Last night, I had a testy discussion with my older sister Joni, a civil rights activist, about voting for Biden. She’s a social democrat & has always voted lesser evil. But I challenged her on how she could vote for a man who is creepy & perverted around women & responsible for the incarceration in federal prisons of tens of thousands of Black kids for minor offenses or for lack of decent legal counsel. She thinks I’m being impractical & too high-minded, even foolish. My question to her, who I love dearly, was ‘To whom is Biden a lesser evil’? To Black kids sitting in federal prisons for life without parole for smoking a joint? To Palestinians who he considers terrorists? To Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Somalians against whom he’s endorsed war?
If you want to vote lesser evil to get Trump out, that is understandable. But to deny the crimes of Biden or whitewash the Democratic Party to justify your vote is not just lesser evil stuff but delusional & naive about politics.
There is an alternative to lesser evil politics. They are the greater good politics of organizing independent political power to achieve our goals of democracy, peace, justice.