by Laurence Peterson
It’s a pity that both of them can’t lose. —Henry Kissinger
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. —J.K. Galbraith
I feel as dirty and disgusted as a chance visitor to Jeffrey Epstein’s island. In less than a fortnight I will walk into a voting booth and be forced to come down on one side or the other in perhaps the worst dilemma I have ever faced in my life: voting for Kamala Harris or a third-party candidate for president, which may well contribute towards a Trump victory. I have no idea where I will end up on this; I don’t even want to think about solving the dilemma, because there simply is no solution. This is not an attempt to influence how anyone votes. It is a commentary on a political system that no longer even allows us the cynical option to avoid it altogether. Whatever happens will almost certainly make life worse in significant ways for vast numbers of people. I sometimes think the only appropriate thing to do is to smuggle poison into the booth and kill myself after pulling the lever.
To me, voting for Donald Trump is supremely well beyond consideration. Many of his economic, and perhaps all of his environment-affecting ones, remind one of his helpful suggestion to drink bleach as an antidote to Covid. His plans regarding mass deportations may directly affect some of my closest friends. His nonchalance about depriving people of rights that were, not so long ago, even by Trump’s most senior appointments to the judiciary, considered secure in law, and his insistence on mentioning policies as priorities of his next administration that are far less based in statute or judicial decisions stretches the imagination in terms of possible outcomes even in a country that has been so shamelessly co-opted and corrupted as the United States has. His cronyism and criminal tendencies are the stuff of legend. He is a militarist of the first order when he thinks it will serve his purposes. If nothing else, what he has to offer is not even close to worth the risk of what he could conceivably do to our basic way of life, even if a vote against him is seen as a mere gesture of extreme disgust at Democrats who have enjoyed nothing more for the last several months as insulting important parts of the party, like the progressive wing. On Gaza, and the Middle East in general, his promises to allow the war criminal Netanyahu to “do what you have to do” reveals that Trump may prove to be even worse than “Genocide Joe” Biden, or the bone-headedly silent Harris, on this issue, despite enormous levels of popularity amongst all voters for a permanent cease-fire, as reflected in many polls.
This being the case, it seems almost miraculous that Harris cannot simply obliterate her ridiculous opponent. This is even more the case when one considers the sickening amounts of money that have flowed into her campaign since Harris and Biden performed their little dance of death in July and August. She raised some 500 million dollars in one month after being named Biden’s successor, a disturbing amount of which came from billionaires. And that, to me, brings us to the crux of the case against her. But before I get to that, I will try to provide a brief assessment of her campaign’s main proposals.
Regarding her economic program, her emphasis on an “opportunity economy” that tries to negotiate a position that mildly suggests ways for the debt-laden and wage-constrained to “get a foot in the door”, rather than screaming for the establishment of a comprehensive and robust economic security programs speaks volumes. Subsidizing loans to new home-buyers and businesses is almost ludicrously insufficient as supply for an unmovable housing stock, that remains bound to a spectacularly untethered pricing mechanism and interest rates that do nothing to accommodate a super-repressed effective demand, whilst rhetoric that focuses on small business neglects the fact that most small businesses fail and can tend to duplicate each other, especially in economically depressed areas. This example is anecdotal, but I live in a very depressed city in which nail and hair care shops proliferate, and there is little sign of startups incorporating productivity or wage gains, all as much of the housing stock simply crumbles.
In foreign policy, somehow absurdly neglecting the Gaza issue altogether, we are faced with a candidate who has promised to create and maintain “the most lethal military in the world”. The administration of which she has been a part has created a situation which, perhaps as never before in human history, featured acute rises in levels of tension across borders that involve one or two nuclear-armed powers, directly or indirectly through proxies, almost simultaneously: Israel/Iran, Ukraine/Russia, China/Taiwan, North Korea/South Korea, with elevated possibilities of parties to these conflicts becoming sucked into other, bigger ones, as North Korea may be doing in Ukraine, or the US in the Middle East if Iran renounces its almost super-human restraint. In these conditions, Harris’s commitment to maintaining a defense establishment that has come to swallow some $850 billion a year, even as deficits swell, and an industrial policy that actively seeks to exclude China from markets that would be essential for future cooperation regarding climate change, amongst other vital concerns, would be foolhardy in the extreme to countenance.
On these counts alone, support for Harris becomes simply impossible for me. When one looks at what is happening in Gaza, in particular, and the situation in the greater Middle East, that calculated impossibility rapidly assumes a moral character of extreme loathing. Back in July, it was estimated that 10% of Gazans had been killed, gone missing or injured since October the 7th, 2023; by now, many of the injured have surely died due to neglect or malnourishment, as medical and food supplies have been denied to the strip by the Israelis, especially when one considers that an inordinate number of the injured were children. By now, in other words, at the very least, about 7% of the population must be dead. The British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated 180,000 of 2.4 million Gazans had died, also in July. In August, it was reported that no less than 90% of the survivors had been displaced since October 7th, 2024, often to areas that were subsequently bombed, in which sanitary and other health-related facilities were, and remain, nonexistent. If we look at the numbers alone, this must strongly suggest the existence of a genocide, one that Kamala Harris seems committed to continuing until how many tens, or hundreds more victims are bound to perish, all too often under unspeakable conditions? And very much of this is paid for by American taxpayers, conducted under the direction of American diplomats and military personnel. We, the American people, are responsible for this crime against humanity. There is no other way to conceive of the situation.
The final consideration for me, though, goes beyond even moral atrocity. If I were to vote for Harris as some kind of lesser of evils, even though I consider that effectively impossible, I would have to ignore the fact that especially on Gaza, but actually regarding a whole host of issues, I would be voting for someone who steadfastly refuses to even mention, never mind consider, pursuing policies that not only I, but many other Americans, enthusiastically support: Medicare for all being the most prominent. This is important because more and more research in political science is indicating that in money-based electoral systems, the preferences of voters almost never hold sway over those of well endowed donors in election outcomes, and that it is the shifting clusters of donors that see policies through the electoral process, whilst ordinary voters almost never obtain what they want unless configurations of elites effectively wave the policies through in the first place. Harris is quintessentially a politician who works within an obscenely money-based system; hence the historic sums she raised, despite the fact that she, like her predecessor, was recycled from the bottom of the barrel of Democratic politicians in the primary process, and effectively foisted on the voters by the party machine. So even if I vote for Harris as a lesser evil compared to Trump, my vote will be going to a candidate committed to preservation and even flourishing of a decidedly undemocratic, money-based political system, one that cannot but continue to dissolve what little remains of a fraying network of truly democratic interactions, and this all in the name of preserving democracy under threat, more than anything else, from an orange fascist! At least the Germans merged the super-authoritarian impulse and a tolerance of genocide; today we much choose between them, and, in doing so, contribute to the hastening destruction of the residue of democracy we still enjoy. I don’t have words to describe this experience.