The full title of today’s essay is “How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself,” which is…pretty apt these days. Hamilton Nolan lays out a case that, rather than treating a candidate as a hero, our job is to elect someone who can be pressured to do something right:
For the most part, it is wrong to think of elections as contests between “good” and “bad” candidates. With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests. Embrace the idea that we are simply pushing to elect the cowards, rather than the enemies. Why? Because the true work of political action is not to identify idealized superheroes to run for office. It is, instead, to create the conditions in the world that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way.
That sounds kind of bleak! But it does make it possible to try to move forward.
You do not need to allow this glaring inconsistency in their approach to human rights to paralyze you, as you try to assess them. Nor do you need to deny that this contradiction exists. You just need to understand that they are cowards. The willingness to overlook certain morally indefensible things is something that most people accept, in their own hearts, when they go into electoral politics. … The cowards, unlike the enemies, can be moved into the right place. That is why we vote for them, when faced with the choice of the two.