The Simplest Case for Conservatives to Vote for Harris, in Three Steps
Foreign policy, civic hygiene, and negative partisanship—not in that order
You may be like me: I’ve been politically (and culturally) conservative for decades. I’ve never voted for a Democrat for president. You might think that the political differences between the parties would prevent any conservative from voting for Kamala Harris, even now. But I think the case for conservatives to vote for Harris can be surprisingly simple, and surprisingly strong:
(1) Foreign policy is the only thing the president really controls; Harris is better than Trump on foreign policy.
As Goldberg and French point out, there’s an argument that we should be voting for president primarily on foreign policy anyway, arguably the only thing the president has primary control over. Congress is the first branch of the federal government (it’s in Article I, pride of place in the Constitution); as much as the relationship between the two branches and domestic policy has always been complex and interrelated—and as much as the system has also degraded over time, as the power of the presidency has enlarged—to a significant extent it’s still true that Congress writes the laws: The president’s job is to “faithfully execute” the laws that Congress has written.
This is perhaps more true now than it has been in decades. With the Supreme Court’s decision to stop giving executive agencies “Chevron deference”, some believe that Congress will feel encouraged to resume more of its proper role as lawmaker; even if not, arguably the Supreme Court has already taken some of that domestic-policy power away from the executive branch.
Meanwhile even on the towering moral issue of abortion, with the successful overturning of Roe vs. Wade, much of the logic for single-minded (or single-issue) devotion to voting Republican is also gone.
So if foreign policy is primarily how we should judge between Harris and Trump, how do they compare on foreign policy?
As president, before the full Russian invasion, Trump threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless they helped him create negative headlines for his political opponent, Joe Biden. (This was what Trump was impeached for, the first impeachment.) As ex-president, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump praised Putin, calling it “wonderful”, a “genius” move. Trump has repeatedly “accused other NATO members of not paying their dues, giving the impression that the alliance is like a club with membership fees,” most egregiously promising earlier this year that if re-elected, Trump would not stand shoulder to shoulder with our treaty allies; instead, he promised that he would use Russia as his bad-cop prop to bully our own allies:
“No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want.”
Also this year, Trump’s allies literally filibustered military aid to Ukraine.
The Harris-Biden administration’s record and philosophy on such matters are not perfect, but they are much, much better than Trump’s.
Meanwhile on Israel and Hamas, Harris sounds the same arrogant, condescending tone that other American leaders do—presuming to lecture Israel, in the midst of a fight for its life, on when it’s “time” to sue for peace (and apparently time to give up on ever getting their hostages home)—but Harris also said in her acceptance speech at the DNC last week:
“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 the terrorist organization Hamas caused on October 7th. Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.”
She said that first, going further than I generally expect current Democrats to go, and added the obligatory gestures of pity for the other side only afterward. Overall, some conservatives had much more favorable impressions of the speech than others (some of the various views), but I appreciated that.
(2) Cooperating in the peaceful transfer of power is foundational and non-optional. For the health of our constitutional republic, we should remove Trump and his enablers from power as much as possible, as soon as possible.
On January 6th, in the months leading up to it, and in the years since, Trump broke and is continuing to break his oath to the Constitution and his covenant with the American people. Like a body rejecting a virus, we should either vomit him up, or crap him out.
In the debate between Trump and Biden in June, the moderator said to Trump, Will you say now that political violence is always unacceptable, and that you will accept the results of the election, whoever wins?
Trump responded by saying, Political violence is always unacceptable (not entirely what he was saying at the time, either on January 6th or in that debate in 2020, but I’ll take it, better late than never), and I said that at the time (again, not entirely).
After giving Trump a long opportunity to answer the other question, the moderator repeated the question: Will you accept the results of the election, whoever wins?
Trump’s answer was not a simple Yes, which should tell all Americans all they need to know, to turn away from him forever and not give him the time of day, much less their vote.
(Specifically, Trump said he will accept the results if the election is fair, which especially in light of his failure ever to accept that he lost in 2020 is a coded way of saying that he’ll accept the results only if he wins, which is no different from the worst possible answer, that he doesn’t accept the election at all unless it happens to coincide exactly with what he wanted to do anyway. But the specifics don’t matter; any answer to the Constitution and peaceful transfers of power other than Yes is unacceptable in our small-“r”-republican and small-“d”-democratic system.)
(3) “They make all the right people mad.”
I’m not a big fan of all the negative partisanship these days, that is (not to put too fine a point on it) tearing our country apart. But I’ll admit that I still enjoyed a certain amount of satisfaction, as I listened to news coverage of the Democratic National Convention last week, in hearing about the various efforts of protesters (from within the Democratic coalition) to advocate for Harris and her party to be more pro-Hamas—efforts that were all unsuccessful, leaving the pro-Hamas contingent feeling frustrated and, yes, excluded.
Others have commented that the DNC has been short on mentions of transgenderism etc. as well. It ain’t exactly “Sister Souljah”, but it may be as close as the Harris campaign could possibly have come, within the constraints of the Democratic coalition as it currently exists, to an old-fashioned “dance to the middle” campaign that a broad range of Americans from across the political spectrum can unite behind.
I’ll take it. For the sake of civic hygiene, for the sake of our constitutional order, I think you should, too.