The Better Evil

"It's kind of a two-edged sword," [Ken] Green[, a retired entrepreneur and three-time Trump voter] said. "You either support [President Trump] or you support the other side, and I can't support the other side right now so … it's the evil you know."
Trump voters call president's pardon of corrupt Virginia sheriff 'a terrific mistake'

This, in a nutshell, sums up the brokenness of American politics for me. A strong binary with the understanding that both sides are, in their way, "evil." And so people vote for the evil they know. This viewpoint, that one should vote for the "lesser evil," and "the other side" is necessarily the "greater evil," is not new. But it strikes me as spreading.

This negative partisanship pretty much can't, by definition, lead anywhere good, because it provides and active incentive for people to excuse what they would otherwise consider clear wrongdoing done by their own side; or perhaps more accurately, by people they identify with. The case of Luigi Mangione, facing trial for the ambush murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is illustrative here, with a significant number of people being willing to excuse murder because it aligns with their political outlook.

But I think the bigger problem is the perceived lack of choices. To some extent, that lack of choices is real; there are only two viable nationwide parties in the United States. But nothing other than people's voting habits and fear of "wasting" their votes perpetuates this, because there are a number of nationwide parties for people to chose from; and once people start choosing them, the money will follow. But there's no real first-mover advantage to incentivize people to abandon whichever major party they currently back. And the "third" parties aren't necessarily making it easy; there are several different flavors of Socialist party to chose from, for instance. Were they to come together under one banner, they might appeal to enough of the Democratic Left to actually get somewhere.

Of course, negative partisanship works against these other parties, too, with the idea that their presence merely paves the way for the other side of the ideological divide to dominate politics. The fact that there are people who don't understand how electoral math works (for instance, believing that a third party vote both takes a vote away from one party and gives to the other major party) doesn't help matters.

As long as people are willing to overlook things they understand to be bad acts done by people who share their perceived enemies, the greater the incentive for the other side to do so. Being willing to punish the wrongdoers on one's own side when "the other side" isn't strike many people as little more than a messy form of suicide. But just as bad is the unwillingness to give credit for good things done by opposing partisans, since it actively pushes against the one thing that would be most likely to lower the temperature.