Political Action and the Principle of Le Meiux est l'Ennemi du Bien
Written August 2016, with a January 2024 postscript
Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good." The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.
Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark MavPhil alliteration: Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.
Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Barack Obama, who has proven to be a disaster for the country and for the world, was elected in 2008 in part because of conservatives who could not abide John McCain. And he was re-elected in 2012 in part because of disgusted conservatives who failed to heed Voltaire's principle and refused to vote for the milquetoast conservative, Mitt Romney. But surely it is obvious in hindsight that the milquetoast RINO would have been preferable to the radical?
And now we face another ugly choice, this time between the vulgarian Trump and the hard-leftist Hillary. Some will vote for neither or throw away their vote on a third-party candidate. If you are a liberal, I warmly recommend that you vote for Jill Stein.
But if you are a conservative, you must vote for Trump. What is the force of the 'must'? It is at least prudential, if not moral. It is surely not legal. You are not legally obliged to vote in these United States. This is the way it should be.
Politics is a practical business conducted in a far from perfect world. While it is not always about the lesser of evils, in most situations it is, including the one before us. But perhaps we should avoid the word 'evil,' which I have found confuses people. Let's just say that in the real world political choices are not between the good and the bad, or the perfect and the imperfect, but between the better and the worse. Real-world politics is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in something worse. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses nolens volens, willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.
Now maybe that is too strong a way of putting it if precision is at a premium. After all, if you refuse to vote for Trump, that is not a vote for Hillary since you may vote for neither. But by not voting for Trump, you aid Hillary inasmuch as you fail to do something that you can very easily do that will have the admittedly tiny effect of impeding her in her and Obama’s quest to "fundamentally transform America."
I am of course assuming that Trump is better than Hillary. That is easily shown by the SCOTUS argument which has been elaborated by any number of distinguished commentators including William J. Bennett, Dennis Prager, and Hugh Hewitt, not to mention your humble correspondent. The responses to the SCOTUS argument that I have seen are breathtakingly lame. I am not in the mood to go over this ground again. In any case it is time for lunch.
Don't be a fool. Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. Try to achieve something achievable. Don't pine after the unattainable. Impossible dreams are for quixotic ‘liberals,’ smokers of ‘utopium,’ not reality-anchored conservatives. It did not surprise me when I learned that Ted Kennedy's favorite song was The Impossible Dream. Figures!
2024 Postscript. We who opposed Obama were right in retrospect. For Obama begat Biden who has proven to be a disaster on all fronts and is driving a once-great Republic into the dirt. And what fronts might those be? Biden is physically decrepit, mentally non compos mentis, morally corrupt to the core, and a mouthpiece for the most destructive strain of leftism infecting the body politic: wokery. He is a disaster both here and abroad. The litany is long: wide-open borders, inflation, colossal foreign policy errors such as the August 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, funding Iran and with it its terrorist proxies, et cetera ad nauseam. And on top of it all, refusal to take responsibility and endless brazen lying.
And we who rolled the dice for Trump in 2016 were right in retrospect for more reasons than I have time to enumerate. But one above all the others: he secured for us a conservative Supreme Court.