This week, as the killing in Gaza continues, Anthony Blinken is back to shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, attempting to build support for a ceasefire deal that the U.S. is bringing up for a vote at the U.N. Security Council — a deal that neither the Netanyahu government in Israel nor Hamas leadership in Gaza seem on board with. Meanwhile, there’s been worldwide condemnation of the weekend IDF raid that killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the rescue of four hostages. And war cabinet member and leading Netanyahu opponent Benny Gantz has taken his party out of the coalition and called for new Israeli elections.
Here in the U.S., continuing support for the Netanyahu government continues to jeopardize Biden’s reelection bid, as younger and more progressive voters find it difficult to justify support for Democrats and Republicans have embraced support for Israel and a supposed battle against antisemitism as political weapons.
That’s the context for what Naomi Klein told us about how difficult a path she sees for the Democratic Party when we talked to her last week. For Klein, it’s not that the Democrats have a messaging problem on Gaza:
[T]hey have a reality problem. And I think they have the deepest kind of reality problem because I share your view that Trump represents a fascist future for the United States. I share your horror. I share your terror. I don’t argue with that. I have no patience for people who say it’ll just be the same. I have made lesser-evil arguments in previous elections, but I don’t know what’s more evil than what’s going on in Gaza. I’ve never seen anything more evil in my lifetime. I’m not saying it’s never happened, but in my lifetime I have never seen it. And I’ve covered wars — I wrote The Shock Doctrine.
Progressive strategist Waleed Shahid — who’s been involved in the Uncommitted protest movement during the Democratic primaries and understands the mechanisms of both partisan leverage and movement mobilization about as well as anybody — just posted a piece that puts the continuing need to get Democrats elected — regardless of the Party’s continuing support for terrible things — in crystal-clear perspective.
Looking back to the work of civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, he argues that hesitant voters, activists, and movement organizers need to take a good hard look at how parties work and what they really are — unruly “arenas of struggle” in which small groups contest their often very different ideas within a structure that makes it possible to get things done — and commit to being in the fight for the long haul.
Shahid is not making a lesser-of-two-evils argument. Rather, he emphasizes that rejection of the Democrats ignores the reality of playing the long game of politics as it exists. There’s simply no other way to exert political pressure for progressive causes in the U.S., aside from doing the hard work of factional battle within the Democratic Party. Doing otherwise is a poor strategy, and ignores democracy as it is.
Despite over a thousand third parties forming in the U.S., few have ever won more than 5 percent of the vote, typically fading after a few election cycles. The last successful third party in the United States was the Republican Party, which was formed 170 years ago. I tell third-party Sisypheans: it would be a strategy worth considering if the Greens or others had a track record of even winning school board or city council seats on a large scale. They don’t. But third parties will always fail in our system without major electoral reform enacted by the two main parties. The first-past-the-post system often results in an unavoidable dynamic in which the Green Party siphons votes from the ideologically similar Democrats, which inadvertently benefits the Republicans, the party ostensibly furthest from the Green Party’s values.
And once you’ve read that, we encourage you to go back and check out Shahid’s conversation with us, from back at the beginning of the Uncommitted protest vote in Michigan.
A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today as a paid subscriber to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.
And we’re offering new paying subscribers a special discount of 20 percent. You will lock in this lower price forever if you join us now!
Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images
This post was originally published on The.Ink.