Tomorrow Americans get the chance to vote for a system \u2013 resource-hungry, war-peddling corporate capitalism \u2013 in two iterations: one has funny hair and a permatan, the other wears lipstick and trouser-suits.<\/p>\n
Yes, there are some policy differences too, or rather emphases \u2013 and Hillary Clinton\u2019s supporters are desperately exploiting them to try to persuade those who have grown deeply disillusioned with the system that a vote for Clinton matters. After all, Clinton is not going to make it\u00a0into the Oval Office unless she can secure the votes of those who backed the far-more progressive Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.<\/p>\n
Clinton\u2019s camp have wielded various sticks to beat these voters into submission. Not least they have claimed that a refusal to vote for Clinton is an indication\u00a0of one\u2019s misogyny<\/a>. But it has not been an easy task. Actor Susan Sarandon, for example, has stated<\/a> that she is not going to \u201cvote with my vagina\u201d. As\u00a0she\u00a0notes, if the issue is simply about proving one is not anti-women, there is a much worthier\u00a0candidate for president who also happens to be female: Sarandon, who supported Sanders in the primaries, spoke for a vast swath\u00a0of voters excluded by the two-party system when she told BBC Newsnight:<\/p>\n I am worried about the wars, I am worried about Syria, I am worried about all of these things that actually exist. TTP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] and I\u2019m worried about fracking. I\u2019m worrying about the environment. No matter who gets in they don\u2019t address these things because money has taken over our system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Given that\u00a0both Donald Trump and Clinton represent big money \u2013 and big money only \u2013 Clinton\u2019s supporters have been forced to find\u00a0another stick. And that has been\u00a0the \u201clesser evil\u201d argument. Clinton may be bad, but Trump would be far worse. Voting for a non-evil candidate like Jill Stein \u2013 who has no hope of winning \u2013 would split the progressive camp and ensure Trump, the more evil candidate, triumphs.\u00a0Therefore, there is a moral obligation\u00a0on progressive voters to back Clinton, however\u00a0bad\u00a0her\u00a0track record\u00a0as a senator and as secretary of state.<\/p>\n There is nothing new about this argument. It has been around for decades, and has been corralling progressives into voting for Democratic presidents\u00a0who have consistently\u00a0advanced US neoconservative policy goals abroad and neoliberal ones at home.<\/p>\n So is it true that Clinton is the lesser-evil candidate? To answer that question, we need to examine those \u201cpolicy differences\u201d with\u00a0Trump.<\/p>\n On the negative side, Trump\u2019s platform poses a genuine threat to civil liberties. His bigoted, \u201cblame the immigrants\u201d style of politics will harm many families in the US in very tangible ways. Even if the inertia of the political system reins in his worst excesses, as is almost certain, his inflammatory rhetoric is sure to damage the fa\u00e7ade of democratic discourse in the US \u2013 a development not to be dismissed lightly. Americans may be living in a pseudo-democracy, one run more like a plutocracy, but destroying the politics of respect, and civil discourse, could quickly result in the normalisation\u00a0of political violence and intimidation.<\/p>\n On the plus side, Trump is an isolationist, with little appetite for foreign entanglements. Again, the Washington policy elites may force him to engage abroad in ways he would prefer not to, but his instincts to limit the projection of US military power on the international stage are\u00a0likely to be an overall good for the world\u2019s population outside the US. Any diminishment of US imperialism is going to have real practical benefits for billions of people around the globe. His refusal to demonise Vladimir Putin, for example, may be significant enough to halt the gradual slide towards a nuclear confrontation with Russia, either in Ukraine\u00a0or in the Middle East.<\/p>\n Clinton is the mirror image of Trump. Domestically, she largely abides by the rules of civil politics \u2013 not least because respectful discourse benefits her as the candidate with plenty\u00a0of political experience. The US is likely to be a more stable, more predictable place under a Clinton presidency, even as\u00a0the plutocratic elite entrenches its power and the wealth gap grows relentlessly.<\/p>\n Abroad, however, the picture looks worse under Clinton. She has been an enthusiastic supporter of all the many recent wars of aggression launched by the US, some declared and some covert. Personally, as secretary of state, she helped engineer the overthrow of Col Muammar Gaddafi. That policy led to an\u00a0outcome \u2013 one that was entirely foreseeable \u2013 of Libya\u2019s reinvention as a failed state, with jihadists of every stripe\u00a0sucked into the resulting vacuum. Large parts of Gadaffi’s\u00a0arsenal followed the jihadists as they exported their struggles across the Middle East, creating more bloodshed and heightening the refugee crisis. Now Clinton wants to intensify US involvement in Syria, including by imposing a no-fly zone \u2013 or rather, a US and allies-only fly zone \u2013 that would thrust the US into a direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed power, Russia.<\/p>\n In the cost-benefit calculus of who to vote for in a two-party contest, the answer seems to be: vote for Clinton if you are interested only in what happens in the narrow sphere of US domestic politics (assuming Clinton does not push the US into a nuclear war); while if you are a global citizen worried about the future of the planet, Trump may be the marginally better of two terribly evil choices. (Neither, of course, cares a jot about the most pressing problem facing mankind: runaway climate change.)<\/p>\n So even on the extremely blinkered logic of Clinton\u2019s supporters, Clinton might not be the winner in a lesser-evil presidential contest.<\/p>\n But there is a second, more important reason to\u00a0reject\u00a0the lesser-evil argument as grounds\u00a0for voting for Clinton.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s popularity is a direct consequence\u00a0of several decades of American progressives voting for the lesser-evil candidate. Most Americans\u00a0have never\u00a0heard of Jill Stein, or the other three candidates not running on behalf of the Republican and Democratic parties. These candidates have received no mainstream media coverage \u2013 or the chance to appear in the candidate debates \u2013 because their share of the vote is minuscule. It remains minuscule precisely because progressives have spent decades voting for the lesser-evil candidate. And nothing is going to change so long as progressives keep responding to the electoral dog-whistle that they have to keep the Republican candidate out at all costs, even at the price of their own consciences.<\/p>\n Growing numbers of Americans understand that their country was \u201cstolen from them\u201d, to use a popular slogan. They sense that the US no longer even aspires to its founding ideals, that it has become a society run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny wealthy elite. Many are looking for someone to articulate their frustration, their powerlessness, their hopelessness.<\/p>\n Two opposed antidotes for the\u00a0mounting\u00a0disillusionment with “normal politics” emerged during the presidential race: a progressive one, in the form of Sanders, who suggested he was ready to hold the plutocrats to account; and a populist one, in the form of Trump, determined to deflect anger away from the plutocrats towards easy targets like immigrants and Muslims. As we now know from Wikileaks’\u00a0release of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, the Democats worked hard to rig their own primaries to make sure the progressive option, Sanders, was eliminated. The Republicans, by contrast, were overwhelmed by the insurrection within\u00a0their own party.<\/p>\n The wave of disaffection\u00a0Sanders and Trump have been riding is not going away. In fact, a President Clinton, the embodiment of the self-serving, self-aggrandising politics of the plutocrats, will only fuel the disenchantment. The fixing\u00a0of the Democratic primaries did\u00a0not strengthen Clinton\u2019s moral authority, it\u00a0fuelled the kind of doubts about the system that bolster Trump. Trump\u2019s accusations of a corrupt elite and a rigged political and media system are not figments of his imagination; they are rooted in the realities of US politics.<\/p>\n Trump, however, is not the man to offer solutions. His interests are too closely aligned to those of the plutocrats for him to make meaningful\u00a0changes.<\/p>\n Trump may lose this time, but someone like him will do better next time \u2013 unless ordinary Americans\u00a0are exposed\u00a0to\u00a0a different kind of politician, one who can articulate progressive, rather than regressive,\u00a0remedies for the necrosis that is rotting the US body politic. Sanders began that process, but a progressive\u00a0challenge to “politics as normal”\u00a0has\u00a0to be sustained and extended\u00a0if Trump and his ilk are not to triumph eventually.<\/p>\n The battle cannot be delayed another few years, on the basis that one day a genuinely non-evil candidate will\u00a0emerge from nowhere\u00a0to\u00a0fix\u00a0this rotten system. It\u00a0won\u2019t happen of its own. Unless progressive Americans\u00a0show they are prepared to vote out of\u00a0conviction, not out of necessity,\u00a0the Democratic party will never have to take account of their views. It will keep throwing up leaders\u00a0\u2013 in different colours and different sexes \u2013 to front the tiny elite that runs the US and seeks to rule the world.<\/p>\n It is time to say no \u2013 loudly \u2013\u00a0to Clinton, whether\u00a0she is the slightly lesser-evil candidate or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tomorrow Americans get the chance to vote for a system \u2013 resource-hungry, war-peddling corporate capitalism \u2013 in two iterations: one has funny hair and a permatan, the other wears lipstick and trouser-suits. Yes, there are some policy differences too, or rather emphases \u2013 and Hillary Clinton\u2019s supporters are desperately exploiting them to try to persuade […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,60,51],"class_list":{"0":"post-2325","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-corporations","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-left-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nJill Stein, of the Green Party.<\/p>\nAmerica’s pseudo-democracy<\/h3>\n
Mounting disillusion<\/h3>\n