Kamala Harris will win the election but who will win the war?

And other happy thoughts as the US goes to the polls

The long path of crime and disappointment that has got us to this point in US political history is not going to be resolved in a single election. Both Trump and Harris are symptoms of a deeper malaise, and the problems that confound the Democrats and the Republican Party—the country in general—will remain no matter who wins or loses today (Australian time).

We rightly worry about the US descending into a state of open fascism if Trump wins, but even as we mouth our concerns, the current Democratic Administration is presiding over an actual genocide in Gaza, and the makings of a multistate regional war based in apartheid and annihilation. Harris has shown little inclination to deviate from the US’s traditional support of Israel, no matter what maniac is running that country, and reasonable people worry about throwing their support behind her for this reason alone.

Democracy would be easy if it was just a matter of choosing between right and wrong or good and bad, but it has never been that.

We can despair about constantly being forced to choose between the lesser evil, and we might even throw up our hands and declare a pox on both their houses and refuse to participate and think this somehow absolves us, but democracy isn’t that either.

The demand of democracy is participation.

It is about keeping alive the circumstances that allow the inevitably unresolvable problems of the world to be discussed and fought about in the most peaceful way possible; of putting in place the institutional and social barriers to authoritarianism that help hold us in that uneasy balance between stumbling forward and outright collapse.

The perfect should always be the enemy of the good. And we always need those unsatisfiable, unreasonable, complaining champions of the perfect reminding us loudly about the impurity of our compromises. But at the same time, we need the maturity to realise that no single argument, or action, or vote is going to get us there.

Which means that what we do in the meantime, as we argue for the perfect, matters. And what we do between elections matters. And whether we vote or not matters. And who we vote for matters.

Just declaring that on some key issues very little separates the two sides doesn’t cede you the high moral ground. I mean, der.

In what world can you genuinely convince yourself that Donald Trump is worth the risk? And how unrealistic do you have to be to think that US is so bad that it couldn’t get any worse? I set out a while ago the horror Trump is likely to cast us into and I don’t see any reason to change what I wrote then. If anything, his behaviour in the last few weeks of the campaign has only reinforced the points I was making in that article.

And the consequences will be global.

Of course, I am mainly (not exclusively) speaking to an Australian audience with this newsletter and we don’t get to vote on November 5, but the basic point is the same: democracy makes unreasonable demands on us. We never get to sit things out.

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