Letter to a Jewish voter in Pennsylvania
Important Announcement: I don’t in any way endorse voting for Jill Stein, or any other third-party candidate. But if you are a Green Party supporter who lives in a swing state, then please at least vote for Harris, and use SwapYourVote.org to arrange for two (!) people in safe states to vote for Jill Stein on your behalf. Thanks so much to friend-of-the-blog Linchuan Zhang for pointing me to this resource.
For weeks I’d been wondering what I could say right before the election, at this momentous branch-point in the wavefunction, that could possibly do any good. Then, the other day, a Jewish voter in Pennsylvania and Shtetl-Optimized fan emailed me to ask my advice. He said that he’d read my Never-Trump From Here to Eternity FAQ and saw the problems with Trump’s autocratic tendencies, but that his Israeli friends and family wanted him to vote Trump anyway, believing him better on the narrow question of “Israel’s continued existence.” I started responding, and then realized that my response was the election-eve post I’d been looking for. So without further ado…
Thanks for writing. Of course this is ultimately between you and your conscience (and your empirical beliefs), but I can tell you what my Israeli-American wife and I did. We voted for Kamala, without the slightest doubt or hesitation. We’d do it again a thousand quadrillion times. We would’ve done the same in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where I grew up (actually in Bucks, one of the crucial swing counties).
And later this week, along with tens of millions of others, I’ll refresh the news with heart palpitations, looking for movement toward blue in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I’ll be joyous and relieved if Kamala wins. I’ll be ashen-faced if she doesn’t. (Or if there’s a power struggle that makes the 2021 insurrection look like a dress rehearsal.) And I’ll bet anyone, at 100:1 odds, that at the end of my life I’ll continue to believe that voting Kamala was the right decision.
I, too, have pro-Israel friends who urged me to switch to Trump, on the ground that if Kamala wins, then (they say) the Jews of Israel are all but doomed to a second Holocaust. For, they claim, the American Hamasniks will then successfully prevail on Kamala to prevent Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, or will leave Israel to fend for itself if it does. And therefore, Iran will finish and test nuclear weapons in the next couple years, and then it will rebuild the battered Hamas and Hezbollah under its nuclear umbrella, and then it will fulfill its stated goal since 1979, of annihilating the State of Israel, by slaughtering all the Jews who aren’t able to flee. And, just to twist the knife, the UN diplomats and NGO officials and journalists and college students and Wikipedia editors who claimed such a slaughter was a paranoid fantasy, they’ll all cheer it when it happens, calling it “justice” and “resistance” and “intifada.”
And that, my friends say, will finally show me the liberal moral evolution of humanity since 1945, in which I’ve placed so much stock. “See, even while they did virtually nothing to stop the first Holocaust, the American and British cultural elites didn’t literally cheer the Holocaust as it happened. This time around, they’ll cheer.”
My friends’ argument is that, if I’m serious about “Never Again” as a moral lodestar of my life, then the one issue of Israel and Iran needs to override everything else I’ve always believed, all my moral and intellectual repugnance at Trump and everything he.represents, all my knowledge of his lies, his evil, his venality, all the former generals and Republican officials who say that he’s unfit to serve and an imminent danger to the Republic. I need to vote for this madman, this pathological liar, this bullying autocrat, because at least he’ll stand between the Jewish people and the darkness that would devour them, as it devoured them in my grandparents’ time.
My friends add that it doesn’t matter that Kamala’s husband is Jewish, that she’s mouthed all the words a thousand times about Israel’s right to defend itself, that Biden and Harris have indeed continued to ship weapons to Israel with barely a wag of their fingers (even as they’ve endured vituperation over it from their left, even as Kamala might lose the whole election over it). Nor does it matter that a commanding majority of American Jews will vote for Kamala, or that more than a third of Israelis (including most Israeli academics and tech people, the kind I mostly know) would vote for Kamala if they could. They could all be mistaken about their own interests. But you and I, say my right-wing friends, realize that what actually matters is Iran, and what the next president will do about Iran. Trump would unshackle Israel to do whatever it takes to prevent nuclear-armed Ayatollahs. Kamala wouldn’t.
Anyway, I’ve considered this line of thinking. I reject it with extreme prejudice.
To start with the obvious, I’m not a one-issue voter. Presumably you aren’t either. Being Jewish is a fundamental part of my humanity—if I didn’t know that before I’d witnessed the world’s reaction to October 7, then I certainly know now. But only in the fantasies of antisemites would I vote entirely on the basis of “is this good for the Jews?” The parts of me that care about the peaceful transfer of power, about truth, about standing up to Putin, about the basic sanity of the Commander-in-Chief in an emergency, about climate change and green energy and manufacturing, about not destroying the US economy through idiotic tariffs, about talented foreign scientists getting green cards, about the right to abortion, about RFK and his brainworm not being placed in charge of American healthcare, even about AI safety … all those parts of me are obviously for Kamala.
More interestingly, though, the Jewish part of me is also for Kamala—if possible, even more adamantly than other parts. It’s for Kamala because…
Well, after these nine surreal years, how does one even spell out the Enlightenment case against Trump? How does one say what hasn’t already been said a trillion times? Now that the frog is thoroughly boiled, how does one remind people of the norms that used to prevail in America—even after Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and the rest had degraded them—and how those norms were what stood between us and savagery … and how laughably unthinkable is the whole concept of Trump as president, the instant you judge him according to those norms?
Kamala, whatever her faults, is basically a normal politician. She lies, but only as normal politicians lie. She dodges questions, changes her stances, says different things to different audiences, but only as normal politicians do. Trump is something else entirely. He’s one of the great flimflam artists of human history. He believes (though “belief” isn’t quite the right word) that truth is not something external to himself, but something he creates by speaking it. He is the ultimate postmodernist. He’s effectively created a new religion, one of grievance and lies and vengeance against outsiders, and converted a quarter of Americans to his religion, while another quarter might vote it into power because of what they think is in it for them.
And this cult of lies … this is what you ask if Jewish people should enter into a strategic alliance with? Do you imagine this cult is a trustworthy partner, one likely to keep its promises?
For centuries, Jews have done consistently well under cosmopolitan liberal democracies, and consistently poorly—when they remained alive at all—under nativist tyrants. Do you expect whatever autocratic regime follows Trump — the regime of JD Vance and Tucker Carlson and the like—to be the first exception to this pattern in history?
For I take it as obvious that a second Trump term, and whatever follows it, will make the first Trump term look like a practice run, a Beer Hall Putsch. Trump I was restrained by John Kelly, by thousands of civil service bureaucrats and judges, by the generals, in the last instance, by Mike Pence. Trump II will be out for the blood of his enemies—he says so himself at his rallies—and will have nothing to restrain him, not even any threat of criminal prosecution. Do you imagine this goes well for the Jews, or pretty much anyone?
It doesn’t matter if Trump has no personal animus against Jews—excepting, of course, the majority who vote against him. Did the idealistic Marxist intellectuals of Russia in 1917 want Stalin? Did the idealistic Iranian students of Iran in 1979 want Khomeini? It doesn’t matter: what matters is what they enabled. Turn over the rocks of civilization, and everything that was wriggling underneath them is suddenly loosed on the world.
How much time have you spent looking at pro-Israel people on Twitter (Hen Mazzig, Haviv Rettig Gur, etc.), and then—crucially—reading the replies? I spend at least an hour or two per day on that, angry and depressed though it makes me, perhaps because of an instinct to stare into the heart of darkness, not to look away from the genocidal evil arrayed against my family.
Many replies are the usual: “Shut the fuck up, Zio, and stop murdering babies.” “Two-state solution? I have a different proposal: that all you land-thieves pack your bags and go back to Poland.” But then, every time, you reach tweet like “you Jews have been hated and expelled from all the world’s countries for thousands of years, yet you never consider that the common factor is you.” “Your own Talmud commands you to kill goyim children, so that’s why you’re doing it.” “Even while you maintain apartheid in Palestine, you cynically import millions of third-world savages to White countries, in order to destroy them.” None of this is the way leftists talk, not even the most crazed leftists. We’ve now gone all the way around the horseshoe. Or, we might say, we’re no longer selecting on the left or right of politics at all, but simply on the bottom.
And then you see that these bottom-feeders often have millions of followers each. They command armies. The bottom-feeders—left, right, Islamic fundamentalist, and unclassifiably paranoid—are emboldened as never before. They’re united by a common enemy, which turns out to be the same enemy they’ve always had.
Which brings us to Elon Musk. I personally believe that Musk, like Trump, has nothing against the Jews, and if anything is a philosemite. But it’s no longer a question about feelings. Through his changes to Twitter, Musk has helped his new ally Trump flip over the boulder, and now all the demons that were wriggling beneath are loosed on civilization.
Should we, as Jews, tolerate the demons in exchange for Trump’s tough-guy act on Iran? Just like the evangelicals previously turned a blind eye to Trump’s philandering, his sexual assaults, his gleeful cruelty, his spitting on everything Christianity was ever supposed to stand for, simply because he promised them the Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade? Faced with a man who’s never had a human relationship in his life that wasn’t entirely transactional, should we become transactional ourselves?
I’m not convinced that even if we did, we’d be getting a good bargain. Iran is no longer alone, but part of an axis that includes China, Russia, and North Korea. These countries prop up each other’s economies and militaries; they survive only because of each other. As others have pointed out, the new Axis is actually more tightly integrated than the Axis powers ever were in WWII. The new Axis has already invaded Ukraine and perhaps soon Taiwan and South Korea. It credibly threatens to end the Pax Americana. And to face Hamas or Hezbollah is to face Iran is to face the entire new Axis.
Now Kamala is not Winston Churchill. But at least she doesn’t consider the tyrants of Russia, China, and North Korea to be her personal friends, trustworthy because they flatter her. At least she, unlike Trump, realizes that the current governments of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran do indeed form a new axis of evil, and she has the glimmers of consciousness that the founders of the United States stood for something different from what those tyrannies stand for, and that this other thing that our founders stood for was good. If war does come, at least she’ll listen to the advice of generals, rather than clowns and lackeys. And if Israel or America do end up in wars of survival, from the bottom of my heart she’s the one I’d rather have in charge. For if she’s in charge, then through her, the government of the United States is still in charge. Our ripped and tattered flag yet waves. If Trump is in charge, who or what is at the wheel besides his own unhinged will, or that of whichever sordid fellow-gangster currently has his ear?
So, yes, as a human being and also as a Jew, this is why I voted early for Kamala, and why I hope you’ll vote for her too. If you disagree with her policies, start fighting those policies once she’s inaugurated on January 20, 2025. At least there will still be a republic, with damaged but functioning error-correcting machinery, in which you can fight.
All the best,
Scott
More Resources: Be sure to check out Scott Alexander’s election-eve post, which (just like in 2016) endorses any listed candidate other than Trump, but specifically makes the case to voters put off (as Scott is) by Democrats’ wokeness. Also check out Garry Kasparov’s epic tweet-thread on why he supports Kamala, and his essay The United States Cannot Descend Into Authoritarianism.