America’s Choice of Poisons:
Walz, Vance, and declaring moral bankruptcy for “all the right reasons”
The electoral choice between presidential tickets that their political leaders offer Americans is to choose your poison.
Trump does not have the essential capacities we demand of a President. He never did. To point to his vicious, self-obsessed, dishonest personality is to state the obvious. To suggest that he is a representative of Republican party principles is to do true conservative Republicans an injustice. Trump’s presidential term was an ego-driven soap opera with few lasting achievements. The way he exited the White House and has conducted himself since then should be enough to elect anyone who runs against him.
Yet, surprisingly, there is no clear frontrunner. Despite the ecstatic expressions of a “politics of joy,” the Harris-Walz campaign is merely holding even in the polls, mostly within the margin of error, in a race against a rival with such pronounced weaknesses. Why?
Some think they have an easy answer. For example, in an essay in The Hill, a man named Brad Bannon, who self-describes as a “Democratic pollster,” gives us one possible answer: Racism. It’s the low-income white voters who “vote their prejudices instead of the economic interests.” Are you reminded of the classic cartoon where the King in the comic strip The Wizard of Id is told that the “peasants are revolting” and replies: “You can say that again.”?
More likely, it is because of the failure of Harris and Walz to address a widespread perception of their inadequacy to the tasks that the next President and Vice President will face.
For me, the central issue is the approach to combating bigotry against American Jews and Israelis. While that is my priority, the problem is broader. Walz’s statement about demonstrators having “all the right reasons” for what they do is just the latest in a series erratic utterances that suggest to me that Harris’s and Walz’s policy shifts from radical stances to more mainstream Democratic party policies on Israel/Palestine, US borders, fracking, and so on may not be genuine. At the very least, they cannot be relied upon.
The dysfunctional Vice-Presidential candidates are a story onto themselves. While Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy touched me deeply with the light it shed on how America’s elites turned their backs on Appalachian society, anyone who would hitch their wagon to the Trump star has decrepit moral values. Vance’s recent failure to condemn Tucker Carlson for promoting a Holocaust minimizer and Nazi apologist is one more reason to defeat the Trump-Vance ticket.
I expected Walz to be better. Vox has a write up of his record as a Congressional Representative and Governor. I did not expect a man with that record to applaud the antisemitism-laced protesters of Israel and “Zionists” as people “speaking out for all the right reasons.” For me, you don’t bounce back from endorsing an antisemitism-infused campaign.
Walz could have called for a ceasefire and the return of hostages, cautioning the demonstrators about the antisemitism that all too often characterizes their message. Sadly, I fear that in a most calamitous way, he revealed his true priorities. Like so many Democratic progressives, faced with the worst outbreak of antisemitism since WWII, largely expressed in those demonstrations, they mouth all the right platitudes when confronted with it, but in their hearts it is not a major concern.
We have reasonable grounds to fear that this is the pattern we will see in a Harris-Walz administration: Protection of the interests of all the minorities declared important by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Jews will find themselves in the cold.
Walz’s casual choice to ignore the antisemitism characterizing the protests is a sign of how dire things are, not just for Jews but for anyone who cherishes democracy. Since October 7th it has become trite to speak of Jews as historian Deborah Lipstadt did in her 1994 book Denying the Holocaust: “as canaries in the mine.” However, as the saying goes, things are only trite when they are true.
Trump-addled Republicans will continue to cuddle with anti-Jewish pseudo-intellectual bigots. Progressive-dominated Democrats will continue to excuse terror supporters and applaud all “the right reasons” that motivate anti-democratic, anti-American, and antisemitic forces. Bari Weiss nailed it:
I see no sign that Trump-Vance or Harris-Walz will combat the bigotries on their own side, so there is no sustainable argument to vote for either. It is not enough that Trump is repulsive, and Harris is not Trump. Perhaps locally you have the opportunity to support candidates who will protect American democracy. If you are blessed with such a candidate, vote for them. You are going to need them.
I wish I had a good suggestion or solution
I am letting it go. The machines behind both movements, especially democratic party's, are too huge for a regular you and me. I am disillusioned in the process that skipped most of the steps.