On November 12 at UCSD the Students for Justice in Palestine held a secret meeting in La Jolla in order to invite Dr. Ahmed Abdeen to discuss his surgical work in Gaza during the genocide. The administration, brutal in their assaults on the students this past year, has intimidated and bullied UCSD students throughout the year in a top-down campaign to chill campus free speech.

Born in 1995, Dr. Abdeen finished his medical degree as the Israeli onslaught began. When he went to the rubble of his home, what he looked for was not photographs or family treasures, but his graduation robe. He could not find it.

“We deserve to live in peace,” he told the student crowd, many of them masked and wearing keffiyehs. “But we also deserve to die in dignity.”

He showed us X-Rays of a young woman’s skull. A bullet sat lodged inside beneath the hole of the skull fracture. Dr. Abdeen sanitized the wound as nurse’s in the surgical tent cleaned brain matter away from her.

“I took out the bullet,” he said. “Yes, we deserve to die with dignity.”

He never cried throughout his remarks. His voice never trembled or broke.

In a careful and emotional monologue, he described the bodies that remain trapped in the rubble of Khan Younis, a place resembling Homs at the height of the Syrian Civil War. He showed us reels of the victims of Israel’s bombings that town where, according to the UN’s Human Rights Office, 70% of victims were children.

In a tragic inverse of America’s wildest political lie of 2024—brown people in America eating dogs—Dr. Abdeen testified to the reality of this year in Palestine: “I saw the dogs eating the bodies of the dead—the dead, left in the street because the living must flee. This, I will never forget this.”

Dr. Abdeen’s twin brother and family remain in Gaza. He showed pictures of his parents. The image of his father stood out to me: a bearded man in a robe, proud and courtly, reading the Quran on the rubble of his home.

There was no mention of Trump or Biden, Republican victories or Democratic defeats, no talk of the billionaires, silly stooges, and donor ciphers who will oversee the Cabinet in upcoming months. There were only the audience’s tears for the fallen. “My people are resilient,” Dr. Abdeen said. “Think of the resilience.”

Other doctors are speaking out, too. In an open letter from medical professionals who served in Gaza last month, they wrote: “It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.”

They continued, describing how with only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.

In one excerpt they wrote, “ In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.”

Ex-NHS surgeon Nizam Mamode, a Professor of Transplant Surgery, recently testified about the IDF’s targeting of children in Gaza. He described how bombs would drop and the drones would descend to shoot children. He has spent this year fishing large bullets out of their bodies.

“They would pick off civilians, children. This was day after day after day, operating on children. It is a persistent and deliberate targeting of children. We had 1 or 2 mass casualty incidents a day. That meant 10-20 dead and 20-40 seriously injured. St. Thomas’s might have 1 or 2 a year. We had 1 or 2 a year. 60-70% of people we operated on were women and children. The majority were young children, a consistent story. The youngest I operated on was a three year old. She died of infection.”

Dr. Mamode was there during the Rwandan genocide, as were some of his colleagues.

“I have never seen anything on this scale. Never. That was the view of my colleagues. One of the surgeons in my team had been to Ukraine. He said this was ten times worse.”

In June, Ukrainian officials said “Russian invaders’ had killed more than 12,000 civilians, including 551 children.

All of this has happened during a Democratic administration. One, mind you, with unprecedented powers recently handed to it by the Supreme Court.

I relay these examples of expert testimony in Gaza, because all across campuses, radio, and podcasts this week there will be conversations among the professional class, the smart set who always seem to know what is best for America: What went wrong in 2024? How did Harris lose to Trump? Who is to blame for the catastrophes of the next four years? How can I work with my family knowing they voted for a fascist?

One colleague of mine at SDSU decided to construct blue bracelets for her and her daughter’s friends so they could more easily identify “blue voters” who felt threatened by Trump supporters. Another walked up to my office today. “How can I even go to work knowing how half this country voted for evil?”

This week, cable news has turned on people of color, blaming the loss on the in-roads Republicans, Trump in particular, made with “Democratic voters.”

70% of those who felt the US economy is doing poorly voted for Trump. Harris found her strongest support amongst those earning $200,000 a year, while Trump won a majority amongst poorer voters.

I sense that professionals, teachers, and the liberal set of America will insist on misunderstanding what happened in 2024. Understanding would require critique and action, neither of which they are willing to do. While Women’s Marches, the Sunrise Movement, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and the embers of the Bernie left rose after 2017, hopes that Trump will self-destruct was the strategy for most liberals during his first term. Brunch was the main menu for the professional class.

Rather than look at the situation in Gaza as an opportunity to re-connect our government’s policy agenda to Americans instead of imperial policy abroad, Harris decided to stay the course. On The View she notoriously said she couldn’t think of a break with President Biden, despite his deep unpopularity on issues like Gaza. In fact, the only places Harris did diverge from Biden were regarding the best parts of his labor-friendly administration: antitrust and regulation.

Lesser known than the embarrassing “I have a glock” comments, or the disgusting bearhug of Liz Cheney, the Financial Times detailed a “charm offensive” with Wall Street. Harris hosted several chief executives at her own home in D.C. including Visa CEO Ryan McInerney and CVS CEO Karen Lynch.

Both were involved in federal antitrust lawsuits and were accused of paying off rivals to maintain monopoly power and of inflating insulin rates and drug prices. The victories against Google weren’t even mentioned at the DNC!

When visiting Michigan last month, after hearing the wrenching stories of people who had family members killed in Gaza, candidate Harris decided to remind those families that the real tragedy was October 7th. She sent Bill Clinton, who referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Sumeria,” and even the loveless madman of X, Ritchie Torres, who campaigned in a state with the only Arab-majority city in the U.S.

Congressman Torres, an unhinged fanatic who seems like an AI meld of Obama and Netanyahu, sometimes forgets he represents the 15th District and not the a West Bank settlement. And at the convention, in a moment that made me gasp, Harris repeated Israeli lies about systemic rape, ignoring the real rape of Palestinian detainees by the IDF.

Even my dear friend and History Professor, Dr. Marci Shore, the author of the extraordinary Caviar and Ashes and The Taste of Ashes wrote “The Morning After” on Monday for “The Democracy Seminar”  that Hillary Clinton should have served the historic role of President eight years ago and that Harris did not run a weak campaign.

Shore wrote “[Harris] was not a weak candidate. We are a weak species.”

In her article, Shore dramatized Trump’s fascism, echoing Hannah Arendt, and then implicated the American public in the new horrors of his second term.

Shore writes, “The horrible truth is that some 72 million Americans voted for Trump not in spite of the fact that he’s a sadistic narcissist, but because of that. There was nothing subtle about his campaign. We cannot say we Americans did not and do not understand who he is: he has told us exactly who he is every single day. Today I feel ashamed of being American and human alike.”

Yes, Donald Trump is an unhinged fascist. Yes, we are a weak species. But were we a weak species when Americans defeated Trump in 2020? Or, could we try a different approach: Is the Democratic Party a weak political organization? Is it better described as a protection racket better suited to squashing internal progressive opposition than winning popular elections?

Rather than offering claims essentializing this election as a referendum on the human species, what if liberals and professionals argued it was time to replace a Democratic leadership that failed catastrophically with a new alternative. There is a clear mandate for change, why not take it? Because it is inconvenient, challenges power, and easier to blame voters.

This week House Democrats reelected their leaders without any dissent at all: Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar will all be reelected, very likely unanimously. To say that Trump has a mandate is absurd. But millions of voters who voted in 2020 simply did not cast their ballot for Harris. Because America is sexist and racist?

This approach is dangerous. This is folly. And worse, in terms I think will better add pathos to those professionals who have grown so detested by the public in recent years: This will ensure the Democrats lose. If liberals do not want a right-populist working class solidified with a re-alignment, there is still time to change. Or, in a horrific foreshadow of our future that we found out today, Rahm Emmanuel could be selected to lead the DNC.

Perhaps statistics can clear some of the context of our moment. With Trump offering the dog’s breakfast of policies, his basic working-class pitch from the garbage truck to the deep fryer was: I am for you. Today, the figures on poverty refer to the Supplemental Poverty Measure: US food insecurity increased 40% since 2021. Poverty in the US increased 67% since 2021. Build Back Better, the liberal alternative to The Green New Deal and left-populism, was killed by Democrat rent-a-villains in the Senate in 2022. Filibuster reform was dropped. Court expansion was never considered by the “institutionalist” Biden. And universal childcare, debt relief, minimum wage hikes, a public option, and job guarantees were a mirage, if ever even considered by the Democrats. Instead, in addition to assisting a genocide and sloppily leaving Afghanistan, Biden deported more people than Trump and sprinted to the right.

Harris was not a flawed candidate? Professor Shore is not alone in this view.

Ed Kilgore in The New Yorker wrote this week: “Harris worked hard to depict herself as a “change” candidate, but that was always going to be a tough sell. With a little luck, she might have been able to squeak by in the Electoral College (she lost the three “Blue Wall” states by less than 2 percentage points) even while losing the national popular vote, just as Trump did in 2016. But nobody should blame her for failing to overcome the dead weight of an administration too many voters considered a disappointment if not a failure.”

Nobody? The Muslim vote, once 93% Democrat, now is only 20%. According to The New York Times, when Harris traveled to a locally owned brewery in New Hampshire to talk about helping small businesses…she made sure one group of Americans felt included: “millionaires who wanted to keep more of their profits from selling stocks and real estate.”

Also, during this campaign, Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, allied with Uber, told her to stop criticizing corporations. She did. She was too weak to stand up for her own voters. This choice ceded the ground of economic populism to the right. In one moment, she smartly chose Tim Walz, a prairie Progressive of the George McGovern stripe who led state-victories with real material change. But it turns out Walz was her second choice. Governor Shapiro, a charter-school lover and denouncer of anti-genocide young people, turned Harris down. Lacking even basic political instincts, Harris would have made every wrong decision if she could. In the Clintonoid mold, she trusted the party spinners and invertebrate hacks supplied to her—like so many of the other empty suit liberal losers of my lifetime.

Despite Harris’s pitiful loss, she outraised Trump with nearly a billion dollars, much of it corporate money. This will surely keep him walking the halls of the White House at night—the rich don’t respect him! Even now, shattered as liberals are, Harris and the Democrats continue to send fundraising emails. This party, this candidate, this President lost to an illiterate felon, rapist, and bankrupt—a habitual liar and notorious con artist they have spent the better part of a decade obsessing over.

True, there are green shoots of clarity. This past weekend, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said, “[Democrats] don’t listen enough; we tell people what’s good for them. And when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

It will be hard for liberals to watch the next four years as Trump flings the remaining functioning institutions of the country into the abyss, deporting a million people, installing thugs, and disintegrating the futures of so many Americans and their collapsing ecosystems. But liberals will be fine. They’ll continue working at their universities or non-profits. Life will go on. The people who will be hurt are the desperate people Trump never really cared about—the people in Michigan whose family members will be under Dr. Abdeen’s scalpel, or the Appalachians drowned or poisoned by the coal and pork companies funding him.

Despite her intelligence, ambition, and the fortuitous situation of being hurled into a historic and necessary role as a change-maker, Harris blew it. She destroyed the hope of neoliberalism with a human face. She lost massively and was warned by those whom everyone ignores. Convenient targets—the woke, the left, and the voters will be targeted. But, as pollster Jim Zogby described this week on Breaking Points, it is the big donors and consultants who never lose an election and are always to blame.

“There weren’t people in the country feeling joy. There were people feeling hurt. Why did we not understand that? Why? Because consultants are out of touch,” Zogby said.

Neoliberalism is finished, even if the Democrats do not know it. What comes next is a darker chapter. Since the professionals in America are so concerned with her feelings, I encourage Harris to go and work in the private sector for the wealthy forces she spoke eloquently for this campaign. She will be fine. Look to Gordon Brown or Rishi Sunak or even Barack Obama for more advice.

Meanwhile, the rest of us should not take the advice of Professor Vladimir Tismaneaunu and Cold Warrior liberals who encourage us to spend our free time reading about fascism and authoritarianism. No, we do not merely need to do this. Many of us have already spent years reading about fascism and Reaganism, the rightward shift of America.

No, we need new reading lists.

Instead, we must read the works of Rosa Luxemburg and Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker and Thomas Paine. We must read about how to disrupt, strike, defy, organize, and challenge. We must produce great satires, organize stoppages, and sharpen our tools of ridicule. We must call out villains on “our side” like Rahm Emmanuel as well as swine of the right like Thomas Homan and Stephen Miller. The corruption of one causes the emboldening of the other. We must read from Eugene Debs—a “Red man” from “red state” Indiana, my home state, jailed by the Democrats for a Canton, Ohio speech opposing the First World War. Last week, Stark County, Ohio where Canton is located, voted 60% for Trump.

We cannot write off these people as racists and enemies. It is easy and cheap and wrong to do this.

We must instead remember the sacrifice of John Brown and Frederick Douglass and the suffragettes and King’s Riverside Address—in my mind, America’s first opposition to the fast-approaching neoliberal America. It is an imperishable speech most Americans have not read, one renouncing the triplets of materialism, militarism, and racism and calling for fellowship and enduring love.

Finally, we must remember Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and Harry Bridges and Joe Hill, a man put up against the wall by the corrupt courts on behalf of big corporations. Before his death, his advice was necessary and simple: Don’t mourn, organize.

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