“Of Two Evils Choose Neither” was a worthy sentiment in 2016, but is less helpful towards being part of the solution in 2020.
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One of the joys of being a pundit is coining a phrase or observation before anyone else. This is, unfortunately, rare. It’s much more common, for me at least, to come up with a terrific idea, and then discover that someone else has beaten me to it. My current favorite political writer is Jonah Goldberg. I became a fan almost exactly four years ago when I joined the fight against Donald’s nomination, and since then have immersed myself in his archives. I constantly find stated in his old material insights that I had thought were original with me, as if he were plagiarizing my essays even before I wrote the essays myself. It’s like we’re twins, but he’s the only one of us who has achieved the professional success we both deserve.
Nonetheless, I have three brilliant observations, all concerning the “Lesser of Two Evils” paradigm, and I’m pretty sure they’re (relatively) original with me. The first is that if you don’t choose the LESSER of two evils, then you are necessarily left with the GREATER of the two evils. If those are, in fact, your only two choices, then arguably there is a moral obligation to choose the one that will do less damage. To do otherwise is to cause more harm, or at least to allow it to happen. (Of course, all this depends upon your choice being limited to those two options. Don’t get me started on False Dichotomies again!) Fortunately, we often — indeed usually — have the option of choosing neither. That’s what I did in 2016, and I’m proud of myself for that.
The second unique part of my idea (at least I thought it was, until I researched it just now, and found one other writer making it. Oh well. I still thought it up before he did, and I’m a better writer than he is) consists of my observation that for our entire lives, up until the 2016 election, we have been using the idiom “Lesser of Two Evils” wrong: nine times out of ten, the two options we describe as “evils” are really not all that bad.
Consider the following scenario: you’re a college student, but you’ve just been offered your dream job. Do you take the job, at the cost of not getting a degree you no longer need, or stay in school, getting the diploma and maybe a second chance at your dream job somewhere down the road? You might describe this as a Lesser of Two Evils scenario, but actually, neither of the two options are all that evil. In fact, they both sound kind of sweet.
2016, on the other hand? Now that was a choice of two evils. Donald vs. Hillary? They qualify.
This explains the common sentiment among former Republicans, like me and many others contributing to this site, best expressed by American activist Michael Marcavage. He wrote, specifically about Christians but it could have been about any American, that we “must turn from the endless cycle of voting for the lesser of evils and expecting an unrighteous act to produce a righteous result. From a communist to a cultist, choosing the lesser of two evils is still evil, and never should we do evil that good may come.” I’m no longer a Christian, but amen, brother.
This is a lesson that the American Right will learn, to their cost, by the time this sad chapter of history draws to a close. Whether constitutional conservatives, fiscal conservatives, or religious conservatives, they will find that the cost of abandoning their principles in favor of a man who never shared them far outweighs whatever short-term benefits they hoped to accrue.
They have forever surrendered any claim to moral authority. For the rest of time, whenever one of them comes forward with a proposal for the future, the answer from the rest of us should be “Is this going to be as stupid as your idea to find the most corrupt man in America and put him in charge?”
Contrast this with me and the other writers on The Liberty Hawk, who will for the rest of our lives be able to brag, paraphrasing the quote from British preacher Charles Spurgeon: “Of two evils, we chose neither. America told us ‘Choose: Donald or Hillary’, and we said ‘No.'”
While I was writing this essay, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race. It’s no longer necessary to imagine voting for a socialist, if that’s what it would take to get rid of Donald because it wouldn’t. Now, all it will require is voting for a dope like Joe Biden.
Say what you want about Biden: he’s not evil. On a good day, I’d call him “an amiable dunce,” as someone once mischaracterized Ronald Reagan. He’s a featherweight politician who has his entire party fooled into thinking he’s a leader. And sure, he has bad ideas. What do you expect? He’s a Democrat. But evil? Not even close.
Never would the idea have occurred to me, prior to June 16, 2015, that I would one day vote for a man such as Joe Biden. Sad to say, that’s the world we currently live in, and I’m willing to do what is necessary to make things right again. Step One: Donald must be defeated.
My final observation about “The Two Evils” dictum is more of a personal opinion: in my experience, it’s the kind of thing that a libertarian, not a conservative, would say. Many years ago, I flirted with the idea of joining the Libertarians, and they actually talked me out of it.
In a scene later parodied in the hit show Futurama (Fry sees a representative of the Voter Apathy Party and says, “Now here’s a party I can get excited about. Sign me up!” The response: “Sorry, not with that attitude”) they told me, accurately, that I’m really a disaffected conservative, and they wouldn’t take me. Every libertarian I’ve ever met has agreed with the sentiment that they’d rather lose an election than compromise their principles.
I simply can’t get on board with that. The reason I vote is because I want conservative principles to prevail. That cannot happen as long as the GOP continues to monopolize conservative votes, and while Donald maintains his chokehold on the GOP. For conservatism to win, Donald must lose. At the moment, Biden is the only one who can defeat him. Those who vote for third party candidates may celebrate their intellectual purity, but they offer no strategy for restoring a conservative party worthy of the name.
I’m reminded here of the role of the philosopher Socrates in the fate of Leon of Salamis. To recap very briefly, a dictatorship of aristocrats known as the Thirty Tyrants overthrew Athenian democracy. They called before them a group of Athenian citizens, including Socrates. They ordered them to arrest Leon, in the full knowledge that he would be killed and his property confiscated by the Tyrants. As recorded by his disciple Plato, Socrates refused to join the others in the crime, and simply went home.
Socrates would later use this anecdote as evidence that he was a virtuous man, and would “commit no unjust or impious deed.” I didn’t understand when I first read this in Philosophy 101, and I still don’t understand now, why either Socrates, Plato, nor anyone else would offer this as an example of the virtue of Socrates. Certainly, Leon himself had no reason to be grateful: he was arrested and executed anyway, and his assets appropriated. Socrates did absolutely nothing to help him or even warn him.
This may be my strongest reason not to sit on the sidelines in this election. Especially not when the cost is so high: the country I love is being drained of all its dignity and grace. I couldn’t vote for a long-shot candidate, no matter how noble, merely so I could boast afterward about my dedication to principle. For me, it would be an empty gesture, like Socrates bragging that, though Leon was dead, he didn’t have any blood on his own hands. (For more on my contrarian views about Socrates, please see my previous blog article, Socrates Was a Fraud).
Perhaps it’s time to retire the motto “Of two evils, choose neither.” I propose, as an alternative, this quote from Isaac Asimov: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
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