Look where the 'lesser evil' got us

Like a kind of Olympics of shit, the US presidential election has come around again.

A lot has been written already about how the genocide is affecting the US election, much of it by people who believe that the main significance of the eradication of a society is how it plays in the swing states. Others are doing their best to pretend the genocide doesn’t exist so they can keep indulging the Disney Adult-style wish fulfilment that an American election provides.

I used to follow American politics obsessively. Events have cured me of this. My no longer being the kind of person who won't shut up about the fucking New Hampshire primary is proof that all of us are capable of growth.

Like every other journalist at the time, I confidently predicted back in 2015 that Donald Trump would crash out of the Republican primary. More than a year later I watched a room filled with the worst people you can imagine slowly realise they had backed a winner. 

I thought the world was ending, and that we were at the beginning of a new and frightening era. Over time I was surprised at how little changed; how closely the 'new' reality resembled the old one.

I felt this again in 2020, when the Democrats won back the presidency. The 'normalcy' that Democrats and their domestic fandom crowed about having restored seemed indistinguishable from what had come before.

In recent days this sense of sameness has been overpowering. The growing movement of American Muslims and supporters of Palestine choosing not to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris has sent American liberalism into another of its trademark blends of mask-off race hate and baffling incompetence.

Wheeling out ageing pederast Bill Clinton to tell Gazans they deserve to be massacred and talking up the support Harris is getting from Dick Cheney feel like moves made by some Democratic insider who's bet the house on a Trump win and is trying to tank the Harris campaign from the inside.

While I agree with the argument that a just and lasting end to Israel's apartheid state and the systems that support it will not come through mainstream electoralism, I think events like the presidential election are useful in that they’re good reminders of the dangers of false friends — of how totally the mainstream 'left' of electoral politics functions as a tool to smother and suppress popular movements for justice, and to provide cover for the endless slide into fascism.

From her days fighting to keep non-violent prisoners behind bars in California's lethally crowded prison system to her recent promise to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building Trump's border wall with Mexico, Harris' entire political career is testament to this. If she wins today, she will join new UK Conservatives leader Kemi Badenoch in the growing corps of political leaders seeking to prove their worth to the prevailing system by licensing its violence against the minority groups from which they come.

The same is true of Tim Walz, the folksy Midwestern former high school basketball coach who went from studying the teaching of genocide in his master's thesis to promising Zionist lobby groups a favourable rewrite of school history curricula.

We have plenty of our own examples to remind us. Over the weekend, as he was awarded the World Zionist Organisation's Jerusalem Medal, former Victorian premier Dan Andrews urged philanthropists to defund arts organisations that allow artists to publicly express support for Palestinians.

"If you want to support Hamas, then get them to pay your bills," Andrews said. "Get them to fund your programs and build your buildings."

One day after losing the Queensland election, state Labor leader Steven Miles — who briefly challenged Andrews' exhausting status as "Australia's most progressive premier" — hinted that Queensland Labor would support the new LNP government's plan to jail children as young as 10 in adult prisons and watch houses.

I wonder sometimes if the people who enrich themselves off our degradation ever marvel at how easy 'progressive' leaders make it for them; at how little it takes to turn a loudly self-described comrade into a willing shill for industrialised murder. Give them a six-figure ‘consultant’ gig, invite them to a few exclusive events, gift them a Qantas lounge membership, and they'll give up anything — a fighting union movement, functioning education and healthcare, opposition to a genocide, you name it. It’s the bargain of a lifetime.

Getting reporters off your case is even easier. While Israel kills journalists on a scale never seen in modern warfare, our best and brightest are flown to Washington DC to file copy filled with insights like "this is a very important election". It’s the journalistic equivalent of jingling keys in front of a baby.

If there's any lesson for thinking people to take out of the US election, it's of the need to bury the "lesser evil" for good — to withdraw our labour from, and our tolerance of, institutions that take our energy and our resources and use them against us in our name. We have spent too much time fighting for change inside the very systems they built to hold us.

If you need convincing, look around at where the "lesser evil" got us.

Fundraiser for Noor and Hoor Hammad

If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money to this fundraiser I’m running for Noor Hammad, a young mum in Gaza, and her baby daughter Hoor. Any money raised will be sent to Noor's brother Abdallah Abdalrahim, who lives in Sweden and can send her money directly.

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What I’m looking at

• The Intercept — ‘Every choice is loss’: voters on their decision amid genocide in Gaza

• The case against voting for Kamala Harris

• The Guardian — ‘We won’t leave’: survivors defiant after Israel turns sights on Lebanon’s Baalbek region