Joe or No?

Particularly annoying is the "If you don't vote for Biden, you're voting for Trump" line, which hides a number of logical and ethico-political flaws.

Sure, there's a logic to that in our zero-sum electoral system, where any third possibility is effectively excluded. That logic is also, indisputably, reversible (as Caitlin Johnstone has pointed out in a trenchant way): If not voting for Biden means actually voting for Trump, then not voting for Trump means actually voting for Biden. Either way you put it, it's just re-stating the obvious: The guy who gets the most votes wins.

VBNMW partisans hate that riposte from leftists. They see it as false or in bad faith, and they get angry, dismissive, and morally self-righteous about it. That's because they assume a leftist is a Democrat by default. They think, therefore, that a leftist who doesn't vote for Biden is taking something away that was assigned to the Democrat by definition, and should know better than to betray their natural allegiance.

I doubt those working hard to elect Joe would take that attitude when addressing a voter they treat as truly independent of party, one whose vote they cannot assume is theirs to be taken away. They better not. Such a voter would respond to "if you don't vote for Biden, you're making it easier for Trump to win", with: "No kidding? You mean the guy who gets the most votes wins. Thanks for spelling that out for me. Now tell me again why I should vote for your guy." For such voters--the majority of voters in the United States--Democratic/Biden surrogates can't expect that "He's not a Republican" will win them over. Which, since they don't have anything else to say, is why they do not get the majority of voters to vote for them.

I hate to puncture the Fox-vs.-MSNBC paradigm that has taken hold in the recent history of U.S. politics, but we do know better. As understood by this old SDS-er, increasing numbers of politically active Americans of all ages, and the millions of people who have participated in the world's left and socialist movements over the past 170+ years, being a leftist has nothing to do with being a Democrat.

Flash 1: Political Left and Right do not correlate with Democrat and Republican; they correlate with class positions. The left--the socialist and anti-imperialist or even serious social-democratic and antiwar left, not the MSNBC, equal-opportunity imperialism "left"--has no intrinsic relation to any capitalist party or candidate.

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