The GOP Is The Greater Of Two Evils

Introduction

This screenshot is of a story in The Guardian, 2021.01.07, which details the GOP president’s remarks leading up to the (failed) insurrection on 2021.01.06 in Washington, D.C. As I will explain below, support for the 45th president isn’t the only way to tell that the Republican party is the greater of two evils, but it’s still a fairly reliable meter.

This page will function as my go-to link in response to several related but varying false assertions. Among them:

“Both parties are the same.”
“Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans.”
“I only vote Republican because the Democrats are worse.”
“Neither major party is worth voting for.”

Like many U.S.ians, especially those of my generation, I was once convinced that both major parties in the U.S. were equally corrupt, that neither represented my views or people like me, and that it really wasn’t worth my time or attention to vote for either of them. When I did vote, I always voted third party or independent — when those were options.

I was wrong.

To be clear, there probably was a time in U.S. history when one could list each party’s pros and cons and the two would be equally good (or equally bad). There were certainly times in history when both parties had liberal wings and conservative wings which provided a lot of overlap for conscientious voters of one viewpoint or another. And of course, there will never be a time when one of the parties is perfect. Nothing on this page should be construed to indicate that the Democratic National Committee (aka “Democratic Party”) is, was, or someday will be without fault. I recognize issues with each major party and the two-party system as a whole. I have always been, and likely will always remain an independent. (Contrary to popular belief, “independent” doesn’t mean my positions are between the two major parties; it only means I don’t belong to either of them. Currently, most of my positions are to the left of both parties.)

I’ve reorganized and reworded this page several times since first publishing it as a blog entry and then moving it off my blog in 2017. Hopefully these many edits haven’t introduced grammatical or factual errors. If you find any, feel free to comment below or send an email (address at bottom).

Why I Was Wrong

It took me a while to realize I had been wrong about the equal badness of the two parties, and it took even longer to realize why I had held the mistaken opinion. (And yes, opinions can be wrong, if they are misinformed.)

One reason I eventually identified was the misnomer of “unbiased” or “objective” news coverage. News organizations today continue to insist they are unbiased or objective, and a couple of decades ago, I think more of them made more of an effort to appear that way. Which sounds like a laudable goal until one examines what it actually means. What it often meant is that horrible ideas were given equal time to good ideas. If one political party proposed protecting the environment, and the other party argued that the environment should be summarily destroyed without warning, news people — especially TV personalities — would debate the “merits” and “downsides” of both ideas. Since one of those proposals clearly is all downside, the news often had to simply read off that party’s press release and pretend it held equal merit with the other proposal.

In my young adulthood, global warming was one of the topics that exemplifies the problem with so-called unbiased reporting. Every time climate scientists would issue another warning or finding, the news would try to “balance” the story by quoting someone on the “other side”, which very often turned out to be a hard-right conservative whose salary was paid by an oil company-funded think tank. This went on for years, while I hedged my bets and remained unconvinced that global warming was actually occurring or that humans were primarily responsible for it. (In fairness, neither of the two major U.S. political parties cared much about the climate crisis until very recently.)

Perhaps even more important, of course, was that I was surrounded by mostly conservative people, both in my family and in my peer groups, as I came of age — and I lived in overwhelmingly conservative states. So, even if the national news did obviously favor more liberal or progressive ideas, everyone around me dismissed it as “the liberal media” with obvious bias. It took a long time to undo this programming.

Why Vote For EITHER Party?

If one party is very very bad (as I will demonstrate below) and the other is merely kinda bad, a reasonable person can be forgiven for asking: why vote for either of them? Why not vote for something better? There are other parties in the U.S. after all, and occasionally independents win elections, right?

The answer to this, ironically, was provided to me by a diehard supporter of the worst party. One of the two major parties is almost always going to win, he accurately told me. Most of the time, the practical result of voting third-party or independent is nothing — it won’t affect the outcome either way. Every now and then, the contest is close enough that a certain threshhold of third-party/independent voters can throw the election, but it’ll still go to one of the two major parties. So, if the leading third-party candidate most closely resembles the Republican position, any votes he gets will likely steal votes from the Republican, giving the election to the Democrat. (And vice versa.) This is why, the same person explained, most reasonable U.S. voters end up voting for one of the two major parties: to ensure that the other party doesn’t win.

He called it “the lesser of two evils”.

Obviously, there are problems with this. The biggest problem, I now believe, is that so many people are voting for the greater of two evils. Another is the entire two-party system, which is enforced by our “first past the post” vote counting system. (This could almost entirely be solved by some form of ranked-choice voting, an idea that is slowly gaining steam.) Not to mention that neither of these problems provides any excuse for the lesser-evil party to remain even slightly evil.

Yet that is where we are, and where we will likely remain for years to come. (1) Like it or not, we DO have only two major parties in the U.S. (2) In almost every election, someone from one of those two parties will win. (3) Until there is systemic change in our voting system, it makes sense to determine which party is the greater evil, so we can vote for the lesser one.

How Do We Determine Which Party Is More Evil?

The next obvious question for a reasonable person is: if “good” and “bad” are very subjective and vague terms, how can a voter determine which party is the more evil, the one worse than the other? (And don’t we all disagree on what is good and bad anyway?)

Certainly, many of us disagree on many things when it comes to specific policy proposals from the two major parties. However, on many of those, it’s worth wondering why we disagree — though that’s not the topic of this page. (I’m convinced misinformation is the primary reason most of us disagree on many things.) But perhaps we can find some common ground on which to agree about “good” and “bad” when it comes to the two major parties.

For example, both conservatives and progressives, Republicans and Democrats, tend to agree that committing (and being convicted of) crimes is a bad thing for elected officials, especially while in office, and especially in the highest offices. So, if “both parties are the same” or are “equally bad”, then we would expect elected officials from both parties to accrue criminal convictions at reasonably similar rates — perhaps proportionate to how often they hold power. This very question arose recently in the context of presidential administrations. Since the 1960s, there have been four Democratic presidents and six Republican presidents, so a “both sides are bad” person would expect approximately a 4:6 ratio of criminals in those administrations, with a little skewing possible depending on which party was in Congress at the time. Instead, we find that almost all the criminal indictments, convictions, and prison sentences (and related presidential pardons) come from GOP administrations. It’s not even close, with more than 90 convictions for the GOP and only one for Democrats. Four separate GOP administrations each produced more criminals than all the Democratic administrations combined.

Other categories, which I get into below, are less objective — less agreeable between people of different political persuasions. Yet I think that even a marginally conservative person — and certainly most independents — might be surprised at the overwhelming nature of the one-sidedness of this. While not every Republican (and not every Democrat) is fully aligned with her party’s platform at any given time, and while both parties actually change their positions over time, it doesn’t require an advanced degree to see the pattern I establish here.

I’ve divided issues into categories, using specific instances as examples only of broader beliefs and positions: Trump, climate change, the environment, election reform, racism, the poor and middle class, immigration, healthcare, LGBTQ+, theocracy, science, education, facts, war/peace, crime/punishment, torture, women, marijuna legalization, consumers, sex education, transparency, ethics, decency, and common sense.

Note: For all, or at least most, of these categories, I can find examples of Democrats being on the wrong (“evil”) side too — both as individuals and for the party as a whole. This is more true the further back in time one goes. What is difficult — and sometimes impossible — to find in recent years are examples of Democrats being worse than Republicans.

Issue By Issue

Trump

Though Donald Trump turned out to be a one-term grifter and failed messiah of white supremacism, I can’t ignore that during his tenure (2017-21), Republican officials and leaders vehemently, consistently, and overwhelmingly supported his policies and positions, and kept smugly quiet at his misdeeds and lies — or outright defended him and attacked his detractors. (Not to mention that the majority of them voted for him in the first place, and his popular vote totals went starkly upward in 2020.)

Trump — both before his 2016 election and during his single term — was incoherent, verbally abusive, almost entirely unacquainted with facts or decency, concerned only with enriching himself, unethical, incompetent, a cheater, and an unabashed bigot — and almost always lied about all of the above. I think I could have understood and forgiven Republicans who only voted for him in opposition to his opponent(s), if they had then actively resisted his incompetence and consistently called out his buffoonery once he was in office. But instead they got in line, kissed his ring, and wholeheartedly supported his destructive policies and rhetoric.

I predict we will see, in 2021 or thereabouts, huge cohorts of Republicans — both leaders and voters — claiming they were always secretly against Trump, that they’re glad he’s gone, and that we should therefore give them the benefit of the doubt. (Update, 2021: my prediction was true.) And maybe some people will fall for this. I will not. If you continue to identify with and/or support the Republican Party, which supported and defended Trump, it’s an admission that you have no decency, self-respect, or love for this country.