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I’m starting to think “the lesser evil is still evil” is the very epitome of privilege, whether race-based or class-based.
 
Loudly identifying the lesser evil as still evil is a juvenile, unsubtle exercise in self-congratulatory, rhetorical posturing. Of course it is. It’s also no wonder that a lot of the people who say that are white libertarians or former libertarians, people who could afford not to reckon with their obvious white privilege, or Bernie supporters who somehow can’t understand why African Americans would overwhelmingly support Biden. 

The idea that most voters are interested in such posturing, or even capable of it after living actual lives in the real world, or have the means to vote against what may seem or actually turn out to be in their immediate or short-term self interest, is wrong.

Obama, as absolutely great as he was relative to Trump, proved this decisively. He was the candidate to end all war. He was the president who maintained all existing wars, started new ones, and wanted to start more. He was the candidate who would give us all free-excuse me, “affordable”-healthcare. He was the president who gave us a mishmosh of favors to entrenched interests and higher premiums with a veneer of “socialized medicine” as embodied in the health insurance exchanges. He was the candidate who represented a multicultural, equitable, and egalitarian future for all. And he was the president who earned the title “Deporter in Chief.”

My point is, in this system, *you’re only going to get less evil.* You’re not going to get Jesus, or Galadriel, or Pee Wee Herman. At best you’re going to get a bright-eyed idealist candidate who ultimately behaves as a hard-nosed, phone-banking, partisan, horse-trading office holder. 

That is literally what we got with Obama. His presidency decisively obliterated the antiwar movement in this country because most of the rich whites who chose that issue to cry about could afford to pretend like Obama had resolved it. They weren’t sending their kids to Afghanistan. They were sending them to the Big Ten and the Ivy League. They weren’t going to watch their brothers and sisters and sons and daughters come home in a box or a wheelchair but in a graduation gown dreaming about six figure “living wages” for the middle class.

The rest of us, those of us who have families and businesses and debt and some inchoate understanding of the value in *some* aspects of the status quo get to be lectured about “ending bosses,” “guillotining billionaires,” “putting Neo-liberals up against the wall.” We get to hear about how free healthcare and free college will solve everything. (It is literally hilarious how those issues trumped ending child torture at the border and ending America’s two decades of total war across the globe. I rest my case.) We get to hear about how our reluctance to burn it all down means we’re racist or privileged or unwitting capitalist pawns or witting capitalist shills. We get to hear about our ignorance and depravity and wrongness while the real progressives-the socialists who don’t understand socialism and the peaceniks blind to total global war-offer up an octogenarian candidate whose entire career has essentially been stumping for socialism in one country, a concept not even the Soviets themselves found palatable given global political and economic circumstances.

“Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil.” Yeah. No shit, Sherlock. You couldn’t get a more idiotically obvious statement. Of course it is. That isn’t the point. If anything, the moral imperative is to make sure you vote for the lesser evil, in making sure you engage yourself in the periodically dehumanizing grind of everyday life, where us working grunts engage on a daily basis with our friends and foes and co-workers and managers, where we make decisions not between absolute ethical purity and blindingly obvious amoral depravity but between lesser evil and more evil. It means that, in times like these. you make damn sure you have developed your ability to see the difference between those things, that you exercise your powers of perception and distinction, and not let them atrophy while sitting back and congratulating yourself that you didn’t vote for evil.