I’m on deadlines and working on material that needs to get out, so this is a quick series of thoughts put together as we near Election Day 2024. Some of this is taken from older posts on social media. There’s a list of links at the end, for further reading. Vote or don’t vote: just, please, stop being such drama queens about it.
This was a great year for Cicadas who emerged, as per their once-every-17-years routine, from the depths of the earth to make their presence known. 2024 was the year when not one but two distinct broods decided to show up, adding to the noise.
Walk around a park and listen to the chirp of cicadas: the sound is a bit creepy and unnerving, and you hurry home because you begin to feel like you’re in a horror movie and that the person on the corner, right there, silhouetted against the setting sun, is about to gut you for no reason at all.
But that is nothing compared to the sound of a lone cicada that has somehow found itself inside your home and flits around from spot to spot, always invisible, crying to its kin to come find it and, I don’t know, mate or whatever it is that cicadas come out to do. Somehow a solitary cicada sounds more ominous and more irritating than a pack of them, when you’re stuck inside with it. I had this happen to me once, in 2007, the last time the insects were out checking on the world. I was on the phone with a friend when I heard a steady and sure chirp, from somewhere behind my sofa. “I’ve got to go,” I said, quickly. “Why?” “There’s a cicada in here, and I have to get rid of it before I go mad.”
Reader, I killed it. The last thing I wanted was for the cicada to birth a million more, forcing me to live life like a cartoon character, forever swatting down loud and angry insects skipping all around me. (My knowledge of their lives is hazy, but I know there are always multiple births involved.)
While I’d never dream of killing any of them, of course, American voters remind me of cicadas, except that they show up every four years during presidential elections, and are loud and annoying all the way up to the first Tuesday of November. This has always struck me as both ironic and hypocritical, given that the U.S has one of the lowest voting turnouts in the world.
And yet, the drama, oh, the drama of it all.
As we approach the day, people are literally screaming at each other about how much voting matters, and how this is the election of our lives. The most peculiar characteristic of the American voter is the constant desire to reveal voting preferences. For those of us who have lived in or are from countries where people literally, actually died for the right to a secret ballot, this is a strange and disturbing phenomenon. I, for one, am now convinced that people who talk endlessly about whom they will vote for plan on doing the opposite.
Donald Trump was elected in 2016. I was convinced he would win. I knew I wasn’t alone in thinking this way, but the prevailing wisdom among my colleagues and friends, many of whom had more real time organising experience than I, was that this was a laughable idea. But I had lived in the midwest for a long while, and not just in a large city but in Indiana, where the term “rust belt” actually meant something. I could feel the anger and despair that drove Trump to the top of the polls, something even he, at the time, was surprised by. And here we are.
Trump is back, more demented and more frightening than ever. Biden didn’t exactly win by a massive margin in 2020, and this year things are really, really close for Kamala Harris. So, of course, her supporters are now preemptively blaming third party voters for any possible loss, and anyone else they can think of.
I watched the Democratic Party convention’s proceedings in August and wrote, decisively, that “Kamala Harris Will Lose.” I’m not one to make hasty judgements but Harris had only just entered the race, and her campaign was a disaster, taking its cues from the tired, old playbook of Hillary Clinton with its disdain for average voters, focused on that ephemeral “youth vote” and sassy women (trust me, this is not the magic pill people think it is, but more on that another day), and no details at all, at the time, on what her own agenda might be.
I still think she could lose, but the race is much too close to call. She appears to have finally dispensed with the “Brat” nonsense (mostly), and has raised a massive amount of money: according to Forbes, it’s “$997.2 million so far this election cycle as of Oct. 16 with $118 million in cash on hand, which is nearly three times as much as the $388 million Trump’s raised, with $36.2 million in cash on hand.” And as far as I can tell, the money is being spent on the kind of outreach that the Hillary Clinton campaign couldn’t be bothered with. The Daily reports that the Harris campaign has a full-time staffed office even in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. At the same time, Harris is out there at rallies and flying around the country, making herself visible and present in a way that she hadn’t been at the start.
She is still, of course, a deeply troubling candidate. On Gaza, it’s clear she has decided to pay no heed to the protestors and Muslim American voters who have made it clear that her persistent support of Israel in the ongoing genocide will cost her their votes. As recently as last week, she sent Bill Clinton out to deliver a deeply racist speech that could just as easily have been delivered by Trump, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As the Electronic Intifada correctly points out, Clinton was “spinning out a fantasy vision of Israelis working night and day for Palestinian rights – and entirely ignoring Palestinian dispossession, shunting refugees into Gaza and decades of anti-Palestinian violence…”
Commenters and friends have described this as an accidental and unpredictable moment, and they’re wrong. Given how tightly controlled and well-funded the Harris campaign is, Clinton’s speech could only have been part of a calculated strategy to reassure mainstream liberal voters that nothing would change with regard to Israel.
And while on the topic of racism: just as Bill Clinton’s vicious diatribe was downplayed or ignored by the press even though he sounded exactly like Trump, liberals have also chosen to ignore the clear racism from their public figures. In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes of the “Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.” It’s an election year devoted to proving that only Trump and his supporters are racist so, the logic seems to be, we’ll just ignore the Nice White Lady stating, in Amy-Schumer-y terms, that Latino and Black men have no brains but are led by testosterone and their dicks to support him because, why not?1Many thanks to G. for pointing me to the Dowd op-ed.
There’s the matter of turning to Liz Cheney and her father, and reassuring voters that she would definitely have a Republican on her cabinet—because what we need right now is a president advised by a family that has openly declared war on any part of the world that stands in the way of American domination.
There’s much more to say on Harris and her record, and the many dangers of her presidency, but I’ll leave it to others and my older articles (linked below) to explain all that. For now, I will simply point out that we are worse off now than ever before on at least two major issues that affect vast numbers of people. These are not the only ones that matter, of course, but they are critical and the problems with them are symptomatic of the larger rot in American politics.
On abortion: if you’re not a well-off woman with private healthcare, your chances of getting an abortion are close to zero. The rapid decline in abortion rights can, of course, be attributed to a right wing that has, historically, worked to get rid of abortion entirely, as an option. Is Trump a problem? Of course. But we’ve lost abortion rights rapidly in the last four years and the Democrats’ reframing of it as a “healthcare” issue and as a “woman’s right to bodily autonomy” does nothing at all. Abortion is an economic issue that affects everyone, including the male children unwillingly birthed by women who could not gain access to abortion. Being forced to birth and raise children substantially decreases a woman’s earning power and can set her back years, even decades, in terms of realising her potential and that of her children; in most cases women are pushed out of the workplace and forced to survive by being dependent on male partners or to take up low-pay jobs just to get by and raise the children they never wanted. And yet, women like Michelle Obama—who will always be able to obtain abortions easily and legally—paint abortion as a matter of feeling and emotion. (Obama’s recent speech about why men should worry about abortion rights is not the radical statement people think it is, but a condescending one that removes agency from women, painting them as helpless and in need of saving.) Abortion has been a problem of access and economic disempowerment for vast numbers of American women for decades before Roe was overturned.
On immigration: Biden and Harris have literally, actually sought to make the possibility of immigration reform much more difficult in order to show that they are stricter than Trump on the issue. Biden’s executive order this summer (before he was made to step away) makes it much harder to apply for asylum at the border: as Stephen Prager writes, he “threw a bunch of vulnerable migrants into a wood chipper to satiate people who will almost certainly never vote for him.” Harris has taken up the “tough on immigrants” stance with more ferocity, and talks about her determination to stop fentanyl coming across the border. This has the added benefit, in her eyes, of making immigrants seem like criminals which, she assumes, is what the average voter wants to hear. But as NPR points out, migrants are not the ones smuggling the drug into the country—and a harsh and punitive emphasis on ending the smuggling also removes attention and funding from preventative and treatment-focused strategies to deal with addiction.
Much of the blame for where we are with immigration lies with what we might call the Immigration Rights Industrial Complex (IRIC): that large and now extremely profitable network of agencies that requires a Trumpian approach to immigration so that it might keep wringing its hands, staging protests at airports, as it did in 2017, and keep donations flowing into its coffers. Liberals and lefties love to blame the Right for its demonisation of immigrants, but have never bothered to ask what proactive measures have been taken up by immigration rights groups. IRIC has nothing to show in terms of any positive proposed legislation, for instance, choosing only to support toothless measures like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that keep it funded. Bring about a robust program of real reform that sets immigrants on the path to citizenship? That would bring an end to the crisis-led approach that IRIC needs to sustain to keep itself going, and then where would it be?
Right now, with only a couple of days before the election, the Cicada Voters for Harris are out in full force, and unafraid to deploy racist and misogynistic rhetoric to make the point that those who refuse to vote for her are only enabling another Trump election. Arab and other communities of colour are reminded of Trump’s racism, as if all of us have been living in blissfully utopian communities all our lives, untouched by prejudice. Women are told that things will be so much worse with Trump and his pussy-grabbing cohort, as if sexual harrassment and rape only began in 2016, and is restricted to Republicans. Anyone who even hints at voting for a third party candidate is told that they and they alone are responsible for their candidate “stealing” the election.
Calm down.
The system is set up for third party candidates, and it is perfectly legal for your colleagues and friends to vote for them. If your favourite candidate is doing so badly that a third-party candidate somehow “steals” the election, that’s a sign of how rotten the system is. If you don’t like the idea of third party candidates, then work to change the system. But don’t whine and moan about them giving the election to your genocide-supporting, Cheney-loving candidate who didn’t reveal that her president’s brain is mud until it became convenient to do so.
The world is still going to suck for the vast majority of people in this country, no matter the outcome. Vote or don’t vote. Go out and do what you must, but don’t be anxious or smug about it, and stop chirping about your vote. What needs to change is not the president of this country, but your own awareness of how utterly broken all the systems are. Don’t fetishise “the power of the vote”—just do it, or not, and think harder, with more anger, about the systems that need to change. Do that instead of retiring into a long, giant sulk for another four years, like an angry cicada just waiting for its next chance to scream at everyone else.
For more, see:
Everything I’ve written on abortion and on politics in general.
Here’s my work on DACA.
Here’s what I wrote about immigration, criminality, and the election, most recently.
For more on these topics, use the search engine on this site: I’ve written a lot on all this over the years.
Current Affairs on Harris.
Electronic Intifada on Gaza and more.
Image: Bruce Marlin
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