The Genocide in Gaza is a test of democracy in America

Can America’s claim to democracy withstand the reality of a military industrial empire?

As Israel continues to wage an unrelenting genocide in Gaza, massive protests against it have swept the country and the entire world.

Yet Washington remains unresponsive to popular dissent. The implications may be as disturbing as the state of international human rights in exile.

A world united...

Protests have swept the entire globe over the past week. A massive crowd descended upon Washington last weekend, joined by others in London, Paris, Berlin, and Milan. Protests spanned from Senegal to Japan.

In San Francisco, tens of thousands marched in the streets, and mobilized again over the weekend to block the Cape Orlando, a ship destined to bring weapons to Israel, from docking in the Port of Oakland. They were followed by counterparts in Seattle & Tacoma who kept the ship from docking there, either.

Only a few times in human history has such global unanimity emerged. One of those moments preceded the American invasion of Iraq 20 years ago.

Photo by Ted Eytan, Wikimedia Commons

Moreover, the American people have repeatedly chosen antiwar candidates for the White House when given the chance. Obama won the Democratic nomination in 2008 largely because of his stance against the Iraq War, which his leading opponent, Hillary Clinton, foolishly enabled as a Senator. His record as a president hardly matched his rhetoric as a candidate, but the point is that voters came together and tried to force change at the ballot box.

Similarly, when Trump came to Washington, he claimed to be an outsider with an antipathy for militarism. That was the crucial distinction that allowed him to outpace a crowded field of Republicans competing for the nomination. Like Obama, Trump ultimately empowered the CIA (which seemed to stage coups in multiple countries under Trump’s administration). Their shared hypocrisy indicates a hole in the bucket of democracy.

Even George W. Bush ran for the White House as an outsider. Journalists indulged him despite his history as the son of a former President and CIA Director who built his career based on a legacy admission to an Ivy League university. Like Trump and Obama, Bush revealed himself in office to be a close ally of the Pentagon.

Each of those figures ran for office as an outsider to Washington unstained by the bipartisan military industrial corruption of which we were prolifically warned. That’s why they won their elections.

We the People of the United States, in fact, don’t support wars of aggression to fill the pockets of weapons companies.

Try telling that to anyone in Washington.

...against Washington and Tel Aviv

The global outcry against America’s invasion of Iraq 20 years ago fell on deaf ears in Congress—even though the voices of global dissent included millions of voters.

The pattern is no different today.

In San Francisco, a one-time epicenter of the antiwar movement, voters took to the streets, organized massive direct action, and forced controversies over competing statements by local officials. Similar protests took place across the country from coast-to-coast.

Yet San Francisco’s powerful voice in Congress, who served for years as Speaker of the House and the leader among House Democrats, flatly rejected global demands for a ceasefire, disingenuously claiming that it would only help Hamas. It is precisely the same canard repeated by Biden administration officials parroting their Israeli counterparts.

The pattern of Washington ignoring grassroots demands is nothing new—but every mounting civilian death in Gaza invites a long overdue reckoning.

Even Bernie Sanders, who articulated the most independent foreign-policy of any presidential candidate in the last generation, has fallen prey to the groupthink in Washington. He broke ranks from some fellow Democrats by publicly calling to “stop the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people,” yet even he rejected calls for a cease-fire.

A response by professor Norman Finkelstein is worth reading. He notes, among other things, that “when you oppose a ceasefire at this point, you are in effect…and in fact, giving Israel carte blanche to continue to indiscriminately target the civilian infrastructure and the civilian population of Gaza.” He observes a painful double standard throughout most discussions of Palestine.

That is the consensus position among both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, notwithstanding rhetorical dissent from a handful of voices who are now facing opportunistic retaliation as a result of speaking out in defense of human rights.

What do “democracy” and “fascism” mean?

Ultimately, popular dissent aims to revoke the “consent of the governed” that political scientists have long described as the essence of democracy: rule by the people.

Yet the competing principles of dissent and consent only matter to the extent that We the People actually had any influence in Washington, which we most certainly do not. A decade ago, researchers from Princeton and Northwestern universities established that, as an empirical matter, congressional policy tracks not public opinion, but rather the interests of capital.

In their own words:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

The British Broadcasting Corporation summed it up “In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.”

Despite the rhetoric of self-interested officials, no one in Washington cares what voters think. As long as participants in protests and outraged voices on social media platforms continue to buy things and go to work, the war machine can comfortably ignore expressions of dissent.

That is precisely the essence of fascism.

As long as Wall Street enjoys continuity, it can ensure path dependency in Washington. When business insulates politics from popular accountability, they inevitably turn a blind eye to human rights violations, and then grow to encourage and rely on them.

The only tools in the box of “democracy” that could stop the war machine in Washington is mass work stoppage. Boycotts theoretically offer an alternative, but the military industrial complex is principally composed of companies that sell to government agencies or other businesses, leaving few ways for consumers to withhold resources from critical decision makers.

An inconvenient truth

Americans pride ourselves on our nation’s history of introducing democracy to the modern world. But bipartisan support in Washington for Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza, like bipartisan support for previous wars for profit initiated by the CIA and the Pentagon, suggests that America’s connection to democracy is a bit like the connection between water and fire.

Paid subscribers can access a collection of articles by a handful of other writers who I respect. They include Seymour Hersh, Robin Buller, Norman Finkelstein, James Risen, and a pair of voices from Gaza whose reports have found a global audience—but apparently not yet one in Washington.