The die, for me at least, has been cast.
After months of argument – with friends, with family, with my own comrades, with countless people online and in person – I have cast my vote in the 2024 election. I won’t be coy: I did not vote for Harris or for Trump. I wrote in “Free Palestine”, not only because I am a communist and do not support the candidates of capital, but because for me, the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which is made possible by US weapons and support, is a red line which no one who wants my support can cross.
But this is not about my personal choice, our yours. Individual people, unless they happen to be exceptionally wealthy and connected, have no say in what the government does, as should be painfully clear by now. What I am attempting here today is something I have tried, to varying degrees of futility, to do in election after election: To break the spell with which the two-party duopoly has bound us, and to clarify our understanding of what is politically possible in this country.
Let’s dispense with the anticapitalist rhetoric for the moment. A huge part of the problem is that the US has two capitalist parties, but I don’t want this to go ten thousand words, so let’s focus on the narrow understanding of politics in the American context: liberal, left, and conservative. Even here we have fundamental misunderstandings, but again, for the sake of brevity, let’s pretend these words mean what we think they mean according to the mainstream media and political discourse.
There are any number of reasons not to vote for the Democratic Party generally and Kamala Harris specifically. But in the context of the present moment, the two biggest ones are these: their material and ideological support of the right-wing Israeli government and its genocidal actions in Gaza, and their historical and proposed future mass deportation by force of millions of immigrant people of color.
I’m not going to waste any time explaining why these things are bad. They are violent, immoral, shameful, politically foolish, and a betrayal of everything liberals are supposed to stand for. I will also not argue the facts of these matters, or that the Democrats are powerless to prevent them; anyone who disputes them is being dishonest, and it is as futile to contest them as it is to fact-check Republicans about their own denials of reality.
What I want to focus on here is what supporting the party in spite of these actions means, and what it says about the nature of the Democratic Party, the ideological nature of its liberal supporters, and the overall political direction of the country. The ship has sailed for now – one way or another, we’ll wake up on November 6th with either Trump or Harris in office. Self-identified liberal ‘realists’ will tell you that’s all that matters, but history does not begin and end with every election. The future of the Democrats, and the future of the country, will be shaped by how we react to its present direction and actions.
We can leave aside the fringe reactions of Democrats who believe the mass slaughter of children in Gaza is somehow justifiable, or who believe that it’s actually a good thing to deport millions of desperate people. We can also skip past the ones who are simply in denial that these things are happening, and the ones who believe that Harris will reverse these policies once she is in office despite all reasonable indications to the contrary. Let’s focus on the most common, and most reasonable, liberal argument.
This argument, to a greater or lesser degree, boils down to this: Maybe Harris does support genocide and mass deportation, but so, too, does Trump, and what he will do to these populations will be worse, so, in the interest of harm reduction, Harris is the only choice. There’s a lot of assumptions backloaded into this, not the least of which is the degree of ignorance or disavowal of the fact that Biden (and before him, Obama) deported more people than Trump, but as far as it goes, it’s a sensible argument. If you believe that there are only two options*, and that Palestinians have to die and immigrants have to be deported no matter who is in charge**, then if you want to see the mass murder and deportation happen at a lesser pace, then your only move is to vote for Harris.
It’s an awfully grim scenario; one needn’t wonder why enthusiasm for voting at all is at such a low ebb when “more or less murder” is the option being presented. But there’s no reason to doubt its inherent logic; Trump will, clearly, be the worse of the two choices. He is the candidate of choice of the right-wing Israeli government; he has loudly declared his intention to continue pursuing mass deportations; and, especially in recent weeks, his rhetoric has leapt from fairly standard reactionary authoritarianism to naked fascism. Whether he is sincere about these things is not really relevant; when someone tells you who they are, as the saying does, believe them.
But, alas, herein lies the crucial component of the counter-argument, the fatal flaw, the thing that makes all of the talk about harm reduction and hard-nosed realism such a lie. What the argument states — what “Whatever you think Harris will do, Trump will do worse” says — contains the seeds of its own destruction, the answer to this gnarly question, for it confirms the very problem before us. Why? Because it affirms, rather than refutes, the idea that fascism is bad and should be fought wherever it arises.
The intention to involve America in foreign wars of aggression and the choice to deport millions of innocent people by force are presented as evidence of Trump’s fascism. (This used to be more clear, but Biden and Harris’ support of the Israeli genocide has muddied the waters; whatever Trump might do — and again, it is hard to argue he would not do worse — we have already signed off on Israel’s massacre of Palestine, its invasion of Lebanon, and its attacks against Syria and Yemen, and are already showing signs of support if they take the war to Iran.) This was once a hallmark of the opposition to Trump! Kids in cages was the scandal of the nation from 2016 to 2020. The mere fact that Trump would pursue these goals is cited as prima facie evidence that he is a fascist.
But if these are fascist positions, how do they become not-fascist when Democrats do them? This isn’t some kind of abstract both-sidesism; it’s straight-up material analysis. If abetting ethnic cleansing and mass deportations are what fascists do, then people who pursue them as policy are fascists. Anti-fascism would pursue the opposite goals: an end to deportation and an end to the support of a genocide. There is no such thing as a lesser fascism. The kids are still in cages. Genocide and deportation are not harm reduction; they are harm. Harm reduction would be not doing them in the first place, and recognizing that it is not necessary to do them. Invading fewer countries, or deporting more people but doing it with a sad face, do not make these actions more acceptable; they are just attempts at blunting the horror through public relations.
The same problem arises with what, on its face, is a far lesser offense: the constant effort by Democrats to ‘reach across the aisle’ and build ‘bipartisanship’ by collecting the endorsements of high-profile Republicans who are resentful of how Trump has blocked their usual route to power, not the least of whom are war criminal and mass murderer Dick Cheney and his daughter, who has voted for Trump more than 90% of the time. Harris has announced her intention to not only create a bipartisan advisory council to review her policy programs, but to bring a Republican into her administration.
All this is despite the near-constant cry from her party that Republicans are a threat to the very existence of American democracy. Note that none of this expansion of the ideological limits of the party extends leftward; the policy goals of progressives, socialists, and other members of the broader left are ever allowed entrance to the big tent, but conservatives of all stripes are streaming through the door. This is a deliberate decision by the party, the ‘for every vote we lose on the left, we gain five on the right’ tactic. The party moves rightward in search of votes, and their policies must move rightward as well.
So, we must ask: If the Democratic Party, in service of electoral victory, continues to pursue policies that are right-wing and reactionary, what kind of party do they become? Certainly not a liberal party; by any sensible estimation, they are not even a centrist party. They have already become a center-right party, and are creeping, with every passing year, towards being nothing but a right party. If the Democratic Party, in service of replacing the left votes that these policy decisions will lose, continues to pursue voters on the right, what kind of people does its base consist of? Certainly not liberals; it becomes, at best, a party of the soft right, of reactionary voters who are uncomfortable with the degree of reaction represented by the G.O.P.
The standard response to this is, well, that is the system we have, and it is the pragmatic thing to work within it and make the most humane decision possible given its constraints. This, too, is true as far as it goes, but it is merely an observation, not a plan of action. If one is to engage in politics, it is one’s duty to pursue one’s political goals, and that is not accomplished by simply shrugging and moving on when one is faced by the obstacles that stand in the way of those goals. The victory of fascism is not permanent. The boundaries of American politics are not set in stone, and never have been.
If the current system can only produce one of two bad outcomes, then if you really care about the things you say you care about, your first and foremost priority should be to change that system into one that can produce something else. Electoral reform, to choose just one element of the systemic change that is needed in America today, should be pursued with vigor by every liberal, so that they do not find themselves facing the hold-your-nose-and-vote-blue dilemma they claim to hate.
But I do not see any urgency or vigor towards achieving this goal. It’s understandable why the Democratic Party itself will never seriously work towards electoral reform, because it is obviously in its best interest to remain one of only two possible options; but voters are harder to figure out. When they win, they usually become complacent and trust that the new administration will do well; when they lose, they simply wait for the next election and hope for the best. True, it is hard to build organization, create mass movements, and pressure political leaders to create change; but they don’t say they’re not doing it because it’s too difficult. Usually, what they say is that their woes are all the left’s fault for insisting principle has any place in politics.
None of this is difficult to understand. It does not rely on abstract reasoning or insider knowledge or precise knowledge of electoral calculations; it relies only on observable reality and a knowledge of history. Pursuing reactionary policies is the purview of reactionary political parties. Building coalition and solidarity with the right wing pushes politics parties to the right. These crises of governance are inevitable because they arise from crises of capitalism (damn, I said I wasn’t gonna do that), and so they will not go away on their own, and it is an extremely unlikely possibility that they can be stopped by voting alone, because no political party has ever dominated in every election without fail.
What is needed is a fundamental shift in how people use their political power in America, and step one is to not endorse policies — and the people enacting those policies — that you find morally reprehensible. There are many steps to follow, but that is the first, and without it, nothing will change, because the parties will simply read your vote as a confirmation that they are doing what you want. Without that very first act of courage and independence, without that initial act of resistance and refusal, you are simply picking the color of the uniform worn by the executioners.
*: There aren’t.
**: They don’t.