My Head's in the Clouds: The 2024 Election
General thoughts on the 2024 United States election, and the repercussions this could have moving forth.
I’m renaming this section Life Updates to Head in the Clouds. Perhaps that might just be the fact that I don’t really know what to write about half the time about my life every weekend to really justify a weekend update - but alas. I think maybe some short fleeting thoughts may be appropriate rather than a full article. (This ended up becoming a full article, so whatever.)
When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, I remember being a fairly naive teenager who supposedly had more liberal-minded views given the fact I was still in high school at the time. But I think that with the way the world has turned since then, I’ve only become more radicalized, even to a point where I only saw that I was moving further and further to the left.
Nowadays, where do I see myself? Perhaps calling myself a Marxist might be one way of putting it; I’ve always considered myself a socialist, or at least someone who’s got very left-leaning positions. So naturally, I thought that the potential re-election of Donald Trump would indeed be a major disaster for the United States, and frankly, it’s really disheartening, if not unsurprising that the turnout was in favour of Donald Trump. Even before this though, I can’t help but admit I didn’t have very much good faith that the Democratic Party was going to learn from past mistakes and instead just double down as they’ve always done.
Frankly, there’s a part of me that was hoping to call back to 1968, when Lyndon B. Johnson was the President following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. During his presidency, he also made clear his position on the Vietnam War, one that was growing increasingly unpopular among many American citizens at the time - and his eventual withdrawal from the candidacy, leaving the Democratic Party to have then-VP Hubert Humphrey as their nominee.
It’s hard not to think back to this time in history when Joe Biden had dropped out of the race when he did, but I think that it’s also a sign that the Democratic Party was never going to learn from the mistakes that Johnson had made. Many people who would have voted for Johnson were also upset by his escalation of American presence during the Vietnam War - a similar parallel can be made towards how Joe Biden had handled the ongoing genocide of Gaza as committed by Israeli authorities.
When Biden declared support for the IDF following the October 7 attacks, it only feels like it was worth stating that this was where one can sense that support for the Democratic Party was only set to dwindle. By that point onward, younger people were slowly turning away support for the Democratic Party, especially as they were continually funding the Israeli military while many had continued protesting the ways in which this genocide would only be further escalated by Biden’s administration.
And yet, many voyers simply knew that this would all turn out much worse under Donald Trump. Calling back to the Vietnam War, as numerous anti-war protesters were looked at in scorn by many Republicans - the fact that they were constantly ignored by Democrats was enough to feel a sense of betrayal. It’s a feeling that might only be worth coming back to now, as many student protesters were being continuously ignored by the Democratic Party, and even by the time when Joe Biden had called for an arms embargo so late into his final year as the incumbent President of the United States, it would be too little too late.
Looking back at the platform which Vice President Kamala Harris had run from the start to Election Day, it only might go without saying: she didn’t run a very good platform. I don’t doubt that American voters were probably more put off by the fact that she’s a woman of colour, especially when past presidents have more often than not been white men, but in an era where many people would be hoping for any semblance of actual change, there wasn’t really all that much that was promising in the Harris-Walz campaign either. And granted, were I an American citizen, she would have my vote. But I can’t even pretend to be excited to vote for her if I was left down in that position.
It was a platform often run on celebrity endorsements, and simply it didn’t really inspire that much confidence things could get better. At the end of the day, I couldn’t help but think she rode on herself “not being Trump” and pointing out everything horrible that Trump could be responsible for, with Project 2025 being one of those key talking points. And yes, those ramifications were horrible, but what kind of change exactly could Kamala Harris propose that would make her time all that much different from having Joe Biden as a sitting president to begin with?
And frankly, I think that this version of Donald Trump is indeed a very dangerous one. For his embrace of authoritarianism to the willingness to silence political opponents, and even his targeting of marginalized people, there’s only so much that would make this a very terrifying time for American citizens. But living in fear isn’t the way to go: it’s the active willingness to start a resistance that would bring people further. And I think that’s going to be where a semblance of change would be coming forth, especially from younger voters who would be evidently targeted by Trump at that.
There’s no doubt in my mind it wasn’t even a fair election, especially because it was often lobbied by billionaires, right-wing think tanks, and even a Zionist committee. Frankly, I think it’s only disheartening to see how much influence Zionism has left behind within the United States, while we’re able to see the destruction that it’s left for many Palestinians - and yet Israel will be continually embraced in the same way that Ukraine has been unanimously supported during Russia’s invasion.
There needs to be some sort of precedent moving forth, and I think that here in Canada, we’re about to go through a very similar ordeal. Pierre Poilievre doesn’t want to be all that much different from Donald Trump, and these past few Canadian general elections have also seen the Conservatives winning the popular vote over Justin Trudeau. The Liberal Party in Canada, quite frankly, is also very heavily broken as is, but I think that here in Canada, we shouldn’t let that running fear take precedence in the same way it’s taken for many Americans. We can’t just go around scaremongering about why voting for third party would only result in a Poilievre victory, especially if we are dealing with our own broken political process too. Thankfully, we’re not a two-party system like the United States is, but it’s also something that needs to be radically revamped into something meaningful.
So what now? During his last presidency, I don’t think Donald Trump came anywhere close to being the worst president of my lifetime (that would be George W. Bush). But there’s a chance he could be sinking the United States even further down, and I think that it should be an opportunity for the Democratic Party to learn from their own mistakes, just as the ardent Liberal Party supporters over here should do. Because the forefront of a revolution is upon us, and I think I’m ready to embrace it with open arms.
Great write-up!