Do you have any idea how much harm you are doing? Let me count the ways
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Dear Jill:
I hope you won’t take it amiss if I tell you straight out, right off the top, that we need your candidacy like a hole in the head.
You may remember that I’ve long respected you. We were, for decades, suburban Boston neighbors. I’d occasionally run into you at Trader Joe’s or the local bookstore. We shared Harvard as our alma mater and each long practiced the healing arts. I believe we saw eye to eye on any number of consequential issues.
Most importantly, we shared a deep concern for the integrity of our electoral processes, especially when the counting process was entrusted almost entirely to private corporations with right-wing pedigrees and proclivities.
We corresponded about the dangers of election subversion and shared podiums at conferences called to address those dangers.
In fact, I provided data and analyses that persuaded you to challenge Trump’s slim and suspect victories in the “blue wall” swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 2016.
After that election I was among the few who accepted a benign explanation for your Moscow dinner in the company of Vladimir Putin, and defended you against charges that you were acting as, at best, a useful idiot for a Kremlin intent on sowing chaos and destroying our democracy.
In short, I have been a fan and a friend.
Thus it is with genuine perplexity that I am writing to ask you… Just what the hell do you think you’re doing now, in 2024, at this fraught moment?
A Fatal Blindness
Yes, I’ve read about your fervent belief in the Palestinian cause, how it is motivating you to campaign hard in swing states like Michigan, where at least one poll shows Arab American voters turning to you and abandoning Kamala Harris in droves. And I get your frustration with the major party “duopoly,” and in fact join you in supporting ranked-choice voting as a step toward opening our politics to other, less corporatized views and voices. These are good causes, both of which I support.
But have they blinded you to the enormous risk of continuing to pursue them via your candidacy in this election?
I have read the Newsweek article whose headline reads “Jill Stein: How and Why I Will Stop Kamala Harris Winning the White House,” which sounds for all the world like her defeat — not your own victory — is your goal.
And it’s not as if a Trump victory would then be some kind of collateral damage. No, on the planet where we all live, a Trump victory is strictly concomitant with a Harris defeat — they are one and the same outcome. Is this really where your head is?
In the course of that article you suggest that Harris and the Democrats could somehow rescue themselves from your offensive by bringing Benjamin Netanyahu to heel, cutting off all military support — and thereby winning back the voters to whom you have been pitching your candidacy.
According to this interpretation of your tactics, you are using your candidacy as a weapon to advance your cause, putting the screws to the Biden administration to put the screws to a defiant — if not outright Trump-serving — Netanyahu, playing electoral brinkmanship.
But you have to know just how unlikely it is that, in the weeks before a presidential election, you will succeed in crowbarring such a monumental shift away from a policy that has been in place for at least as long as we both have been alive.
Not to mention that you know full well that Harris and her party face something like an equal threat from the substantial pro-Israel sector of the Democratic base and are politically pinned by this no-win wedge issue.
So the claim that you have a constructive purpose for the threat that your candidacy poses to Harris rings hollow at best. Your campaign will confer no tangible benefit upon the oppressed. Its only plausible result will be to siphon critical votes from Harris, and possibly drag down-ballot Democrats down as well.
That is, after all, what you did in 2016:
- Took 1.07 percent of Michigan vote; Trump’s margin was 0.22
- Took 1.04 percent of Wisconsin vote; Trump’s margin was 0.77
- Took 0.81 percent of Pennsylvania vote; Trump won by 0.72
In all cases your vote share exceeded Trump’s margin and it is no mystery where those votes came from.
That was the Electoral College and the election, right there. Absent your candidacy, America would almost certainly have had its first woman president and been spared the nightmare that has been Donald Trump.
“Wait a minute,” I can hear you say. “That is nonsense! Clinton ran a terrible campaign; FBI Director James Comey ginned up an October surprise; there were other candidates. You can’t blame me!”
Ralph Nader has offered much the same defense for his role in giving us George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 (“Gore would have won if he had just taken his home state!”), along with Afghanistan, Iraq, the Patriot Act, and the triumph of the fossil fuel industry over the environment.
But here’s the thing, Jill. There are multiple factors affecting the outcome of any election. But all the hypotheticals (if Clinton had this, if Gore had that…) in the world won’t change the reality that, with but-for causality, Nader’s candidacy gave us Bush and your candidacy gave us Trump.
Leave everything else in place and take away only your siphoning of votes, and the outcomes and our history would have been radically different.
Well, perhaps you don’t think the difference would have been that radical — because the two parties, like the roads that diverged in Frost’s yellow wood, are really just about the same.
But I believe the differences are profound: Name any policy, program, judicial ruling and, nine times out of 10, it’s an easy guess which party was behind it. Cut taxes for the rich? Republican. Help vast numbers of previously uninsured obtain health coverage? Democratic. Strip regulations protecting workers or the environment? Republican. Protect women’s reproductive health needs? Democratic. And so on.
But even if it were fuzzier than I believe it to be; even if the complexities of foreign policy have led to much party overlap in support of what you regard as the great American war machine; even if, in previous elections, it may have been desirable to lay down a marker for a purer, less compromised, more idealistic alternative — 2024 is manifestly not previous elections.
Nader has bristled at that “now is not the time” argument, saying that it’s always used to disparage and discourage third-party candidacies, and I can only assume you agree. And yes, an argument can be made that every election is critical, every election changes the course of history.
But Let’s Be Real
The election of Donald Trump would bring, in large helpings, just about everything you and I oppose, despise, and rightfully fear:
- Yet greater wealth inequality;
- An assault on personal rights and freedoms (except that sacred right to bear arms and shoot up schools);
- More control of women’s bodies and choices, up to and perhaps beyond a national abortion ban (wink, wink);
- A “drill, drill, drill” turning back of environmental regulation, renewable energy sources, and any steps taken toward grappling with global warming;
- The sale of vast swaths of federally protected land to favored corporate bidders;
- A truly insane, tariff-dependent plan for the economy;
- Desertion of democratic allies and embracement of dictators abroad;
- Mass deportations and internments at home;
- Far-Right Supreme Court and lower court domination that will outlive us;
- The Project 2025 list goes on for hundreds of pages.
And, lest we forget, Trump has proven himself no friend to the Palestinians — and a great friend of Netanyahu.
And those are just the policy related disasters that await us. More chilling by far is Trump’s lust for cruelty and violence, the sadistic “purging” of the “weak” by the “strong” — which has only been intensifying recently as he salivates over greater levels of viciousness. I’ve dubbed it the “dictator’s doom loop” and written about it here.
Coupled with his sneering contempt for the truth and the rule of law (at least as applied to him and his friends), and with his plan to consolidate power (the Nazi word for it is Gleichschaltung) and surround himself entirely with lickspittles, Trump’s thirst for revenge and domination is truly terrifying.
And please bear in mind, Jill, that should Trump lose, the narrower that loss the greater the post-election turmoil when he launches Stop the Steal on Steroids Squared.
Can you look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that it doesn’t scare the bejeezus out of you? Can you look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself that you’ll be OK with following through on your plan to bring down Harris? Are you really that reckless?
Look, Jill, we obviously don’t see the challenges of this moment in the same way. You see an opportunity; I see a surrealistic nightmare, like watching Satan laughing with delight the day the music died. I ask: How is it possible that enough of our country may be in thrall to a deranged pathological liar to elevate him yet again to the high office that he has already degraded and defiled more profoundly than any previous occupant?
How is it that the rigged game that is the Electoral College is operating yet again as a tool to achieve that elevation, the popular will be damned? How is it that the Kennedy family legacy and Musk’s mega-platform and billions have been placed in full-blown service to hand our country over to Trump and MAGA? How is it that MAGA election deniers are poised to attack and possibly overrun our overmatched, rickety electoral processes?
How is it that — for all your denials and professed refusals to accept any major-party help — the MAGAs are boosting your candidacy (just as they did RFK Jr.’s when they believed it would help take down Biden) and using you as a tool to throw the election to Trump?
You’ve said, “I’m not preparing myself to be considered a spoiler because I reject the notion. Democracy is about political choices.” You may reject the notion but I think you’d better prepare yourself. Because whatever you want to call yourself, there’s a good chance that you will in fact wind up a spoiler — not just for the Democrats but, given Trump’s diabolical plans, for democracy. Ask yourself: Is Hungarian, or Venezuelan, or Russian “democracy” about political choices? And please don’t kid and comfort yourself that such could never happen here.
Hasn’t this democracy got enough problems right now? I ask you to picture for a moment the morning of November 6, and election returns that show you have achieved your goal. You have succeeded in winning enough votes in swing states to leave Donald Trump the winner of those electoral votes and the White House. Will you smile your work to see?
Jill, our democracy hangs by a thread right now. It has taken many wounds. One more may well be enough to kill it. You would not, then, be its lone assassin, but your cut might well be the unkindest of all. It will, when and if the dust settles, haunt you. Democracy will cry out to you in its death agony: “Et tu, Jill Stein?”
