FPJ — When American voters cannot agree that if a president violates his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, he should be disqualified from consideration for reelection, there exists a serious problem. Similarly, when a candidate for the presidency seeking to challenge the incumbent makes clear his intention to maintain the status quo and perpetuate the existing criminal establishment order, and American voters cannot agree that this should disqualify him from consideration, there exists a serious problem.
The standard argument one comes across when confronted with individuals who plan on voting for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is that “We must vote for the lesser of two evils!” One hears this standard refrain time and time again, the reasoning being that if we don’t vote for the “lesser” evil, then the “greater” evil will gain power. The argument goes that if you don’t vote for either evil, then you are “throwing away your vote” and thereby effectively voting for the “greater” evil for not helping to increase the chances that the “lesser” evil will win. Consequently, you will be responsible for the even more disastrous consequences of the policies that the “greater” evil will pursue.
When confronted with the “lesser of evils” argument, one might be tempted to inquire: Why must we vote for evil? Shouldn’t we rather oppose it and not vote for it? After all, it takes no great feat of cognition to recognize that this logic serves only to perpetuate evil on an ever increasing scale as Americans incrementally lower their standards every election cycle for what currently existing evils they are willing to accept and tolerate in order to supposedly prevent even worse evils in the future.
Now, when one points this out to someone who has just offered up the standard “lesser of evils” argument, a typical response is for them to try to backtrack by saying something like, “Well, I don’t really think (insert candidate) is ‘evil’.” They then will list things their candidate has done or positions they have that they think are good, and perhaps add a comment like, “It’s unrealistic to expect there to be a candidate who is perfect”, or something similar—which will bring the conversation right back around to the above points about candidates doing certain criminal things or having certain unjustifiable positions that should disqualify them from consideration. And then if you therefore ask such individuals if their standards are so low that they consider a president violating his oath of office to be merely “imperfection”, they will typically say something like, “Well, I’m not voting for those bad policies, I’m only voting for his good policies.” And then if you point out that they just contradicted their own argument that if you don’t vote for the “lesser” evil with them, then you will be responsible for all the bad things that the “greater” evil will do, they will probably begin to start saying slightly less predictable things, such as telling you what a naïve idealist you are for believing in utopian fantasies, and so on.
The Devil himself would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective means by which to corrupt an entire nation—to make a society into a people without principle, a people who meaninglessly spout empty words about moral values while accepting and even defending the lawlessness of their government and actively struggling to maintain the criminal establishment order—than to convince the masses that they “must vote for the lesser of two evils”.
And if the existing establishment order wished to overthrow the Constitution, turn the U.S. into a totalitarian police state, and enslave the population, it would be the simplest thing for it to do, so long as Americans continued to cling to this logic. All it would need to do would be to create an illusion of “choice” each election cycle between two amenable, pro-establishment candidates who would both continue down this path towards tyranny, albeit each at a slightly different pace or with different sounding rhetoric, and the American sheeple, content to bicker with each other over which of these two candidates would pursue their enslavement at the slower pace, would just continue to vote in favor of legitimizing and further entrenching the violations of the Constitution, loss of their Liberty, illegal wars, murderous criminality, etc., that had occurred over the previous four years in order to supposedly prevent the very same from hypothetically occurring in the future on an even greater scale under the other guy. So long as the establishment would present one candidate who adopts positions that are even more extreme than the other, even more frightening to contemplate than the horrors that exist under the present status quo, then Americans would be incrementally made into obedient serfs who would vote to have themselves shackled and chained so long as it meant keeping the guy from their party in power. And in the end, it wouldn’t really matter which party’s candidate a plurality of Americans decided was the “lesser” evil, because the ship of state would remain steady on course regardless.
What people who make the “lesser of evils” argument are really saying, if we translate it into meaningful terms, is that for the president to repeatedly violate his oath of office, trample the Constitution, violate international law, murder innocent civilians abroad, continue the nation down the road to economic ruin, etc., is all acceptable to them, just so long as the president is a member of their party. Thus, when Romney supporters say we must vote for Romney to prevent Obama from getting reelected, what they are really saying is that maintaining the criminal establishment order is acceptable to them so long as a Republican is president. And when Obama supporters say we must vote for Obama to prevent Romney from gaining office, what they are really saying is that maintaining the criminal establishment order is acceptable to them so long as a Democrat is president.
It is remarkable that this kind of commitment to ideology straight down party lines exists in this day and age, the age of information and the internet, and yet one may still come across many Americans who consider the Democratic party to be the yin to the Republican party’s yang. The very language used in political discourse of “left” vs. “right” reinforces this downright delusional paradigm. Then there are Americans who recognize that there is largely a consensus across party lines on pretty much all of the most crucial issues, but they tend to focus on those areas where there are subtle differences, real or perceived. Missing the forest for the trees, they argue that we must feed this monster rather than that one, to stop that one from devouring us, all the while failing to see how futile this is since they are just two heads of the same hydra, and the only way to stop it from further devastation is to just stop feeding the beast altogether.
We may see how application of this “lesser of evils” logic has worked out so far this century. In the 2000 election, anyone who did not vote for either of the two pro-establishment candidates was considered to have “thrown away” their vote. But where is the logic in the argument that having voted for either of the two pro-establishment candidates and thus having voted to perpetuate the status quo was not throwing away their vote? One would think that, if the goal was actually to effect real and meaningful change, it would be more logical to say that anyone who voted for the Democratic or the Republican candidate wasted their vote. In that election, it was not exactly clear which candidate a plurality of Americans actually viewed as the lesser evil, so the Supreme Court stepped in and decided for them.
And then after four years of Bush, a plurality of Americans cast their votes to reelect him to a second term, thereby signaling to the establishment that the trampling of the Constitution, the loss of Liberty, the torturing of prisoners, the murderous war on Iraq, etc., was acceptable to them, just so long as a Republican was in the Oval Office. The message received by Washington was that the president could violate his oath of office and commit high crimes for which the Constitution demands he be impeached and for which he should be tried for war crimes under international law, and this was all okay with the American people and could be carried out in their name. The message received in Washington was confirmation that Americans would accept the extraordinary criminality of the existing establishment so long as a plurality of them voted to legitimize it on the basis of the belief that not doing so would result in some even greater evil if the other party’s candidate won.
Although Bush was elected into office on a platform of limited government, free markets, minding our own affairs internationally, “no nation building”, etc., and although he proceeded to put the lie to his rhetoric by implementing opposite policies, his supporters continued to back him anyway and voted to reelect him in 2004 simply because he was their party’s guy, and if they voted for a third-party candidate, the Democratic party’s guy might win. This blind loyalty to party was—it should by now be uncontroversial to say—absolutely disastrous for the country. By voting to reelect Bush, a plurality of Americans were responsible for legitimizing, in the eyes of the establishment order, the violent crimes and authoritarian usurpations of power by the U.S. government.
Even so, by the end of Bush’s second term, Americans were finally beginning to wake up to the realities of just how disastrous eight years of Bush had been. Even many conservative voters had become disillusioned with what had transpired under his two terms, and the liberals and independents had begun to effectively mobilize against the government’s criminal policies. And then along came Obama, with his empty rhetoric about “hope” and “change”, perfectly transparent at the time to anyone who took the time to parse his words and analyze them for any real underlying meaning. Even many of those who largely recognized the vacuousness of his lofty-sounding rhetoric were convinced that he was the “lesser evil”. All it took for the establishment to ensure that there was no rollback of the policies that were implemented under Bush was to pit Obama against someone who would be regarded by more Americans as the “greater evil”. Enter Bush-policy advocate and warmongerer extraordinaire John McCain.
Unsurprisingly, Obama won, and many liberals went back to sleep, satisfying themselves in their sense of accomplishment and false sense of security that now that they had cast their ballot and a Democrat was in the White House, rather than one of these Republican warmongers, things would be okay. And then, rather than rolling them back, Obama proceeded to complete the institutionalization of Bush’s policies so as to cement them into permanency.
By declaring his empty promise to close Guantanamo, for instance, he succeeded in obtaining Americans’ acquiescence for the system of military detentions, which he made clear from the beginning he would continue. He succeeded in gaining Americans’ acceptance of the usurpation of Executive authority under which this system was established and the basic framework under which it operated. He ended, so far as we know, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—otherwise known as torture—while refusing to renounce the assumed unconstitutional power of the Executive to authorize such human rights abuses and while preventing those responsible for implementing this policy from being held accountable for violating U.S. and international law.
Obama in fact escalated this policy of military detentions by expanding it to apply to American citizens, who may now be kidnapped on U.S. soil and held in indefinite military detention.
While those on the “left” are fond of claiming that Obama “ended the war in Iraq”, the fact of the matter is that all he did was continue the existing policy, with the status of forces agreement under which all “combat” troops would be withdrawn having been signed by Bush.
Despite somehow managing to be perceived as the “anti-war” candidate, Obama proceeded to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
He also escalated the Bush administration’s policy of using drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, which illegal attacks are responsible for the murder of innocent civilians, which only serves to escalate the threat of terrorism and harm U.S. national security.
Obama in fact escalated the Bush administration’s policy of targeted killings even further by expanding it to apply to U.S. citizens, claiming for the Executive authority to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to assassinate even Americans.
He continued Bush’s policy towards Iran of rejecting its “inalienable” right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to enrich uranium for civilian applications, continued the policy of deceiving Americans into believing that Iran has a nuclear weapons program even though the U.S.’s own intelligence community has continued to assess that it does not. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) actively monitoring and supervising Iran’s program has continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material to any military aspect of its program, and there is no credible evidence that any such aspect of its program exists. The administration knows this, but continues to deceive the public about it, anyways, in perfect continuity with the Bush administration’s use of this issue as a pretext to further the government’s ultimate goal of accomplishing regime change—the same way regime change in Iraq was accomplished under a pretext of lies. In fact, Obama not only continued Bush’s policy, but escalated it by increasing the sanctions aimed at collectively punishing the civilian population for their sin of living under a regime that refuses to take its marching orders from Washington.
Although when he was a Senator, Obama correctly observed that “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation”, he nevertheless as president launched a war of aggression against Libya in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution and international law (exceeding the U.N. mandate to protect civilians in order to overthrow the Gaddafi regime in violation of the U.N. Charter).
Similarly, Obama escalated U.S. support for Israel’s violations of international law and crimes against the Palestinian people. Despite a delusional perception that he has been “tough” on Israel, in fact, Bush had at least gone through the motions of opposing Israel’s policy of constructing illegal settlements and annexation wall in the occupied West Bank by withholding about $1 billion in loan guarantees from an allocated amount of $9 billion, when Israel had only requested $8 billion in the first place. As meaningless as this gesture was, it was far more than Obama has ever done. During his first campaign, Obama visited Israel, where he told his audience that he would support Israel’s illegal annexation of east Jerusalem. While Israel was raining down death and destruction on the defenseless civilian population of the Gaza Strip from December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009, after having violated its ceasefire with Hamas, Obama was silent. He proceeded as president to ensure that any implementation of the recommendations of the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission into the Gaza massacre, which sought to achieve justice for the victims, was blocked. He refused to call on Israel to end its siege of Gaza, an illegal policy of collectively punishing the civilian population, and similarly defended Israel against censure and accountability for its murderous attack on the civilian flotilla seeking to break Israel’s blockade in May 2010, in which nine peace activists, including one American, were murdered by Israeli forces. He demanded that the Palestinians return to negotiations with the Netanyahu government in Israel “without preconditions”, meaning without an end to Israel’s illegal settlement activity. Reinforcing this green light for Israeli’s criminal policy, Obama called on Netanyahu to renew a partial and ultimately meaningless “moratorium” on new settlement construction while assuring Israel that there would be no consequences if the request was ignored, that the upwards of $3 billion in annual military aid to Israel would continue, as well as offering additional rewards such as an agreement on the sale of 20 F-35 jets, for Israel to persist in its criminal policies. While Bush had written a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressing U.S. support for Israeli annexation of illegally built settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, the Obama administration went much further and vetoed an uncontroversial U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel for continuing its illegal colonization.
Et cetera…
And thus we now have a situation in which many Americans seek to reelect Obama for another term because he is the “lesser of two evils”. There is a remarkable phenomenon that occurs when one confronts Obama supporters with the fact that he has repeatedly violated his oath of office by violating the U.S. Constitution and international law. What is remarkable is that they typically do not even bother to deny that he has done so. That he has is rather uncontroversial. And yet they say they will vote to reelect him anyway simply because they believe if Romney was president, he would be even more supportive of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, even more aggressive towards Iran, etc.
Thus it is that people on the “left” have come to the point where they are ready to vote in favor of Bush administration policies that have not merely been continued, but escalated and expanded upon—all in the name of stopping the “greater” evil of another Republican president gaining power.
Ponder that for a moment.
The Devil must be grinning ear to ear.
Albert Einstein famously defined “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” The “lesser of evils” argument certainly qualifies. This insanity sometimes manifests itself in an intriguing way; you will sometimes hear people on the “left” telling others that they should vote third-party if they live in a “blue” state, but that if they live in a “swing” state, they should vote for Obama. In other words, the argument is that Obama is a candidate who is at best not worthy of receiving your vote, who is unworthy of the office of the presidency on his own merits, but who is just considered less unworthy than the other guy.
We may agree with liberals that stopping Romney from becoming the president is a worthy cause, and with conservatives about stopping Obama from gaining a second term—but at what cost should this goal be achieved? At the cost of sending the message to Washington that the president is above the law, that he will not be held accountable for violating his oath of office, no matter how abhorrent his violation of the Constitution or international law? The ends do not justify the means. Preventing Romney from becoming president does not justify voting for Obama, and vice versa.
The observation that U.S. foreign policy remains consistent over time regardless of whether a Republican or a Democrat is president is relatively uncontroversial. So it is natural for adherents of one or the other party to just completely ignore the government’s consistent criminal foreign policy across administrations and focus on some domestic issue. The two parties are not the same, they insist. There are meaningful differences between them, we are told. But how true is that, even on domestic matters? Sure, there are differences, but just how meaningful are they? How significant are they, really, if we look at them in their larger context?
Let’s take an issue that is sure to be at the top of most Americans’ list in terms of importance: the economy. While there are certainly attempts to make this out to be a partisan issue, with both parties blaming each other for the problems that exist, this is a completely manufactured controversy. The truth is that the causes of the U.S.’s economic woes have nothing whatsoever to do with party politics. The Federal Reserve, through its inflationary policy of artificially low interest rates, along with the bipartisan government policy of encouraging homeownership, created a housing bubble. The illusion of economic growth came to an end when the bubble burst, precipitating the financial crisis and ushering in the “Great Recession”. While liberals and even many conservatives try to blame the crisis on the free market, the fact is that it was caused by government intervention in the market. And this intervention is of a completely bipartisan nature.
Both parties advocated a government policy of encouraging homeownership. Both advocate the Keynesian economic policies that caused the crisis. Bush appointed Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve. And while Bernanke couldn’t see the crisis coming—despite the fact that it was predictable and predicted years prior by many, and disproportionately by Austrian economists—Bernanke declared to the world that he knew what was best and how to fix it—by zeroing interest rates and keeping them there for as long as it would take. And what did Obama do when he came into office? He kept Bernanke on at the Fed to keep doing more of the same that caused the trouble in the first place, as though wealth could be created from a printing press. In their first presidential debate, which focused largely on the economy, the role of the Federal Reserve was not once mentioned by either Obama or Romney. That pretty much sums up the situation and how meaningless their supposed “differences” are on the topic of the economy.
Aside from the Fed’s monetary policy, what was the Bush administration’s response to the crisis? To bail out the banks at taxpayer expense, thus preventing the liquidation of malinvestment and further entrenching the already existing implicit promise to major financial institutions that if they engage in excessive risk in pursuit of profit and so get into trouble, then the government will confiscate wealth from the taxpayers to bail them out. Once again, we see the government responded by continuing to do more of the same that caused the crisis in the first place, only on an even greater scale, and once again, we see this is a completely non-partisan issue, with the Obama administration having continued the Bush policy of welfare for the rich, a policy Romney also supported.
Similarly, there is a nonpartisan consensus that the proper response to an economic downturn should be the Keynesian prescription of more government spending, more deficits, more debt. The Bush administration ran up deficits and added well over $4 trillion to the national debt. When Obama came into office, the national debt was at around $10 trillion, and running upwards of $1 trillion in deficits every year, he managed to increase that to over $16 trillion in less than four years. When libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, running as a Republican, proposed a plan to cut $1 trillion from the budget in his first year, Romney showed his true Keynesian colors by responding that doing so would throw the economy into a depression, the underlying assumption being that government bureaucrats know better than the American people how best to spend the American people’s money, know better than the market how to direct scarce resources to the most productive ends in order to create economic growth.
Romney has also adopted what some are calling “militarized Keynesianism”, arguing that if the U.S. cuts military spending, it will result in a loss of jobs in the military/security complex. Neither party has proposed any serious cuts in military spending, which is likewise projected to increase over the next decade. Despite lots of talk about spending “cuts”, there are none, only reductions from baseline spending increases over the next decade, and neither party is even remotely serious about eliminating the deficit and tackling the debt. The budget plan of Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, doesn’t project balancing the budget until sometime after 2040, and only then based on rosy and delusional assumptions about economic recovery that isn’t going to happen, because the bond bubble will inevitably burst, and when that happens, it will make the 2008 financial crisis look like a walk in the park.
Ah, but what about entitlement programs and health care? Isn’t there real, meaningful difference between the candidates in this area? Don’t Democrats want to take care of poor people while Republicans want to eliminate welfare and entitlement programs? Those on the “left” seem to think so. The actual facts don’t support this paradigm, however. The legislation that created Medicare Part D, for example, was signed into law by Bush. During their debate, Romney criticized “Obamacare” because it will reduce Medicare spending. Think about that. And Obama himself pointed out that his position on Social Security was not much different from Romney’s.
And returning again to the debt, the figure of $16 trillion does not include the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security. Including these liabilities brings the debt to over $100 trillion. While Republicans and Democrats bicker on the details of these programs, the truth is that they are bankrupting the country, and neither party is willing to face up to that reality or deal with it seriously. So much for their supposedly “meaningful” differences.
Then there is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. “Obamacare”), which many on the “left” support because they believe it will, as the name implies, do something to make health care more affordable, especially for the underprivileged. They believe this simply as a matter of faith. But this is false. The ACA in fact does nothing to reduce health care costs and, apart from the name, doesn’t pretend to. Rather, it seeks to try to manage costs by shifting the burden from one group of people to another, such as to health care providers (such as via the aforementioned reductions in Medicare spending, which will likely lead to fewer doctors accepting Medicare patients), and in ways that will likely only exacerbate the underlying problems. With the artificial increase in demand that will result, while the supply of doctors remains the same, the predictable result will be that it pushes costs even higher, either in terms of money or time spent in the waiting room, or both.
On its face, costs are so high in the first place because government has done its best to eliminate a free market for health care, such that prices for health care services don’t even exist and the market incentive to provide the best possible care at the lowest cost is eliminated and replaced with countless perverse incentives, so the idea that even more government interference and attempts to centrally manage a complex system is the solution easily falls within Einstein’s definition of insanity.
Apart from just being bad law, the Act’s individual mandate is also patently unconstitutional. The Constitution nowhere enumerates to government the authority to lay a direct unapportioned tax on individuals for nonconsumption. In fact, it expressly forbids the laying of such a tax. The usurpation of this authoritarian power, which the American people meekly accept and even joyfully embrace in the naïve belief that government will use it only for good, is a dangerous precedent. The potential for abuse is limited only by the imaginations of corporate lobbyists and corrupt politicians who now claim for themselves the power to be able to force Americans to participate in the market by purchasing some good or service against their will or to pay a penalty tax for their refusal to do so.
The reasons why bureaucrats decided it was “necessary” to include the mandate to purchase health insurance is instructive. One of the centerpieces of the ACA is its reform that would force insurance companies to accept people even with preexisting conditions. One of the reasons people are unable to get insurance is because they are ensured through an employer, but then they lose or change their job, and when that happens, under the current system, they typically lose their insurance as well. And if, in the meantime, they have developed some health condition requiring costly care, they are unable now to get on a new policy. Instead of making reforms to allow people to have more control over their own insurance and how their own money is spent, such that they might obtain a portable policy, the bureaucrats decided to just force insurers to accept people with preexisting conditions, which defeats the whole purpose of insurance. (If that isn’t plainly obvious enough, imagine if the government, in the name of helping poor homeowners, passed a law forcing fire insurance companies to insure people after their house has burned down.)
There are two predictable immediate consequences: one, insurers will have to increase premiums to cover the additional costs that would be incurred; and, two, people would have an incentive to not buy insurance unless and until they get sick. Thus a bill that ostensibly set out to make insurance more affordable and to have more people be insured included reform that would produce the exact opposite results. But instead of recognizing that this was just bad policy and scrapping it, they came up with another “solution” to solve the very problem that they, with their own bureaucratic bungling, created in the first place: the individual mandate, among the practical effects of which include forcing young people who have lower incomes to subsidize the costs of care for older people with higher incomes and forcing healthy people who eat right and exercise to subsidize the costs of unhealthy people whose lifestyle choices result in their higher health care expenses.
Returning to the alleged “meaningful” differences between Obama and Romney, those on the “left” seem to forget that Massachusetts’ “Romneycare” was the model for “Obamacare” (and Romney supporters seem only too happy to do the same). The only difference between Obama and Romney on the matter of the unconstitutional mandate is that Romney thinks that state governments should have such a dangerous authoritarian power, while Obama thinks this power belongs properly in the hands of the federal government, as well.
This is illustrative of the nature of the kind of “choice” people have this election. Sure, there are differences, but the basic underlying premise of both candidates’ positions are exactly the same. Sure, one can find areas where they disagree, but only within a framework wherein the disagreements lie within a limited range of acceptable dissent and debate that doesn’t risk upsetting the existing status quo. Thus, while Romney disagreed with Obama on bailing out the auto industry, there is no difference between them on the basic principle of using taxpayers’ money to bail out troubled corporations, as illustrated in the fact that Romney, like Obama, supported bailing out the banks. On matters of foreign policy, as already noted, the only difference, if there is any, is that Romney would escalate the policies of Bush/Obama even further (which Obama is likely to continue doing in a second term, anyway, just as he has escalated Bush’s policies during the first). Like Obama, Romney also said he would have voted for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) under which the government has claimed for itself the power to lock away American citizens in indefinite military detention (R.I.P. habeas corpus). In a speech outlining his positions on foreign policy, Romney asked “how the threats we face have grown so much worse” before proceeding at length to explain how he would continue to do more of the same that resulted in the situation becoming “so much worse” under Bush and Obama, promising to continue or escalate all of the U.S.’s existing policies right across the board. Et cetera…
Such is the nature of the “choice” Americans are faced with this coming election.
The logic behind the “lesser of evils” argument can be effectively boiled down to: “Most everyone else is going to vote for one of the two pro-establishment candidates, so therefore you should do so, too!” Or, to put it another way: “Most everyone else is going to employ a failed strategy that can only prevent real change by perpetuating the existing establishment order, so if you don’t do the same, you will be wasting your vote!” This thinking is beyond merely irrational; it is insane. If most everyone else was going to either jump off the bridge or lie down on the railroad tracks, would you decide that you should do so, too? If most everyone else in the group was going to commit mass suicide by drinking the Kool-Aid, would you decide that therefore you must do it, too? If you were on the playground and a bunch of your friends started talking about how they were either going to beat up the new kid or call him names, would you vote to go make fun of him on order to stop him from getting beat up, or would you dare to speak up and object to both suggestions? If you were chosen to participate in an experiment in which the scientists told you that if you didn’t push a button to apply an electric shock to a subject strapped into a chair, someone else in another room would apply an even more powerful shock, would you push the button in order to “help” the subject to be spared the even worse consequence of the guy in the other room pushing his?
By this logic, if Americans were given a choice between voting for Hitler running as a Republican, Stalin running as a Democrat, and Jesus running as a third-party candidate, they would vote for Stalin to keep Hitler from gaining power rather than wasting their vote on someone who is “unelectable” by virtue of not belonging to one of the two establishment parties.
Of course, the only reason it is true that “most everyone else” will vote for one of the two pro-establishment candidates in the first place is because they all cling to this same flawed thinking, too. It would be like observing that most other people weren’t recycling and concluding that therefore it wouldn’t make a difference for you to do it, when the whole reason nobody else was doing it was because they were all thinking the exact same way you were, and if everyone just stopped thinking that way, everyone would recycle. It is a self-fulfilling argument, because acting according to the conclusion of this logic is the very thing that makes its premise true.
How many people actually would have preferred Ron Paul as the Republican nominee but didn’t vote for him in the primaries simply because they considered him “unelectable”? How many people would prefer one of the third-party candidates, such as Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, but will still choose to vote for one of the two establishment guys anyways because they think that’s what everyone else is going to do, and they don’t want to “waste” their vote?
Voting isn’t a horse race. It’s not about picking a winner. Chances are, if everyone just stopped thinking, “I really like this alternative candidate, but I won’t vote for him because he’s ‘unelectable’,” and instead just voted their conscience, then he wouldn’t be unelectable, the establishment order could no longer be sustained, and the door would be opened to the possibility that the country might see real, meaningful, significant change.
There has to be people who are willing to go against the herd mentality, to reject groupthink, to dare to be different, to have the audacity to set aside insanity and adopt reason. And then more people will follow the path of sanity and moral conscience. And then more, until finally a tipping point is reached and change is ushered in. What is needed is a revolution. Not a violent revolt, and not even peaceful protests, but a revolution in thought. What is needed is a paradigm shift. The tipping point will not likely be reached this election. But if more people wake up this time around and either vote for an alternative candidate or simply choose not to participate in the whole charade at all so as not to recognize its legitimacy, then that will constitute progress.
Whatever you do this election, do not vote to perpetuate the establishment order. Do not vote to maintain the status quo. Do not vote for more illegal wars, more violence and murder of innocent civilians, more violations of international law, more trampling of the Constitution, more loss of your Liberty. Do not vote for the nation to continue down the path of self-destruction and economic ruin. Do not vote to legitimize the corruption, lawlessness, and immorality of the government. Do not vote to approve of a government committing crimes in your name, to have blood on your hands. Whatever you do, do not join in the mass insanity. Whatever you do, do not waste your vote. Do not vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.
