First of all, his entire argument rests on a logical fallacy; begging the question. The unproven premise being that, of the two major party candidates, Clinton constitutes the lesser evil. This is far from settled fact. Oh, I know what you're thinking devoted partisans, “Apostasy!” What could possibly by worse than the very Doofenshmirtz of evil? I feel your indignation. But not really. For every hateful Trumpian screed soiling the internet, I can produce a community, a country, an entire region that has been destabilized, militarized, plundered and privatized out of existence as a direct outcome of Hillary Clinton's support of neoconservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic philosophy . Tally up the lives lost to this reckless adventurism and she wins (or loses if you prefer) on body count alone. This is something that should weigh heavily on the soul of any liberal or progressive considering a vote for Hillary. But even if we were to accept Chomsky's premise, his argument still manages to miss the point entirely, which is this: in a sane world, there is, or ought to be, a threshold beyond which no degree of evil can be tolerated or sanctioned with a vote. And that to affect moral valuation within this space is to commit a special kind of violence against morality. This is the same twisted reasoning that argues for tolerating waterboarding on the grounds that it doesn't physically maim. It's a false dilemma, but more importantly it is morally repugnant. For me, Clinton's toxic foreign policy agenda passes this threshold. Trump passes on bigotry alone.
Once we dispense with the tortured logic, the nut of Chomsky's argument reveals itself thusly: a Trump win delivered by an abstaining and disaffected left hands to The Establishment a cudgel with which to beat back future progressive policy proposals. This is a truly a spineless rationale that also manages to completely disregard the ongoing and wholesale evacuation of ALL human rights in the name of hopelessly ambiguous tropes like "national security,” "counterterrorism” and “free trade,” which are just synonyms for global profiteering and geopolitical hegemony. It is out of these coffers that the Clintons have amassed their own private fortunes as "public servants." Extend the pathocratic agenda to its logical conclusion, and your ethnic or gender identify won't mean shit. To paraphrase, we will all be equally worthless.
There is no uplifting coda to this. Simply an urgent need to frankly apprehend the depth of the shit we are mired in. We are not going to vote our way out of it, but we can't even begin to posit real solutions until we can think about the problem clearly.
UPDATE
(Below is a my response to another’s comment on this diary that was posted elsewhere on the internet. For context...)
I guess what troubles me most, what seems to be missing in all of this, is an acknowledgment of how easily disposed we have become to arguing the merits of evil – evil for fuck’s sake, as if this were all just a matter of course. There is something insidious about that, wouldn’t you agree? I feel like that kind of flaccid capitulation should be beneath human dignity more than it is, or least one’s progressive sensibility. But the population seems content to jostle for the position of less wrong. At least we ought to concede that progressivism, once hitched to a regressive status quo (is that a contradiction in terms, I don’t know), ceases to be progressive by definition. That at least would be intellectually honest. And I don’t believe there will be any un-hitching after this, by the way. Not for the movement at large. Once it becomes an arm of the establishment, someone else will pick up that mantle. I believe that is already happening.
It’s worth noting, as well, the role Trump plays in this; the nemesis neatly repolarizing the subjective reality we’ve grown accustomed to. You have to admit it is damned convenient to have an adversary so easy to hate. Much more convenient than, say, parsing a dispersed policy that doesn’t have a spray tan or a twitter account attached to it, and which few seem inclined to consider, although they are quick demand evinced-based data, as if this information were not freely available to anyone curious enough to investigate it. But I digress. I understand my views cut a naïve and quaintly idealistic figure in the face of hardened pragmatism or blatant partisanship. Well, I am in idealist. The world could use more idealism, frankly. Truly novel ideas are sorely lacking from the discussion. My only objective here and elsewhere has been to carve out a little space in the polarity for nonparadigmatic thought.