My Excruciating Vote

It was hard for me, voting for Kamala Harris. It was emotional. But I did it anyway, voting "in-person mail-in" a week ago today at the emergency services center outside Gettysburg. The day before, I’d changed my mind (again) and was definitely going to vote for Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate. Earlier in the cycle, I’d considered Cornel West and Jill Stein. I take myself to be neither on the left nor the right, because I take each side to be a random formation of internally incompatible clichés. I strongly prefer not to vote for either of the major parties.

At this point I regard both parties as authoritarian in orientation, and more to the point, I’ve always regarded myself as "out of the mainstream" in every respect. I first voted in 1976, for Libertarian Roger MacBride, and only the occasional emergency has brought me back. I voted for John Kerry 2004, for example. I kept picturing Dick Cheney torturing prisoners at Guantanamo, or sitting in front of a hundred screens, running the Total Information Awareness surveillance program.

I drove to the polls that year not sure who I was going to vote for. The Libertarian candidate, Michael Badnarik, was even less viable than most, and emphasized the “guns” part of the libertarian agenda, which isn’t my favorite bit. But I thought Kerry ran about as bad a presidential campaign as I’ve ever seen, and the former leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War couldn’t bring himself to oppose the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, or other oppressive and death-dealing measures. But "the war on terror" was being conducted as a pointed destruction of basic American political values. If Kerry wouldn't end it, I thought, maybe he’d ameliorate it to some extent. I thought that was important.

I thought I faced a ridiculous choice in 2016 between Trump and Clinton. I wrote in 'Maya Lin.'  I was convinced that Trump couldn’t realistically win PA. But I was wrong, and I contributed (infinitesimally), to his victory. I've regretted that (a bit) ever since.

This time, I decided as we drove that it was going to be Harris. If I'd had a few more hours, I might’ve switched again. But I have to say it was the women in my life, my wife, daughters, 99-year-old mother, who convinced me. For I know it to be the case that my tendency to toy with practically useless self-expression in the voting booth might be partly an artifact of my being a guy, particularly right now as abortion rights disintegrate and the world's biggest gender gap looms. People keep telling me to think about my daughters. My daughters agree.

It's not only women's issues (which are also men's issues). I do think Trump is a fascist. The extreme nationalism, anti-immigrant demagoguery, state capitalism, complete indifference to the truth: in my opinion, each of them is thoroughly disqualifying. Anyone proposing massive round-ups and deportations is evil. I spend a lot of time ragging on the left and on the mainstream media. But I agree with them that Trump’s a threat to democracy, a demagogue, and an aspiring tyrant.

However, and aside from my ultra-hip persona as an outsider sneering at all you mainstream mediocrities, there are substantial reasons that I didn’t want to vote for Harris. I don't think she's a person of conviction, and I think that, contrary to what she says, her values have changed and are changing continuously, in response to polling. It's "Clintonian," we might say, and that's just how Hillary Clinton and many others ended up authorizing the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, and so on.

More on point, and like a lot people, including the protesters who’ve been interrupting almost every Harris speech: Gaza. Harris has put no distance between herself and Biden on this, and the position is, I feel, both murderous in effect and thoroughly soaked in incoherence. Harris calls every day for a ceasefire. And her administration every day continues to supply the weapons with which Gaza and its people are being reduced to piles of rubble and puddles, respectively. That’s a degree of screeching incoherence that I would’ve hardly thought possible, and it's a formula for a lot more death very soon. I don't see how the sentences she formulates about Gaza can float through anyone's consciousness without getting trapped in an ethical or logical filter.

I think I just voted for someone who’s practically supporting a genocide as she talks bullshit about it. I remark that I felt cornered into this, and I regard myself as ethically compromised by my vote. I felt like choking and crying after I turned it in. I’d voted for the candidate endorsed by Dick Cheney. I was shocked by the wave of regret. I blame the two-party system for not being able to look at myself in the mirror that day.

And I condemn wokeness and identity politics, but that's not what Harris is running on, though it is what she ran on in 2020. But this year she's enthusing about "personal freedom," "rights," "democracy," and even "the Constitution." That is, the abortion debate has dragged the Democratic Party away from authoritarian socialism and back toward something recognizable as American liberty. That's not everything I want, but it's a start.

And meanwhile, I still believe I needed to do what I could to stop Trump, however I ended up feeling about it.

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell