Choose the Lesser Evil

The Rematch Nobody Wants; Lessons From 2016; Horseshoe Politics; and “Boob-bait for the Bubbas”

The End is coming for us. (Illustration by Jim Swanson)

Nobody seems happy about a Biden-Trump presidential rematch, but it looks like that’s where we’re headed. In our polarized country, opposing this dismal do-over is the one thing a solid majority agrees on.

So this year is going to be about bad options and lesser evils, and so is this week’s Scribe’s End Notes. But first, let’s admit 10 months is an eternity in American politics and anything can happen.

Nikki Haley still has a slim shot at the GOP nomination, if she can somehow parlay her decent finish in New Hampshire into an upset victory in her home state of South Carolina. But that would require some semblance of sanity from Republican voters, which is truly a long shot.

Haley is probably right when she said, "The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.” But it looks like the Grim Reaper might be more likely to accomplish that feat than primary voters.

One of these two octogenarian nominees could die or stroke out before November — or in Trump’s case, be imprisoned, although even that might not stop him. Presidential elections are stressful for even healthy young folks, and this is going to be a long, difficult year for everyone.

Beginning of The End: The sudden and unceremonious shutdown of my beloved San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2014 broke my heart and hurt The City. But the newspaper industry had been in decline throughout my long career, so I can’t say that I was too surprised.

No, the real heartbreak that I’ve been remembering these days, the one that started my deep frustrations with the Left, was the 2016 presidential election. I was a big Bernie Sanders supporter from way back. Like Bernie, I considered myself a democratic socialist and loved all his political stances and rhetoric.

So 2016 was a very exciting year for progressives like me as Bernie outperformed all expectations and gave Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment a real run for their money, in the process helping to pull the party to the left.

Now, most of us knew he wasn’t actually going to win, even if that was our fervent hope. The party and its most loyal voters just weren’t quite there yet.

But instead of celebrating the real progress Bernie’s campaign and political positions represented, way too many of my fellow progressives flipped out and headed down conspiratorial rabbit holes.

Many blamed the DNC for Bernie’s loss, as if it were some all-powerful force. In a dark foreshadowing of right-wing election denialism to come, they claimed the election was rigged and that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had cheated.

Extremists on both sides have so much in common that sometimes they even switch sides.¹

Choosing Between Evils: I can’t stand the Clintons and I never could. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, they botched a historic opportunity to move us closer to socialized medicine, moved the Democratic Party to the right, proudly ended the “era of big government” and “welfare as we know it,” opposed same-sex marriage, and used the prosperity of the first Internet boom to attack federal budget deficits rather than poverty and the growing concentration of wealth and power.

But after the primaries were over and the race was between Clinton and Trump, that seemed like an easy choice to me. Trump was an incompetent megalomaniacal con-man with authoritarian tendencies, a true danger to the republic; versus Hillary, a reasonable, qualified moderate who Bernie had helped pull to the left on many policies.

Yet for the second half of 2016, I had a series of maddening conversations with my supposed progressive allies — both in person and online — about their refusal to support Hillary or even to temporarily go easy on their criticism of her.

Over and over, they voiced the mindless mantra of “I’m not going to vote for the lesser of two evils anymore,” as if enabling the greater evil was somehow a virtuous position. They refused to understand or accept that our country’s flawed electoral system really only allows for a binary choice in the main presidential election. It’s just one or the other.

I, too, would prefer that we have a multi-party parliamentary system for choosing our leaders, but that would require a major constitutional amendment that I don’t see coming along anytime soon.

So we ended up with Trump narrowly winning the presidency, and being an even worse president than our worst fears. And now, when Trump is more unhinged and dangerous than he’s ever been, facing prison unless he can seize presidential power again, too many Democrats and progressives are still whining about Biden and refusing to fully support him.

§ Still A-Biden? Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden was my least favorite candidate in the Democratic presidential primary election of 2020 — and mostly for the same reasons. They were both safe centrists who were way too conservative for my tastes.

But I enthusiastically supported Biden once he won the nomination in 2020, like I had Clinton in 2016, and he went on to win the race and defeat Trump by an even greater popular vote margin (4%) than Clinton had (2%).

After living through Trump’s madness and flirtation with fascism, Leftists largely set aside their concerns and voted for the lesser of the two evils: Biden. And Biden rewarded that support from the Left with progressive appointments to key cabinet posts, the biggest investment on combatting climate change in U.S. history, and direct cash payments and student debt relief to the poorest Americans who were still struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In other words, Biden was an unexpectedly progressive president, perhaps the most progressive president of my lifetime (although that bar is admittedly very low). And yet too many progressives are still grumbling about what he didn’t do or about his age or blaming their general malaise on him.

Same with the independents and suburban women who were key to his victory four years ago. And now, with intractable, U.S.-supported wars raging abroad and college campuses in upheaval, Biden is in danger of losing support among young people. It’s not looking good.

Are American voters really prepared to choose the greater of two evils? What are we going to do about this, folks? Or will Republicans keep going too far in their conspiratorial weirdness and “war on woke,” turning off the independent voters they need to regain power?

Anti-Woke’s Florida Retirement: A year ago, Florida man Ron DeSantis seemed like someone who could actually win the presidential nomination in the newly MAGAfied Republican Party. He was all puffed up from taking on Disney, denigrating Black folks, and firing progressive prosecutors as part of his mean-spirited “war on woke,” somehow trying to out-Trump Trump.

Riding high from a landslide reelection as governor, DeSantis said a year ago in his inaugural speech, “Florida is the place where woke goes to die.” It was a line that doesn’t make much sense, but DeSantis loved it and used it repeatedly.   

All year long, DeSantis and other MAGA Republicans couldn’t stop railing against “woke,” using it as their favored epithet toward anything vaguely liberal or enlightened. But now that DeSantis has flamed out, showing his anti-woke crusade had limited appeal even within the crazed GOP, is it too soon to say Florida is where anti-woke politics go to retire?

Hopefully, but I wouldn’t bet on it. On Sunday, just as DeSantis declared his presidential campaign over, The New York Times did a deep dive on the roots and backstory of the right-wing campaign against “wokeism” and the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs they see as its embodiment.

The national campaign was cooked up at the Claremont Institute in Southern California, the same right-wing extremist camp who helped Trump develop the strategy for overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election. It took aim at the DEI programs of many universities, government bodies, and big employers.   

As you may remember from last week’s Scribe’s End Notes, I’m not a big fan of the central role identity politics has taken on the Left or its backlash on the Right, and I had mixed feelings about my own lengthy DEI training sessions.

But I generally think it’s good and long overdue to teach Americans more about racism, white privilege, and the realities of our country’s troubled history, even if it triggers thin-skinned conservatives.

So it’s pretty ridiculous when they cry, “America is under attack by a leftist revolution disguised as a plea for justice,” as the Times found in insider emails and other documents from the national campaign, which has succeeded in banning DEI programs in many Republican-led states.

Rather than making good faith arguments for academic freedom and color-blind standards, the documents reveal racism, homophobia, intolerance, and naked political partisanship as the true motivators behind the campaign. It was “boob-bait for the bubbas” designed to make rednecks vote Republican.

“Our project will give legislators the knowledge and tools they need to stop funding the suicide of their own country and civilization,” they wrote in a grant application to a right-wing foundation. They even argued that “a healthy society requires patriarchy,” putting a fine clarifying point on their concerns about more women and minorities moving into positions of power.

But too many Republicans don’t seem to have gotten the message that anti-woke tactics won’t work. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) — who might become Trump’s running mate — grabbed headlines last month by grilling university presidents over campus anti-Semitism and plans to continue her crusade against “wokeism” in higher eduction this year, declaring, “This is just the beginning.”

No, ma’am, this is The End.

1. Switching sides: Even before 2016, many anti-establishment leftists in San Francisco and other big cities were already drifting off into the political darkness. One extreme example is David DePape, the guy who broke into then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer.

I knew DePape as a leftist pro-nudity activist, part of a San Francisco movement that even fielded mayoral candidates. But as the Washington Post and other outlets reported, DePape’s online postings show he basically switched sides after the weird GamerGate controversy in 2014.

Fed by online misinformation, his right-wing radicalization accelerated through Trump’s election and presidency, the Black Lives Matter protests, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the madness surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. I know lots of other former friends and allies who followed similar paths, another manifestation of these strange end times, the horseshoe theory of politics that been gaining increased attention.

As German terrorist expert Daniel Kohler told the Post, “Side switching across mutually exclusive or hostile ideologies is really not that uncommon.”

The crazy train boards on both sides.