WE’RE now just one week away from millions of Americans going to the polls to vote in one of the most important – and depressing – elections of all time.

Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have spent the past couple of months vying for votes and if polling is to be believed, are more or less neck-and-neck, meaning that in this final week, everything is still to play for.

With Trump pledging to be a “dictator” on “day one”, and reportedly stating “I need the kind of generals Hitler had”, he has quite explicitly told the American people exactly what to expect from a second Trump presidency.

He is a fascist, and will rule as a fascist. This election could spell the end of the last remnants of American democracy as we know it.

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The sad reality though is that Trump’s competitor in the US two-party system doesn’t deserve to win either. Harris’s campaign has been utterly uninspiring, offering virtually nothing in the way of real change and actively pushing away core demographics that usually turn out in droves to vote Democrat.

It’s little surprise that this same tactic resulted in the UK Labour Party receiving fewer votes in this year’s General Election than in 2017 or 2019, losing safe seats to Greens and independents.

Keir Stamer became Prime Minister thanks only to the overwhelming dissatisfaction with the ruling Conservatives and the UK’s deeply unfair and undemocratic electoral system.

One of the former safe-seat Labour MPs who was explicitly rejected by the electorate, Jonathan Ashworth, met with Harris’s team just a couple of months ago to share election tips.

If Harris and her team had any sense at all they’d have ignored every word that came from the mouth of one of the now most famous losers in British electoral politics, but it certainly does seem that they took a fair bit of the Starmer playbook on board.

Much like how Starmer’s Labour chose not to condemn racist and xenophobic anti-immigration policies and rhetoric from the Tories and Reform, Harris has criticised Trump’s infamous border wall not for the racist rhetoric which was symbolised so heavily by the “build the wall” chants of his 2016 campaign, but rather because he didn’t build enough of it.

Where Starmer and Wes Streeting chose to give cover to and even endorse Tory transphobia through the General Election campaign, Harris too has failed to stand up for transgender Americans, dodging questions around gender-affirming care rather than supporting the rights of a vulnerable minority.

Above all else though, Harris’s refusal to distance herself at all from Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people – a genocide she too is complicit in as vice-president of the country which is by far the biggest supplier of the weapons Israel uses to slaughter the Palestinian people – means that she is entirely unfit for office.

The US under Biden (above) and Harris has given cover to Israel at every opportunity, actively condemning the International Court of Justice for daring to hold Israel to account for its repeated and blatant breaches of international law.

The Harris campaign’s further racism against Palestinian and Muslim Americans – repeatedly refusing to meet with them, and refusing to allow a Palestinian to endorse Harris on stage at the Democratic National Convention, while welcoming with open arms a number of Republicans – has shown only disdain for a core voter demographic for the Democratic party, and sent a clear message to them that they simply don’t matter to them.

It's no surprise then that – as we saw in the UK back in July – Muslims and their allies across America are turning against the party they’ve long supported but which has now chosen to abandon them. If this results in Trump regaining the keys to the White House, the blame will sit squarely with Harris.

It’s a terrifying state of affairs. I despise the idea that politics should just be about voting for the least-worst option – not least when that least-worst option is actively supporting a genocide.

If genocide isn’t a red line for you, then what will be?

But in a scenario where the alternative is a fascist who could spell the end of the last wee bit of democracy Americans still have, I have an awful lot of sympathy for progressive Americans who need to decide how to use their ballots next week.

While it’s easy for me to posture while sitting at my desk here in Scotland, it’s important to remember that we too may find ourselves in a very similar position to the Americans come 2029.

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Reform became the third-biggest party in the UK in terms of vote share at this year’s election, and we mustn’t forget the clear links between Reform and the Trump campaign, with Reform leader Nigel Farage endorsing and offering his explicit support to his friend Trump.

Farage’s support for a US presidential candidate who has been found by a court of law to be a rapist, who has espoused some of the most extreme racist, misogynistic rhetoric and who has called for extreme retribution against his political opponents perhaps offers an even more terrifying insight into what the UK might look like were Farage and his party ever to be in a position to form a government.

Polling is showing that it’s increasingly likely that Reform UK will elect MSPs at the next Scottish Parliament election, and in just the past few days two councillors in Aberdeenshire joined the party, giving them their first representatives in Scotland since Michelle Ballantyne’s brief stint as a Reform MSP for a few months in 2021.

Whether it’s Starmer’s Labour, Harris’s Democrats or indeed John Swinney’s SNP, the lesson to all parties when up against those who threaten our democracy and target vulnerable groups must be to offer radical change, not to capitulate to the right.

As the US goes to the polls next week, I desperately hope that Trump loses, and I fear immensely for what the world may look like if he wins. But I won’t be cheering on a Harris victory either, and my fear for the lives of the Palestinian people will be no less tempered by her winning the keys to the White House.