Why I will never vote for the lesser of two evils

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Trump and Biden are but symbols of our moral decay – it is time to arrest that slump not to rubber stamp another monster.

How did we end up here? How did democracy in the allegedly free world become two British flunkies fighting over who gives NATO more money and two octogenarian maniacs in the US arguing about their golf handicap (when at least one of them could remember it)?

Bush, Blair, Johnson, Biden, Truss, Sunak, Starmer and Trump. There is a point at which pointing out the serial duplicities and incompetencies of the people who front the Anglo-American axis becomes self defeating, for these people are a symptom – not the cause. We need to analyse the currents that brought us here and where they are taking us.

(a) The inability to recognise the fundamental importance of universal moral norms and the methodologies by which we agree them.

(b) The inability to distinguish between morality and its shadow.

Contemporary public discussions are oft characterised by a groupthink headfuck in which participants furiously moralise while subscribing to the fashionable rejection of…moralising.

To moralise is to participate in a discussion about morality. The purpose being to interpret / explain or provide education as to what is good or bad, with meta discussions about the veracity of moral methodologies forming the basis of philosophy for thousands of years.

But you don’t need a degree in philosophy to see what has gone so tragically wrong in western societies especially. Put simply many (most?) have lost the capacity and the willingness to make and win a moral argument.

Religion is to blame for poisoning the well of public morals. Specious claims of transcendent knowledge are a very poor basis for a moral framework and the intellectual incoherence, hypocrisy, prejudice and violence of many religious puppet masters has a long and well documented history.

When people don the robes of morality to hand down twisted judgements upon others, that is a failure of morals – it ought not to discredit the proper task of moralising. As a species we cannot abandon the work of moralising because some abuse its power.

Human beings cannot escape moral norms as an organisational pivot of life, what differs is how aware we are of them and how explicitly we refer to them.

When moralising becomes unfashionable in a society then the morals upon which it pivots become shadowy and hidden. Straightforward moral discussions become much harder to prosecute, even when very moralistic statements are being exchanged.

In the absence of a dialectic about morals (and indeed about dialectic itself) a framework will exist nevertheless. The relative decline of religious faux moralising has seen other frameworks fill the void, namely rugged individualism, unrestrained licence and of course the all powerful market. Each of these pivots of western contemporary life contains a payload of moral decisions, but because they purport to eschew moralising, their moral content is dishonestly disguised and thus harder to evaluate and challenge.

The absence of a healthy dialectic and the elevation of a dishonestly posed anti-moralism (in which morals are scorned as merely personal projections) has brought us to where we are today, with decisions left to the morally blind and thus supposedly neutral arbiters of material science and the market.

Left wing campaigners on every topic you can think of, are understandably wary of the shadow side of moralising and thus have often give up on making and winning moral arguments in favour of technocratic wheezes.

Ironically the key moral of much left-wing moralising now is that people’s feelings must not be hurt, even if their assertions are dangerously incoherent.

For example, the most powerful argument that ought to be at the forefront of all discussions about climate change is a moral one, it being simply WRONG to discount posterity so we can enjoy luxury, convenience and entertainment via fossil fuels.

I doubt you will have heard that argument from anyone in The Green Party, who instead agitate for increasingly fantastical techno-fixes that imply we can have our cake and eat it.

The reason why the techno obfuscations of the climate change debate are necessary is because moralising has become almost taboo, but more dangerously because we have been propagandised into believing that:

• The market allied with science can deliver us from having to make hard moral choices ever again.
• Doing the right thing will forever be easy and will never threaten anyone’s personal licence.
• Goodness is a function of our existing system, a managed product that will be dispensed automatically if we just press the right buttons in the correct order, not something that could possibly transcend the existing system or short-term human desires.

The longer that moral discussions about climate change, biodiversity loss and the threat of nuclear war are avoided the harder the decision making becomes

Left wing ‘progressives’ remain reluctant to engage in moral arguments because they fear it is tactically unwise (a reasonable concern, but a mountain that simply has to be climbed) and culturally taboo amongst their peer groups.

While it is clearly correct that left wing activists partially define their activism by avoiding the faux moralism of their opponents, they cannot absolve themselves of the need to make better moral arguments.

Right wing propagandists work tirelessly to shift the moral landscape ever further to the right, rendering the task of moving it back incrementally harder and so providing the left with even more reasons to regard the task as impossible. In this way the electric fence of permissible discussions and electoral choices floats ever further to the right.

This is how we ended up being offered the non-choice between Sunak and Starmer and indeed how American voters are now offered the choice between a genocidal warlord and a narcissistic megalomaniac / climate vandal.

I was recently taken to task for suggesting that no moral person could possibly vote for Biden or Trump and that I should thus mandate Biden to prevent Trump, but this is grotesquely absurd.

When a ‘democracy’ has become so malign and corrupt so as to offer only a choice between evils, the time has come to reform that democracy – not to mandate whatever wizened horrors it vomits up.

When a democracy decays to the point where its institutions are being used to provide a rubber stamp for evil acts, then good people must conclude that they are not dealing with a true democracy but the shadow of one and act accordingly.

As a proud and unabashed moralist. I place a moral overlay over everything I write and try to do. We can certainly discuss the logical soundness of my positions and indeed the rational framework I provide in defence of taking moral positions (grounded in my faith in a moral universe).

But I will never concede the need to take moral positions, for they are an unavoidable truth of the human condition and the widespread denial of that truth has led us to the abyss we are descending into today.