I trust that I am not the only
one to have noticed that in rural areas and economically distressed
neighborhoods in towns and cities, lawn signs for Donald Trump are everywhere,
while Hillary signs are rarer than Teslas and Maseratis.
I think I understand the Trump
signs: they are cries of defiance.
Hillary’s supporters are
harder to figure out. I suspect that most of them would just as soon not
advertise their intentions November 8. Even if they think that there is no
other way to stop Trump, they understand that, by voting for Hillary, they are
embarrassing themselves.
Lawn signs apart, the evidence
that Trump is kaput is, by now, overwhelming. He seems finally to have done his
campaign in – to such an extent that even diehard anti-Trump fear mongers
concede the inevitability of the Clintons’ return to the White House.
Trump’s campaign had been on
life support for weeks when the pussy grabbing tape surfaced, followed by a
seemingly endless stream of women – a dozen or so already — accusing the Donald
of groping them and worse.
Then, in the third debate,
Trump announced that he would “wait and see” before accepting the legitimacy of
a Clinton victory. This seems to have been the final straw for all but the most
bona fide “deplorables.”
And so, the writing is on the
wall: Hillary will win just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow – well, not
quite, but almost.
There is no reason to rejoice
in her victory, only in Trump’s defeat.
And even that isn’t as obvious
as it seems . Hillary probably the lesser evil all things considered. But Trump
is very likely the less dangerous of the two.
The man is an adolescent in a
septuagenarian’s body, with a tendency to act out. But at least he is not a
Russophobe or a neocon or a “humanitarian” intervener intent on regime change
in countries that resist American domination.
This would include not only
the usual victims, countries incapable of harming the United States militarily,
but Russia and China as well.
It is relevant too that the
supposed lesser evil is a committed neoliberal and a Wall Street toady, and
that Trump’s “crooked Hillary” taunts hit the target more often than not.
These considerations, and
others like them, should cause concern to those who are fine with lesser evil
voting in general, but who think that there are thresholds beneath which lesser
evil considerations should not apply.
There is no need to agonize
over these issues, however; not in this case. When Trump became the Republican
nominee, lesser evil arguments became moot.
This would still be the case
even if more voters were not quite so willfully blind to the dangers inherent
in Clinton’s determination to maintain American world domination by any means
necessary, and to her fondness for military “solutions.”
Lesser evil considerations are
irrelevant because Trump is and always has been bound to lose to any Democrat,
even to her.
I have been pressing this
point and its corollary — that anti-Trump hysteria is a distraction – from Day
One. As recently as a month ago, hardly anyone agreed with me.
If only I had a dollar for
every time I have been taken to task for not seeing the parallels between the
Trump phenomenon and the rise of Nazism in the final years of the Weimar
Republic! I would be a rich man today.
But because it is now
recognized that Trump’s chances of becoming President are, for all practical
purposes, nil, no one is pressing that line these days. I used to be out on a
limb; I no longer am.
It would be only natural to
take pleasure in this turn of events, and I would — but for the fact that a
Trump defeat implies a Clinton victory. That prospect is, at best, only
slightly less nightmarish.
Worse, it doesn’t seem to
matter that all but the most flagrant worrywarts now finally concede that there
will never be a President Trump. Liberals and centrists and even a few foolish
leftists are still going all out for Hillary.
From the dead center to the
soft left, the consensus view is still that now is a time to boost, not knock,
Hillary’s campaign — especially in the dozen or so states where the Electoral
College outcomes could not have been determined years ago with absolute
certainty.
It is remarkable that so many
people cannot let anti-Trump hysteria go; that they are so focused on Trump’s
misogyny, temperamental instability, and narcissistic blather that they don’t
see that the only thing we need fear, where Trump is concerned, is, so to
speak, the fear itself.
However, in Hillary’s case,
there really is something to fear: that she is about to become the
Commander-in-Chief of the most lethal military force in the history of the
world.
On that point, her supporters
are in denial, and even people who know better than to support her for her own
sake remain determined to waste their votes by adding to her totals.
Apparently, they think that this is a way to send the message that Trumpian
“fascism” shall not pass.
How much better it would be if
they would use their votes to build alternatives to the neoliberal perpetual
war regime that Hillary and Bill and their co-thinkers have helped fashion!
The best chance for that, at
this point, is Jill Stein’s campaign on the Green Party ticket.
Stein cannot win, of course; a
vote for her is only a protest vote. But there is nothing wrong with that.
Hillary needs to know that she has no mandate to end the world “as we know it,”
and this is one of many ways to convey that message.
Pundits who claim otherwise
are dead wrong. Those who pile on for Hillary are wasting their votes; protest
votes aimed at Hillary are not wasted at all.
I would imagine that at least
some Trump voters are thinking along similar lines. But the racism, nativism
and Islamophobia of their candidate tarnishes the messages their votes will
convey. They therefore cannot register with any real clarity.
The message protest votes for
Stein convey is, on the other hand, as clear and distinct as can be.
And if she garners at least
five percent of the total votes cast, the Greens will have access to federal
funding in future elections, and will have a much easier time gaining ballot
access in all fifty states.
This would not make for much
of a “political revolution,” even in Bernie Sanders’ highly attenuated sense of
the term, but it would make future elections less mind-numbing and degrading,
and it could ultimately lead to more far-reaching transformations of the
political scene.
Now that Trump has all but
killed off the GOP, the duopoly party system is in jeopardy, and all kinds of
political realignments have, at last, become feasible.
***
I wasn’t just being contrarian
when I went out on a limb about Trump’s chances; and my confidence was in no
way based on inferences from polling data or statistical extrapolations.
Let the blogosphere’s
“political junkies” and the corporate media’s talking heads knock themselves
out with that. What they do is useful only for entertaining people who care
about the horse race aspect of presidential elections. It is distressing how
many Americans indulge in that spectator sport. Most of them are essentially
apolitical.
I was confident that I was
right about Trump’s chances because I knew that what people tell pollsters when
an election seems far off is basically irrelevant for predicting the election’s
outcome. Information about how they and people like them voted in the past is
more relevant, but not by much.
This is especially true when,
as in this case, disdain for one or the other candidate, or for both, is a
dispositive factor in many voters’ minds.
I was also fairly sure that,
rightly or wrongly, more people fear and loathe Trump than fear and loathe
Hillary; and that, if they didn’t at the outset, they would before long –
because Trump was all but certain to undermine himself, and because there is so
much dirt out there on the Donald’s sleazy connections and moral turpitude that
even God-fearing Republicans, capable of believing almost any nonsense, were
bound eventually to be repulsed.
I suspected too that Trump
never really wanted to be President; that he only got into the race to promote
his brand, and because he is an egotist and publicity-hound.
Trump hates to lose, however —
especially to the likes of Hillary — and so, at some point, he must have
decided to give the campaign his all, even if it meant bringing the Trump brand
down with him.
Should it come to that, I will
shed crocodile tears for his brood, Ivanka especially. A worthwhile thing to do
in the months ahead would be to work to make that happen; to do everything
possible to assure that the damage done to all things Trump will be
irreversible. What a delightful irony that would be!
There are plenty of
Hillary-haters in the Donald’s base who hate Hillary because they consider her
the embodiment of coercive goody-goodyism, or because they think she is
disdainful of people like them (people in the “deplorables” demographic), or
because they think that she is too leftwing.
The idea that she is too
leftwing is nonsense, of course; she is not nearly leftwing enough. That anyone
would think otherwise is a testament to the media’s ability to shape public
perceptions and to the degree of political ignorance rampant in some quarters
of the American electorate.
But “vast rightwing
conspiracy” Hillary-haters are spot on right about the rest of it — and two out
of three isn’t bad.
Even so, there are better
reasons than theirs to dread the prospect of a Clinton presidency. They all
have to do with the service Hillary has done, and will go on doing, for the
miscreants who control the commanding heights of America’s and the world’s
capitalist order, and with her untrammeled, ideologically-driven bellicosity.
Hillary knows how to game the
system; and she and Bill know how to benefit from doing so. But,
for all her vaunted “experience,” she is clueless about the world.
And although she and her fans boast of her “pragmatism,” that woman is
seriously inept.
Most of what she undertakes to
do is ill conceived, and nearly all of it turns out badly.
In short, the lesser evil, if
that is what she is, is a very great evil indeed.
It won’t take long, once she
moves back into the White House and starts putting her stamp on the empire’s
depredations, for the scales to fall from the eyes of all but her most gullible
supporters.
I am even more sure of this
than I was of Trump’s defeat, but I will take even less joy in being proved
right again. What lies ahead, with Hillary in control, is too horrible to
contemplate.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior
Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE
AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL
KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in
political philosophy. His most recent book is In
Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor
(philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor
(philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a
contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
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