There is a meme going around social media that commands us to “Vote like your daughter’s life depends on it.” It comes with different images, depending on whether it is being pushed by someone from the left or the right. On the left, it focuses on abortion, choice, and women’s control of and power over their own bodies. On the right, the meme is an attack on trans women, making the claim that they are a threat to young women, especially in sports.
Readers of this blog know where I stand on this issue and likely know how I cast my ballot (by mail last week).
I post this as a final reminder that your vote today matters. It will have consequences. We survived a first Donald Trump term, some will say, but that is not exactly right. The Supreme Court — featuring three Trump appointees — ended the protections for abortion established by Roe v. Wade, and has made it easier to undermine administrative action on labor issues, the economy, the environment. He brought us to the brink of war several times and refused to accept a peaceful transfer of power — which he has reminded his base of in recent weeks on the campaign trail, telling them “I should never have left the White House.”
I think today’s Jamelle Bouie column sums up the stakes. He writes that the version of the American republic in which we live, one forged in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II and structured by a rights revolution that opened society to all Americans, is on the ballot.
A Trump win imperils this republic.
With Trump in the White House, social conservatives can use executive action to try to ban abortion; MAGA nationalists can end most forms of immigration, commence mass deportations and leverage civil rights laws against imagined “anti-white” discrimination; and reactionary opponents of social insurance can weaken Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And this is to say nothing of Trump’s own plans to rule as an autocrat under a court-sanctioned theory of unitary executive authority.
Should the United States take this path on Election Day, then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the “rights revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.
He asks:
Will the meaning of our Republic change or will we hold fast to the egalitarian ideal that shapes this country as we understand it? Will we keep striving to make good on a more inclusive vision of American democracy?
This is not an academic question. How we answer it — at the polls and in the streets — will determine the kinds of lives the most vulnerable of us live. Immigrants are the most endangered, but so are African Americans; Muslims; gay, lesbian, and trans individuals; Jews.
Our foreign policy is at stake, as well. The Democrats have been awful on Israel and Gaza, allowing the genocidal assault on the narrow strip to continue with only nominal criticism, but Trump has a record of supporting Netanyahu and dallying with dictators. I get why the left peace movement — and Palestinian-Americans — sees a vote for Harris as a vote for genocide. But a vote for Trump — or a protest vote for Jill Stein that leads to a return of Trump to the White House — is also a vote for genocide, but for a genocide that spreads throughout that region. (Much of the pro-Israel money is flowing to Trump, which somehow has been lost in the discussion of the genocide.)
This is longer than I planned. My point is that this election matters. Elections have consequences and, in this race, the differences in consequences are fairly stark, for Americans and Palestinians.