The Brooklyn Rail

Choice! That’s what elections (like the free market and America itself) are all about. You can choose to support the right to an abortion and (possibly) healthcare for trans children as long as you also choose the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the deaths of tens of thousands of women, children, and men. Of course, even if Harris wins, abortion rights will have to be fought for on the state level, referendum by referendum—the Democrats chose to do nothing on the federal level when they controlled the presidency, Senate, and House, and it’s hard to see how they could do so now. Still, life will feel better and more predictable for blue-state professionals and their young (myself included) if she wins.

It’s easy to fault the Germans who put up with Hitler or even enthused about him; after all it was their neighbors as well as people in distant lands who took it in the neck. Here the killing is far enough away that we can almost pretend it’s not happening. And someone else is doing it—we’re just providing the bombs, the money, and the diplomatic support. And anyway, what else are we (just like those Germans) supposed to do? Like them, we actually have no choice in the matter, so long as we accept the “rules-based liberal order.” Unlike the Germans under National Socialism, we can (as of this writing) still protest without immediate arrest, but whoever wins the election the US will continue to supply Israel with the weapons it needs for its murder spree. No government will act forcefully to stop the organized mass starvation of northern Gaza. Especially now that Saudi Arabia is flexing the muscles of its oil-powered independence, Israel remains the dependable, most powerful ally of the US in the Middle East, at a time of declining American international hegemony. The Netanyahu government can be as fascist as it chooses, while Harris warns Americans about Trump’s black-shirt leanings.

The half of voters who favor Trump, apart from the few who look forward to paying even less taxes and having even more freedom to market crypto scams, seem to believe the president controls the economy. And still more amazingly, the fraction of those voters who are not upper middle class believe that this right-wing nut, of all people, will bring hard-working Americans higher wages and lower prices. But the Republicans will no more than the Democrats be able to “bring back manufacturing” and reverse the socio-economic decline of “white non-college-educated” workers. Whatever the voters choose, living and working conditions will continue to degrade; poverty and homelessness will continue to increase; and war will devour economic resources, while the climate rushes onward to 3°C.

The feel of the campaigns is certainly different. While “joy” has given way to celebrity-themed vacuity on the Harris side, Trump’s rallies get darker and weirder. But the actual differences are far less significant than the vibes would indicate. Although Trump talks big about “energy supremacy,” under Biden oil and gas production actually increased to historical highs; Harris’s unchanging values are all in on fracking. A victory for either party will not affect the fossil fuel companies’ expansion plans. And both parties are committed to making immigrants suffer; now that Trump has switched to the impossible project of mass deportation, Harris has taken up The Wall, promising to finish what Obama started. They vie for who can be more brutal to the global poor at the border, though the promise to solve the “migration crisis” can hardly be kept.

That the choice offered by this election even seems worth discussing testifies to the poverty of real choices. The slaughter in Gaza, the weather, the immiseration of the working class, the fear and dislike of people who look different or want to live differently—all these are manifestations of a social system, a way of life, so all-encompassing and with so little space for change as to be immune to protest. Could this be why the two sides are so evenly matched: that negligible concrete differences render the whole “choice” frozen, static, nearly meaningless? Especially since, as experts tell us, the election will actually be decided by 150,000 voters in a handful of neighborhoods, with all other votes basically playing no role except as a sort of background noise?

From time to time there are reminders that other modes of life are possible. The burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis in 2020, the uprising in Chile the year before that, last year’s mass anti-government fights in Kenya and Bangladesh suggest that when patience runs out, people will try something new. So far, all such attempts have been crushed or defanged, but who knows what a few more decades of fires, floods, and housing crisis will produce?