As the U.S. elections come closer, there is growing pressure on many progressives in the Global South to make our voices heard in support of the candidacy of Kamala Harris. No act on your part is insignificant in these elections, we are told. The votes of your relatives in the United States could spell the difference in a very tight race.

The argument is fairly straightforward. Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in the United States and to the interests of the Global South as well. Harris and the Democrats may have their flaws, but the alternative, four years of Donald Trump, is worse.

Past Democratic administrations, the argument continues, may have failed to bring about a more equal society, rein in Wall Street and Big Tech, and make more progress in promoting the rights of minorities. But under the Democrats, there is at least the space to debate these failures and correct them, racism will not be given a free pass, the climate crisis will be given the urgent attention it requires, and fundamental democratic norms like majority rule in electoral contests will not be brazenly violated. Trump in power is very likely to push hard to bring the United States to the brink of authoritarian rule, if not fascism, and informally his administration’s ruling ideology will be unbridled White supremacy.

I have no quarrel with this assessment that a Harris victory would be in the interest of the majority of people in the United States. It is the claim that a Harris presidency would be better for the Global South than a Trump regime that I find questionable and worth an extended discussion.

Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms. Both have mobilized the ideology of missionary democracy, or spreading the gospel of western democracy in what they consider the benighted non-Western world, to legitimize imperial expansion. And at certain historical moments, like during the debate to invade Afghanistan in 2001, both have manipulated democratic hysteria to advance the ends of empire.

The record speaks for itself. To take just the most recent examples, only one Democratic member of Congress, Barbara Lee, voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the absence of evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, the majority of Democratic senators voted to commit U.S. troops to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. And it was a Democratic president, Barack Obama, that led the campaign that, in brazen violation of the principle of national sovereignty, overthrew the Qaddafi government in Libya in 2011, leading eventually to the state of anarchy that has prevailed since then in that country.

Of course, there have been some variations in the ways Democrats and Republicans have conducted their empire-building or empire-maintaining activities. Democrats have tended to be more “multilateral” in their approach. They have, in other words, invested more effort in marshalling the United Nations and NATO behind Washington’s imperial adventures than have the Republicans. They have also pushed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to take the lead in economically disciplining countries of the global South. But the aim is simply to provide the U.S. moves with more legitimacy than would a unilateral exercise of U.S. power,........

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