Our votes matter

By Ande Jacobson

Most of my friends have made up their minds for this contentious 2024 election, and the vast majority are voting Democratic up and down the ticket for the good of the country as a whole even if they aren’t completely in line with some specific policies or even registered as Democrats. This makes sense to me. I’m never completely in line with any politician’s policies, but I learned a long time ago that with politics you never get everything exactly the way you want it. I learned that you should vote based on the overall good of a given candidate and whether they want to help us all or not. This election, I agree with most of the Democratic Party’s policies such as:

Enacting fair taxation where everyone pays their fair share including the wealthy and corporations
Lowering prescription drug prices not just for seniors but for everyone
Stopping price gouging, especially for essentials like food, housing, and healthcare
Protecting Social Security and Medicare without raising the retirement age or cutting benefits
Producing more clean energy
Enacting initiatives to address climate change
Enacting sensible gun safety laws
Protecting reproductive choice and freedom by codifying the protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide
Enacting bipartisan legislation to tighten border security and enact humane immigration policies
Continuing job growth and strengthening unions
Making education affordable and accessible
Continuing to improve the ACA to make healthcare available to all without the threat of financial ruin
Protecting voting rights so that every eligible voter can cast their ballot – a bedrock principle of democracy
Appointing judges and justices who will uphold the Constitution and rule of law, not shred it
Strengthening our democracy
Maintaining the separation of church and state enshrined in our Constitution

VP Harris recently announced that she also supports expanding Medicare to cover long term care at home to help the disabled and our seniors when they need it most without the threat of financial ruin.

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the Democratic Party understand that we have to work together and support making things better for all Americans through the above initiatives and the rest of the platform and policies they support. As such, I am very enthusiastically supporting Democrats up and down the ballot in this election along with most of my friends.

That said, I have a small number of Trump supporting friends. Not many anymore, but I still have a few. They make various claims while ignoring how obviously unfit Trump is to lead. They ignore his blanket hatred and disdain for the vast majority of Americans along with his intention to end the rule of law in this country. They ignore his worsening detachment from reality and accept his dystopian fantasy world as normal and desirable. Some say they want a return to Trump’s policies. They like the hardline stance he takes with foreign leaders such as telling NATO allies that we aren’t going to protect them if they don’t pay up to the level that he thinks they should pay. While in reality, Trump’s foreign policy shows the U.S. to be an unreliable ally and makes the U.S. and the world far less safe, they like the “tough guy” image they think his blustering projects as he emulates dictators like Putin, Orbán, and others.

They like the lower tax policies, though none are in the income brackets that truly benefit from those, but they hold the view that they do not want to pay for things they don’t directly benefit from or help people they think are unworthy, so they have no real feeling of any community responsibility despite in some cases claiming to be “good Christians.” While I don’t put any stock in religion and think that it leads to magical thinking, the hypocrisy of those claiming adherence to so-called Christian ideals of charity, community, etc., while denouncing those different from themselves is more than a little disturbing.

They like his economic policy of using tariffs as a blunt club ignoring the fact that effectively means a tax on all manner of goods that American consumers will pay, not the foreign companies. Tariffs by themselves aren’t either good or bad. They do serve a purpose, but indiscriminate tariffs against all foreign products when we as a society rely on those products because we cannot produce them here, that’s both irresponsible and foolish. It also hurts those least able to pay.

They like his anti-immigration policies and just dismiss the fact that there was a bipartisan border security bill that would have addressed a lot of the issues we face at the southern border. They like that their cult leader convinced his party to scuttle that bill so that he could run on it as an election issue. As Kamala Harris has said, Trump would rather run on a problem than do anything at all to fix it. And if he were to take office again, he’d commit hundreds of billions of American tax dollars to his cruel mass deportation efforts putting families and entire communities of legal immigrants at risk.

One friend claims that Trump’s policies are consistent with the best ideals of conservatism and liberty. Never mind that liberty extends only to rich, straight, white, Christian men, and subjugates women and minorities, attacks vulnerable communities, and sows hate. This friend praises Trump’s SCOTUS appointments and the SCOTUS majority that has consistently shredded the Constitution ignoring the bedrock principle of stare decisis in reopening what had been considered settled law to pursue an extremist agenda as they did in overturning Roe v. Wade.

Then there’s a friend who when asked how they can support Trump claims that not everything said about him is true. In the words of Tim Walz, “That’s a damning non-answer.”

Project 2025 details Trump and the MAGA cult’s policies. They are horrific, though interestingly, what used to be available for download without providing any personal information now requires any interested party to provide their name, email address, and zip code before being given access to download the plan.

Contrast Project 2025 with the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform, and the differences will shock you. Project 2025 doesn’t protect liberty for the nation. It raises the white male patriarchy to new heights, and it takes the rights of others away piece by piece. It seeks to end many of the protections the federal government provides by eliminating the agencies that are in place to ensure public safety such as NOAA, FDA, CDC, EPA, FEMA, etc.

Without the FDA, imagine no food inspections happening in the future so that we wouldn’t be able to have food that is safe to eat or medications that have been thoroughly tested before being released to the public. There would be no food recalls because contamination wouldn’t be disclosed promptly, and food-borne illnesses would be the norm rather than the exception.

The CDC tracks health concerns and provides guidance to keep us safe from deadly communicable diseases.

The EPA’s monitoring of environmental hazards is key to maintaining our health and safety in an ever more crowded world.

NOAA allows meteorologists to provide up to date weather forecasts and tracks storms to give us the life-saving warnings we rely on to survive ever more dangerous weather events.

Without FEMA, there would be no federal emergency response to natural disasters leaving states and local communities on their own to repair and recover from such events that have become much more frequent and more severe due to climate change.

Project 2025 seeks to eliminate the Department of Education ensuring that public education crumbles to make education as a whole something only the financial elite can access.

Project 2025 seeks to put the DOJ at the direct beck and call of the president, removing any independence of the judiciary. It’ll no longer be an independent branch of government, but it will instead be an arm of the White House for the president to direct as he pleases. And yes, in the MAGA world, the president would always be male.

Project 2025 seeks to eliminate any social safety net thrusting tens of millions more into abject poverty. If Project 2025 were enacted, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP would all be eliminated.

Project 2025 seeks to enshrine fetal personhood nationwide which would give a fetus more rights than the person carrying it even in cases where that fetus was unviable. We are already seeing women dying because of the state abortion bans even in cases of miscarriages with complications. Under Project 2025, this would become a nationwide problem, and women (or anybody with a functioning uterus) would become little more than an incubator in human form with no say over their bodies.

Project 2025 seeks to end freedom of religion in the U.S. turning the country instead into a Christian country allowing for discrimination of anybody not outwardly holding those ideological beliefs.

There is so much more that shows just how far the planning has gone to end American democracy and replace it with a theocratic autocracy headed by Trump, a prototyrant who desperately wants to be a tyrant and avoid accountability for his crimes. A prototyrant only interested in power for himself no matter who he hurts as evidenced by the disinformation campaign he ran in the aftermath of two horrendous weather emergencies. His disinformation prevented a lot of people from even seeking the help they needed that the federal government was in place to provide. It was so outrageous that after Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit, governors from red and blue states alike refuted Trump’s claims and praised the Biden-Harris administration and FEMA’s for their proactive response. FEMA had boots on the ground before the storms hit to start work immediately and get people what they need while Trump made objectively false claims that sounded much more like confessions for actions he took when he was president and withheld aid from states that voted against him.

The choice this election is simple. Either we vote to protect our democracy by supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz along with Democrats down ballot, or we fall to autocracy and may never see democracy again. If we fail to maintain our democracy, we’ll end up taking down a large part of the developed world which is why the rest of the world is watching what’s happening here in horror. History shows us what happens when prototyrants get unbridled power. They become tyrants, and then it’s much harder to get them out. Just look at how close the world came to losing democratic freedoms in WWII. For years, people in the U.S. wondered how regular people could allow such a thing to happen. Well, as we’ve seen over the last 40 or so years, through careful planning, media manipulation, lots of money, and greed, it can be done to any population if they are not engaged and paying attention to the reality before them.

Please pay attention to what’s happening. Please vote to save our democracy and ensure we have a bright future. Please vote for Democrats up and down the ticket because so much of the GOP has fallen to the sway of the MAGA cause to end democracy for us all. It’s in our hands. We the people have our right to vote (for now). We need to exercise it responsibly. Sitting this one out is the same as voting to end democracy. We each can make a difference.

References:
https://www.project2025.org/policy/
Project 2025 really for free (downloaded early this year)
2024 Democratic Party Platform
https://kamalaharris.com/issues/
https://kamalaharris.com/project2025/
https://agoodreedreview.com/2024/09/24/book-to-stop-a-tyrant/