Update (Sep. 17): Several people, here and elsewhere, wrote to tell me that while they completely agreed with my strategic and moral stance in this post, they think that it’s the ads of Republican Voters Against Trump, rather than the Lincoln Project, that have been most effective in changing Trump supporters’ minds. So please consider donating to RVAT instead or in addition! In fact, what the hell, I’ll match donations to RVAT up to $1000.
For the past few months, I’ve alternated between periods of debilitating depression and (thankfully) longer stretches when I’m more-or-less able to work. Triggers for my depressive episodes include reading social media, watching my 7-year daughter struggle with prolonged isolation, and (especially) contemplating the ongoing apocalypse in the American West, the hundreds of thousands of pointless covid deaths, and an election in 48 days that if I didn’t know such things were impossible in America would seem likely to produce a terrifying standoff as a despot and millions of his armed loyalists refuse to cede control. Meanwhile, catalysts for my relatively functional periods have included teaching my undergrad quantum information class, Zoom calls with my students, life on Venus?!? (my guess is no, but almost entirely due to priors), learning new math (fulfilling a decades-old goal, I’m finally working my way through Paul Cohen’s celebrated proof of the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis—more about that later!).
Of course, when you feel crushed by the weight of the world’s horribleness, it improves your mood to be able even just to prick the horribleness with a pin. So I was gratified that, in response to a previous post, Shtetl-Optimized readers contributed at least $3,000, the first $2,000 of which I matched, mostly to the Biden-Harris campaign but a little to the Lincoln Project.
Alas, a commenter was unhappy with the latter:
Lincoln Project? Really? … Pushing the Overton window rightward during a worldwide fascist dawn isn’t good. I have trouble understanding why even extremely smart people have trouble with this sort of thing.
Since this is actually important, I’d like to spend the rest of this post responding to it.
For me it’s simple.
What’s the goal right now? To defeat Trump. In the US right now, that’s the prerequisite to every other sane political goal.
What will it take to achieve that goal? Turnout, energizing the base, defending the election process … but also, if possible, persuading a sliver of Trump supporters in swing states to switch sides, or at least vote third party or abstain.
Who is actually effective at that goal? Well, no one knows for sure. But while I thought the Biden campaign had some semi-decent ads, the Lincoln Project’s best stuff seems better to me, just savagely good.
Why are they effective? The answer seems obvious: for the same reason why a jilted ex is a more dangerous foe than a stranger. If anyone understood how to deprogram a Republican from the Trump cult, who would it be: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or a fellow Republican who successfully broke from the cult?
Do I agree with the Lincoln Republicans about most of the “normal” issues that Americans once argued about? Not at all. Do I hold them, in part, morally responsible for creating the preconditions to the current nightmare? Certainly.
And should any of that cause me to boycott them? Not in my moral universe. If Churchill and FDR could team up with Stalin, then surely we in the Resistance can temporarily ally ourselves with the rare Republicans who chose their stated principles over power when tested—their very rarity attesting to the nontriviality of their choice.
To my mind, turning one’s back on would-be allies, in a conflict whose stakes obviously overshadow what’s bad about those allies, is simultaneously one of the dumbest and the ugliest things that human beings can do. It abandons reason for moral purity and ends up achieving neither.
Follow