On Voting (for Democrats in 2024)

 

Not surprisingly there is a great deal of ~discourse~ about what those of us who care about Palestine should do in the 2024 election. I am particularly moved to respond to an episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast on this subject, in which the host Sam Adler-Bell discussed the matter with three leading political thinkers and activists of our generation: Astra Taylor, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, and Malcolm Harris, all of whose work I greatly admire.

Nonetheless I found the conversation exasperating, because it seemed to take as its starting point the dichotomy between principle, which would entail voting against Harris/Walz in solidarity with Palestine, versus strategic expediency or hard-headed realism, would lead one to vote for them as a measure against the greater threat of a Trump victory, then continuing to agitate on behalf of Palestine and other causes toward the presumably-friendlier audience of a Democratic presidential administration. That was highlighted by Malcolm’s advocacy for disruptive direct action against the national security state and supply chain as a supposed alternative to voting, which Sam eagerly seized on as a foil because it enabled him to juxtapose that supposedly more radical position with his own pragmatism, and in response to which he could graciously state that we need both.

I don’t consider voting for the Democratic presidential ticket to be strategically sound or expedient. If you saw someone trying to convince a dejected, broke gambler to take out another loan and go back into the casino because it was his moral obligation, you wouldn’t consider that person to be giving strategically sound advice—you would hold them in contempt. If you saw a financial advisor telling someone behind on their rent to take out another payday loan because they have a moral obligation to their landlord, you might think that could be the best of a very bad set of options, but you would be very suspicious of the moral claim. If you heard a career counselor telling someone whose career isn’t going the way they wanted to take out a student loan to attend a coding bootcamp, you would rightly wonder whether the career counselor was being paid by the coding bootcamp to take advantage of someone in a vulnerable position. All of these are better analogies for the present situation vis a vis the 2024 election, because the entity whose aims voting serves, the Democratic Party, is a malevolent one that exists to exploit its voting base on behalf of its plutocratic constituency and needs our votes to continue to be able to do so. It doesn’t care how morally anguished we are, only that it gets what it needs to keep the grift going. The idea that we should serve up to our oppressor what it needs to keep oppressing us is repulsive, and that’s before we even get to Palestine.

The most extreme example of this that I’ve seen wasn’t on the Know Your Enemy podcast, but rather in a twitter thread by David Klion.

 

The argument here—that voting for Harris is strategic for the left because if she loses we will be blamed for it—is battered spouse mindset: the bully must be appeased and pampered at all times, because if anything isn’t exactly to his liking, we will be the ones to pay. This is a marriage counselor giving the advice “things will go better for you if you just give him what he wants.”

If Harris loses, that is on her and the party, as was the case in 2016. Of course they will try to blame us; they always do. We don’t have to play along. If you do, you’re tacitly admitting that we are, in fact, to blame. That she is owed anything by any constituency is the negation of democracy. The reverse is the case, and her plutocratic supporters know it. The dynamic we are seeing play out now stems from the ironclad certainty on Harris and her campaign’s part that her plutocrat backers will bolt to Trump the second they sense any deviation from unconditional support for Israel. They don’t care about “protecting democracy” or whatever slogan is used to rally support from the rest of us. They’ve already given it away, having decided that it’s inconsistent with them getting everything they want. The slogan has the same moral and prudential status as an advertisement that says attending a coding bootcamp will solve your career and financial problems: it exists to keep a predatory regime in power and profit.

The question to be asked in this moment is “who should be in power? Trump? Harris? Or us?” If you can’t get yourself to the third answer because you can’t let go of the security blanket you’ve been clutching since you became eligible to vote, you’re of no use politically. Because the question isn’t whether a Democratic administration can be “moved” by outside pressure, versus a Republican one that can’t. The window of opportunity for that as a mode of political engagement has closed, frittered away over the course of the last administration in exchange for fancy-sounding White House jobs for a select few insiders. Continuing to put faith in it is an admission that we ourselves can’t be trusted with power or otherwise don’t aspire to hold it, which in turn validates the people who use the same claim to excuse their own destructive and self-serving conduct in office when they continually come up with excuses not to do what we politely request.

To conclude on an optimistic note: in the last decade Mexico has seen its political system radically upended. In the presidential election earlier this year all the previous major parties jointly nominated a candidate who received 28% of the vote, as against 60 or so percent for the candidate of the now-dominant party Morena. Its newly-inaugurated president Claudia Sheinbaum, at the head of a congressional supermajority, is promising further increases in the minimum wage, constitutionalizing welfare programs, and a national high speed rail network. And her administration has demonstrated solidarity with Palestine. Right before she took office the outgoing one passed a constitutional amendment to elect the judiciary, against cries of outrage from the federal legal establishment and the US ambassador speaking on behalf of the interests he truly represents: those of the transnational corporate elite. What changed is that a political party put itself before the voters as a radical break with a political order that offered nothing other than the hollowing out of their country. When they did that, democracy won.

What Morena is offering isn’t a radical program—it’s less than what was at stake in the Mexican revolution over 100 years ago, namely egalitarian land redistribution. It’s a program that the Democratic party *should* be able to put forward itself here. But it won’t, and the longer we pretend there’s an opportunity to change that, the more we feed ourselves into its death machine, all while telling ourselves we’re being “strategic.” I for one am done with that. Breaking with the Democrats doesn’t require radical direct action as Malcolm proposes, even if it is morally justified, nor does it need to accompany a radical political program. But it would be a radical challenge to the political system and a decisive break with the past, which is exactly what the electorate is evidently crying out for. The longer we fail to give them that, the more complicit we are with prolonging a political system that exists to exploit them, and the more the constituency we aspire to represent knows that about us.