So yeah. I’ve gone from “I will hold my nose and vote for Biden because the alternative is horrible” to “I’m actually pretty glad to be able to vote for Harris.”
I guess I need to revisit this statement, a bit.
I am not okay with her stance on Gaza/Israel. Or her statement that she will never call for a ban on fracking. Or some of the other things she’s said lately. It makes this election less comfortable than I would have liked.
However. I very much agree with Bernie on this.
On every issue where I find Harris’ stance weak or unpalatable, Trump is inevitably worse. He is a walking disaster, a liar and a criminal, a racist sexist homophobic transphobic xenophobic ignoramus, a weird disgusting moronic con artist, a clearly sick old man who should be in prison, not in office.
I have tried not to pay attention to the polling, tried to stay away from doomscrolling. One still absorbs things, and this race is way closer than it should be. TFG is so bad, he should have less than the “crazification factor” level of support, and yet here we are, people supporting a man that they know is awful, that they’ve been repeatedly willing to say out loud in front of the press is awful.
He doesn’t have the qualifications to manage a lemonade stand, to be the captain of a one-person tiddlywinks team, or to get to decide what his family is having for dinner. He doesn’t have the integrity of a wet sheet of one-ply toilet paper. He can’t be reasoned with. He can barely string words together into a coherent (if inevitably wrong) sentence; whatever low cunning he may have once had has surely fled, whether it’s dementia or decades of drug abuse or just getting high on his own ego.
See also: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles. (Not just more scathing criticism but some insight too.)
Harris isn’t perfect, but if you had to negotiate with someone about condemning genocide, would you rather do it with a moron who can’t spell “genocide” and during his previous term literally told his own staff he wished he had Hitler’s generals because they wouldn’t stop him from using military force against US citizens, or with someone who, at least, supports humanitarian aid for Gaza?
I protest-voted Green in one election. I felt really twitchy about voting for “a lesser evil” and felt like I should vote with my heart. The thing is though… this doesn’t work and it doesn’t help. Yes, I hate it that Democrats can get away with a minimalist platform of “at least we’re not the other guy.” But protest voting is an utterly ineffective form of protest, in our system.
The Democratic party doesn’t care about courting leftist votes; they have written us off as crazy. They would rather try to steal votes from Republicans and those (inexplicable IMHO) undecided voters. Which isn’t great news for their policies/politics generally. But while they have drifted rightward in some respects, in others they’ve stood fairly firm and they do the right thing once in a while. I’ll give the Biden administration some credit for doing some good, even if I feel there was a whole lot more good that really needed to be done.
If people don’t vote for Harris — if they stay home and abstain out of moral outrage, disgust, laziness, or whatever reason, or if they vote third-party or write in AOC or Bernie Sanders as a protest vote, the asshole is going to win. I hate that our system works this way, it’s not right at all. In an ideal world, one should be able to vote one’s conscience, to truly express oneself, to choose a person who would lead with the principles you want them to have. But that’s not the system we have.
Trump must be stopped. And the smarter but equally vile politicians who ride on his bandwagon must be stopped — perhaps even more so. The only way we can do that with the system we have is to put the Democrat in. And then, we work to hold that Democrat accountable, make her do the right thing, and work to change the system so better things are possible in the future.