[Peace-discuss] Halle & Chomsky on LEV

[C. G. Estabrook]

Halle/Chomsky on 'Lesser Evil Voting' seems to me correct if unremarkable. LEV is - perhaps obviously - the proper voting strategy for all recent US presidential elections: it rests on the assumption that they are so controlled as to be not very important - worse, they are conscious distractions from real political opposition to the unrepresentative government of the US. (That's probably why 'Professor Chomsky requests that he not be contacted with responses to this piece.')

What's changed in the last two months (since this statement was written) is that it has become clear that Hillary Clinton is not the lesser evil (but perhaps, as Glen Ford said of Obama, 'the more  effective evil'). Clinton's policies on war and the economy are worse than Trump's. She carries on the political programs of all recent administrations, Republican and Democrat alike: neoconservatism (more war, as the US attempts to reverse by military force its relative decline in the world economy) and neoliberalism (more inequality, as wealth in the US concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, at an accelerating rate)

Remarkably enough, Trump has broken with that tradition and presented a class politics of a sort abandoned by US liberals 40 years ago. (Inter alia, see Jeffrey St. Clair’s acute analysis of Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention: <http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/22/late-night-thoughts-on-trumps-jeremiad/>.) He has become the unlikely spokesman for the 80% of the population who have seen their livelihoods and prospects curtailed in a generation, and especially since 2008.

His class politics presents a severe and unexpected challenge to Clinton’s identity politics, the ideology - rather, propaganda cover - of the 'political class' (Mosca, Weber - roughly the 20% of Americans who've gone to a good college.) Adolph Reed's refutation of IP is unsparing: <http://bennorton.com/adolph-reed-identity-politics-is-neoliberalism/>.

As a result, Clinton’s formerly apparently easy victory is no longer sure. I will be voting for Jill Stein, the Green party presidential candidate, who like Trump is neither a neoliberal nor a neoconservative, but whose positions on war and the economy (and other matters, notably climate catastrophe) are better than those of either major party candidate. And I won’t be dissuaded by the argument that a vote for a third party helps Trump, because on war and the economy his class politics are substantially superior to Clinton’s identity politics - which defend the US economic elite, the one percent.

—CGE

> On Aug 11, 2016, at 10:18 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
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