#robert simpson

But you can have reasons for being unwavering in your principles, without thinking those principles are perfect. Young Turks who become wishy-washy moderates often get there through a series of incremental compromises. This is a natural result of the fragile psychology of commitment. Just as a few cigarettes or doughnuts can unravel months of self-discipline, a retreat to lesser-of-two-evils pragmatism can undermine one’s sense that it’s worth aiming for the best in the first place. And there’s a long history of savvy political actors tactically pressing on the urge to compromise, as a way of quelling and ultimately disarming revolutionary opposition to unjust systems. We know what happens if we apply a lesser-of-two-evils voting strategy over and over. It pushes all meaningful anti-poverty policies off the political agenda. If nominally progressive parties can take for granted anyone who cares about economic justice, they lose any incentive to shift their policies. To vote for the least-worst candidate, under these conditions, is to validate something verging on a sham democracy – a power struggle between two factions of the ruling elite. Following in [Bernard] Williams’s footsteps, then, there is something to be said for remaining ideologically intransigent. In some cases, there’s a credible motivational logic to prizing your integrity, and declining to cast a pragmatic vote. Being high-minded about ideals and principles is a way of undermining the suboptimal choice architectures the world has handed to you, and instead promoting structural transformation.

[Bernard] Williams’s ideas about integrity suggest that someone who’s reluctant to follow a lesser-of-two-evils strategy needs to at least interrogate that instinct. If you’re genuinely trying make the world a better place, Williams says, it isn’t enough to simply promote the good within the limited range of choices you’re being offered. You need to try to become someone who actively builds those choices, shaping which outcomes result from which actions. And that means taking on projects and principles that you mean to live by – even if this might produce undesirable outcomes in the short term. Compare a fervent keyboard warrior – who has all the right-on takes on principles of economic justice – with a community organiser working on the ground to combat poverty, and for whom these principles aren’t passive beliefs, but an active source of motivation. For the Twitter activist, there is nothing at stake, apart from integrity itself, in being uncompromising. And to treat one’s integrity, in that situation, as a higher priority than averting disaster seems like a serious case of moral narcissism. By contrast, for the community organiser, a vote ‘the other way’ might act as a genuine impediment to their other world-shaping endeavours. So, in deciding whether to compromise your ideals, or whether to take a stand, you might ask yourself: ‘Will this compromise undermine projects that I’ve committed to, through which I’m actively trying to make the world a better place?’ (In which case: stand by your principles.) ‘Or are my ideals and principles simply idle, such that a moral compromise wouldn’t affect any projects actively in train?’ (In which case: act so as to promote the lesser of two evils.) The immediate payoff of this approach is that it gives a framework for people whose ideals make them reluctant to vote for the lesser of two evils, but who don’t have any real commitments or projects fuelled by those ideals.