The Impotence of Being Earnest.

Strategic voting in our post-democratic nation.

Short walks down long piers.

As you jog down the pier, early in the morning, you see someone in the water, flailing to stay afloat. They’re drowning and there’s nobody around but you. Fortunately, there’s a floatation device—aptly called a lifesaver—nearby, attached to a rope on a reel. All you have to do is trigger the control to lower it into the water and rescue them.

Do you pull the lever to save them or do you walk away?

Many pages have been filled by philosophers debating scenarios akin to this one, but sophisticated analysis is wasted on so simple a case. It’s open and shut. Whether they arrive at the obvious conclusion through tedious reasoning from first principles about deontology, virtues, the veil of ignorance, utilitarianism, or some other idea, no system of ethics deserving of the name will contradict what common sense and empathy make plain: You have a moral obligation to save the person who’s drowning.

There are people who would deny this. Some are simply evil; there’s not much to say about them. Others are evil in more complicated ways, such as by insisting that you can never have a positive obligation to do anything without explicit prior agreement. This is nonsense in general, but it’s bigger nonsense in specific because we’re not saying you should risk your life by jumping in the water; all you have to do is pull a lever. How hard is that?

It is literally the least you could do as a decent human being.

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Fact: Donald Trump is an incompetent, bigoted, corrupt traitor.

There are actually people who would deny this. Perhaps they don’t consider his mishandling of COVID-19 to be gross incompetence. Perhaps they don’t recognize the bigotry of calling Mexicans rapists. Perhaps they don’t see the corruption in funneling taxpayer money into his golf courses. Perhaps they don’t acknowledge the treason in seeking foreign aid to win re-election. Perhaps they’re oblivious to all the many examples of these failings, not to mention others.

Or perhaps—and this is far more likely—they see it all but are either happy about it because they share his worst traits or are blithely willing to overlook these “minor” faults because they’re convinced he will pander to their white grievance politics by making America great for straight white Christian men again.

If you’re one of these people who’s happy to vote for Trump, you might as well stop reading now. Sociopaths are incorrigible. There is literally nothing I could say that would convince you to do otherwise, much less feel a hint of remorse. You are a deplorable person in a basket with others just as deplorable. Reconsider your life.

Still here? If you’re one of the many who recognize what a horror show Trump is and will be pulling the lever for Biden, then there’s nothing more for me to say, other than to encourage you to vote no matter what obstacles and distractions the Republicans throw in our way. This essay’s not directed at you, but you might benefit from reading it.

If you understand that Trump is terrible but aren’t planning on voting for Biden, read on. It contains some facts that are highly relevant.

There can be only one.

Fact: The only vote that increases the chances of Trump losing is one cast for Biden.

There are other voting systems under which this would not be the case. All sorts of parliamentary and preferential and hybrid voting systems exist that would let you vote non-strategically. You could just express your preference and trust the system to pick the person who best represents the will of the people.

Not in America, though; our system sucks. We have first-past-the-post voting, so Duverger’s law ensures that we wind up with a de facto two-party system. The winner will be a candidate from one of the two major parties, so a vote for a minor-party candidate has the same impact on the results as not having voted at all.

A protest vote amounts to a protest, not a vote.

Have no fear, Underdog is here!

Fact: A minor party will not win.

Nothing stops the voters from spontaneously deciding to go with a minor-party candidate. That’s true, but only in the same sense that nothing stops all the molecules of air in the room from spontaneously going off in one corner, leaving behind a vacuum.

Polls are imperfect, but they do tell us what’s likely, and what’s statistically possible. In 2020, no polls suggest that either major party is so weak that a minor party stands a chance. For context, the best a minor-party candidate has done in modern times was Ross Perot in 1996, with less than 20% of the vote.

Currently, all of the minor parties combined are well under 10%. It’s almost as though the minor parties are called that because they’re minor. Here’s a tip: when you see “minor”, think “numerical minority”, as in the electoral losers.

Does this mean that we’re stuck with Republicans and Democrats forever? No, but if either should fall, we’d quickly restabilize with another pair of major parties. And long before such a dramatic event occurs, we’ll have plenty of warning from the polls. Until then, no minor-party candidate is viable.

If you vote for a minor-party candidate in the hope that they will win, you’re just kidding yourself.

Spoiler Alert.

Fact: You only get one vote, so where you spend it matters.

Just because a minor-party candidate can’t win doesn’t mean that they can’t help another candidate lose. Worse, it’s usually the wrong candidate.

When you have a clear preference between the two viable candidates, throwing your vote away on a non-viable one—simply because they’re closer to your ideal—means hurting your preferred candidate. The best is the enemy of the good; your ideal candidate acts as a spoiler for your preferred one, helping the one you oppose.

Given that you recognize that Trump must be stopped, a vote for a minor-party candidate is a spoiler for Biden, and therefore helps Trump. Those who “vote their conscience” are just voting their privilege, revealing their lack of a conscience.

Paying it forward.

Fact: The goal is to stop Trump.

Some respond by insisting that they don’t “owe” Biden their vote. This is not so much wrong as entirely missing the point.

It’s not about helping Biden, it’s about ousting Trump. If Biden was replaced by another Democrat, then voting for them would instead be the only option that gets rid of Trump. What you owe, to yourself and to those around you who are less privileged, is to make the decision that saves us from another term of Trump.

This is not about debt to Biden; he’s just the means to an end. It’s all about paying forward your debt to society by doing the right thing for everyone.

Be my inspiration.

Fact: The DNC does not negotiate with terrorists.

Doing the right thing is intrinsically moral; it is its own reward. However, some are unsatisfied with that.

They respond to the call of civic duty by reacting like greedy corporations, or lovelorn poets, or murderous terrorists. They insist that they want more for their vote than Biden is offering. He has to persuade them, inspire them, fill them with love. Or, more simply, bribe them with their VP of choice and promises of radical policies and free stuff. The other side of this is that, if we don’t bend the knee, they’ll kill the hostages. And, under Trump, we are all hostages.

As the passerby who rescued the drowning person, you might receive heartfelt thanks, or public admiration, or even a fat wad of cash. Or you might not. It doesn’t matter because you didn’t become a Good Samaritan for some extrinsic reward. You didn’t do it for selfish reasons; you did it because you knew you ought to, because your moral compass rejected the alternatives as perverse. Any reward is nice, and perhaps well-deserved, but unnecessary.

Now imagine if you were the one drowning and they stood above with one hand on that lever, haggling with you over how you’d compensate them for their assistance. Consider what you would think of them for attempting to take advantage of your desperate situation. This is what it’s like for them to insist on more from Biden in return for acting to stop Trump; they’re lowering themselves morally by demanding payment for doing what they should have done in the first place.

There is also a very pragmatic reason why this is wrong. If you were drowning, you might even promise them whatever they demanded, just to survive, but a commitment made under duress is not binding. A SWAT team will promise the bank robbers anything to free those hostages, but the moment their rooftop snipers have a clear shot, they’ll take it.

Maybe they could force Biden to promise them something politically infeasible, but there’s no way to hold him to it. Even if he tried to make good on it, he’d fail because he needs the support of the rest of the party, including Congress. Realistically, Biden wouldn’t promise such a thing in the first place, not only because he knows it would be a lie, but because publicly endorsing a doomed policy would hurt him with more voters than it would help.

Biden’s job is to win so that he can do his job. In return for a few fickle people whose votes he still can’t count on, he’d lose the support of moderates who are desperately looking for any excuse not to vote for Trump but are allergic to socialism. It would even drive non-voters to turn out for Trump. We learned this lesson the hard way in 2016: giving in to the populist left’s demands is a losing proposition. (More on that later.)

Ultimately, holding out for perfection in politics is as self-defeating as it is selfish. Voting isn’t marriage, it’s public transport. You’re not waiting for “the one” who’s absolutely perfect, just the next bus that will take you where you need to go. And you’re not going to get far by trying to hold the bus hostage.

Message in a bottle.

Fact: A vote is not like holding up a sign at a protest; it matters.

Voting for a spoiler certainly does send a message. Unfortunately, that message is, “I don’t care”.

They don’t care whether Trump wins. They value their ideological purity above the very real consequences to very real people, including the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who will needlessly die under a second term.

Some of them don’t seem to understand what voting is for. Voting is for selecting who wins public office. That’s it. If you want to send a message, try email. A vote is not a popularity contest with a cardboard crown as the prize. The prize is power over our lives, including the power to kill us all in a global thermonuclear war.

The loser does not get a participation trophy; they are relegated to the dustbin of history, stuck on the sidelines without the power to do anything but watch as it all falls apart, as our historical experiment with democracy comes to an end and our people die.

Voting is not a survey about what your ideal preference would be if all things were equal. Nobody cares. If you’re not voting strategically—with the goal of ensuring that your preferred candidate wins—then you’ve missed the point entirely. A vote that is earnest but ineffective is a lost chance to make a difference. It is impotent.

Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing, and voting is how you win. It is how we influence the path our country takes, not an opportunity for harmless personal expression. That’s what t-shirts are for, so buy a Che shirt with a matching COVID-19 mask and then vote for Biden to get rid of Trump.

Apples to oranges to turpentine.

Fact: There’s a best, a worst, and a lot in between these extremes.

If you support a spoiler candidate, then neither of the viable candidates matches your ideal. In the same way, neither apple juice nor turpentine is orange juice. While they’re not what you ordered, only one of them will kill you.

If all you judge drinks on is whether they’re orange juice, you can equate apple juice with turpentine; they’re both the “same” in that neither one is orange juice. But if you judge them as you should—on which one is poison—the turpentine sticks out.

Trump is turpentine. He’s a Nazi and he will kill us all. However much you’d prefer someone other than Biden, you cannot seriously lump him in with Trump. Given how much practical and ideological distance there is between that fascist and any liberal, this is the most absurd sort of false equivalence. It’s insultingly dishonest and I can’t believe anyone actually believes it; they just use it as an excuse.

Biden will restore rule of law, beginning the process of healing the wounds that Trump has inflicted. He will choose the replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who will safeguard our most fundamental rights for the rest of their life. And, perhaps most importantly, he will preside over the punishment of the traitors who tried to destroy us, setting a precedent for future would-be dictators.

In contrast, Trump would not only continue dragging us down the path to ruin, but finish undermining the safeguards that keep him—and his less senile, more vicious successors—from just doing whatever they want to us. The SCOTUS will be fully packed, our civil rights will go out the window, and we will never have free elections again. There will be genocide, famine, plague, and nuclear war.

But, hey, with Biden, you might have to opt in to Medicare instead of it being the only option. That’s basically the same as the end of the world, amirite? Who are you kidding?!

It’s easy to say that, since neither viable candidate matches your ideal, they’re both bad, but this completely ignores the difference between bad and worse. The lesser of evils is, unsurprisingly, less evil, hence relatively good. And throwing your vote away is truly evil because it only helps the very worst of evils: Trump.

Moreover, Biden is not the lesser evil because he’s not evil; he is the choice for the greater good.

Swiss marshmallows.

Fact: Marshmallows are for roasting, votes are for making a difference.

Probably the weakest of the common defenses for not voting for Biden is the idea that, by voting for neither, they are remaining neutral, not helping or harming either. Desmond Tutu rebutted this handily with: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Since we have a moral obligation to get rid of Trump, there’s just no parallel, no equivalence. You were never going to vote for Trump, anyhow, so failing to vote does not hurt him. Since you must vote for Biden to stop Trump, failing to vote only helps Trump.

The most charitable interpretation is that they’re saying that throwing their vote away helps Trump less than voting for him would. That’s technically true, but a low bar. It doesn’t do any more to stop him than staying home and binge-watching Game of Thrones while drinking Swiss Miss Marshmallow Hot Cocoa would. It’s like bragging that, hey, at least you didn’t throw any bricks at the bobbing head of that person as you watched them slowly drown. Some hero!

Apathy is not a virtue; people are dying out there. This really isn’t very complicated; the whole argument collapses the moment we acknowledge our obligation to stop Trump. We are not Switzerland; there can be no neutrality in what is ultimately a binary decision, and roasting marshmallows won’t save America.

Sour grapes.

Fact: Your vote matters.

Perhaps the strangest, most self-defeating argument against voting for Biden is the claim that their vote doesn’t count because they’re not in a swing state.

To be clear, claiming their vote doesn’t matter is an obvious case of sour grapes. Since they can’t get their candidate, they won’t lift a finger to help us remove Trump. It’s as childish as taking the ball home because your team is losing.

Ironically, if it was true that their votes don’t matter, then although they insist that we should care what they want and therefore cater to them, they have nothing to offer us. They want us to drag the entire platform off to one side, alienating the base and depressing turnout, without replacing the votes we lose in the process. That would be political suicide, which only helps Trump.

Perhaps fortunately, it’s not true: all votes matter. This is a strange election and traditionally safe states are in play. Texas, for example, might go blue, so no red state can be written off entirely. On the flip side, we have good reason to expect truly unprecedented levels of Republican cheating. The attempt to destroy the Post Office, just as the plague has shifted voting to mail, is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no safe blue anymore.

Republican ratfucking is largely focused on two categories: foreign propaganda, like the Russian Wikileaks email attacks, and voter suppression, which includes everything from gerrymandering, to purging the rolls, to the USPS slowdown mentioned above.

The commonality is that these dirty tricks all amount to placing a thumb on the scale, not simply ignoring what the scale reads. They can block votes but not change them. It’s incremental, and each increment costs them in terms of both money and risk of getting caught. The more they have to spread themselves thin to combat democracy, the fewer resources they have available to do so. As such, every bit we do helps.

To win, it won’t be enough to have a plurality of votes, like we did in 2016: we really have to run up the score. We need a blue wave, like in 2018, that sweeps the Republicans out of office. Their cheating might overcome a 5% gap, but not 10%, and that’s where we’re heading. We just have to turn out the vote everywhere.

Even winning is not enough. We can’t just get rid of Trump, we need to demonstrate that we have an overwhelming popular-vote mandate to repudiate Trumpism itself. We need to restore democracy and hasten the natural end of the RNC as the demographic shift overcomes it, by wresting control of all three branches and purging the corruption. Once we get our country back, we can quibble about details such as which form of universal healthcare we want.

Incidentally, the need to win overwhelmingly also refutes the notion that voting for a minor party will put it above some magical percentage and make it viable. Not only is this simply false, due to Duverger’s Law, but we don’t have the luxury of votes that don’t do anything to stop Trump. There is too much on the line to get distracted by mere party politics.

Volunteers only.

Fact: There is what we must do, and then there’s everything else.

Pulling the lever to save a drowning person is morally obligatory, but there are also morally good things that are not required, and are instead supererogatory. For example, you could also buy the rescued person some lunch, or offer them a hot shower at your house, or literally give them the shirt off your back.

These laudable actions go above and beyond, so if you can do them and wish to, then you are encouraged to, but it’s not like you have to. And while they’re nice, they’re not life-saving, so they’re just not as important. You are the best judge of what you can afford to offer, and nobody can blame you for drawing that line where you see fit, so long as you’ve fulfilled your obligations.

Everyone can vote, so if you understand how terrible Trump is, you have a moral obligation to pull the lever for Biden. Filling in some circles and dropping an envelope off is not too much to ask of you. If you can do more, great, but it’s not required.

If you can spare the money and would like to donate to his campaign, feel free. If you have more time than money and feel comfortable making cold calls, there are phone banks that will hook you up. (Before Trump’s plague, volunteers would even canvass in person, going door to door.) And there are many more ways to volunteer to help Biden, from lawn signs to full-time campaign jobs, but all of them are just that: voluntary.

The reason this even needs to be mentioned is that some people respond to a direct question about whether they’re voting for Biden by asking why we’re not phone-banking for him. This is more of a diversion than any sort of argument, and it doesn’t hold up to even casual inspection.

Phone-banking is supererogatory—above and beyond—while voting is obligatory. It also misses the fact that, by arguing in favor of Biden, we’re doing exactly what we would have by phone-banking. And, of course, it arbitrarily chooses one voluntary action above all others and holds it up as some sort of standard.

Even as dishonest tricks go, this is pretty weak, but it’s a trope that these people frequently fall into. It makes sense rhetorically and emotionally, but not logically.

Rhetorically, it’s a way to dodge the question and try to refocus on something irrelevant, flavored with a bit of false equivalence between the bare minimum and the entirely optional.

Emotionally, it’s just a way for a NeverBiden left-populist to say “go fuck yourself”. This lets them shore up their hurt pride at losing their bid for control of the party by playing impossible to get. They’re just pouting.

Logically, it’s like asking whether they’re willing to pull a lever to save a drowning person and instead being criticized for not offering the shirt off your back.

Rhyming history.

Fact: Protest votes gave us Trump.

In 2016, about a quarter of the people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary ignored their moral obligation to vote for Clinton so as to stop Trump.

Of those, about half actually voted for Trump. The rest threw their vote away, whether on spoiler candidates or simply by sitting the election out. This is despite Clinton and the rest of the party bending over backwards not to offend the Berners and even giving in to as many of their demands for platform changes as possible.

It is incontrovertible that this, in itself, made enough of a difference to propel Trump into office, despite his falling short of Clinton by millions of votes. Democracy failed because the Bernie-or-Busters went bust and failed democracy. They did not simply betray the party they claim as their own, but the nation and the world.

History, they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. The way to silence it is to learn from our past mistakes. Protest votes broke democracy. Voting for Biden to get rid of Trump is the first step towards healing it.

It is the bare minimum requirement, akin to rescuing that drowning person by throwing them a lifeline. All you have to do to save the world is pull a lever or ink in a circle. What’s your excuse?

The bottom line.

Fact: There is no excuse for throwing your vote away.

Nothing I say can convince you to vote for Biden if you truly believe that Trump is at least as good a choice, but you no longer have any excuse otherwise. If you know that Trump is the worst—and you do—you must vote for Biden.

It is the only action that will get rid of Trump, so if you fall short of that low bar, you’re a Trumper in denial. Only now you know it, and so do we all.

Do the right thing.