Hard conversations with friends about imperfect options in democracy

Response to friends who argued that it’s unconscionable to vote for Harris because she’s not (yet) come out fully against the Palestinian genocide.

I’m copying this here because I guess it might be helpful to others who are having similar hard conversations with friends who believe that resistance to genocide, and not voting for candidates who even equivocate on that, is an absolute moral duty, and has priority over the likely consequences.

The problem is that such duty-first (deontological) moral reasoning takes priority over the realistically likely consequences, and who suffers from that mainly is not the person making the decision, so it’s easy to discount.

I had the moral intuition before I struggled with this moral dilemma that this level of evil — genocide, intentionally imposing famine and epidemics, targeting children, is such that absolute duty-first moral reasoning is appropriate, but I keep coming back to ‘who suffers?’ That’s been my guide to how to think about politics globally since I got involved with refugees. (I think of it as an implication of the Preferential Option for the Poor.)

It may not be enough on its own, but I think trying to embody the perspective of the victim(s) is a better starting point than my own feelings.

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Hi [friend 1 & 2] sorry for being slow to respond, I was really busy n tired with work and taking some time to think how to respond as well as possible in the circumstances. I guess this will be a goodbye. It’s very unlikely I’ll convince you to change your minds about this, and I already accepted that. I’m just going to try to leave some seeds of uncertainty about your decision to assign me to your enemy group, about the All Good vs. All Bad binary, and the traumatized-traumatizing loop.

You can of course rant otherwise, and if the venting makes you feel better okay, but I think you both know that realistically it’s very unlikely that I really have the motives you’re assigning to me. How likely is it that someone would commit years of voluntary work to defending the universal human rights of people coming from conventionally the same or closely related cultural group in one situation and then be prejudicially against people from a similar group in a similar situation another time? Besides any particular characteristics of me, that’s just generally very unlikely.

The motivations and intention argument is different from the argument about whether I’m right about what course of action is more likely to actually benefit Palestinians and limit the Palestinian genocide as much and as soon as possible. You could logically consistently accept that I’m not secretly for some bizarre reason intending harm to Palestinians or not genuinely caring about them and still believe that I’m objectively mistaken about the best course of action to realistically benefit them as much as possible. (It’s also almost certain that I don’t know fully what’s for the best for them.)

I think the motivational core of the argument about which course of action is more likely to help is about All Good vs. All Bad thinking. Part of how this comes to be and is maintained is trauma adaptations. In dangerous situations with high unpredictability it’s adaptive to over-attribute causality to inter-group motivations and patterns of behaviour, “they do this to us because they’re all like this”, because errors the opposite way are less likely to kill us or negate our reproduction, individually. The problem is that longer term it tends to cause more of similar cycles of inter-group reactionary violence. I’m sure this is not new to you. Maybe reacting at me vents the rage and leads you to a calm enough state to reflect on the whole pattern.

It’s also frankly a limited stage of developing mentalisation about other people. Projecting how you feel onto them and explaining why they’re acting that way because of how you feel, rather than realistically what you know about them. We’ve all done this more or less. Realising that other people are other people and have their own interior mental states is hard especially when accepting the reality of their situation and their state of mind is incongruent with our current identity formation. Still, accepting reality and dealing with it always leads to less suffering for all of us in the long-run.

It is straightforwardly factual that Corybn, Stein, West, Daly, and many others, perform well speaking for Palestinians’ rights, but do not speak up for other groups of people subjected to equivalent or worse atrocity crimes when the main culprits are not the US government or their allies, but other imperialistic regimes or their client regimes, and they more or less repeat excuses for the main culprits when they’re conventionally anti-Western.

As you may know, I put together a directory listing of some of the evidence about 150 Western propagandists/ influencers who make excuses for Assad — http://archive.is/nA4Kc it only goes up to 2018, so there’s more evidence out there now which could be added, but it’s enough to show I’m not saying that these figures are Tankies/ Campists/ Minhabbakjiyeh for nothing.

My attitude about Western chauvinism vs. Tankie-ism is ‘a pox on both their houses’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_plague_o%27_both_your_houses!).

I think you already know enough of the facts about this to recognise the judgement is true, but you want things to be simpler so that you feel like you know who you can identify with and feel safe relating to. The desire for a community in which you feel safe is very fair. The unrealistic over-simplifying to make up an ideal community in your mind and project onto it that it’s All Good, and anyone even doubting that must belong to the All Bad side, isn’t reliable. You’ll end up getting hurt more, and causing more hurt, than if you accepted the more complex and varied view of the world.

On the specific issue of who to support in the election for POTUS, the USA has an electoral system such that it is practically impossible for any third party to get a significant share of government power. I don’t agree with that, but it is what’s there now and the system within which we get to choose now. Even if Stein and West weren’t Tankies, even if they were perfectly consistent, it’d still be worse than useless voting for them in a situation with dangerously closely matched polling %s for the fascist vs. liberal options. If you were in a safe progressive constituency with a choice between an imperfect liberal Democrat vs. a genuinely radically better third-party candidate, who would vote along with Democrats/ Labour when it’s justified and object conscientiously when it’s not, that would be better than voting for an imperfect liberal candidate (I was lucky to get this option in my home constituency in Bristol Central, UK, and the Green who I voted for won.)

Yes liberals are not consistent, too loyal to their class and racial interests, and act in a bunch of collectively stupid ways which they perceive as clever (examples examples examples) which keep on letting fascists back in again, but when the choice is potentially permanent fascism vs. imperfect progressive liberal democracy, it’s perverse to reject the imperfect good for an imaginary perfect option when it will effectively help let the fascists in.

About Harris — there’s no sign that she’s enthusiastic for or as socially conformist about the Zionist consensus in US politics as Biden, or Trump. With Trump you’d get the full-on Christian Zionist / fascist relationship to the Israeli fascists. With Biden you get the self-deluding ‘liberal’ Zionist position, repackaging the Israeli fascist government’s actions and their rhetoric in Israeli media into phoney liberal doublespeak, but at least they’re ashamed about it enough to lie that the facts are otherwise, which is better than normalising a set of values such that those facts don’t matter, which is the overtly, proudly sadistic and ethnonationalist chauvinistic position you’d get with Trump. All the options available now are more or less horrible, which also motivates wishful thinking about alternatives like Stein.

Harris’ first statement about the issue after becoming the lead candidate was about as much pushing back on the Biden admin’s position as she reasonably could be expected to do in the circumstances that soon, otherwise as I said above she’d be effectively out of the race and unable to do any of it, because of the context and contraints of US politics, thus useless to Palestinians too. She didn’t actively lie and she didn’t say anything which would actively cause more harm to Palestinians, but she just didn’t say everything there is to say truthfully about the situation or advocate for a fully just response now (she can’t apply it now til mid January anyway), only some bits of progress.

Tact and timing can sometimes be more helpful, for the people needing change the most, than saying everything that ultimately should be said, right now.

It’s likely that she still believes some of the liberal Zionist ‘alternative facts’, or she believes that maintaining the idealism of liberal Zionism helps more than it harms (I don’t agree, but she could sincerely believe that) by covering up for the actual version in power in Israel now. There was a real liberal alternative Zionism in Israel, in the Brit Shalom movement and Ihud party, but they lost that struggle by the 1960s. The version of Zionism which won majority control of the trajectory of the modern nation-state of Israel’s development has cultural roots in European Romantic Nationalism, and I believe that more deeply influenced its shape now than religious Judaism did, which overall is more ethically universalising than particularistic. I think it’s unrealistic and irresponsible to promote liberal Zionism when in this context it effectively provides propaganda cover for fascist Zionism.

I mean, Harris is neither All Good or All Bad, but somewhat ambivalent. We could argue indefinitely about her motives and intentions, but none of us can see inside of her. The signs on the outside are that she’s projecting a political personality of being more empathic and less socially conformist than the old stiff White guys. She’s probably somewhat limited in her views by her particular social and cultural conditioning (who isn’t?) but she’s not a cartoon villain, and among the realistically available options, she’s clearly better than Biden, and far better than Trump and the network behind him. Perfectionism tends to lead to fascism or totalitarianism.

What Palestinians are suffering now is partly the result of Hamas choosing to prioritise an ideal ‘strategic’ win of Israel destroying their own global perceived moral legitimacy, hence undermining the social basis for the state to exist, but sacrificing actual Palestinians’ lives and futures and hope, without their consent to be sacrificed as a group. It’s a case of prioritising an ideal for oneself or one’s selfish in-group over actual embodied reality for others. This isn’t at all relieving Israel’s major share of culpability, but their reactions were very predictable, and that was part of Hamas’ strategy.

What you’re doing by choosing to idealise into All Good vs. All Bad sides is effectively a little bit of the same kind of prioritising an ideal in your own minds which makes you feel better, at the cost of sacrificing other people’s lives — in this case, the indirect consequences would be more on the groups subject to Russian and Iranian imperialistic regimes’ atrocities, but I think such perceptions and actions are also part of what has kept this conflict intractable for three generations now (and post-Cold War dynamics too).

About voting, resistance to genocide is about as reasonable a case for deontological moral reasoning as there can be. Anyone who aims a gun at a child, absolutely independent of any politics, is always wrong. Some things are really simple. I’ve been struggling with this too — my moral intuition is also against voting for any candidate (incl. Labour in the UK) who’s even equivocated on genocide or deliberate starvation or mass expulsion of a civilian population or snipers targeting children, even if they are objectively the lesser evil out of a bunch of more or less evil options, but then if I opt for my own purity by not voting for such a lesser evil candidate, who suffers? It’s not me mainly. I’d get to feel better about my political identification, but the victims of my individual purity by deciding “I can’t” vote according to the expected consequences rather than my identity consistency would still be the people being sacrificed now. So maybe I’m back to deontological reasoning, but the duty is a step more abstract: in such moral dilemma situations, think first about who suffers most, not myself.

There’s a concept in psychotherapy called ‘Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’, which is about accepting the things we cannot change and doing the best we can with the things we still can change. Accepting involves grief, which has layers of numbness, sadness, rage, fear of annhilation, identity disintegration, loss of shared meaning with family or community, despair, but also flickers of curiosity, resistant hope, empathy, and a depressive realism more open to more realistic mentalising about more different others. The shortest path through the fire is straight through the middle.

Putting yourself back together again better (Dabrowski, 1967 ‘Personality shaping through positive disintegration’) is also a hard process but very worth it, and not only for yourselves, but because you’ll become the kind of person who’s grown out of mere social contract morality, beyond perceiving things according to what’s normal for your in-group (incl. All Good vs. All Bad perception), and become more courageously fully personal and committed to a more universal humanity (and still not perfect, but okay with admitting it and open to changing and listening as long as one’s alive).

People who have fallen apart, become ‘not normal’ people according to normal society, and then put themselves back together again better, are exceptionally capable of helping to stick societies back together better too.