this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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I'm genuinely curious, would you vote for Hitler as a form of harm reduction? Obviously the genocide he did was bad, but say he was running against someone else who was also planning on committing a genocide.
The Nazis put money into infrastructure development, education (granted in this context it was also indoctrination, but there was genuine education being done too), expansion of welfare; better access to healthcare, public works programs, public health policies (though again, muddied with ideas about "racial purity").
Imagine he was running against another pro-genocide antisemite, but who was against all the welfare/public spending mentioned above, and instead wanted to deregulate the economy, causing even more material harm than the Nazis.
Would you be telling people to go out and vote for Hitler as a form of harm reduction? Is there literally no line a person/party can cross that makes them not worthy of a vote; no line that makes the system illegitimate and participation in it/implicit endorsement problematic?
Look, what you're trying to to get at here is that by voting for one party, you're affirming support for their policies. Perhaps the best way to frame this is that this is a little like the trolley problem, in that I can choose to do nothing and let the trolley (the US political system, in this case) run over five people people (Trump stops any finger-wagging at Nettanyahu and probably encourages a similar attack on the West Bank, as well as starts rounding up and deporting anyone with any detectable melanin levels, as well as going all in on climate change on the side of CO2, as well as whatever the fuck else who knows), or I can become a participant and pull the lever to try to make the Trolley run over one person instead (Biden's half ass finger wagging at Nettanyahu). Is pulling the lever problematic? Yes. But I think not pulling the lever is objectively worse.
Agreed on the trolley scenario, but that's not exactly analogous. I'll try to make an analogy that extrapolates the principle of our current scenario to illustrate what I'm getting at.
Imagine there are 3 candidates, two major parties and a third party. Both candidates in the major parties want to nuke the planet to establish an American world government. Our guy wants to nuke 6 billion people, their guy wants to nuke 7 billion people. Polls show that the third party candidate has the same chance of winning as polls in the 2024 U.S election show. The third party candidate is against dropping nukes on the planet to establish a global America.
Do you vote for the one who wants to nuke 6 billion people as a form of harm reduction? Or is there some line that a candidate/party can cross that makes voting third party the best option, despite how unlikely they'll win?
I've voted third party before; it's a fairly meaningless gesture at best, letting the trolley run over five people while still holding the lever at worst. Imo, you're looking at the wrong thing here. In a FPTP election system, you're always going to end up with a two-party duopoly with voters constantly trying to play harm reduction. If you want to have a meaningful impact at the ballot box- to have our third party votes actually count for something, it requires addressing the voting system that creates these conditions. Ranked Choice Voting/ STV movements are growing in the US; I plan on joining the one in California, I suggest you do the same thing.
I understand your sentiment, but I'm curious if you'll actually commit to the principle you are espousing. Would you actually vote for a candidate that wants to bomb "only" 6 billion people over 7 billion, instead of "throwing away" your vote for someone who doesn't want to nuke the planet?
I came back to say that your assertion about a two party system never arriving at a "too extreme" position is 100% correct. That's why it needs to be done away with.
That's a hard thing to answer for me, because it turns into looping arguments about ethics vs game theory. In practical terms, I know that other voters will avoid choosing the third party candidate, so the obvious choice is then re-apply my selection filter to the one of the two likely candidates that kills fewer people. In pure ethical terms, the obvious choice is to vote for the candidate that wants to kill nobody and then spend the rest of my life standing on the side of a road in the nuclear wastes ranting about how other people are bastards. I've been on both sides. In the moment, I choose pragmatism.
But really, the best thing to do is to try and reform our election system. I actually just signed up with CARCV.org before I hopped on here. When I have more time, I'll look at what I need to do to volunteer instead of just signing a petition and joining a mailing list.