Yes, It’s Okay To Not Vote For Either Rapist.
It doesn’t even make you a fascist.
With Drew Miller
If you’ve ever considered NOT voting for a major party candidate, you might have caught the ol’ “a vote for a third party is a vote for Trump” canard. We’re here to tell you that’s absolute poppycock.¹ It’s just one of several arguments, both good faith and bad, used to declare that Biden or Trump, Blue Rapist or Red Rapist, are your only options come November.
Henceforth, you’ll find our 2020-edition anatomy of the VOTE OR DIE mantra, and how you can repel its tendrils without feeling like a member of the fascio littorio. We’ve tried to exhaustively cover most of the common objections to not voting for a major party candidate for president, and why that choice is anything but destructive.
Arguments Against TP/NV (Third-Party Voting or Nonvoting)
It’s a zero-sum game. The most common American electoral mentality is that there are solely two choices when picking a president. If you decide not to vote for X candidate, then ‘effectively’ you just voted for Y candidate. But when you decide not to vote, how do they decide who, for you, is candidate X and who is Y? They look at your politics, and judge that you are “closer” to candidate X. So they assign your ‘nonvote’ to X and your ‘effective vote’ to Y. The problem? The forces behind candidate X (let’s call them the DNC) are not automatically deserving of your vote. The DNC can demand it, but it is not entitled to your vote just by virtue of being Not The GOP. That kind of thinking is what allows the GOP to pull the Democrats ever further to the right. How? Because when your vote is guaranteed, the party has no reason to represent your views. Your nonvote for the Democratic nominee is the only way to meaningfully reject the party’s actions.
So when you hear that a nonvote for Biden is a vote for Trump, reply that Biden was never entitled to your vote in the first place (and alternatively, tell them your nonvote for Trump is actually a vote for Biden). Bernie Sanders attracted millions of voters who had never been addressed by other Democrats. Biden feels entitled to those votes simply because someone else drew them ‘into’ the Democratic Party, but they are right to demand real action, not lip service, before hopping on the quadrennial neoliberal train to failure.
This Election is Different/Trump is Different. This argument relies on a persuasive but ultimately false premise: that the circumstances of this election demand rejection of TP/NV because things are now so bad. In other words, Trump is uniquely bad as a president, in a way that demands obedience to the Democratic candidate that other elections did not.
It is absolutely true that Trump has accelerated the damage to our environment, our democracy, and our humanity. However, his violence is simply that — an escalation of trends already in place. The greedy business interests he has let loose have been at work within both parties for decades; just look at the long explosion of wealth and income inequality. The xenophobia he stokes has always been a part of the American mentality; families were deported and put in cages long before Trump. His push to cut welfare finds easy precedent not just in GOP politics but with certain Democrats as well. The major difference with Trump is a degree of intensity, not a difference of nature.
We absolutely must understand Trump as a predictable consequence of an anemic democracy, not some random mutation unrelated to our most fundamental politics. Trump is no fluke. There are plenty of other Republican politicians, other proto-fascists (most with more tact), who would eagerly enact the same policies, and with greater gusto. He has been enabled at every step by his entire party; damage on this scale is not possible without their help. One anticapitalist politician described fascism as “capitalism in decay.” You need not agree with his body politic to see the truth in that quote. Increased concentrations of wealth and power among the national elite is exactly how democracies collapse — the entire controlling power is responsible, not just one man.
More importantly, if you reject the above arguments and still insist that this election is distinct from all the other elections, why would you return to the same tired, old strategy? If this moment truly requires every effort we possess, why should we bet on a repetition of the last failed centrist campaign?
Damage Mitigation/Harm Reduction. Our most reliable source of information about a candidate is their record. More often than not, plans, platforms, and rhetoric amount to empty promises that, due either to political opposition or the candidate’s own apathy or inefficacy, tend to go unfulfilled. As such, appeals to what a candidate claims to want to do, or plans to do once in office are somewhat speculative, especially when those promises run up against the cold, hard reality of what they have already done during their career. Looking at his record, it is absolutely possible to make a case that Biden is not an improvement over Trump. In fact, it would take diligent effort to pretend otherwise.
Take a look at foreign policy, the domain where the president has the freest hand: Biden’s long-planned, dedicated push for the Iraq War is well-known. Just as damning are his recent positions on Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Israel, the utter destruction of Libya, etc. That’s to say nothing about the War on Terror. If you truly care about ending American brutality worldwide, Biden is no improvement — he’s barely distinguishable from the worst neoconservative chickenhawks.
Biden represents all the worst, most murderous impulses of the U.S. imperialist war machine. What lengths would self-described leftists, progressives, and liberals have to go to in order to make believe that this man represents a positive step toward a more peaceful and just global order? He refuses to recognize the legitimacy of Venezuela’s democratically elected leadership. He has supported the destructive sanctions against — and U.S. “democratization” of — Cuba (which happens to already be a democracy), only changing his tune when reined in by the leadership of Barack Obama. He has even been unable to bring himself to denounce a literal fascist coup that overthrew Bolivia’s first indigenous president.
As a self-described Zionist and “stalwart supporter of Israel,” Biden takes part in the grand American tradition of defending brutal regimes against the people they brutalize. His undisguised eagerness to assign equal blame to Palestine when it has been the subject of a horrendous, plainly illegal occupation — practically an ethnic cleansing — shows us exactly how humane and just a Biden foreign policy would be. His absolute refusal to even consider withdrawing military aid from Israel for its many and obvious crimes makes his priorities clear, and things like human rights are apparently relegated to the bottom of that list.
The idea that the U.S. could ever be a force for peace in the Middle East is already laughable, but Biden’s unwavering insistence that Israel be allowed to “defend itself” from the “existential threat from their neighbours in the region,” renders any U.S.-led peace process an impossibility. Why would the Palestinians come to the negotiating table when the U.S. funds and arms their oppressor and bends over backwards to defend even its most gruesome atrocities? Biden undoubtedly understands this, which means an actual peace is not really a priority for him.
Despite helping to promote the Iran nuclear deal, Obama’s most significant policy achievement, Biden is nonetheless a staunch supporter of crippling sanctions, which inevitably punish the people of a country in order to force its government into compliance with a political economic program that is favorable to the U.S. (and rarely succeed in doing so anyway). This international gangsterism is not an improvement over Trump’s foreign policy; it is a continuation of it, and of the same imperialist drives that have guided U.S. foreign policy for decades.
Foreign policy aside, many of the pro-Biden “harm reduction” arguments hinge on the assumption that Biden’s cabinet and agency appointments will be favorable compared to Trump’s. The problem is that this is not evidently true. Biden is reportedly considering JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Bank of America vice chair Anne Finucane, economic angel of death Larry Summers, and even Michael fucking Bloomberg for major leadership positions. This isn’t merely not an improvement over Trump — it’s unacceptable.
Many of the big problems we have now (healthcare, economic disparities, forever wars, etc.) existed when Obama took office. And Biden has leaned heavily on his Obama record amid the obvious realization that more Obama-style policies will not meet the moment.
Take the current pandemic. Yes, Trump has fucked up massively, but his fuck-ups are possible only through the sort of market fundamentalism that constitutes Biden’s politics. The neoliberal hollowing-out of government services in favor of privatization has always been a driving force for him and other Democrats. The result: We now have states, cities, and hospitals caught in a desperate bidding war for PPE and other supplies that have been funneled from federal stockpiles into a supply chain of private distributors who opportunistically gouge prices to exorbitant rates. Meanwhile, private hospitals and clinics are laying off staff in record numbers to preserve their bottom line. Nothing could be more obvious: The solution is to return the resources to public use, not a Biden-style, neoliberal continuation of business as usual. The whole reason we were caught so unprepared is that private healthcare providers were already operating with the minimal (overworked) staff and equipment necessary for normal function. Any shock to this system would have had the same disastrous outcome.
This crisis brings into stark relief the absolutely crucial nature of a policy like Medicare for All, yet Biden remains stubbornly noncommittal. Asked whether he would sign a Medicare for All bill into law if it passed both houses of Congress, he suggested he would veto it. Employing the standard right-wing posture of feigned budgetary concern, he plaintively asked, “How did they find $35 trillion?” The U.S., as he must know, is not revenue-constrained, rendering such questions transparently bad-faith. And this is to say nothing of the pitiful, means-tested, one-time stimulus package for ordinary Americans.
It doesn’t end there. Biden insisted that the Wisconsin primary be held in the middle of a pandemic, knowing full well the result wold be an increase in suffering and death. If this guy is willing to kill his supporters to win primaries, how can he claim to be on their side?
He’s no better when it comes to preserving the planet. Biden’s climate change plans are woefully inadequate (a certain former competitor put this well), and his relationship to the fossil fuel industry should raise some eyebrows, at the very least. Climate change requires massive legislation just to give us a fighting chance at avoiding ecological collapse, and his insistence that we can just “middle ground” our way through global ecosystem failure is scary as hell. To be clear, staying below the threshold temperature for global crop failure will require direct action on a massive scale. But Biden’s dedication to compromising (read: caving) means anything he passes will be terribly lacking, making this a poor argument for any sort of damage mitigation.
Another Four Years of Trump Will Damage the Progressive Movement. Having grown up during the Bush years, the authors take particular issue with this argument. From the outset, it surrenders to the idea that political power begins from the top and not from the people, and ignores the fact that opposition governments stimulate popular organization far better than ‘friendly’ ones. Just look at what Obama did to the antiwar movement. The corollary to this is a similar argument, namely, that a Biden (or any Democratic) presidency would strengthen the progressive movement. For reasons that should already have been made clear, we find this to be unpersuasive, if not outright laughable. There’s no ‘preserving’ or defending the progressive movement by installing one of its enemies: a corporate capitalist.
Setting aside Biden’s outward antagonism to progressive goals and principles, liberals have been yearning for a return to “normal” since Trump was sworn in. For four years, they’ve signaled their intent to quiet down, unplug from the #Resistance, and get back to brunch once he’s gone and all that’s left to worry about is the economy, healthcare, the forever wars, immigration, police brutality, reproductive rights, climate change, LGBTQ+ equality, etc. The implication is clear: Trump is why these things now warrant protest and outrage. They didn’t before he took office, so there is little reason to think they will after he leaves it.
Needless to say, that sort of apathy and conditional solidarity do not add up to a strong progressive movement. Beyond that, however, the mere fact that Joe Biden is now being billed as the ostensible figurehead of Democratic progressivism is so ironic and so self-defeating that it beggars belief. His candidacy itself is a complete refutation of just about everything progressive liberals claim to believe in.
Biden has single-handedly deconstructed the intersectional appeal that has formed the basis of Democratic politics in recent years. He is the very antithesis of it, and yet he won anyway. For instance, liberals recently spent a week or so up in arms over the fact that Trump has been referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.” We can quibble over the efficacy or relative importance of dying on this particular hill, but it is nonetheless unambiguously racist. But, these same people are willing to line up behind Biden, who refers to Asia as “the Orient” and recently released a campaign ad attacking Trump from the right by appealing to Americans’ xenophobic distrust of the Chinese.
His history of blatantly racist comments, advocating for segregation, and authorship of the needlessly cruel and destructive 1994 crime bill may have been too much even for arch-cop Kamala Harris to let slide, but it has barely dented his support among nonwhite voters (although the generational divide is promising). The irony is that the standard intersectional approach really is for white, college-educated liberals more so than the vulnerable, disenfranchised groups whose interests they (unconvincingly) purport to represent. Whether it’s Trumpian neofascism or Bidenist neoliberalism, these are the groups that will lose the most. (Meanwhile, these same liberals point to Bernie Sanders’ defeat as evidence that he should have adopted the winning strategy of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign).
It is not simply a matter of hypocrisy; it’s about what that hypocrisy does to the movement. #MeToo loses all purchase when its proponents are simultaneously shaming people into voting for a man whose many inappropriate, photographed encounters with women and girls are plastered all over the internet. We deserve better than what basically amounts to celebrity careerists declaring, from on high, which public figures are bad enough to cancel and which ones we are required to support. Feminism is supposed to be radical and liberatory, firm in its convictions. Instead, we find (again, mostly white, well-to-do) liberal feminists all but openly begging the general public not to take them seriously by halfheartedly throwing their support behind a man whose behavior is obviously predatory.
Every dollar, every second of time, every ounce of effort spent to help put Joe Biden in the White House cheapens the progressive movement and drains it of its credibility — and, consequently, its ability to win over and retain supporters — by revealing its ideals to be fundamentally hollow.
Furthermore, this undercuts another common argument: Biden Can Be Pushed to the Left Once He’s Elected. First of all, it’s probably not true, and Biden’s record gives little indication that he can be favorably swayed. We’ve already mentioned his staunch refusal to give Medicare for All its due consideration. He has many known financial ties to industries that would serve as incentive not to move to leftward on many issues. But, the idea that he’d be amenable to pressure from the left cuts against the idea that he’d be a progressive leader who helps to grow the movement.
Supporters are selling us a tale of two Bidens: There is the Biden we all know, proudly one of the Senate’s most conservative Democrats, who needs to be forced into genuinely progressive politics by the movement. But there is also the Biden who will allegedly stand as a champion of progressive values and policies, and therefore will lead on key issues rather than merely responding to grassroots pressure. So, which is it? Is Biden leading the movement, or is the movement leading Biden?
As always, we can look to his record for some clues. Biden voted for DOMA in 1996 and withheld support for same-sex marriage until after polls showed majority support for it in 2012. Similarly, his support of the explicitly anti-abortion Hyde Amendment, which he withdrew just last year, ended only in response to current trends within the Democratic electorate. It’s a pattern of swimming with the tide, not against, it; making safe, politically expedient choices, not difficult moral ones. This doesn’t seem like the kind of progressive leadership anyone has in mind. And, if that’s what it takes to move him, then…what is the point of Joe Biden? If he’s an opportunist who simply follows the popular will after all the hard work of building public support for progressive causes has been done, then it seems there is little reason to support him other than that he is a warm body who can occupy the Oval Office while not being Donald Trump. After all, pretty much every politician — Trump included — will cave to public opinion on social issues.
Not Voting/Third-Party Voting is a Privileged Action. This is related to the damage mitigation argument, but emphasizes that particular people have a higher duty to vote. It often uses the idea that those who are well-off are more able to withstand the likes of Trump, but ignores the fact that those who are worst-off rarely benefit from the likes of Biden.
But for many of the people who argue that TP/NV is a privilege, the obligation to vote is conditional. It’s obviously shitty to tell a sexual assault survivor to vote for a rapist. But to then say to a non-survivor, “well, you should still vote for the rapist” subverts any idea of morals. It’s absolutely the neoliberalization of morality — there is no good or bad, there is simply good or bad for you. Don’t worry about the collective effects of your actions or anything other than how it relates to you. This, truly, is the ‘privileged’ position.
Moreover, if nonvoting actually reflected privilege and not a general disillusionment with anything our politics have to offer, you’d see that reflected in the make-up of nonvoters. This is obviously not the case.
But What About the Supreme Court? We’re not in danger of losing the Supreme Court; we’ve already lost it. To be sure, there are probably some nuances between a series of devastating 5–4 rulings and a series of devastating 6–3 or 7–2 rulings. But as mentioned above, it’s not like there’s any reason to suppose Biden wouldn’t put more conservatives on the bench. He voted to confirm Antonin Scalia. His misguided gesture to unity was directly responsible for Anita Hill’s humiliation and Clarence Thomas’ confirmation. His 1992 suggestion that the Senate should not confirm election-year SCOTUS nominees later gave the GOP ammunition to block Merrick Garland. Biden, who was vice president during Barack Obama’s infamously gridlocked presidency, even advised the president against selecting a SCOTUS nominee who would be “too liberal,” out of some harebrained attempt to extend a hand (read: cave) to the Republicans. He still maintains that same deluded sense of bipartisanship. The man actually believes the GOP — yes, that GOP — will work with him.
“So, you’re just giving up?” It’s extremely common to hear a nonvote or a third-party vote described as “giving up.” In other words, you’re a cynic, a nihilist, an accelerationist. The same people might argue electoralism is the only acceptable form of political action. And it’s a completely reasonable question — not voting feels like giving up. What else can we do?
First, it’s important to realize not voting for Biden is meaningful on its own. Unquestioning obedience to electoralism is what has led us into this political hellhole. By repeatedly voting for the Democratic candidate, even when that candidate hasn’t been truly progressive in half a century, voters tell the party that politics are not important — winning is. So when someone says you’re making things worse by not voting for this year’s centrist Democrat, tell them they’re making things worse by permitting the Democrats to abandon every last principle we had.
Second, voting is not the only way to politick. Electoralism crowds out other forms of political action, both in our minds and in our schedules. We tend to assume that by voting, we’re doing all we can and must to achieve our political aims. But our current obstacles require far more than that. Direct action and mutual aid are examples of non-electoral political action.
These tactics arise from the belief that political power originates not from our elected representatives, but from the people themselves. Most importantly, this power can be expressed without elected representatives. The untapped power of an American general strike is a political excalibur waiting to be drawn, far more powerful than even a ‘landslide’ election. The belief in this direct power of the people is what makes direct action and mutual aid so popular among currents of the radical left, who sometimes favor it over any participation in elections whatsoever. But the tactics themselves can be embraced by anyone.
Unfortunately, some in the mainstream tend to deride these actions as politically irrelevant, and as insignificant compared to electoral action. With this the authors could not disagree more. The greatest political achievements have eventually been codified by the liberal mainstream, but initiated by radicals outside the accepted political arena. And for many of our goals, it’s far more plausible that direct action will succeed where the Democrats simply will not. We won’t abolish ICE through legislative actions. But mass marches on detention centers just might do the trick.
Not voting for Biden is a political action in itself, and it must be complemented with non-electoral political action. By doing nothing between elections, we let our representatives off easy. If we truly demanded action from them, there would be no need to compromise ourselves every two or four years. If we truly engaged in mutual aid, they would have far less power over us in the first place. Strikes need no ballot box.
If you currently intend to vote for Biden for any of the above or any other reason, would anything cause you not to vote for him?
Tara Reade accuses her former boss, Joe Biden, of forcibly penetrating her. The basis of the #MeToo movement is that we listen to, and believe, women. So when Tara Reade gets the Christine Blasey Ford treatment, major movement supporters remove #MeToo from their Twitter bios, and the media handles Biden’s accuser radically differently from any other accuser, something is happening. We saw Democrats take a strong stand against sexual assault when it came to Al Franken. But that was just a Senate seat. Where is Kristen Gillibrand now? Why is Elizabeth Warren happy to endorse Biden over Ms. Reade’s allegation of sexual assault, after refusing to endorse Bernie for an allegation of sexism? And it’s not just individuals. There’s strong institutional resistance to any investigation of Biden’s sexual assault allegations.
It’s easy to blame a simple cynicism. People are just spineless, and those who changed their Twitter bios simply didn’t ever believe in #MeToo. But that’s a shallow analysis. There’s a reason so many of us feel like we have to hide our principles. It’s becasue we feel like progress requires moral compromise, and increasingly so.
There’s a serious question here: If you currently intend to vote for Biden for any of the above or any other reason, what would cause you not to vote for him? Is there anything beyond an outright comparison to the other candidate on which to base your choice? If Biden admits he raped Tara Reade, would that change your vote? It’s not hard to find liberals arguing in favor of Biden because A) ‘Trump has raped more’ and/or B) ‘rape/personal sexual politics are comparatively unimportant when evaluating a potential president.’ The point here is not to call those people out. The point is to indict this system. The one that assembles and assumes our commitment to one of two political parties. The one that creates ethical lapses like minimizing sexual assault or forcing a clearly senile man to run for office, and in a general sense, total moral relativism. The system that forces its voters to repeatedly compromise our most basic morals is not one worth preserving.²
This returns us to our confrontation with the two-party binary. There’s a number of ways to describe the assumption that you, mere voter, will support whatever candidate ‘your’ party offers up. One that comes to mind is manufactured consent. This manufacture, this deep assumption of your support, is what leads Democrats to demand that people literally advance the causes of their own trauma. Biden is a perfect example. His supporters demand votes from the victims of his dedication to expanding the carceral state, from the victims of his student loan debt fuckery, and from sexual assault survivors. A perfect example of three groups — people of color, youths, and women, respectively — directly oppressed by Biden’s actions. And who, as demographically ‘left leaning,’ are expected to vote blue anyway.
To unsubscribe from this mailing list of ever-shittier corporate Democrats with ever-heavier ethical baggage, we need to not pick up the same weapon as last time, to not fight the same battle with the same rusted tools. In other words: Reject the Democrats unless they decide to put up an actual human being. Until then, fight like fuck for the few decent Dems out there, organize within your community independently of the party structure, and most importantly, don’t let the assholes get you down. You’re not a fascist for disavowing both November rapists.
[1] The authors fully admit they were both Ready for Hillary in 2016. They deeply regret the error. See also: The Peter Daou School of Realizing You’ve Been Blinded By Neoliberalism.
[2] After the 2016 election, the mantra “anyone but Trump” began circulating among disappointed voters. The authors insist the DNC took this request at face value.
