Nilay Patel: ‘A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for School Shootings and Measles’

Nilay Patel, endorsing Kamala Harris at The Verge:

But look beyond the locked-in message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of people to support her that range from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention while having Google antitrust defense lawyer Karen Dunn serve as her debate advisor.

You might not agree with some of the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly big tent. You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

I still see some friends on the left who are uneasy with Liz Cheney’s full-throated endorsement of Harris. And even more so by her father’s. Back in September, when Liz Cheney declared her endorsement of Harris, I wrote:

But (lowercase ‘d’) democratic politics ought to be viewed very much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are in psychology. Some things matter more than others. And nothing — not climate change or the environment, not reproductive rights, and certainly not fucking tax rates — nothing matters more than support for democracy itself and the rule of law. The only way we’re going to get those other things right — which are really, really important — is through democratic governance and the rule of law.

Everyone who supports democracy, who understands the stakes, who sees who Trump is with clear eyes, is on one side in this election. That side is with Kamala Harris. It certainly makes for some strange bedfellows on the sort of policy disagreements most U.S. elections are waged over. It is terrifying and depressing that so many Americans are seemingly on the other side. But make no mistake, those are the stakes.

★ Monday, 4 November 2024