At the outset, there are a few important points to make about last night’s debate. First, it is clear that no party can claim a more substantive victory than the state of Israel, especially not either candidate. If anything, the tiny segment of airtime devoted to the “Israel-Hamas War” was primarily marked by the candidates seeking to outdo each other in their support for the entity’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Otherwise, perhaps Trump found himself grasping for new material, as Harris has adopted much of his platform from 2016 and the Biden-Harris administration has retained many of his policies. This would explain why he was forced to resort to peddling disgusting disinformation about Haitian immigrants cooking and eating household pets in Ohio. Indeed, it seems that Trump’s racism has been on the uptick in recent months, as evidenced by his recent and appalling use of “Palestinian” as a slur. What I mean to suggest specifically is that the Democrats, by pursuing Trumpian border policies and supporting genocide in full view of humanity, have actually forced him to ramp up his racist rhetoric in order to shock the viewer. The debate was a grim picture indeed, I generally don’t find myself shocked by Trump (for better or for worse) but his performance last night did happen to get under my skin. I can only imagine that this open pandering to racists provokes the corresponding response in them, which I suppose would be enthusiasm.
It hardly seems worth it to sift through Kamala Harris’s talking points in too much detail, as her campaign has been scant on policy thus far and primarily focused on the threat that Donald Trump poses to America’s “democracy”. Centrist liberal commentators have been indignant at the suggestion that the Harris campaign has any obligation to articulate a meaningful policy platform at all, retorting that voters have an ethical obligation to “do their own research” and that anybody who has been paying attention knows all they need to know about Trump, which of course boils down to his racism, his willingness to suspend democratic norms, and his plans to restrict reproductive rights at the federal level further. Thus, the demand that the Harris campaign make any modicum of an appeal to actual voters is beyond the pale by virtue of the fact that it implies that there is a legitimate alternative.
Like most bad-faith arguments, this one has a kernel of truth. At this stage, the political culture of the United States has essentially organized different blocs of voters into affinity groups claimed by either party and removed certain groups from participation in the two-party system altogether. By and large, “nonvoters” and those who support third-party candidates like Jill Stein find themselves outside of two-party politics not because they are “uninformed” or “unreasonable”, but for the simple fact that either the platforms of both parties are built on their exclusion and malignment, or their interests cannot be assimilated into the platform of either party because they run counter to those of donors or threaten the entire edifice of United States imperialism.
Trump’s rise primarily owes to his ability to capture voters leaving the Democrat coalition without alienating the Republican base, who are ultimately comfortable with racism. Kamala Harris’s greatest point of vulnerability this year, conversely, is of course Arab American and Muslim voters in Michigan, with whom she polls well below third-party candidates. In order to avoid alienating these voters in the last 11 months, Biden, and Harris following him, would have had to take concrete steps to stop Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinian life such that Palestinian Americans in Dearborn (and elsewhere) would not have had dozens of relatives killed by Israel. This is not an imaginable choice within our political system, thus Harris and Trump both have acknowledged with their debate performances and other public appearances that Palestinians and those who don’t consider them expendable (including yours truly) have, in fact, already been organized outside of the system of United States electoral politics.
This is to say that the choice has been made for us, Palestinians and those who stand with them have already been removed from the calculus of Republican and Democrat coalitions by virtue of the fact that our interests or point of view cannot be comprehensively addressed within the system, thus we are excluded from genuine democratic participation through no fault of our own. Concerning those who tried, in hindsight it is clear that threatening Harris with a loss in the general election will not be an effective strategy to build pressure for an arms embargo for this reason. The arms embargo is simply not an imaginable choice. Even in a scenario wherein the small but growing Anti-Zionist bloc of the American right gained enough steam to pressure Trump or another hypothetical leader, any embrace of the Palestinian cause would necessarily entail proximity to other social justice causes that the Republican base would find anathema. No, there is no electoral solution, as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has found something of an eerie echo to a removal of Palestinian life from the acceptable range of policy objectives.
One could retort that Harris has acknowledged the horrifying death toll in Gaza and stated that she is working for a cease-fire. Indeed, this is the 2024 election. One candidate makes up bizarre lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats, the other says that Palestinian civilian casualties are sad. Both candidates promise to continue arming Israel and promise to pursue draconian border and asylum policies. While Trump’s re-election will almost certainly bring profound consequences, as it did in 2016, there will be no electoral solution. We will have to take the two-party system at its word and act as if we have been excluded from its spectrum of legitimate views.