We know now that beyond successfully turning out his base, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory depended on cutting into what normally would have been parts of the Democratic coalition. Women, whose reproductive rights Trump was instrumental in dismantling and for whom he has demonstrated disregard and contempt more generally, voted for him to the tune of 46%. Latinos, whom Trump has repeatedly promised to deport, voted for him in numbers surpassing anything achieved by Republicans prior: around 42%. In the same year that Jared Kushner suggested that once Gaza was razed to the ground, it could become valuable waterfront property, Muslims voted for Trump at a rate of 21%, higher than the 20% Harris received. (This in the wake of his “Muslim Ban,” which was imposed after he took office in 2017 and restricted travel to and from countries like Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria for three months.) And not only did “Gen Z will save us!” turn out to be false, but 18-29 year olds voted for Trump in large numbers (almost 60% of Gen Z men and 40% of Gen Z women).
So, Democrats have to confront the fact that significant portions of our coalition abandoned the party for the worst presidential candidate imaginable; that we lost an election we should have won in a landslide, and it was our own fault. Thousands upon thousands of people who should have voted with us voted for him instead, but even worse, thousands upon thousands of people who should have voted for the Democratic ticket didn’t vote at all — or voted for fringe, protest candidates like Cornel West and Jill Stein — on self-professed moral grounds. This is what I want to talk about and specifically, the attitudes behind it, which belong to a broader category of moral inclinations that I have elsewhere described as “Virtue at Others’ Expense.”
Those in the “progressive” wing of the Democratic party who refused to vote for Harris acted under the principle of “making the perfect the enemy of the good.” Food prices haven’t come down as fast or as far as you might have liked under Biden-Harris? Don’t vote for Harris. The US hasn’t put sufficient pressure on Israel after its invasion of Gaza, following the October 7 massacre by Hamas? Don’t vote for Harris. The alphabet communities were insufficiently “centered” during the campaign? Don’t vote for Harris. The party reached out to “Never Trump” Republicans like Liz Cheney, in order to try and expand the coalition? Don’t vote for Harris. You get the drift.
It would seem a relevant question whether any of these things would be better under the leadership of Donald Trump. A Harris loss meant a Trump victory, given that none of the progressive fantasy-candidates had any chance of winning, so as a practical matter, every progressive who didn’t vote for Harris effectively voted for Trump. The trouble is that the type of progressive I’m talking about doesn’t think of politics as a practical activity — of winning elections, passing legislation and governing — but as a vehicle for personal expression: What am I saying to the world with my vote? And though the self-absorption at the heart of such a conception of the political is obvious — I wrote about it in a recent essay — what I’m interested in here are the moral and political confusions it involves, which are significant.
What does it mean to care about an issue like food prices or imperiled minorities or Gaza? Presumably, it means that one is concerned about the well-being of the people involved: i.e. those who can’t afford to feed their families; those who are being mistreated and abused for their identities; and those who are being bombed into the stone age by Netanyahu. But what is it to be concerned in this way? Presumably, it is to wish for and to do whatever one can to insure that these people’s material and other conditions will be improved. In short, to care about — to be concerned for — people in this way is fundamentally utilitarian in nature.
It seems implausible that progressives who refused to vote for Harris thought Trump would be better in any of these areas. Indeed, it was crystal clear, whether from his previous actions as President or from the things he promised during the 2024 campaign, that he would be significantly worse. If there is a progressive who thinks fewer Gazans will be killed during a Trump presidency than would have been during a Harris one or that Trump is more likely to lower food prices or cultivate a more sympathetic environment for racial and sexual minorities than Harris, it is only the rarest, most exotic sort.
The only way to understand a person who purports to care about Gaza or food prices or marginalized communities, but who votes in a way that can only make the conditions of the relevant people worse, is as someone for whom virtue is entirely about him or herself. And the language such people employ reflects this: they will go on about how “betrayed” they felt by Biden/Harris on Gaza or how “condescended to” they have been by “neoliberal elites” in the party, with regard to the economy or whatever it is they are upset about. The same people who rush online to tell 20 million or so strangers what they will or will not “tolerate” are eager to inform everyone that a politician has strayed too far from their ideals to support: “You disappointed me, so I will punish you, regardless of whom it hurts, including the people I claim to care the most about.”
It is hard to make sense of an activism whose main activity involves hurting the people it is designed for, until one realizes that helping people (Gazans, the working poor, the otherwise downtrodden, etc.) was never really the point, but rather, sustaining a tribe defined around the purity of certain ideas and actions; that is, the opposite of democratic, coalition-based politics, which involves governing through negotiation and compromise. Indeed, what “Never Harris” progressives practice isn’t really politics at all, but a Forever War predicated on the presumption of the failure of politics.
Keep losing and be right! may offer a heady cocktail of romanticism and narcissism that keeps people feeling good about themselves and their compadres in whatever movement they fancy themselves as being in, but it’s also one according to which everyone else be damned. That activists think this sort of misanthropy and nihilism is what political morality consists of beggars the imagination, and though philosophers may want to parse it with fancy talk about holding an “agent-” rather than “act-oriented” morality or some other such thing, it still means that you think being moral is about you rather than other people, which is difficult to admire however you dress it up.
