In all the thoughtful - and less thoughtful - analysis and punditry following the US election, I haven’t seen anyone contemplate what it might actually have meant for the country, its people and their place in the world, if Kamala Harris’s forces of “joy” had somehow overcome Donald Trump’s forces of “darkness”.
Let’s stop, just for a minute, and consider the implications. Registering joy at a Harris win would have meant - what, exactly?
No matter the kind of mental, intellectual, emotional or political acrobatics involved, at least part of that joy would also have meant explicit support for the US participation in, and enabling of, the Israeli genocide still being perpetrated against Palestinians.
Would such a result not have also fully validated and presented, in a completely unadulterated fashion, the utter rot at the core of US policies and so many of its institutions?
Would it not, then, have dug an even deeper hole out of which an expiring US empire must finally find ways to climb out of? And lamenting her loss, as so many are now doing, has precisely the same meaning. There can be no other logical possibility.
While president-elect Trump might very well have the political will to reach a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine, his initial cabinet appointments point to a fervent Israel first, rather than America first, agenda - solidifying the immovable uni-party’s bedrock policy of absolute Israeli impunity, no matter what it does.
In the background, the response of western mainstream media and politicians to the Israeli footballers’ rampage in Amsterdam - presented as a “pogrom” in which the perpetrators were portrayed as victims - points to a future of oncoming psy-ops and the production of “antisemitism” at an industrial scale, in an attempt to raise from the dead the idea of Israel as a “safe haven” for “persecuted” Jews.
These manoeuvres will be met on the ground with further acquiescence and invention from the media, as well as new laws equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism; new campaigns to ban various kinds of speech; and further violence directed at anyone standing up in protest, not to mention new forms of military coercion and destruction, aided by technologies field-tested by Israeli occupation forces, who will go down in historical infamy.
Exactly. And in a first-past-the-post system like the US, parties are constantly running the calculus of which interest groups to bring in or kick out of the big-tent coalition. You can call for raising taxes on the rich; that will help you with progressives, but it will cost you with the wealthy. You can be for LGBT rights; that will help you with LGBT folks and progressives, but that will cost you with conservatives. Parties constantly balance these issues to try and maximize their chances of winning elections.
The Democrats made this calculation on Gaza. It wasn’t some spontaneous act. They actively ran the numbers; they did the market research. They estimated that being 100% pro-Israel would gain them more moderate votes than it lost them in progressive and Muslim votes. They thought they would lose some Muslim voters, but they figured rebuking Israel would cost them too many middle class white voters.
Well, the Democrats fucked up. The middle class white voters they signed the Gazans death warrant for never showed up. And enough Muslims and progressives stayed home that they lost the election.
If the blame can lay anywhere except the DNC themselves, then the blame lies with middle class white moderates. No serious person should expect a group of people to show up to vote for a coalition if that coalition deliberately kicks them out of the coalition. But the Democratic Party bent over backwards to appeal to suburban white voters. Yet they still voted for Trump.
The Democrats deliberately and intentionally chose to throw Gaza supporters out of Kamala’s coalition. They did this hoping that it would net them more votes than they lost. Ultimately it failed, and yet, still, there are people now blaming those who were kicked out of the party, instead of the people who run the party.