I was thinking of writing something like this before the election, but life intruded. Anyway, one of my biggest beefs with the anti-Hillary crowd among the far left was the meme, expressed in various ways, that I can summarize as "If you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting for evil." The first problem is that it expressed a belief that Hillary was evil. I won't go into why that is ridiculous at this point. The worse problem with this is that it was a shorthand way of saying, "Even if one candidate is measurably closer to my own policy and social views than the other, I still won't vote for her because she has a few, or even many, issues with which I disagree." That view misapprehends the function and purpose of voting in a two-party system in which minor parties can't win. First, let's agree that no candidate is ever perfect. There is no candidate, for a voter, that embodies 100% of that voter's aspirations. There are always issues on which they would disagree. The purpose of voting in such a system is not to vote only for the perfect or near-perfect candidate, and if such a one does not exist, to stay home out of "principle." The civic duty of voters in our system is to make a reasoned deliberation of which candidate is, in the voter's view, better for the country. BETTER. Better, on a relative scale. Not the best possible in some Platonic ideal. But many voters seem to feel that if they don't find one of the candidates completely acceptable on almost every issue, they can without guilt abstain. They are wrong. In this election, too many Democrats stayed home. Turnout was lower than in past years in many battleground states, probably because they bought into the meme that it was immoral or distasteful to vote for "the lesser of two evils." This is true even if they did not explicitly drink the Kool-aid of Hillary being evil. All year the media has pressed the theme of two "flawed candidates." Of course they were flawed candidates. All candidates are flawed, always. They are human beings. Your job as a voter is not to turn away in disgust because there are two flawed candidates. It is to assess which of the two flawed candidates will do the best for the country. In this task, too many Democrats failed the test.
