I will disagree - which is rare with you, Joe.
Lesser evil has consistently proven to move us the other way - Not toward liberty, but always away from it... It is definitively the shedding of principle things. That which is not insisted upon will not be defended in the next election. And so it goes. Soon it is all nothing but lip service.
And the mechanism of that is indeed mechanical. Lesser is the excuse, but it removes all consequence for no performance. We all 'know' somehow we'd have been worse off if (x)... Which is not necessarily true because it is actually unknown.
To me it is the ultimate cop out. The easy way. And we know where the wide road goes.
In the end it is not winning. Because what we are supposedly defending will be all gone.
Permit me to explain, by "lesser evil" I mean less evil than what we have now, today. NOT merely less evil than the obviously more evil alternatives proffered by the opposition.
People are going to have to be eased into being free, unless they are mad enough to fight for it.
Few have that fire in their bellies.
The concept of making their own decisions, being responsible for outcomes which are not guaranteed, having to do on their own, for themselves (or even getting to know and trust those in their community to work with them to make things happen) terrifies most in this day and age.
One hundred sixty plus years of becoming increasingly removed from the concepts of this Republic will not be reversed peacefully overnight.