Gaza, Fascism, and the Future
Voting to Save Democracy
I have met many left-leaning voters who refuse to support Kamala Harris in the upcoming election because of the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, aided by the American military and funded by our tax dollars. I agree this is horrifying and unconscionable. I understand the bitter rage many feel about the U.S. as a global empire, spreading death and destruction around the world. We spend untold billions on foreign wars while we mistreat millions of poor and homeless people here.
Even so, in what follows I am going to make the argument that, despite the Democrats’ ongoing support of Israel we are still much better off if we elect Harris / Walz. Of course, I feel sad to make this argument. The Democrats play a dangerous game of political brinksmanship. It sometimes seems their strategy is to push things to the edge of political doom to keep power. I am afraid they have seriously miscalculated this time.
In many areas of foreign and domestic policy, the difference between Democrats and Republicans remains vast. Most crucially, the Democrats are not planning to institute dictatorship if they win this election (see my past essays for details). They don’t threaten to imprison and even kill their political opponents, as Trump and Vance keep doing. My friend Richard Greene’s article, “The 98.6% Difference Between Republicans and Democrats,” shows the vast difference in voting on many bills in Congress that actually matter to our lives in this country, such as “The Women’s Health Protection Act” and “The Assault Weapons Ban.”
We must keep our society from going under, devolving into Fascism, which would lead to collapse of our institutions and civic life itself, including the Constitution and the at least putative rule of law. Jim Stewartson’s essay, “The Railroad to Civil War”, seems a highly probable scenario to me, if the election is close.
What we can do now to prevent this dark outcome is to unreservedly support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. We must help them win with enough of a margin to reduce the threat of civil war. After this election is over, we must apply pressure to our system to bring about deeper change. This includes the transformation of the Democratic Party, which is clearly broken.
For now: Micah Sifry’s “One More Thing: Let’s Go Relational!” describes a tool we can all use to help in the coming weeks. I will explore this in more detail in future newsletters: I believe everyone who cares must dedicate time to rallying their networks using this method, or something similar. If enough people use this relational technique between now and the election, we can still win by a decent margin.
If I am honest, I must admit we did not do enough in the last four years. We went back into comfortable sleep after Biden won. We assumed the Trump menace was somehow going away: Out of sight, out of mind. Now we must all realize that Trump is not an anomaly: In fact, a new and much more dangerous coalition has formed around him that will be with us for the foreseeable future.
Even when Trump dies — which I suspect he will soon, he doesn’t look well — those powerful forces have found each other and will continue to strengthen their position as an anti-democratic, Fascistic counterforce in our society. Those forces include the incredibly wealthy, very dangerous Right Wing of Silicon Valley: People like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and Mark Andreessen.
I find it absolutely amazing that many people are so confused and mind-fucked that they think the Right Wing are the “freedom party” while the Democrats are all about censorship etc. In fact, the Republicans pose a much greater danger to our freedoms and rights. Here is what top Trump donor Larry Ellison has in store for us if Trump/Vance wins. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting,” he crows.
In a Fascist technocracy, we will quickly find ourselves in a hyper-controlled, repressed situation like China, where dissent becomes criminalized. And no, that is not anything like what we have now.
Thiel and Musk are backing 39-year-old JD Vance. Their allies include Right Wing media like Rupert Murdoch’s vast empire, and Christian evangelicals. Supporters include Opus Dei, a secretive Catholic organization and corporation that ran Francisco Franco’s economic program, and the Heritage Foundation, largely funded by Charles Koch. The Right is also increasingly aligned with dictators and authoritarian leaders around the world, like Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, and Netanyahu in Israel.
When it comes to Israel, as much as I hate the Democrats’ refusal to make more military aid contingent on ceasefire, I also know that the Republicans are far worse and far more pro-Israel in their policies. Netanyahu desperately wants Trump to win the election because the Christian Right will give him a much freer hand to oppress and commit genocide against the Palestinians. As The Washington Post reports, Trump has also promised to ruthlessly repress college protestors:
Former president Donald Trump promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, telling a roomful of donors — a group that he joked included “98 percent of my Jewish friends” — that he would expel student demonstrators from the United States, according to participants in the roundtable event with him in New York…. Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, Trump said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror” and boasted of his White House policies toward Israel.
Along with withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords and abandoning a nuclear treaty with Iran, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. This emboldened Jewish extremists who attacked Muslim worshippers at the Al-Aqsar Mosque. Hamas launched the Gaza strike as a retaliation for this attack, which Muslims considered sacrilegious.
Voting for Harris does not mean endorsing the status quo in Gaza. It means recognizing that the alternative will deepen the killing and suffering in Gaza while closing the door on a way out of this conflict. Even reporting on the ongoing genocide will become impossible. Harris will seek negotiation. Trump will not.
During Donald Trump's presidency from 2017 to 2021, his foreign policy contradicted the absurd narrative he was somehow a "peace president,” or anti-war. While Trump occasionally voiced skepticism about prolonged foreign interventions, his actual policies reveal a hawkish stance.
In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the number of U.S. drone strikes surged. According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Trump administration authorized over 2,200 drone strikes in its first two years, compared to around 1,800 during the entirety of President Obama’s second term. This increase in airstrikes coincided with a rollback of Obama-era policies that required high-level vetting of targets to minimize civilian casualties. The consequence was a sharp rise in civilian deaths due to drone warfare in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
In Yemen, Trump’s policies exacerbated the devastating humanitarian crisis resulting from ongoing civil war. His administration expanded U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s military campaign, providing arms, intelligence, and logistical assistance for Saudi-led airstrikes. According to the United Nations, these airstrikes were responsible for a significant portion of the tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Yemen, creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with millions facing famine and widespread displacement. Despite bipartisan calls in Congress to end U.S. involvement in Yemen, Trump vetoed a bill in 2019 aimed at ending American military support for the Saudi-led coalition. How anti-war was that?
Trump’s administration also brought the U.S. closer to direct conflict with Iran. In 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iran nuclear deal, which had been negotiated under President Obama to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Trump’s decision led to a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran, including harsh economic sanctions that severely affected Iran’s economy but failed to curtail its nuclear ambitions.
In January 2020, tensions escalated to near-war when Trump authorized a drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. The assassination led to a retaliatory strike by Iran on U.S. military bases in Iraq. While both sides avoided full-scale war, it was one of the tensest moments between the two countries in decades.
Trump, the “anti-war President,” jacked up the U.S. military budget: The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2020 approved a defense budget of $738 billion, which represented a huge rise from the $611 billion budget in 2016, Obama's final year in office. Trump’s justification for the budget increase was to counter threats from countries like China and Russia. This massive increase further fueled the military-industrial complex, continued the cycle of prioritizing defense spending over other critical areas such as healthcare and infrastructure.
Additionally, Trump aligned with the Israeli right-wing government, culminating in several controversial decisions. His administration’s strong support for Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the eventual unveiling of the "Peace to Prosperity" plan—widely seen as favoring Israeli interests—further strained U.S. relations with Palestinian leaders and regional actors. Though framed as part of a peace initiative, these moves deepened the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than resolving it. The fanatic Christian Right in the U.S. wants this to be a “hot conflict” as they move us toward Armageddon/Rapture/Singularity.
While Trump may have avoided starting new large-scale conflicts, his administration's foreign policy was far from peaceful. He increased use of drone strikes, continued military engagement in Yemen, heightened tensions with Iran while expanding defense budgets, and exacerbating the Palestinian crisis. These policies perpetuated the U.S.'s role as a dominant military power, undermining any claims that Trump represents peace in our time.
Yes, it is easy to sit out this election as an act of protest, but it is a very stupid idea. The consequences of doing so will be drastic. As this hidden recording of the author of Project 25 reveals, Trump/Vance will impose a nationwide ban on abortions even in situations of rape or medical emergency. They intend to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with Right Wing Christian fanatics.
Leftist sympathizers need to think carefully about what kind of political terrain they will be navigating after November. I believe that a Harris/Walz administration provides a much better foundation for continued advocacy and negotiated settlement than the dreadful alternative.
I do not endorse everything Harris stands for. I don’t ignore the flaws in her pro-Israel foreign policy. But we need to recognize the broader stakes of this election and the catastrophic consequences of a Trump/Vance victory. Not only the future of Gaza, but the future of the world, could be at stake. This is no time to walk away from the fight.
Thank you for putting all of this in one document, including the link to Micah Sifry's relational post. It was on my "to do" list to incorporate that action item into a comment on your newsletter; now I don't have to!
I am very concerned that despite this well-constructed rebuttal to the idea that T is for freedom, anti-censorship, and antiwar, people much prefer to hear that than to hear that we have our work cut out for us pressuring a Harris/Walz administration to do the right thing over the next 4, 8 years. And then the political work beyond — well, for the rest of our lives, as you rightfully point out we should have been doing all along. Hence my undying resentment (I'm really working on it but it's stubborn) towards those who just think the whole operation is like an ongoing county fair, where we can dip in once a year and celebrate the continuous work that others are doing and get that nice cotton-candy jolt.
HOWEVER. My "concern" (to put it mildly) is neither here nor there. What I also think we need is add a much more non-cognitive, emotional, and energetic focus coupled with our active work on the ground. The Right is pretty much harnessing the sun's energy with a mirror to fry an ant; the best metaphor I could come up with for the left (in the car last night) is that we are sort of like an essential oils diffuser, spraying a misty haze across the land. We need to focus our energy like the mirror., but towards the felt-sense of regenerative possibilities presented (as imperfectly as you articulate) by a H/W administration and not just the fear-sense of doom.
To that end and towards establishing such a practice 3 weeks out (one that I'm brewing), I'm wondering from your thoughtful readers: do you have any vision of a regenerative future for the US, the planet, for peace? Can you actually picture it? Can you feel it in your body? Not just what we want to not lose, but what we wish to GAIN and CREATE and BUILD?
Can you connect with a feeling of hope at all, like really feel it?
This is almost silly, but I have never been able to shake the power and beauty of this little Chobani commercial, depicting a world like that: not romanticizing the past, but incorporating tech into a values-driven future that nourishes all, in soul and body. I know it's just a dumb commercial, but I still think it's such a useful touchpoint with which to ground a vision and I have watched it many times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ng5ZvrDm4
Brilliant Daniel. Thank you! It's a tragedy that Biden/Harris have so muddied (bloodied) their own water by supporting/ funding genocide. If the Democrat faithful had risen, with one voice and threatened to withdraw support at the ballot box, until Biden made necessary changes, very few would vote 3rd party.
As it is now, according to recent article in New Yorker (could have been NYT. I forget which one) Biden's actions in Gaza, are the straw that will break the camel's back.
The US has a history of imposing dictatorships, forming alliances and killing brown people. If Trump does win, due to Biden's support of yet another dictator, it can be viewed as bringing the third world home.
Not endorsing it, just analyzing it.