What Does "The Lesser of Two Evils" Really Mean?
And why it's more important than ever to have a viable, leftist third party
I know, I know. It’s too late in the 2024 election cycle to have a viable third party run a presidential candidate. It’s a non-starter in the political media world, and a laughable threat to the two right-of-center parties in the US. Anyone who believes in a viable third party, especially one that is left-to-center-left, either believes in Santa Claus or is a damn fool.
But I wrote about it anyway in Al Jazeera English last week. The full link to my piece is here:
Here, though, I want to highlight a couple of excerpts that were cut and didn’t make it to the published draft, ones that I ensconced in the moment of the past few months of protest against the American machine:
The past few months of college student protests, sit-ins, occupied buildings, and encampments have been indicative of three things. One, American universities are basically neoliberal corporations. They have been using vagrancy and anti-rioting laws to treat their mostly peacefully protesting students and faculty like “outside agitators” and criminals. University leaders have called in law enforcement to tear down encampments and to arrest nearly 3,000 students and faculty all across the country. They have overruled faculty and either denied student protesters their degrees or threatened to expel them altogether. It seems like US colleges and universities are run by presidents more interested in donors than in their communities or higher education.
Two, the United States is in desperate need of a viable, leftist-to-center-left third party. It’s not just about Donald Trump and the Republicans and their fascism…
What I am advocating with my thoughts about a viable leftist third party is that most USians don’t know what is leftist at all, equating “liberal” with “left,” as if the last Willie Mays played left field for the New York (baseball)/San Francisco Giants for more than 20 years instead of center field. Seeing so many otherwise intelligent people in my life and on the Interwebs assume the US left reflects itself in the Democratic Party, it infuriates me to no end. This is really where I think MLK was correct in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and not just about “white moderates,” either:
The difficulties of forming a leftist third-party alliance in the US are further complicated by the confusion over the word itself. Pollsters like the Pew Research Center and Gallup obfuscate the differences between being liberal and being leftist. The same is true of the US news media’s dutiful reporting in redefining leftists as mere liberals over the past 60 years. But to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., if most liberals are really “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” then they definitely are not leftists, whether they are white or of color.
And the one that makes me wanna holler while putting my crusty feet through a cheese grater, the so-called “lesser of two evils,” like what so many media-types and talking heads often say. What does this even mean? Have any of these clowns ever read Dante’s Inferno, like I had to when I was in 10th grade?
Both parties prove that Dante’s conception of Hell is not an exaggeration. A second term of Trump and his MAGA Republicans may well make the United States a semi-fascist nation-state equivalent to Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell of a cold-blooded, treacherous cabal. Yet Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell of fraudulent, smooth-talking hypocrites under Biden and Democrats is only marginally better. Building a viable third party is necessary work. The alternative is a status quo that is deadly for America’s people and untenable for the future of America’s weak democracy.
This is a long-haul idea, one that will take years of planning, meetings, and vetting. I mean, what else should I and anyone who cares about the future do? Hope that craven, racist capitalists hell-bent on roasting the planet one day seek radical social justice on their own? Yeah, right!