The most well-known problem with lesser-evil, two-party, winner-take-all elections, at least in a system of legalized bribery and corporate-state media, is the absence of virtually any really good candidates. Naturally this results in (or is at least one major cause of) the tendency of many to not vote at all with the United States claiming a lower voter turnout than many other countries it loves to look down on.
But the most serious problem is the tendency of those voters who do vote to nonetheless identify themselves with one of the lousy candidates and parties and its statements and actions year-in-and-year-out so that a larger phenomenon than lesser-evil voting is total lesser-evil existing. The extremely rare individual actually votes with his or her nose appropriately pinched, containing the voting to a single moment while rejecting the hype and keeping a free mind every other day.
This problem is compounded by, and its prevalence exaggerated by, the tendency of commentators to invent explanations for votes based only on who was voted for and not on who was voted against and certainly not on what would have been voted for had it been anywhere to be found.
The top vote-getter in virtually all U.S. elections is nobody at all. The most popular political party in U.S. polling is neither. Yet, we rarely hear about votes having been cast for this schmuck or that schmuck for lack of anybody better to vote for.
Pre-Trump, we didn't hear much about people voting for candidates only because there wasn't someone more racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and buffoonish. But once Trump gained the White House, we heard all about the inevitable, intrinsic, systemic racism latent in every Trump voter who had previously voted for Democrats apparently even those who'd backed Bernie Sanders and even those who'd voted for Obama.
Did many people, in fact, support Trump's racism? Of course. Did many of them have a latent history of racism and live in a country with a deep history of racism? Of course. But could something completely different from Trump have appealed to them more than Trump did? I think so.
Nobody claimed that any Trump voters were voting that way for lack of any candidates with less clarity, more dementia, and a long-standing commitment to corporate corruption, wars, credit card companies, and quasi-liberal muddling. The need for Joe Biden only needed explaining after Biden had been elected, not before.
Biden and Democratic votes are sometimes recognized as anti-Trump votes, and sometimes as deep devotion to whatever mashup of LBJ and Reagan the Democrats seem to be peddling, but rarely as nose-squeezing, quasi-nauseous votes for the lesser evil of two repulsive crapsandwich choices.
When Terry McAuliffe lost his campaign for governor of Virginia after campaigning almost entirely on his opponent being like Trump, it wasn't necessary to look closely at his weak platform or his devotion to gas companies.
Nor has there ever been much examination of the cheating that was required to deny Bernie Sanders a presidential nomination. In fact, a ridiculous propaganda gimmick invented to distract from that story itself exploded into a top news story for years, with the debunking of it still occupying prominent space it was called Russiagate.
What does any of this have to do with Build Back Better? Well, the BBB bill, as originally conceived, was a minimal sort of social needs proposal, pathetically far behind the norm on the planet, originally costing about a third of U.S. military spending (across all departments and agencies of military spending, and treating both BBB and military spending in terms of annual cost, rather than multiplying only the former by 10 as is the custom). BBB has now been cut to (depending on how you count it) a sixth of military spending and with wait for it no, it's really worth the wait wait for it tax cuts for the mega-wealthy thrown in during the process of paring the bill down because of you guessed it costs.
The U.S. public supported the original Build Back Better bill and even more so the more progressive elements in it, and yet more so a simpler and fuller provision of those elements that was never proposed. There's not a single human right treated in the BBB bill as a simple universal human right to be provided to everyone without question, means testing, form filling, or resentment building. Rather than providing everyone with pre-school and college, and improving schools from pre-school through college, the bill provides a number of ways to pay less than you do now for preschool depending on your income, etc. This is trumpeted as "Universal Pre-K," but misses the entire point of universality, which is to make people better off, not to piss people off. The bill tweaks the existing hopeless, and hopelessly complex health coverage system, rather than turning healthcare into the human right it is for humans in other countries. There's no free college, no living wage, no debt cancellation, no major green new deal for us all. There's little to inspire and less to bring us together.
I think better than building back any of the twisted, convoluted, half-assed programs in existence, would have been the creation of new, simple, bureaucracy-free, rights to a better life. I think universality, despite its success in other parts of the world, is radically underappreciated in a divided and conquered United States.
Why should rich people get pandemic survival checks? Why shouldn't descendants of enslaved people get reparations payments? Why should someone who doesn't go to college pay taxes to make college free? Why should smokers get health coverage? Why should someone get out of their student debt when I didn't? These are the popular demands.
I don't claim to have a universal answer to all such questions. There are some questions that I would certainly answer differently if they stood alone. If the rotten U.S. political system were condemned to remain unchanged except in one single regard, then, sure, I'd vote for slavery reparations. By the same token, I'd vote for term limits just to get different corrupt faces into the news, rather than working to make it possible to unelect incumbents.
But I think that there is a consideration being missed by all of these questions, and that it is an extremely important one that usually ought to tip the balance. It is the value of universality. It's not a theoretical value. It's what makes Scandinavia a desirable place to live. It's what makes Social Security and public high schools so popular. It's why people campaign for Medicare for All, not Medicare for the Worthy. It's why we're outraged at the idea of a fire crew asking to see paperwork and check qualifications before putting out a fire.
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