Falling Backwards Into History
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Corroded Soul
I’m going to start here by making an awkward confession, particularly for an anarchist who wants to smash the state and end capitalism, so that you know everything I’m about to say is sincere and from the heart. After the 2020 Democratic National Convention, I had some small degree of hope for organized American liberalism. To be sure, I remained suspicious that an old dog like Joe Biden could learn new tricks, but with a Party platform denouncing the carceral state and racialized police violence, promising an end to forever wars and regime change policies while reducing military budgets, and pledging to end Trump-era fascist immigration policies while expanding the asylum system, I genuinely thought they were making progress. Democrats also offered increased action on the climate crisis, promised to vigorously defend trans rights, and at least appeared to me to pledge conditioning U.S. financial support and arms sales to Gulf states on increased respect for human rights. In light of this significant shift towards actual progressive policies, I allowed myself to believe that just maybe U.S. liberals, as exemplified by the Democratic Party, were taking baby steps toward justice, equality, and the proverbial “right side of history.”
Of course I mention all this in the past tense because after less than four years of the Biden presidency and this year’s DNC gathering, I no longer have the ability to delude myself with any such hopes for American liberalism. While everyone around me was squealing in approval about the “joy” and “unity” on display, the DNC I saw represented a cynical, realpolitik-style commitment to genocide, the carceral industrial complex, and the appeasement of imperialists, nativists, and other fascists, that has brought the Party back to the dark days of Clintonism, even though the political moment – and the ideals of their own voters – have long since left those politics behind. This convention was no triumph; it was a surrender to the reactionary right on so many levels it made my heart hurt, and dashed my (already quite low) expectations for a likely Kamala Harris presidency before that hypothetical administration even exists.
This capitulation to reactionary ideology on policing, the carceral state, and migrant justice the 2024 Dem Party Platform represents is utterly shameful, and objectively fascist. Rather than criticizing still quite deadly, violent, and racist American policing, Democrats are now literally applauding murderpigs for their sacrifices; I guess we’ve come a long way from even the tepid support liberals offered the Black Lives Matter movement and allies protesting the police execution of George Floyd back in 2020. To wit, the Party has replaced calls for police reform with promises to fund more violent, racist murderpigs, and the terms “mass incarceration” and “police brutality” have been stricken entirely from the platform.
On the subject of immigration and border policing, the Democrats have all but surrendered to fascist rhetoric and a moral panic about migrants entirely cooked up by the Republican Party. Promises to fight against “kids in cages” and expand the asylum system for migrants have been replaced with plaudits for a Biden deportation regime Politico recently suggested was so expansive that Trump would have a hard time surpassing it. The platform also offers up three proverbial cheers for Joe Biden’s immoral adoption, via executive order, of Trump’s objectively fascist immigration policies designed to limit the number of asylum seekers entering the U.S. based on harsh quotas dictated not by risk or need, but by the president; policies that are likely in direct violation of international laws on asylum, by the way.
On the subject of foreign policy, the 2020 Party platform’s criticisms of Trump’s “race for a war with Iran” have been replaced with celebrations of Biden’s escalating military actions against Iranian-linked groups, and admonishing Trump for being too soft on Iran, a scant four years later here in 2024. After decrying Saudi Arabia’s disastrous war in Yemen and promising to turn the country into a “pariah” in it’s 2020 platform, the Dem Party touts Biden’s plans to normalize relations between the KSA and Israel, which is an extension of Trump era policy (and also entirely unsurprising after Biden lifted his ban on providing Prince Bone-Saw with offensive weaponry.) Given all this, it should surprise no one that the 2024 Dem Party platform has also stripped mention of opposing forever wars and regime change operations while dropping promises to decrease defense funding. Gone too are vague nods to avoiding “a new cold war” with China, and reforming the U.S. sanction regime.
On the subject of climate crisis, Dem speakers at the DNC were mostly silent, although organizers did allow Punchbowl News to hold an event sponsored by ExxonMobil nearby without comment. Hey, what’s the big deal, it’s not like we’re already in a mass extinction event in which fossil-fuel driven capitalism is threatening to kill billions of people, right? While the Party platform offered some assurances on protecting the rights of trans people, if anyone pushed back on or mentioned at all the fascist right’s ongoing pogrom and eliminationist policies targeting trans folks, I certainly missed it. Don’t worry though, I’m sure working to support trans rights behind the scenes and refusing to publicly stand up for a vulnerable minority group being demonized as pedophiles and targeted for extermination by fascists will win Democrats as many as a half-dozen cracker suburban voters who want to pogrom trans people out of existence, so clearly doing nothing to push back on that dangerous rhetoric and these monstrous policies has no downside and was the smart play here.
Nowhere however was the Dem’s betrayal of its own voter’s values more apparent than on the subject of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. The Party’s ninety-two page platform offers no reasonable hope for an end to Israel’s atrocities and appears completely unchanged from Biden’s already disastrous pro-Israel, pro-genocide policies towards Gaza. Anti-genocide protesters were assaulted by Chicago Police outside the convention but nobody inside even mentioned it. The DNC refused to allow a single Palestinian American to speak at the convention despite a widely publicized sit-in outside the hall by Uncommitted delegates begging for a few minutes of their time while offering officials the chance to vet the speech in advance. Naturally, the Dems allowed Israeli and even Republican speakers, however. A Harris delegate was physically attacked with “we heart Joe” signs by attendees for raising a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel,” while folks calling out to “stop killing women in Gaza” where shouted down by nationalist chants of “U.S.A!” from the crowd around them. Did I mention that progressive prodigy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised Harris’s “tireless work” to obtain a ceasefire despite no evidence that work exists at all? There was also no mention whatsoever of an arms embargo on Israel while it continues to conduct a genocide, which forces one to assume that nothing has changed since a Biden spokesperson said it was off the table even under Harris earlier this month.
Please keep in mind that all of this is despite recent polling that shows 70% of likely voters, and 83% of Democrat voters support a permanent cease fire, and all evidence indicates that nothing short of an arms embargo on Israel will force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand enough to grant one. As representatives from the Uncommitted movement itself have stated, even a large number of the delegates at the 2024 DNC support a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo, yet there was little to no public indication of this on offer at the DNC. Furthermore, this recalcitrance and silencing in support of a genocide was also going on despite the fact that the slaughter in Gaza has a very real chance of being the number one election issue for folks who might vote Democrat in the must-win swing state of Michigan.
Naturally, I suspect that this is the point where a few outraged liberals in their feels, will start flooding my inbox to call me a liar and point out that a Trump administration will almost certainly allow Israel to keep conducting a genocide in Gaza, or perhaps to gleefully tell me to “enjoy the camps” the American fascist party no doubt has in mind for folks like me, whether they mean trans women or anarchist scribes. They will tell me that a Trump administration would be a far more enthusiastic supporter of the carceral state, deportations, and boiling the planet like soup so rich donors can make a quick buck. Of course I won’t argue most of these points with them, but as I’ve written multiple times in the past, my question here is how much does it mean that the Democratic Party of 2024 is merely a bit better than the most unhinged, genocidal, nativist freakjob in American politics since the presidency of Andrew Jackson? What kind of campaign slogan would it be to proudly shout “we’re less fascist than Donald Trump?” What can the result possibly be, from appeasing fascists, and surrendering to fascist ideology on all of these issues, but to encourage more fascism? Please keep in mind that you cannot tell me with a straight face that I’m asking for too much out of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party because the Party itself agreed with me on most of these issues as recently as the day it released its 2020 Party Platform – a platform most folks on the left voted for, and Joe Biden won a presidential election running on.
In the end, that final point is the part I can’t rightfully shake from the darkest corners of my mind; the fact that all of this appeasement ,and the open rightward shift of the Democratic Party since 2020, isn’t even remotely necessary because Joe Biden won the 2020 election without appeasing the fascists at all. In that context, I’m forced to assume that the Party, and its presidential candidate are for some reason choosing to embrace reaction, appease cracker fascists who’re voting for Trump anyway, and alienate the very same broad, diverse, progressive coalition that got them over the finish line only four years ago. Despite what I said at the top of this blog, and the endless excuses liberals supporting this monstrous crap have to offer, I must confess that I don’t believe this is really even about cynical political maneuvering or acquiescence to the dictates of realpolitiks. These choices represent what the Democratic Party wants to be, and what it’s leaders want to show the voting public. And given that reality, I’m forced to conclude that the Party, and a potential Harris administration, have willingly surrendered whatever meagre claims they ever had to anything resembling a soul.
Look, I’m certainly not here to tell anyone how to vote this election, but after what I’ve seen this week during the 2024 Democratic National Convention you cannot tell me that the Party itself hasn’t succumbed, at least in part, to the sickness of fascism, and the dubious (at best) idea of a public rightward shift in the Overton Window. Kamala Harris may well be the next President of the United States, but unless something changes drastically between now and November, there will be no victory over fascism. How could there be, when reaction, nativism, and genocide are set to win no matter who we elect this fall?
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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