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October 23, 2024

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Weeks Before Election, Harris Rebrands as a Dick Cheney Democrat

Vice President Kamala Harris and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

With less than two weeks until Election Day, the 2024 presidential race is as tight and tense as any in recent memory. America’s almost suspiciously divided voters are within the margin of error for a dead tie in many polls, including in the important swing states — although the tide is turning.

Six weeks ago, the picture was quite different. After Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, her campaign took off like a rocket. The momentum was fueled by excitement over President Joe Biden dropping out of the race and a palpable feeling that something new was on the ballot for the first time since Barack Obama in 2008. Harris selected progressive Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for Vice President, trounced Trump in their only debate, and filled arenas with an energetic campaign focused on looking forward and calling out the weirdness of the MAGA movement.

Now, all the momentum heading into November 5 is in former President Donald Trump’s favor. In most polling aggregates and betting markets, Trump is at least a slight favorite to win reelection. It begs the question: How are Democrats this close to fumbling yet another winnable election against Trump’s MAGA circus?

Harris’s hard-right pivot

Despite her campaign’s surprising early momentum, there were signs of trouble. Harris failed to win a single delegate in the one primary she ran in, in 2020, then clinched the nomination without contest at the Democratic National Convention. In other words, national voters have never chosen her. She then refused to break with the Biden Administration’s policy of unconditional and unlimited funding for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, alienating a large section of the party’s base.

At this point, Harris faced two choices: Make some concessions to the antiwar left or pivot right to win over so-called centrists and moderate Republicans. She chose the latter.

Since making that turn, Harris made several baffling decisions that dismiss, alienate, or anger her base, including:

  • Bringing in 2016 election loser Hillary Clinton for advice, along with other out-of-touch D.C. insiders.
  • Cozying up to ultra-right-wing neoconservatives Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney.
  • Pledging to put a Republican, widely rumored to be Liz Cheney, in her cabinet if elected.
  • Abandoning some of her most effective messaging about not looking back and MAGA being weird.
  • Insisting on continuing to arm, fund, and sanction the genocide in Gaza without restriction or condition.

These moves allegedly appeal to Republicans who don’t like Trump, but it’s a curious play because it isn’t at all clear how many such people exist. Trump’s approval among Republicans remains very high and the MAGA faithful’s cult-like devotion to him won’t be shaken by longtime D.C. villains like the Cheneys.

Meanwhile, support for Harris among core Democratic constituencies is plummeting. In Michigan, for instance — the state with the largest Muslim population — some polls show Green Party candidate Jill Stein receiving 40% of Muslim support while only 12% back Harris. That’s a huge drop from 2020, when Biden carried as much as 85% of the Muslim vote. Even in Michigan, Muslims are a small portion of the voting bloc, but with margins so razor-thin it’s political malpractice for Harris to alienate them — and outright appalling to do it in the service of genocidal war crimes.

Birth of the Dick Cheney Democrat

All this adds to the long and disturbing trend of Democrats trying harder to win Republican support while taking the left for granted. Going back decades with the so-called Blue Dog and Reagan Democrats, Democrats often try to appear as xenophobic, hawkish, and conservative as Republicans. Now, Harris is breathing life into a terrifying new political frankenstein: the Dick Cheney Democrat.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is one of the worst people who ever lived. It would take multiple encyclopedias to account for all the damage, death, and destruction his crimes wrought in this world. His endorsement is nothing to be proud of, yet Harris’s closing argument to voters in the last weeks of her campaign appears to be, “The Cheneys like me.”

Both Dick and Liz Cheney have argued their support for Harris is about norms and preserving democracy. Recall, though, that alongside George W. Bush, Cheney himself successfully stole the 2000 election; he has no qualms about subverting democratic norms.

Nonetheless, their endorsement does demonstrate something significant: that the social, cultural, and religious fights Republicans and Democrats often wage most bitterly — such as on abortion and LGBTQ issues — are of minimal real interest to the ruling class. Liz Cheney even specifically encouraged anti-abortion conservatives to support the pro-choice Harris.

What matters most to the Cheneys is a militaristic, interventionist foreign policy that creates new markets. For all his own hyper-capitalism and litany of war crimes, Donald Trump is unpredictable. That the Cheneys feel more comfortable Harris will pursue their foreign policy agenda, even as the world teeters on the brink of World War III, is a deeply worrying sign of what lies ahead regardless of who wins the election.

So the Dick Cheney Democrat, as exemplified by Kamala Harris, is a person with little to say on issues like healthcare or the minimum wage, who is committed to war and imperialism, but who will defend some of our important personal freedoms and social progress. That is what passes for a progressive in this bleak election: a neoconservative who’s libertarian on individual life choices.

For Gaza, no hope either way

A Dick Cheney Democrat may still be a better deal than Trump, depending on one’s perspective and priorities. But the genocide in Gaza is of paramount concern to a huge number of Americans, many of whom might otherwise be predisposed to viewing Democrats as the lesser evil.

Yet Harris has been campaigning, and indeed the Democratic Party has been behaving, as if horrific scenes of the Gaza holocaust are not flooding social media every single day. Despite Democrats’ best efforts to rationalize, minimize, or ignore the genocide, those who care enough to watch closely have seen Israel deliberately starve Palestinians in Gaza; target civilians, hospitals, infrastructure, and aid workers; and herd people into prison camp “safe zones” only to bomb and burn them alive anyway.

In one of the signature moments of her campaign, Harris silenced a pro-Palestine protester by saying, “I’m speaking,” and the insistent words quickly became a slogan. But if “Don’t commit genocide” is too demanding an ask from voters, then there’s hardly even a pretense of democracy in America left to defend. And if Harris pulls off this election with her Cheney-first strategy, the Democratic Party will know they never need to listen to the antiwar or economic left again.

When confronted on her stance toward Palestine, Harris typically takes a more sympathetic tone than Biden while reiterating her unconditional support for Israel. Trump has pledged to be an even better friend to Israel than Biden and Harris, and some Democrats point to this to argue he’d be even worse for Palestinians. But since Biden and Harris have already covered up, armed, and funded the genocide, and pledge to continue to do so, it’s an unimpressive argument at best.

It’s not clear what percent of Americans view the genocide of Palestinians or the merging of the Democratic Party with Bush-era neoconservatives as dealbreakers, but it’s plausible that it’s enough to tilt the election to Trump. It’s also plausible that Harris still manages to win, propelled by backlash against the GOP’s Dark Age brutality toward women’s reproductive health and Trump’s overt odiousness.

Either way, America is left with two newly realigned factions: the super-hawk Dick Cheney Democrats on the “left” and the Christian fascist MAGA cult on the right. Two grimmer, more depressing choices are difficult to imagine, but if recent history teaches us anything, it’s that it can still get worse. In another 20 years it might be JD Vance who emerges as a bipartisan voice of reason. By then, the Republican might be a vigilante Klansman wearing a necklace of his victims’ skulls and the Democrat might be Ivanka Trump.

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August 23, 2024

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Madame Vice President, Do the Right Thing on Gaza

The coronation and ascent up the polls of Democratic Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris has been remarkable to witness. From out of nowhere, a person widely considered a relative dud of a Vice President, who received zero delegates during her primary bid in 2020 and zero votes in the 2024 primary (during which, of course, she was not a candidate), is now the woman chosen to beat Donald Trump. And if vibes and momentum are any indication, she may be well on her way to doing it. She has galvanized Democratic enthusiasm and is being celebrated by multiple factions of her party.

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Harris and the liberal coalition. While the Republican opposition is flailing, unable to build a meaningful counter-narrative and falling back on their usual canard of hysterically painting every minimal reform as communism, on her left is a potentially more disruptive force: Americans who want their country to stop arming and funding Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Here and there, there have been clues and gestures from Harris toward a policy change on Gaza. Even before she became the nominee, Washington rumors suggested she disagreed with Biden’s 100% tolerance of Israeli violence, though to what degree has never been clear. As a candidate, she said, “Now is the time to get a ceasefire deal.” 

But so far there’s been little evidence of any real changes coming and increasingly, it’s looking like Harris’s policy toward Israel and Palestine will not be different from Biden’s. She uses more sympathetic language, but is always careful to reiterate her unwavering support for Israel and to couch her sympathies for Palestine in false equivalencies (the violence in Israel and Palestine overwhelmingly comes from one side to the other).

More important things: Or, how liberals learned to stop worrying and love bombing Gaza

Liberals have a number of ways of rationalizing the Gaza genocide. They say Donald Trump will be even worse, and they may be right (Trump has encouraged Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza, which sounds eerily like a final solution). Liberals might argue they can push Harris on the issue once she’s in office (hasn’t worked so far). They might also claim that Harris’s hands are tied for any number of political reasons, though if that’s what’s holding her back it only demonstrates a lack of leadership.

For plenty of liberals, the issue is simply secondary to the more pressing concern of defeating Trump and saving democracy. But that framing sounds peculiar given the party’s treatment of its anti-genocide wing. The 2024 Democratic primary was somewhere between a formality and a sham, but as a result of it, voters sent a contingent of Uncommitted delegates to the DNC this year. Those delegates, elected representatives within the Democratic Party all, have been neglected, barred from entry, and relegated to protests in the hallways. Their simple demand to allow one pro-Palestinian perspective on stage during the DNC’s weeklong, celebrity-filled party was denied. None of that sounds terribly democratic. 

Other liberals simply don’t want to acknowledge that a genocide is happening. Outside the DNC in Chicago, some Democrats plugged their ears as they walked past protesters reading the names of children killed in Gaza. Both The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe argue that “It’s time to retire the word genocide.” It’s simply too controversial a term; sometimes nations would like to kill tens of thousands of children without all the nasty name-calling. If we stop using the word genocide, then there is no such thing and we can stop worrying about it. 

It needs to be made clear: Israel’s actions in Gaza meet every sensible definition of genocide, as the rest of the world well understands. There are mountains of photo and video evidence, as well as Israeli soldiers’ and officials’ own declarations. It’s all but impossible to count the dead, dying, and wounded in Gaza. Almost every single one of the strip’s 2.3 million people has been maimed, relocated, starved, or killed. Most sources put the number of dead somewhere around 40,000, while the medical journal The Lancet estimates it could be as high as 186,000.

Why Harris should oppose genocide

Harris’s coronation has been a rousing political moment, but it’s severely tainted by the context in which it exists. An ongoing genocide enabled by a bipartisan consensus of the US government and unchallenged by either candidate is too glaring and grim for many voters to overlook.

If this were a genocide we had nothing to do with, the moral calculus would be different. But every one of us bears some responsibility for what’s happening in Gaza. Our dollars fund it and our bombs blow entire families to smithereens. To demand a change is the only moral, sane, human reaction. The fact that there is no representative for that position on the ballot, or even allowed into the conversation, is a truly damning indictment of our politics. 

Certainly there are plenty of good reasons to want Harris to defeat Trump. She is, domestically, a lesser evil on every count. But it’s just as understandable why people of conscience would not be able to support this party. It’s as if we’re choosing between A) genocide with reproductive health, voting rights, and some semblance of a safety net, or B) genocide without those things. For many voters, that’s an obvious choice, but it says something incredibly grim that it’s the only choice.

Harris has a real opportunity to do something important, and it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t help her politically. Americans are currently divided on Gaza, with 48% disapproving of Israel’s actions and 42% approving. If Harris took a stand, that divide would almost certainly split down party lines, likely costing her little if anything in terms of public support. It would surely energize the party’s left wing and help her win the swing state of Michigan. But she apparently doesn’t want to do that – either because of political pressures, electoral paranoia, or personal views. None of these, reasoned though they may be, justify her inaction thus far. 

Harris’s nomination for commander-in-chief is historic, but history will not look kindly on those who allowed and enabled Gaza to be erased from the earth. Activists must continue to pressure Harris, and there’s no need to wait until after the election to do so. She doesn’t have to do much – just pledge to stop sending the guns, bombs and money or, better yet, pressure President Biden to stop now. If we want to have any shred of faith in our system and our countrymen, we ought to be able to believe that doing the right thing is good politics. And unequivocally opposing this genocide is certainly the right thing.