A Sincere Vote in November is an Intelligent Vote

The choice people will be making on November 3, if not earlier, is undoubtedly of greater importance than in previous presidential elections. Most progressives are in agreement that defeating Trump is of extraordinary importance for the country and the world. Trump is either a neo-fascist or a potential fascist and in either case he must be defeated.

Having said that, I believe that there is an urgent need to register a rejection of U.S. foreign policy and militarism which in my mind is, aside from the issue of the environment, the overriding issue of our times. The U.S. is the major threat to world peace, the promoter of wars throughout the world as well as an arms race which spills over to nearly all the countries in the world. This is not leftist rhetoric nor am I saying this because I am “anti-American” (everything to the contrary). I say this because our military budget is greater than that of the next 10 countries combined. And I say this because the U.S. has 800 military bases outside of the country with 200,000 soldiers abroad. Furthermore, it is impossible that the progressive policies even of Democratic Party moderates can be at all successful as long as military spending saps up as much as 54% of the federal government’s budget. Finally, the double standards which drive U.S. foreign policy sabotages the efforts of third world countries to follow independent strategies for economic development, while doing nothing against undemocratic, and in some cases narco-states, countries such as Honduras and Brazil. Consider that during the coronavirus, the U.S. has continuously stepped up sanctions against Venezuela and other countries, rather than relaxing them, in an effort to take advantage of the excruciating difficulties the people of those nations are facing in the context of the pandemic in order to achieve the goal of regime change.

There is no question that the Democratic Party leadership is far better than the Republicans when it comes to domestic issues, even without the progressive reforms that the Bernie Sanders wing of the party is pushing. But not so when it comes to militarism and U.S. foreign policy. Consider the following. The push for a military buildup in Southeast Asia which forces China to increase military spending was announced by Obama when he said the U.S. would prioritize its military presence in the Pacific over the Atlantic. Furthermore, the Democratic Party leadership failed to oppose Trump’s creation of a new branch of the armed forces, the Space Force, which will also inevitably set off a new arms race. Finally, consider this: Trump actually has some decent policies when it comes to withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Syria and his friendly relations with Putin and North Korea (note: this does not make me an admirer of Putin nor Kim Jong-un, just an admirer of world peace). In each one of these areas the Democrats join the Republicans in attacking Trump. Nearly all of John Bolton’s attacks on Trump in his recent book have to do with Trump’s expressions of uncertainty and vacillations when it comes to these hotspot issues. And the Democratic leadership including Biden jumps right in to attack Trump in each one of these cases. Recently he attacked Trump for being soft on China. Give me a break.

I think it is important for voters in non-battleground states to vote for a third-party progressive candidate who raises issues that the Democrats ignore completely, as does the mainstream media (such as the cruelty of the crippling sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba). Biden does not need your vote in states like California, Connecticut and Massachusetts. There is no way that Trump is going to come close to winning there. People should take a look at the positions of the Green Party candidates for president and vice president – Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, respectively.

A 5 or 7 % nation-wide vote for the Hawkins-Walker ticket would make a world of difference in U.S. politics for three major reasons. First, because being on the map politically, they would be raising issues and reaching people that the mainstream media and Democrats completely ignore. Second, because a relatively sizeable vote would force a Biden president to listen to progressives and make greater concessions to them on foreign policy, which Bernie Sanders and his allies, unfortunately, are not emphasizing. And third, because  a good vote for independent progressives would represent a much greater blow to the far-right led by Trump because progressives are hitting much harder against Trump and raising a much wider range of issues against him than is the Democratic Party leadership. Just one example: Progressives called on the Democratic leadership to charge Trump on a number of counts regarding unethical and illegal conduct, unlike Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment strategy. Probing these issues in the hearings had a much better chance of generating a groundswell of support and enthusiasm for impeachment, a dynamic which had a much greater chance of pressuring senators than the single-issue approach of Pelosi.

Indeed, Pelosi is being challenged in her San Francisco congressional district by Shahid Buttar, who is a progressive and very articulate Democrat. He is challenging Pelosi and implies he will not vote for Biden in his state, while saying that he favors supporting Biden in battleground states.

The electoral college system is highly undemocratic. But because of it, it makes all the sense in the world for progressive voters in solidly blue and red states to vote for a progressive presidential candidate, as opposed to the perennial “lesser of two evils.”