I’m working for Kamala Harris … but I'm not voting for her
“Out of democratic and republican administrations alike, have come Jim Crowism, mobbing, segregation, lynching, southern disfranchisement, and general terrorism." - -Grace Campbell, 1928
I am believing more and more in two realities:
*The United States is not so much a democratic nation as a capitalist republic …which means power does not lie with the people but with the small subset of the people with enough money/resources to ensure their seat and voice at the decision-making table.
*Elections are increasingly an exercise in harm limitation and a not an effective means of social progress.
This does not mean elections are not important. This presidential election, for example, is incredibly important – because the harm we are trying to limit is extensive.
There are many problems with that … one being that fear is a limited motivator.
I fully admit I drank the Obama Kool-Aid. And that’s not to say that Barack Obama was a bad president or is a bad person. In fact, comparatively I think he was a really good president.
And that I sometimes long for the presidency of someone who launched 542 drone strikes that killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians and led President Obama to say in 2011
“Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
That I sometimes long for the presidency of someone who deported 2.5 million people – more than Donald Trump – and famously got an F grade from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence – shows how much elections have become an exercise in harm limitation.
And this one is no different.
I don’t imagine anyone who is reading me needs to be convinced of what particularly those who are already most vulnerable in this nation have to fear from another Trump presidency. We must do whatever we can to prevent that from happening.
And … there is a dual long game that needs to be played.
The first is adjusting expectations.
Every president in my lifetime (I was born a few days after Nixon was elected in 1968) has convinced me that the most I should hope for from the person who is able successfully to campaign for that office – or really any national political office – is harm limitation and maybe … maybe … allowing movements of the people to achieve a tiny fraction of a modicum of the change we really need in this country (e.g. Obamacare).
The absolute most our elected leaders can be expected to do is to move the law where popular opinion has already moved … as long as it doesn’t piss off people with money and power too much. Because if it does … they won’t be in office very long or be able to do anything with the power they have as long as it lasts. (kind of have some experience on this one)
As much as we like to pretend JFK and Lincoln were visionary progressive leaders, that collapses under closer examination. So, what hope does a president today have?
Even our fictional presidents whom we long for fall short lest the story seem too unrealistic.
There’s a great scene early in Season Five of The West Wing (the first non-Sorkin season) where President Bartlet is talking with Chief of Staff Leo McGarry about his complicity in the assassination of a foreign leader. All hail, IMDB, here is the exchange:
President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet : "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral. Returning violence with violence only multiplies violence adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.'"
Leo McGarry : Dr. King.
President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet : I'm part of that darkness now, Leo. When did that happen?
Leo McGarry : Dr. King wasn't wrong. He just didn't have your job.
And really, this is nothing new.
Go back in history. The prophet has never sat upon the throne. The prophet has more often ended up where Jesus ended up --- crucified by the state for speaking the truth that I long to hear from the one on the throne.
So that’s the adjusting expectations piece.
And that’s why I will be flying to my hometown of Tucson, AZ in a week or so to spend All Saints weekend going door to door trying to turn Arizona blue for Harris-Walz and prevent a second Trump presidency.
Because I no longer expect my president to actually have the courage to lead in the way that I would hope a president would lead … hell, even my fictional president couldn’t do that.
I am going to join workers from Unite Here Local 11 (one of whom is my son, Schroedter, who has been in Tucson doing this for nearly two months) going door to door getting out the vote for Harris/Walz (and enjoying some awesome Mexican food at El Charro and going to a U of A basketball game with my friend Edina Hall … all work and no play…)
I am working for VP Harris’ election because I think she is a decent human being and because I have black, brown, LGBTQIA+, and other dear ones whose lives will literally be in more danger than they already are if Donald Trump wins.
And … I am not voting for her.
And that gets to the second part of the dual long game.
My brilliant colleague, the Rev. Lauren Grubaugh-Thomas, has written an inspired two parts of a three part series on her substack A Souful Revolution titled “Tell me how to vote!” (I’m sure the third part will be equally as inspired, it just hasn’t dropped yet).
She says:
“A lot of us are reaching out to people we trust for answers this US election season. We want the comfort of a clearcut solution — to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that we have done the right thing when it comes to our vote. Perhaps even more so, we want to know there is authority behind the answer we receive.
“This essay, in three parts, constitutes my response to the question: “Tell me how to vote.”
“Short answer: No.
“But the longer answer is: I will accompany you as you discern what to do. I will share questions and stories that are shaping my own discernment. And I will support you as you deepen your attention to your own inner authority.”
Brad Whitford, a West Wing alum who I got to know a very little bit during my time at All Saints Church, bemoaned to me once about how “Democrats need to fall in love” while Republicans vote strategically .. and that’s why Democrats lose.
This is not about a need to fall in love. And this is absolutely a post about strategy.
I don’t need to be in love with a candidate to vote for them. But I have reached a point in my life where I have seen too much to vote for someone who is unwilling to stand up for core faith principles (for me) of welcoming the stranger and at a minimum giving voice to someone to talk about how her people are being slaughtered in a genocide that our tax dollars are funding.
I just can’t do it.
Lauren asks some basic questions that have helped me make my decision about how to vote (so mission accomplished, Lauren, great job … and you’re only 2/3 of the way through!)
First she asks this (and read the whole post here )
Who are you carrying with you to the ballot box?
What do we owe one another?
How do we honor the life and struggle of those who came before us?
How do we make the way easier for those who will come after us?
How do we honor those who are not able to vote, perhaps because they are undocumented, or because they have been disenfranchised by the penal system, or because they have been unknowingly erased from the rolls?
How do we stand with those whose suffering and deaths are funded by our tax dollars?
How can we be in solidarity with those living in places where any semblance of democracy has been entirely stripped away?
Then she asks this (read the second post here )
What do you worship and why?
Taking spiritual inventory: is this just for me?
How do we know what a “vote for our spirit” entails? How do we listen to what our conscience demands?
A vote for our spirit is not some morally pure, spiritually righteous higher ground to stand upon from afar and feel good. Anything that cuts us off from our relationship with and responsibility to a wider community is ultimately self-serving. (Consider the reluctant prophet Jonah, looking down on the city of Nineveh, waiting for God to judge the city, only to be profoundly pissed off when the people repent and God shows mercy).
No, to vote for our spirit is to vote with Love as our highest law. Doing so calls for a courageous spiritual inventory that asks: who is this for?
The quote at the top of this piece is from Grace Campbell (https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1007600719) , an advocate for women’s suffrage and one of the co-founders of the 21st Assembly branch of the Socialist Party in Harlem.
Let me thrown down her words again:
“Out of democratic and republican administrations alike, have come Jim Crowism, mobbing, segregation, lynching, southern disfranchisement, and general terrorism; lack of opportunity of making a living and poor educational facilities.”
I’m not saying there isn’t a difference between the two parties. There is. I am saying that there are no “lobbyists for the poor” as Cornel West would say.
There is no party that isn’t beholden to the oppression of what is probably not late-stage capitalism.
There is no party that won’t fold in a second when their self-interest is threatened.
There is no party that is willing to call a genocide a genocide
…or stand against a carceral system that cages a higher percentage of our citizens than any other so-called “developed nation:” in the world.
…or actually name not just the existence of climate change but the global ecological, immigration, economic and human rights disaster that we are facing even if we join forces to reverse it today.
I could go on, but I have been told when I preach lists, I get tiresome.
Truthfully, I am not sure there is any saving this country.
And … I haven’t given up trying.
And … I have given up on either one of the two extant parties being the one to do it.
Because Grace Campbell was right. She was right then, and she is right now.
It’s not just today.
There has never been a truly progressive party in this country in the past century. The closest we came economically was the Democratic Party under FDR – a legacy into whose coffin Bill Clinton drove the final nail when he infamously proclaimed “the era of big government is over.”
We need to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House (listen to this tragically prescient podcast from Ezra Klein to hear a cogent argument about why a second Trump term would be exponentially worse than the first because the one thing he seems to have learned from his first term is he cannot have anyone working for him who is not unquestioningly loyal as the only criterion )
So if you live in a swing state … please … vote for Harris/Walz.
And … I live in California.
There is no way that Trump is going to carry California. So I have a chance to use my vote another way.
So I am voting for the Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia … on the ballot in California as the Socialist candidates … and I have donated to their campaign.
I am voting for them because they are the candidates who best represent the answers I give to the excellent questions that Lauren poses to us.
I am voting for them because my vote will not help elect Donald Trump and do the extreme harm his presidency will do to the most vulnerable in this country.
I am voting for them because of the choices on my ballot (Cornell and Melina … sorry, you aren’t on my ballot!) they represent best the voice that I think can save this country from the trajectory we have been on since our founding … one that privileges whiteness, wealth, and sustains the three evils of which Dr. King spoke – poverty, racism and war.
I am voting for them because it is the best way to use my vote to make a statement that neither the Democratic or Republican Party Speaks for me and that we need at least one more alternative.
Because I am committed to standing in front of the most vulnerable among us and guarding them against the harm of a Trump administration.
And … I recognize that that harm will not go away under a Harris administration, though it will be mitigated somewhat.
And … I have a sliver of hope left that we can save this nation from the tyranny of a two-party system that is more hydra than anything else.
And … I have adjusted my expectations.
So I will get out the vote for Kamala Harris in Arizona.
And I will vote for Claudia De la Cruz in California.
And whatever happens, I will continue to dedicate my life to doing what I believe out government has never been willing to do.
And that is actually be a democratic nation.
And that is stand with Huey Newton and say:
Please vote for Kamala. The alternative is unthinkable.
Mike, as usual you have given me a lot to digest so it took some time before I could reply. I think you have seriously overthought this one. If you check out of the system you have to completely check out, like the mistake I made in 1980, going fringe because Reagan was unthinkable and Carter was ineffectual. To throw away your vote in California because you can, and then work in Arizona because the stakes there don't allow thrown-away votes puts you on ground you've always been careful to avoid: white male privilege. You are essentially saying: Do as I say, not as I do. That doesn't sound like you at all.