U.S. Elections: We Don’t Need To Settle For Genocide

Joe Allen critiques attempts to rally leftists behind Kamala Harris as the “lesser evil” choice against Trump. Allen argues that US imperialism and Zionism are at stake in this election, as voices on the left push for a choice between harmful status quos, warning that anti-war and social movements must resist these pressures to preserve genuine opposition to both the complicit duopoly Republican and Democratic parties.

Writing recently in the LA Progressive, former civil rights lawyer Stephen Rhode lamented:

I learned an important lesson in 1968.

My conscience could not allow me to vote for [Democratic Party nominee and serving Vice-President] Humphrey because of his unflinching support of President Lyndon Johnson’s dangerous escalation of that illegal war. So I voted for Dick Gregory, the Freedom and Peace Party candidate. And Nixon was elected. I’ll never forgive myself for that mistake. Humphrey only lost the popular vote by .7 percent. In thirteen states, the Electoral College was decided by a margin of 5% or less. I wonder how many other young idealistic anti-war voters helped elect Nixon by casting a protest vote or by simply staying home. He went on to perpetuate the war.

Today we face an election even more consequential than the one in 1968; it is existential.

Rhode’s latest is one of a series of arm-twisting messages being sent out over the past several weeks to those on the US left who have not yet reconciled themselves to settling for Kamala Harris—mainly the Uncommitted campaigners or—even worse—those who contemplate voting for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein of the Green Party, who is on the Michigan ballot. Rhode chastises the Uncommitted:

It would be a grave mistake if Uncommitted voters refuse to vote for Harris. They know full well that the plight of the Palestinian people will get worse and the prospects for peace in the Middle East will be dashed if Trump returns to power. Trump is a staunch supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies in Israel.

Strangely, Rhode doesn’t seem to have noticed that the Biden-Harris administration are also ‘staunch’ supporters of Netanyahu. They have handed Netanyahu’s government $18 billion dollars in financial aid, so far, and all the weapons that can be delivered to destroy Gaza and launch a regional war. If Biden-Harris weren’t ‘ironclad’ supporters of Netanyahu, they would have cut-off diplomatic, financial, and military aid long ago, and we’d be having a different conversation right now.

Rhode draws upon a recent editorial from the Nation magazine, another left-liberal publication that has made its peace with Biden-Harris:

Leftists contemplating voting for a third party in protest of Harris’s shortcomings—or out of discontent with our two-party system—need to ask themselves why their particular cause, or their personal discomfort, is more important than making sure that Trump, JD Vance, and their claque of congressional collaborators are defeated decisively, not only in the Electoral College but in the popular vote as well. Especially since we can already see Trump preparing another attack on the legitimacy of our elections.

Is it possible that the ‘personal cause’ that the Nation’s editorial writers are likely referring to is the genocide in Gaza and the prospect of a regional war? For one, I’m glad people are so thin-skinned. Wasn’t the unrelenting bombing of North Vietnam one of the major factors in turning world opinion against the United States during the Vietnam War?

With just a few weeks left in the US presidential campaign, the battle for votes in the upper Midwest and Pennsylvania is reaching fever pitch. The polls go back-and-forth about who is in the lead currently in these states that will, under the archaic Electoral College, ultimately choose the president irrespective of the national popular vote. Former President Barack Obama, for example, has been deployed to Detroit to chastise Black men for not enthusiastically supporting Vice-President Kamala Harris, and he has been joined by an entourage of prominent Black Democrats like South Carolina Congressman James E. Clyburn, who led the hatchet job on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary run and handed the south to Biden.   

The social democratic In These Times recently posted an editorial by senior editor Mile Kampf-Lassin, The Warning Signs for Kamala Harris’s Campaign Are Flashing Red:. He noted that 

Harris has not yet rebuilt the fragile coalition that pushed Biden over the finish line four years ago. Compared with Biden in 2020, polls show Harris underperforming with voters of color, younger voters and seniors — all key for Democrats. And when it comes to lower-income voters and those with less formal education, Harris is being outrun. 

If a few thousand blue-collar votes are likely to determine the outcome of the election, trade union leaders frustrated over loyalty for Trump among a sizable layer of members have seemed unwilling to leverage their endorsement of Harris to win concessions from the Democrats. With the exception of the Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien, whose courting of the far right has bewildered many of his own members, labor leaders have uncritically defended the Biden administration—whose economic policies have done little to lift workers struggling with long-term decline—and have tailored their campaigning to align with the Harris-Walz ticket.

This means that former President Donald Trump’s appeal to economic nationalism—tying the decline of US global economic standing to falling living standards, have never been effectively countered. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’ courting of yesteryear’s Republican neocons like former Vice-President Dick Cheney and John Bolton—formerly regarded as dangerous lunatics by many of the liberal-left—is not likely to win any votes from those who suffered death or disability in their “forever wars.”

Most importantly, whether labor leaders or people on the left like it or not, Zionism and US imperialism are on the ballot this year. Some of the surviving veterans of the Vietnam anti-war movement now at home in the Democratic Party seem to have developed political amnesia: it was the Vietnamese, through the Tet Offensive, that drove Lyndon Baines Johnson from the White House. Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has opened up a thin crack in the “lesser-evil” politics that have suffocated the US left and broad social movements in this country for nearly a century. Serious activists have to do everything in their power during this election season to see that these cracks widen. The question in this election is therefore pretty clear: Which side are you on? With Palestine or with the US-led global system that is orchestrating genocide in the Middle East? 

Joe Allen been has been a revolutionary socialist for over four decades in the United States. He writes regularly for Counterpunch and is the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service.