Elect Kamala Harris

At the beginning of 2024, I had planned to write a post on the election, perhaps around the Convention (though I know by now I will always be late). For a title I meant to reappropriate the text of one of the many pins I have laying around, this one picked up years ago from some older family member, supporting Nixon in ’72: it says “Re-Elect The President”. Well, that obviously isn’t something I can say now, but it’s worth mentioning simply as a reminder of what some have forgotten – that the Biden administration has been one of the best administrations of my lifetime. That’s not to say I agree with everything the President has done, or am not greatly frustrated by some things – but this is true of every Presidency, to varying degrees, and there are ways in which even valid critiques may miss complicated aspects of a decision. It’s difficult to think about the manner and aftermath of the evacuation of Afghanistan; it’s difficult to contemplate what is transpiring in the Levant, and the fact that we do not have clean hands. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine other modern Presidents managing these situations in a substantially better way (and many would be worse). It seems likely that there was no clean way out of Afghanistan once the decision to withdraw was made, and it is possible that the administration is currently maintaining the special relationship with Israel in part to preserve a degree of leverage and preclude additional escalation. We may not know until a later date. But what is clear is that the current administration has done more to aggressively invest in economy and our infrastructure than any in the last fifty years, and has drawn a clear line it is willing to defend between the liberal democratic western alliance and the increasingly shameless axis of authoritarianism that is testing its edges to see what it can bite off. In this Biden has in some measure improved on the foreign policy of President Obama, who I like, but who was perhaps too quick to assume the best in some actors, or perhaps not idealistic enough about certain fundamental conflicts - in many ways he inherited much of the policy orientation of President Bush, who went too far afield chasing the wrong enemies. And all of this of course follows Biden’s great public service of unseating his predecessor.

Why am I beginning an endorsement of Vice-President Harris with a paragraph about President Biden? For three reasons. First, because I struggle with knowing how to begin any post, and directly commenting on that creative process is my go-to shortcut into writing. Second, in order to answer the attempts at criticizing Harris by tying her to every decision the President has made. This is obviously specious given the relatively limited role of the VP, but it is also misguided because it only works if one views the present administration as more of a failure than what came before it – when it in fact has been significantly more productive than the average administration, to say nothing of the last one. Finally, I think it’s helpful to understand where I am coming from, and what the status quo is – and to understand that a potential Harris administration would exist in a context, and not simply fall out of a coconut tree. The Vice-President has done a lot of work to explain her own biography, which I will not repeat, because my interest is more in what the stakes of this election are for politics and policy. All I will say is that for years I never had particularly strong feelings about Kamala Harris as a politician either way; she was not my preferred candidate in 2020, and I had concerns (ultimately unfounded) about her electoral popularity on that ticket – so I’m not some longtime fan. I have, however, been fully won over and impressed by the way in which she has assumed the mantle in this impromptu campaign, and I think she will make a very good President.

But the coconut tree is much taller than just the last four years of growth, and there is a context more salient to this election than anything President Biden of Vice-President Harris have done or propose to do. I am of course speaking about former President Trump, who is not only an individual, but a symptom and synecdoche of a much larger illness in politics domestic and global. It occurs to me that an increasing number of people I consider peers and friends are now younger than me (a very troubling trend because it suggests I am getting older, which is something I must do something about). For some, the past near-decade of politics since Trump came down the escalator on June 16, 2015 may encompass the entirety of their adult awareness of politics. For me, it arrived after a decade of serious interest in politics, during which my views shifted several times in dramatic ways. I don’t want to re-commit the error others have made when waxing nostalgic about past eras of bipartisanship, which masked over ugly inequities, and I think there is a real extent to which Trump did not only change our politics, but also revealed things which were already present – in other words, I don’t want to mythologize the past or suggest that the present needs to be uniquely troubled (if anything, it is this sort of cataclysmic thinking about the present that has gotten us into this mess). But I do think that it is important for people to understand that for me, the last nine years are not normal – and I do not intend to accept them as such.

There is of course an extent to which I think political myth – in a very limited sense – is necessary. I want to be careful with this – even innocuous political myths, nationalisms which began as liberal reform movements to achieve independence for a subjugated ethnic group, have often become sources of violence against the innocent, and for much of American history the myth of our own national greatness has likewise posed this problem. But to the extent that nations and empires and polities are to an extent constructed fictions, I think that a myth can be necessary – as an ideal, a standard to rally to and unify around – as long as it does not overshadow the many inconvenient truths which interrogate it. In that sense, the notion that this decade must be made an aberration in our political history is not meant to suggest that everything was better before Trump, but rather to say that this myth of a past which had not fallen into its current state is helpful to articulating what we have lost and what we now aspire to. Of course no myth can contain the whole flavor of truth about a country, and there are many multiform political myths on offer from a whole host of minor players and fringes, with varying degrees of influence. What interests me is what mythic claims seem closest to those who would actually exercise power in the wake of the election, either way. And that is what is on offer in this election: two diametrically opposed mythic narratives about who we are as Americans.

And as I see it, the current vision of politics ascendent in GOP leadership is one which divides America along two axes: first, it frames politics not as a process of decision-making between all Americans, but as one theater of a war between the portion of citizens it feels count as legitimate, either because of who they are or because they hold the right views or cultural affiliations, and everyone else who are excluded from that legitimacy. Because of this difference in who is viewed as legitimate, the right, especially many of the younger activists who consider themselves intellectuals and who will staff the next Republican administration, already feel ready to take their ball and go home from the game of democracy if they can’t win a majority. If you think I am being unfair, I would simply point out that whenever the electoral college, or any other aspect of our electoral system which allows an absolute minority of the electorate to actually make policy over and against the will of the majority, is debated, they will tend to defend a counter-majoritarian system as a feature, not a bug. This may be grounded on the idea that small states should have as much representation as large ones, or rural areas should not be ruled by cities – but at the end of the day, this always comes down to a larger mass of individuals being ruled by a smaller mass of individuals in a way which flies in the face of the logic of representative democracy that justified the Revolution in the first place. If pressed, many will outright admit that they feel people who agree with or are more similar to them culturally deserve power more than others.

Now, I don’t want to ignore the argument that all political sides tend to seize every advantage and complain about unfair features that hurt their cause, while defending those which help it. Many have pointed out that many liberals had a sort of procedural fetish for the Supreme Court for many years, some of which was born out of sincere desire to believe in the process, but which obviously was aided by the legacy of the Warren court and the way in which SCOTUS had acted for many years – a tune which changed after the composition of the court shifted to the right. And it’s not exactly wrong, if one believes one’s political side to be morally right in a way that has high-stakes human rights implications, to want it to be in power even if some of those views are not popular with the majority. American history is full of movements in defense of civil rights which were not broadly popular at the outset, and which resisted in ways legal and illegal, and which are now justly valorized in hindsight. But I think are there two caveats to this which the new right is failing to see.

First, it is one thing to argue that the human rights of an individual or a minority may need special protection from the whims of the majority. That is, after all, the great insight of the Bill of Rights. Most Americans, right or left, would agree that there are certain things that governments, however democratic, should simply not be allowed to do to people in the name of the public. But it is quite another thing to believe that by extension all power should be exercised by a minority which is seen as more legitimately American than others. This is essentially a feudal or caste-logic, and it necessarily undermines the right of the people to govern itself and act collectively.

Second, it misses the point of democracy in general. The idea is not that 51% of people have the divine right of kings to lord over everyone else and do whatever they wish without limits; the point is that democracy is the best way we have of manufacturing enough legitimacy and consensus for a state of productive peace to exist between people who disagree. It is an agreement to try to effect change through the slow, frustrating process of persuading others, even if they are selfish, ignorant, or pig-headed, rather than resorting to violence or giving up on cooperative civilization. We have fought hard to get to the point in human history where there are alternatives to autocratic tyranny without recourse or means of change, or violent conflagration. But by attempting to embolden a section of the body politic to block or remove the means of the majority to win power, those ascendant on the right are pouring gasoline on our polity and then playing with fire.

I said that the political myth of the new right, which is not identical to everything every conservative believes and certainly not identical to all of the GOP’s historic positions, divides America along two axes. The first is between those with the right to rule, with or without a majority, because they have the ‘correct’ values, and everyone else who can be dismissed and scorned; the second is between ‘real,’ ‘heritage,’ legal’ Americans, and Outsiders. I want to be careful to note that I am aware that many of the people I know personally on the right, I know in the context of church communities that are very outward-looking, open, and welcoming to the stranger, and so people in those contexts who think of themselves as conservative may feel this is an unfair depiction of the right as it may not accurately describe their own motivations or experiences. But from the broader standpoint of the right as a whole, can anyone deny that the last nine years have not been defined, more than anything else, by the castigation of immigrants, migrants, various kinds of ‘others’, as well as calls for the wholesale abandonment of people around the world to whom we have commitments and obligations both diplomatic and human. One of the very first things Trump did in his administration was an attempt to implement what he had sold as a ban on Muslim immigration (obviously he had to limit this to a temporary ban on immigration from a specific list of countries for security reasons, because his administration was staffed with people who understood that nothing else had a chance of surviving in court – but we know how the former President referred to the executive action, and how he wanted the public to think of it). These divisions, between worthy and unworthy Americans, and between real Americans and all other people, are the animating spirit of today’s GOP, and the content of its national myth about who we are as a people.

The Democratic Party contains multitudes of competing views, but when we look at the political mythology in power at the top, we don’t see perfection, but we do see something that fights for our imperfect democratic republic to continue to breathe and function imperfectly as we muddle on through. It’s not very romantic, and it’s not apocalyptically or eschatologically satisfying in the way I suspect motivates some of the voices on the right; but what Harris is proposing to do, and what Biden has in fact done, is to try to rule by winning over the majority of the public through persuasion and shoring up a democratic process where coexistence between Americans of both parties is possible over the long-term, and conflict is worked through peacefully. And crucially, it is a national mythology which avoids the fatal sin of so many other nations mythologies: it is not exclusive. It is more motivated to see all Americans, and all people, as our neighbor, than it is to find reasons to disdain the Samaritan. This isn’t perfectly reflected in the platform or the party; I could rattle off a score of ways they fall well short of the ideal right now. But the content of the myth’s ideal and the direction of its aspiration are markedly divergent from the right’s, which turns its back upon others.

I am by necessity speaking in broad terms, because while elections have excruciatingly specific outputs for individuals affected, the voters only have the lever of the broadest input on what happens. This certainly does not seem like an ideal system – and indeed, it is not. The democratic process is often sluggishly frustrating and infuriatingly unjust in its outcomes, and it is always tempting, for a certain kind of person with an actively idealistic political imagination, to think ‘if only I could just run this or that for five minutes…’ – but of course we must choose between ourselves who would get that say, and the wise understand that they do no in fact understand the ways in which they would, untrammeled, abuse.

When I say that democratic legitimacy is under threat, some will feel I must be exaggerating, and I admit that this is an area in which I would rather be over-cautious than be caught sleeping. You may also suggest that my motives for saying this are entirely driven by political outcome, a desire to shore up liberalism by any means – and I don’t want to discount that criticism out of hand. I do think, as in the bill of rights, there are liberal human rights which should be maintained even against a democratic majority, and I am as susceptible to the same outcome-derived biases where procedure is concerned as anyone. But I think that even if you are on the right and disagree strongly about desired outcomes, the potential abrogation of democratic legitimacy posed by the current direction of the GOP should trouble you.

Whenever this topic is raised January 6th is what immediately leaps to mind, but it is only the tip of the iceberg, and my concern over democratic legitimacy greatly predates it. The fact of the matter is that our particular political system, with the Electoral College, numerous veto points, a House which skews rural, and a Senate which bears little resemblance to the overall distribution of votes in the country, is already far from wholly democratic. Of course, in many ways we have made great strides in improving this system since the Revolution, and I am not arguing in favor of a pure non-representative democracy with every issue voted on a simple majority, with no veto points whatsoever. The danger is that our system increasingly skews things so that a minority of the population has been able to rule over the majority, to prevent necessary legislative reforms – not in the protection of individual liberty, but in all areas, bringing the process of legislating to a near standstill. This has crippled our ability to respond to crises and changing conditions in an effective way, and it has poisoned public opinion with the view that the state cannot operate, when it is in fact being sabotaged.

The public is growing increasingly aware of this gap between public opinion and votes, and actual power in government, which tends to trend overwhelmingly in a single direction, and this threatens to undermine faith in the Republic as an institution – faith without which it cannot function. But more troublesome is that professional political actors are increasingly informed about the ways in which the system skews right, and they are behaving accordingly. We see in the gamesmanship in the lead-up to January 6th around putting forward alternative slates of electors an openness by Republican strategists and staffers to attempting to cheat the electorate by testing the limit of the letter of the law, knowing that if such an argument about the rules were to break out, in our present polarized moment it would immediately collapse into partisan camps – in other words, it might be possible to get away with cheating simply by carrying along one side of the public and ignoring the other along with the principle of the thing.

This is beginning to bleed into an overt disregard for democracy as a principle at all; anecdotes are not good statistical data, and I think my experience represents more the way the algorithm promotes loud extremism over what is popular, but it has been hard to ignore the rising salience of voices in public discourse and online who are openly contemptuous of democracy, and who don’t really even try to deny that this is because it doesn’t vote the way they want. And I get it. When I was a teenager, I was an ideologically hard libertarian, and my perhaps OCD-propelled logic, from the emotional premise of the non-aggression principle, let me to my own lack of respect for democracy, because it seemed to consist of the public deciding how to apply force to individuals. But of course, following this to its logical end, I wound up being carried toward the waterfall of an anarchism that just does not work in this fallen world, which made me realize that the entire premise was flawed, and that government that collects taxes and works for the public good in imperfect ways is the best option available to us in this world. And most on the right today are not anarchists, and still believe in a government that collects taxes and enforces laws. The question, then, is on how the public good is determined, and what avenues are available to rectify abuses and promulgate reforms.

This, ultimately, is what the Revolution, for all its flaws, was fought over. And the danger we face now is the same of the 1770s. There are many who point to our Constitution, which creates the institutions I argue are skewed, and who say that they are simply playing by the rules as written – and that is the real danger. There is a distinct probability that the right will, if returned to government, exploit the technicalities of our system to entrench their power in a way that allows them to claim the fig leaf of procedural legality, while permanently denying the public the ability to govern itself in practice. This is not unlike the situation facing the Colonies: after all, the British parliamentary system was one of the most liberal and democratic constitutional systems in the world at the time, and backed by centuries of legal precedent as a font of legitimacy. But without representation, even this was not good enough; to maintain legitimacy, the state must grow with its people and remain responsive to the population as a whole. And the Revolution of course did not achieve this – as we know, the vast majority of Americans were excluded from power. But we have made many steps forward, and we can continue those now – or we can let a small clique wedge themselves into power to spite the majority.

If this occurs and is not corrected, then we will face two undesirable outcomes in succession. Either the minority will exercise a kind of tyranny over the majority, which will delegitimize the government, and frustrate the people’s ability to effect change. If there is no realistic democratic path for the majority of the public to ever change or correct a political problem, then they will either grow disengaged with politics, and rule will be by force by a stagnant elite, or they will feel forced to pursue other means of direct action to pursue their political goals. The ultimate danger is an authoritarian state with no accountability, or the collapse of the democratic social peace treaty and a return to general violence, which almost always resolves into an authoritarian state no matter which side wins, because avoiding that requires the commitment of the disagreeing wings of the public to honor democracy as the compromise to gain peace and legitimacy.

The danger is present now more than before, because the Republican nominee has already demonstrated an avowed willingness to abrogate democracy in favor of power, the party around him has acquiesced to this, and its intellectual leaders have decided that they are not going to even try to win majorities going forward, but that it is now or never for them demographically, which incentivizes them to ensure they do not lose power again. That is why it is crucial this anti-democratic politics be stopped here and now, and broken permanently so that it is replaced even on the right by a politics of persuasion.

Vote for Harris-Walz on November 5.