The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was a zealous defender of all human rights, but there was one he spoke about as a first among equals: the right to emigrate. This was, he wrote, “an essential condition of spiritual freedom.” The power to vote with your feet, to exit if you so choose, gave the individual a veto over the state. So many other rights are important for an open society—expressing your political views, worshiping freely, assembling without constraint—but all have much less meaning if (as in the Soviet Union) you can’t even decide where to live.
I find myself, in these nail-biting days before the election, prioritizing in much the same way. What rights matter most? What conditions are necessary for a democratic society to exist and persist? What material makes up the floor on which we all stand?
The freedom to dissent ranks near the top for me—and reading the recently published memoirs of Alexei Navalny, an intellectual descendant of Sakharov, only made it seem more precious; you can pay with your life under a government that cares little for this freedom. Luckily, we in the United States live—for the time being—in an open society, and if you want to know what dissent looks like in such a society, the past year has offered a pretty good illustration. The American left, in its anger over the administration’s laissez-faire approach to Israel—and in response to the horror taking place in Gaza—has protested loudly, disruptively, and without cease. Certainly there have been excesses, but these activists have also shown very clearly that, in a democracy, protest can shift opinion (if not yet policy).
But I’m also afraid that these dissenters—progressives and, crucially, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Americans in those all-important Midwest swing states—are approaching the election with a self-defeating plan, one they surely think of as a continuation of this protest. It is not. By neglecting to consider democracy’s basic conditions, they might end up undermining their ability to ever protest again.
They are livid over Kamala Harris’s steady military support for Israel, and they are grieving over the tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza. We have all spent a year watching unrelenting carnage—and for Arab American voters in particular, the victims in the rubble are (or could be) friends and family members. Their attitude is not just ideological. It is visceral. It is personal. “I feel very guilty,” one Michigan voter, Sereene Hijazi, told The New York Times. “A lot of Arab Americans feel guilty because, like, we’re here, we’re safe, but it’s our tax dollars that are killing our relatives and people we know.” As a response, Hijazi has made her choice for 2024: the third-party candidate Jill Stein.
This is the plan: Either opt out of voting, choose a third-party candidate, or pull the lever for Donald Trump, all as a form of protest. Any of these choices would, if they happened on a large enough scale, have the effect of swinging the election to Trump. If that seems unlikely, consider the fact that one activist is already taking credit for pressuring a national newspaper to pull a Harris endorsement. Nika Soon-Shiong, the daughter of the owner of the Los Angeles Times, has said that her father’s controversial decision was “an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.” (Patrick Soon-Shiong has denied that his daughter had any influence over his move.)
For some, their protest vote or abstention will be a matter of revenge, punishing Harris for her position. And as an emotional reaction to mass death, this is understandable. But these voters would also be punishing themselves. Regardless of whether you think Trump would do more to protect Palestinian lives—an absurd notion, on the evidence—a more fundamental issue is at stake.
Many of Harris’s rallies have been interrupted by demonstrations. A protest was set up outside the Democratic National Convention to demand that a pro-Palestinian speaker be allowed to address the delegates (a request that was denied). Campuses have been boiling over with encampments, occupations, and physical confrontations. If this year of protest has not nudged policy much—though Harris’s rhetoric is noticeably different from Joe Biden’s in many respects—it has lodged the issue of Gaza in the American consciousness. A recent Pew poll from early October found an uptick since last December in the number of Americans who think Israel has gone too far in its military response.
In other words, protest matters. But we should not take for granted that we will always be able to protest. Trump has made it clear how he views dissent. He has mused about throwing protesters in jail. He wants to revive the 1792 Insurrection Act so he can sic the military on those who might object to his policies. His defense secretary Mike Esper said that Trump proposed shooting demonstrators in the legs during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd.
This avowed, even gleeful, willingness to violently suppress any dissent from what Trump calls the “enemy within” is the main reason 13 of his own former staffers signed a letter warning about Trump’s “desire for absolute, unchecked power.”
Back in May, when Biden was still the Democratic candidate for president but the progressive anger was no less intense over Gaza, Jewish Currents, a progressive magazine, organized a panel discussion for those on the left unsure of how they might vote in the upcoming election. One comment, from Waleed Shahid, the former spokesperson and communications director for Justice Democrats, cut through the tone of sorrowful worry. When he was asked whom he would vote for if he was living in a swing state, he didn’t hesitate with this answer: “When you’re voting for an elected official in this country, you are voting for the conditions under which you would organize.”
Those conditions should be front of mind; they make everything else possible—and there is only one way to guarantee them.
To those who think that Trump would prove to be a better choice for peace in the region and the fate of Palestinian lives, I’m not sure what to say. His entire approach to Israel can be boiled down to what he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a call this month: “Do what you have to do.” Forget caring about Palestinian lives; he has reduced the very word Palestinian to a slur, lobbing it at his political rivals. I would like to remind Amer Ghalib, the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, who is endorsing Trump because of the former president’s vague promise to “end the chaos” in the Middle East, of two words: Muslim ban. This policy of excluding anyone from a Muslim country, even tourists, from entering the United States is now one Trump wants to expand.
And if this isn’t convincing enough, remember that there are factions that would apply pressure on President Harris over this issue. If the country is inching toward a more pro-Palestinian stance, the struggle will take place within the Democratic Party. Harris is movable. Who among the Republicans will put pressure on Trump to care about Palestinians? Tom Cotton? Marco Rubio? Stephen Miller?
Gazans are still dying. And this makes it hard to think first about maintaining democratic norms. The instinct is to scream, which in this case might mean choosing Stein or Trump or no one at all. But a scream is a reflex, not a strategy. The left and those who care about the Palestinian future need to live to fight another day on this issue, and to do so they need to exist in a country where it is possible to fight at all.
