I Honestly Don’t Care If Stein Got Trump Elected Or Not

Peter MacDonald
Aug 9, 2017 · 8 min read
Life comes at you fast.

Since the 2016 electoral results came in, much has been made of the Green Party’s Presidential Candidate, Jill Stein, and her impact on the results. Many have pointed out that Trump’s margin of victory in several key states was smaller than Stein’s vote haul in those states. Others have pointed out that her campaign’s narratives were eerily similar to those pushed by the Russian disinformation campaign, lending those narratives more credence and helping to depress Democratic turnout. Whenever this comes up, the response from Stein supporters is almost always bizarre mockery, or occasionally a pointing to a more data-driven argument against her constituency being the deciding factor. It’s silly, they say, to blame the loss on the Greens instead of the Clinton campaign.

And you know what? I concede that argument. Not because I necessarily agree with it, but because it’s a distraction and a deflection. It honestly isn’t important.

We will never know how the election would have turned out without Stein’s presence. That’s the thing about elections: you only get one go at them. Counterfactuals are, at best, educated guesses. So if your position is that Stein didn’t get Trump elected, an argument over that can go in circles for eternity. You can’t know for a fact that she didn’t any more than I can know that she did. With no way to disprove the other’s position, such an argument would just be the two of us circling each other, posturing, and retreating to our corners, like a pair of irritated cats. And, you know what, I think there is a pretty reasonable case to be made that Stein didn’t turn the election! So: I concede the point.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t care.

Morality isn’t contingent solely on outcomes. If I try to push someone off a bridge, and they manage to catch themselves on the edge of it, I don’t get to say ‘no harm no foul’. Despite the outcome of the situation, I still did a pretty shitty thing. If I pass by someone starving to death in the street without helping, the fact that the person coming up behind me stopped and gave him a sandwich doesn’t absolve me of my callousness.

If I was given an opportunity to oppose Donald Trump, an unqualified billionaire who made his money by cheating and stealing, whose default conversational stance was to lie constantly, who brags about sexually assaulting women, who is temperamentally unfit to be dog catcher, who has no concept of public service, who never released his tax returns and was set up to be grifting from day one, who had surrounded himself with white supremacists and open fascists, and I chose to let that opportunity pass me by…

Well, you can see where I’m going with that.

Voting For Stein Wasn’t Voting At All

When Stein voters stepped into the voting booth, they had three options: to vote for Trump, to vote for Clinton, or to piss on their ballots and go home. Because that is what voting for a third-party candidate for President accomplishes: nothing. Third parties are not and probably will never be viable at the Presidential level in the United States of America for reasons that have nothing to do with people’s fear of wasting their votes (as is so often asserted) but rather structural issues. The way American democracy is set up predisposes it heavily towards a two-party system.

Maybe you don’t like that system. Heck, I don’t particularly like it! I think there are some real flaws there, and the fact that it chokes out third parties is only one part of it. But that system isn’t going to change while you stand in the voting booth. It’s not going to change between casting your vote and having it be counted. Hell, it’s not going to change between the start of the campaign and election day! Changing the USA’s system of democracy such that third parties are viable would require ripping up and replacing big chunks of the constitution, and even really small modifications to the constitution are some of the hardest things to do in American politics. And if you feel really strongly about that, then go with God, my friend. Advocate for that change to your heart’s content, you have my full support. But until that happens — and even in the best-case scenario, that’s the work of decades at a minimum — on Election Day you have three choices: Republican, Democrat, or Nothing.

And before you go dragging out the old ‘Republicans and Democrats are the same’ canard to justify choosing Nothing, allow me to indulge in some counterfactuals of my own. I think you’ll find them a bit harder to argue with than the ones about the election results.

If Hillary Clinton were President…

If Hillary Clinton were President, Kris Kobach wouldn’t have been given a national platform for his voter suppression schemes.

If Hillary Clinton were President, the Department of Education would not be spending its resources pushing the myth that college admissions are unfair to white people.

If Hillary Clinton were President, the nation’s top law enforcement officer wouldn’t be a racist keebler elf who wants to crack down on marijuana use.

If Hillary Clinton were President, America would have a functioning State Department.

If Hillary Clinton were President, a Republican-controlled Congress would probably still be voting to take away health insurance from millions of people. But there would be no real threat of such efforts becoming law.

On that subject, if Hillary Clinton were President, she wouldn’t be trying to collapse the health insurance market just to satisfy a fit of pique.

If Hillary Clinton were President, we wouldn’t have random ICE raids terrorizing communities across the country.

If Hillary Clinton were President, there would be no Muslim Travel Ban.

If Hillary Clinton were President, there wouldn’t be deafening silence broken only by obscene conspiracy theories after a mosque in Minnesota is bombed.

If Hillary Clinton were President, she wouldn’t be making 4.9 false or misleading public claims per day.

If Hillary Clinton were President, there would be no effort to ban trans people from the military.

On that note, if Hillary Clinton were President, she wouldn’t be making major military policy announcements on Twitter, without consulting anyone in charge at the military.

If Hillary Clinton were President, the administration’s agenda would not be set by whatever drivel Fox & Friends regurgitated that morning.

If Hillary Clinton were President, she wouldn’t be discussing highly classified information openly in the middle of a public area.

If Hillary Clinton were President, she wouldn’t be threatening Nuclear War with North Korea over Twitter.

None of this is news.

I could go on and on. Where this administration isn’t outright evil, it’s horribly incompetent, and in many areas it’s both. You don’t need me to tell you that the Trump Administration is a shitshow disaster; it’s evident to anyone with eyes. And you don’t need me to tell you that Clinton would be better for the country, and for the people who live in it. Even if you might be in denial, you know it, deep down. If you need reminding why, skim through Hillary Clinton’s policy platform — still available on her campaign website — and imagine how much better your blood pressure would be if the nation was being run by a President who was trying to keep even a fraction of these promises.

More importantly: there is no excuse for not figuring this out on Election Day as well.

If you genuinely lived in a media bubble that left you with the impression that the two candidates were similar or equivalent, consider reassessing what you read and watch, because I can’t think of a US election where the choice was more stark. On policy, on temperament, on every issue, the right choice was clear. If your media sources fed you the narrative that they two parties were the same, your media sources were lying to you.

131,954,094 voters managed to figure out the difference between the two candidates by November 8th. Of the 570 newspapers and magazines that issue candidate endorsements, 558 were able to work out the difference. So what’s your excuse?

All That Is Necessary For The Triumph Of Evil…

On Election Day, November 8th 2016, third-party voters walked into the voting booth, and were handed an opportunity to oppose an authoritarian racist, and they chose to do Nothing. It honestly makes little difference to me what their reasons for choosing Nothing are. Voting isn’t about you. It’s about all of us. It’s not a way for you to express your identity. It’s you being handed a tiny sliver of the power over what vision gets to control the country for the next four years. Choosing to do Nothing with so much on the line isn’t just foolish; it’s selfish.

If you voted for Jill Stein, you were given an opportunity to help oppose an obvious proto-fascist, and you chose not to. If you voted for Jill Stein, you were tested, and you failed us all.

Your Vote Was Bad, And You Should Feel Bad

As should by now be obvious, this post is about the moral dimension of the vote, not about the outcome of the election. Voting for Nothing was an abdication of duty with Trump on the ballot, and would have been just as much of an abdication had Clinton won.

Frankly, if I had voted for Jill Stein, then in the face of the currently unfolding debacle in the White House, I would feel like a stupid asshole. I would feel like I had fucked up to a monumental degree. And I would be right to feel that way!

In fact, judging by how defensive Stein voters tend to get when people point out their failure, and how quickly they point the finger elsewhere and try to make the conversation all about the outcome of the election rather than their part in it, I think a lot of them do feel like stupid assholes over their vote, even if they’re loathe to admit it. If you are one of those Stein voters: good. You failed at a simple moral test, and feeling shame over that is normal and healthy. But if you want to make up for it, then instead of wallowing in your shame, learn from the experience and do better in the future.

Don’t waste your time, money, and voting power on vanity third-party campaigns. Engage with issues in a real and grounded way, and do the dirty work of advocating for change in practical terms. And when you next find yourself in the voting booth, actually make a choice and pull the lever for D or R, even if you need to hold your nose while you do, because otherwise you’re voting for Nothing.

And you don’t want to feel this way again.

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