Democrats Are Suddenly Okay With Voting For A Man Accused Of Rape

Yesterday in a New York Times column Linda Hirshman said she believes Tara Reade, but she’s going to vote for Joe Biden anyway because anything is better than Donald Trump.

That is to say, she believes Biden sexually assaulted Reade in a locker room when Reade worked on his Senate staff years ago. It’s nonsense at this point to try to discount or denigrate every new corroborating witness who comes forward to bolster Reade’s claim, Hirshman says. The accusation of sexual assault against Biden is credible, period.

Therefore, supporting Biden, she says, is “agonizingly hard for me to do.” But it must be done because Trump is “the worst president in the history of the Republic.” Plus, compared with the good Biden can do, “the cost of dismissing Tara Reade—and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors—is worth it.”

A presidential election is a binary choice, and sometimes you have to bite the bullet and make a utilitarian calculation. Sometimes you have to say to yourself, “I don’t care what he did, I don’t care that he’s a moral degenerate and a narcissist and a liar, it’s better than the alternative.”

That is, you have to justify your vote not on the basis of some unrealistic purity test but on whether you think your candidate will advance the things you care about and protect you and yours. You also have to consider whether it’s morally acceptable for you to tacitly support the opposing candidate by not voting or casting a protest vote for some random weirdo.

Based on that cold logic, Hirshman should now understand why half the country voted for Trump in 2016.

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