What a Waste! III

Trey Smith

Even if that were true, which it ought to be clear by now it is not (see Bart Gruzalski’s “Jill Stein and the 99 Percent”), it would still offer a very poor justification for voting for a candidate one doesn’t really like. Why? Because it is an expression of short-term thinking. Thomas Hobbes argued that privileging short-term over long-term goals was irrational, and yet that’s what we’ve been doing in this country for as long as I can remember. Americans are notoriously short-term oriented. As Luc Sante noted in a piece in the New York Review of Books, America is “the country of the perpetual present tense.” Perhaps that’s part of the anti-intellectualism that Richard Hofstadter wrote about. “Just keep the republicans out of office for this election!” we’re always commanded. “We can worry about real change later!”

Of course anyone who stopped to think about it ought to realize that that mythical “later” is never going to come. Our choices are getting worse not better, and if we keep invoking the “lesser of the two evils” to justify them, we are in effect, digging our own graves. (emphasis mine)

~ from On Wasting Your Vote by M. G. Piety ~ 

The phrase in bold is the crucial point to this idiotic rationale. If "lesser evilism" was a competent strategy, then our choices would be getting better, not worse. The very fact that Democratic candidates keeping listing farther and farther to the right is the proof that this strategy is, in fact, idiotic!

The proof is so glaring that, if this doesn't convince you, I don't know what would.