JUNE 3, 2020 – An attorney I know often quotes Voltaire famous line, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” The lawyer’s point: by pressing too hard for perfection, you risk blowing the deal that your client desperately wants. At the same time, you must touch all the bases and home plate to score, no matter how perfect your base-running and slide are otherwise.
Recently, I was reminded of these axioms while talking politics with a neighbor. He remarked that his daughter, a “Bernie-Sis,” was so disgruntled with Biden that she might not vote. In other words, because Biden is an old, white guy with an old white guy liberal agenda, the Bernie-Bros and Sisses might boycott the election. In my opinion, that’s dangerously irresponsible: insistence on a 100% progressive agenda ensures that the Naked Emperor will be re-elected. The end result will be the end of our country. (But then again, I myself am an old white guy liberal.)
However, I know many libertarians who are perfectionists too. They’d never vote for Trump, but because Biden is, well, an old white guy with an old white guy liberal agenda, they’ll support some third-party candidate or not vote. Again, insistence on a purist agenda will allow the human wrecking ball to raze our country.
The problem with perfectionism, progressive or libertarian, is that representative democracy is by definition, impure. As Bill Maher put it so succinctly, “Democracy is a system under which you get to live with people you can’t stand.” That description is particularly apt with regard to a democracy encompassing 330 million people who occupy a 5,000-mile spectrum of interests and attitudes. “Perfection” under such circumstances is so impossible that to strive for it at the ballot box winds up being the enemy of “good.”
Never has “good” ever been so endangered.
None of which is to say that “perfection” doesn’t have its place in the examination of issues and policy formulation. It does. And in the long haul, democracy suffers to the extent thoughtful, informed people don’t look beyond the immediacy of interests and issues; don’t examine systemic causes and apply “perfectionist” ideas to effect fundamental change.
But we are amidst the biggest crisis of leadership in our history. “Perfectionist” ideas must await salvation of “good.” In fact, perfectionist ideals—however progressive or libertarian—are now dependent on survival of “good.” The human wrecking ball in the White House has become such an enemy of the values and principles on which our country is grounded, the whole structure is in danger of imploding. If, as a “perfectionist,” you won’t vote for Biden in November and Democrats for Congress, then you will be putting your own knee on the neck of democracy in America, however flawed it was and is.
To pull ourselves back from the brink, Democratic wins—White House and Congress—must be overwhelming. Only by an electoral smackdown will reactionary forces be stilled long enough for democracy itself . . . to breathe. Only if it can breathe can it recover; only if “good” is saved can “perfection” live.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
