So, let’s say you’ve followed my advice and decided to remain undecided or even began supporting Jill Stein from this point until election day, and then you find yourself in the voting booth, then what?

Then you have to evaluate the campaign up to that point, including all the promises, all the backing off of promises, all the back and forth, the history of all the candidates, their records of consistency or lack of it, the feel you get from the candidates about whether, if elected, they will go through with the things they’ve promised, and also the dynamics of the campaign including the primaries up to that final day. You also have to evaluate which of the candidates is likely to push the United States toward full-blown fascism, which will continue to create the background conditions strengthening inverted totalitarianism reinforcing the possibility that full-blown fascism will emerge, and which candidate, if any, will disrupt current trends and move the United States towards full-blown democracy – political, social, and economic.

If you wait until the day of voting to decide who you will vote for, while taking all the above into account, then you will be able to make your decision taking into account the full performance of all the main candidates: Clinton, Trump, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein. At this point we think we know where will Hillary stand on election day and what she will do in the lame duck and when she takes office. We think we know where Trump will stand on that day, as well, and what he will do if he wins.

However, we have more to learn about Johnson and the Libertarians, and also about Jill Stein and the Greens. What we learn collectively about all the candidates between now and then can affect the polls as the race moves along. This has been a strange election year which has been much less predictable than other elections. Berniecrats are even more fed up than they were before the primary season.

Hillary Clinton may run such a nasty election campaign that people inclined to vote for her today, may be less inclined later. The same applies to Trump. Both of the major party candidates may find themselves with shrinking polling totals, and with growing undecideds drawn from both of them as time goes on.

If the ranks of Stein voters swell quickly in the coming weeks, along with the ranks of Johnson voters, the election campaign may not look like a race in which a vote for Stein carries with it a substantial risk of Trump. I can’t say whether Johnson or Stein will poll well enough before the decision is made about whether they will qualify for the debates. But if one or both of them qualify, then the trend away from the major party candidates may accelerate sufficiently so that voters, including Berniecrats with third or fourth party preferences will not be risking the victory of the major party candidate they most despise by voting for the candidate they prefer.

On the other hand, this outcome is unlikely. So, in the voting booth, even if Berniecrats fail to commit to Hillary and this is reflected in the polls, then we will have a choice. Here is the choice as laid out by a Hillary supporter, the well-known for his IT work, Clay Shirky, who says:

A. I prefer Donald Trump be President, rather than Hillary Clinton.
B. I prefer Hillary Clinton be President, rather than Donald Trump.
C. Whatever everybody else decides is OK with me.

Of course, we Berniecrats are supposed to believe that Clinton is the lesser evil compared to Trump and so we ought to bow to the inevitable and support her, while forgetting about Jill Stein, Donald Trump or Gary Johnson. But what if, on election day, after the campaign has run its course, we decide that Donald Trump is the lesser evil, then Shirky’s construct suggests that we ought to vote for Trump.

I know it’s hard for him to imagine the following; it’s hard for me too. But, what if Hillary backs off her opposition to the TPP as the campaign wears on, and what if she emphasizes very strongly that she is going to support the “free trade” agreements, go to war again in the Middle East, end the scourge of whistle blowing represented by Snowden, Assange, Manning, and others, pursue deficit reduction and balanced budgets vigorously as her husband did, and work assiduously for bipartisan agreements with the Republicans on Supreme Court Justices, Medicare, Social Security, and other aspects of the social safety net?

And what if, as is even harder to imagine, Trump backs off his racism and “wallism”, and bellicose statements about national defense and immigrants, and incitements to do violence to people he is running against, and advocates for no more war, comprehensive infrastructure programs, opposition to the pending trade agreements, reconstruction of our energy foundations, enhanced Medicare for All, and a Federal Job Guarantee program to provide jobs at a living wage for all Americans including the victims of NAFTA and the other so-called “free trade” agreements? Would Trump then still be the greater evil?

Well, I can say a few things about that. If Hillary were to advocate for and then to pursue the above agenda I think that would doom us to a deep recession by halfway through her term, because when the trade deficit exceeds the Government’s budget deficit, the private sector is progressively losing net financial assets to the Government. That would further exacerbate the extreme inequality existing in America, and would inflame rightist populism and its drive toward fascism.

On the other hand, if Trump implemented the imagined agenda above, then that would lead to substantial improvements in the economy. These would not necessarily be balanced by any successes in moving the US toward fascism, unless Trump’s victory was accompanied by a Republican sweep of both Houses of Congress. But this is very unlikely since the Berniecrats defecting to Trump would be very unlikely to vote for Republicans for the Senate, in turn making it likely that Democrats in control of the Senate would remain there to counter proposals designed to stifle dissent, which they would do because they would be on the receiving end of such laws.

Apart from the possibility that Shirky’s 3 choices could possibly backfire to the benefit of Trump, his construction of them is quite biased in that it ignores the time dimension of political life, and assumes what he is trying to prove, namely that the goal of voters in a two-party election, once one is in the voting booth, ought to be voting for the lesser evil.

But what if the goal, instead, is to prepare the way for future elections in which one won’t have to vote for the lesser evil between two despised candidates? Then the choices may be formulated differently than Shirky does.

For example, to Shirky’s choices we might add:

D. I prefer to vote for Jill Stein because in doing so I increase the likelihood that the Green Party will become more visible, get Federal matching funds in 2020, and poll more than 15% at that time so that they can get into the debates, and have an opportunity to win the presidency. I also prefer Hillary Clinton as President to Donald Trump, but when I rank order my preferences I get this: 1) the Green Party gets larger, gets into the debates in 2020, and gets a chance to win a plurality; 2) I prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump but not to 1); 3) I prefer 1) to Donald Trump more strongly than I prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. So, I am willing to risk Donald Trump in order to get 1).

I can also add an analogous choice E, preferring to vote for Gary Johnson so the Libertarian Party has a better chance to get into the debates in 2020 to get their candidate a legitimate chance at election in 2020. So these two new choices, both future-oriented preferences, invalidate Shirky’s argument when one is deciding who to vote for in that booth.

So, depending on the dynamics of this campaign and what it teaches us about the major party candidates, we may want to choose Jill Stein, rather than Hillary Clinton in the voting booth. Our choice will ultimately follow from how much we value the opportunity to make the future better compared to how much we risk by either allowing Trump to be elected rather than Hillary, or Hillary rather than Trump.

People who argue for voting for Hillary to ensure that Trump doesn’t win, don’t value getting off the treadmill of having to vote for one of two major party candidates; both of whom are representing the interests of the multinational corporations and the one percent rather than the 99%; and both of whom are also intending to advance either the forward march of inverted totalitarianism, or fascism itself i,n the same way we do. That is what accounts for our willingness to reject the lesser evil argument and their willingness to comply with its mandate.

Sometimes voting is not about the present lesser evil, but about the future good. And, to coin an aphorism, sometimes the lesser evil, not the perfect, is the enemy of the good!