Compassion for MAGA Voters Compels Us to Vote for Harris
Written with Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” Playing in the Background
Although a Donald Trump presidency may be the worst choice Americans could make for the continuance of the American political experiment and for human civilization, I sympathize for those who will vote for him. Many Americans see themselves – correctly, I believe – to have been poorly served by both major political parties. And many of them see Trump as not really being of either party. Because everybody knows that he has created what is being called the New Republican Party in his own image.
And everybody knows Donald Trump is a mean, vengeful bloviator, a con man, a whiner who was born with a silver-plated spoon in his mouth. He’s racist and misogynist and hateful as the devil. He rambles, he deceives, he has no policy longer than a Hemingway sentence. Like a broken dam, expletives and lies and vitriol pour from his mouth. Everybody knows that he’s unhinged and Putin’s lapdog and that his antipathy for immigrants may be considered just the least little bit Jesus of Hitler because his mass deportations won’t end in gas ovens (but then my friend Shawn reminded me that no ethnic cleansing is free of mass murder, because guns and forced mass displacements and imprisonments can be just as effective).
And everybody knows that Trump couldn’t buy a television ad or pay for his arena rallies if it were not for the billionaires like Elon Musk and Timothy Melon and Miriam Adelson and Dick Uihlein and Ike Perlmutter and Jeff Yass, all of whom have donated tens of millions if not a hundred-plus million to super PACs that promote Trump’s daily deluge of bile and bitterness.
And, yet, everybody knows that he just might become the next president (and first fascist leader) of the good ole USA.
It is boggling their minds - at least when everybody is the American half leaning left – that this highly flawed human being can consistently poll at forty-five percent, much less fifty, of Americans surveyed. Especially when that same everybody remembers that he left the White House four years earlier in disgrace with a 29 percent approval rating.
But that American half cannot be blamed if they hear in Trump’s whining their own dismay at being left behind in a world fast changing and their own outrage and resentments in his unhinged rantings about immigrants and the dark days of a country that many once believed was the greatest because a gallon of gas cost a buck and their pickup trucks did zero to sixty in 5.2. If America ever was the greatest it surely is no more. At least if the following numbers have any meaning.
The U.S. is no longer considered a full democracy, but rather a “flawed democracy” or “deficient democracy.” Depending on how democracy is measured, the U.S. ranks somewhere between 29th (The Economist) and 60th (Freedom House) among nations. It ranks as one of the most unequal countries in the world when income is the measure — 127th according to the World Bank. When the more accurate measure of inequality is considered – wealth, not just income – the U.S. ranks 156th, in the company of the Central African Republic, Malawi, and Congo. And when the conditions of the richest and poorest Americans are compared, the U.S. resembles an ancient kleptocracy more than the image of a modern constitutional republic. For instance, the richest one percent of Americans have more wealth than the bottom ninety percent.
Given this disparity, it will not come as a surprise that the U.S. ranks among the world’s worst in most every important socio-economic metric. Within the 37 OECD countries, only Costa Rica has a greater poverty rate than the U.S. And, whereas the U.S. is the world’s largest food exporter, over 47 million American households regularly experience hunger. The average American life expectancy has dropped to under 80 years, 48th among nations, although we have the most expensive health care system in the world. Only thirteen countries — none of them Western or Northern European — had a higher COVID death rate than the U.S., thank you, Mr. Trump. The U.S. ranks 12th in education, but in only three countries does school cost more.
The U.S. is decisively number one in the following respects. U.S. citizens hold the highest average credit card debt, and the U.S. spends by far more than any other country on its military and is the greatest arms exporter. The U.S.A. ranks amongst the highest in murder rates (Yemen, Zimbabwe, and Russia are our statistical neighbors) and gun homicides. And no country in the world has more incarcerated people than does the United States, not even China with four times our total population.
And everybody knows that it is the poor and working middle class that suffer from these failings. The affluent is this country still send their children to good schools, enjoy gold and platinum health insurance, reside in safe neighborhoods, and live longer, more commodious lives.
This unequal state of the union did not just suddenly pop-up during any one administration. The American condition has slowly worsened through the decades, no matter who was in the White House or in Congress. Research by OpenSecrets.org on campaign financing, lobbyists, and the “revolving door” of the elite class gives us a window into the machinations of our decline. Their data show that business has, for decades, given generously to campaigns of both parties, albeit usually more to the Republicans. And the 2010 Supreme Court decision, cynically named Citizens United (as if it were favorable to the citizenry) ensures that none of our socio-economic problems will improve significantly for ordinary Americans. Why? Because the wealthy will not financially benefit from such changes.
As Leonard Cohen’s song goes, everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. So, the Dow Jones stock average has risen 15-fold since a low in June of 1982, from around 2,600 to over 40,000 today, enriching the lives of many, few of whom belonged to the working class, of course. In those forty-plus years, as the U.S. economy shifted towards low-paying services (servers and cashiers, for instance) and high-paying information specialists (like finance and software development), the salaries of college educated employees rose and wages for workers without college degrees plunged (when compared to the average American income). Wages have dropped most precipitously for white men. Two-thirds of American men over the age of 25 fall into this category, many of them living in the “Red” Southeast states and in the swing states of the Rustbelt.
To add insult to injury, along with their lower education levels and declining wages came diminished social status, an inferiority they can easily track as they rubberneck the celebrities and influencers of all colors and genders parading their bling and beautiful bodies across television and smartphone screens. They are like the poor kids with their noses pressed to the display window of the candy store. Meanwhile, right-wing politicians and pundits who make a living by sowing discord are using the oldest political red meat trope to inflame the Trump base, that of scapegoating the immigrants.
Everybody knows that immigrants are far easier to blame than the American and European corporations that orchestrate the conditions of our daily existence. We still consume all those cars, refrigerators, and televisions that (mostly white male) Americans and Europeans used to make in factories, and these products are still sold by lots of the same companies; they’re just made elsewhere, mainly in the Global South where wages and corporate taxes are low and environmental laws are lax. The American Rust Belt was caused by corporations moving out, not by immigrants coming in.
While it may be true that both the Republicans and Democrats have been party to our problems, the two have, as the economist Paul Krugman put it, “diverged sharply on economic ideology. In general, Democrats favor higher taxes on the rich and a stronger social safety net; Republicans favor lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy paid for in part by cutting social programs.” In this, Trump’s New Republican party is much like the old. And this is a principal reason that some of the worst victims of a Trump presidency will be his base.
Trump’s biggest con has been to convince the working class that he will save them. For, although he speaks the language of the aggrieved, his policies and “concepts of a plan” have – in traditional Republican style – hurt everyone but the wealthy. While in office, his tax cuts favored corporations and high-income Americans; his tariffs (a sales tax on Americans, as Harris correctly called them) only hurt the poor and middle class; he proposed substantial cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare in every one of his budgets; and, as everybody knows, anti-abortion laws create more involuntary parents and unwanted children only among the poor and cash-strapped working class, especially in the red states.
Kamala Harris is clearly the better choice for the working class—white, black, brown, of every gender, ethnicity and ideology, across the board. In her short few months as a candidate, she has already crafted far kinder and more detailed policy proposals than has Trump in his eight long political years. And she is the far more lucid, sane, and capable person to be near the “nuclear button” and to lead the country in times of crisis. Even if one has not apprised themselves of her policies, and even if a Harris presidency proves to be a continuation of the old-world order, it will surely be more stable, promising, and sustainable than the dark chaos Trump is relentlessly threatening us with.