As a graying radical who often voted for a 3rd-party candidate (Nader in 2000 was the last) and is still sympathetic to that principle, for the current election I must ask: how do we recognize a qualitative vs. quantitative difference? And how much is loyalty to the superb values of Bernie or Elizabeth becoming a self-indulgent cover for acting merely out of spite?

Of course we must remain militant about seeking moral social goals. But does that mean we should let existing (and disappearing) achievements keep disappearing?

We can be honest and acknowledge that a President Biden is likely to be inadequate in many important ways. To me, the logic then dictates that even as we agree to vote for him based on the qualitative difference argument (more on this below), we can be setting up organizations to try, starting the day after the election, to hold his and his administration’s feet to the social justice fire.

We would have to keep doing that, with much less likelihood of success, in relation to Trump regardless.

I’ve never been enthusiastic about Biden. Yesterday I saw a graphic on Facebook (maybe from a Russian bot to get lefties to abstain) of areas in which Biden’s history of behavior can be claimed to match Trump’s (though if you think about it, only in very general ways). I worry about whether he is as bumbling as he can seem–though this image is apparently a result of his history of stuttering–a behavior normally stereotyped as comic and reflective of stupidity when it’s nothing of the sort. (Making fun of him about stuttering is about as intelligent as acting as though Trump’s problem is reducible to his orange pallor.)

But whatever Biden’s failings, there IS a qualitative difference between him and Trump. Maybe when I was young I would have ignored that. I hope not, but who knows? If so, I can only hope that someone speaking from a lefty angle generally sympathetic to my own would have been able to show me my mistake.

Some elections after this may return us to lesser-of-evils debates. Trump and his enablers–and we should never forget that he couldn’t do all his wickedness alone (indeed, he’s not smart enough to)–are undoing even the modest social justice gains, however incomplete, that we have managed to make over recent decades (I go back to the civil rights movement).

I haven’t usually been greatly moved by arguments about Supreme Court appointments, but we have seen how important that (and other court appointments) have become as the Court subverts laws we care about. And even if she can survive, if she’d like a well earned retirement, we shouldn’t keep forcing Ginsburg to continue her hard work on the court. And previous Democratic appointees, whatever their virtues or failings, are getting old, while Republican ones are mostly relatively young for their station in life.

If we can stop this administration’s crimes against humanity like killing of immigrants and their children, killing of Americans via all the mistakes related to this pandemic–and likely future ones,–enabling of white supremacists (add the trumpian perfidies that dismay you most), we’ll have already made valuable (however incomplete) steps forward. We shouldn’t pretend those are the only important matters, but neither should we shirk our moral duties by pretending they’re trivial.