To other USAmericans on here:
I voted for Kamala Harris, and you should too, regardless of how you feel about her politics.
I know plenty of people who are still not convinced that voting for Kamala is an ethical choice given the state of the world, mostly in that she isn’t running on a platform that will make all the changes we want to see. This is in part because while she is a candidate, she also has a job as VP and that job means not breaking from the current administration’s stances. She has been more empathetic when speaking about the horrific conditions in Gaza (and spreading) and how civilians deserve better, sure, but she hasn’t taken any substantive actions to end a war being fought with American weapons (1). She has decided that right now it is better strategy to stand behind Biden until his term ends (2).
Maybe it’s that she needs to play her hand close to her chest and wait until she wins and has the power to do something more than what she could now. Maybe it’s that she has no intention of doing any such thing and any hints that she cares are a front to try and keep the attention of uncommitted voters and string people along to her own ends. I really couldn’t say.
Here’s the thing though: a vote is a tool towards an end, not an endorsement of every view a politician espouses. Trump voters know that; there’s plenty of them who don’t agree with half of what he says but they’re voting for him because they know he will take America closer to the Christian Nationalist vision he alternately praises and denies that he’ll bring about. Some of them aren’t in it for that but they don’t really care what he says as long as he keeps telling them he’ll fix the economy by deporting anyone who doesn’t look like them.
But those of us who think the world can be better, more inclusive, more compassionate, don’t like to put our name behind someone who isn’t going to get us there. I can’t tell you that voting in a Harris-Walz administration will fix things. I can’t say they won’t fail us. But what I can say is this:
-The next president of the US will either be a democrat who can appoint experts in important leadership roles in the administration (3), or a republican who will fire everyone and fill those roles with cronies and oligarchs and names from the list that project 2025 put together (4).
-The next president will either be a democrat who wants to fund FEMA to provide aid in disasters (5) or a republican who had to be begged to allow Orange County California of all places to access that funding after wildfires and only agreed because aides told him that there were, in fact, republicans that lived there (6).
-The next president will either be a democrat who is backed by environmental groups and will continue the Inflation Reduction Act’s work towards clean energy, or a republican who repeatedly says climate change is a hoax and a scam (7) and vows to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement again (8).
-The next president will either be a democrat with experience in diplomacy who has spent the last four years as VP meeting with leadership from around the world, or a republican who worships and praises strongman dictators and can’t shut up about how cool they are and how much he wants to be like that too (9).
-The next president will either be a democrat who will have the opportunity to nominate new justices to the Supreme Court who will work to hold ground against (or even replace) the conservative justices (who are in the pockets of billionaires and who have clear agendas and will accept or turn away cases and interpret the constitution in ways that help them reach those ends (10)) or a republican who will allow the oldest conservative justices to retire so he can replace them with younger and more extreme conservatives to ensure they will remain on the court for years and years to come (11).
-The next president will either be a democrat who can perhaps be persuaded to listen and change policy with sufficient pressure (and we do need to apply pressure!) or a republican who doesn’t give a solitary shit what anyone thinks if they’re not in a position to increase his power and/or wealth.
If you care about cutting off military funding to Netanyahu’s administration? There is only one possible upcoming administration who there is *any* chance of convincing (12), and the other administration is one that has said that he thinks Netanyahu should “get it over with” and that he plans to decisively shut down pro-palestinian protests with force and threat of deportation (13).
I could of course continue. There are, in fact, only two possible outcomes here. There is no world in which a third party presidential candidate wins in 2024, and Jill Stein has made it explicitly clear at this point that her goal in this election is to peel off enough votes to “teach Democrats a lesson” and keep Kamala from winning key races, just like in 2016, so a third party vote will not clean your hands of complicity in the winner’s platform (14). We are living in the trolley problem, and refusing to participate in our country’s two party system is itself participation, and carries the same harm as deciding to leave the lever where it is. The difference is that in this trolley problem, pulling the lever happens to also give you a megaphone you can use to yell at the person holding the hand brake, and that person might just listen.
To leave metaphor behind, I would rather live in a world where Kamala Harris is president and nothing changes and all the things that are terrible in the world (which, to be clear, aren’t all things that the president has any power to affect) are still terrible and we’re chugging along pretending that this is a functioning democracy, than a world where Donald Trump is president and he doesn’t give a shit about anything like a facade of normalcy and immediately implements project 2025 and makes everything far far worse very very quickly for everyone who is already suffering. The one and only way to avoid that world is to vote for Kamala.
Right now we have an electoral college of which 48 states are “winner takes all” with the “all” being the sum of the number of senators and representatives, which over-represents republicans. While that means the race is primarily won or lost in a few key districts of a few key states, the margins are going to be horribly narrow everywhere. If you decide not to vote for Kamala because you’re in a blue state anyway, you can assume that other people who think the same things as you are making that same choice. When enough people make that choice, suddenly your city isn’t as blue as you thought, and then your state isn’t as blue as you thought and then your state’s electors collectively aren’t as blue as you thought, and then that “winner takes all” kicks in, and we simply can’t afford to lose any of the electoral college votes we’re counting on as sure things.
In other words, I don’t care how much it seems like your vote won’t count, it sure as hell will count when the state is lost by a few hundred votes in a normally blue city. This is not the time to throw away your means to reduce harm in the name of punishing politicians. In a more gruesome analogy I heard today, if your arm is caught in a bear trap, you don’t gnaw off the other one to teach it a lesson.
So, vote for Harris-Walz. Vote the whole ticket blue, and remember that there’s time to be pissed at Kamala for insufficiently progressive policies and to participate in protest once she’s in office. Let’s just get her there first.
I’m attaching the urls I linked throughout the post here.
