Half-Truth

 I wish I could say that, since Donald Trump is totally wrong, that means that Democrats are always right, and that everything they do to prevail against him in this week's midterm elections is therefore justified—but unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case. 

Obviously, the big story about election interference right now is the fact that Trump has turned the U.S. Department of Justice into an instrument of his personal authority, and is using it to sow doubt about the integrity of the vote for transparently corrupt and partisan purposes. 

But just because this is a much greater threat to democracy than any dirty tricks Democrats may pull on the campaign trail, that doesn't mean I can give the latter a pass. 

If the New York Times's recent bombshell reporting on Mary Peltola's campaign is accurate, and they really did coordinate to put a second "Dan Sullivan" on Alaska's four-person ballot, that does indeed seem indefensible to me. It seems like a blatant effort to mislead voters. 

In response, the best excuse Democratic strategists and pundits seem to be able to come up with is: "But everybody does it." One such person reportedly tried to diminish the allegations against Peltola by "post[ing] a series of examples of G.O.P. chicanery on X." As the Times quotes one Peltola defender on social media: "this sort of thing is not really new." 

But even if true, this is merely the "tu quoque" fallacy that we have long rejected when used in defense of Trump's unethical behavior. Robert K. Merton writes in his On the Shoulders of Giants, about the "defensive tu quoque (thou also)," and provides as an example: "meeting a charge of plagiarism by retorting that the accuser has himself plagiarized." 

Here, the argument seems to be: "so what if she ballot-stacked? Republicans have themselves ballot-stacked."

Republicans have often tried to use this argument to exonerate Trump. Every time he weaponizes the Justice Department against one of his political opponents, they try to come up with examples of when Democrats did the same. 

In both cases, though, the argument is a fallacy because the goal should be to level up not to level down. We should expect all politicians, regardless of party, to actually behave with integrity. 

Moreover, I'm not sure it's quite true that "everyone" ballot-stacks. Defenders of Peltola may be able to point to a long series of instances in which PACs and political dark money have backed "spoiler" third party candidates to take votes from their opponents, but that's not precisely the same thing. 

A person who votes for a Green Party or Libertarian candidate, even if in doing so they are diverting votes from Democrats, at least knows what they are getting. They are choosing to back an outsider candidate who is unlikely to prevail, and they basically know who they are voting for. 

The trick here, by contrast, appears to have been to try to deceive people who meant to vote for one Dan Sullivan into accidentally voting for the other. This goes beyond simply backing a "spoiler" in the race, to actually subverting the whole point of democracy, which is that the candidate who actually won the most intentional votes on their behalf should prevail. 

As Elias Canetti writes in his Crowds and Power, the social purpose of a ballot is to substitute for a contest of arms a periodic contest of armies of supporters. Instead of having a violent civil war every four years, in other words, we agree to match arms only metaphorically, and see who has the majority of votes behind them. 

Anyone who tries to fudge or muddy this process, then, and make it something other than a straightforward measuring contest of who has the most votes, "lets death in again without knowing it," Canetti writes (Stewart translation).

The Alaska Senate election, then, like every election, should we decided based on how many people actually want Peltola to be the senator, versus how many people want Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan to be senator, and how many people want some other third party candidate to be senator. If people want to vote for the third and fourth candidates on the ballot on the merits, that's their choice. But the result should not be skewed by people accidentally thinking they are voting for someone they are not. 

Nor is this the only example of bad behavior from Democratic Senate candidates. Haley Stevens is right to be uncomfortable and expect an apology from some of the recent rhetoric from the El-Sayed campaign that arguably promotes antisemitic tropes. Indeed, some of them really sound like they could have come from Nathanael West's "Shagpoke Whipple," the antisemitic populist demagogue in his great Depression-era classic A Cool Million. 

One of the most controversial pro-El-Sayed ads—which features a couple blaming Israel for making them pay more for eggs at the store—was produced by an outside PAC that was not presumably coordinating with the official campaign, so El-Sayed cannot really be blamed for that. But another ad—this one apparently from the official campaign team—reportedly spotlights Tucker Carlson's idiosyncratic support for El-Sayed. 

Last month, I was complaining on this blog that El-Sayed had not done enough to disavow overtly Carlson's support. Now, he is apparently choosing to advertise it like it's something to be proud of. For a reminder, Carlson has promoted Holocaust revisionism and is basically the new Father Coughlin of our time. The fact that he also doesn't seem to like Israel has an all too simple and obvious explanation, and any Democratic strategist who pretends not to see it is simply being disingenuous. 

This is what I mean about how Democrats, as much as they may be the good guys—or at least, the better guys—in this election, do not exactly have their hands clean here. 

To be sure, even the worst allegations against Peltola's campaign pale in comparison to Trump ordering the Justice Department to file legally groundless lawsuits to try to preemptively set aside the results of the election (but only if Peltola wins), or trying to intimidate voters and sow doubt about the results in California by making high-profile raids for the benefit of news cameras targeting a statistically insignificant group of noncitizens accused of voting unlawfully. 

So too, the questionable "tropes" in El-Sayed's campaign are far more ambiguous than the overt, naked Islamophobic bigotry that Trump and his allies have deployed to try to denigrate Muslims. 

What we seem to have in these midterms, then, is simply another example of that off-repeated plight in politics: the match-up between the "half-truth" and the "total lie," as Arthur Koestler put it. Trump here represents a total lie. But that doesn't mean the other side is all true. They are, at best, a "half-truth." 

Koestler advised us to support the half-truth over the total lie. That's why I still think any Alaskan who can do so should vote for Mary Peltola, and any Michigander for El-Sayed. We don't need to fall for what Koestler called the "fallacy of clean hands," according to which we are not entitled to do anything at all in politics until we have found the morally pure way of doing it. 

But we also don't need to simply accept the "half-truth" in its imperfect state and give up our efforts to improve it, Koestler wrote. We certainly don't have to make disingenuous excuses on its behalf, when we can all see its ethical breaches for what they are.