Why the Reluctant Biden Vote Wins this November: An Open Letter to My Fellow Hesitant Voters

(Please share widely)

Short version:

Eligible voters have no alternative but to vote out the worst candidate on each ballot competition this Fall (2024). That requires weighing the negatives of each candidate and voting for the least bad candidate. Here’s my analysis of Biden and Trump’s negatives, none of their positives — and why the reluctant Biden vote might just save us all.

Why Biden is Undesirable: even though actuarial scientists predict that both Biden and Trump are fit enough to serve a second term, Biden does not telegraph much strength on the national or global state. So while his status quo administration is positioned to pick up any slack, his personal apparent weakness raises questions — some of them fair — about how effectively his next administration will address national challenges such as economic inequality, healthcare reform, and criminal justice reform. Biden’s administration also represents such a big tent of contested political values and practices, that he is sure to disappoint any particular set of values: for example, if I am more progressive, his institutional centrism (and the raucous Congress) is sure to continue to slow much of our shared agenda; if I am moderate, his progressive social and cultural values may feel often unaligned with mine; if I am a conservative hawk on foreign policy, curiously, his mostly consistent funding on wars abroad align well with my values — in fact, arguably his largest foreign policy failings are withdrawing from war in Afghanistan and now checking the US armaments of Israel (in other words, he is too good at war, if still not good for the hawks, to fall in the center or its left on foreign policy). Also, if my values are only anti-Trump, then the Biden administration has continued many of the policies from the Trump administration, such as immigration at the border with Mexico and costly tariffs with China. A stumbler of words, Biden has ties to corporate interests and his second son is under federal investigation for tax fraud and possessing a gun while on drugs.

Why Trump is Undesirable: Of the three most common reasons to deny someone security clearance — sexual impropriety, ego, and financial liabilities — Trump fails all three by significant degrees: first, Trump is a twice-divorced philanderer charged by judges with rape, sexual abuse, and trading influence for sex with an adult film actor months after his third wife gave birth. Second, a clinical narcissist, Trump’s ego is his platform: he has a record as an incurious leader with little capacity for public and military service, the norms of governance, and the burden of knowledge and expertise. He knows almost no policy details or little of the constitution. Third, and most devastatingly, Trump is a felon convicted by a jury of his peers; he is the only former US President to face any criminal charges (34 guilty, 54 pending), with legal fees measured in the hundreds of millions. There are still other serious issues: He uses language without commitment to truth, meaning, or clarity; he has a flair for divisive and inflammatory rhetoric aimed to entertain partisans, to undermine the credibility of the press, to exacerbate social division, and to elevate his own personal interests above public interests. For example, under the banner of a pro-family party, his administration separated considerably more than 4,000 children from their parents seeking refuge at the border, thousands of whom remain apart years later; he also downplayed the federal response to a major global public health crisis that killed over a million in the US. While claiming to be anti-corruption, his first administration sped corruption by obstructing justice, committing financial crimes, and violating campaign finance rules and the emoluments clause. Twice impeached, he brings even less symbolic capital, professionalism, and honor to the highest office than his dotting opponent. He surrounds himself with many now indicted loyalists (while dozens of former allies in his first cabinet now criticize him) and promotes some members of his own family members. A self-professed billionaire selling Bibles on Holy Week is, in its worship of gain, a priestcraft idolatry of the very Christian ethic it professes. Trump lost a winnable election and does not welcome defeat with dignity. He showed no intention of transferring power peacefully and lionized his followers who attacked the Capitol. He encourages populist reactions against the very norms and institutions supporting the country he wants to but evidently cannot run.

Trump is clearly worse than Biden. Therefore, I conclude, progressive, moderate, and institutionally conservative voters alike should vote for Biden against Trump this Fall, no matter how reluctant we may be.

If we don’t, Trump 2024 will make things even worse.

It is appropriate, perhaps even good, to feel reluctant about this hard conclusion so long as we also all vote and get out the vote.

Long version:

I write today with some real reluctance. I know many good people — some of them pickup-driving moderates in Oklahoma, some latte-sipping progressives in Brooklyn — planning on not voting this Fall.

To all my friends, I say, please vote: we risk way too much by not voting this Fall.

Say hard true things and then act on them: the cases against both Trump and Biden this Fall are both significant. But the case for voting for Biden against Trump, especially if you feel reluctant about voting for either, is the strongest.

Do you also feel underwhelmed or exasperated by the US candidates for President? Does it feel like the highest office for the US rarely has candidates as undesirable as Trump and Biden? (And the alternatives, somehow dangerous beyond looney?)

Over the coming pages, I’ll summarize a short series of reasons, despite all the reasons to be reluctant to vote, why not voting or voting for a third party would be still worse. In short, there may be many reasons not to vote (I cover seven). But whoever does not vote (or votes third party this round) also becomes responsible for our faltering democracy.

Remember: the difference between a reluctant voter and a partisan ideologue is that the first swallows the bitter pill and votes with reluctance, and the latter votes with a vengeance. Trump’s base will vote despite their and our greater interests. Will the rest of us vote? Unless enough reluctant voters vote, we may not keep our republic.

So here’s my modest proposal for action: US voters who feel reluctant about either candidate should, for November 2024 (and 2028 if necessary), vote against Trump by voting for the one candidate that will beat him this Fall. In 2024, that’s Biden. This is especially true if you feel reluctant about Biden, as I often do. This piece explains why voting matters — and, curiously, it is not a case for Biden; it is a case against both but actionably more against Trump than against Biden.

I think there are a few special reasons why the 2024 election is sure to brim with reluctance and bad feelings (special interests with two-digit, billion-dollar campaigns, social media rage casino algorithms, aging candidates, etc.): in particular, I believe this election may be only the second time in modern US history in which both major party candidates are former Presidents (1892 is the other). In other words, for the first time in over a century, almost every voter in 2024 already knows both candidates as US Presidents. Neither candidate can convincingly persuade with the promise of unrealized hope: “just wait until I’m in office” sounds like a threat in 2024. No candidate can lay out a vision of sweeping hope for a brighter, unrealized future because we know Trump, Biden, and their administrations already. All the positivity and promises are firmly in the past tense. So buckle up: it’s going to be a negative campaign season.

Yet negativity of a certain kind can also be a good hard thing. This open letter critically reclaims that fact: no matter how awful, divisive, and idiotic our candidates and their supporters will be to one another on the debate stages, campaigns, and online, under certain conditions, each of us reading this letter today may learn to think negatively and calmly. And that could be a good thing — even a very good thing. How might thinking against and acting for help amid all the polarization?

On the one hand, it is not good to have a nation polarized by political rancor and violence, most recently the January 6th storming of the Capitol. On the other hand, it is also bad (although less obviously) to have candidates promising away the future with unrealizable optimism, even the quasi-religious potential of Obama’s campaign rhetoric. Between those two extremes lies US voters learning to analyze negatively and then take positive action. In other words, negative analysis (clear, calm, fair) paired with positive action (voting, getting out the vote, especially when feeling reluctant) marks the Aristotelian ethical mean between divisive polarization and far-fetched hopes sure to disappoint.

Here is why I think almost everyone I know — progressive, moderative, and, under certain conditions, conservative — should vote against Trump by voting for Biden this Fall. If you’re an institutional conservative or if you’re a foreign policy conservative, Biden is your man; if you are a cultural and social values conservative, you don’t have a solid candidate in the race but you do have an institutional system of checks and balances that serve your interests (judiciary, congress, and executive), so vote for the institutional conservative more likely to preserve the system status quo. If you’re libertarian or democratic socialist, you don’t have a candidate either and the best one can do, absent a candidate who will reform the status quo carefully, is to continue, not further corrupt or erode, the status quo. In short, unless you believe that a vulgar political outsider you are anything other than on the right, Biden is the more obvious choice — but we have to actually choose him this Fall.

I say none of this with ease or joy. But, to all the roughly conservatives, centerists, liberals, and leftists I know who want to sit out the election this Fall, don’t: let me explain.

The US national political system requires negative partisanship. This is a firm fact of any two-party system. In a two-party system, if your vote for a candidate counts, it counts because it falls into one of two piles — and until we reform the electoral process, the count works not by counting a vote for a candidate, but by counting votes for a candidate as votes against the other candidate.

Imagine three people trying to choose one pizza from two pizzas on the table, and the first person has voted for the first pizza and the second has voted for the second pizza. In this scenario, the third person doesn’t just vote for a pizza: they vote against the pizza they do not like.

I enjoy making positive cases for things I like, but the voting system doesn’t care what I want. It simply sorts our votes into two plausibly winning piles and then requires that each of us vote for the less bad candidate over the even worse candidate. James Madison baked negative partisanship — or the requirement that we vote against the worst candidate by voting for the less bad candidate — into our two-party system. Doing so insures our voting system: while the voting public may never in their life encounter a net positive candidate, every election guarantees a choice between worst and less bad, and if our system functions against the worst case, then our system functions even when the cases are bad.

Negative partisanship is a bitter pill, but, when disciplined, negative analysis, at least, comes with a few advantages:

A. All voters have to do is simple: Think calmly against both of them, carefully weigh which is worse on the evidence, and then vote for the one who is less bad. We do not have to feel net positive things about a candidate — all we have to do is vote for the least unfortunate of the two candidates, and then check that candidate once in office.

B. All voters can also step aside and catch our breath with the confidence-building observation that this kind of politics is supposed to feel exhausting: our system requires us by design to think negatively. Frown emojis proliferate in election seasons. Knowing that can take the sting out of it, and let us have a bit less sour when anyone thinks negatively or reacts poorly to necessary negativity. People are supposed to be frowning at the situation, just not spitting and definitely not swinging at one another, in election seasons. Sure, it stinks psychologically, but at least we understand why — and that peace of mind can afford negative analysis with positive action.

C. All voters can also advocate today for local ballot reform, moving from two-party ballot to rank-choice or rank-order voting overnight.

The US should also strenuously avoid the counterfeit and corruption of negative partisanship, apocalyptic fear-mongering:

D. Neither candidate will speed the end of the Republic, neither candidate will personally usher in the rapture, although both have different consequences in very different ways. It’s possible to weigh utterly serious negative stakes without slipping into only catastrophic negatives. We avoid apocalyptic fear-mongering by being specific and careful in our negative analyses.

So let’s get to it. I’ll start by hazarding my own negative analyses of Biden and Trump below. Out of principle, negative analyses deliberately ignore all the success and efforts across their careers. I welcome you to make your own — just remember to base your claims on verifiably empirical claims as carefully and as calmly as you can.

*Warning: a repeat of my negative analysis follows*

Why Biden is Undesirable: even though actuarial scientists predict that both Biden and Trump are fit enough to serve a second term, Biden does not telegraph much strength on the national or global state. So while his status quo administration is positioned to pick up any slack, his personal apparent weakness raises questions — some of them fair — about how effectively his next administration will address national challenges such as economic inequality, healthcare reform, and criminal justice reform. Biden’s administration also represents such a big tent of contested political values and practices, that he is sure to disappoint any particular set of values: for example, if I am more progressive, his institutional centrism (and the raucous Congress) is sure to continue to slow much of our shared agenda; if I am moderate, his progressive social and cultural values may feel often unaligned with mine; if I am a conservative hawk on foreign policy, curiously, his mostly consistent funding on wars abroad align well with my values — in fact, arguably his largest foreign policy failings are withdrawing from war in Afghanistan and now checking the US armaments of Israel (in other words, he is too good at war, if still not good for the hawks, to fall in the center or its left on foreign policy). Also, if my values are only anti-Trump, then the Biden administration has continued many of the policies from the Trump administration, such as immigration at the border with Mexico and costly tariffs with China. A stumbler of words, Biden has ties to corporate interests and his second son is under federal investigation for tax fraud and possessing a gun while on drugs.

Why Trump is Undesirable: Trump is a convicted felon. He is the only former US President to face any criminal charges (34 guilty, 54 pending), with legal fees measured in the hundreds of millions. Of the three most common reasons to deny someone security clearance — sexual impropriety, ego, and financial liabilities — Trump fails all three by significant degrees. A convicted felon, Trump is a twice-divorced philanderer charged by judges with rape, sexual abuse, and trading influence for sex with an adult film actor months after his third wife gave birth. A clinical narcissist, Trump’s ego is his platform: he has a record as an incurious leader with little capacity for public and military service, the norms of governance, and the burden of knowledge and expertise. He knows almost no policy details or little of the constitution. He uses language without commitment to truth, meaning, or clarity: he has a flair for divisive and inflammatory rhetoric aimed to entertain partisans, to undermine the credibility of the press, to exacerbate social division, and to elevate his own personal interests above public interests. For example, under the banner of a pro-family party, his administration separated considerably more than 4,000 children from their parents seeking refuge at the border, thousands of whom remain apart years later; he also downplayed the federal response to a major global public health crisis that killed over a million in the US. While claiming to be anti-corruption, his first administration sped corruption by obstructing justice, committing financial crimes, and violating campaign finance rules and the emoluments clause. Twice impeached, he brings even less symbolic capital, professionalism, and honor to the highest office than his dotting opponent. He surrounds himself with many now indicted loyalists (while dozens of former allies in his first cabinet now criticize him) and promotes some members of his own family members. A self-professed billionaire selling Bibles on Holy Week is, in its worship of gain, a priestcraft idolatry of the very Christian ethic it professes. Trump lost a winnable election and does not welcome defeat with dignity. He showed no intention of transferring power peacefully and lionized his followers who attacked the Capitol. He encourages populist reactions against the very norms and institutions supporting the country he wants to but evidently cannot run.

Whew. Ugh. None of this comes with joy or ease.

These are the options I see that might win this Fall. Remember, to avoid slippery slopes into apocalyptic fear mongering, it’s key that our negative analyses express the worst true things that matter about candidates. So please correct my own profiles above using well established facts.

So now what?

By almost any reasonable negative analysis, Trump is clearly the worse candidate of the two. The Biden big tent contains most usual political choices while Trump tries to present as the anti-system candidate but now with a twist: unlike in 2016 (or 2020), Trump cannot claim to represent any positive platform toward reforming society or draining the swamp since. That, after four years of experience in the oval office, the GOP elected him as their standard bearer is an incrimination not just of Trump but of the system: for he does not represent a real alternative to the status quo. He is his first, last, and surest supporter. He stands for little outside his own ego and interest. Thus he is — and should be — at best remembered as a loser and better yet (after we have learned some cautionary tales) forgotten.

So vote against Trump by voting for Biden this Fall.

Remember: one can vote for Biden without actively supporting him. In the profile above, we have not considered any of their various virtues at all. Our only task is to weigh which one is worse and then vote for the other one.

While such negativity may feel icky, it can also be a bit liberating: one does not need to actively believe in Joe Biden as a person or a platform in order to vote for him — one needs only to vote for him against the other guy. In fact, we all can disagree on almost every issue and yet still agree we have, in Biden, a less costly pathway toward negotiating our issues since a Biden administration welcomes the moderating forces that check the big tent of the Democratic Party, institutional centrism, and the checks and balances of a rancorous congress. A second Trump administration is riskier because no one knows what comes after that: based on 2020, under what conditions would he relinquish power in 2028? Does he try to change the constitution? Force a contingent election? Inspire another insurrection? Usher in a worse and more competent strong man to fill his void?

This is a negative slippery slope, but they are not yet apocalyptic since they reasonably extend what happened in 2020 and 2021.

In other words, those of us who will be firmly voting for Biden in order to keep Trump from power have no need to actually believe in the progressive muddle we must also vote for: we need only believe that a second Biden administration will be held more responsible and face more checks and balances than a second Trump term. This minimal but surer belief is the better bet. Even Biden’s most obvious weakness — his age and occasional frailty — implies he will be more checkable than Trump. A second Biden term appears far more checkable than a second Trump term. Thus the reluctant conservative voter may choose Biden over Trump for Biden is the institutionally conservative choice.

Let’s say a reader disagrees, having recognized that our bipartisan system encourages them to analyze negatively my analysis. Awesome: forward ho!

I see several ways forward for those who disagree:

Those who want to actively support Donald Trump as a person and a platform face steeper odds: to paraphrase Nate Oman recently, first, Trump supporters may operate within a fantasy that a criminal hustler and philanderer with a long and mounting criminal record deserves to stand as both the GOP’s moral leader and as our country; or, second, they may paint Biden out to be a monster so heinous that opposition to him appears the only moral possibility (even though doing so will stovepipe in grotesque fantasies like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory against Clinton and birtherism against Obama); or, third, and perhaps more subtly and devastatingly, they will have to shift their core beliefs about what is moral and appropriate in a democratic republic so far that some former Trump supporters will be unprepared to keep at bay the growing floodwaters of 4Chan conspiracies and stronger strongmen who ride in their wake.

All of those options are worse than voting reluctantly for the alternative.

For those who still do not want to support either candidate, read on: swallow with me Madison’s bitter pill. We do not have to actively support the candidate we vote for but we must vote for the less bad candidate. It’s math. There’s only two candidates that can win (read on for rank-order and third-party footnotes). My vote counts only if, by being in one pile, it counts against the other pile.

Let’s also give credit to those who genuinely support Biden without reluctance too. I salute you. Any one of us may genuinely adore Biden’s model of progressive change: slow (even Burkean slow), institutionalist, imperfectly bipartisan, whatever else. I’m glad some feel good; it’s just that no one’s good feelings have to convince anyone else. It must be enough to vote simply that Biden is clearly less bad than Trump.

Doesn’t this kind of negative thinking fan the flames of rancor and bitterness polarizing our country? Surely its counterfeits — rage and tribalism — are negative and abundant. But, if we are to be mature citizens, as voters must strive to be, we should take courage that it can be comforting, even liberating, to think clearly and calmly through a balance of negatives. If this modest open letter has succeeded in the slightest, it will do so by proposing a practical next step (vote for Biden) while also modeling how to arrive at practical action without ending up in one of the two usual political traps: say no to entertaining popular disgust and reaction and say no to defaulting into the land of whataboutisms and polite shrugs. Tis’ the season for analyzing negatively and then voting carefully against.

And finally, for those who share none of the conclusions of this open letter: get out the vote for Biden this Fall so we can vote against Trump, and then check Biden. Biden’s weakness is the strength of my analysis — he is more checkable and less of a threat than Trump — and my unwillingness to vote would speed something worse than Biden’s weakness. If none of this resonants, then join me in pushing for ballot reform locally so that future elections can avoid having to think negatively.

And join me in future addendums to this letter in considering seven reasons why to not vote this Fall, and why each makes this case clearer.

As a long addendum to my open letter to the reluctant Biden voter, here are seven reasons that appear to suggest why one should not vote at all this Fall, and end up suggesting that we should all vote against Trump by voting for Biden with reluctance.

1. The US Election Day doesn’t give me enough time off from work to vote, I’m not sure how to register, or I face other practical problems that keep me from voting.

That’s a real problem. Democracy and republic are two words (one Greek, the other Latin) for people rule. None of this works without a wide distribution of eligible voters who then vote. I was not registered in my early years of college and didn’t realize how easy it was to register: I also didn’t realize that if all college-aged people would regularly vote, US politics would be permanently transformed. So, please stop reading right now and instead take the moment to register to vote by mail now here, so you can vote absentee this Fall: https://vote.gov/ and https://www.usa.gov/absentee-voting

Thank you for voting!

2. I don’t consider myself informed enough to act, so why vote?

As the Russian state knows, it benefits those in power to have a population disengaged from normal civic life. So, while we do not necessarily have to storm the barricades, we do bear a duty to participate meaningfully in public life: volunteer. Pay taxes. Read trusted sources. Turn off the TV and most talk radio. Seek professionally fact-checked written sources that subtly check and complicate with evidence — not confirm, not reject — core beliefs about reality. Unsubscribe from social media, the clickbait headlines, and the rage casinos that are free media forums online, and subscribe to our local newspaper, read fact-reporting from the Associated Press and Reuters, listen into NPR and PBS (knowing the difference between fact-based reporting and editorials), and, if we can afford it, subscribe to sources like the Washington Post and the Economist. Most of these can be accessed online through a free public library account (find yours here). Just 15 minutes a week of professional written news will soon leave one better informed than most of the voting citizenry. That’s a low-stress and clear win.

What if we already feel marginally informed but still unsure how to act? Let’s come back to that in the seventh question below. Meanwhile, take confidence: it is often the wisest and most sensitive among us that hesitate the most. How can we act when the world is complex and overconfident fools holler on without doubt?

3. My single vote cannot make a difference, so why vote?

The secret ballot box fits only one person at a time, and yet no one is an island: if I do not do my duty to vote, what claim do I really have on our republic? Just as each of us takes care of our own hygiene, tries to be polite, pays our taxes, honors our elders, and stops at stop sign intersections, so too do all citizens bear the duty to vote. It is precisely the modesty of the single vote that makes it such a sustainable civic duty. It is the smallest and most modest norms, actions, and duties that make the world turn. Small means bring about great things: fewer than three percent of the world population can vote in US elections, whose outcomes could influence the other 95% of the world population. (1 in 40 people in the world can vote in the US, yet all 40 are indirectly influenced by that vote.) All voting-eligible US citizens bear a rare privilege and duty to vote.

4. I live in a city, county, or state where the electoral outcome might as well already be predetermined, so why vote?

I grew up in a purple state (Iowa) only to live in only solid blue and red states once I could vote (Utah, California, New York, Oklahoma): so at no point has my vote ever made a difference in the count for federal offices. And yet here’s the thing: if I were not to vote because my state felt predetermined, I would not be part of the ongoing transformation of red and blue states into swing states: Georgia, most remarkably, but also Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, among others. But I am part of that, because my vote feeds the national popular count, which swinging states watch: with demographic change, the experiment in American democracy is far from over. Plus, in solid red and blue states, I’ve discovered more sunlight between candidates within a party than between them in local elections. So casting my vote always matters locally and historically in an evolving country, even if it doesn’t matter in any one given national count. That’s good news!

5. The electoral college has elected to the Presidency the candidate that lost the popular vote twice in my lifetime, once in 2000 and again in 2016. What’s the point of voting if the electoral college keeps swinging the election away from the popular vote?

In a third of the US Presidential elections I have voted in, the loser of the popular vote won. The anti-democratic function of the electoral college deserves careful consideration: even if it escapes reform, nationwide rank-order or rank-choice voting can still help depolarize voting, encourage cross-aisle alliances, and speed less polarizing primaries. But until then, the most necessary thing we can do to reform the system is to gather evidence that the electoral college is broken, and the way to do that is to vote, especially if the electoral college risks swinging against the popular vote. If all people worried about the electoral college never voted, there will never be any evidence that the system needs reform. Before we can reform it, we have to have strong popular vote turnout. Work against the system by getting out the vote. If all we accomplish is to show the system is broken, that is already a historical step forward.

6. The world is complex. Either I don’t know how to sort these complexities into candidates, or I do know how to sort these complexities and the candidate’s don’t align, so why vote?

Bertrand Russel once put it well (if with ironic certainty): “the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are so full of doubts.” It is reasonable to feel doubts. There are very good reasons to feel conflicted about our political positions. Consider any number of complexities — wars abroad, reproductive health, economics, COVID-19, the environment, etc.

None of the following life-and-death issues break easily into party politics, yet I believe there’s a solid case for voting against Trump in almost all of them:

Wars: Putin would love nothing more than a Trump win in our increasingly multipolar world. A balanced judiciary requires a Biden win; a Trump win would speed further imbalance and delegate the court. Neither party appears prepared to do anything about booming economic inequality, although at least Biden admin occasionally cuts child poverty in half. The devastation left by COVID-19 hurts everyone, including the excess death counts that favor the Democrats at the same time that all the vaccination conspiracy talk punishes that already injured small minority with legitimate vaccination effect concerns: at least Biden appears to take the complex threats of public health failures seriously. The environment: no one appears prepared to act systematically, although at least under Biden there’s a better chance of remaining a system.

So, in a complex world, all we can do in the ballot box is vote out the worst guy (on each of the campaigns, not vote straight party ticket).

Three ideas:

A. Let’s thank our stars that complexity exists! Let’s vote for folks who work better with complexity and let’s work on issues locally. Even the attempt will help heal and mend some divisions. If reality is complex and nonpartisan, and it is, then it is better to elect the candidate that will negotiate these complexities in a disappointing big tent of politics than to bulldoze over such complexities with over-strong principles or scattershot selfishness. Biden’s politics entertains more complexity in detail — and more normal negotiation of that complexity in practice — makes him less bad than Trump. That much is clear.

B. Engage locally. Another thing we can all do is to engage politically at the local level where our feet, hands, wallets, and voices matter where our votes fall short on the federal stage. What else can we do but lift where we stand? May we invest our political energies into communities that are smaller than the public and larger than the home: extended families, neighborhoods, PTAs, book clubs, community centers, educational communities, churches, local charities, city councils, NGOs, volunteer networks, movements, and so much more.

C. Let’s set aside political symmetry talk: reality has no obligation to be symmetrical. Want evidence? Generative AI thinks politics is symmetrical, and it’s hallucinating. I just asked ChatGPT for its balanced take: it reports that Biden’s strengths include “experience, temperament, unity message, and international relations” and Trump’s strengths include “economic record, political outsider, strong base of support, and his America First agenda” while Biden’s weaknesses include “his age and health concerns, lack of enthusiasm, policy flip-flopping, and progressive skepticism” while Trump’s weaknesses include “divisive rhetoric, handling of COVID-19, legal and ethical controversies, and international relations.” It is not that ChatGPT’s analysis is wrong: it is that it is nonsense in its framing and misleading in its absent details. It is just inane to imagine that “flip-flopping” is as calumnious a sin as “ethical controversies’’ without specifying what those mean: might “flip-flopping” be evidence of surprising evolution over a fifty year career in public service? Might “ethical controversies” be a constant across a fifty year career in real estate and entertainment? Imagine somehow trying to zero out as equals the “positive” (or rather isolationist) rhetoric of “America First’’ with the negatives of “international relations.” For example, it’s impossible to balance these since the first causes the second: namely, if Trump realizes the “America First” rhetoric of withdrawing the US from NATO, the US will not be anywhere on the list — not first, not last — of NATO allies. That’s more America Alone than America First. Political analysis cannot be built out of tit-for-tat whataboutisms because reality is not symmetrical (Madison saw that about our complex world too). So don’t talk like ChatGPT: no more talk as if the political “spectrum” were symmetrical. It’s not. It’s empirically uneven and twisty.

Let’s do all this a bit better and again, get out the vote against the worst guy this Fall. Triple your vote. Make plans. Help others. Make it matter.

7. I want dramatic, radical system change. Trump is more likely to usher in the apocalypse than Biden, so why not vote for Trump?

I want social change too. I just really do not want what follows Trump. Here are a few cautions:

Wanting revolutionary change is not at all wrong — in fact, it may be the most correct desire in principle. The animating spirit of the young and the ethical, it is moral and good to wish and then work for a better world. Indeed, wanting and working to make the world better has, in so many ways, brought about precisely the extraordinarily complex progress that much of the world enjoys today. Yet this progress rarely comes through reactionaries or anti-system candidates who proclaim themselves our saviors: it will be better after the revolution, they promise! They alone can see the way forward, they promise! Such savior candidates are very, very, very bad bets, to put the historical record generously. Thus we have to conclude that on questions of economic reform, Trump is the worse bet than Biden by a considerable margin, although neither will bring about significant economic change. Even if I were to perniciously imagine that Trump would accelerate the US public to — what, an uprising, an overturn, a collapse, more likely an erosion? — I would have to be banana bonkers to imagine that the power brokers most likely to pick up the pieces that follow his wake would suddenly be committed to higher public values than at present. While this is not a high bar, it is a sure bet. If we cannot elect quality candidates through painfully long election processes, who would imagine that a second grifter administration or, worse, the erosion of democracy would facilitate an even better leadership selection process? We do well to doubt self-appointed national saviors. (Obama’s religious campaign rhetoric flirted with this bad bet too from another angle, until it normalized into everyday technocratic problem-solver talk.) My point? I want a different world but I don’t trust the rhetoric or analysis of radical change: we need meaningful change but we don’t need the magical thinking of imagining that a better world will follow a worse world. Most of the time, worse conditions follow radical ruptures and slow erosions alike. Things don’t have to get worse before they get better — without self-checking, things usually get worse before they get worse.

So let’s be careful but still act: it’s surely best to discount all candidates’ visions of the future, especially those that promise general unrest unless they win (even if both may be correct in predicting unrest). History reminds us that what comes after the anti-system strongman candidate is more corrupt strongmen. The solution to strong men is not to assassinate them: it is to vote and shame them out of power while we still have democracy and norms. We keep the republic we have by modeling the norms our social contract demands of us and living a higher standard of responsible, self-checking civics — or, minimally, by getting out the vote and voting. Democracy means standing a bit taller, even taller than our leaders.

So, now that I’ve wrapped up the semester and this essay here, I’ve outlined some of the wicked hard questions above (I see some complexity and feel the hurt negative thinking causes), and now I should be clear about my own proposed modest next step: be anti-Trump enough to get out the vote for Biden this Fall — and do so without mindless partisanship and with a clear commitment to checking any second term. I’m not worried about Trump himself: he is a remarkably forgettable flat character, just another boring omnivorous ego. I am not even most worried about Trumpism, or the popular unrest that he is both an underwhelming symptom and a worrying accelerator of. I am most worried about what comes after a second Trump administration: more erosion, a constitutional crisis, a coup, a younger, better strongman?

So prepare now to vote and get out the vote, especially the reluctant vote: this time, Biden is the progressive vote, the moderate vote, and the institutionally conservative vote.