For anyone who has to hold their nose to vote for Harris

I think this newsletter is better than yesterday's, but let me know what you think if you'd like to. Thank you to everyone who sent feedback (it was all positive, which is good on the first day) and to all of you for reading, except Tony. —JW

There are people—people on the internet, at least, where I live—who say they're not voting for Kamala Harris because she isn't progressive enough. A big sticking point for them right now is Israel; they want Harris to speak out loudly against the Israeli Defense Forces' ongoing assault on Palestinians (which the United States has abetted by supplying weapons to Israel), and to promise to use our leverage to end the killing if she's elected. And because of Harris's refusal thus far to do those things, these people say they're not going to vote for her.

I'm not gonna specifically talk about Israel-Palestine right now (although I am happy to, if anyone wants that, and will probably do it even if no one wants it), because it's not the only issue left-wingers are threatening to withhold their votes over. Some left-wingers are angry that Harris has had former congresswoman Liz Cheney campaigning with her, and thanked Cheney's father—the Republican former vice president justifiably compared to Darth Vader—for his endorsement. (Today she told The View she's going to put a Republican in her Cabinet.) Some don't trust her because she used to be a high-ranking district attorney, which typically involves amassing a lot of successful criminal prosecutions, which typically involves getting a lot of people who aren't white convicted, whether those people are all necessarily guilty or not. For some, it's the combination of all these things. And I'm sure there are other reasons progressives and leftists don't want to vote for Harris.

Now to be clear: I think these reasons are good insofar as: We as Americans should do everything possible to prevent or stop genocide, and should not abet it. It's not great that we're conferring respectability on any part of the Republican Party, which has hijacked the country, especially when Never Trump Republicans like the Cheneys very much helped lay the groundwork for Donald Trump's takeover of the party. Our justice system is racist and inflicts pain on marginalized people, whom it is supposed to treat as well as it treats a wealthy white man, and we should be aware of decisions Kamala Harris made as a person with authority in that system.

These are solid moral positions for anyone who cares about making the world better for more people, grounded in an accurate understanding of real life and American culture and politics. If you are going to withhold a vote for someone, "I don't want my country to help another country murder small children it was already oppressing" is a good reason, full stop. You are on the left because you believe life is precious and should be treated with respect, and you don't want your support to go to an American president who doesn't align with those values.

But if you are thinking about not voting for Harris for a reason like this, I would consider two things. The first one you've probably heard, but I don't know about the second one.

First: Because there are only two alternatives—Harris becomes president, or Trump becomes president—you're going to end up with an American president who doesn't align with your values either way. Barring some reality-shifting change, this was going to be true no matter who ran for president, because the United States operates through a lot of oppressive systems, which shape our political possibilities and aren't rooted out quickly or easily. If we want a president who aligns with our values, we need to reshape the systems the president operates through. Electing a president doesn't do that on its own, but when you're trying to bring things into alignment—like progressive values and the values of the U.S. government—you will get further if you start with a president whose values are closer to aligning with progressive values. Who even holds progressive values herself. It's not a thought experiment; it's a mechanical issue. And a President Harris would be way more in alignment with progressive values than a President Trump. There's no reasonable argument against that. Trump—and more importantly, the people a Trump administration would empower, like JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Stephen Miller—has said he will oppress Black and brown people, women and queer people and children of all colors. Trump will supply Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with all the weapons the IDF wants. He will weaponize the American justice system against marginalized people. If there were some path that took us from "withholding votes for Harris" to "things get better for people who are already suffering" (or even just "things don't get worse for those people"), withholding votes for Harris would make a lot more sense to me. But I don't see that path.

Here's the second thing, which goes back to the idea of reshaping our systems to make it possible to have a progressive U.S. president: We can't reshape systems with an election, even a presidential election. We just can't! Just to get an openly progressive presidential nominee in this country, and certainly to get a critical mass of progressive leaders elected over time, we need news media that will report more accurately about who holds power in this country and that holds the wealthy accountable. We need a major political party that isn't beholden to plutocracy. We need grassroots organization empowering communities to band together to get those and other things. Or at least we need to be working on these things. We push at the presidential level by electing presidents whose values are closer to ours; we push on the ground by building ways to materialize those values.

A lot of us—and I absolutely include myself in this group—don't think hard about our political values until election season rolls around. Then we make a big dramatic show of deciding which party we're going to grace with our special, beautiful, one-of-a-kind vote. Then we don't take any practical steps toward the improvements we want to see, and then the next election rolls around and we're mad that our system and candidates haven't gotten better—even though it's quite clear that our problems are too big and deep-seated to fix by voting alone. It will take sustained work between elections. (And I will tell you: It will be much easier to do under Harris than Trump. None of us do better work on anything when we're anxious or sad or scared all the time.)

If you are thinking about not voting for Harris for moral reasons, I would ask myself (one more time) if that's an effective way to get us closer to the kind of better world you want. And maybe I would decide to hold my nose and vote for her, as the saying goes, while also pledging to find some kind of work that will get us closer to that world between now and the next election.

In fact, even if I decided not to hold my nose and vote for her, maybe I would pledge to find some kind of work like that. In fact, I am pledging to find some kind of work like that. I will let you know what I've come up with next Tuesday.

If you can't do that kind of work—if all you can do right now is vote—I'm sorry to hear that, and I'm certainly not going to argue with you; you know your situation way better than I do. Even if you just don't want to do that kind of work, I'm not going to argue with you. There are going to be people on the left who just won't vote for Harris. And if you're already doing that work, I'm not going to argue with you either (but I am sincerely grateful).

• There's a right-wing campaign to spread lies about the federal government's hurricane relief efforts. On Friday, Trump said, "A billion dollars was stolen from FEMA to use it for illegal migrants." That's so absolutely not how FEMA funding works.

• In early 2020, when covid tests were much harder to come by, Trump sent some to Russian president Vladimir Putin. That's from a new book, War, by Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, which comes out next week.

• Trump also said yesterday that there are "a lot of bad genes" in the country because of migrants. "Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they're now happily living in the United States," he said in an interview. "You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now." None of that is true, and all of it is, as one person in my feed put it, "Nazi shit."

Joke

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