The Lesser Evil

I do not believe it is a controversial notion to argue that, if one searched long enough, they would be able to procure a quote that could justify their own method of thinking. The source is less relevant, be it a speech, a film, a book, or a video game, the appearance of being profound is enough of a validation in and of itself. Therefore, if all art is not in some manner political, then it is at least serviceable as a lens through which politics can be rationalized. 

I am a rather large fan of Netflix’s The Witcher and feel it is one of the stronger shows present on the platform.While the fantasy setting and the action set pieces are all well and good, the slower, quieter moments are just as intriguing to me, especially when it allows for an exploration into how its main protagonist, Geralt, would fashion a way out of a moral conundrum. Indeed, the very first episode of the series starts out quite strong by presenting one such conundrum to him. Geralt is a paid monster killer, and is known to be incredibly efficient at his job. One day he is hired by an old mage to kill a renegade princess, arguing that she has already left a line of bodies in her wake, that she is on her way to kill the mage, and that killing her would be “the lesser evil.” Geralt refuses the job altogether, responding as follows; “Evil is evil. Lesser. Greater. Middling. It’s all the same… If I have to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.” Although Geralt leaves town shortly afterwards, he is approached by the renegade princess who explains her side of the story and implicates the mage as the orchestrator of much of the hardship she endured in her life, similarly arguing that ending his life is the closest thing to justice in this situation. This time Geralt provides an alternative to the princess; leave town altogether, forget the mage, and live her life as best as she can. She rejects this offer and returns to town with murderous intent, and it is here that Geralt makes a conscious choice to get involved. He could allow the princess to kill the mage, but he does not, and in stepping in the midst of their quarrel he is forced to make a choice that costs one of their lives. The binary choice that Geralt initially rejected has now been fulfilled, and what does he get for his efforts? The survivor turns on him, tauntingly claiming that he will never know if he made the right choice, before joining in the growing chorus of voices from the townsfolk calling for his immediate exile. Geralt leaves town once again, but this time he is drenched in blood. This time he is never welcomed back. 

And it is because all art is easily politicized, whether it is intended or not, that I cannot help but view this scene in the context of today’s political situation. 

Here we are in the year 2020 with another presidential election looming on the horizon. The battle lines are now drawn; President Donald Trump vs. former Vice President Joe Biden. The latest casualty? Senator Bernie Sanders, champion of the progressives and widely popular with younger-generation voters, has suspended his bid to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for president and has since endorsed Biden, whose platform is largely antithetical to Sanders’. 

And because history has a nasty habit of repeating itself, it did not take long for cries of “Never Biden” to ring from the hilltops, as progressives who staked their hopes and dreams in a Sanders presidency see “evil” in both Biden and Trump, and choose not to make a choice at all in an effort to avoid being bloodied and reviled by the end of it anyway. 

Sanders has at least had enough foresight to understand that the worst possible scenario is to irreparably fracture the party on whose platform he has been running. He has done exactly what he did when he lost to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election; he has conceded the race to his opponent, endorsed them, and asked his supporters to support them as well. Will they? That remains the million dollar question, but a very familiar million dollar question. After all, we’ve been here before. Hillary Clinton was able to beat Bernie Sanders, but not Donald Trump. Let’s not forget that 2016 Donald Trump advocated for absolutely abhorrent social proposals, threw his support behind acts that constituted torture and war crimes, relied on vile populist rhetoric, and demonstrated an incredibly juvenile understanding of domestic and foreign policy, and still managed to clinch the Republican nomination and, ultimately, the presidency. Then came the think pieces. How could Clinton lose to this? How could the projections be so wrong? Was James Comey responsible? Were Bernie Sanders supporters responsible? 

It’s not difficult to see why that last question would beg an answer. The progressive and moderate democratic platforms are inimical on many very critical issues, not the least of which concern wealth distribution, free education, and socialized health care; all of which disproportionately impact younger generations. It was not uncommon to see voters in their twenties and thirties to show fervent support for Sanders, especially on social media where minority voices and opinions have the potential to be amplified. Granted, Hillary Clinton came with her own assortment of baggage, and young voters who were uncomfortable with supporting what they felt was an establishment that had no room for them were more than willing to voice their intention to seek alternative avenues for their votes, be it writing in Sanders, voting for a third party candidate, or simply not voting at all. To a certain extent, similar sentiments are being expressed now that Joe Biden, commonly considered a “safe” and “uninspiring” establishment candidate with his own checkered voting past that puts him at odds with the progressive agenda, has all but clinched his party’s nomination. And so, as I sit here and write this, looking at #NeverTrumpNeverBiden trending on Twitter, I cannot help but feel a certain sense of déjà vu.

Now, I am not here to speculate about how many Sanders supporters will inevitably vote Biden or Trump come November. I am not here to argue whether or not they should. I am not even here to speculate on how many of those Sanders supporters were Democrats to begin with, or if there is any correlation between social media engagement and election turnout. But there does exist this idea, regardless of how many Sanders supporters actually support it, that it is more ethical for a jilted progressive voter to give their vote to a third party candidate or otherwise withhold it as opposed to simply giving it to the Democratic nominee. 

After much thought, I have come to believe that such an attitude is not only immoral, but also immature. 

Let’s take their argument at face value and dissect it; if democrats continue to eschew the progressive platform, are progressives responsible for a Trump re-election if they don’t vote democrat? At face value it seems like a perfectly sound argument. It is the job of politicians, after all, to present platforms enticing enough to earn the votes of their constituents, and it is indeed in that word “earn” that progressives have imbued much value. Biden’s ideas on labor, education, and healthcare aren’t resonating with young voters in the same way Sanders’ did, so why should those voters give their votes to a man who doesn’t represent their interests? 

My answer would be simple; they shouldn’t, but if and only if they were comfortable with the alternative, which is Trump. And that involves grappling with a level of responsibility that I don’t think certain Sanders voters are willing to acknowledge. 

In March of this year, The Guardian published an article that featured a few quotes from Sanders supporters that were ardently opposed to ever supporting Biden if he won the Democratic nomination. There was one passage in this article, featuring the comments of a 54-year-old Sanders supporter named Martha Baez, that stuck out to me. For the most part, Baez echoed the sentiments of many other respondents in the article, indicating a desire to punish or otherwise reform the Democratic party for pushing out the progressive champion by withholding their votes. The sentiment has largely been, as one supporter put it, to “send a message: what you’ve done is not OK.” But Baez, when asked about the potential impact on social policies and the Supreme Court in the case of a Trump re-election, only had this to say; “Why is that my problem? Shouldn’t it have been considered before selecting ‘the chosen one?’ Will they try and flip the script and make it my issue or fault?” 

Yes, they will. Because it is. 

Here’s the problem with Baez’s argument; she wants the satisfaction of knowing she made no choice but doesn’t want to be held responsible for the fallout of that decision; making no choice is itself a very important choice. To use the Witcher example, Baez wants the freedom to walk off into the woods and let the belligerents in town fight to the death, come whatever may, even though it is within her power to influence who the victor is. If presented with a binary choice, Baez chooses option C, and she wants the fault to fall on the Democrats, not herself, for having to make that decision. 

But the reality of the situation is that we are indeed presented with a very binary choice, and it has been this way for a while. Third party candidates exist, yes, but they aren’t treated as serious choices for the presidency, and without widespread national movements they simply cannot muster up enough of a presence to truly contend for it. The last time a third party candidate surpassed one of the two major parties in the general election was in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt ran on the Progressive Party ticket and defeated Republican William Howard Taft in the general election. But the Progressive Party itself was formed from a schism within the Republican party, and this schism only served to elevate Democrat Woodrow Wilson into office, securing him 41.8% of the popular vote. By 1918 the Progressive Party had been firmly reabsorbed into the Republican Party. It is because of outcomes like this that we tend to view third party candidacies as “spoilers,” existing only to leech votes off the party to which it is the most ideologically similar. 

In a reality where support for third parties, such as the Libertarian Party, was so energized and enthusiastic that they were fervently elected at the local level and their presidential candidates were featured on the national debate stage, a third-party vote wouldn’t be seen as a “wasted vote.” But that’s not the reality we live in. The 2020 election can only end in one of two ways; either Donald Trump will remain president going into 2021, or Joe Biden will become our next president. Barring some unforeseen and cataclysmic disaster between now and November, this is our reality. 

The only question that remains left to ask is towards which of these two administrations would one lean? Being politically apathetical is a choice, but it is not a choice that can or should absolve one’s responsibility. By all means, a Sanders supporter should not vote for Joe Biden if they find him morally and politically repugnant, but by that same token it would not be inappropriate for someone else to treat that political apathy as tacit support for another four years of the Trump administration. Perhaps not overt or enthusiastic support, but at the very least someone who chooses not to choose at all has actually chosen to establish an equivalency between the two choices, implying that the magnitude of their personal feelings would vary incredibly little between the two outcomes. 

I do not see it as necessarily a bad thing for a voter to own their political apathy. If a Sanders supporter truly believes that a Biden administration is just as bad as a Trump administration, then it falls on them to make and defend that argument. They do not get to dodge responsibility and the conversation as a whole by choosing not to choose. Let us not forget that political apathy is itself a form of privilege. Baez wants to place responsibility for populist social policies and a conservatively-consolidated supreme court squarely upon the shoulders of the democratic establishment that voted for Biden, leaving none for herself. What Baez fails to acknowledge is that a conservatively packed supreme court could kill the progressive agent for decades, even beyond Trump’s presidency. Beyond that, it is also incredibly easy to feel ambivalence towards policies that may or may not impact you based on your station in life, and if we’ve seen anything over the last four years it is that the Trump Administration’s policies have a nasty habit of producing disproportionate impacts. If you’re a member of the LGBT community, or a recipient of DACA, or someone who relies on the services of Planned Parenthood, the impact of the 2020 election isn’t just something you can ignore, and you might find it more than a little annoying if someone who could have helped you is simply shrugging their shoulders, pointing at Joe Biden, and telling you to blame him. 

If a Sanders supporter doesn’t vote because they simply don’t care about any of those people, then that’s fine. But at the very least they have to own that argument. Is a reformed healthcare system so important to you that you’re willing to risk the damage four more years of Trump could do to the Democratic party, the federal court system, the supreme court, and the voting population of the United States? Great, then make that argument. But understand that that makes you culpable for the consequences of that argument. And that’s not a bad thing. It means you’re politically conscious, aware of the impact of your actions, and ready to make an argument justifying why you feel what you’re doing is in the best interest of your community. 

The reason why I love the Witcher scenario so much is because it, above all else, illustrates the central fallacy of Geralt’s thinking. Geralt wants to believe that the most righteous thing to do is to never commit an actor evil, but deep down he simply knows that’s not true. Why does he return to town in an attempt to stop the bloodshed between a princess and a mage? Because the truth is, even if he were to just walk away, he knows he would still be culpable for whatever comes out of the conflict.

After all, not making a choice is sometimes the worst choice one can make.