Lesser evilism
Hitchens, Christopher
"Whenever A and B are in opposition to each other," wrote George Orwell in 1945, in "Through a Glass, Rosily," "anyone who attacks or criticizes A is accused of aiding and abetting B." He added:...
...So let us at least, as we pay our regular rental to pragmatism, be honest...
...It must be agreed for one thing that no outcome is identical to any other...
...Ergo they can and will get away with it...
...There is an enduring legend, among those foot soldiers who always stayed loyal (to generals who found them expendable), that it was the left that secured Nixon's original victory in 1968...
...Pull out of the Paris peace talks at the last minute, said Nixon and Kissinger to their friends, and Saigon will get a better deal from the Republican victors...
...He has made the morals of the underclass into the touchstone issue, holding the poor accountable for their conduct in a way that he would never dare to do with his rich campaign donors...
...I don't claim to know the answer (though I think I can guess it) but I do remember how the arguments went and I hate to see them being so smoothly recycled...
...The onus here is on those who hold the contrary opinion...
...In Italy, a ramshackle coalition of Stalinist, Eurocommunist, liberal, and centrist forces narrowly outpointed an opportunist alliance of neofascist, fascist, clerical, separatist, and conservative parties...
...Now, if all this were being done by Bush or Dole, it might or might not be more thorough and brutal...
...He has learned how the Republicans can be, at once, a steady source of new ideas and a perfect foil...
...I had the most remarkable conversation recently with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...Humphrey personally decided not to go public with this devastating intelligence, according to Clifford, because it would do such damage to bipartisan civility...
...The campaign pledge to lift the ban on homosexuals serving in the military was the high-profile quid for this quo, and enjoyed wide public sympathy...
...Try rephrasing it...
...But it wasn't the fault of the few isolated rejectionists...
...And in such a petrified landscape, who has time or permission to notice the other"alternatives...
...Time spent in that way is seldom wasted...
...The smooth stone can become an effective projectile, to be employed with care by either antagonist...
...How can you be an autonomous and free citizen if your franchise is pledged to one machine, without conditions, whatever happens in the course of the election or in the conduct of the argument...
...The above-mentioned Edwin Edwards, a high-octane fraud and poseur and captive of the special interests, was the Democratic standard-bearer against David Duke...
...So power takes care of itself, and as for the birds . .. well, they can always chirrup "lesser evil" in tones of surprised relief...
...But this faction no longer exists for our purposes...
...The self-correcting mechanism of emotional coercion temporarily broke down, or at least faltered...
...There is an undistributed middle in the lesser-evil syllogism, and a rather indigestible one at that...
...Out of respect for Orwell, and for the sake of sheer convenience, let us call these respective debaters A and B for now...
...But, as he made haste to tell Michael Kelly of the New Yorker, he was still intending to vote for Clinton this fall...
...I'll select mine only from what was going on in the newspapers while I was writing this essay...
...Once concede that you are with party B, and that's all anyone wants to know about you...
...During the last election, he "delivered" large sums of money and large quantities of votes to the Clinton ticket, making this the first presidential election in which the organized "gay vote" played a distinctive role...
...And until August, his re-election strategy was being crafted by a paid-up Republican strategist, Dick Morris, who cut his teeth working for Jesse Helms...
...In the instance of Russia, what is wrong with the following factual assertion: "With Boris Yeltsin, the United States worked tirelessly to assure the political triumph of a drunken, moribund, authoritarian war criminal...
...Faced with such an undignified willingness to capitulate to the Christian Right before battle had even been joined, Mixner spoke bitterly of "an ugly, vicious act" and "one of the most immoral things I've ever seen him [Clinton] do...
...It might be objected that there is no reason in principle (and therefore, no reason in practice) why one cannot chant the above slogan and succeed in having it both ways...
...Whenever A and B are in opposition to each other," wrote George Orwell in 1945, in "Through a Glass, Rosily," "anyone who attacks or criticizes A is accused of aiding and abetting B." He added: "It is a tempting maneuver, and I have used it myself more than once, but it is dishonest...
...Why do we imagine so automatically that he desires the return of a Democratic Congress...
...This was Haris Siladzic, at different times prime minister and foreign minister, and now leader of the Party of Bosnia-Herze112 • DISSENT Arguments govina...
...It's been known to happen in American foreign policy...
...Yet these forces, FAIL • 1996 • 115 Arguments whenever faced with a turn in the party that they do not care for, are always ready to jettison lesser evilism...
...Politically, he did the right thing...
...They made a correct calculation that they could do this to us and get away with it...
...Let us have a "two-track" strategy, say these master tacticians...
...The leadership had spent the preceding four years steadily destroying the basis for reformist politics and consciously crushing opposition within the party itself...
...To this declension we have all come, by degrees that were invisible until they became explicit...
...In our time, of course, the great question has become more banal...
...It places a guard upon the tongue, and upon the exercise of critical intelligence...
...But one thing can be stated with confidence...
...Democrats for Nixon" did so well, in fact, that it became the building block for the Democratic Leadership Council and eventually for the Clinton candidacy itself, just in nice time to sound the "lesser evil" alarm for everybody else...
...His reward, last June, was a presidential announcement that, as soon as the "Defense of Marriage Act" could be rammed through both houses, Clinton was impatient to sign it...
...David Mixner is wellknown in both gay and liberal Democratic circles as a highly effective activist and organizer...
...Furthermore, surely B would generally scorn anyone whose vote was, so to speak, mortgaged in advance...
...This brings us smack up against the ironies of history...
...The As were right in many ways this time, in predicting early that Yeltsin would turn out to be a bully and a demagogue and a chauvinist...
...They had demobilized...
...Once Yeltsin had become "our" man, moreover, there is no guarantee that he would not have been defended just as dogmatically against a more democratic opponent...
...Sergei Kovalev, for example, who inherited the mantle of Andrei Sakharov and who resigned as Yeltsin's human rights responsable over the butchery in Checlmya...
...Consider the alternatives...
...Just be Newt Gingrich for a moment...
...Much the same could be said about civil libertarians and the crime and terrorism bills, and about labor and African-American forces across the board...
...Should it not concern us that the other side knows when to lose...
...Nothing, as a matter of fact, except when we do our patriotic duty and "consider the alternatives...
...He has advertised himself as the candidate of capital punishment, and his crime and terrorism bills have cut great roads through civil liberty and habeas corpus...
...To take the classic instance of opposition politics, is it not the case that many liberals and even leftists (and even Dissentniks) were inclined to hang back about the Vietnam war and about civil rights, for no better reason than that a possibly friendly White House might be upset...
...For one thing, this is not a four-yearly excruciation...
...There used to be a subset of A, which said with contempt that the worse things were, the better...
...Folded inside the "lesser evil" argument, there is a worthwhile confrontation waiting to be enacted...
...However, as Prince Hamlet once exclaimed, one may be confined in a nutshell and still count oneself a king of infinite space...
...Yet there was a Netanyahu victory, and who can say that, by echoing Netanyahu on the fetish of "security" in this way, Peres did not (subjectively and yes, "objectively") assist in bringing this about...
...The Bs would have sat on their hands morally, or perhaps applauded something very questionable indeed, and seen their own side defeated not with honor but instead with ignominy...
...Not much alternative here: the balance of forces is too equal...
...It is most commonly stated as the theory and practice of the "lesser evil...
...We have already made the decision that they can do this to us and get away with it...
...He was a major fund-raiser for the Clinton administration...
...Clintonoid score: neutral...
...When, in fact, did they ever multiply the difficulties of a supposedly friendly incumbent, or potentially friendly candidate, under this flag...
...But it will that...
...Most reports from the region ignored this "incident," since the electoral "process" was seen as a referendum or plebiscite on a pre-arranged decision to divide Bosnia into three one-party and one-religion cantons.A vote for Siladzic, in this discourse, was a wasted vote and a romantic gesture, an inconvenience to the pragmatists and realists who said, indignantly, that war was the "only alternative" to their peace plan—which had itself, be it noted, grown out of a war they had licensed...
...favorable to partition throughout...
...The revolt was more one of moral revulsion than of political principle but it did at least say out loud what is supposed never to be said— that there is a limit of decency beyond which one should not allow oneself to be pushed...
...In a speech on the proposed welfare compromise— the one that pitches perhaps a million children off the support rolls—he had asked what had happened to the dozens of well-organized lobbying groups who usually watch out for the interests of the poor and neglected...
...That's what we engage in politics to do...
...Do you suppose that they worry about the exquisiteness of your calibration...
...It commits us in advance to underwrite those who have an objective quite different from our own, and methods entirely different...
...Once secure in his position as a "lesser" evil, Yeltsin is free to be more and more "great" an evil, if not indeed greater...
...It's Important...
...In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Dayton accords created conditions where those parties would do best that represented a one-nation, one-religion, one-leader ideology—very much in accordance with the partitionist spirit of the accords themselves...
...No need to rehearse what happened to FALL • 1996 113 Arguments power in America, and that a second term would see all these tendencies become more full blown...
...He has fired or abandoned, with contempt, any members of his government, or any nominees for government service, who come under the least attack from the right...
...But I can certainly recognize it as "evil," for all the good that does me...
...Only one leader of one party in one post-Yugoslav republic stood both for democracy as the end as well as the means, and for multi-ethnic pluralism as the system as well as the goal...
...It goes on, as does the campaign process, all the time...
...Not a bad mantra, when you come really to reflect upon it...
...Hurray for all those brought us to this pass, and will bring us to narrower ones...
...Or a host of other citizens and rights groups who, once their ruling enemy was defined as indispensable vis a vis their more traditional enemy, found all the oxygen sucked out of their atmosphere...
...He has proposed the dumping of a half-century-old commitment to provide a welfare minimum for all American children...
...Absurd insinuations from the GOP to the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that Clinton has fully internalized all the regnant assumptions of 114 • DISSENT Arguments be found, both in practice and in principle, that all euphemisms and all compromises and all adaptations exact their toll...
...Clintonoid score: they endorsed Yeltsin whether he was a bully and demagogue and chauvinist or not, and thus have a large share in his crimes as well as his comparative and marginal advantages...
...It is not our task to devise, on their behalf, further evasions...
...Surely you're not saying you really want a return to the past...
...The Bs could hardly be expected to give up their point that there were worse demagogues and chauvinists around...
...When the big decision has already been taken, what need of paltry misgivings...
...They were shuffling their feet...
...Yet B would never be caught arguing in favor of permanent one-party rule, in the real world or any other...
...On the eve of the vote, furthermore (as we suspected then, and has been attested since in the memoirs of Clark Clifford and H.R...
...Amos Perlmutter, a rather hawkish Israeli pundit, observed to me that if the problem was the bases of Hezbollah then Peres could have sent a commando expedition to deal with them, so to speak, selectively...
...We are, albeit in a "soft" way, back in the petrified world of party-mindedness, where Democratic centralism brooks no disunity and where dissenters are accused of"giving ammunition to the enemy" or weakening the united front...
...Those in power in our present politics already possess, by way of excuses and self-justifications, an embarasse de richesse...
...You don't like our Boris...
...So, just this once, let's give the benefit of the doubt to Marion Barry or Richard Daley or Edwin Edwards...
...This ratchet-like rule will apply in other comparable situations...
...If the purely pragmatic ingredient of lesser evilism were any good, it would surely appeal to those who make a virtue precisely of their pragmatism: the conservative Democrats and right-wing Lib-Lab types...
...Anyone who wishes to play the old "lesser evil" board game after considering the above had best put himself in the position of his smartest opponent...
...The As would have made a correct moral point and been able to claim that in doing so they had not undermined their "own" side...
...Let us try some "real world" applications...
...If it were a doctrine, instead of a reflex or a dogma, it would be a doctrine without limits...
...But a definite defeat for those who opposed both ethnic partition and the use of force to achieve it...
...Irony is marketed at a discount these days...
...It cannot be true only some of the time, without losing all or most of FALL • 1996 • 111 Arguments its force...
...And what about Bill Clinton...
...Very hard, however, to classify Izetbegovic versus Siladzic as in any intelligible sense as the "lesser evil...
...most inclined to think of all ruling-party signatories to Dayton (Milosevic, Tudjman, and Izetbegovic) as the only "players" worth bothering about...
...An example, first, from each of the four overseas ones: • In the closing days of the Israeli election campaign, where nobody but a fool would claim that there was "no difference" between the two main coalitions, Shimon Peres undertook a campaign of ruthless bombing and strafing in southern Lebanon...
...Well, that should have been an easy enough call—if you could forget the role of people like Edwards in recruiting populist support for a person like Duke in the first place...
...True, perhaps, that the next time around the right will be led by the neofascist Gianfranco Fini, who will run against the austerity program and possibly win...
...Orwell lived and wrote in a period when the pressure on intellectuals to "take sides" was ostensibly much more palpable than it is now, and when with that pressure came a surreptitious invitation to moral blackmail: the element that tells thinking people that the less adventurous the use they make of their ratiocinative capacity, the better...
...It was, I thought, slightly too easily said by American and Israeli pundits that this could be overlooked as a hard-headed electoral test of Peres's "toughness" (surely sufficiently demonstrated already) on the "security" issue...
...His whole "take-off" as a re-electable president began with the eclipse of his own party in White House and Senate...
...And here is a micro-example...
...One-party rule does not work in practice or in principle...
...Do you suppose that he wants Bob Dole to become president...
...We have made this decision known in advance...
...Clintonoid score: uncritically pro-B, but retaining the power (and the readiness) to shift to Netanyahu in any case...
...Clintonoid score: indifferent to the war at the first...
...The hundredand-one local, regional, and "mid-term" pressures will replicate themselves across the board, and allow less freedom of choice rather than more...
...The Tony Blair "project" depends, after all, on a clear unity against the Tory foe...
...When compounded of the elements of renascent Stalinism and chauvinism, this argument from alternatives has the hoped-for effect of a Medusa's head...
...I have heard his acolytes snickering to the contrary these past two years...
...His entire power of patronage and placemanship demands a Democrat in the White House...
...Do you imagine that in a bottomline argument, you can out-bottom-line them...
...Those "social democrats" who fled the Labour party in the face of Thatcherism, and who ensured Thatcherism's success at two subsequent general elections, have now made their peace at a high price and been readmitted to a Labour party that brooks no criticism at all from the left...
...Who desires to be called a wavering intellectual dilettante when grand enterprises are on foot, and when the engine of destiny has gone to all the trouble of revving itself up...
...Let's keep score...
...A does not really maintain that it makes no difference which party wins the election...
...It is not even useful as a tactical resort (which is just as well, since it can be so simply grasped as to make any op-ed amateur into a master strategist...
...one designed precisely to quench the consideration of alternatives...
...So, what is wrong with the following factual assertion: "Shimon Peres, leader of a party that is a member of the Socialist International, ostentatiously killed and scattered the civilians of another country in order to protect himself from domestic criticism and to guard a personal and electoral flank...
...And not just in a nutshell either, since the amount of time and of mental effort expended is usually less than it has taken me to set it down...
...Factual statement: "The As accepted the logic of the Bs, who accepted most of the logic of their right-wing opponents, who were glad to be out of power in a crisis period...
...It could only be true if those with the power to decide such things decided to make it so...
...Thus A will exhort B, how can you vote for Clinton when . . . (list of betrayals and depredations follows) and B replies, without the slightest rehearsal, do you suppose that the right wing (taxonomy of depredations and fell intentions ready to hand) would be preferable...
...Now let us see how this macro-argument plays out in the case of Clinton and the left...
...True, the left put forward a mediocre candidate of conciliation to "reassure" waverers...
...He has awarded the military-industrial complex a heavier share of the national budget than it even had the nerve to demand...
...They had fallen silent...
...Reviewing the near destruction of the Democratic party in the July 1996 issue, the intelligent conservative Daniel Casse had this to say: In the shadow of November 1994, what few could have predicted was that the ousting of the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress would turn out to be, for the President, a liberating experience .. . . Since January of this year, the President has appeared bent not only on imitating but on seizing on the Republican agenda . . . Far from trying to rebuild the party, Clinton is trying to decouple the presidential engine from the congressional train...
...It is therefore morally shady...
...It turns all criticism into stone...
...Elections and campaigns were underway in Israel, Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia, and the United States...
...It would be meeting with opposition...
...We should all, always, be considering the alternatives...
...And even Milosevic has benefited in his time from being a "lesser evil," indeed continues to do so...
...Thus, B starts with the advantage of being able to address A in pitying tones, as if A had a lesson still to learn from that great moral tutor, "the real world...
...Difficult to score this one as between A and B, since As and Bs had taken different and similar positions on the war and on partition...
...And, as argued in its conventional form, it has become worn as smooth as a stone...
...Evidently, the calculation had been made that Clinton "can do this to us and get away with it...
...Why, then, does B argue that it is always better for the Democratic party to win an election, whether congressional or presidential, and that it always has been better...
...Tanto pio, tan to meglia, as the Italian Red Brigades once happily intoned...
...They discovered an unethical and probably illegal back channel between Nixon and the South Vietnamese junta...
...He had separated himself from the ruling SDA (Party of Democratic Action) under whose colors the war of liberation had largely been fought...
...And as it happened, the Democratic ticket was narrowly defeated that year...
...The argument from the lesser evil, however, has become a different sort of mantra...
...Let us admit that we know what the price is going to be...
...Not only do the arguments that sustain the first have a tendency to militate against the second, but so do the habits of mind and patterns of behavior...
...I had to shame them," said the original begetter of "welfare reform...
...What's not to like about that...
...If the "lesser evil" argument is not an axiom, it is nothing...
...If one divides the contending parties into the purists and rejectionists on the one hand, and the pragmatists and lesser-evilists on the other, one can discover at once that neither really means what they say...
...Had already said that they did not object to the presence of neofascists in government (a postwar European first...
...And that's the whole exchange...
...In four short years, Clinton has made himself both the patron and the serf of corporate America, and not just "presided" over the national polarization of power and wealth and income, but actively sponsored it...
...True, also, the left will now have to impose an "austerity" budget...
...So . . . not in front of the goyim, if you please...
...In June 1996, campaigning near Bihac, he was attacked by an Islamist mob, loyal to the ruling party, and beaten to the ground with an iron bar...
...If A had said this, then B might have replied (as the Clinton-Gore administration indeed did) that one had to bear in mind the "peace process" and the dangers of a Netanyahu victory...
...Ironies of history are not just conversation points...
...Anyway, the anti-Duke activists in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and many tougher spots, came up as they had to with the disarming slogan: "Vote For the Crook...
...It suggests that we are not responsible for what we do vote for, only for what we vote against...
...The last time I can remember it being deployed at full strength was during the gubernatorial election in Louisiana in 1992...
...Mixner nonetheless continued his loyal efforts on behalf of the administration...
...Nor does A usually like to argue that it would be better for "the other side" to win, because it is that "other side" that anchors the concept of "lesser evil" to begin with...
...He has dissipated a once-dynamic consensus in favor of national health care...
...Might not the Mississippi delegation have been seated at the Democratic convention a little earlier if the Democratic party had been out of power...
...I would not undertake to say for certain whether this state of affairs qualifies as "lesser," because the "lesser" is an assumption at once unprovable and unfalsifiable...
...I hate to say it (all right, I don't actually hate to say it) but it's a bad day when Cornmentary magazine shows a superior grasp of the ironies...
...And I think that the examples, of Mixner and of welfare "reform," are sufficient refutation of a certain line popular among left-liberals...
...I think we may take it that this same advice was available to Peres...
...116 • DISSENT...
...Haldeman), the Johnson-Humphrey forces came into possession of information that might have made the difference...
...Some hundreds of thousands of refugees were created as a matter of policy, and some hundreds of innocent civilians were, in "collateral" manner, deprived of life and limb...
...Oh dear, it turns out that the beneficiary will always be the person who takes the party-line argument in deadly earnest...
...This point, though it left untouched the larger issue of Israel's right to be in occupation of southern Lebanon in the first place, was at least congruent with Perlmutter's second point, which was that the actual collective punishment had increased support for Hezbollah and stored up future trouble, while exposing Israeli soldiers to the temptation to commit crimes against the defenseless...
...Well—since we are after all speaking of brute practicalities—cui Bono...
...Yeltsin was, for example, given great latitude to protect and defend Slobodan Milosevic lest any affront to the Serbs increase his own difficulties with Orthodox and irredentist types...
...It is both ahistorical and unhistorical...
...Here, stated in its full masochistic form, is the very essence of "lesser evilism...
...But if the two-party collusion is the evil itself, then the birds will have to learn a new song...
...In that year, with the country ruined by an imperialist war and with the gains of the civil rights movement callously flung away and with a state-sponsored campaign against dissent in full swing, some people actually did say that they would not vote for a man, Hubert Humphrey, who was directly complicit in all this...
...Let us vote for Clinton on Tuesday, and mobilize independently of, and if necessary against, him on Wednesday...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
