There’s a video of Lawrence O’Donnell, spokesperson for MSNBC, saying in 2020 what he’s paid to say, namely that electing a candidate with a platform you approve of is somehow in conflict with electing a candidate who can win. The logic of this is that most people are expected to vote for a candidate with a less desirable platform, which is only self-fulfilling if nobody shouts out that the hold-your-nose candidate has no clothes before a mysterious substance called “momentum” can be declared to exist and the candidate whom people actually prefer can be persuaded to give up.

There’s a video of Lawrence O’Donnell, years ago, saying something that would get him fired from MSNBC in a heartbeat:

“If you want to pull the major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking to what you’re thinking you must show them that you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them that you’re capable of not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t listen or have to listen to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party because the left had nowhere to go.”

Every four years in the United States since the time of the dinosaurs and Joe Biden’s full mental faculties, millions of people have volunteered for roles in the most often performed play in history. The tickets are free because nobody would pay a dime to see it twice and everybody’s seen it thousands of times. The play is a debate over whether to hold your nose and vote for some awful swamp creature or not.

This year was supposed to be different. I was going to vote for Bernie Sanders in the General Election, as I in fact did in the primary, not because I don’t have strong disagreements with him, but because his platform was so far superior to those of the other candidates as to really give meaning to the concept of “lesser evil.”

The endless arguments for lesser-evil voting that are part of the standard quadrennial performance make sense up to a point. I thought Bernie Sanders fell within that range in which they made sense.

In fact, as I explain at ridiculous length a ridiculous number of times every four years, my chief complaint with lesser-evilism in typical U.S. elections – elections without a candidate like Bernie Sanders in the big-two parties – is not that less evil isn’t less evil than more evil or that my brain simply doesn’t work. It’s that the value even of successfully electing a typical candidate who is in certain ways not as hideous as another candidate is outweighed by two factors. One is the giant diversion of resources away from activism and education and nonviolent strategies for political change and into the election. The other is the nearly universal practice of those who advocate less-evil voting of becoming cheerleaders for evil for periods of four years, not simply voters for it for one day.

Here’s a debate I had many elections back on this with Daniel Ellsberg.

People, with very few exceptions it seems, cannot do lesser-evil voting on a single day without having it take over their identity and influence their behavior. But even if they could, they’d still be telling Democrats: Do not bother with me, I’ll vote for you no matter what.

This could hardly be clearer than with Joe Biden.

If I go out today and advocate electing as U.S. president the neocon, corporatist, safety-net slashing, longtime racist, private health insurance promoting, war mongering, emoluments taking, opponent of public college education, enemy of major wealth taxes, champion of job-destroying corporate trade agreements, opponent of any serious green new deal, . . . the first question has to be: Yeah? Which one? Which of the two?

Here’s a graphic comparison of three candidates: