See update for August 24, 2024, at end of post.
I should have known I would need to hold my stomach: “Our nation with this election has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past. A chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”[1]
Far from being “a new way forward,”[2] this is the same old Democratic Party playbook, the same old plaintive appeals to bipartisanship that Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter clung to so desperately even as bipartisanship hasn’t been reciprocated by Republicans in decades. It is how white Christian nationalists and their predecessors have been able to move this country to the right even when Democrats held the White House and both houses of Congress.
Democrats seem incapable of comprehending that it takes two to tango.
We mustn’t upset the Republicans, the unspoken yet visceral refrain goes. It’s an appeal to the center, a center that holds zero coherence as it worships the “golden mean.”
It gets worse: “Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”[3] This has always meant support for ethnic cleansing and now, genocide. And when she calls this genocide in Gaza “devastating,” she echoes Biden, who keeps sending money and weapons even as he decries Israeli tactics.
My position from the beginning has been that I cannot vote for genocide. It is now clear that if I cast a vote for Harris, I would be doing just that.
And that’s as much as I could bear to read. The answer to genocide was supposed to be “Never Again.” Many genocides have occurred since those words were first uttered. That does not make them acceptable.
And when she appeals to bipartisanship, she eviscerates her other policy positions. After all, we mustn’t upset the Republicans.
There is no way I can vote for this.
Update, August 24, 2024: Qasim Rashid writes of the Democratic National Convention that, “[t]he missed opportunity is regarding Israel and Palestine. And it wasn’t so much what [Kamala] Harris did say, though that’s a conversation worth having, but more so what Harris didn’t do. The Democratic Party’s ultimate refusal to allow a Palestinian-American speaker to speak from the DNC stage was an unforced error. As I wrote before, it was meaningful and heartfelt to hear from the parents of an Israeli hostage because it humanized the struggle the hostages are suffering through. Palestinians deserve that same humanity. The Democratic Party had an opportunity to demonstrate the humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians, and their choice to only platform Israelis sends a clear message—Palestinian lives are not as important.”[4]
I have previously noted both what Harris did and did not do.[5] Rashid is correct in what he writes here, even if he does seem to support Harris despite this.[6] That latter step is a step I cannot take, for Harris echoed rather than revised, publicly at least, Joe Biden’s genocidal policy, a policy I cannot in any way be complicit with, for to do so subsumes the ultimate human rights crime to other (admittedly important) issues.
There can be little question that Donald Trump is abominable and he is certainly no better on Gaza. At this point, I cannot imagine him winning. As many others have observed, he seems entirely flummoxed as he faces a woman of color. And he looks terrible in recent photographs, raising doubt about his health—I’ll be mildly surprised if lasts the year, meaning we face the horrifying potential prospect of a President J. D. Vance.
But that we face the dilemma of choosing between two pro-genocide candidates is the product of an institutionalized false dichotomy—the “two party system.” Institutionalization does not make a false dichotomy any less false. It is the institution that has utterly unsurprisingly failed us as we have, election cycle after election cycle voted for “the lesser evil,” heedless that this path was nonetheless itself evil and productive of evil, in this case, of the ultimate human rights crime: genocide. To accept this dilemma is to be complicit in that evil. It fails on logical and ethical grounds. I must therefore reject it. I will not be voting for the “lesser evil.”
[1] Kamala Harris, quoted in Toluse Olorunnipa and Tyler Pager, “Harris makes case for ‘new way forward,’ attacks Trump in DNC speech,” Washington Post, August 23, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/22/kamala-harris-dnc-speech/
[2] Kamala Harris, quoted in Toluse Olorunnipa and Tyler Pager, “Harris makes case for ‘new way forward,’ attacks Trump in DNC speech,” Washington Post, August 23, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/22/kamala-harris-dnc-speech/
[3] Kamala Harris, quoted in Toluse Olorunnipa and Tyler Pager, “Harris makes case for ‘new way forward,’ attacks Trump in DNC speech,” Washington Post, August 23, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/22/kamala-harris-dnc-speech/
[4] Qasim Rashid, “Three Major Lessons as the Historic 2024 DNC Concludes,” Let’s Address This With Qasim Rashid, August 24, 2024,
[5] David Benfell, “Voting for uncertainty,” Not Housebroken, August 23, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/the-lesser-evil
[6] Qasim Rashid, “Three Major Lessons as the Historic 2024 DNC Concludes,” Let’s Address This With Qasim Rashid, August 24, 2024,