In less than two weeks, the American electorate will be formally asked to select Kamala Harris or Donald Trump for president, but that, in my opinion, constitutes a false choice. Regardless of Harris’ merits, the real option in this election is whether to vote for or against Trump. I hope that many of us who voted for him in the last election will now do so for Harris — that is, against Trump, whose victory would be the most serious calamity that could have happened to the United States since the Civil War. Voting against Trump is the honorable decision for anyone who defines him or herself as conservative.
If I vote against Trump, I will not be moved by any ideological change, but, quite contrary, by my loyalty to the conservative ideology that I have maintained throughout my life. My vote will be in appreciation of and respect for established institutions (this is what it means to be a conservative) and in opposition to those who insist on violating and undermining them, and who, brandishing a clumsy and fake nationalism, aspire to split the United States from its global mission.
Donald Trump is not a conservative; he is an anarcho-populist agitator who has wanted, and even intends, to subvert the institutional order and establish, as far as possible, a one-person regime in imitation of the strongmen he admires — men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — for the sole gratification of his narcissistic ego. Many of his followers who call themselves conservatives, or who are called that way by an equally uneducated press, don’t know what they’re talking about, and if they found out, they would be horrified at their own stupidity.
It never ceases to surprise me that so many exiles from authoritarian regimes persist in passionately supporting Trump without recognizing the relationship between his speech and that of those same leaders who brought them into exile. Although they differ in the theoretical foundation and manifest objectives, the emphasis is the same, just as the demonization and ridicule of the adversary are identical, as is the promise of a better society that does not seem to materialize anywhere while he takes pleasure in attacking the status quo and the establishment, the cornerstones of conservatism.
Someone who wants to dismantle the established order cannot be conservative and cannot be seriously defined as such. He is rather a revolutionary who dares to induce an assault on the seat of Congress — to alter, through violence, a democratic process, instead of approaching that place with the reverential respect that the temple of the laws deserves to true citizens.
The Make America Great Again slogan, which Trump has promoted under the “MAGA” acronym since the 2016 campaign, is a fallacy that many of us overlooked at the time. Although suffering from some signs of decline, as is natural and as has always happened throughout history, the United States was still, at the time of Trump’s arrival to power, at the apex of its international power and peacekeeping ability — which he, driven by an isolationist impulse, proposed to decrease. The result was growing distrust between NATO members and other partners, while the audacity of the enemies of global democracy grew. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the need for committed leadership.
Kamala Harris, despite the leftist background that is attributed to her, responds more to the central interests of the nation, to its establishment; this necessarily makes her — compared to her adversary — a conservative, as she has demonstrated so far, especially in the international arena. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a disruptive agent, a real criminal, something that many of us did not see clearly in the last election.
May we all see clearer in the election to come.
Vicente Echerri is a Cuban writer who lives between the United States and Spain.