The illusion that liberals are liberal
How should Americans make choices during the Gaza Nakba presidential election?
The political choice facing the USA appears to be between Genocide Joe and Mr Orange. It’s a high stakes choice, but is a no-stakes choice seen from the perspective of Palestine.
Biden has funded, encouraged and backed genocide to the hilt, right up to the present moment. There’s almost nothing I could imagine Mr Orange could do that Biden hasn’t already done. Can any liberal support genocide, just because it’s ‘their man’ enabling it? Can they really stomach voting for Genocide Joe?
Clearly the stakes are high. Mr Orange has gone through buffoon to full on fascist, and is now actually promising civil war.
It’s a credible threat whatever happens to Mr Orange. As a figurehead and cipher he doesn’t actually have to do much, and anyway comes over as largely out of control of his destiny, partly because it is in the hands of lawyers, courts, election officials and state governors, but also because, let’s face it and not mince words, the guy is a moron, he’s a disgrace for a human being, and has negative emotional maturity and the mind of a sewer, combined with the ethics of a rapist. His treatment of veterans, every woman ever, political rivals and the constitution itself is beyond appalling.
We’ve had the failed Munch beer hall putsch equivalent. Maybe a bit of jail time is due, then the burning of the Whitestag. We haven’t had Mein Drumpf yet (do we expect one from those piggy little pinkies?) but then to be fair he does write a lot on Truth Social and tweeting back when X was Twitter. You could possibly stitch together an equally turgid, insane, fucked up and resentful ‘My Struggle’ from Twitter, through Capitol Hill, to the increasingly unhinged and dangerous ramblings he’s now coming up with.
The threat may be ludicrous but is also real. His base includes all of Amerikkka’s rabid and obsessed gun nuts. They go to the gym, practice survivalism, street level defence, shooting practice… unlike the left. They build networks of men like themselves, like the Proud Boys who are deeply embedded and part of the police and military (and proud to be so).
So how do we cope with a situation where there are no good choices? One response from American liberals seems to be the head in sand strategy. A friend writes:
In a world where there are no magic solutions to hard questions outside of our control, do we really expect Biden to impose solutions on the world? The difference between Biden and Trump is that Biden works in the real world where other actors drive events. Putin, Hamas, Netanyahu, Zelensky, ISIS, are real and independent.
To equate serious people like Biden with a sociopath grifter like Trump is truly nutty. Anyone who thinks that Palestinians will be better off with Trump is not paying attention.
Is there any way that the people of Gaza could be worse off? Does anyone believe that there’s something worse than genocide? Or worse than watching village after village in the West Bank be taken over supremacist violent thugs supported to the hilt by the Israeli state? And now the attack on Raffah regardless of the results of the bogus ‘peace talks’.
The lack of ambition of the classic American liberal can be seen in this friend’s final comment:
As long as we want magic solutions, lets just ask Hamas to turn over all their leadership for international trials in return for a two state solution. Easy peasy.
The idea that Israel would be behaving in this genocidal way without diplomatic, media, funding and arming support from the US is ludicrous. This is simply liberal denial. Most of the two-passport holding political leaders in Israel are as much American as they are Israeli. They clutch on to those second passports and would be highly responsive to targeted personal sanctions. Stopping arming genocide, personal and diplomatic pressure, sanctions in the UN, support for two-state or one-state solutions… they would all have an effect, and haven’t even been tried. Encourage the ICC to issue arrest warrants. Make public condemnations. There’s so many things that can be done. None of them have been. That’s the issue.
Instead the ‘liberal’ president has personally ensured extra military funding for Israel twice DURING the genocide, and has blocked UN resolution after resolution, at times on his own. And the whole political elite voted in favour of more arms this most recent time. This is the real message to Israel from the USA: keep on genociding on, we have your back.
Yes American power is powerful. And not necessarily affected by window-dressing elections. The military-industrial complex, fruitloop Christian evangelicals, gun nuts, corporations and AIPAC are all in lockstep on this issue. But the reality is that their support over Israel would be the same on any issue that threatened the rights of the US Empire to dominate the world, or to develop a humane immigration system, or to provide universal health care, or sensible gun control.
Politics is too important to be left to the politicians, as college students across America are realising. Nobody else is going to stop the genocide in Palestine, so they are doing their best to put their shoulders to the wheel. And good on them. Why it took so long is something Caitlin Johnson suggests may exactly be this residual reliance on liberal leaders to behave as if they were human or humane. They are neither of those things. They rely on the illusion that liberals are liberal.
On some issues there may be clear blue space between GJ and MrO, but they are largely about domestic politics. On the Gaza Nakba, the border with Mexico, the lunacy of provoking a war with China, leading us into a Europe-wide war via Ukraine and Russia, I really don’t see a difference. Do you?
Until the US develops a coherent left, the best we can hope for relies on immediate direct action — the encampments, the boycotting, BDS — and community-based campaigns. Assume elections won’t change anything. Vote of course, but don’t think that gives you an excuse to ignore politics. Don’t vote to feel good about yourself, because the truth is that none of your options are good. Voting is the start, not the end of political involvement.
