Why Leftists should Help Defeat Trump by Voting for Harris, Not a Protest Candidate

The choice is fascism, repression, reversal of freedoms women and minorities won over the past century, and climate disaster, or a chance to continue pushing for a better, fairer more humane society

The choice is fascism, repression, a reversal of freedoms won by minorities and women over the past century, and disaster for the earth’s ecosystem, or a chance to continue pushing for a better, fairer and more humane society

By Dave Lindorff

I’ve been hearing from a leftist friend whose credentials as an antiwar activist and revolutionary journalist are impeccable, who says I’m naive for suggesting that in this particular election it is essential for real leftists to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and not to waste votes on a protest candidate who has no chance of being elected. This is likely to be a very close election and one that will again face Trump campaign efforts to disenfranchise minority voters and to upend the vote counts. 

Harris, he says, will continue the policy of arming Ukraine with weapons that allow it to launch attacks inside Russia, which he warns increases the risk of. nuclear war.  Now that is a threT that. definitely needs to be considered seriously.

So since I know this friend is not alone in that thinking, and in also making the argument that former president Donald Trump will not only not threaten Russia, but might end the Ukraine war, I want to here give my analysis of that war and of the even more horrific war on Gaza by Israel, which is being almost totally supported by unlimited provision of arms, armaments and ammunition and bombs by the United States. 

I believe that if Trump wins this election in November, he will not end the war in Ukraine (which he has bragged he could end “in a day,” even before his inauguration in January, thanks to the “respect” he claims Russian President Vladimir Putin has for him). I believe he won’t end the conflict because even if he might want to, the arms industry and the US  national security establishment that depends upon the demonization of Russia to stay in business will not allow it to happen. 

Harris, meanwhile, I will likely continue the US policy of backing Ukraine for the same reason, pushing limits in the provision of advanced weaponry as Biden has done, but like him, not to the point of threatening Russia in any existential way, and perhaps in Harris’s case, not so fulsomely as Cold Warrior Biden has done. In that respect she would be little different from Democratic presidents going back to Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan  and Bill Clinton in Serbia and Nato’s eastern expansion, who all provoked Russia (or in Carter’s case, the USSR). 

At the same time, fears about the Ukraine conflict going nuclear, or leading to the entry of US or Nato country military forces, are In my opinion overblown and not realistic. The reason for my confidence in saying this is the same as the reason that there has not been a head-to-head war between the US and Russian or Soviet  military forces since World War II, when of course the USSR and its Red Army were the main allies of the US in the European theater. In fact it’s the reason the US hasn’t been involved in a war against China either since the end of the Korean War. That reason is nuclear weapons. (China of course didn’t have its own atomic bomb until 1964, but in during the Korean War and in the intervening decade until the PRC became a nuclear power, despite frictions between Moscow and Beijing, Moscow, with its nuclear arsenal, still had China’s back.)

As Richard Rhodes, the dean of historians of the atomic age, wrote in a foreword to  the 25th anniversary re-issue of his magnum opus The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 2012):

When the Soviet Union exploded a copy of the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb built from plans supplied by Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall and went on to develop a comprehensive arsenal of its own, matching the American arsenal; when the hydrogen bomb increased the already devastating destructiveness of nuclear weapons by several orders of magnitude; when the British, the French, the Chinese, the Israelis and other nations acquired nuclear weapons, the strange new nuclear world matured…

So cheap, so portable, so holocaustal did nuclear weapons eventually become that even nation-states as belligerent as the Soviet Union and the United States preferred to sacrifice a portion of their national sovereignty—preferred to forgo the power to make total war—rather than be destroyed in their fury. Lesser wars continue, and will continue…but world war at least has been revealed to be historical, not universal, a manifestation of destructive technologies of limited scale.  

Rhodes has been proven correct. Despite some close calls, no nuclear weapon has been used in war since Aug. 9, 1945. That’s quite a record, given that by 1982 there were over 22,000 nuclear bombs, shells and warheads in global arsenals, before a period of gradual mutual reductions of those weapons began.

So to get back to why leftists and anti-war activists should vote not just against Trump but for Harris, it is not because Trump will provoke a nuclear war, but rather because  Trump is quite likely to provoke a non-nuclear (or perhaps even a limited nuclear) attack on a still non-nuclear Iran if returned to the White House. He nearly did that on Jan. 3, 2020 (just 18 days before the end of his term of office), with his brazen attack on Iranian Major Qasem Soleimani,  who was in Iraq on a diplomatic mission attempting to end the conflict between his country and Saudi Arabia. 

Trump, far more supportive of zionist Israel than even Biden, would be glad to accommodate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wish for a US or joint US/Israel attack on Iran and its nuclear development complex.  I do not believe that Kamala Harris would do so, but would far more likely return  to the nuclear agreement the US had negotiated with Iran with the backing of France, Germany, Britain Russia and China not to further refine U-235 or to develop a nuclear bomb (something Iran’s newly elected president has spoken in favor of). 

Turning to the genocidal war on Gaza, it is clear to me that if Trump is elected, he will basically give Netanyahu a free hand in continuing to attack and slaughter Palestinians, including on the West Bank, and with US military aid. Harris, on the other hand, has already shown signs, notably toward the end of her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, of separating herself from Biden’s fulsome backing for the Israel’s genocide. It has to be remembered that Biden is still the president and is calling the shots on US policy regarding the conflict. Like VP Hubert Humphrey who was actually warned by the lame-duck President Lyndon Johnson that he would “destroy him” if he came out against the Vietnam War, and thus who only called for an end to that war  a few weeks before the November election (too late to save him from losing to Richard Nixon), Harris is hamstrung. That said, she has already made it far more clear than Biden that the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians “has to stop.” That is much stronger than Biden’s ignored pleas to Netanyahu to require the Israeli military to “be more careful” in their targeting of civilians.

My guess is that if elected, Harris will not accept being ignored as Biden has repeatedly done. It’s a hunch, but in any event the odds of her taking a stronger stand on ending slaughter is vastly greater than of Trump’s doing anything to stop it. Trump’s only proposal so far has been for Israel  to go ahead and eliminate Hamas but to “get it done quickly..”

As a leftist journalist, a long-time anti-war activist, and a believer in socialism, I am well aware that both candidates Trump and Harris and both the Republican and Democratic parties are supporters of capitalism. I have no illusions that the Democrats will ever take actions that would challenge that exploitive socio-political system. But the reality is that there is no mass movement or mass-based socialist party as there was in the late 1920s and 30s that is doing that. We have to work for the moment with what we have. 

Having thus given my analysis above of the war stances of the two major party presidential candidates, which shows the much greater risk posed by a Trump presidency, let’s turn to the other risks. 

Trump is clearly a threat to civil liberties, having openly made calls for having US active-duty troops, armed with assault weapons break up protests, using live ammunition, and not just special anti-riot weapons. He has has spoken in favor of limiting abortion rights nationally, of ending efforts to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions, He proposes deporting millions of undocumented immigrants as well as documented immigrants who might get arrested for minor legal infractions, and plans on replacing White House cabinet  department civil servants with politically appointed sycophants, as well as weakening the protection of the right to vote for all citizens. An outspoken advocate of a powerful president he would be backed in his stated goal of acting s an autocratic leader by a Supreme Court Court now packed with three of his own right-wing nominees and three equally right-wing justices appointed by prior right-wing presidents. Those six justices have already ruled that he and future presidents are immune from prosecution for acts commited while in office—an outrageous ruling that has no basis whatsoever in the Constitution whose actual wording to which they claim to hew strictly.

There has not been such a threat to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights or to its original text in the history of the nation. 

Harris meanwhile will defend the right to vote, will work to strengthen Social Security, will at least protect the Affordable Care Act that for millions of Americans is their only avenue to obtaining affordable  health insurance, will take actions to at least address the climate crisis (which Trump still calls a ‘hoax”), will increase federal funding for education, appoint judges who will defend the Bill of Rights, and will defend women’s right to decide on what medical care they need, including birth control and legal abortion.  None of these are “minor” issues but are centrally important domestically.  Those things alone would be reasons to support her election even if the alternative even in a more normal US election where the alternative wasn’t fascism. Since the alternative however is a fascist who plans to seriously attack what freedoms this country still has they should be all the more reason to help get her elected...even if she isn’t going to crush capitalism, end US imperialism and establish a socialist utopia.