If I were to slip into a coma at some point between now and Tuesday night and then came back to consciousness on Wednesday morning, when the dust has settled and the United States has elected its 45th president, and I were to discover that Hillary Clinton was elected, the one word to describe how I would feel would be "relieved." Hillary Clinton is an imperfect presidential candidate, so despite the obvious historic implications of the United States electing its first woman president my word would not be "excited", but she is not Donald Trump, for whom my reactive word to his election would be "horrified."
We as a species, particularly in the United States, tend to partake in over-simplistic "well actually both sides are bad" politics as a defensive mechanism. We understand that people would be more offended if we dislike the thing they like than if we like the thing they dislike, so saying everybody is bad is a good way to avoid conflict, and saying they're equally bad is a great way to avoid having to think about complex issues.
People were saying "lesser of two evils" nonsense in 2004 and 2012, when the presidential challengers were John Kerry and Mitt Romney, both of whom were created in a lab in Amherst as the most generic political candidates possible.Neither Kerry nor Romney were going to be retroactively carved onto Mt. Rushmore, but neither represented any sort of existential crisis for the United States. That these two milquetoast candidates could be part of a "lesser of two evils" comparison should tell you all that you need to know about how trite such claims are.
There are things about Hillary Clinton I dislike, though there are also things about her I like. But I'll start with the dislikes. She is too pro-military intervention for my liking. While she eventually found herself on the right side of history regarding gay rights, she, like much of the Democratic Party, were enormous cowards in the early part of the 21st century, settling for "at least we aren't as loudly hateful as the Republicans" until it became politically popular (or at least politically acceptable) to be a proponent of marriage equality, etc. Her vote for the Iraq War should have been a career killer, and I believe that she would have won the Democratic nomination in 2008 had she voted against it.
I did not vote for either Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, in which I had voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I was going to vote initially for Joe Biden that year, but while he remained on the ballot, Biden had dropped out of the race. There were two candidates and I voted for the one I preferred. I'm doing the same thing on Tuesday.
As I said, Hillary Clinton is flawed. I don't think Hillary Clinton is uniquely flawed, nor supremely flawed; I think she's flawed in a sadly normal political way. I think Donald Trump is a horrifying maniac
It's really as simple as this: I would prefer to live in a world in which Hillary Clinton is the president of the United States than a world in which Donald Trump is the president of the United States. And one of those two things is going to happen.
Some have taken to criticizing Gary Johnson for his lack of knowledge on international issues, or Jill Stein on her purported anti-vaccination leanings, but this is a pointless exercise. Nobody is picking Johnson or Stein because of how equipped either would be to be president; they are being picked as a referendum on the two actual presidential candidates as well as the two-party political system as a whole.
But the two-party system is inevitable--even when a third-party candidate is viable, such as in 1968 or 1912, it leads to the major party which more represents the same ideology as the third party being diminished. And it doesn't matter how great or awful Johnson or Stein or McMullin or anybody else is because they are not actually running for president. The one with the best odds, still the longest of long shots, is McMullin, whose entire strategy to making it to the White House is "win Utah, hope that neither Clinton nor Trump gets 270 electoral votes, and hope that a Republican-controlled House of Representatives decides not to elect Maniac Donald Trump and instead votes for McMullin, basically a Republican but also an actual adult".
But Republicans had a chance to elect an adult as their nominee when they had guys like John Kasich on their primary ballots and instead they picked Donald Trump, a man who has failed at absolutely everything he has ever tried. One of the few things he has not failed at is politics, because he has no experience in politics.
If you actually think Donald Trump is a better candidate than Hillary Clinton, then that's one thing. Like, it horrifies me that anybody thinks this, but what amazes me is that there are people who will sit out voting for one of the two actual presidential candidates when they would also be the first people complaining about Trump's election. But since the alternative to the "it's a good thing to use nuclear weapons" guy is somebody who, um, seems disinclined to use nuclear weapons, I'm going to vote for the one and only candidate (out of two) who probably won't cause the actual end of the world.
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