Why I Am Begrudgingly Voting for Kamala Harris

By Jacob Weindling  |  October 24, 2024 | 2:05pm
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Elections 2024 Election
Why I Am Begrudgingly Voting for Kamala Harris

I understand how this vote can seem contradictory to my well-established position that Kamala Harris has been part of an administration that has consciously fueled a genocide, and I don’t blame anyone for calling me a hypocrite because I sure feel like one casting it, but I also have come to accept that’s a natural consequence of being an American. In a perfect world, the Democratic Party would collapse into the dustbin of history where it belongs so it can make way for a new kind of political party that isn’t in thrall to soulless consultants and fundraisers who believe in nothing other than the next election cycle and whose entire reason to get up in the morning is so they can scam seniors out of their life savings. But if the last year has taught us anything, we live in the opposite of a perfect world.

I hate how many Democratic partisans take the posture of, “tough shit, it’s a binary system so what choice do you have? We have to back the Dems no matter what.” This kind of flippant attitude is one of the big reasons the Democrats have been so successful shifting right, as their voters have been trained to treat compromise of any kind as a virtue unto itself while shaming anyone who doesn’t fall in line with whatever happens to be the party priority at the current moment. This is how you wind up with a situation where people who were decrying Trump’s immigration policies as unspeakably evil eight years ago are now echoing the Democratic Party’s stance that Trump’s immigration policies are now just common-sense bipartisan solutions while the Democratic presidential nominee criticizes Trump for not building enough border wall.

There are so many good outcomes that could spring from the collapse of the Democratic Party that it’s difficult not to root for it, and losing to Donald Trump twice sure seems like an adequate catalyst to send this party into a spiral.

But that collapse doesn’t happen in a vacuum and if you accept this fundamental shift in our system, you must address the reality it presents: who fills that power vacuum? The left, the neocons or the people with all the guns?

This is the hardest vote I have ever had to cast. I wrote “How Can You Vote for the People Committing a Genocide” to voice my fundamental concern around the morality of this choice. In that article, I wrote that I generally view voting as strategic pittance we are afforded as citizens of this “democracy,” and I don’t ascribe much of a moral value to my actions when I’m participating in our morally bankrupt system. But this is a bridge too far. The only thing that could push me back over it is a similar threat on the other side–and there is–one who is classifying you and me and everyone else who isn’t a part of his cult as the “enemy within” while waxing poetic about Hitler’s generals.

I also hate when liberals lecture people about the danger of Trump. If someone is being flippant about a second Trump presidency, sure, educate them. But we lived through one already, most people are well aware of what he is capable of and how seriously to take his vast array of authoritarian promises, and focusing solely on Trump has a way of giving a pass to the Biden-Harris administration’s horrific record. It’s another way to shift the party right by letting Trump set the bounds of reason and adjusting to Trump’s stance, like how Biden has backed Jared Kushner’s Saudi-centric “peace” plan for the Middle East that is now standard liberal foreign policy.

What partisan liberals need to understand is that the Biden administration fueling Israel’s genocide of Palestine put Democrats on a level of evil at or above Trump in many people’s eyes, especially those with loved ones under Israel’s siege. The embrace of Trump’s immigration policy and the Dick Cheney bearhug does not make them look much, or any, better than the Republican Party to many others who remember the world before Trump distorted it. Doing idiotic things like this below does not help either. The Democrats are incompetent and deserve to lose to a bloviating game show host with his brain seeping out his ears.

So why am I voting for someone who is part of an administration that if I had my druthers, I would lock every person in it away in the Hague forever? Three reasons.

Trump Is Worse for the Left

Writing as someone with contacts in lefty movements, I can confirm that there is at least a level of consistent communication between activist groups and Democratic members of Congress and the executive branch. How effective it is, who knows, but we at least have a seat at the table in a way we never have before, and that seat is gone if Trump wins. Lefties who just got into politics in 2016 or later need to understand that this is the best period for lefty politics in a generation. We don’t know how long this may last, and if the Kamala Harris/Dick Cheney bromance is any indication, there are many in the party itching to close that chapter and get back to the dead-eyed Clinton years that helped lead us to Trump.

I thought David Klion, “writer for all your favorite lefty magazines,” made good points in this thread about our current position relative to 2016.

The left has made real progress. Don’t take this for granted. We got Joe freaking Biden to pass the most ambitious climate policy in American history and it’s working. A significant portion of the Democratic base is sympathetic to socialist ideas, more so than they are to capitalist ones according to a Data for Progress poll from 2022. I totally understand the burn-it-all-down feeling because this depraved fucking system deserves it, but that includes our victories too. The Democrats will shift right if they lose, that is clear as day from how they have run this election (just look at how willing the Dems were to step back and watch Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush get picked off by AIPAC). The left will be the biggest losers of a Trump presidency while Dick Cheney gets an office at the DNC.

If you don’t think the left can get shut out of the Democratic Party, check out the 2004 Democratic primary after the 2000 election loss, won easily by a loaf of establishment white bread, John Kerry. He beat South Carolinian John Edwards, the party’s chosen rising star who joined Kerry on the ticket (before later being indicted by the Department of Justice). Coming in a distant third was the lefty candidate Howard Dean, who was doomed before his infamous scream many misremember as the event that cost him the election, and fourth was General Wesley Clark. That is what Democratic primaries could very easily look like going forward if Trump wins, and it’s a lot more effective to build power from a position of strength than from weakness. The Bernie/Warren policy teams from 2020 were a real victory, as exemplified by people in the Biden administration like Lina Khan making historic progress against corporate greed.

As Naomi Klein noted, don’t ever assume that it cannot get worse. American history proves otherwise. She and others whose opinion I greatly respect like Rep. Ilhan Omar, Zeteo Editor-in-Chief Mehdi Hasan and Senior Democratic strategist who helped organize Michigan’s Uncommitted Movement, Waleed Shahid, all have endorsed Kamala Harris in part because they want to protect what we have won, and this thread from Shahid summarizes this line of thinking as well as any I have seen.

I Have a Duty to Protect Vulnerable People

Israel’s genocide of Gaza is and has been the biggest story in the world for the last year. I am a Jew who has never bought into this colonial vision of Israel, and the plight of the Palestinians has been at the forefront of my concerns. It still is as the genocide accelerates in the north and Israel expands its war to Lebanon–all enthusiastically backed by the United States only issuing tepid red lines they never planned to adhere to in the first place. I consider the Biden administration and his State Department and everyone in Congress who has voted to arm and enable Israel’s genocide an enemy of humanity.

But Trump is promising “a really violent day” in his bid to deport tens of millions of people from America. He has long been infatuated with our nuclear arsenal, so much so that he wanted to use it on a freaking hurricane. There are an endless line of hawks in D.C. lined up to encourage him to realize their half-century-long goal of waging war on Iran, and a Trump election would surely place the world the closest it has been to nuclear conflict since the Cold War. North Korea, who he wanted to nuke and blame someone else for it, entering the war in Ukraine, is another harrowing global development pointed towards Trump’s worst instincts.

Not to mention that all the smart money in the world is betting on Trump’s economic policies bringing us certain doom, and if you are a lefty who believes that economic malaise is at the root of fascism’s appeal, then fascism should only get more appealing to more people under a Trump-driven economic crash. He has already helped take away a women’s right to choose in America and would continue the fight to restrict the fundamental human rights of women, all while promising to use the military to put down protest movements against him. Hysteric #Resistance liberals are right about one thing: fascism is indeed at our doorstep.

The thing a lot of them miss is, it never left.

At Paste Politics, I once wrote about the dynamic on the Polish and Jewish side of my family, where thanks to the evolution of American racism and how some nonwhite people become white over time, I am the first white man in my family in America’s eyes. While my personal relationship with whiteness and Judaism is endlessly complicated, the world treats me like a white man, therefore that is what I functionally am.

And white men, we have a duty in this misogynist, white supremacist nation to protect the victims of white supremacy. My own personal feelings take a backseat to the millions of people I can help lend my privilege to. This is a question of relative impact. Does withholding my vote do more for the vulnerable people of Gaza, Lebanon and the U.S. than voting for Kamala Harris does?

I don’t think so.

Some may point out that I live in one of the 43 states that do not matter to the electoral college, which dramatically lessens the impact of my vote, but the popular vote is still important. Not because there is a value Harris can win by where Trump will accept that he has lost, but because Trump will claim he won the election no matter what, and the war after it is going to be fought partially in the court of public opinion where things like the popular vote will matter. Unless you live in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Georgia, your vote does not matter to this broken imperialistic system, but it still does to the people living underneath its boot.

This Isn’t a Democracy Anyway

If you think at this point that the United States is a genuine democracy, then I am sorry, but you are more naive than adults who still believe in Santa Claus. This has never been a democracy for, by and of the people. Women have had the right to vote for just 16 years longer than slavery existed as a legal institution in America. One of the first things we wrote down in Article I Section 2 Clause 3 was that different people were literally valued differently to the organization of the union, establishing that “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

America was founded as an aristocratic republic, a nation run by land-owning white men to rule over their subjects, a dynamic which still endures to this day. Socialists are fond of correctly saying there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and that applies to interacting with the largest government that is a wholly owned subsidiary of global capitalism too. Voting for either political party is a vote for an empire which has proven itself to be opposed to the overall progress of mankind, but voting for the Green Party is to be duped by a vanity candidate who floats in once every four years to pretend she’s some principled warrior while never building any lefty power in the intervening period.

In short, we’re fucked, so don’t put too much pressure on yourself for facing down the atrocious choices you have been presented.

The decision is between people who have done a genocide and a man who openly aspires to do more. This is the United States of America with its mask off. The Democrats are forever branded as the party of war criminals, and they are also the best that this sclerotic, decaying 18th century system built as a compromise between slave owners and slavery financiers has to offer its people. When you consider both how fundamentally and intentionally broken this all is, it becomes a lot easier to detach any moral value from your vote. That doesn’t change the fact that this vote rewards people who are authoring a genocide, but such is life in a collapsing empire.

I am voting for Kamala Harris because I want to protect the gains the left has made in the Biden era as well as the billions of people who are most under threat from Trump. Her participation in Israel’s genocide of Gaza is unforgivable and should appear at the top of her record forever. She has given little indication much would change for Gaza under a Harris administration, and the best hope that we have at this point is that like most Vice Presidents not named Dick Cheney and Joe Biden, she has had little input on foreign policy and does meaningfully want to split from Biden on Israel, but her refusal to do so in public is another campaign mistake among many.

Morality left America a long time ago, if it ever existed here, now all we can do is try to stave off complete and utter disaster. That’s what a vote for Kamala Harris is–no more, no less. I would encourage my fellow lefties—especially in swing states—to abandon the notion that votes for Democrats have any moral endorsement behind them, appreciate the gains that lefties have made since 2016, and accept the bleak realities we are faced with in the age of collapse.

 
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