So says Garry Wills, putting into print what any sentient voter understands instinctively.
The etherialists who are too good to stoop toward the “lesser evil” of politics—as if there were ever anything better than the lesser evil there—naively assume that if they just bring down the current system, or one part of it that has disappointed them, they can build a new and better thing of beauty out of the ruins. Of course they never get the tabula rasa on which to draw their ideal schemes. What they normally do is damage the party closest to their professed ideals. Third parties are run by people who make the best the enemy of their own good and bring down that good. Theodore Roosevelt’s’ Bull Moose variant of his own Republican Party drained enough Republican votes to let the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, win. (His voters, believing he would not “send our boys to war,” saw the prince become a frog in World War I.) George H. W. Bush rightly believes he was sabotaged by the crypto-Republican Ross Perot, who helped Bill Clinton win. Ralph Nader siphoned crucial votes from Al Gore to give us George W. Bush.
There’s something else he says which most of us Democrats also know:
To vote for a Republican means, now, to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. It does no good to say that “Romney is a good man, not a racist.” That may be true, but he needs a racist South as part of his essential support. And the price they will demand of him comes down to things like Supreme Court appointments. (The Republicans have been more realistic than the Democrats in seeing that presidential elections are really for control of the courts.)
Amen, Brother Wills.
No matter how sanctimonious the third-party advocates get, they are still wrong. If we had a system which gave proportionate power to parties depending on what percentage of votes each got in elections, that would be one thing. Then you could argue voting for the Green Party in hopes it would break a 5% or 10% threshold and get some share of power in Congress. But we don’t have that system. Voting for the Greens means taking votes from the Democrats (see Nader, above). That leads to results that are antithetical to what a Green voter should want — a Republican party which doesn’t believe in climate change, wants to despoil the environment by drilling for oil everywhere, and wants to cut the tops of mountains off and befouling waterways for years.
And while Ronald Reagan rolled Jimmy Carter out like a pancake, it didn’t help Jimmy to have John Anderson running as an independent and siphoning Democratic votes. Like mine. I still feel guilty.
The Egyptians, by the way, just learned this the hard way. Their secularists couldn’t agree on a single candidate, half a dozen of them ran; the secularists as a group got over 50% of the vote, a clear win, but the actual runoff is between an Islamist and a Mubarak shill. I hope the Egyptian secularists understand what just hit them.
And the city of Oakland, speaking of the perfect versus the good, just approved a major deal to develop the former Oakland Army Base as a logistical center for the Port of Oakland. This is MAJOR good news, absolutely essential for jobs and prosperity – and yet yesterday I read some candy-assed do-gooder (with which Oakland is unnecessarily well provided) saying, yes yes, it’s a good deal, but it can’t go through because it won’t provide ENOUGH jobs for our local people. (Most of whom have felony convictions…) Thank God the council didn’t listen; too often they do.
RE: Egypt
Even worse, because of the likelihood that the Muslim Brotherhood guy would win the Presidential election, they now have the Army firmly implanting itself even further as the men in charge. What the secularists needed was some practical advice about multiple candidates and how to coalesce around one, even if it meant holding one’s collective nose.