mumbri.ch

These days, when people find out that I’m a dual national (Swiss/American), they ask who I’m going to vote for. They are consistently surprised by my response that I’m not going to vote.

Principally, I’m not voting because I don’t believe in exercising political power in a jurisdiction where I won’t face the consequences of my decisions. One could argue that in the case of the United States in particular, all citizens of the world are concerned by the maintenance of the liberal world order, itself a consequence of US military power. So, if I’m being intellectually rigorous, I have to have a second reason.

Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for the world, this is the third US election in a row where the choices were thoroughly uninspiring. This time around, however, I think the case can be made that its a lot worse.

For one, we’re in the opening stages of world war 3 (a topic I’m likely to write on soon), so the stakes are quite a bit higher. Then there is the fact that a significant number of the supporters of both candidates think that the other side are literally fascists. And finally, I think the candidates and campaigns themselves are simply uniquely bad this time.

Donald Trump

Interestingly, I don’t think there’s much to say on Donald Trump. He is a showman, he is funny, he is a terrible human being, and he is wholly unsuited to being president. He is not a fascist, however, and he is not a credible threat to democracy. We have already seen what a Trump presidency looks like, and it isn’t scary; at least, not directly so. It is mostly incompetent and unsophisticated, which is admittedly quite worrying in the context of global instability and conflict, but as I’ll explain later, probably not significantly worse than the alternative.

What he is, is a dire warning to the powers that be in Washington, and one that few people have bothered to listen to. Trump’s mandate is to uproot the institutions that run the American government and redress quite real wrongs that have been committed to a large portion of the American rural population. (Again, a topic for another time.)

Thank god for Trump, because a more ambitious politician could use that mandate to plunge the world into turmoil.

The Democratic Party Candidate

Kamala Harris is not a real candidate. By this I mean that a political candidate is an avatar of a set of mandates and policies, and to a certain extent a persona that has been cultivated by the political process. Ms. Harris has none of these things. She was a candidate in the 2020 primaries, but in 2024, she is just “not Trump.”

Nate Silver wrote a blog post on this issue, where (I’m paraphrasing) Harris is campaigning on “Vibes” while Trump is campaigning on policy. That policy is nonsensical and won’t (and can’t) be implemented, but it’s still there. Silver makes the point that in reality most people vote on vibes and adopt the policy of their candidate, which is certainly fair, but it’s still a glaring issue for “undecideds”, who are probably voting more on policy than average. I will discuss this more in detail in the next section.

First, however, we really need to discuss how the democratic campaign has been mismanaged. Voters have been concerned with Joe Biden’s age since the 2020 election; The trumpism of “Sleepy” Joe Biden would not exist if there was not an undercurrent of concern in the zeitgeist. Recall that Trump is above all a showman: everything he says publicly is a reflection of the audience. If it comes out of Trump’s mouth, it is likely that a sizable fraction of the electorate thinks it is so.

Which makes it all the more baffling that the democratic party decided, four years later, and with insider knowledge of his actual mental capacities to try and sneak an aging candidate past the electorate with highly favorable media coverage and sleight of hand. To skip the primary process with a substandard candidate would constitute malpractice, were marketing and campaigning a regulated industry. When the façade of Joe Biden’s mental capacities inevitably crumbled, it forced a crisis in the candidate selection process, in which they went with the “least bad” option of Kamala Harris. As Nate Silver writes, this problem was entirely avoidable.

Now the Democratic party has an appointed candidate with very little record, no policy proposals to speak of, and all of the issues of an unpopular incumbent candidate due to her association with the Biden administration.

On top of all of those self-inflicted issues, the Democratic Party still does not know how to run a campaign against Donald Trump.

Trump Mania vs. Sound Strategy

I am firmly of the opinion that, despite everything, the 2024 election was Harris’ to lose.

Despite everything, Trump is both unpopular and polarizing. He runs a relatively straightforward populist campaign, centered around anti-establishment sentiment and, critically, a persecution complex (“It’s me against the swamp!”).

Undercutting this strategy really isn’t that hard if you’re willing to think outside the box. Emphasize the ineffectual nature of the Trump administration, highlight Trump’s freedom to run as a presidential candidate, focus on the cynical blocking of the immigration bill in March of this year, and maybe, if you’re feeling crazy, propose some serious policy remedies for the disenfranchised working class hurt by globalization.

What probably isn’t a good idea is pushing through a sensational felony conviction for a crime which ammounts to an accounting error (and only in the state of New York) and prosecuting Trump for a crime every recent president seems to be guilty of. Or slanting media coverage so obviously that even the New York Times gets fed up with working with the White House. You know, maybe don’t pointlessly victimize the self-proclaimed martyr.

To be fair, many of these behaviors seem to have dropped off precipitously after the first(!) Trump assassination attempt. But the fact remains that the Democratic Party’s strategy seems to have been a panicked attempt to use every tool at their disposal to block Trump from the White House, no matter the cost.

All that remains is the persistent drumbeat that “Democracy is on the ballot.” I personally find this message rather weak, when the man in question had the reigns of power for four years, and the US was not particularly more totalitarian in 2020 than in 2016. The change, if any, was certainly less than in the period from 2001 to 2016.

For the record, the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a decentralization of power. And that it had the effect it did was also a result of cynical politics.

What Actually Matters

Like many people, I like to consider myself an “issues voter.” Normally, the only issues I care about are energy policy and infrastructure, under the assumption that essentially every problem is downstream of those two subjects. Given the fact we are in the opening acts of WWIII, however, my political interests have narrowed to the Ukraine War (considering that I live in the European theater).

Youtuber Sarcasmitron has published a video exploring the foreign policy consequences of this election quite well, in my opinion. I agree with essentially all his points, and in summary, a vote for Trump is a vote for “Tough Guy” vibes to ward off WWIII, while a vote for Harris is a vote for a slightly less risk-averse continuation of the same foreign policy.

The issue is that the Ukraine war looks to me like a long string of missed opportunities. In the name of de-escalation, the collective west has hamstrung and undersupplied the UAF in its struggle against an imperial power which explicitly uses nuclear coercive tactics. I am not well informed enough to understand why it would have been so dangerous to send 3000 Abrams tanks in mothballs to the UAF, or the necessary Grippens or F16s to achieve air superiority. I do understand that my position on direct intervention may be considered risky, but I still think NATO should go in and kick Russia out of Ukraine; at least if Nuclear non-proliferation is a regime worth defending.

My specific position, and why I believe it is correct, is out of scope for this (already quite long) post. I believe that the current US strategy in Ukraine is deeply flawed, however. I think that the current administration has overthought the issue, and, ironically, a less sophisticated foreign policy might be more effective in this particular context.

The Harris administration will likely continue the same drip-feed of critical equipment, but hopefully with less risk aversion and therefore fewer missed opportunities. They will, however, likely prolong the war unnecessarily and give Russia far freer of a hand than they need to.

The Trump administration, on the other hand, has articulated a strategy which can charitably be described as “unrealistic.” Forcing a negotiation between Putin and Zelenski is going to end up no better than the Tucker Carlson interview. Fortunately, his fallback position seems to be to give Ukraine “more than they ever got if we have to,” which is at least better than the current trajectory. The major issue is JD Vance, who has said that he doesn’t care about the outcome of the Ukraine conflict, and as VP, likely has influence on Trump’s decisions.

So in essence, both choices are bad on the Ukraine issue, in the sense that they are not interventionist enough, if at all. The choice is either high variance (Trump) or low variance (Harris).

And now we’re back to voting for a turd sandwich or a giant douche. Hopefully the European Union can get its act together in time. (Don’t worry, I have things to say about them as well; and a few words for our own [swiss] foreign policy…)