The Greens Want to Harm Their Enemies

And they think Trump will do that for them.

Image by Gage Skidmore, CC

Democrats sometimes accuse Green Party voters of deliberately trying to put Republicans in office by peeling off left voters. Usually, Greens insist that they actually want their candidate to win, and that they are casting their votes for Jill Stein because they want Jill Stein to be president. They are not ratfuckers, they argue; they’re just voting for their sincere preference.

Again, that’s the usual argument. In the last week, though, as polls have opened in Michigan, several Green Party spokespeople have stated outright that they don’t expect to win, and that they are voting specifically to defeat Kamala Harris and make Donald Trump president.

“We are not in a position to win the white house,” Green Party surrogate Kshama Sawant declared on Monday, “but we do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan. [The crowd cheers.] And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan.”

Later this week, at a rally where Stein herself was present, sociologist Hassan Abdel Salam passionately argued, not that Stein would be a good president, but that the Greens could ensure “a failure for the Vice President—the loss of Michigan and the loss of the White House.” He added exultantly, “We can depose the leaders who sit atop a superpower!”

Again, what’s notable here is the utter lack of a positive vision. The left often criticizes the Democrats for simply saying, “orange man bad” without pushing positive policies for change. But the Greens here aren’t even pretending that they have any hope for making the world better for anyone—not people in Gaza, not their neighbors, not anyone else in the world.

The Green spokespeople here aren’t, for example, calling on Harris to change her policy. They don’t claim to be pressuring her to halt the genocide. They simply say that they can harm Harris and (by extension) people who vote for her or support her. The goal is to humiliate and (given the likely results of a Trump presidency) materially harm and likely kill many Democratic (and Green) voters. There doesn’t appear to be another message.

MAGA is for revenge

The rage, anger, and despair of many Green voters is entirely understandable. Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Middle East—starting in Gaza and now extending into Lebanon—is unspeakably horrific. There’s good reason to believe that the civilian death toll has topped 200,000 at this point. Israel’s war crimes are too numerous to list, but just this week Israeli troops fired on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon and forced the panicked evacuation of a children’s hospital in Gaza. Israel also killed journalist Hasan Hamad this week, bringing the total number of murdered Palestinian journalists to an unconscionable 175.

President Joe Biden is required by law to halt arms shipments to regimes that use US weapons to commit human rights violations. Nonetheless the arms keep flowing. Harris has managed to sound more sympathetic to Palestinian suffering than Biden, but she has refused to commit to ending arms sales. Harris also denied a request to allow Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman speak at the convention. She did so even though Romman wanted to use her speech to endorse Harris.

Biden and Harris could not make it much clearer that they have no concern for the lives of Palestinians abroad. More, they’ve shown that they see the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities at home as an inconvenience at best.

Given the contempt with which Biden and Harris have treated them, and given the administration support for endless war crimes, genocide, and death, it makes sense that many people on the left, and many Arab-Americans, feel alienated and angry. It makes sense that they feel like they wanted to punish Biden and Harris.

That’s the promise of MAGA. Trump offers airy, vague assurances that the mere presence of his ass in the White House chair will usher in an era of happiness and abundance. But that’s smoke and mirrors, and even his most ardent supporters have to know as much on some level.  

Trump’s real promise, the one he can be counted on to fulfill, is that he will hurt people his supporters see as enemies. He will launch a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against immigrants and non-white people. He will torment trans people. He will target and harm Harris voters. If there is a marginalized person or a partisan enemy somewhere you want to harm, Trump will harm them for you.

That’s an argument which appeals to bigots and fascists whose main goal in politics is to stomp on marginalized people. And it’s also appealing to those who are enraged at Biden and Harris for their decision to back a genocide. Trump, everyone knows, will not help Palestinians, and will make things worse in Gaza if he can. But at least, while he’s doing that, he will also make Democrats (like me) miserable by (for example) preventing my trans daughter from getting health care.

The politics of hate can’t save us

Again, I get it. When you can’t help people, or save people you care about, there’s an impulse to do what you can to harm those you hold responsible, or even to harm those standing near those you hold responsible. When both parties in a two-party system are committed to a horrific policy (in this case, genocide in the Middle East), people become alienated and frustrated. They think they might as well burn it all down. Why not make your enemies suffer, if you can’t help your friends?

The problem is that this is the logic of fascism. It’s a politics committed, not to lifting everyone up, but to finding someone, somewhere you can tear down, and using the power of the state to do that. Hassan Abdel Salam boasting about how he can cause Harris (and her voters) pain, and presenting that as empowerment—that’s not a politics of solidarity, or hope, or of empowerment. It’s a politics of cruelty and of despair.

Biden’s current policy in Gaza is also a policy of (nightmarish) cruelty. By embracing fascist genocide abroad, Biden and Harris have helped to open a breach for homegrown fascists, too. They are responsible for that. But the Greens are responsible for their own cynical politics of ressentiment, which explicitly urges voters to embrace Trump as the embodiment of their dreams of revenge.

Fascism pits us against each other; it thrives on division and hate. We’re facing a very bleak moment in our nation’s bleak history. Electoral politics aren’t the only politics, and voting is not the only way to show solidarity. But if your vote is explicitly intended to give power to Trump and harm marginalized people, and if you sincerely want to build a better world, I’d just beg you to reconsider what you’re doing and why.

We all need to stand against Trump; we all need to stand for Palestine. Solidarity for all those who need it can be difficult and confusing; it can be hard to see the best way forward. But electing Trump will empower no one except the worst people on earth—including, not least, Putin and Netanyahu.

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