You’re right, living in an oppressive society means some forms of oppression are more or less unavoidable. The only completely pure option is to withdraw from that society, and that’s assuming that’s something that your oppressive society would even allow you to do. Still, there are some things that society says you MUST do; and they say that you must do these things because they give strength to the status quo. Now, if you, say, stopped paying taxes, the penalties for that are steep enough that it’s tough to fault citizens who continue to do so. But when it comes to voting for mainstream candidates who promise to uphold the oppression in every meaninful way, shape and form, nobody’s going to throw you in jail if you don’t. (Yet. :p) So… don’t!

To me, it makes more sense just to do the same fighting against child-killing without giving support to any bad guys in the form of one thing they really do care about getting from you: your vote.

To me, it makes more sense just to do the same fighting against child-killing without giving support to any bad guys.

This is impossible.

You live in an oppressive society, which means that you, presently, as you sit in your chair, are contributing to and benefiting from the oppression of others.

Voting for a third party does not change that.

I filled in the box for McKinney/Clemente with a ballpoint pen made with plastic produced from vanishing petroleum stores and iron mined by workers who, like villagers who live around the mine, will generally live to be about 30. The pen was assembled by Chinese children working in slave-labor conditions, and shipped to me in a rusting container ship that pushed three species of marine life closer to extinction.

All this happened so I could feel a bit better about symbolically not supporting, y’know, oppression and environmental destruction.

Violet/Marc: “Local level radical activism” also appeals to me. Far more than trying to get the vote out for candidates who cause the oppression I’m hoping to fight. And in fact, it is probably the best route for bringing about the larger changes we’d all like to see.

Thebigmanfred: If you’re looking for a “lesser-of-two-evilist” who really, truly does understands that it is the lesser of two evils which they support, you need look no further than Punkass Marc. His response to the child-killing argument is, I think, the best that I could ever imagine hearing.

Marc: Your response to the child-killing argument is, I think, the best that I could ever imagine hearing. You have successfully defused the visceral repugnance of child-killing by comparing it to imperialism before I had a chance to. But, I would still contend that, even in the “they’ve killed children for generations, so only fight for small change” scenario, agreeing to support the Non-Torturing Child-Killers until all child-killing can be stopped just means you’re supporting child-killers. The fact that you fight against child-killing when you’re not busy handing out flyers for the NTCK doesn’t change this fact. To me, it makes more sense just to do the same fighting against child-killing without giving support to any bad guys.

But, obviously, this is utterly and transparently the same argument I’ve already been making, so I’ll let it drop for now unless I can come up with a fresher argument.

I like it! Local level radical activism. I can get behind this entirely.

Yup! With the caveat that “community” may not be equivalent to “local” in the sense of being geographically localized, thanks to the tubes. (Projects like Food not Bombs and The Backup Project require some kind of physical presence and action, but a lot of design and organizing can happen in a global community).

Thene, whether instinctively or consciously, I feel you’ve used a nice bit of jiu-jitsu to avoid actually answering the question I posed. You are leaving third parties out of the equation in your reasoning, yes? In other words, you’ll only consider candidates on their merit if they’re either Democrat or Republican. If so, I guess I was clumsy to phrase the question only in terms of Democrats. Let me ask it a different way. If I haven’t misconstrued you, you want to support the better major party candidate; or, if they’re both bad, you’ll take the one that’s a little less bad than the other one. I get this. So the question is: What would be an example of a policy which, if both major party candidates supported it, you wouldn’t be able to support either of them in good conscience? (Or do you have no such lower limit?)

The jiujitsu was unintentional but you read me more or less right – I’m from a country where there are three viable parties, and the least powerful of these is regularly used as a refuge for disaffected supporters of the other two. It finishes in second place in most constituencies, naturally, so voting third party is usually a strong, productive thing to do.

But in America, where there’s no such outlet for useful protest voting? Well, don’t ask me, I only just got here. I’ve voted three times, for two different parties, but none of them were tight races and only one was a general election; it’s pretty easy to lose my vote, and in local elections in 2006 the Lib Dems managed it with one stupid offensive mailer about how people like me were ruining the area. (If it had been a national race I might not have been deterred by that, but if you’re running for local office on the platform that I am the problem, then fuck you too).

There has never been a point in my adult life when I’ve considered myself to be a loyalist to any party. It’s all very well saying ‘Vote for a small party!’ but what if none of those represent my views either? They don’t. Just like the big parties, they’re a collection of priorities and opinions that I may or may not agree with. All votes are a compromise. So in a tight race for an office that mattered I would likely vote for the major candidate I hated least – particularly if the other major candidate was threatening me personally, eg. with an anti-choice or anti-queer platform. (I think that tends to supercede all else, too – if I had to pick between an anti-choice Democrat and a pro-choice Republican, I’d take the Republican every time, because you can lobby someone who disagrees with you about how the numbers add up, or about foreign policy, but you can’t lobby someone who thinks you have no sovereignty over your own fucking body).

But if they were both anti-choice queer-bashers, and it was a really tight race, and it was for something important? Well, they’d both equally want to destroy me personally, so I’d look at the next level – how many other human beings they want to destroy, or maim, or kill. I’d rate them on doveishness and on emphasis on other issues that actually matter and aren’t just about moving numbers around. If it’s still a tie I’d go third-party. If. But only as a protest, because there’s no third party I like the look of much either.

But on the other hand, there’s the question of how we address problems on the ground—like, say, domestic violence, or the violence imperialist oppression. And we can look to the state and say, “well, we can pass this or that legislation, and try to get more funding for this-and-that program.” That approach can be effective in a limited way, but it has serious problems, particularly when we talk about leveraging the criminal justice system—notably, we increase our reliance on the state as it is, and our programmes inherit some of the systems of oppression built into the machinery of state.

And that’s where I think radical activism has a strong role to play. We can build institutions within our communities to address the problems affecting them without invoking the institutions of state. These radical institutions are almost definitionally more localized and cellular, but that gives them, ideally, the flexibility to respond to actual problems people are having right now in a way that avoids replicating the oppression and violence of state institutions. The value of radical politics is particularly acute in instances (and I’m not just talking about the U.S., here) where state actors are part or all of the problem, and where however much you might want to change the actions of the state, you need your self and your community to survive as the state lumbers itself into better shape (or not, depending).

Ah, this is the same exact argument I keep on having. I wish more people who disagreed with us here could at least respect us for the fact that we’re trying to adhere to a strongly moral principle just as much as they are.

When I hear the lesser of two evil argument, it’s usually from people I don’t actually think believe they are choosing from the lesser of two evils. Usually people who make such an argument are highly critical of one party and one party only. If you’re not critical or very critical of both parties then you’re probably applying the “best candidate” test, which is completely different from the lesser of two evils.

I hear you on the adhering to a strong moral principle part, which is why I’m not bothered that people vote on those grounds. I do wish however, that people would consider that those that they’ve voted for, Democrats and Republicans, have both caused a great deal of harm in this country and that there are better options them both of these parties. I wish Americans would wake up to the fact that if the government was a business then most of the employees in it would deserve to be fired. The national debt alone would be grounds for firing. I hope for the day where political parties will not run and ruin this country, where people elect people with good ideas and not people beholden to a political machine.