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democratic socialism
A Note on the 'Lesser of Two Evils' Voting Argument in 2024
Why people, and radicals in particular, fail to grasp the reasoning behind this argument is truly mind-boggling.
Sep 10, 2024
One of the most bewildering reactions on the part of certain segments of the U.S. left (whatever that means these days) is that every time there is a crucial election, and the voice of reason dictates casting a ballot in a direction which will help the most to keep out of public office the most extreme, and often enough the positively nuts, candidate in the race, is to scream that this is a case of “the lesser of two evils” thinking and to imply in turn that the one making such an argument is, somehow, a sellout.
Noam Chomsky, of all people, has been the recipient of such brainless reactions for much of his life as he has repeatedly made the argument that voting for a third-party or independent candidate in a swing state would accomplish nothing but increase the possibility of the most extreme and positively nuts candidate winning the election.
Why people, and radicals in particular, fail to grasp the reasoning behind such an argument is truly mind-boggling. Either they don’t understand the nature of U.S. politics, with its winner-take-all election system, or they are simply wrapped up in the “feel-good” factor in politics to even notice such subtleties. But since even a fairly bright elementary student would most likely be able to understand the difference between a winner-take-all election system and proportional representation, it would be logical to conclude that what we have here is nothing less than a display of the politics of feeling good, which basically translates to acting in whatever manner makes one feel good, politically speaking, regardless of the consequences of those actions.
Now, one might say that when the Comintern adopted Stalin’s thinking in the 1920s that “social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” and proceeded later to lump together Hitler’s Nazi party and the German Social Democratic Party that it was doing so out of conviction that the capitalist world was teetering on the brink of collapse and that the communists would inevitably emerge as the victorious party.
But what is the excuse of the tiny segment of U.S. self-professed radicals who fail to see that in order to advance the program of socialism we must first defeat Trump at the ballot box? Incidentally, this also happens to be the official stance of the Communist Party USA. Yet, one can already hear the argument that U.S. communists must have also fallen victims of the picking a lesser of two evils mental attitude. However, in numerous conversations I've had with radicals (leftists, anarchists, and communists) across Europe, their own thinking was also in line with the reasoning of the Communist Party USA—namely, that priority number one of U.S. progressive voters should be to defeat wannabe dictator Donald Trump in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Can this be done by voting in a swing state for someone like Cornel West or Jill Stein when these candidates have zero chance of winning? My chances of being attacked and killed by a shark, which are estimated to be one in 3.75 million, are far greater than either of these two candidates making it to the White House in November 2024.
Oh, but I forgot! Such realizations hardly matter in comparison to how good it might make one feel by voting for a candidate outside of the two existing parties. Who cares if the candidate who would love to turn the U.S. into an autocracy wins the election? The other candidate is simply the lesser of two evils, which is like saying that it makes no difference to live under a political regime that is inadequate in realizing the ideals of a decent society and one that is bent on a process of societal fasticization.
Still, there is something even more bewildering with the lesser-of-two evils dictum that is thrown around by small segments of the left. Generally speaking, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, there have been two doctrines about voting: the official doctrine, “which holds that politics consists of showing up every few years, pushing a lever, then going back to one’s private pursuits,” and the “left doctrine.” For the latter, “politics consists in constant direct popular engagement in public affairs, including a wide variety of activism on many fronts. Occasionally an event comes up in the formal political arena called an ‘election….’ It’s at most a brief departure from political engagement.”
The third doctrine about voting, which is the “lesser of two evils” principle, has appeared on the political scene rather recently and, as Chomsky highlighted, is “now consuming much debate on the left.” The debate, he went to say, “also falls within the official doctrine, with its laser-like focus on elections.”
Most leftists, radicals and communists know fully well what the Democratic Party represents. Moreover, the recently held Democratic National Convention, with its pathetic effort to reclaim the mantle of "freedom” in a simultaneous display of militaristic jingoism, gave us ample warnings of what lies ahead. It takes no political genius to see that Kamala Harris is yet another centrist and wholly opportunistic Democrat who will change her tune as the circumstances dictate. Or, as the British political philosopher John Gray aptly put it, to recognize that she has “been abruptly transformed by compliant media from a vice-president commonly acknowledged to be barely competent into an uplifting national leader.”
Leftists, radicals and communists living in capitalist societies know that elections are hardly the stuff of political participation that will turn things around. Only grassroots activism can bring about meaningful change. But whenever elections come up, and proportional representation is not in the picture, we hold our nose and vote for the lesser-known threat to what is left of the democracy we have. And then we go back to real activism in order to change society and the world for the better.
It's not complicated.
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A Nonviolent Revolution, Viking-Style
Could the United States actually be home to an organized movement to deliver its people a happier, healthier, and more egalitarian future?
Dec 18, 2023
In the first half of the 20th century the descendants of the Vikings did what we Americans have been hesitant to do. They waged a nonviolent revolution to take away the dominance of the economic elite.
In the U.S., even though the economic elite is okay with bringing climate emergencies to an increasing number of Americans, it maintains its control of both major parties. For the Nordics, overcoming elite control was a very big reach, but the Danes broke through in the 1920s and then the Swedes and Norwegians matched them in the 1930s. (Finns and Icelanders followed in the ‘50s.)
I personally experienced the payoff of a nonviolent revolution when as a young man I studied at a typically free Nordic university, in Oslo. Of my eleven books, the most pleasurable to write was Viking Economics, published in 2016 and still in use. When the book came out, an international association of Nordic economists invited me to keynote their conference, and I learned still more.
Few Americans seem to know that the 2023 World Happiness Report rates the people of Finland, Denmark, and Iceland as the top three countries in the world, with Sweden as sixth. The U.S. is fifteenth. The World Economic Forum’s measure of the gender gap among the nations puts Nordic countries in the top five, while the U.S. is 43rd. Racial Equity Rankings by US News and World Report puts the Nordics in the top ten. The United States? The U.S. comes in 73rd.
Yale University has created an Environmental Performance Index for rating national accomplishments. Four of the Nordics are in the top 10 while Norway follows at 20th. The U.S. is 43rd.
When an oligarchy is in charge, misery is widespread no matter how small and homogeneous you are!
In the 2022 Democracy Index rating, on a 10-point scale Nordics exceed 9.0. The U.S. is 7.85. In the 2019 rating of “best countries to raise a child,” the Nordics took the first four places, while the U.S. came in at 22nd.
Still, that was considerably better for the U.S. than the 2023 Global Peace Index: Nordic countries got the top two places while Sweden scored 28th. The U.S. scored 131st -- down ten places since the Democracy Index of three years ago!
I could continue with rankings but you get the idea. For Americans, the full potential of our energy, smarts, creativity, and yearning for justice remain hobbled by the power of the economic elite and its political culture maintained through mainstream mass media and the two major political parties.
The Vikings used to be in bad shape
If such ratings existed before the 1920s, the Nordics also would have been caught under-performing. In fact, they were in such trouble that their people were emigrating to the U.S. in large numbers.
Some people believe the Nordics do well these days because they are small and relatively homogeneous. But in the Nordic “bad old days” they were smaller, and much more homogeneous. They performed poorly because their economic elites were running things. When an oligarchy is in charge, misery is widespread no matter how small and homogeneous you are!
What changed among the Nordics to generate today’s high ratings? Their people who didn’t leave figured out how to use nonviolent direct action campaigns to force their oligarchies to give up control.
But why not make a violent revolution?
To many Finns in 1918, armed struggle seemed the obvious choice. Their violent insurgency turned into civil war. The capitalists and conservatives crushed the socialist uprising: the result in that small population was at least 35,000 dead.
The Finnish people’s defeat delayed their movement’s eventual victory over the economic elite, which they finally achieved through nonviolent struggle. (Another of the many cases in history where violence failed to reach an objective, then nonviolent struggle succeeded.)
The Finnish direct action climaxed in the 1950s: a nationwide 10-day metalworkers’ strike was followed by a general strike of half a million workers, and at last the Finns could put themselves in the same league with their Scandinavian comrades.
While many Danes in the early 1920s were also tempted by violence, sufficient activists noted the failure of the Finnish violence and also became disillusioned with how their “next door leftists” in Germany were handling their struggle for revolution.
Danish radicals chose first to build on the credibility of the co-op movement and on their common-sense vision of what Denmark could look like if Danes took away the dominance of the economic elite. They then plunged into nonviolent campaigning. By 1924 the Danes obtained their first social democratic prime minister.
Impressed, Swedish workers and others followed this Danish recipe: create a clear vision of a new society, escalate community organizing (via co-ops + unions, in their case), and launch campaign after campaign of nonviolent struggle, through which the movement grows more massive.
By 1931 the Swedish economic elite was desperate to hold onto power. They used their government’s military and killed workers in a local but important strike. The labor movement responded to the killings by calling a national general strike, supported by middle-class progressives, and took power.
Norwegian workers and farmers, eager to learn from both Danes and Swedes, then upped their level of struggle. The Norwegians had a more radical vision than did the Swedes—Lenin even invited Norwegian Labor Party leaders to join Russian revolutionary meetings in Moscow. The labor movement increased the level of strike activity, aiming to end the elite’s ownership of the means of production.
By then, however, Norway was caught by the 1930s’ Great Depression. Norwegians in poverty were starving while still trying to maintain their strikes. Given the pain and hardship, the Labor Party decided not to continue the struggle to make a full-scale victory and instead to settle for social democracy, which was less expansive than their version of a new society.
The coalition of workers and farmers agreed to let the capitalists continue to own and manage their means of production, but required them to accept complete unionization, a high degree of regulation, huge taxes on large incomes and capital, and accept a large sector of co-ops as well as many municipally-owned and nationally-owned enterprises.
Most importantly, the Norwegian economic elite would have to give up their power to run the economy as a whole: big-picture decisions would be made by the working class and family farmers, through their dominance in parliament.
A growing number of mass strikes forced the Norwegian economic elite to surrender. The Labor Party—the most socialist of the Nordic workers parties—then basically ran the country for half a century.
Icelanders show Americans what we could do here
An observer might guess—since today’s Vikings have it so good—that their capacity for nonviolent struggle would have vanished through disuse. Wrong.
After decades of basic Icelander contentment with their social democracy, in 2008 Icelanders found most of the bankers—in league with the government—had become so corrupt that the country’s economy collapsed. Even the ATM’s no longer worked!
Icelanders quickly built a nonviolent direct action campaign powerful enough to oust the bankers and major party politicians alike. The media called it “the pots and pans revolution” because people massing outside parliament banged their kitchen pots so loud that the parliamentarians couldn’t debate!
The movement refused to allow Iceland to cooperate with the capitalist International Monetary Fund, whose job is to aid countries in bankruptcy. Instead, the movement itself rebuilt political and economic structures on a sound basis. (The women’s banks were uncorrupted and didn’t need to start over.)
When I later interviewed the rebellion’s leader at the key site of the struggle, I learned that 3% of Iceland’s population actively engaged in the direct action. I began to fantasize what ten million Americans (3 percent of the U.S. population) might do given a crisis—a climate disaster, for example—PLUS strategic nonviolent leadership.
The Icelanders’ story raises this question: Will Americans and other activists prepare our vision and strategy now, for large-scale nonviolent struggle when a climate emergency or other crisis arrives that makes it possible?Keep ReadingShow Less
We Need an Economic Bill of Rights to Save American Democracy
The time has come for our many progressive organizations and resurgent labor unions to create a grand progressive and social-democratic coalition that will press the Democratic Party to redeem FDR’s 1944 call.
Sep 30, 2023
We can save the rights we have inherited from our fathers only by winning new ones to bequeath our children. – Henry Demarest Lloyd
After nearly 50 years of corporate, conservative, and neoliberal assaults on the progressive achievements of the long “Age of Roosevelt” from the 1930s to the early 1970s—assaults that have stripped workers, women, and people of color of their hard-won rights, engendered unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power, and devastated the lives of millions—the American political system, indeed, American democratic life is in jeopardy. The time has come to do what our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did. The time has come to make America progressive, indeed, radical again. The time has come to renew the fight for an Economic Bill of Rights for All Americans.
Public faith in government “to do the right thing” cratered over a decade ago and has remained low. Most feel that money perverts our elections, resulting in policies that favor the rich over the average person. (They are right on both counts.) Scandals and innuendo receive more coverage than legislation and policy. Partisan squabbling dominates the national dialogue. Blocking the opposition takes precedence over pursuing a positive program. And to top it all off, the Republican Party is poised to re-nominate Donald Trump for President, even though mountains of evidence show that he broke his oath to uphold the Constitution in attempting to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election. Moreover, he has good chance of winning in 2024—which would be not just terribly tragic, but also perversely ironic in light of the fact that the American people support democracy overwhelmingly and avidly.
But as President Franklin Roosevelt warned 85 years ago, popular support is not enough:
As of today, Fascism and Communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land….
Sure, communism is moribund. But fascism is resurgent.
So, what are we to do? We should start by taking hold of our history and remembering what Republicans don’t want us to remember and too many Democrats have either forgotten or would just as soon keep us from remembering. We should remember how FDR and those whom we call the Greatest Generation saved America from economic ruin and political oblivion and turned it into the strongest and most prosperous country on Earth by not simply taking up the labors and struggles of the New Deal and the War Effort, but also making the United States progressively, indeed, radically freer, more equal, and more democratic than ever before.
Appreciating how earlier generations had confronted and prevailed over mortal national crises in the 1770s and 1860s by radically transforming America, Roosevelt told a friend two years before he was to run for the presidency: “There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.” And in his ensuing 1932 “New Deal” campaign, he promised Americans not only a vast array of progressive policies and initiatives that would empower them to overcome the Great Depression, rebuild America and themselves, assure greater economic security and opportunities, and finally bring an end to the persistent Gilded Age power structure that had brought about the worst economic and social catastrophe in U.S. history. He also proposed an “economic declaration of rights” to redeem and renew the revolutionary promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.
We have both the history of what Roosevelt and the generation he led sought to achieve and solid reason to believe that our fellow citizens already fundamentally embrace his vision of economic rights.
Encouraged by FDR, Americans did more than take up the labors of the New Deal. They pushed Roosevelt to go even further than he may ever have planned on going—and together president and people initiated revolutionary changes in American government and public life.
They subjected capital to public account and regulation; empowered government to address the needs of working people and the poor; organized labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations to fight for their rights and broaden and level the “we” in “we the people;” established a social security system; built schools, libraries, post offices, parks, and playgrounds; vastly expanded the nation’s public infrastructure with new roads, bridges, tunnels, and dams; dramatically improved the American landscape and environment; and energetically cultivated the arts and refashioned popular culture.
Undeniably, they left much undone, especially regarding questions of racial justice and inequality. But Americans in all their diversity imbued themselves with fresh democratic convictions, hopes, and aspirations. And when the second crisis struck, they did not stop. Inspired by FDR’s projection in 1941 of a postwar United States committed to pursuing the “Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Worship, Freedom from Want and Fear,” they not only went “All Out!” to defeat fascism, but also subjected the economy to even greater public control; continued to expand the labor, consumer, and civil rights movements; reduced poverty and inequality from the bottom up; and further transformed the “we” in “we the people.” Moreover, diverse national polls showed that what they had accomplished in the New Deal and ongoing War Effort had made them ever more determined to keep building and moving the country in a more progressive and social-democratic direction at war’s end.
Americans’ surging democratic aspirations and energies gave FDR the confidence to declare in his 1944 State of the Union Message:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men...” In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
And returning to his proposal of 1932, he proceeded to call for nothing less than a Second Bill of Rights—an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans that would guarantee, among other things, a useful job at a living wage, universal healthcare, a good education, food security, a decent home, and opportunities for recreation.
FDR’s Message thrilled the democratic left and labor unionists. And almost immediately the AFL and CIO labor federations, the National Farmers Union, and a newly organized National Citizens Political Action Committee (which was filled with celebrity liberals and progressives) launched campaigns to promote the idea and help secure Roosevelt’s election to a fourth presidential term.
And yet, as popular as his call was, Roosevelt did not assume it would be easy going forward. With corporate bosses, Republican conservatives, and white supremacist Southern Democrats in mind, he not only spoke of the likelihood of fierce “rightist reaction,” but also warned, in words that should speak loudly to us today: “if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”
FDR won re-election that year but passed away in the spring of 1945. And yet, the idea of an Economic Bill of Rights did not die. It directly informed the now-legendary GI Bill of Rights. It propelled the ensuing Truman administration to try to secure national healthcare. It led the Democratic Party to structure its 1960 platform around it. It encouraged Lyndon Johnson to pursue a host of Great Society and War on Poverty programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. It inspired labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph to advance a “Freedom Budget: To Achieve Freedom from Want” (1966) (which garnered the endorsement of 150 the most prominent academic, foundation, labor, and religious leaders in America). And it moved the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr to echo FDR in calling for an Economic Bill of Rights in 1968.
More recently, both democratic-socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Masss.) renewed FDR’s call for an Economic Bill of Rights in their 2020 presidential campaigns; Marianne Williamson is championing the idea in her 2024 presidential campaign; and, while Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has cited it in speeches and writings, many of his congressional Progressive Caucus colleagues have advanced bills in that spirit. Actions are underway in the states, too: The Democratic parties of Massachusetts and Arizona have officially embraced the idea of an Economic Bill of Rights; progressive legislators in Wisconsin have proposed an Economic Bill of Rights (though action on it is blocked by the GOP senate and assembly majorities); and in New Hampshire such a bill has just been advanced in the statehouse. Not to mention, the pages of liberal, progressive, and democratic-socialist periodicals and websites regularly speak of redeeming FDR’s vision.
But most critically, perhaps, even if most Americans do not remember the history recounted here, national polls show that the great majority of them still aspire to secure the makings of what would constitute an Economic Bill of Rights.
So, what are we to do? The time has come to do what our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did. Admittedly, we don’t have an FDR as President—one who will call for overthrowing the power of the “economic royalists,” seek to empower and engage working people in democratically transforming the prevailing political and economic order, and inspire us by proclaiming the likes of the Four Freedoms and projecting an Economic Bill of Rights. But we have both the history of what Roosevelt and the generation he led sought to achieve and solid reason to believe that our fellow citizens already fundamentally embrace his vision of economic rights.
The time has come for our many progressive organizations and resurgent labor unions to create a grand progressive and social-democratic coalition that will press the Democratic Party to redeem FDR’s 1944 call and join in rallying working people to fight for a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights that will guarantee to all Americans:
- A useful job that pays a living wage.
- A voice in the workplace through a union and collective bargaining.
- Comprehensive quality healthcare.
- Complete cost-free public education and access to broadband internet.
- Decent, safe, affordable housing.
- A clean environment and a healthy planet.
- A meaningful endowment of resources at birth, and a secure retirement.
- Sound banking and financial services.
- An equitable and economically fair justice system
- Recreation and participation in civic and democratic life.
The time has come to save American democratic life by progressively, indeed, radically enhancing it.
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