By Norman Solomon
With Election Day just three weeks off and voting already underway in some states, the race for president is down to the wire. Progressives could make the difference.
While no one in their left mind plans to vote for the fascistic and unhinged Donald Trump, some say they won’t vote for Kamala Harris because of her loyalty to President Biden’s support for the Israeli war on Gaza. That might enable Trump to win with enough electoral votes from swing states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Those seven states are where progressives may well hold the future in their voting hands.
The policy that Harris has defended for the war on Gaza is despicable. At the same time, she is the only candidate who can spare us from another Trump presidency, which -- from all indications -- would be far worse than the first one.
The need is urgent for dialectics -- “a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to find the truth” -- in this case, the truth of what’s most needed at this electoral crossroads of fateful history.
“The harms of the other options” mean that the best course of action is to vote for Harris, 25 Islamic clerics said in a letter released last week. They focused on an overarching truth: “Particularly in swing states, a vote for a third party could enable Trump to win that state and therefore the election.” The U.S. clerics called such a vote “both a moral and a strategic failure.”
Personally, as a resident of solid-blue California, I have no intention of voting for Harris. But if I lived in one of the seven swing states, I wouldn’t hesitate to join in voting for her as the only way to defeat Trump.
Some speak of the need to exercise conscience rather than voting for Harris. Yet in swing states, what kind of “conscience” is so self-focused that it risks doing harm to others as a result of a Trump presidency?
If it becomes a reality, the Trump-Vance administration will force progressives back on their heels, necessarily preoccupied with trying to mitigate the onslaught of massive damage being inflicted by right-wing zealots with vast government power.
On domestic policies -- involving racism, reproductive rights, civil liberties, the environment, climate, labor rights, the social safety net, civil rights, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, freedom of speech and the right to organize, the judicial system, and so much more -- the differences between the Trump and Harris forces are huge. To claim that those differences are insignificant is a nonsensical version of elitism, no matter how garbed in leftist rhetoric.
On foreign policy, Harris is the vice president in an administration fully on board with bipartisan militarism that keeps boosting the Pentagon budget, bypassing diplomacy for ending the Ukraine war while stoking the cold war, and -- with vast arms shipments to Israel -- literally making possible the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
At the same time, anyone who thinks that Trump (“finish the job”) wouldn’t be even worse for Palestinian people -- hard as that is to imagine -- doesn’t grasp why Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is so eager for Trump to win.
The leadership of the Uncommitted movement has sorted out the political options. The terrain was well described by Uncommitted leader Abbas Alawieh, who said last month: “At this time, our movement opposes a Donald Trump presidency whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing. And our movement is not recommending a third-party vote in the presidential election, especially as third-party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency, given our country’s broken Electoral College system.”
As his frequent collaborator C.J. Polychroniou noted last month, Noam Chomsky “has repeatedly made the argument that voting for a third-party or independent candidate in a swing state would accomplish nothing but increase the possibility of the most extreme and positively nuts candidate winning the election.”
In an interview with Jacobin a few weeks ago, Alawieh had this to say: “As someone who has family who lives in South Lebanon right now -- who are living under the terror of U.S. weapons raining down on them from the Israeli military -- I do not have the luxury of giving up on the only one of the two major parties where there is room for this debate. To be clear, there’s room for this debate not because the Democratic Party is friendly to Palestinian human rights. There’s room for this debate because A) the Republican Party is not the party where we can have this conversation; not a single federal elected official on the Republican side even supports a cease-fire as this genocide has raged on, and B) the Democratic Party speaks of being the party of justice and inclusion, and there are more and more of us within the party who are insisting that the party change its immoral and illegal support of sending weapons to harm and kill civilians.”
Similarly, another prominent Uncommitted movement leader, Palestinian American Layla Elabed, said: “We urge uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot. Our focus remains on building this anti-war coalition, both inside and outside the Democratic Party.”
This is certainly not the presidential election that we want, but it’s the one we have. The immediate task is to prevent a Trump victory. His defeat is essential to keep doors open for progressive change that a new Trump presidency would slam shut with extreme right-wing power.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.