What does it mean to vote now (especially for those of us on the left)?

A vote for president is not a vote of confidence. It is not a declaration of faith. It is not a power of attorney. It is not an act of personal identification that in a intrinsically satisfying way enables the voter to enjoy identifying with the party's candidate and platform (to which the candidate is not bound) at the price of conferring on that candidate a kind of glory. It is not a symbolic act in which a part of the voter's willful subjectivity is signed over to a representative who is empowered to act on their behalf. It is not a transaction in which voters sign a contract with the candidate with blanks that, after elected, that politician can fill in as they like. Above all, it is not like signing up to work for a company that demands your total and unquestioning obedient allegiance, and that makes you a bunch of promises it may or may not keep (at least unless enough of the workers pressure them to do so). Or rather, it both is and is not like choosing, when one is lucky enough to have a meaningful choice, to work for a company whose marginally more liberal character means we can bring pressure to bear upon its management a bit more easily than if it had a management that was more ruthless.

A vote for president is a choice between alternatives. This time, it is between the normalcy of constitutional bourgeois liberal traditions of representative democracy and a move towards their abolition by the extreme right. The left has always been sensitive to how oppressive that state can be to political dissidents, to the poor, to those who "do not count," and to working people if they want a better life (like wages and working conditions and the right to protest and strike) and not just the ideological satisfactions the right offers them, including attacks on the often false character of the constitutional state that empowers corporations and bureaucracies.

The liberal center is not very sensitive to any such disaffections; fascism appeals to disaffected people who feel left behind and offers them ideological and affective satisfactions that feed on a culture of grievance and depend on targeting enemies, who then become privileged victims of the state violence that promises mostly only that. The centrist candidates who represent only the normalcy of the capitalist state with its traditional welfare-state claims and do not speak to the global crisis of that system except as fear of fascist efforts to cut its Gordian knots, we “progressives” know they are not an answer. And so people on the left are quite understandably often divided or ambivalent about whether to vote for Harris.

I solve the conundrum by voting my preference, but placing my confidence elsewhere. The left doesn't locate being political in elections but in activism of various kinds. So what is the problem?