Trump’s Victory Won’t Push the Democrats Left—It’ll Only Weaken Our Movements
It's deeply troubling to see some on the left now campaigning to help Trump win, as most visibly championed by the Green Party and the Abandon Harris campaign, who both seek to defeat Harris in a bid to punish one half of the duopoly while the other half carries on unaffected.
"We are not in a position to win the White House. But we do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of MI. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without MI." - Kshama Sawant, campaigning in Michigan for Jill Stein and the Green party
This isn’t just a strategic misstep; if their efforts succeed, rather than teaching the Democrats a lesson history tells us they will ignore, a Harris loss is far more likely to hinder our ability to effectively challenge power in concrete terms for years to come, as I’ll explain below.
The narrative promoted by the Green Party that the Democrats are an equal or greater threat is not just rhetoric. It has profound implications for real-world activism. Saying both parties are equally bad or equally fascist reflects a deep frustration and despair with our political system, and believe me, I understand the anger toward corporate Democrats, given their outrageous year-long complicity in Gaza, but here’s the problem: functionally aligning with an authoritarian demagogue like Trump, even out of spite for the Democratic establishment, isn’t an act of defiance. It’s an act of self-sabotage. Trump and Harris may both represent the failures of our system, but they are not remotely the same kind of threat. It’s not radical or revolutionary to pretend they are. It’s self-defeating.
Netanyahu Wants Trump to Win
On Gaza, we know Netanyahu and his extremist far-right party wants Trump to win. He knows that our movement’s chances of getting an arms embargo drops from slim to zero should Trump take power. He’s also well aware that a rising generation of Democrats are hostile toward Netanyahu’s vision of a permanent apartheid state. Trump, meanwhile, will fulfill his promise to help Netanyahu “finish the job” abroad and crush dissent at home. Project Esther, a plan released this month by the Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation, falsely alleges that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are inseparable, equating anti-genocide protests with a “global Hamas Support Network.” The document calls for a plan to dismantle pro-Palestinian networks within one to two years, under the guise of combating antisemitism.
To those who argue that Trump will energize the anti-war movement’s opposition to genocide, I would say this: we could double our efforts, but our impact would be halved. Trump will criminalize dissent while ignoring our demands, the same way Bush dismissed the largest anti-war protests in history in 2003. We simply have no leverage over Republicans, and if Harris loses, we’ll lose what little leverage we have over Democrats too.
It's true that we have failed to push the Democrats to act against Israel’s genocide over the past year. But abandoning them in favor of Trump is surrendering any last shred of leverage we have.
Embracing chaos for the sake of disruption is not a strategy—it’s surrender. It may feel satisfying to reject a broken system, but by allowing the country to turn towards Christian authoritarianism, we lose the very ground on which real resistance can be built.
It’s unsettling that “let’s defeat fascism” isn’t a universally embraced strategy in 2024. I understand the frustration—it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who have overseen a U.S.-funded genocide for the past year. But I can’t shake the thought that Trump would have done the same or worse in Gaza, while also ushering in dozens of draconian policies that would swamp us all at the same time. That’s what we face with his return: an even steeper battle to end the genocide, alongside new fights on multiple fronts—from his plan to dismantle democracy to mass deportations to a national abortion ban.
To Activists, Voting = Choosing Your Opponent
What I want to hammer home here is that there are, in fact, dramatically different conditions for activism presented by a Trump versus a Harris administration. While their similarities in policy are long, no serious leftist should pretend that the differences between the two are irrelevant. It’s true: both are entrenched within a neoliberal system that has failed to meet the needs of the working class and both serve the interests of empire. However, the terrain on which we build our movements looks very different depending on who is in power.
With Trump, we face the immediate existential threat of authoritarianism. His administration—and the fascist apparatus it seeks to build—represents a direct attack on the remaining vestiges of democracy, civil rights, and any capacity for progressive organizing. Instead of having space to advance a positive agenda, we would be stuck in a purely defensive fight on every front.
Project 2025
The "Project 2025" agenda should make this abundantly clear. A hidden-camera recording obtained by CNN reveals a Trump campaign operative’s brazen intent to transform the federal government into an instrument of unaccountable executive power - the kind of fascism that crushes civil society, demolishes dissent, and turns activism into a futile exercise of survival. In the video, the operative openly admits Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 is mere theater, and that Trump is deeply supportive of the Heritage Foundation's agenda behind closed doors.
On the other hand, Kamala Harris represents the damp soil of neoliberalism, no doubt deeply flawed, but still fertile enough for grassroots organizing to envision and pursue something better. Neoliberal governance, with its commitment to corporate capitalism, exacerbates inequality and enforces the status quo. But under such a regime, the structures of democracy and civil society remain intact, however weakened. Movements can still breathe, protest, organize, and demand change without the immediate specter of state-sponsored repression on the scale of fascism.
Towards a Democratic Socialist Future
Some argue that under Harris, we’d still be fighting neoliberalism, which is true. But there is a profound difference between fighting to transform a system that allows for some degree of dissent and fighting against a system that seeks to criminalize and destroy it. Under a neoliberal administration, there is at least a semblance of political space, however limited, to organize for a democratic socialist future.12
The idea that socialism could somehow spontaneously rise from the ashes of a fascist state is a dangerous fantasy. It ignores the reality that authoritarian regimes, once entrenched, dismantle the very tools and institutions that allow for mass organizing and political engagement—tools that are essential for any meaningful social change.
The fight for socialism is, at its core, a fight for democracy—not just political democracy but economic and social democracy, where people have control over their own lives, workplaces and destinies. But that fight can only happen in a world where democracy exists in the first place. If America is ever going to realize the sort of socialist reforms seen in countries like Denmark or Switzerland, they must be built on the solid ground of democratic reforms. This isn’t a concession to liberalism, but a recognition of reality. Without democratic foundations to build on—without the basic freedoms of speech, assembly, and the right to organize—the aspirations for socialism only recede further in the rearview mirror.
The failure to understand this is a failure to grasp the essential nature of power. Authoritarian systems—whether wrapped in the flag of Christian nationalism or the corporate technocracy that serves the elites—exist to crush dissent, to close the spaces where organizing can happen, and to erase the possibility of meaningful resistance.
No Real Difference = No Real Strategy
The argument that some make, that there is no real difference between Trump and Harris, is simply false. It’s a rhetorical trap that obscures the urgent reality of what is at stake. Choosing not to recognize this is not an act of radicalism but one of political naivety.
There’s a reason Netanyahu prefers Trump over Harris, however small that difference is. As Noam Chomsky has said, even “small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences.”
The path to a just and sustainable world requires fertile ground—soil where seeds of dissent can grow and have room to breathe. Under Trump, our seeds of change will be thrown upon scorched earth. The project of authoritarianism is not to merely thwart our efforts but to obliterate them entirely. Trump suggested he would deploy the military against our movements under cover of the Insurrection Act. He called our movements "vermin" that must be rooted out. He wanted to fire live rounds at protestors when he was in office but aides rebuked him. Even one of the most senior generals under Trump’s administration, Mark Milley, called him “fascist to the core.”
A new book called Unhumans labels leftists and liberals “nonhumans,” and “praises Pinochet’s helicopter killings as a good way to deal with political opponents,” as noted by Daniel Pinchbeck. The book was praised by JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr, with a forward written by Trump ally Steve Bannon.
It’s one thing to criticize neoliberalism; it’s quite another to imagine that a fascist regime will provide better conditions for our movements to flourish.
To throw seeds on scorched earth is a waste. Voting to punish Harris in swing states will only punish our movements and handicap all our efforts, from an arms embargo to restoring Roe to necessary climate action. We need to recognize the real differences in the political landscape and choose our strategies accordingly.
Function vs Rhetoric: A Response to the Green Party’s Strategy to End the Genocide
Can anyone tell me how voting for Jill Stein in swing-states will *functionally* help end the genocide? If the Democrats lose, they will be in no position to act for four years, and by then it will be far too late. We also know third party voting doesn't send a signal to elites to change course because that strategy failed in 2016 in the wake of Clinton's loss. They sidelined Bernie Sanders again in 2020 and we got the centrist Biden anyway. Rather than appeal to progressives they continue to court centrist voters when they lose, as foolish as that strategy is.
Make no mistake, if Harris loses, Harris and the Democrats in power will have only themselves to blame, but I don’t believe our vote should hinge on what signal it may or may not send to elites.
Sadly, tragically, without Ranked Choice Voting, seeking to defeat Harris in a bid to punish one half of the duopoly only serves to punish our own movements while the other half of the duopoly carries on unaffected. This is the functional outcome in a rigged system that ensures third-party votes merely empower one half of the duopoly over the other. The only thing that will threaten both parties is a movement to build democratic power at the local level and get RCV in all 50 states.
In the meantime, Netanyahu and his right-wing party wants Trump to win, because it will obviously make our efforts to get an arms embargo far harder. Vote your conscience by all means but my conscience compels me to use my vote as effectively as possible to support our movements. I'm not interested in using it to send a message to elites they will likely ignore, which functionally only serves to empower extremist right-wing forces.
Your vote, of course, is yours to cast how you wish. Just know that no matter how we vote, whether Stein, Harris, or otherwise, that will not stop the genocide. The only thing that has a chance is organized, sustained activism, which must continue and grow no matter who wins in November. Everyone I know who is voting Harris to defeat Trump is not doing so because we “endorse genocide” as some argue in bad faith. We are doing so to give our efforts the best chance to succeed.
On Friendship Among Disagreement
Whether you agree or disagree, I appreciate you hearing me out. I appreciate your efforts to improve the world, especially beyond the ballot box and regardless of how you vote. I’ve always said, “I don’t care how people vote. I care that more people become activists and get engaged year round no matter who is in power.”
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, an online library for people who want to change the world.
This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
1 https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-public-ownership-solution/
2 https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/a-10point-programme-for-21st-century-socialism/