An anguished but emphatic endorsement.

Andrew Sullivan

Sep 27, 2024

∙ Paid

Looking back over the many presidential elections I’ve now witnessed in my life, I don’t think I’ve ever been as heartsick about the choice as this year. We live in a critical moment; the era of globalization and neoliberalism is coming to an end; the familiar structures of the post-Cold War settlement are being tested; climate and demographic change is generating an epic mass migration, as the global south moves relentlessly north.

And in the most important power center of the West, we have to choose between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the venal or the vacuous, the awful or the empty, the malignant or the mediocre. I’ve tried and tried to be impressed by the Harris campaign so far, as have the handful of genuinely conflicted voters, and remain distinctly underwhelmed. Even in sycophantic interviews, Harris cannot answer a direct question, lurches from canned phrases to puréed pablum, offers policies that seem oddly estranged from our current discontents, and keeps her distance from any truly spontaneous or lively interaction.

There’s something missing here, and that is not entirely surprising given the circumstances of Harris’ rise. In California, she existed within the hot-house of a one-party state, with no serious competition from the right. In the Senate, she played it safe. In 2020, her presidential campaign collapsed before the first primary, after she attacked Biden from the left on race. She became vice president only after Biden explicitly ruled out any men from his search, and then implicitly any white women, undercutting his veep’s credentials from the get-go. She then became the least popular vice president in polling history. Her signature issue — the Southern border — is the greatest single liability for the Democrats, after inflation.

And so the rushed coronation always felt a little forced, the “joy” a little contrived, and the enthusiasm a product more of relief at Biden’s departure than Harris’ arrival. She gave a terrific convention speech, and decided simply to ignore almost all her previous far-left positions, without explicitly renouncing them. She’s just about getting away with it. At best, she represents a continuation of generic Democratic rule in the White House, a female Biden with a very different, but just as American, ancestry. (And this is a great thing, however tainted it has been by the stain of DEI. For America to have a female president at long last, and one who has not campaigned explicitly on those identity lines, is something to celebrate. I will gladly do so.)

How will Harris resolve the open-ended war between Russia and Ukraine? What is her strategy for containing China’s nationalist aggression? How will she handle a Jewish state digging itself into a deeper and deeper hole in the Middle East? I have no idea, except to guess a replay of Biden’s manifestly flailing improvisation.

Domestically, she seems wedded to something like the industrial and immigration policies of the Biden administration as of 2024 — a bigger role for government in the economy, and some small tightening of asylum rules alongside a general amnesty. In the culture war, we know exactly what she is: an equity leftist, a strong believer in race and sex discrimination today to make up for past race and sex discrimination yesterday, and a politician who favors redefining womanhood to include biological men, and conducting medical experiments on gay, autistic and trans children, based entirely on self-diagnosis. These are her values, they are the values of every Dem special interest group, and she assures us they have not changed. I believe her.

In other words, she represents the status quo. She is the standard-bearer of our current elites, who have launched a sustained campaign to promote and excuse someone who is very much one of them. She is the daughter of leftist academics, reared in Berkeley and Montreal, championed by the Dem machine in California, a protégée of Willie Brown, a darling of Nancy Pelosi. She didn’t forge a path like Obama, or grasp the center as he did; she rose with the machine and will not trouble the machine. I have yet to hear her say a single interesting or memorable thing in her entire career. Have you?

It is not her fault, of course, that she finds herself running for president. It is entirely because of Biden’s vanity in preventing a real primary for a successor, and the lies told by the smug, insulated clique that still surrounds him. It is vital to remember that no Democrat called out Biden’s near-incapacity to govern — and Harris was and is part of the cover-up. She is not someone to ruffle feathers, to point out the uncomfortable obvious, to act decisively when the situation demands. She is extremely cautious, deeply insecure, and out of her depth. If a serious Republican candidate were up against her — even Nikki Haley — this election would not be even faintly close.

But we do not have a serious Republican candidate.

We have the most shameless charlatan in American political history — and there are plenty of competitors. He is unfit in every respect to be president of the United States. To say this is not a function of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It is not about being upset by “mean tweets” or grotesque rhetoric. It is not the same as falling for some of the worst Resistance myths — that Trump is a longtime Soviet/Russian asset. I’ve steadfastly called out the excesses of the Resistance. They have done as much harm to liberal democracy as good. I haven’t thrown out all my conservative principles as some have. But I can also see what’s directly in front of my nose.

Trump does not merely break norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic, the norm first set by George Washington when he retired from office, the norm that changed the entire world for the better: accepting the results of an election. This is the meaning of America, and Trump despises it. I do not think this is even within his personal control. He is so genuinely psychologically warped that he has never and will never agree to the most basic requirement of public office: that you quit when you lose; and that the system is more important than any individual in it.

He is not lying when he insists that he won in 2016 and 2020 by massive landslides in the popular vote. He believes it. He believes he will win by a landslide in November, and there is no empirical evidence that could convince him otherwise. If he loses the election, he will call it a massive fraud one more time, and foment violence to protest it. We know this more certainly than we know anything about Kamala Harris. He tried to leverage mob violence to disrupt our democracy once. If that was not disqualifying, nothing is. And nothing done by his opponents or enemies can justify or mitigate it.

Unlike Harris, however, Trump has grasped some core truths of our time. The premises behind our entire immigration system — especially around asylum — have evaporated, with epochal climate and demographic shifts. The trouble is partly illegal immigration; but it is also partly the legal right to asylum. Once reserved for a few desperate dissidents from Communism, this loophole — broadened to include gang violence, domestic violence, economic hardship — now qualifies the entire world to show up at our doorstep and demand to come in. And yet the Democrats remain purposefully blind. Biden issued an executive order that tightened asylum rules this year, but it’s three-and-a-half years too late.

There is also near-autism on the left when it comes to “diversity”. No one in the Biden administration has ever once accepted that integrating millions and millions of new arrivals of different ethnicities, languages and cultures at a literally unprecedented scale and pace will strain society’s cohesion and order. On top of the economic dislocation since the China shock, it is simply not good enough to decry all anti-immigrant sentiment as racism, to rain contempt as well as chaos on people who were born and grew up here and feel like second-class strangers in their own land. Obama and Bill Clinton empathized with that sense of dislocation and bewilderment. Hillary and Biden and Harris seem incapable of it.

When the elites added wokeness to mass migration, launching a culture war on whites, men, Asians, and Jews, decrying America as “white supremacy,” lambasting the police, defending urban violence, launching purges of any dissidents in media and academia, insult was added to injury. When every counter-argument was dismissed as a function of the critic’s race or sex, anger was always likely to mount. Many now say that wokeness is declining. I don’t see it. Rather I see its natural conclusion: the emergence of a foul white identitarianism that is flirting with evil. And I see an elite utterly unwilling to reconsider its ever-radicalizing, ever-metastasizing Kulturkampf against the races and the sex and the biological reality they view as “oppressive”.

Equally, the American imperium established after the Second World War and entrenched with the end of the Cold War is obviously becoming obsolete. For all his failings, Trump called the Blob’s bluff. Without the Communist threat, the case for global American hegemony doesn’t work anymore for most Americans. It really is that basic. Risking a nuclear holocaust to negotiate a new border between Ukraine and Russia or defend an island 100 miles away from China and 7,000 miles away from the US just will not fly with a majority of Americans for the next century. Something has to give; and Trump is the only one to admit it.

America’s alliances do indeed require a tough reassessment. Trump was right that Germany was crazy to rest its entire economy on cheap Russian oil and American arms; NATO countries remain laggards in defense spending (though they have rallied for Ukraine); and the unintended consequences of the WTO and the new NAFTA have now made it easy for tariffs to make a comeback. I don’t believe in abandoning alliances; I believe in updating them. A more equal relationship is needed. That also goes for America’s dysfunctional relationship with Israel, where huge indispensable support for the Jewish state has led to absolutely no influence over its decisions. I see no inkling of any change on that front — just the revelation of a superpower’s utter irrelevance.

The trouble with Trump, however, is not the message. It is Trump. This is a time for a sane and responsible conservatism to pivot toward a more cohesive and integrated common culture by lowering the pace of legal immigration for a while, and stopping illegal migration entirely; to rescue equality of opportunity, color-blindness and merit as core American values; and to engage our global rivals pragmatically but firmly.

Trump makes this impossible. Creepy admiration for foreign tyrants has profoundly discredited a sane and responsible retrenchment of American power. His demonization of legal and illegal immigrants delegitimizes serious arguments for stronger control of immigration. And it was under Trump, remember, that wokeness won the commanding heights of the culture — because this ugly, nasty demagogue seemed to prove every leftist right: that bigotry was the lifeblood of America, and Trump its true representative — even if he’s never won the popular vote.

His policy of drastic, broad protectionism is certain poison for American prosperity. It is a guarantee of stagflation. His unfunded tax cuts would further destroy American solvency. A simple capitulation to Putin would encourage enemies across the globe. A program of mass deportation, accompanied by the literally Nazi-esque rhetoric Trump is now deploying, would generate massive, violent resistance. And in the depression and chaos that would follow, God knows where Trump’s gut could take him.

He will not become a dictator, constructing a new autocracy. His first term showed that, I think. Our constitution held, even if our culture didn’t. But in a second term, he will still be incapable of being other than himself, which means the rule of law will always be secondary to the rule of Trump, the legitimacy of our entire election system will be fatally broken, the discourse will turn ever-cruder and nastier, and the far left will mobilize. You do not have to destroy the Constitution to end liberal democracy. You just have to make the rule of law irrelevant, disrespected, discounted; you just have to delegitimize every institution. Trump does that every single day. And at some point the system is so discredited and the void so great you don’t need a tyrant to replace it. It’s already gone.

Trump is not just toxic for America; he has proven toxic for conservatism at a moment when we desperately need its realism, its sobriety, and its core instinct for order and stability. Trump grasped some essential truths others have missed; and we should be grateful for this, and learn from it. But if a conservative future is possible, it will only emerge from rejecting and ejecting him and his despicable character. It should have been done in January 2021, with the Senate barring him from future office of any kind. So it will have to be now. Not by lawsuits. But by voting.

Rebuilding a conservative party won’t be easy — but a President Harris will be extremely vulnerable if she pulls off a win. Look at the UK: a nascent new conservatism arose only to be squandered by a single leader’s flaws and failures and vanity. Character does matter. But the new Labour government has very shallow support, and the chance for a sane, responsible move back to the center-right is real.

But leave Trump there and watch the degeneracy spread. We are witnessing truly foul developments on the American right — old-school anti-Semitism, revived homophobia, deranged “eating the cats!” racism, weird ideas about the dignity and equality of women, anti-American tropes re-packaged as patriotism. Something dark is being allowed to resurface, empowered this time by social media. It has always been here in America, but always defeated in the end. But there is no defeat for it if decent conservatives don’t take a stand.

So I will vote for Harris, despite my profound reservations about her. Because I have no profound reservations about him. I know who he is and what he is. I know what forces he is conjuring and the extremes to which he will gladly take his own personal crusade. To abstain, though temptingly pure, is a cop-out. I vote not for Harris as such, but for a conservatism that can emerge once the demon is exorcized.

And exorcize it we must. Now, while we still can.

Back On The Dishcast: David Frum

David is an old friend, a long-time writer at The Atlantic, and a contributor to MSNBC. He’s the author of 10 books, including Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the way Biden has empowered Trump, and the confidence that won the Cold War. That link also takes you to a bunch of commentary over my debate with Michelle Goldberg, as well as reader debate over race and IQ.

Clip Of The Week

I post this in honor of the great and glorious Maggie Smith and of my late mother, whose views on tea are indistinguishable from the above. And held with Sullivanian passion.

Money Quotes For The Week

“We have to guard that spirit. Let it always inspire us. Let it always be the source of our optimism, which is that spirit that is uniquely American. Let that then inspire us by helping us to be inspired to solve the problems,” – Kamala Harris.

“Kamala Harris is no Barack Obama. She hasn’t got his chops. And I say that as a guy who’s no fan of Obama’s!” – Glenn Loury.

“To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide. What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea,” – Kyrsten Sinema on Harris’ proposal.

“If you do not control the borders, you are going to destroy our country … Now that they are sending migrants into New York … all my super liberal friends realize what a problem it is,” – Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan.

“There’s something inherently disgusting about a politician cheerfully autographing instruments of death, regardless of which country’s people are going to do the dying,” – Robert Wright on Josh Shapiro.

“It’s simply a fact that immigrants have low crime rates. Immigrant crime is so low that immigration seems responsible for the American decline in the overall crime rates since the 1990s. ‘Immigrant crime’ is the right’s equivalent of ‘police shooting unarmed blacks,’” – Richard Hanania.

“America saved my life. I graduated from the United States Naval Academy. I earned a Masters in physics, and fellowships at MIT and Harvard, before the left replaced merit with racial quotas,” – Hung Cao, a refugee from Vietnam running for US Senate.

“The woke left claimed that America, one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world, was the most racist country ever. The woke right claims America, one of the best governed countries in the world, treats its citizens worse than any other. … [T]his is just victimhood for clicks and it’s frankly pathetic, unpatriotic and silly,” – Konstantin Kisin posting a Tucker Carlson clip.

“The first tenet of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it must be overthrown. … And that’s why I’m a critical race theorist,” – Brian Lozenski, a professor appointed by Tim Walz’s education department to help craft Minnesota’s ethnic studies.

“I see Ta-Nehisi Coates has come down from Mt. Sinai to pronounce on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, declaring one side wicked and the other righteous and dismissing all efforts to acknowledge moral ambiguity. Such relief to be unburdened of complexity and difficulty,” – Damon Linker.

“According to gender ideology, if I find a man attractive, and he speaks the magic incantation ‘I identify as a woman’, I am suddenly bisexual. If moments later he says ‘Just kidding, I’m a man’, I’m back to being gay,” – Bender871, a Twitter user.

The View From Your Window

Portillo, Chile, 5 pm

Dissent Of The Week

Jerry Coyne, the evolutionary biologist, tackles my latest column:

[Sullivan] commits what I see as a serious error. He describes recent studies by a crack geneticist (David Reich at Harvard) and his colleagues, studies showing that there has been natural selection on several traits within Eurasian “populations” in the last 8000 years. But then Sullivan extrapolates from those results to conclude there must then have been natural selection causing differences among populations. Now we know that the latter conclusion is true for some traits like skin pigmentation and lactose intolerance, but we can’t willy-nilly conclude from seeing natural selection within a population to averring that known differences among populations in the same trait have diverged genetically via natural selection rather by culture culture (or a combination of culture and selection).

The hot potato here, of course, is IQ or “cognitive performance.” This does differ among races in the U.S., but the cause of those differences isn’t known (research in this area is pretty much taboo). So even if there’s been natural selection on cognitive performance within Eurasians, as Reich et al. found, one isn’t entitled to conclude that differences among populations (or “races”, a word I avoid because of its historical misuse) must therefore also reflect genetic results of natural selection. […]

It’s surely true that 1) if two or more populations show genetic variation in a trait and 2) natural selection ACTS DIFFERENTIALLY in those different populations (or “races” or “subpopulations”), then yes, selection can in principle cause genetic differences among populations. But this is not an empirical observation, but a hypothetical scenario. It’s almost as if Sullivan wants to use within-population data to show that differences among populations (especially in “cognitive performance”) must, by some kind of logic rather than empirical analysis, also be genetically based, and instilled by natural selection. But he is talking about what is possible, not what is known.

But that is precisely what I wrote! I was extremely careful not to say what Coyne says I said. I’ll quote the sentence that Jerry seems to have missed:

The new study is just of “West Eurasians” — just one of those sub-populations, which means it has no relevance to the debate about differences between groups.

“No relevance”. Is it possible to be clearer than that? All I said is what Coyne says: “selection can in principle cause genetic differences among populations.” Nothing is proven in this study but that.

Many reader dissents are on the pod page, arriving in your in-tray shortly. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

A mashup of the Bee Gees and Guns N’ Roses and several others:

In The ‘Stacks

• As the carnage in Lebanon continues, Park MacDougald keeps a close eye on Iran.
• Zelensky hits the campaign trail in Pennsylvania.
• Niall Ferguson never thought he’d be urging the Germans to rearm.
• Eric Adams and his fall from Gracie Mansion.
• The Dems keep milking Project 2025 for all it’s worth.
• Nick Gillespie elicits the latest bullshit from Trump on the national debt.
• Did Elon Musk just censor his own version of the Hunter laptop story?
• Bill McKibben conveys a “big new study” on our rapidly-warming planet.
• Kate Aronoff fact-checks Biden’s claims of climate progress at the UN.
• The return of Three Mile Island would be a good step forward.
• An update on US supply chains — “a disaster waiting to happen.”
• A notable trend: Americans migrate to red states; immigrants head to blue ones.
• “Mass low-skilled legal immigration” is a saving grace for so many small towns.
• No, Rich Lowry didn’t use the n-word, FFS.
• Bethel McGrew explores the ethics of the new mockumentary, Am I Racist?
• Lisa Abend launched a stack to “put the serendipity back in travel” — sans Internet.

The View From Your Window Contest

Recommend The Weekly Dish to your readers

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – Orwell