my case that there is functionally not all that much to choose.
Primarying dems with further left candidates seems pretty different than voting for Trump over Biden.
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I haven’t suggested voting for Trump. And I’ve said I have my doubts about a Tea-Party-style primarying approach being viable for the left. There’s no left-wing version of the Kochs and the Mercers etc willing to bankroll it, for one thing.
Well maybe this is semantikes, but I think it’s offered as a rhetorical device in response to people making your type of argument. As in:
“Biden sucks!”
“Yea all politicians suck. But it’s still important to vote for the one who sucks less.”
So, moving back to your post, we now have:
Once you characterize everyone other than your favorite candidate as sucking, you’ve removed the need to think in terms of degree.
This is just not speaking to the point. I cheerfully grant that Biden is indeed less sucky. Way more mbars or whatever. What I’m disputing is the claim that that’s innately good enough a reason to vote for him.
I’d argue that how much less sucky would determine how good the reason is.
I think it could be (although it’s important to bear in mind how astroturfed the tea party was), but it also seems like that’s a different strategy than is implied by rejecting LoTE reasoning? Tea party types probably voted for Romney, right?
If the strategic idea is for the left to primary everyone and run lots of candidates then I think that’s a good idea.
There’s a historical record on this and exactly the opposite happened. The people in the Republican party like George W Bush Senior have been discarded as liberals. Have you ever heard of RINOs? The Tea Party? Ross Perot? The libertarian party?
Not only did the far-right force the Republican party to move right it also resulted in the Democratic party moving right to fill the gap. Go back to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
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I don’t think you’re a Trump supporter, and I’m not really sure what you’re objecting to? The goal of the strategy is to elect Trump by strategically not voting so that [someone] finally realizes that they need to [something], right? I just want to understand what goes in the brackets and, in particular, understand why the someone’s will do the something rather than keep on doing what they’re doing.
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What if I feel that I have a moral duty to vote and a moral obligation to avoid voting for non-viable third parties, regardless of the quality of candidates?
I’m saying, not less sucky enough.
Sure, but, as you (and I) say, the funding’s really not there. It is a different strategy, and I’m sure a lot of TP-sympathisers did vote for Romney. But let’s not forget Romney lost, granting that it was to a like Babe Ruth of getting elected. What if the LoTE calculus is itself changed by the viability of a credible threat of widespread primarying? As in, if there’s a credible threat, maybe there’s no need to reject LoTE.
This part, this twice-corrected misconstrual of the OP, that’s the part I’m objecting to.
I just want to understand what goes in the brackets and, in particular, understand why the someone’s will do the something rather than keep on doing what they’re doing.
At present, the eDems are, from what I can make out, entirely correct to regard the left as a captive vote. With no credible threat of a veto, the left’s demands are not a part of their strategy. Those votes, they believe, are locked in. The goal — the sole goal, the single aim, the one and only intended outcome — is to arrange matters so that they’re no longer correct.
What if you feel you have a moral duty to dance the Charleston? What can I tell you? If you feel you have a moral duty to abide by the LoTE argument, there’s not much I can tell you except that it sure does lead to some sucky outcomes. But a deontic moral duty isn’t going to care about that.
Presumably your moral duties are responsive to reasons? I don’t get what you’re trying to do by repackaging “What should I do?” as “What is my moral duty?” It’s the same question as far as I can tell.
This just seems like an assertion. Did the far right stay home in a presidential election and force the party to reassess? After Romney, the party literally studied the results and attempted to actually broaden their base and court Latinos. Trump blindsided them.
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OP is arguing that LoTE is a consequentialist idea that doesn’t actually lead to the best consequences. I suggest that some people could use a deontological approach. Thus, the LoTE position isn’t necessarily rooted solely in outcomes for all those who hold it.
Where I think the argument fails to be compelling for consequentialists is that there is no guarantee that there is a better long-term outcome. While it makes sense in theory, it needs a more concrete plan for how not supporting Biden leads to a better world.
One problem with pushing this line is that Democratic voters tend to love Obama and see Biden as an extension of Obama. This argument requires someone to believe that Obama was part of the problem, that going from Obama to Trump was not a huge difference. This feels like the wrong year for that to be an effective argument.
What did the GOP party insiders do? I dunno. If they tried to move the party to the center because of threats from the right (Goldwater, Reagan, Perot, Ron Paul, Tea Party, Trump) they have failed. The party moved to the right. So, I don’t get your point unless you’re saying that if the Dems choose to move to the center in response they will fail and the party will move to the left despite their efforts.
I was talking about Republicans generally, not insiders.
The line isn’t intended for the sorts of people who love Obama. Those people, imo, aren’t inclined to agree that Biden is a lesser evil at all. The argument is aimed at a relatively small rump of Democratic support — Bernie Bros, Liz Lads and maybe some Yang-Gangers (being real, mostly Bernie Bros, but the more the merrier) who feel obliged to vote for the LoTE on the grounds that the consequences of not doing so are unthinkable.
If a vote can’t be withheld, and if nothing can be extracted by threatening to withhold it, then that vote is worthless to the person it’s cast for. I agree that it’s not guaranteed to work — in fact, it’s possible that the left could abstain and Biden could win anyway. But in that case, the left were never getting so much as a sop no matter what. The eDems are still tripping over their feet to court Disaffected Republicans. If they actually can win without the left, it’s better that that be out in the open. They already behave as though it’s the case, it’s the left that keeps running at the football.
And on the last, it always feels like the wrong year. Jam tomorrow is a foundational myth of the LoTE position.