A few days ago I wrote about the Biden folks who were continuing to pound on Bernie people, even after Bernie endorsed Joe. It’s only fair that I get around to the Bernie folks who are now far too pure to cast a vote for Joe.
Among my guilty pleasures on my RSS feed is Down with Tyranny, which has, in all honesty, given me some good insights into the darker corners of the Democratic Party, from its perspective as the arbiter of all that is progressive. But this, today, a panegyric agains Biden’s lack of progressive credentials really set me off. It’s not that I disagree with their take on Biden’s inching toward progressive positions. In fact, I’ve made at least one of the same points made in the Tyranny post to which I’ve linked. It was this in the opening paragraph that set me off:
I vote for candidates, not against someone who is worse. Over the decades, the Democrats have taken interpreted progressives willingness to vote for their putrid centrist candidates as an endorsement of putrid, centrist policies. If that’s ok for you, go for it.
There may have been an election in my lifetime in which this purist nonsense was intellectually defensible, but that time is not now. It’s a matter of pure mathematics. If you vote third party, or refuse to vote at all, you are, for all intents and purposes, casting a vote for Donald Trump. You are casting a vote for another Brett Kavanaugh (and maybe more than one) on the Supreme Court. You are, in all likelihood, casting a vote for a permanent change to our institutions, such that we maintain the fiction of a representative democracy while we institutionalize an autocracy. Given the narrow Trump 2016 victories in some critical states, it is not too much of a stretch to say that those victories were delivered not just by the Russians, but by the purists as well.
I don’t know who wrote this particular post, but Howie Klein, who is, I think, one of the top folks at Down with Tyranny, often talks about his background in the music industry. Perhaps the folks there should recall these lyrics from the decade that produced the greatest music of all time:
You can’t always get what you want.
You can’t always get what you want.
You can’t always get what you want.
But if you try, sometimes
Well you just might find
You get what you need.
Update: Noam Chomsky agrees.
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