Photo: Intelligencer; Photos: AP Photo
Kamala Harris is holding a campaign event in Wisconsin with Liz Cheney to emphasize the moral imperative of those Republicans who still value democracy to support the one pro-democracy candidate running for president. This message is surprisingly controversial. One point of consensus between the right and the far left that has developed during the Trump era is that Republicans who refuse to vote for Donald Trump are the scum of the earth.
It is completely intuitive that Trump devotees like Mollie Hemingway would recoil at the defections from the “politically toxic and hate-filled Cheney family” or other formerly loyal Republicans. It may seem slightly surprising that their sense of betrayal has been matched or even exceeded from corners of the left.
The steady trickle of grumbling on the left that has greeted Republican defectors since 2016 has been met with a roar of indignation when no less a reactionary than Dick Cheney, the Prince of Darkness, announced his intention to vote for Harris. “It’s embarrassing to put out a statement lauding Dick Cheney’s endorsement,” complained Matt Stoller. American Prospect editor David Dayen declared Cheney’s endorsement would sway “zero” people. “I can’t help but think that if (heaven forbid) Harris loses in November, it will be because she leaned too hard into the Liz Cheneys and ignored the voters most put off by the Cheney family and by US policy in the Middle East,” predicts Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch.
I would stipulate that Republicans have views on public policy I disagree with, and many of them, especially Cheney, have made the world a worse place, and that endorsing Harris will not be nearly enough to account for the harm he caused. However, I still would rather have Cheney endorse Harris than have him endorse Trump. And I think Harris is shrewd to tout that endorsement.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, which appears to be sadly necessary, the logic of soliciting cross-party endorsements in general is that you convey your appeal to the broadest possible segment of voters. In theory, it would be possible for endorsements from right-wingers like Cheney to subtract from a Democrat’s appeal, by signaling they would implement unpopular right-wing policies like regressive tax cuts and invading Iraq.
However, there is little evidence this fear is playing any important role in limiting Harris’s support. Harris stands clearly to Trump’s left on taxes, the Middle East — where Trump refuses even to endorse a two-state solution — and everything else, with the arguable exception, depending on how you categorize it, of supporting Ukraine over Russia. (My view is that giving arms to a democratic country threatened by imperialism is liberal, and Trump’s attraction to Putin’s reactionary ideology is right wing, but leftists whose foreign-policy ideology is defined in opposition to American power tend to see it otherwise.)
The policy objection is especially weak given the specific nature of the Republican endorsements. Harris’s Republican supporters generally don’t claim her policy agenda is better than Trump’s. Their argument is simply that supporting the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power is a threshold issue he fails to clear. Trump “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” said Cheney, “He can never be trusted with power again.”
This is not the entirety of Harris’s message. But it is a portion of her message, and it appeals to a segment of traditional Republican voters who supplied a crucial and possibly decisive swing that enabled Joe Biden to win in 2020.
The case against Harris brandishing, or even accepting, Republican support combines several related sentiments. One stand is a belief in politics as a form of purity. To accept support from the impure is to contaminate oneself. Shayana Kadidal wrote an entire story for The Nation decrying “Torturers for Harris.” Its argument is less that Harris’s campaign will be harmed by Republican endorsements than the idea that the endorsements are upsetting:
The sight of [Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales], both of whom played such key roles in advancing the Bush administration’s embrace of torture, endorsing Harris is distasteful enough. To see Harris embrace the support of such people is even worse …
There are quite a few other Bush Republicans for Harris. J. Michael Luttig announced in August that he would vote for Harris, apparently mad that Trump wants to “terminate” parts of our sacred Constitution — the same Michael Luttig who, as a judge, terminated quite a few provisions of the Constitution in 2005 by deciding that a U.S. citizen could be held as an “enemy combatant,” even inside the U.S. There is also a letter signed by a veritable Army of Darkness — 200 figures in past GOP administrations and campaigns, mostly notable because I have never heard of any of them (“Nobodies for Harris”?).
A related strand is the belief that the Democratic Party has a potential majority coalition of working-class voters, whose formation has been stymied by the neoliberal elite. This belief materialized in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign and has persisted even as it’s been proven fairly clearly to be fool’s gold. The Biden administration followed this belief, at least directionally, by adopting anti-trade, anti-monopoly, and unwavering pro-labor policies, which were supposed to unlock the working-class support that was supposedly previewed by the Sanders campaign. It wasn’t crazy to think these policies might arrest the Democrats’ working-class decline, but the formula failed completely.
A related strand is a skepticism of the whole idea of defending liberal democratic norms. If you go far enough out on the left, normative ideas about the proper conduct of politics look very different than they do on the center left. Defending the sanctity of the electoral process, content-neutral defenses of free speech, and categorical opposition to political violence are all notions that can be used against the radical left. They are naturally reluctant to allow these ideas to go unchallenged.
Obviously, the most important leftists in American politics don’t share these objections, which is why the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC are supporting Harris without reservation. Nonetheless, elements of the left remain committed deeply to the factional struggle for control of the party. And when factionalism is your highest aim, actually defeating the opposing party becomes a secondary objective. Indeed, shrinking your party’s coalition, which expels your internal enemies and makes the party easier to take over, feels like a win. By the same logic, expanding the party toward the center by accepting GOP refugees, which helps Democrats win elections, feels like a defeat — the larger the coalition, the harder it is for a small faction to gain control of it.
I spent the Bush years not only despising the people running the Republican Party but warning (correctly, in retrospect) that it was growing radicalized and dangerous. Donald Trump represents a departure from the traditions of the Republican Party in some ways (his damaged personality, total contempt for patriotism, and frequently undisguised racism). In other ways, he represents a continuation of its descent into authoritarianism. I wish Republicans had recognized this trajectory sooner and stopped it before the party became irredeemable. But a belated conversation to the pro-democracy cause is better than remaining loyal to a party whose goal is to hand power to a madman.
