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TripleInterrobang  6d ago (youtu.be)   1185 thread views

Voting for the lesser of two evils

youtu.be

In the past I have made video essay content about SSC/ACX articles. My most popular remains my summary of the concept of Moloch.

Today I've made something a little different. It is a video summarizing the arguments surrounding voting for the "lesser evil". If this interests you, give it a watch and let me know if I missed anything or if you agree/disagree.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=46gi-ODAjF0

Note that I do not make any money off this or other videos. I also apologize if I have broken a rule I didn't see by posting this.

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Regarding consequentialism: The trend I see from the last ~20 years of US politics is away from catering to undecided votes and towards riling up your base. While a highly partisan voter might never actually switch sides, motivating them to show up seems to be the primary tactic employed by both parties today.

To the extent this is rational on the parties' part, it is because these people don't show up all the time to vote for the lesser evil! If they did, then the portion of this pandering that is rational (as opposed to the portion dictated by the primary system, which is significant) would go away! This is my point.

(To be clear, I think that "get out the vote"-based politics is bad for the USA and that Australia's mandatory IRV which mostly negates it is very good for us (IRV's clone independence also provides an important guardrail against "well, the special interest bought out both major parties, I guess we're fucked"). But that doesn't change the incentives for a US voter as it stands.)

I suppose I agree that if every person always voted for the lesser of two evils then the incentives would be very different, but in our current system, on the margins I still support more people doing so and think it will have a bigger impact on outcomes than abstaining.

That's a valid position! But you can hopefully now see how your argument comes across as a strawman, because you didn't engage with the actual argument for the "you didn't earn my vote" position.

(And I'd have to agree with @RenOS: either be upfront partisan or be actually, for-reals nonpartisan. People really hate getting suckered.)

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