Peter Hitchens:
"Don’t vote for someone you want. Vote based on who you don’t want."
This strikes me as good advice. So often you don't like any candidate. Or you like one, except for this or that policy. Then it’s got to be “The lesser of two evils” voting.
Like the American 2024 presidential election. If you care about politics and where the country is going, you have to vote. It's binary. Both may be bad. But even then, one candidate will be "horrible", the other merely “bad".
Thus, you could vote for Trump in 2024, not so much because you like him. But because you judge Kamala Harris policies absurd — to the extent you could even fathom what her policies were through the fog of her "word salad". You really, roooly don't want her. So you have to vote for the other, in this case for Trump.
That's fine. And just about sums up my view of it. Like, I don't much like listening to Trump and his pabulum; or reading his offensive tweets. But I'm still glad it's him there and not Kamala. I judge his policies to be measurably better than hers. Hurty tweets don’t change that.
I don’t buy, I don’t understand, those who are politically-engaged, but who won’t vote in a binary election because neither side meets their high and noble expectations. That’s just a cop out.
Back to Peter Hitchens. Most of the talk above is not about what I just said. It’s about the U.K.. Mainly.
Hitchens recommends: Adam Tooze. The Deluge
Hitchens' books to read: The Abolition of Britain. And: The Phony Victory.
Fun fact: in his youth Peter Hitchens was a Trotskyist. As was his more famous older brother, the late and much lamented Christopher Hitchens. Both lefties. Far-left lefties. Trots! Both became centre to conservative. They share this move with Tom Sowell. Who was a Marxist until his thirties. Then wasn’t. Asked why he had abandoned Marxism, he answered: “Facts”.
