“Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten…”

For the last year Palestinians have been living in an extra-hellish hellscape, harried from place to place by Israeli military and systematic bombing that has killed between 45,000 to nearly 200,000 people, depending on which figures you trust.

Early on, the American political establishment and an empire-friendly media settled on the dishonest narrative that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” after which the US threw tens of billions of dollars at Israel, arming and funding it to the teeth with brutal weapons that alarmed even politicians who voted for the transfers.

Anyone who opposed either Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians or the US breaking its own laws to fund human rights abuses became a dissident — to use a word we once reserved primarily for the Soviet Union. We turned on our own dissidents as a host of new legislation appeared, criminalizing protest of what has now been rightly judged to be a genocide.

Dissidents in putative “Western democracies” suffered arrest, censorship, loss of income, public humiliation, charges of “antisemitism,” doxxing, and show trials. These occurred under “liberal” governments as well as authoritarian ones. In the US, McCarthyite hearings were conducted to purge college presidents and shut down student groups. Current legislation proposes to shut down non-profits and human rights groups that oppose Israeli genocide.

Bipartisan consensus gives the middle finger to international law and international bodies like the UN and the ICC. The Imperial State has unabashedly shown us its long, bloody fangs. And, amazingly, they look just like those in dozens of repressive regimes across the globe. Gaza has offered Americans a dismal peek into the realities of every one of their national institutions. For anyone paying attention.

All of this is to be expected. Imperialism and Capitalism are ultimately incompatible with democracy, so guess which one takes the hit? The Capitalist gods have created a government in their own image. On January 20th it will be: out with Democratic Party billionaire donors (who prefer to quietly wield their influence) and in with triumphal Republican billionaires who will screw up your life as much as the Democratic billionaires, but will troll you as they do it.

Corrupt, malevolent regimes never fail to produce dissidents — just as unbearable repression produces resistance movements, including some you may not like. No one can be a disinterested spectator forever. Sooner or later someone comes to take your house, your orchards, your land, your life, your job, or your voice. Eventually you have no choice but to take a side.

“Beit Lahiya is gone, Beit Hanoun is gone. Operations are underway in Jabalya, essentially clearing the area of Arabs.”

If there was ever any question of what the war in Gaza was really about, we now have confirmation from former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, acknowledging — in the Jerusalem Post of all places — that Israel’s disproportionate response to Palestinian resistance was a fantastic opportunity for Zionists to start a new round of annexation and ethnic cleansing. Just as in Israel’s first round of ethnic cleansing in 1948, “Nakba 2.0” was accomplished through terror, slaughter, and the forced transfer of civilians. But this is what Zionism is, even the “friendly” version Joe Biden espouses: I win, you disappear.

Both American political parties signed on to support and commit war crimes and human rights abuses, bringing dissidents into the streets all over the globe. The blunt and clumsy instrument used to defend Israel is “antisemitism.” We are asked to swallow a crude and nonsensical explanation — that “antisemitism” has spontaneously spiked by orders of magnitude for no good reason. The fact is: people don’t hate Jews any more or less than they did a year ago. But there is considerably more reason to hate the Israeli state. And incidentally, that includes a lot of Israelis too. But criticism of Zionism is not antisemitism, as much as Democrats are now willing to create laws to criminalize the former as the latter.

It’s a long relay effort involving both parties. Democrats may have (again) brought us to this point but Republicans are about to (again) take the baton and run with it. But it wasn’t just the Democratic Party that left us in such a tough spot; it was the party’s liberals who placed all their eggs in the “lesser-evil” basket, hoping they could save a few domestic rights at the cost of sacrificing, quite literally, the lives of others out of sight thousands of miles away. They ended up saving neither.

As long as pesky dissidents were only the allegedly “antisemitic” Left or a bunch of disobedient college students, Liberals were content to throw them under the bus too. Enough Democratic politicians broke ranks to vote for repressive laws, condemn dissidents, or conduct McCarthyite hearings with MAGA Republican colleagues, that we can fairly say that both parties have brought America to ruin.

If you’ve ever read Martin Niemöller’s quote beginning with “First they came for the Communists,” you know that by the time the fascists came for pacifist Lutherans like Niemöller, there was no one left to defend them because all their predecessors were dead. Niemöller’s point was the importance of both moral integrity and solidarity.

Moral integrity and Solidarity: a little something to think about as Trump takes power and the Democrats conduct one more political post-mortem.

I have spent the last three quarters of a century in and out of the United States and lived though tumultuous chapters of our national history that have often been measured in wars of choice and countless instances of undermining other people’s democracies. Now things have come full circle; it is our own democracy that we’ve decided to torch.

If authoritarianism — or let’s just call it by its proper name, fascism — seems like a new choice, Americans have always had a rather low opinion of actual democracy. This is why we purge voter rolls and disenfranchise ex-felons. This is why we give cops carte blanche to murder civilians without consequence. This is why the majority of our national treasure is spent on destruction instead of lifting up the people who pay the freight. This is why the building blocks of our democracy, like the electoral college and the Senate, were designed to be inherently undemocratic. This is why we have a Supreme Court that gives lie to what you learned in social studies — that it is held in check by two other branches of government. Clearly it no longer is.

Americans could care less about democracy. We worship at the altar of raw power and we sneer at equality, justice, civic virtue and social cohesiveness. We are not all in this together. It’s every man for himself, and that’s just the way the capitalists like it.

There is so much in Trump’s win that boggles the mind, from his obvious dementia — if not outright insanity — to his incessant lying, the multiple felonies, the sleaze and corruption, and the fascist toadies and evangelicals who have sidled up to him. But the greatest insanity is the expectation that a corrupt billionaire and a coterie of other corrupt billionaires will somehow make things right for the common man — instead of simply lining their own pockets. What moron would believe such nonsense?

It turns out that the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump are not morons. While they may not have been voting in their own long-term self-interest, and many no doubt disapproved of Trump’s countless moral, intellectual, and mental failings, they were not voting for a man but for a Führer who will dictate and decree the kind of country they have always wanted — dominant Christian and White-controlled. If there are any doubts about this, Trump’s cabinet appointments make it abundantly clear.

Emergent fascism is scary enough, but what was equally shocking about this election was how fluidly the Democratic Party moved from years of denying that its incumbent president was cognitively impaired to fielding a new one — all without the inconvenience of a primary. How easily the party machine raised billions from mega donors while continuing to gaslight voters about the benefits (it turns out, mainly to Wall Street) of Bidenomics. How easily, barely raising any alarms, the Democratic Party moved significantly to the right on immigration, war, military spending, foreign policy, and even social issues. How coldly the party provided “ironclad” and excessive support for Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. And refused to change course, even with a new candidate.

Democrats of every stripe behaved badly in this election, from Blue Dog Democrats to Democratic Socialists. From Congressman Bill Keating, who cheer-led the Gaza war while profiting from his Boeing investments — to good old Bernie Sanders and [former?] Democratic Socialist spitfire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who both shepherded progressives, herding them into line to stick with an administration that was illegally funding the genocide of Palestinians even as they both supported performative legislation to stop it.

The Democratic Party is finished. Or it should be. Like a trojan virus in an operating system, unless thoroughly rooted out, the Democratic leadership will continue to advance the neoliberal policies and losing strategies that have had it on the ropes for decades and are its hallmark. Like a trojan or root virus, the most reliable solution is to start all over again, installing a new OS on the bare metal.

The Left has always argued for a new party of working people. Now liberal Democrats are slowly discovering they need one too.