I may upset people with this essay…I am prepared. I just hope that you enjoy reading my writing because I may have a different perspective than your own, not because I am parroting an opinion you may already hold. I do not want to cultivate an audience that ideologically conforms to me.
I also understand that emotions may be running high. About an hour ago, on my way home from work, I had to navigate around an inconsolable woman wailing in the middle of the sidewalk clutching a Kamala Harris poster. So, I’m sorry if this piece angers anyone, but I have been sitting on it for days and purposefully waited until after the election to write it.
I live in a working class neighborhood in South Philadelphia.
My small section of the city is approximately a third Italian, a third Southeast Asian, and a third Central American. Cambodian Vietnamese Mexican and Salvadoran markets and restaurants mingle with small mom and pop owned auto shops and hundred year old Italian bakeries.
During this last year’s election cycle, one of the most stressful and divisive voting seasons in recent memory, my neighborhood became an unexpected battleground. I saw just as many Trump signs and bumper stickers dotting the porches and bay windows of the brick row houses that define South Philly’s architectural identity as I did Harris flags and flyers.
The plot twist? Most of the Trump swag and posters seemed to be decorating the homes of immigrant families in my community. My neighbors of Mexican, Honduran, Salvadoran, Indonesian, Cambodian and Vietnamese descent, many of whom live in cramped accommodations, with multiple generations occupying the same households, appeared to all be supporting the Orange Man.
Moving north and shifting closer towards the UPenn campus, past Washington, across Broad, and further west, the political signs on the houses start to change. The Trump stickers and posters disappear and the “In this house, we believe” signs, those multi-colored font, black background, cardboard listicles of platitudes, multiply.
In this section of the city, nannies are common, pro-Palestinian signifiers of solidarity decorate light poles, six dollars is the average price of a latte, and Kamala Harris signs are everywhere.
The Harris supporters have larger signs, and much more garish displays of party loyalty than their Trump stumping downstream neighbors. Giant flags fly in the front windows of stately early colonial homes in fonts inspired by “Barbie”-- the Mattel toy doll turned culture war symbol, emblazoned with “Harris-Walz” or “Kamala Harris with Tim!”
All these Pepto-Bismol pink popular culture vulture partisan political declarations seem to be displayed by left leaning white folks of considerably more comfortable means. And, the closer you get to the University of Pennsylvania, the wealthier and more ideologically uniform these cultural markers become.
Over the last few weeks, there has been significant and disruptive construction work being done on South Street, the main arterial roadway that leads into the heart of UPenn’s campus. The construction workers who have been working on this project are clearly from a different socio-economic world from the students, staff, and faculty that pass them by on their way into campus.
Every morning, I walk by two different men with Trump stickers pasted on to their yellow construction hats. They wear the Trump stickers like a small protest, or a fuck you to the smug academics who are forced to traverse the maze of orange construction cones and yellow caution tape barriers that separate “us,” the elite paper pushing ivory tower “professionals,” from “them,” or the dirty uneducated proles who toil away in degree-free manual labor jobs.
Twenty years ago, these construction workers were not the “deplorables,” or “garbage people” but loyal blue collar supporters of the Democratic party. Twenty years ago, the immigrants in my lower middle class neighborhood would also probably be casting their votes for a Clinton or an Obama instead of proudly displaying the signs of a man who is proclaimed to be a “racist Nazi.” So what happened? And what changed?
While the New York Times and MSNBC seemed blindsided by the election results, I cannot say that I was surprised. I could sense just through the, to appropriate a word from the Harris campaign; “vibes” of my southern corner of the city, that a significant cultural shift was in the air.
And contrary to what the mainstream media says, this election wasn’t about race, and it wasn’t about misogyny–it was about class.
In March of 2023 I visited my sister in Brooklyn right before taking the train down to Philly to apartment hunt. I was in New York for a few days for an illustration festival and took the 7 from Greenpoint right into Midtown. I had read that Trump was in town, as he was set to appear at federal district court somewhere in Manhattan that day.
As I exited the subway, I did not expect to come face to face with the man himself. Trump was hanging out of the back of a limousine and greeting his fans who were running into the middle of the roadway to shake his hand. I was stunned and my gut reaction was to scream “FUCK YOU” at the top of my lungs.
What happened after confused me then but doesn’t now.
After my outburst, I was admonished by an older Afro-Caribbean woman with a thick Trinidadian accent who said:
“What are you doing!? Trump is great!”
It was then, that I turned around baffled and realized every single person rushing up to the car to shake Trump’s hand was brown.
If you are still looking at the polls scratching your head and proclaiming that these results happened because America is still an inherently misogynistic and racist country, let’s talk about some facts and some stats.
Trump got 27% of the vote in the Bronx last night. Twenty seven percent of the vote in a borough of deep blue New York city where the population is only 8.6 percent non-Hispanic white. If that doesn’t send a message to Democrats about how identity and race politics have failed, I do not know what will.
Harris also picked up some undesirable endorsements. Including from two white supremacists: Nick Fuentes, and Richard Spencer, and one totalitarian ruler—Vladimir Putin. While I definitely know why the campaign did not publicize these erroneous endorsements, they are on their own quite interesting, and together they show a pattern.
And, while Harris is married to a Jew, her picks for staff and administration were…problematic to put it mildly.
Phil Gordon, Harris’s pick for national security advisor has dubious ties to Tehran through Pentagon official Ariane Tabatabai, a senior Department of Defense official. Tabatabai is currently a person of interest involving leaked documents outlining Israel’s plan to attack the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unfortunately, Harris’s preferences for government officials with Islamist and Tehran ties, seemed to be more a feature than a bug of her foreign policy plans (read this).
Funnily enough, while Harris was busy stocking her cabinet full of Hamas sympathizers, Trump was the person who ended up winning the entire state of Michigan.
Trump won the heavily Arab and Muslim city of Dearborn Michigan with 55 percent of the vote and was endorsed by Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, a city with the largest Arab population in the state.
To further showcase Hamtramck’s values, In May, Hamtramck became the first American city to boycott Israel. Mayor Amer Ghalib who has also met with Harris, has also liked tweets referring to Jews as monkeys. In addition, Hamtramck banned pride flags in June of 2023, and has passed a city ordinance allowing Islamic animal sacrifice in the home.
While I understand that many average Americans aren’t as wrapped up in foreign policy the way I am, most United States citizens do want a president that can speak to them and appeal to their values. Disappointingly, Harris doesn’t hit the mark there either.
Harris is the child of two prominent upper middle class intellectuals. Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris is a celebrated Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan was a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. While, Kamala Harris did not grow up with the same gratuitous displays of wealth as Donald Trump, Harris is also far from being the product of a working class immigrant family, like the kind that live in my neighborhood.
I would like to iterate before I go further that I have no issues with Harris’s upbringing. I am not a person who writes off people just because they come from the more comfortable echelons of society.
However, I do have issues when a person like Harris markets herself as if she grew up on the rougher side of the tracks as a ploy to appeal to people who may share her skin pigmentation, but not her class background. And in addition, it’s offensive and infantilizing to those that have worked their way up from the depths of poverty.
Harris did not have to work as hard as say Roland Fryer or Ritchie Torres or even JD Vance to get where she is now.
Harris in many ways failed upwards, and left a track record of prosecution failures in her wake. In her brief career as San Fransisco DA, Harris oversaw rulings which have contributed to the dire economic conditions for poor Californians to this very day. Many rulings which, disproportionately impacted poor black men—if we all really want to go there.
I want a woman president. But I do not want to vote for a woman as president just because she is a woman. I want to vote for a woman president because she is the best man for the job. Unfortunately in Harris’s case, I did not think that she was—and I clearly was not the only garbage person who has come to that conclusion.
I am not a Trump fan and I am not a Harris fan either. In fact, I didn’t vote. A decision I made as carefully as any person who did cast a ballot. Not voting is a choice too-and I refuse to be bullied into picking between the red or blue button just because these two candidates happen to be our only two options.
As South Park so astutely laid out in their season 8 “Vote of Die” episode—who wants to vote for a giant douche or a turd sandwich? Having the freedom to choose not to vote is just as much of a privilege as making the choice to do so.
The ugly entrenched antisemitism of the Democrats was enough to keep me away from Kamala Harris, and the bullish misogyny of Donald Trump still turns my stomach. Opting out was the best thing I could do for my nerves and my conscious.
People are sick of identity politics. People are sick of a bureaucratic managerial class lecturing and moralizing to a corporate church filled with half empty pews. And no one is more fed up with being talked down to and infantilized than working people of all backgrounds.
This hand wringing around gender, race, and sex the Democrats have been doing since 2016 all the while blatantly ignoring class needs to stop.
No one was fooled by Kamala Harris’s weak appeal to the middle class. No, she is not “one of us,” and say what you will about Donald Trump, but at least he doesn’t pretend to know what it’s like to grow up poor.
A message had to be sent. Hopefully this time the Democrats finally process the results and act accordingly.