Why We Vote For the Lesser of Two Embarrassments

We hold our nose — and pull the lever.

Why do so many voters support the kind of candidates that we know are deeply flawed? The kind we would have laughed off the stage just a generation ago.

Candidates like Donald Trump — a man who is chronically dishonest, vulgar, and vengeful. Yet none of these things disqualified him. He was elected not once but twice.

We didn’t simply overlook his faults, we embraced them — same with Graham Platner in Maine. He had a Nazi tattoo on his chest for almost 20 years — but voters shrugged. No big deal. And in Texas, Republican voters tossed out John Cronyn, a decent, well-respected man who served honorably in the U.S. Senate for more than 20 years, and picked a philanderer who was impeached by his own party in the Texas House.

Yes, we acknowledge they may be the kind of people who lack character, but they’re not phonies — at least that’s what we tell ourselves. They’re authentic. And nowadays what passes for authentic goes a long way.

But there’s another reason we vote for people like Trump, Platner and Paxton. And it’s not complicated. It’s simply that we’ve convinced ourselves the other side is worse. A lot worse. And in a binary system, where we have to choose between two candidates from the major parties, “the other side is worse” argument carries a lot of weight.

Which brings me to a recent column by Gerry Baker in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s part of what he wrote:

“Few things could induce me to vote for another four years of the sort of Republicanism we are enduring now. But one of them is definitely the alternative of Islamist-friendly, open-the-borders, defund-the-police, kill-the-billionaires socialists running the country. Out of America’s vast diversity we are somehow at risk of narrowing our choice to that between a rampantly corrupt, inept, ideologically and practically capricious personality cult of a party and a party of graduate student activists with terrorist sympathies and ideas about economics that were discredited half a century ago.”

Makes sense, I guess — but only if you’re standing on a certain side of the line.

On the other side are a lot of younger voters — Baker is 64 years old — who actually embrace much of what he rejects.

They don’t like Israel. Some even support Hamas. They hate billionaires. They’re no fans of the police. They like “free” stuff. And they don’t believe the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.

So Gerry Baker, a conservative, will hold his nose and vote for a party led by a narcissist who tells the truth only when it’s convenient — a party of weak men and women who tolerate Trump’s pathologies because they know he’ll unleash the MAGA faithful on them if they don’t. All because we tell ourselves the other side is worse.

We deserve better than this, don’t we?

Gerry Baker thinks so.

“There’s no prospect of a third-party breakthrough,” he writes. “But if I can live in a country where I can have my steak done medium-rare and washed down with a glass of a liquid that is one-third soy, one-third oat and one-third half and half, why can’t I choose a government that is sane, honest, patriotic, responsible and worthy of the people it governs?”

Fair enough. We do deserve better. But here’s another question: What if this is exactly what we get when we keep rewarding bad behavior?

Politicians don’t lower the bar all by themselves. Voters help them do it. If we keep settling for the lesser of two embarrassments, we shouldn’t be shocked when embarrassment becomes the new standard.

In a democracy, sooner or Ilater, we get the government we tolerate — and maybe, whether we like hearing it or not, the government we deserve.

Maybe someday we’ll get back to something that seems — for lack of a better word — normal. When candidates don’t do and say the kind of things that make us cringe.

When Donald Trump and the other “authentic” politicians are a mere dot in the rearview mirror.

As far as I’m concerned, that day can’t come soon enough.