Despite the title, Andrew Levine’s Counterpunch article “The Illogic of
Lesser Evilism: the Obama Example”, opens the door a crack for getting
behind Obama once again.
Despite saying all sorts of churlish things about Obama, Levine reveals
his true orientation in the first and last paragraphs:
Barack Obama will likely be the lesser evil in the 2012 election. That
may be a reason to vote for him then; perhaps even a compelling reason
in some circumstances. But it is not a reason to support him now.
Of course, saying No is no substitute for building a real alternative;
but at this point, with an election looming, it is a quick and dirty way
to launch a credible threat that just might make the lesser evil less
evil. This is why now is emphatically not the time to come to the aid
of the Democratic Party. Perhaps in a year and half, for the few minutes
we spend in the voting booth, lesser evil logic will be less illogical
than it now is. But that will be then; this is now.
This is exactly the kind of sophistry would expect from “a Senior
Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.” The IPS is a liberal
think-tank that was launched in 1963 by Richard Barnet and Marcus
Raskin, two disillusioned JFK appointees. Like the Nation Magazine that
receives funding from the same wealthy liberals, the IPS tries to
straddle the fence between challenging and reinforcing the system.
Nothing captures this paradox better than the support that the IPS and
the Nation Magazine gave to Barack Obama in 2008, a candidate they hoped
would have the same kind of relationship to the liberal left that Bush
had to the Christian fundamentalists and incipient tea party formations
that helped get him elected.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/andrew-levine-and-the-lesser-evil/
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