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It is natural to think about what happened in America over the past year in terms of the rise of Trumpism. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that the real political story of 2024 is the utter emptiness of the Democratic Party. It was the year when the party’s total lack of moral grounding let it shrivel up and blow away.
The death of the Democratic Party’s claim to respectability looks like a dead child in Gaza, killed by a bomb supplied by our government. It looks like five more dead journalists in Gaza, assassinated by our ally with our blessing. It looks like one more bombed hospital in Gaza, the endpoint of the road away from humanity and towards barbarity. It looks like our government burying official warnings of a famine in Gaza, because it doesn’t suit our political purposes. All of these things were done by the Biden administration. All of these things were done by the Democrats. When Joe Biden thinks back on his time as president, he should see nothing but an image of a mother crying over a dead child with its limbs blown off by an American bomb. That is the most morally significant thing that Joe Biden accomplished in the White House. No bit of positive domestic policy or sense of personal empathy is more important than the reasoned decision to supply the tools used to conduct tens of thousands of murders. That is what Joe Biden’s half century political career adds up to. When murderers die, their crimes are the first paragraphs of their obituaries. There is no reason to treat Joe Biden differently than that. Like other criminals, he was a complex man who did many things and had many redeeming qualities, in addition to being a mass murderer.
Of course, Joe Biden did not kill thousands of children in Gaza all by himself. He had a political party helping him. He had advisers. He had cabinet secretaries. He had the State Department. He had ambassadors. He had an entire Democratic Party superstructure of strategists and donors and lobbyists and state party chairmen, who put him in the position to kill thousands of children, and ensured that nothing would stand in the way of his determination to enable the killings of thousands of children. The Democrats wholly and completely own every child amputee, every dead baby, every shattered civilian body, every destroyed family home, every death by starvation and disease, every life ruined by Israel’s inhuman bombardment of Gaza, which would not and could not have happened without the blessing of the Biden White House. If you have children, or a home, or loved ones, you need only ask yourself: How would I feel, if that was me? That feeling—that rage, that revulsion, that despair—is, properly, how you should feel about Joe Biden’s legacy.
If I shot your child in the head, would you forgive me because I had good green energy policy? If I blew up your entire family as they slept, would you write it off because I was pro-union? If I assassinated your brother with a missile because he was a journalist, would you feel that was okay, as long as I supported slightly higher marginal tax rates than my political opponents? We all know the answers to these things. These things are simple to understand. These things are basic. No statement about the other party, no hypothetical about what the other guy would have done, can erase what the Democrats did, themselves. If you murder someone and then tell the judge, “I know another person who would have done this murder even worse,” the judge will not let you go. If you believe that the people who supplied the means and the funding for the 9/11 hijackers to fly those planes into the World Trade Center are culpable for the deaths that occurred, there is no reason to feel any differently about the Biden administration, for what it has done to the people of Gaza. Except that the Biden administration has helped to kill many more people than Osama Bin Laden ever did.
The Democrats facilitated an awful ongoing slaughter of human beings because they found it politically convenient to do so. Whatever qualms they may have had about it, the bulk of the party—with notable and heroic exceptions—concluded that the price of not killing thousands of children was, for them personally, higher than the cost of killing thousands of children. And so they went ahead and helped to kill thousands of children. That is what happened. I am sure that the members of Congress and the foreign policy advisers and Joe Biden himself all justify what they did, when they look in the mirror, in very creative ways. But thousands of dead children speak for themselves. They amount to evidence that is irrefutable. They are blown apart. We could have prevented it, but we didn’t. Instead, we helped it happen.
The Democrats have a problem: They countenanced and even perpetrated atrocities for their own personal gain. But that is what they accuse the other party of doing. The Democrats, in the broadest sense, in the world of branding where political parties forge their reputations in the public mind, are supposed to be the humane party. “Callously doing bad things for selfish reasons”—why, that is what rich people do, who don’t pay their fair share. That is what runaway corporations do. That is what fossil fuel companies do. That is what all of the malignant forces that the Democratic Party brands itself as opposed to do. That is their thing! That is all of it! All of the behavior that progressives stand against is reducible to that. We, the liberals, the progressives, the leftmost half of the voting population that clusters in the Democratic Party base, are, in theory, members of the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party because we think it is bad when powerful people and institutions callously do bad things for selfish reasons. We do not support that. We dislike it when rich people do bad things for selfish reasons, when corporations do bad things for selfish reasons, when unscrupulous politicians do bad things for selfish reasons. We believe in universal love and peace and human rights and we think that, even though it’s hard, we should all pull in the direction of helping out the most vulnerable people in society. We do not believe in the unrestrained exercise of power for self-serving ends. We do not believe that the powerful should be allowed to oppress the weak. This basic belief can manifest itself in many different ways, on many different policy issues. But it is, in most cases, central to why people choose to be Democrats rather than Republicans.
So when the Democrats supply an endless stream of weapons to an aggressive ally so that that ally can oppress a weaker population and kill thousands of children, well, the Democrats have forsaken their reason to exist. What use is this party? If I were for oppression, and violence, and the granting of carte blanche to stronger groups to use force to obliterate weaker groups, I would be a Republican. They have traditionally supported those things in a more straightforward way. The Biden administration’s decision to support those things as well does not mean that I will become a Republican. It does, however, mean that I and millions of people like me have been effectively robbed of a political home. Even more so than before. If the Republicans stand for fascism and the Democrats stand for nothing, the Republicans are going to win. And, indeed, they did.
Some people will wave their hands and say “the parties are both corrupt” and act as if this was all expected and therefore should not arouse any great sense of outrage in us. Though there is a certain amount of analytical truth in this world-weary pose, it also amounts to a formula for nihilism, an implicit statement that if something is not surprising then it is not worth talking about. Few things in politics are truly surprising. People have been corrupt and malevolent and violent and self-serving for thousands of years. Our collective determination to improve on humanity’s failures of the past is what makes politics worthwhile. It is important to be outraged about the Democratic Party’s vacuousness for both moral and practical reasons. Morally, if our nation is going to cling to a two-party system that forces most citizens to pick one side or the other, we all have the right to insist that the side we pick not act in abominable ways. And practically, as I have written before, the Democratic Party are the cowards who can be pushed towards righteousness through political force, rather than the enemies who cannot be moved at all.
Gaza is not the only manifestation of the Democratic Party’s emptiness. It is just the clearest one. Dead children have a way of clarifying things. You could make a list of the party’s failures to uphold its stated purpose—cultivating billionaires, failing to fight for universal health care, and on and on. Yet Gaza will suffice to make the point. When you eagerly feed the machinery of death that kills thousands of poor people, and then use your diplomatic might to block the world’s attempts to halt the slaughter, you have exhibited a total lack of the moral scruples that are supposed to make you an appealing political choice, as compared to the other party. Apart from questions of what voters thought and what issues drove the electoral outcome sits the cold fact of mass murder. Joe Biden did not lose the election because of Gaza, but he did lose his soul.
The first and most basic step forward for the Democratic Party is to stand for something. Before the internal debate on the party’s values must come the decision to have values. Today, the party can claim nothing. No ethics, no moral red lines, no ability to assert its superiority to the poisonous (but transparent) fascism on the other side. It lost all of that as the children of Gaza lost their limbs and their lives. The party that says it will protect the downtrodden cannot murder the other downtrodden. It doesn’t work. It’s not convincing. Besides going to hell, Biden’s advisors have left the Democrats with no plausible identity.
The Democratic Party is a vessel. Right now, it is an empty one. It has to be filled up with meaning that is real. It has to stand for something. The people who got it to this point should—though they won’t—cast themselves out of politics forever. The people who have genuine moral concerns about the state of the world are the only ones capable of rebuilding the party, and they will have a lot of work, given where things are today. I don’t need to be reminded that this is a lofty ideal, but it is the truth. The Democrats have tried being spectacular hypocrites who perpetrated a great atrocity. They didn’t win. Time to try the alternative.
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Related reading: It Would Be a Shame If You Sacrificed All This Good Domestic Policy In Order to Kill a Bunch of Kids; Don’t Make Your Voters Step Over Dead Bodies; The Left Is Not Joe Biden’s Problem. Joe Biden Is.
Are you disgusted by the Democratic Party’s failures and seeking a new base from which to rebuild American politics? Join the labor movement. I wrote a book about it. My last book event of the year is tonight: Saturday, December 28, at 6 pm at The Lynx Books in Gainesville, FL. If you’re in the area, join us.
This will probably be my last post of 2024. How Things Work will return in 2025. Thank you all, sincerely, for the support you have given me over the past year, that has allowed this publication to survive and thrive. Good things can happen in independent media, even during bad times. How Things Work is 100% supported by readers like you who choose to become paid subscribers. If you like this site and would like to help it continue to exist, become a paid subscriber today, for a modest price. I’ll see you all in the new year, my friends.
