The tragedy of cults of personality

The Democratic Party is riding a wave of enthusiasm, despite remaining committed to right wing goals

In the wake of Joe Biden’s long overdue withdrawal from the 2024 presidential election race and his replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats celebrated themes at their national convention including unity, joy, and defending democracy. Buried under the enthusiasm, however, are some uncomfortable realities that most Democrats—and the journalists who enable them—have preferred to ignore.

Democrats support imperialism

No Palestinians were allowed to speak at the DNC, even though an Uncommitted movement responding to the continuing U.S.-enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza registered nearly a million votes in Democratic primaries across the country. Meanwhile, human rights activists at the DNC were brutalized and arrested by the dozens.

Not for the first time, the job of expressing outrage over the disturbing failures of party elites fell to comedians unfettered by co-opted editors. For instance, Jon Stewart noted that on the stage at the DNC, “Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, gay Americans, [and] Jewish Americans,” all had a chance to speak, while Americans of Palestinian descent were entirely excluded while facing police brutality outside the convention site.

While Kamala has rhetorically indicated some independence from Biden’s foreign policy, nothing suggests that she would reign in Israel, or consider suspending weapons shipments. In fact, she appears poised to continue Biden’s strategy of deferring to Netanyahu while bleating about human rights abuses enabled by weapons exports approved in Washington.

Similarly, Democrats brag about their commitment to proxy war in Eastern Europe, relying on their supporters to forget the 2014 coup that instigated Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Wrapping their militarism in the flag of “defending democracy,” they also enjoy the support of journalists who conveniently ignore long-standing U.S. support for autocrats and dictators, pretending that the US has not been a consistent threat to peace around the world for the last 3/4 of a century.

Some writers and Democratic Party activists do pay attention, and have reacted accordingly. For instance, Mehdi Hasan—who has already faced retaliation from a national network based on his choice to report the truth despite the insistence of editors favoring propaganda—wrote powerfully that:

If they have time and space for a former Republican congressman, and for Israeli family members of a hostage, they have time and space for an elected Palestinian Democratic lawmaker. Anything else is straight up racism and erasure.

Accordingly, on Wednesday, Muslim Women for Harris, a grassroots group previously supporting Kamala’s campaign, officially disbanded. The group posted a poignant statement observing that:

The family of [Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin] was on the stage tonight and has shown more empathy towards Palestinian Americans and Palestinians than our candidate or the DNC has. This is a terrible message to send to Democrats.

To be fair, the bipartisan commitment to militarism has unified Washington long before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president. Biden was an active agent of it during his many years in the Senate, and continued to defend American imperialism even as he was removed as the party’s nominee.

In his speech on Monday night, Biden managed to lie almost as much as Trump typically does, enabled by professional journalists unwilling to fact check his comments. For instance, the New York Times uncritically repeated his words, reporting that “Biden has defined the United States as the leading player in an alliance to combat autocracy. ‘Who can lead the world other than the United States of America?’ he asked last night.” 

While the New York Times had better things to do than observe Biden’s consistent support for autocrats from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to India’s Narendra Modi, other writers have been willing to call it out. For instance, writer Kwame Osei correctly described Biden’s comments as “a nationalistic speech replete with American exceptionalism,” and cited his rhetorical question above as a case in point. Similarly, Debasish Roy Chowdhury observed in Time magazine—three years ago—that Biden’s claim to support democracy abroad is so preposterous that it could form the butt of a joke.

Similarly, Malaika Jabali insightfully observed that:

After the largest demonstration against police violence in the U.S., we gained a pro-police administration in 2020. After possibly the biggest movement for Palestinian liberation we have witnessed while seeing the depths of America’s imperialist violence, patriotism is being whipped into a frenzy….America is indeed an empire. Its leaders will always serve that function, whatever the party, whatever the race.

Sadly, that commitment to militarism is an institutional one shared widely by today’s Democrats, regardless of which particular figure stands at the top of the ticket. 

Imperialism infects both foreign and domestic policy

Kamala’s support for the Pentagon and America’s military industrial complex doesn’t stop at the border. The domestic face of militarism includes policing, to which she has been not only thoroughly committed, but on which she built a career preying on the public. Border security is another domestic component of militarism to which Harris appears publicly committed, despite the party’s rhetoric supporting human rights.

Kamala’s background in criminal justice is dangerously conservative. For instance, as California’s Attorney General, she breathed life into the death penalty in a state that had prolifically repudiated it.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote at the time to praise her decision, describing it as “putting professional responsibility over personal politics,” while also noticing inconsistency in Harris choosing not to support a ballot proposition that aimed to halt same-sex marriages. They concluded that “Harris’ response to the two cases suggests a willingness to pick and choose the limits of professional obligation.”

Harris also pioneered a disturbing statewide reform effort enabling the criminal prosecution of parents based on their children’s truancy. HuffPost’s Molly Redden wrote about the human costs of Kamala’s truancy program in 2019. Her appearance on NPR’s Code Switch program in 2020 helped explain why it disproportionately affected families of color.

Kamala’s support for predatory policing is a big reason why she struggled during the presidential primaries in 2020. She did not win a single state—not even the one that she represented in the U.S. Senate. 

Ultimately, the support Kamala received before being anointed as the party’s presidential candidate came mostly from moderates. She is a creature of the Pelosi wing of the party—and having built her career in the very same city, with the same set of wealthy supporters, herself a Pelosi protégé.

A memoir missing some details 

On the eve of the convention, Pelosi published a memoir titled “The Art of Power,” acclaimed by professional journalists dedicated to supporting power rather than critiquing it. The timing of the publication exemplifies Pelosi’s unfortunate and longstanding commitment to leveraging her office to fill her family’s pockets. It also conveniently reified her cult of personality, predictably overlooking the parts of Pelosi’s history that she would rather not publicize.

For instance, Pelosi’s role as an enabler of the domestic surveillance state and recurring wars for profit did not make the narrative. Nor did her infamous decisions to fund Trump’s border concentration camps, delay his impeachment proceedings, or limit his impeachment charges to avoid exposing the unfortunately bipartisan pattern of self-enrichment at the taxpayers’ expense. 

Also missing from Pelosi’s narrative was a reflection on how she went to Congress, and how she has held her seat for the past 37 years. Her supporters pretend that she is a political genius, but the facts suggest that privilege has played as much a role in her career as acumen.

Pelosi was born to a powerful family enabled by connections to organized crime, and hand-picked for her congressional seat by its former occupant based on her fundraising prowess. Once in office, she never debated an opponent during the nearly four decades she has represented San Francisco in Washington. Ducking debates, however, is only part of Pelosi’s strategy.

Pelosi has also played the press like a fiddle, relying on sycophants among journalists to perform several functions. Writers covering her work have consistently mislead the public about her bizarrely conservative policy record, while also covering up her longstanding and continuing corruption. Others have chosen to smear her challengers leveraging racist tropes (while others chose instead to ignore and obscure us) on the rare occasion that we have managed to draw political blood.

Light without heat

Democrats have been eager to promote a narrative about spreading joy, optimism, and unity.

But the unity they promote is a fiction enabled only by the deference of some among them to the continuing corruption of American politics in the service of capital and state violence.

Earlier this year, two members of the Squad™ lost their primaries in contested elections heavily influenced by AIPAC money. Two of the remaining members, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, found themselves at odds this week over whether to enable the party’s imperialism. Papering over concerns about human rights violations enabled by U.S. weapons shipments represents not unity, but conciliation.

It is especially remarkable that so many Democrats lack the spine to challenge Israel, when even the head of the Israeli Shin Bet security service has taken the courageous step of recognizing right wing Israeli settlers in the west bank as “terrorists.” It seems that Democrats are less concerned about human rights abuses than the officials of states who leaders are wanted by international jurists.

It makes sense why Democrats are enthused, if only because their previous nominee was moribund and appeared to be sleepwalking into an election defeat that he described as presaging the end of democracy in America.

But the self-congratulation of Democrats who have grown increasingly confident about their prospects in November ignores the hole in the bucket of democracy: an impregnable bipartisan consensus favoring human rights abuses from Gaza to our nation’s borders, and every hospital across the United States.

Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez summed up the moment when reporting on the convention:

One of the things that struck me most was the level…of choreographed mass spectacle, that would be worthy of…Hitler’s filmmaker and propagandist in terms of controlling the narrative that the American people receive of what the Democratic party is about….

[B]oth the Republican Convention and the Democratic Convention show the two faces of American capitalism. On the one hand, with the Republicans, you have a party of white supremacist capitalism, of anti-immigrant xenophobia, of patriarchy, and of war on the working class.

Now, this past week, we’ve seen the party of multiracial, neoliberal capitalism, a party that seeks a kindler, gentler form of mass deportation and border militarization, and one that is even more aggressive in the imperial policies of the United States than even the Republican party…and both parties having a disconnect with the rest of the world.

Live to fight another day?

Retired Fourth Circuit judge Michael Luttig made waves this week by endorsing Kamala Harris, despite his preferences for conservative policies. He described his endorsement as setting aside those preferences for the sake of democracy, leaving in place a mechanism for the country to resolve its many disagreements in the future.

On the one hand, Luttig is an admirable figure. Despite his lifelong conservatism, he has frequently stood up to the corruption of leaders in Washington, including those from his own party. His historic decision in the Padilla military detention case reflected a continuing commitment to human rights and due process, and demonstrated a laudable judicial independence. Luttig’s decision challenged the bipartisan consensus in Congress to abandon due process, and also undermined his own ambitions to one day serve on the Supreme Court, for which he was previously poised as a rumored figure on the short list for George W. Bush’s appointees. Luttig’s later decision to walk away from his lifetime appointment as a federal appellate judge resembled falling on a principled sword.

In any case, Luttig’s endorsement of Kamala Harris itself reflects how meaningless is her supposed commitment to progressive principles. Harris is a cipher created by party elites, on whom observers have projected various political fantasies. Luttig may be willing to switch parties and sides for the sake of defending democracy, and that understandably seems like a good thing to Democrats terrified about Trump.

But putting in office yet another centrist Democrat willing to silence the voices most concerned about human rights abuses does not bode well for the future. Democrats, however, delighted in their celebration, cheering on the military industrial complex with their hands in the air while chanting Beyoncé lyrics.

Paid subscribers can access a further discussion about self-inflicted wounds. It discusses how former President Donald Trump embodies the concept for both Democrats and Republicans. It also explores two sets of self-inflicted wounds committed & endured by Democrats that may still threaten the party’s prospects in the November election.