In today’s edition of CounterPunch, Andy
Smolski lays waste to the feeble and patronizing lesser-evil argument
advanced a couple of weeks ago by Noam Chomsky and John Halle, which
admonished the Left (such as it is) to vote for the neoliberal war-monger
Hillary Clinton as the last bulwark against the fearsome Trump and his
rampaging band of post-industrial Visigoths.
Hillary Clinton is a living refutation of the logic of
lesser-evilism, since her candidacy as the most rightwing Democratic nominee
since Harry “A Bomb” Truman is the inevitable consequence of decades of
lesser-evil voting. This toxic political pragmatism engenders a process of
natural selection in reverse, where the candidates get more-and-more retrograde
because their opponents can always be painted as fractionally more odious.
Well, let each pick their own poison in the privacy of the voting booth.
Rationalizing, however weakly, a vote for Hillary Clinton isn’t my main problem
with the Chomsky/Halle essay.
The most noxious element of the Chomsky/Halle
endorsement of Clinton is their paternalistic guilt-tripping that seeks
to blame people who choose to vote for Jill Stein, Gloria La Riva, Gary
Johnson or no one at all in the extremely unlikely event (one percent according
to analytics guru Nate Silver) that Trump prevails in November. If HRC,
who now enjoys support from both the Chomsky wing of the Democrats and
the Kissinger-Goldman Sachs wing of the GOP, manages to lose, it will
be the fault of her own record of mendaciousness and villainy, just as
Gore was solely responsible for blowing the 2000 election, even though
liberals continue to viciously scapegoat Ralph Nader.
It’s an intellectually dishonest position and a morally
indefensible one. According to the specious argument of their Tractatus
Illogico-Politicus, Halle and Chomsky would not bear any responsibility
for the deaths caused by the candidate (HRC) they support. But Greens,
anarchists, socialists and anti-war libertarians who recoil from the Queen
of Chaos would bear responsibility for the carnage caused by the candidate
(Trump) they did not support. That’s a textbook case of moral hypocrisy.
Halle has attached himself to Chomsky like a sea
lamprey on a sperm whale. Chomsky should, of course, be cautious about
associating with political lampreys such as Halle. Noam, who knows his history,
would do well to consider the fate of Henry the First, who “ate a surfeit
of lampreys which mortally chilled the old man’s blood and caused a sudden and
violent illness against which nature struggled”–struggled futilely, it turned
out. Chomsky has a sturdy constitution, but these days it pays to be
prudent.
Who is John Halle, you ask? Halle teaches music theory at
an over-rated and over-priced institution for the trust fund children of
liberal elites. Halle’s political association with Chomsky is an episode of
almost comical self-aggrandizement, on the order of Kenny G sitting in with
John Coltrane. It’s probably safe to assume that most of the false notes in
their sophistic reasoning were struck by Halle. But that doesn’t
absolve Chomsky from affixing his name to an ethically bankrupt argument
that is now also being made by Hillary’s new friends: George Will, Henry
Kissinger protegé Richard Armitage, Brent Scowcroft and one of the men who
brought you the 2008 financial crash, Hank Paulson. A confederacy of
lampreys, indeed.
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new
book is Killing
Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and
Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
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