By Steven Johnson
November 6, 2024
All my love, all my solidarity, all my good feelings go to those among Arab and Muslim voters and pro-Palestinian allies who sought to punish the Democrats, by abstaining or voting third party, and succeeded. I disagreed with your strategy. I supported another one. But the matter was anything but cut and dried. My weighing of the pros and cons of each potential action that could be taken in this election was different from your own, but by far not all the weights were on one side of the scales, and you had compelling reasons.[1] Whatever happens going forward, I hope, really and truly, that each and every one of you will experience some measure of joy in this moment, as at least one small consolation amid the ongoing carnage and desolation that the major streams in US politics do not give a rip about.
And I also send absolutely all of the same love and solidarity and good feelings, no more and no less, to folks like Ruwa Romman, Mehdi Hasan, and others who advocated a tactical vote for one of our genocidal enemies, as a kind of necessary tactical retreat and part of a long game plan, the move that I also supported.
Nothing but utter contempt for Trump, and for Harris and the majority of Democratic politicians who march in lockstep with the donor class and who essentially handed the presidency to Trump.
[1] There could be a point of confusion here, because the stern critique of Jill Stein and her party’s overall strategy that I have presented in this series may seem to contradict what I am saying here. But the strategy and aims of Jill Stein and the Green Party are not the same, in every important respect, as that of many of the Arab and Muslim voters who voted for her in this election. Their own vote, in many cases at least, was as “tactical” for Stein as mine was for Harris. When I say that they had “compelling reasons”, I do not mean that I now think Jill Stein’s overall strategic vision is sound, but that I think there was a case for doing anything possible in this election to DISRUPT the complacent genocide-ignoring narrative of the Democrats. There were potentially grave consequences of either doing this or of voting for Harris, and while I made a case in this series for why I thought our best best was to vote tactically for Harris, as part of a larger strategy, assessing the total net effects of either of these approaches is intrinsically difficult, and greater certainty, in retrospect, may elude us for some time, or possibly for all time. Even if future events may seem to make matters devastatingly clear in one or another direction, it will remain the case that it was difficult or impossible to assess with certainty at this time.
The same confusion might also be reinforced by the fact that important articles remain missing in this series, thus perhaps giving the misleading impression that I was lumping a number of perspectives together with Stein’s. At this time I do not know whether I will write the envisioned further articles or not, or whether I will be capable of writing them adequately or not, even though their topics are essential to consider in relation to the rest. These would address potential strengths and weaknesses of the strategic approaches of people like Sami Hamdi (whose advocacy for a tactical vote for Stein was not because he was a big fan of Stein), the No Votes for Genocide! campaigns, “The Uncommitted”, Ruwa Romman (whose approach overlaps with but also differs in important respects from mine), etc., concerning this election. And, of course, my interaction, in the articles that I have written, with strategies concerning electoral politics that have long dominated in the revolutionary socialist left, was just a small start in addressing what needs to be addressed. Such articles might belong immediately after the article “When Has Jill Stein’s Approach Ever Worked?”, because there would be distinct approaches to be treated in turn. Keeping these important gaps in mind, I hope that what I have written will at least stimulate reflection, no matter to what extent a given reader may agree or disagree. I will aim to revisit and reevaluate my own material here in the future, not to see IF the march of events exposes my finitude, because it most assuredly will do that to all of us, but to try to discern in what ways it does.