Some months ago, I wrote a politics post, which I framed as primarily being about third parties, but I also addressed this idea that that young people might not vote for Biden (primarily because of his stance on Palestine), and the conflicting attitudes that engendered from the “experts.” And I included a long quote from Democratic lawyer Marc Elias who was doing exactly what liberal podcaster David Rees said he wouldn’t do, and what liberal commentator (and former lawyer) Elie Mystal said one shouldn’t do: scolding people (especially young people) for saying they wouldn’t vote for Biden by fuming about how Trump would definitely be worse.
Well, the race is quite different no
See how it’s possible to like and appreciate someone and disagree with them? Kind of like when people say they don’t agree with Biden’s take on the Israel/Palestine conflict (which is now morphing into the Israeal/Palestine/Lebanon conflict). Instead of responding to that with a knee-jerk “but Trump would be worse!” perhaps it’s worthwhile to consider the closing words of Mystal’s article from The Nation that I quoted last time:
The people saying they won’t vote for Biden know that Trump would be worse. They’re saying Biden should be better.
And, while Harris isn’t Biden, she definitely inherits his policies via guilt by association if nothing else. Of course, if you believe Trump and Vance, those policies have ceased to be Biden’s policies altogether: they’re Harris’ policies now. This is, of course, somewhat silly ... as Trump also said, the vice-presdient “makes no difference.” Harris was probably in the room when these decisions were made, but to imagine that she had any real control over them is just dumb. So the truth of the matter is, we don’t actually know whether Harris’ approach to the Middle East would be as controversial as Biden’s.
But that, of course, is the problem. She’s had plenty of chances to distance herself from the pro-genocide position, but has taken none of them. At the Democratic convention, they had the opportunity to highlight pro-Palestinian voices, to vet the speeches ahead of time, to show the world that even people who disagree with her administration’s actions would still support her in the election. Nope. Not a single Palestinian-American voice was allowed on the stage, being instead consigned to hold protests outside. And I’ve heard plenty of people say that this is the right move for her: that, by picking a side, she can only make things worse. Which, maybe, is true. But of course if you’re taking that attitude, then you just have to accept that some people are going to take the silence as proof of being just as bad as Biden.
And, yes, I use the term “pro-genocide” advisedly. If you pay any attention to what Netanyahu and the members of his cabinet actually say, you know very well that they are remarkably open about their goals to eliminate the Palestinian people from the Earth, and that’s kind of what “genocide” actually means. “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group” says Dictionary.com, quite succinctly. When the deputy speaker of the Knesset says “Now we all have one common goa
And the problem with sending a country a shit-ton of bombs and then saying that you had no idea that they were going to be used for whichever atrocity-du-jour they’ve been used for is that that only works if you then stop sending them bombs. Which, you know, we haven’t. Saying, “well, we told them that this was unacceptable and then just gave them more bombs” is not taking an anti-genocide stance. So you can say my language is deliberately inflammatory when I call Biden’s policies “pro-genocide” if you like, but I stand by my statement that it’s more factual than incendiary. And now they’re bombing even more people with the bombs we’re faithfully continuing to supply them with? It’s utter insanity, I tell you.
But I digress. I was reminded of this whole “scolding” thing yesterday while watching Robert Reich. Now, I really like Reich. Possibly because, like me, he’s an old liberal—
Why is this not getting through to people: why are there still so many people who are willing to say, well I’m going to go with Trump ... you know, why are they voting against their own self-interest? ... I mean, what why are people voting, or willing to vote, against their economic self-interest? I really don’t quite know, except that, you know, ... for so many years, so many people have been so devastated by the economy ...
—Robert Reich, The Saturday Coffee Klatch, 9/28/24
I suppose that, one of the things I like the most about Robert Reich is that he’s a nearly 80-year-old man who doesn’t sound like a typical old man. And I suppose that’s why I found this particular quote so disappointing: because here he does sound like the old guy shaking his head about “these kids today.” Note that, in this particular video, his regular co-host Heather Lofthouse2 is out sick and he’s talking instead to Michael Lahanas-Calderón, one of their producers who happens to be a member of Gen Z (as Michael puts it earlier in the video, “the oldest of the Gen Z’s, yes”), so maybe that’s partially responsible for his falling into the trap of the rambling-old-man-speak. Here’s another, perhaps more telling example, after discussing the recent announcement by Chapel Roan that she was not officially endorsing Harris:3
But don’t they, Michael, don’t they understand that Trump would be worse! That is, if ... you’re making a choice here. I mean, by not making a choice, you’re making a choice. By not voting for Harris, you are essentially voting for Trump. Don’t they understand this, your friends, your generation?
Ummm ... yeah, Robert. They understand that Trump would be worse. But, if Harris can’t inspire them to give a shit about politics, if it seems like she’s promising more of the same old horrible crap we’re already living through, they just might not bother.
The weird thing (at least to me) is that these same pundits seem to understand it perfectly when the shoe’s on the other foot. Listen to any given batch of them talking about how the ridiculosity that is Mark Robinson could discourage Republican turnout:4
This is what I think you’re hoping for if you’re Kamala Harris: that there’s some category of people in North Carolina that are just like, “These guys are too crazy, I’m not gonna ... I’m just not gonna bother this year. I’m taking this year off.”
—Tim Miller, Inside the Right, 9/22/24
This sort of perfectly describes my father, who hates Trump, but almost certainly can’t bring himself to vote for a black woman.5 But, when it comes to young people feeling the same about Harris, people just don’t seem to get it.
Don’t get me wrong: I will be voting for Harris, personally. I actually think she’s been rather energizing in this race, and, far from being someone who didn’t know who she was before becoming vice-president, I’ve actually voted for her before, both when she ran for Attorney General in 2010 and when she ran for Senator in 2016. Plus she had some great YouTube moments making Trump appointees look dumb in congressional committees. And, while I think she won’t be as firm with Israel as I’d like, I agree with Cody Johnston (of Some More News) that she at least represents a break from the generation of Israel-is-always-right old white guys, of which Biden is hopefully the last. So at least there’s a chance that she’ll be better than Biden, and that’s good enough for me. But, if you’re a younger person (or even an older person) who thinks it isn’t good enough, that she damned well ought to come out and say she’s against murdering Palestinian children no matter how evil Hamas is ... well, I totally respect that position too.
People have various reasons for seemingly voting against their economic interests. In the case of my father, and many others, I’m sure, it’s simple racism. In the case of many other working class folks, it’s just that they’ve been told all their life that capitalism is good and socialism is bad, and from that perspective voting for anyone other than a Republican seems a bit insane. But these things are changing. Only the oldest among us truly remember McCarthyism, and even the Cold War is a fading memory. So the boogeyman of communism doesn’t hold the power it used to, and equating socialism with communism, when we have modern counterexamples like France and Sweden,6 is also falling a bit flat these days. And, while racism is certainly still going strong in our country, it does seem to be going more and more underground. Today’s younger generations not only have lived with diversity all their lives, but they’ve lived with the pain of late-stage capitalism and seem to instinctively understand that there must be a better way.
And some of what appears to be “voting against one’s own economic interests” is just plain evil marketing campaigns launched by rich people, who desire nothing more than to continue to be rich (and not to collect any more peers). For decades, rich people convinced poor white people that poor black people would take their jobs, their homes, and their American dreams. Nowadays they’ve mostly switched to convincing poor people both black and white that it’s the immigrants coming for their bounty, but it’s the same playbook. And it might be easy to think that people that buy into these messages are dumb, but that’s oversimplifying the issue: people who are struggling will often latch onto any message, especially the ones that are slickly produced, and there’s no point in being naïve about the fact that advertising works. Getting upset at the victims of these evil marketing campaigns is sort of missing the point.
So I’d love to see less of people railing against young people for not voting against Trump, and railing against working class people for “voting against their interests,” and more people pushing Harris to do more to try and reach these cohorts. I think she’s doing great in many ways, but could she be doing better? Absolutely. And the polls are too close for her not to try.1 If you want to follow along, here’s the video; jump to around 14:09.
2 Heather is also the president of Inequality Media, who produces those videos.
3 Same video, around 11:20.
4 Again, follow along in the video at about 8:26.
5 You may recall that I said recently that my father claimed he’d vote for anyone the Democrats put up, unless it was Biden. Well, his sexist, racist ass is kind of eating those words now.
6 Yes, yes: neither France nor Sweden is technically socialist. But then neither are any of the policies that Republicans label as socialist. So I think it’s a fair correlation.