Jenny Brown writes:
> Why change our rhetoric every four or eight years? I favor raising
> expectations no matter who's in power.
I think the point is that when the "lesser evils" are in power, underscoring where they are in unison with the conservatives strikes a well deserved blow to their legitimacy. However, when the conservatives are in power, focusing on the similarities obscures the right's more odious efforts.
Perry Anderson had a nice take on the whole "lesser evil" shtick in his 2000 election recap:
"Regularly, if reluctantly, much of the American Left has been dragooned behind the Democratic Party with the argument that it represents, in a forbidding environment, the lesser evil—a case pressed with especial vehemence in 2000 against those who stuck with Nader. Historical situations exist, of course, when the argument holds. Where a genuinely urgent and formidable danger looms, even the least reliable ally is better than none. More typically, however, arguments from the lesser evil rest on exaggeration of the greater one, to coerce acceptance of what would otherwise be unacceptable. There is no shortage of recent examples of this sort of casuistry: Spanish socialists justifying the scuttling of the Republic after Franco’s death, on the grounds that fascism was still round the corner; Italian leftists sustaining centrist coalitions in Italy, on the grounds that Berlusconi or Fini threatened the country with little short of dictatorship; British radicals condoning Yeltsin’s bombardment of his Parliament, on the grounds that Stalinism threatened Russia once again. In cases like these, the contrast is not between a greater and lesser evil. The true distinction is between an operative and an inoperative evil— the second invoked to mask the first." <http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24201.shtml>
> That said, yes, my experience with organizing for the Labor Party is
> that when the dems are in power, people can see that they aren't the
> solution. With Bush in, there's too much defensive work--in the
> unions and everywhere else--to even think about an alternative party.
> It's a fine example of the general case that being more downtrodden
> doesn't automatically lead to more revolt--
Exactly exactly exactly.
-- Shane
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