(And Vote Tactically for Harris to Stop Him)
By Steven Johnson
There are no signs, at least none that I can see, that the imperialist horsemen of the apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine, and Death) have any intentions of slowing down over the next US presidential term, no matter who wins the elections. My best guess is that, though it’s hard to imagine, things will be significantly worse, under either Harris or Trump.
But there are different KINDS and DEGREES of worse. And so we must ask, are we likely to have the worst worse under a Harris administration or under Biff World, Part II? We can never know any such thing with absolute certainty, because it’s the future. But we have to make our decisions in the light of the best indications that we have from the facts of the past and present.
And I think that Mehdi Hasan, in the video below, makes a strong case for betting on Trump being worse. Not trivially worse, but LOTS worse.
Hasan also dashes to pieces the mantra that is being repeated, often accompanied by photos of dead children, that NOTHING could possibly be worse than what has happened, over the past year to the present day, in Gaza. I am very sad to say that he very easily refutes this.
As have I, and as can anybody who can muster the will to reflect on these horrors:
What could be worse than the current genocide?
How about MORE of the same, affecting more people over wider territories? Israel’s genocidal campaign since October 7, 2023 greatly accelerated what had been a slower-cooking process of murder, displacement, blockade, economic sabotage, incarceration, etc. that it engaged in before. But it has the capacity to kill MANY TIMES more Gazans, MANY TIMES faster, than even the accelerated pace of the campaign since Oct 7. What is keeping them from going all out to the max is the need to maintain that thin line of plausible deniability that Biden and the establishment Democrats need in order to save face domestically, in the eyes of their base, and to maintain the sham pretense that this is all really about going after Hamas fighters and not about simply removing a whole population in order to take over the territory. But TRUMP’s base will cheer him on if he green-lights even more massive and rapid extermination.
How about the above PLUS the annexation of the West Bank by Israel?
How about all of the above PLUS the use of nukes on Iran?
How about all of the above PLUS moving from the repression-lite that has been carried out against protesters in the US under Biden to a much more serious level of repression (think, e.g., Plan Condor, with imprisonment, torture, disappearances, etc., but done inside the US)? Trump explicitly says he wants to greatly turn up the heat, and his base loves him for it.
How about all of the above PLUS a faster and surer path to the entire extinction of humanity, thanks to more aggressive environmental deregulation and fossil fuel extraction that Trump pushed before and that he is campaigning on pushing again?
So much more could be added to this list.
Now some, like the Islamic scholar Shadee Elmasry, are saying that Trump generally did less harm than what he said he would do. “It’s always much less than his words.” And I can see how such a conclusion could be arrived at on the basis of a series of snapshots of what occurred during Trump’s first term.
But were the gaps between his accomplishments and words due to some kind of internal restraint within Trump himself, or due to the fact that he simply could not get away with carrying out his every whim?
I would submit that Dr. Elmasry’s picture of the matter is overly static, and misses the trajectories of important forces in motion as they have developed since the beginning of his first term to the present day. Early on Trump faced more restraints, which Trump, Bannon, etc. sought to whittle away at as much as they could. Trump supporters, on the whole, were relatively more timid early on. In 2016 we were misled by the polls because many people who planned to vote for Trump were afraid to admit it. Now they are many, many times more bold. The precedent of January 6, 2021 set new standards. Worldwide fascism has also become much more powerful and organized.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but from where I sit, while I am greatly concerned about what Trump himself will likely do with, e.g., the Supreme Court on his side, with more compliant generals, with progressively less and less constraints, I’m even MORE afraid of what his successors may do, after Trump and those who are working for him, and the interests that are using him, succeed in further eroding the administrative state and every form of checks and balances. At a further stage of this process, the monster that Trumpism has thus created could very well escape the control of Trump himself, dispense with him while making him a martyr, and replace him with someone more competent and efficient. Trump would be well-advised, I think, to watch his back.
But what Trump himself could accomplish with less restraints upon him is bad enough. And, honestly, with specifically the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s aggressions throughout the region in mind, even with the CURRENT level of restraints that are in place, e.g., military leaders committed to constitutionality and certain standards of at least maintaining plausible denial, a simple change in Commander-in-Chief from Biden to Trump, from a president whose base requires at least the illusion that scruples and limits are being observed to another whose base would reward him for letting Netanyahu pull out all the stops, could make a huge difference. Like how the small rudder of a ship can change the ship’s course dramatically.
And this is why all of the indications that Netanyahu and his people prefer Trump over Harris make perfect sense. There is NO reason to think that their statements do not reflect their real thinking or that they are trying to pull off some kind of elaborate trick of reverse psychology on the US electorate. Plainly and simply, they want Trump in the White House because, politically, he can get away with extending even more latitude to the Israeli genociders.
But we are told, “NOTHING could be worse!” than what is already happening. Let’s face it, even many of the people who are reciting this mantra know at a deep level that it is not really true. Because they are not ignorant of history. And in their own life experiences they have known imperial reality’s routine habit of making the unspeakably tragic even worse.
It may sound like I’m trying to discourage people. But the truth is that if I didn’t have hope that we can effectively resist all of this, if I thought there were no viable paths for making things better, for bringing empires and genocides to an end, I wouldn’t be making this call to realistically take stock of the challenging conditions in which we must fight, and to adjust our strategies and tactics accordingly. Because if there were no hope of taking effective action amid the extreme difficulties with which we’re faced, there would be no point. But I think there IS such hope. As long as humans live and struggle, there will always BE such hope. There are no easy, magic paths. But there are some complicated and difficult ones that are very much worth traveling. And we owe it to our neighbors and ourselves to never give up.
The Practical Challenge, In Brief
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part I
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part II
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties: The Really, Really Short Version
Why We Should Expect Trump To Be Worse