The present moment provides some good reason for optimism for pessimism. Of the two persons with any chance of being elected president this fall, only one can claim to have never officiated at the disintegration of a North-African state; unfortunately, the same one has advanced a doctrine of foreign policy that can be summarized as “nuclear unpredictability.” The country seems to have put Philippa Foot in its mouth.
Maybe the only good that can come of having to countenance cataclysm in this way is that it forces one, if one is an American and can vote, to consider with especial seriousness the terms of the election and one’s responsibility to participate in it.
Most of us are unhappy with our two possibilities for president—polls have had Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as the least popular nominees for their respective parties in history—but it remains impossible that anyone but one of them will win.
This latter assertion one might rebut with the claim that it’s only because we make such assertions that they turn out to be true. A conservative friend recently posted online a photo of Gary Johnson beneath exasperated text along the lines of, “You say you won’t vote for him because he can’t win because no one will vote for him?” (This was before people weren’t voting for him because of Aleppo.) Apathy and dejection being contagious, the effective cynic does have the pernicious power to make his claims more probably true, over the long haul, just by making them. But even if we accept as true that people like Johnson and Jill Stein can blame the hopelessness of their electoral causes on the past years’ accumulated undue fatalism, that is irrelevant to present considerations. There is no conceivable world in which enough support shifts over the next month and a half for a non-major candidate to win no matter what we now say otherwise. Resignation in this case has the effect only of clearing our heads.
Once we’ve established that voting for a candidate who cannot win is refusing to contribute to the actual choice at hand, it’s left to decide whether one is obligated to contribute to that choice at all, i.e., whether one must choose to choose.
Let us consider a point repeatedly enunciated by Noam Chomsky: that “In a system of immense power, small differences [between candidates] can translate into large outcomes.” This is surely true, and it’s extremely easy to come up with examples for the point. For instance, in 2000, whatever one thought of Al Gore, neither he nor his associates had the war-fetish of those who would become principals in George W. Bush’s administration. The better part of three million presumably well-meaning Americans disregarded this distinction in voting for the admirable Ralph Nader, wherefore it was possible for a Republican administration to make some decisions to the effect that perhaps the better part of one million Iraqis, as well as several thousand Americans, are no longer alive. There are of course other reasons why Gore lost—we shouldn’t just reflexively blame the Greens for the Democratic Party’s failures, let alone for the Rehnquist Court’s—but it’s still true that he would not have lost had he received Nader’s votes. In the end we cannot get around this recognition.
We may suppose that many disaffected citizens, including many former Sanders-backers, are reluctant at this point to participate in the political system, because they believe that it is illegitimate. For instance, of the close to 5000 delegates whose votes would decide the Democratic primary, more than 700 were superdelegates—party officials, donors, and the like, who were understood to have the right to contravene the will of the people, and whose disdain for that will is evident in the fact that hundreds announced their support-decisions months before the first regular citizen had gotten to cast a ballot. That Clinton went on to win the primary’s popular vote is purely incidental to this point and does not detract from the impropriety of this arrangement, even if we assume that the establishment’s premature embrace of Clinton, and the concomitant impression of her inevitability, had nothing to do with her ending up with those votes. And we should be spared the condescending suggestion, made blithely by a pair of reporters for the New York Times, that the rise of Trump may legitimate superdelegates: for the presence of all sorts of elite control-institutions does much to induce, and give an impression of legitimacy to, extreme anger in the electorate.
Superdelegates, though, while a common and appropriate punching-bag, are not the source of the most fundamental and instructive illegitimacy in the political system. That illegitimacy derives from the fact that our system, whose operation non-Americans are given no right to affect, is nevertheless allowed to produce a government with the power, frequently exercised, to inflict massive suffering on the peoples of other countries. (For examples from the last half-century we may consider the populations of Vietnam, Argentina, Iraq, and obviously many others.) If we believe that the right of a state to affect persons’ lives comes through the willingness of persons to be so affected—and this seems a reasonable generalization of the principle, which we rightly cling to for ourselves, that “Governments derive[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed”—then we should be ashamed to enjoy the benefits of our citizenship while not doing our utmost to limit the damage done by our state to other peoples. A more or less Hippocratic principle—“First, limit harm”—emerges, and we see that the joke finally is on the cynic who discourages participation because he knows the system is a joke: it is precisely because of the system’s illegitimacy that self-involvement in the system, to limit its external harm, is the only legitimate course.
Recognizing that we have no right to ideological purity in a political system with externalities, we reluctant voters must weigh the harm predictable under a Clinton presidency against that predictable under a Trump presidency. This would be easier if Clinton didn’t have so many foreign-policy liabilities—her Libya project, her Iraq vote, her State Department’s coercion in Haiti, her reliable support for NATO’s continued expansion toward Russia, her and her associates’ prospective plans regarding Syria, and every other error that would fit the dismal patterns established—but it should still be easy. The alternative is Trump. This would leave us either with the Donald himself making the decisions or, if he really doesn’t want to preside as president, authority delegated to some of his associates—a reasonable representation of whose collective character we find in Rudy Giuliani’s recent supposition that everything is legal in war. At any rate, the vital Iran deal as it exists would presumably be torn up, nuclear armaments would be more likely to proliferate, and the countdown to Ragnarok would accelerate substantially.
And this all ignores the international issue that, barring nuclear war, is overwhelmingly likely to emerge as the most important of the next decades: the changing of the climate, which is already killing lots of people and which per a recent World Bank estimate will threaten more than one billion more. Clinton accepts the scientific and international consensus on climate change and can be expected to sustain and, as circumstances dictate and allow, intensify American and international efforts to mitigate the crisis. Trump thinks the whole thing is a Chinese conspiracy (a more conspicuously offensive variant of his party’s orthodoxy). Those of us in a position to recognize these considerations should recognize that to fail to vote against Trump is, as far as we should suppose, to agree to consign millions of people to death on the basis of a problem they overwhelmingly didn’t contribute to causing.
It should be clear that disaffected voters can still be effective if we refuse to let being mad eventuate in culpable madness. My right not to vote for Clinton is much lesser than a non-American’s right not to suffer Trump. Meanwhile, Clinton’s lead, which in the summer might have seemed secure, is risibly narrow. And the next seven unforeseeable weeks may feature the exploitation of any Clinton-vulnerability up to the release by Vladimir Putin of those Goldman-Sachs transcripts.
And even if no further crisis materializes, and Clinton’s lead soon reverts to seeming security, we should remain insistent that everyone who can vote, and won’t vote for Trump, should turn out to vote for her. A large victory-margin would be useful to neutering Trump’s insinuations of electoral fraud, such as his remark that Democrats could only through cheating win Pennsylvania (incidentally, a state whose Republican legislators four years ago passed an effective poll-tax, since judicially stricken). And increasing the number of votes for Clinton would presumably increase the number of Democratic straight-ticket voters, perhaps to the point of bringing the party into effective majorities. The Democratic Party for now represents what Michael Harrington, the great American socialist and spiritual author of the War on Poverty, pledged his support to: “the left wing of the possible.” Once we are finished being threatened with Trump we may turn to the work of extending leftward that possibility.
Image credit: Alex Lee/Flickr