A President Kamala will be no different from her predecessors

IN the two months before the US election in November, we’re making the same mistakes with Kamala Harris as we did with Barack Obama in 2008. One mistake is the fair observation that Harris cannot possibly be as odious, divisive, toxic, offensive and dangerous as her opponent, Donald Trump. We believed, similarly, that Obama would not be as bad as his predecessor, George W Bush.

Another mistake we make (unless you don’t see race) is believing that because Harris is black and a woman she is an infinitely more desirable candidate. Obama is black, and was therefore a step in the right direction.

These are/were progressive signs in a country that reached (fuller) democracy only after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Think about that; the US might imagine it has been the land of the free since 1776, but full participation in electoral processes and fuller democracy came about 60 years ago. (To be clear; from the spectacular beauty of Glacier National Park to the Four Corners, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon, and in the north-east to New York City, the US is a marvellous country.)

I should lay down a marker. By “we" I refer to those of us who will have to accept the role of the US in the world and the decisions made by its president that affect the rest of the world. Ultimately, I would venture to say Harris is preferable to Trump, but she will make no difference to the role and historical mission of the US in the world (with the heavy caveat that this role is diminishing and the US will deploy its military might over the coming years to retain its power).

The lesser of two evils

Hardliners of any stripe typically present their ideas, beliefs and values as ethically or morally absolute. Expressed politically, it is fairly congruent with the statement “you’re either with us or against us", a binary that gives hardliners moral flexibility and complete licence in the application of force or the distribution of justice. This “lesser of two evils" proposition can lead to a trap, a moral ambiguity where tolerance and permissibility of violence and injustice is preferred to any alternative – whatever that may be or lead to.

When this frames political rhetoric we end up with a situation where an electorate is faced with the crude binary of voting for Trump (the good/bad) or for Harris (the bad/good), where good and bad are defined by their supporters or detractors.

This framing can lead to parsimonious decision-making, and avoids more thorough ratiocination that may lead to different conclusions or choices. In the case of Harris vs Trump, the choices are personalised (Harris/Trump), party political (Democrat/Republican), race (black/white) and gendered (female/male), and avoid structural and historical contexts. The observer, pundit or voter is led, then, into a trap of parsimony.

In the specific case of Harris being black, it also ignores the likelihood that she may be no different from any of her predecessors. To the extent that it matters, the previous black president, Obama, romanticised hope, promised that “we can" (not that he would), but was unable to change the structural and historical determinants of the presidency, of being the commander-in-chief of the military, and the US as an historical force.

That sounds like a rarefied argument, but let us look at what the previous black US president did and how he was no different from any of his predecessors (in some respects he was worse than his immediate predecessor, the redoubtable Bush) even though we supported him because he was “one of us”.

The drone presidency

As evidence only of consistency, allow me to reflect on what I said before Obama became president as a way to support the contention that Harris will not be better for the world. In June 2008, I wrote the following:

The implication that President Obama will change the role and place of the US in the world is ill-conceived and could do with an historical reality check. Internationally, at least since the end of World War 2, the election of a new US president has rarely, if ever, rolled back or stalled this country’s more aggressive, even bellicose, foreign policies and adventures, and the ways in which such policies have been justified…

There may be some among us who, not unfairly, claim that the US has been responsible for the creation of international organisations like the United Nations. This is true. We should not lose sight, however, of the fact that the US purposefully manipulated the inception process to ensure that the UN served the interests of Washington.

Similarly, by playing a vanguard role in expanding capitalism across the world, some may suggest that the US has played a positive role. However, this process was driven, it would seem, by narrow self-interest and the preservation of the US’s position as the dominant power.

The important aspects here are “the role and place of the US in the world” and “narrow self-interest and the preservation of the US’s position as the dominant power”. What happened after Obama became president? Was he better than Bush? I’m not sure. By one count he oversaw more strikes in his first year than Bush carried out during his entire presidency. A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared with 57 strikes under Bush. Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries.

The following were not written by ardent leftist radicals, nor by supporters of Russia, China or Iran: Obama’s foreign policies were described by liberals as “a failure … he promised to bring change but mostly drove the country deeper into a ditch". The Washington Post observed in July 2016 that Obama had gone from being a “reluctant warrior to drone champion… [becoming] the president who, over the past seven years, has sanctioned the largest targeted killing campaign in American history".

The right wing described his presidency, especially his war on the Libyan people, as “an illegal disaster". Conservatives considered his legacy in the Middle East as “tarnished".

Obama’s targeted assassinations were one of the stains on his presidency. “For decades," wrote the liberal Jameel Jaffer, then director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, “the US condemned targeted killings, characterising them as assassinations, but it was unclear what distinguished America’s drone campaign from the killings it historically rejected as unlawful."

Even people who twice voted for Obama explained how he had opposed the death penalty in the US but ordered extrajudicial killings abroad with what the New York Times and others described as “kill lists". That most conservative US establishment think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, reached the same conclusions.

I have no doubt that a President Harris would accept the vision of Obama, who wrote in The Audacity of Hope that “there will be times when we must again play the role of the world’s reluctant sheriff. This will not change – nor should it.” 

This is an echo of the most militarist of presidents. It also means we cannot expect the US to refrain from getting involved in or starting wars. It has been true for decades that “political violence is no anomaly in American history" [and] “throughout our nation’s history, the threat – and actuality – of political violence has served to thwart and suppress black agency and emancipation”, as we were reminded by Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren. It was Harris-Perry who used the descriptor “Obama’s drone presidency”.

The US is “a cause", not just a country, Lawrence Lindsey, Bush’s chief economic adviser, said during the 2000 election campaign. For what it’s worth, in his book Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer wrote that Americans were “the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented and root-destroying people on earth", a description that is most fitting, it should be said, about the organised barbarity of present-day Israel, for which the US has pledged unflinching and unquestioned support.  

From the Middle East Monitor we learn: “In front of an excitable crowd chanting ‘USA, USA, USA', Harris deployed familiar language: ‘I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organisation called Hamas caused on October 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.' 

“The references to sexual violence and the festival massacre have long been deployed as a way to legitimise Israel’s war on the whole of Gaza, which has continued for nearly a year now. Meanwhile, Palestinians are raped in Israeli prisons and Israeli politicians openly say this is justified. Harris, like most US leaders, had nothing to say about it.”

There is nothing for which an argument cannot be made. To portray this year’s election in the US as a clash between good and bad is parsimonious and leads to a morality trap. Voters are expected to make a decision that would place them in a position of moral absolutism or certainty, and many of us would insist that Harris is necessarily better than Trump (for the record; she is), and we love and support her because she is black (and we should).

It would be disingenuous, nonetheless, to overlook the structural and historical circumstances, and the contiguous militarism that has been employed by the US to secure its historical mission. This militarism is foundational to US power and dominance. A President Harris would probably not change that.

No country praises or celebrates its warriors and foreign wars in the same way as Americans. From the national anthem to a public holiday (Memorial Day), one of the most important measures of true patriotism in the US is complete and uncritical loyalty to the military. In fact, any criticism of “the troops" may be considered unpatriotic or even treasonous.

This blind loyalty and hero-worship of soldiers, regardless of their actions, was best summed up by The Independent after the brutality and humiliation of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. See Leonard Doyle's 2007 report, “A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi… You know, so what" in which interviews “with US veterans show for the first time the pattern of brutality in Iraq". The point remains valid.

A President Harris would be no different from her predecessors. 

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A postscript: When I think about the possibility of Washington’s next war, especially on a country such as Iran, and the splendour of a city like Isfahan and what little appreciation US soldiers have for the people they kill or countries they ruin abroad, I am reminded of a strain of incredulity and callousness that runs through the American military imagination.

During the US war on the Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s, amid 4,000-year-old structures of Confucian-Buddhist civilisations, the soldiers were dismissive of what they simply considered to be a wilderness, a “jungle" that had to be destroyed in order to save it from America’s enemies. As one commander of the US military in Vietnam was reported to have said on February 8, 1968, after the destruction of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it."

Anyone who has visited Isfahan (or any great city in Asia, for that matter) may understand how a country that has such a deep history threatens the self-image of a society that has gone to war perhaps more than any other state over the past two or three centuries in order to preserve its status of a city on the hill.

♦ VWB ♦

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