The Lie of the Lesser Evil

 I want to speak to those who chose what they believed was the “lesser evil,” often with real anguish and a sincere desire to prevent greater harm, and who are now confronting a painful realization: that when we teach ourselves to live with one profound injustice, we quietly make room for many others. And so the question becomes not who to blame, but what we do next.

There are also many “lesser evil” voters who believe, deeply and sincerely, that if their candidate had won, we would not be living in this level of brutality now. That belief deserves to be taken seriously, because it comes from fear, grief, and a longing for safety—not malice.

But it’s also worth pausing over what that belief asks of us.

It asks us to place our moral footing in a counterfactual: a story about a world that never happened and therefore can never be tested. It asks us to measure ethics by imagined outcomes rather than by the structures that were already in place, already funded, already normalized long before any single election.

The uncomfortable truth is that the conditions we’re living with were not created overnight, nor by one administration alone. They were built incrementally, across parties and decades, through policies that treated some lives as expendable, some violence as necessary, and some suffering as strategically acceptable. Elections may accelerate or decelerate that process, but they rarely reverse it.

Believing that everything would be fundamentally different “if only” our candidate had won can function as a kind of emotional shelter. It allows us to grieve without having to interrogate the deeper systems we’ve all been living inside—and, at times, accommodating.

This isn’t about denying that some outcomes are worse than others. They are. It’s about noticing how easily hope gets collapsed into personality, and how quickly responsibility gets outsourced to leaders instead of retained in our own ongoing choices.

The danger isn’t that people hoped for a different outcome. The danger is allowing that hope to become a substitute for reckoning—with the limits of electoral power, with the continuity of policy across administrations, and with the ways brutality persists even when it wears a more polite face.

If the question is only “who should have won,” we remain trapped in the same loop.

If the question becomes “why does so much violence remain possible regardless of who wins,” then something more honest can begin.

The real question is not: How do I vote inside this system?

It is: Where do I place my political energy if I refuse to become compatible with it?

The “lesser evil” framework pretends that evil can be portioned, domesticated, and safely managed. As if there exists a stable category called acceptable atrocity. As if some crimes, once baptized by electoral math, cease to be crimes at all and become unfortunate necessities.

This logic does not restrain brutality.

It trains it.

When we tell ourselves that certain harms are tolerable in the name of preventing worse ones, we are not minimizing harm—we are teaching the system that there is no absolute moral floor. Only thresholds. And thresholds are meant to be tested.

Power is not a moral actor. It does not respond to nuance, intention, or tortured sincerity. It responds to permission.

Once profound injustice becomes negotiable, nothing remains sacred. Civil liberties. Labor protections. Bodily autonomy. Due process. Environmental limits. These are not separate fights. They are downstream of the same permission structure.

People want to believe they made a tragic but necessary compromise. But history does not record interior anguish. It records outcomes.

You don’t get to normalize the machinery of suffering abroad and then act surprised when it is turned inward. You don’t get to excuse cages, bombs, and starvation as unfortunate but unavoidable and then clutch your pearls when surveillance, repression, and open corruption become unavoidable too.

The moment we accept that some lives are expendable for political stability, we have already accepted that any lives can be.

This isn’t about ideological purity. It’s about naming a hard truth: there is no “lesser evil” once we agree that harm can be a legitimate governing tool. There is only a sliding scale of brutality. And every time we vote along that scale, we push the bottom further down.

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If You Withhold Your Vote, Then What?

The first thought is simple: I refuse to legitimize harm.

Many of us arrive there honestly. We look at the political landscape and see not a tragic choice between imperfect options, but an ecosystem that metabolizes suffering and calls it governance. We see mass death rationalized, entire populations rendered disposable, and a language of “harm reduction” that functions less as ethics and more as anesthesia.

So we step back. We say no.

But refusal is not a destination. It is a doorway.

Because opting out of a corrupted system is only half a move. The other half is deciding where to place your energy instead. Not symbolically. Not performatively. Materially.

The great lie of modern politics is that voting is the primary site of power.

It isn’t.

Voting is a downstream ritual. A final, thin layer atop much deeper structures: capital flows, labor control, narrative production, land ownership, supply chains, and social cohesion.

This doesn’t mean voting is meaningless. It means it is a tactic, not a moral identity.

You are not a good person because you vote.

You are not a bad person because you don’t.

Sometimes a tactic is useful. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes abstention communicates something. Sometimes it disappears into static. None of this substitutes for having an actual political life.

The moral center cannot live inside a ballot box.

Once you understand this, the false binary collapses:

“Vote blue or you’re complicit”

versus

“Don’t vote and feel righteous”

Both positions avoid the same uncomfortable truth: real power requires sustained, unglamorous, relational work.

So what does the second thought look like?

It sounds like this: If I am not placing my faith in the electoral system, I must build legitimacy somewhere else.

Not in vibes.

Not in personal branding.

Not in online consensus.

In institutions.

Small, local, imperfect, human institutions that meet real needs and therefore create real leverage:

• Mutual aid networks that move food, medicine, and money.

• Tenant unions that keep people housed.

• Worker cooperatives that keep people employed without extraction.

• Community land trusts that pull land out of speculation.

• Legal defense funds.

• Strike funds.

• Independent media.

• Alternative schools.

• Local assemblies.

None of this is glamorous. None of it goes viral in a satisfying way. Most of it is repetitive, tedious, and slow.

It is also the only terrain where ordinary people have ever accumulated enough power to force structural change.

When people can meet their basic needs through one another, the system loses its primary weapon: desperation.

If your landlord can evict you, your boss can starve you, and your healthcare can disappear overnight, your political “choices” will always be constrained. You will always be negotiating with a gun on the table.

Building parallel capacity—however small—removes fingers from that trigger.

This is not about purity. Purity is a luxury ideology. It belongs to people who mistake personal cleanliness for collective impact. Washing our hands by tossing plastic into a recycling bin does not solve the plastic problem. Writing a check to a charity does not solve poverty. Symbolic fixes are comforting, but they do not redistribute power, resources, or dignity.

This is about coherence.

Do your values and your daily behaviors point in the same direction?

Do they reduce harm in tangible ways?

Do they increase people’s ability to survive outside the terms imposed by powerful institutions?

If yes, you are doing political work, whether you ever step into a voting booth again or not.

Another trap is waiting for permission. People imagine “real” organizing as something that happens elsewhere, led by more charismatic, more credentialed, more radical people.

But real organizing starts where you already have gravity: your town, your neighbors, your creative circle, your spiritual community, your coworkers. Ten people who can actually show up for each other matter more than ten thousand who agree with you online.

Ask simple, dangerous questions:

Who could we feed together?

Who could we house together?

Who could we employ together?

Who could we care for together?

Who could we defend together?

Every one of those questions is political.

Stop outsourcing your conscience to electoral cycles. The system trains people to become briefly animated every four years so they remain passive the rest of the time. Invert that.

Care every day.

Act every week.

Treat elections as background noise to a much larger, ongoing project.

If you vote, do it without romance.

If you don’t vote, don’t confuse abstention with action.

Action has texture. Action has cost. Action builds something that did not exist before.

This path does not offer the psychological comfort of believing you will “win” in any conventional sense. Most people who contributed to meaningful historical change did not live to see the world they were trying to create. They acted because they refused to become compatible with what they were living inside. That refusal—when paired with construction—is already a form of victory.

So if you withhold your vote, then what?

You build.

You connect.

You redistribute.

You defend.

You tell the truth even when it costs you social ease.

You become less legible to systems that require your fear, your isolation, and your exhaustion in order to function.

Not perfect.

Not pure.

Not cinematic.

But real.

And real is the only place anything has ever actually changed.

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Author’s Note

Much of this essay grows out of my own life, but not in any grand or heroic way.

I’m building a small home and a few simple cabins on a piece of land in rural Wisconsin. It’s my retirement plan. It’s also the kind of life that feels more sustainable to me at this stage—slower, simpler, closer to the ground.

I’m not trying to create a model for anyone else. I’m not pretending this is a solution to large-scale political problems.

It’s just one person making a practical choice about how to live.

I want fewer moving parts.

Fewer dependencies on systems that feel increasingly unstable.

More direct relationship with place, neighbors, and daily rhythms.

In that modest sense, it connects to what I’m writing about here.

Not as a statement, but as a posture.

I don’t expect one big moment of change. I don’t expect a clean break from the world as it is.

I expect a long, uneven process of adjusting how I spend my time, my attention, and my energy.

Of choosing, where I can, to make my life a little more coherent with my values.

If this essay resonates, I’m not asking you to mirror my choices.

I’m only suggesting that each of us probably has a small, ordinary version of this available to us:

A quieter way of living.

A simpler arrangement.

A few relationships we can tend more carefully.

A bit less dependence on systems we don’t trust.

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing pure.

Just a series of human-scale decisions.

That’s what the “second thought” looks like in my own life.