On the Importance (Or Not!) of Electing a Good Politician to Get a Good Reform or Stop a Bad Governmental Policy (like a war) in the Short Term:
What does history suggest in this regard?
by John Spritzler
March 11, 2026
This gag made the rounds back in 1965: “They told me if I voted for Barry Goldwater for president instead of Lyndon Johnson then American boys would be sent to fight and die in an Asian war. And they were right! I did vote for Barry Goldwater, and American boys were indeed sent to fight and die in an Asian war.”
Some people believe that in additions to building the egalitarian revolutionary it is nonetheless important also to devote time and energy to elect a good politician to high office in order to make things better—win an important reform or stop a terrible governmental policy—in the short term.
Is this reasoning borne out by history? Let us see.
Who were the politicians in high office when the government(s) did these good things or stopped doing these bad things?
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Who was the president of South Africa who brought the system of apartheid to an end? Was it Nelson Mandela? No! It was F. W. de Klerk, the leader of the ultra-pro apartheid party in South Africa.
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Who was the president of the United States who withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam and thereby ended the horrible Vietnam War? Was it the peace candidate, Gene McCarthy (or George McGovern or Robert F. Kennedy)? No! It was Richard Nixon, the president who had earlier viciously escalated the war with horrendous bombing of civilians in Cambodia (PDF). (“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.” ― Anthony Bourdain [And we all know which president Henry Kissinger served as National Security Advisor and Sec. of State.])
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Who was the president of the United States who made sure that Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act that abolished the racist Jim Crow laws? Was it Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X? No! It was a man who conspired with FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, to orchestrate the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., as the book below makes very persuasively evident (Skyhorse publishing, 2018):
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The president who abolished Jim Crow was a man who was an outright racist who used the “N” word all the time, as reported by even MS.NOW here. It was—you guessed it—Lyndon Baines Johnson, the ‘good’ politician we were told to vote for in 1964 in order to prevent Barry Goldwater from sending American boys to fight and die in an Asian war. (Read here WHY this racist warmongering politician was forced to end Jim Crow.)
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Who was the chancellor of Germany who abolished the horrible euthanasia program that “killed useless eaters”? Was it some nice-guy politician? No! I described this episode of history in my book on World War II (online for free here (PDF), and at Amazon):
One of the most dramatic examples of how the Nazis failed to win over peasants to the regime’s anti-human racist world view was enormous opposition by peasants to the Nazi euthanasia action. Shortly after the war began, Hitler gave a secret order to doctors that they should kill patients who were a drain on the Aryan race due to injury or physical or mental handicap. In two years more than 70,000 people were killed by this action.69 As people realized what was going on, they grew alarmed and angry and a number of their Church leaders wrote letters condemning the action and gave sermons denouncing it. The unrest in Wurttemberg in the summer and autumn of 1940 was sufficient to persuade top Nazi Heinrich Himmler to close down the extermination center in Grafeneck.70 One Nazi report, written by a Nazi who did not realize that the euthanasia action was secretly ordered by Hitler himself, said, “Whoever gave the advice to carry out these measures in this way must have a poor knowledge ofthe mentality of the people. They [these measures] are all the more keenly discussed and condemned and [they] destroy, as hardly anything else, confidence also in the Fuhrer personally...The people reject in their feelings the thought that we have the right to gain financial and economic benefit from the elimination of national comrades who are no longer capable of working.”71 Church leaders, Kershaw writes, “were responding to popular opinion as much as leading it" when they articulated the protests. When Bishop Galen ofMunster gave a sermon “thunderously denouncing the ‘murder’ of the mentally sick as opposed both to the Law of God and to the laws ofthe German State,” local Nazi leaders moved to hang him. But “Goebbels pointed out, however, that ‘if anything were done against the bishop, the population ofMunster could be regarded as lost to the war effort, and the same could confidently be said of the whole of Westphalia.' ”77 At this point Hitler gave the order to halt the euthanasia action.
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The leader who “did the right thing” by abolishing the horrible euthanasia program was none other than Adolph Hitler!
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“But wait!’ you might say. It took a good politician—FDR—to enact the New Deal, right?
Wrong. Read here WHY FDR enacted the New Deal. It was because he knew this was the only way to head off a revolution by increasingly revolutionary and extremely militant workers in the 1930s.
What history tells us
F.W. de Klerk knew that, because of the world wide and increasingly strong movement against apartheid, his choice was to either dump apartheid and thereby keep the rich in power, or risk having the rich be overthrown from power. FDR only enacted the New Deal to prevent revolution. Lyndon Johnson and the billionaires in power likewise figured that if they didn’t dump Jim Crow they’d risk losing power altogether. Richard Nixon was informed by the U.S. military brass that the American GIs were refusing to fight the Viet Cong. This, plus the fact that MLK, Jr. had joined the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement together as one movement with an increasingly revolutionary aim, made Nixon and the ruling class realize that it was necessary to end the Vietnam War in order to keep the ruling class in power. Hitler knew that if he did NOT end the euthanasia program his power would be dramatically weakened.
The idea that it is important to elect a good politician to end a bad government policy or enact a good one rests on a fundamental failure to understand reality. Whenever these good things happen it is NOT because there happened to be a good politician in office. It is because the ruling class feared revolution if it did not make these good things happen. When the ruling class wants such a good thing to happen it directs the politician currently in office—no matter who it may be, a conservative or liberal it matters not—to make that good thing happen.
The ruling billionaire class was never elected (as a class) and cannot be un-elected. The ruling billionaire class uses politicians to control us, it never is controlled by politicians. When the masses threaten revolution because of anger at this or that, the ruling billionaire class will use ANY politician in office—be it a Genghis Khan or a Nelson Mandela—to do what it (the ruling class) believes will best keep it in power. What the ruling class decides to do has nothing whatsoever to do with the public image (good guy or bad guy) of the politician that happens to be in office.
Electing a good politician is not the way to make the changes we want; building the egalitarian revolutionary movement is. The ruling class tries to lure us into doing the former in order to prevent us from doing the latter. That is one of the main reasons the ruling class holds elections in the first place!
As I wrote about in my book on World War II (online free here (PDF) and also at Amazon), the German aristocratic and capitalist ruling class in the pre-Hitler year of 1932 went back and forth about what kind of politician to use to control the increasingly revolutionary German working class. First they chose to use an FDR-type liberal politician, and then they decided to use Adolph Hitler:
Germany’s rulers feared not only working class votes, but a general strike that could lead to civil war. On December 2, General Kurt von Schleicher told the current Chancellor, Franz von Papen, “The police and armed services could not guarantee to maintain transport and supply services in the event of a general strike, nor would they be able to ensure law and order in the event of a civil war."18
Hindenburg subsequently dismissed Papen and appointed Schleicher as Chancellor, telling Papen: “I am too old and have been through too much to accept the responsibility for a civil war. Our only hope is to let Schleicher try his luck.”19
Schleicher, responding to the same Great Depression and the same kind of working class militancy that forced FDR to offer Americans a New Deal, tried to pacify the German working class with similar promises, but workers did not trust him. Afterjust fifty-seven days in office the elite decided that only Hitler could do what had to be done.
Twenty-six days before Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, Baron Kurt von Schroeder, a Cologne banker, had a private meeting with Hitler, three other Nazi leaders, and Papen. During this meeting Papen and Hitler agreed that Social Democrats, Communists, and Jews had to be eliminated from leading positions in Germany, and Schroeder promised that German business interests would take over the debts of the Nazi Party.
Twelve days later, Goebbels reported that the financial position of the (previously bankrupt) Nazi party had “fundamentally improved overnight.”20
When members of Germany’s elite prevailed upon Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor January 30, 1933, the reason was because they were convinced that only Hitler would do whatever was necessary decisively to defeat workers’ power.
The lesson of history is that it is only the fear of revolution, and not the ‘goodness’ of whatever politician happens to be in office, that may cause the ruling class to implement a good reform or stop implementing a terrible policy.
The lesson of history is that we should devote ALL of our activism time and energy towards building the egalitarian revolutionary movement, and none of it towards trying to elect a good politician on the mistaken belief that this is how to get a short-term improvement.
Of course it may (may!) be possible to use the electoral system for the purpose of building the egalitarian revolutionary movement, i.e., by using the electoral process to reach the public with the egalitarian revolution idea. But in this case it is important never to sacrifice spreading the egalitarian revolution idea to the goal of “doing what it realistically takes to win an election.” Almost for sure, many of the people in a campaign to elect a good politician will (wrongly in my experience) believe that the way to get the most votes is to downplay or even censor any talk about egalitarian revolution. There will likely be a lot of pressure from such people to avoid spreading the egalitarian revolution idea in the campaign. It would be a terrible mistake to yield to such pressure. Indeed, the almost inevitability of such pressure is a reason to doubt that it is wise to try to use an electoral campaign for a good politician in the first place.