February 22, 2025
Before, during and after the election, I spent way too much time on Twitter looking at arguments about it. In particular, I saw enormous amounts of discourse about the morality of refusing to vote for the Democrats in the November election over the issue of Palestine. Before I go on criticizing these "abstentionists", I want to make a couple of caveats:
So, considering that, I think I have identified 4 categories of "abstentionists" (people who would have voted for Harris, but did not, because of the issue of Palestine). They are described below, in order from least to most sympathetic (from my perspective at least).
These people are those that were always conservative, but who previously voted for Democrats because they were much better on the Israel-Palestine issue. These people are mostly Arab-Americans: the classic socially conservative immigrant who votes for the center-left party mostly because they're not as racist (e.g. pro-BJP, Harris-voting Indian immigrants). Their transition over to the GOP was probably inevitable given racial depolarization; it just happened to trigger now.
This type of conservative loves the idea of tolerance when it comes to race and religion (particularly their own). But when it comes to gay people or feminism, they are highly skeptical. And in a world where they remain in the Democratic fold, they might even truly believe in generalized tolerance. But, when the perceived "benefit" of supporting Democrats fades to unreality due to American and Israeli behavior (a perception change supported by enormous suffering executed under a Democratic administration), many took the excuse and switched over to their more natural ideological allegiance.
These people are the reason that Trump (not Jill Stein) won in Dearborn last year.
At first glance, it's hard for me to parse through why this would change their behavior; it's not like the Democrats and Republicans got any closer on Palestine - Trump's statements on Palestine have been escalating too. Every truly pro-Palestine person in this country is still either a Democrat or further left than them. Maybe a lot of these people believe that Trump will be better on Palestine than Biden or Harris (which is absurd). But, I think the more cogent reason behind this is that they feel that neither party is "good enough" on Palestine anymore. The (former) benefit of voting for Democrats was not the distance between their position and Republicans'; it was that Democrats might lead somewhere other than total Israeli hegemony over Palestine. But now, if you don't believe Democrats offer any hope, then the salience of that issue drops; if no American will ever help Palestinians, why vote on that issue? And, as an added bonus, you get to vote in closer alignment with all your other policy preferences.
I still think this is a dumb (and evil) decision, and that future Democrats will be significantly better on Palestine than Republicans, but I think this makes some sense from their perspective ... and it was probably an inevitable switch anyway. I hope some of these people observe the behavior of Trump and the GOP and switch back ... but I fear that a lot of them are gone forever.
These people see politics not as a struggle over power, but as a celebrity-creation mechanism; politics is there to create people to like (and reward) and people to hate (and punish). Most of all, they see voting as a way to reward people they like - and not voting for someone as a way to punish them. Voting is a decision about deservingness, not about political power.
This mindset feels so fundamentally American to me: where democracy is about picking "good people", and not about exerting your own political power to affect policies. It's an idea that feels deeply fundamental to American civic religion; it's something that's mostly false, but it's on the naturalization test because it feels nice.
I am not free of this impulse. I love it when the person I'm voting for seems nice. I love it when the person I'm voting for doesn't seem horrible.
But, no, politics is not a game where things would end up perfect if only good people got into office. Simply picking good people is not sufficient, it's not even necessary. There is certainly a minimum level of competence required, but once you reach a certain level of competence (which most non-Trump politicians easily meet), it is about choices between alternatives. A personally wholesome person should not hold power if they want to implement policy worse than the alternative. A personally nasty person should hold power if they want to implement policy better than the alternative.
Sometimes, both candidates are horrible, but voting is not a personal endorsement (or condemnation) of someone's character. These people are rich and powerful. These people will live out the rest of their lives in luxury and splendor if they lose (unless they are driven insane by their own brainworms).
I don't think deservingness should ever come into play when it comes to elections. We are not picking the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award. We are picking the President of the United States. Whatever your moral grounding, the evil of picking an evil man to be president is inconsequentially small compared to the impact of their policies.
The American state is enormous, violent, and ever-corrupting. No politician can escape complicity by being nice. And no American can escape complicity by refusing to engage with politics.
A lot of people felt very uncomfortable with voting for a politician who aided a genocide (notwithstanding the fact that Harris wasn't the one in office, and there's good reason to believe that she would've been far better on Palestine than Biden). I get it. I get thinking about the pros and cons of voting for Democrats and immediately being horrified when images of Gaza pop into your mind. I understand being physically revolted by the idea of not wanting to check the box next to someone's name when they helped perpetrate horrible things. I understand wanting to avoid making that vote.
But ... come on. What are we actually doing here? Refusing to vote for someone because it makes you personally uncomfortable? Unless you have relatives living in Gaza (which, I can only imagine, would make this emotion overwhelmingly powerful - and make abstention extraordinarily understandable), this is unimaginably cowardly to me. People say they're willing to go through the horrors of a revolution, but aren't willing to take the uncomfortable, morally-correct action right in front of them? Why are you judging this decision based on some undefinable feeling about its morality, instead of, you know, the obvious material impact of the decision-at-hand? Why are you all deontologists the second utilitarianism gets difficult?
Voting is not some sacred transmission of your beliefs into American governance; it is a choice about who, among the viable alternatives, will be given political power.
It's a bad argument to say that a vote for a third party is a vote for Trump. It's much more accurate to say that a vote for a third party is half a vote for Trump and half a vote for Harris. It's accurate to say that not voting is an endorsement of the whoever your fellow citizens voted for. You do not get to escape complicty for not choosing. You had the option. You chose to not choose. You chose to go with whatever your fellow citizens believe. Have you seen how evil they are?!
A smaller portion of people have actually decided to engage with the moral question at hand, and have taken the stance that not voting for Democrats will actually have positive consequences (therefore it is not only acceptable, but the only acceptable choice). But, they are simply wrong. This reasoning is based on some ideas that are just verifiably false.
These are beliefs that only make sense if they need to be true in order for one's actions to be justified. I don't know how many of these people truly believe these falsehoods, or if this is just a rhetorical cover for some underlying deontological discomfort, but they're wrong regardless.
To get the facts out of the way first:
The two-party system is deeply entrenched in US politics due to: first-past-the-post electoral systems, our government's presidentialist setup, the lack of serious regionalism in modern US politics, our long history of having a two-party system, and, yes, the electoral college. This system is extremely hard to change. In my mind, the only ways to resist it are:
Any reasonably ideological third party candidate is just going to be (correctly!) seen as a spoiler for their wing of the political spectrum. Americans understand this well (feels strange to be complimenting Americans on their understanding of the political system, but they get this one). Unless it's a Ross Perot-style figure who can't really be identified as part of either wing, people just aren't going to vote for them.
On the Green Party in particular (the preferred vehicle of leftist abstentionists), they are simply not a serious party. They run a presidential election every four years, but that is not the way to build a serious party. If they were serious, they'd be running in state legislative races, in house races, and avoiding inevitable defeat in the presidential race, but that is not what they're interested in. They are interested in being a spoiler for the Democratic Party. Their support comes not from support of their policy positions, but from opposition to the Democratic Party's current candidate; this support base is inherently unstable. Giving them more attention and money will not result in long-term success.
If these abstentionists get their way and the Democrats lose, that will not push them left. It will push them right. Democratic voters and politicians both correctly perceive that there are generally more voters to their right than to their left. Consistently, many more Americans say that the Democrats are too far left than too far right. First and foremost, this is evidence that Americans are awful and have awful opinions, but it does lead to the (probably, regretably correct) idea that moving right will inevitably help Democrats win more elections.
And throughout history we have seen the reaction of Democrats to losses. Nixon's landslide win in 1972 did not result in the next Democratic president being a leftist. Instead, the arch-moderate Jimmy Carter won in 1976. And after he lost, and the Republicans controlled the White House for another 12 years, who was the next president? A diehard leftist? No, Bill Clinton. The 1970s and 1980s were an era of consistent losses for Democrats; and the Democrats that came out of that were more conservative than ever. Democrats only got more progressive when they felt like they could afford to be that way. The massive unpopularity of late second-term Bush and of Trump made the relative progressivity of Obama and Biden possible.
Make Democrats feel electorally comfortable if you want to move them left; they will not risk that under threat of Republican dictatorship.
This is the awful truth of American politics. The median American is an evil dumbass who thinks Democrats are too left-wing.