The revolt is growing louder: Biden must listen to the dissent in his party
Otherwise, the party won't stand a chance in November
Just a follow-up to my last entry, as it appears that I have had some traffic from my previous platform in terms of visitors, and some folks from there might be surprised at my apparent change in tone. “Biden not run? We never would have heard that from you before, Nova. What’s gotten into you? It’s those Substack Nazis, isn’t it?”
Truth be told, I’ve been perturbed about President Biden’s direction since October. That’s not a coincidence. The bear hug Biden gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was bad enough—as I noted earlier, that performative, symbolic move made it so that Biden really had no room to pivot if and when things got prickly. The first real sign of trouble, however, came when Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, got up at the podium and equated protest against Israeli action in the Middle East with the march of white supremacists in Charlottesville. That was the first warning sign that something was quickly going sideways.
Those comments came at a time of extraordinary repression against dissenting voices, a level of silencing and ostracism not seen since McCarthyism in the ‘50s. In short order, that suppressive force was harnessed by right wingers like Rep. Elise Stephanik, whose pointed, disingenuous and dishonest level of questioning of three female presidents of liberal arts colleges have seen the resignation of two of them. Stephanik and others of her party were looking to trap those administrators, and they so far have been largely successful. Stephanik has boasted about her sandbagging of those women. “TWO DOWN,” she said. One of the major nongovernmental forces behind that move, Christopher Rufo, simply bragged, “SCALPED.”
This broadside from the right may have been able to have been countered, but the Democratic Party has seen fit to lacerate its left side as well. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in November expressed his concern that progressives were being taken advantage of by Hamas sympathizers. A Washington Post article reporting on those remarks included others by unnamed sources complaining about anti-semitism on the left. The very next day, an opinion article followed up on Schumer’s comments, stating that the columnist knew better what really was driving anti-semitism on the left.
That one-two punch of a smear campaign has extended to Nancy Pelosi, former House Speaker, to make unsubstantiated, apparently unfounded charges that many pro-Palestinian demonstrators are supported by Russia, possibly serving as operatives. She went so far in that same interview on CNN to call for the FBI to investigate these dissidents. From descriptions, she yelled at one group of people protesting her at a California venue to “go back to China.” From an outside perspective, these look to be highly paranoid responses to an electoral threat. Pelosi is smart and not given, I’m sure, to paranoid outbursts, which is why it is remarkable that this is her level of response. Had she heard the news that 48% of Democrats consider what Israel is conducting in Gaza genocide? Is she concerned that this will spill over into the 2024 contest? That’s where I would place my wager.
Those two, Schumer and Pelosi, are Biden’s principals. Like counterpoints in music, they help provide structure and perspective to what the main line, the melody, emanating from the White House. And indeed, we see that Schumer and Pelosi have reinforced Biden’s predominant theme. There’s no deviation here.
Biden himself has done several things that have alternately alarmed and disappointed me. I am not here to campaign against Biden. At the same time, I cannot be blind to what I have noticed in the last several months, things that have become clear to me. He breathed life into the now-discredited rumor emanating out of Israel about forty beheaded babies. (He’s repeated that rumor, even after it had been shown to be without substance—that is to say, he knows it’s a lie but he chooses to keep the lie alive anyway.) He instructed his envoy at the United Nations Security Council to block all resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza.
He’s huffed and puffed and stood on one foot, but what he hasn’t done is restrict funds going to Israel. In fact, he has twice circumvented Congressional approval for funds, instead invoking emergency powers to empower Israel to restock munitions as it pulverizes Gaza into dust.
When South Africa submitted its application to the International Court of Justice, replete with 84 pages of substantiating its claims of genocide leveled against Israel, Biden’s White House dismissed that the case had any merit at all. When South Africa’s barristers presented an airtight case, that was the day the Biden White House decided to fire upon Houthi ships in the Red Sea.
The ICJ ruled against Israel, finding that genocide is plausibly occurring in Gaza as we speak. That same day, Biden’s White House escalated by finding more targets in the region. Then, the very next day, amidst unsubstantiated claims by Israel against a dozen UNRWA workers of assisting in terrorism, Biden’s White House led the multinational effort to defund UNRWA, the aid agency responsible for delivering the lion’s share of aid to the Palestinian people. This, just as Israel was ordered to enable humanitarian aid to stave off a famine that Israel itself has largely caused. Starvation as a method of warfare is against international law, but the U.S. is abetting Israel in utilizing this tool against everyday Palestinian civilians.
I’m not the only one who sees this.
A good deal of younger voters have noticed how utterly unethical and immoral all of this is, especially the fact that the U.S. keeps propping up Israel to enact its genocidal aims. The U.S. could withhold funding, which would be a rather insurmountable obstacle as far as Israel’s capability to carry out its plans, but just in the last few days Biden has urged Congress to “swiftly” pass more than 14 billion dollars in aid for Israel’s efforts. Younger voters see this Janus-faced behavior just as well as I do.
Instead of heeding these younger voices, though, what we’ve seen is an absolute crackdown on student demonstrations that plead for an end to the current round of hostilities. College campuses, which naturally would be nodes of activity for this sector of the left coalition, have been besieged by repressive forces. By breaking up networking among this vital area of progressive organizing, that disintegration absolutely promises to have ramifications come November.
I’m not even talking merely about disillusionment among young activists, though that too is important to keep alive in mind. I am talking about college campuses being laboratories of ideas, places where concepts come to fuse and combine into something greater. All of that potential will be lost due to this intention by establishment figures to squash and dismiss what they see as rabble-rousers. Talk about cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
But, of course, the people who have grown oppositional to Israel’s actions in Gaza are not limited to college students and activists. Regular people also feel this way (and that’s not restricted to the Democratic Party—according to a recent YouGov/The Economist poll, that includes approximately 20% of Republicans as well). This is a growing sentiment. Yet, instead of facing the fact of this dissatisfaction head-on, we see President Biden ducking crowds in Michigan, declining to publicize where his event was to be held so as to avoid the optics of protesters crashing his appearance in a must-win-yet-slipping-away state.
According to Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept, Biden’s team seems to be banking on the image that Biden has crafted so far, as someone who is privately speaking with Netanyahu and exhorting him to change course. That hasn’t amounted to a hill of beans, but it’s the optics that Biden is depending upon here to convince voters that “he’s done something”:
These sentiments, expressed as part of a barely concealed political spin campaign, are not being promoted because they are sincerely held reservations or concerns; rather they are the linchpin of a crass effort to scatter bread crumbs the White House can later point to, including during the 2024 election, in an effort to make it seem as though they were powerless observers who just wanted to help the Israelis defend themselves but that dastardly Netanyahu took it too far. The actual scandal, in this narrative, will not be the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza in a genocidal campaign armed by the White House, but how Bibi and his band of rogues, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, used the just war to push their “extremist” agendas.
Alternately, we have the politics of cynicism rearing its ugly head, as some Democratic strategists are beginning to communicate openly that voters have only a binary choice, so they will have no real option other than to vote for Biden if they want to keep the worse person out of the White House.
That’s coercion. That’s moral coercion, no matter how you dress that up. Voters should not be put in the position where they honestly have to weigh whether or not to cast a vote for someone actively supplying arms and funds to a regime dedicated to genocide. Voters should not be forced to choose between peace in the country and the peace of their own consciences.
You can’t vote against your conscience. That’s why so many people have begun to state that they might not even vote this year. That’s the last thing that Biden can afford. Does he not see this?
He can’t have it both ways. He can’t continue to support Israel and expect to glide to victory in November. These things are at cross-purposes.
That’s why I am hopeful (not expectant, but hopeful) that Biden will reconsider his candidacy. If he stepped aside, someone who could generate fresh grassroots energy could be put forth as the standard bearer, someone who has had nothing to do with these efforts to fund and aid an active, ongoing genocide, the worst crime that humans know. The rest of the year, Biden could devote himself to attempting to bring actual peace to that war-torn region without being pulled in two different directions, because he can’t phone this in on either side, either electorally or with respect to the devastation in Gaza. He can’t divide his attention and expect to win on both fronts.
Again, I don’t say these things to just be down on Joe Biden for no good reason. I have plenty of reasons why he has come to disappoint me. I voice my discontent because I know I’m not the only one. Yet, on my previous platform, I never would have said any of these things. Was that because I didn’t feel this? No. It’s because the atmosphere there is such that voicing these reservations is frowned upon to the point of being sanctioned by peers. Hell, there was an article I wrote back in the day where I criticized Wendy Davis and garnered punishment from peers for that. Wendy Davis. So I knew inherently that I could not step out of line on that particular platform when it came to speaking out about President Biden.
However, it’s important for folks who’ve come from over there to glance over here to know that what I represent is a barometer. I’m not a discontent, and I’m really not a radical. (Yes, I am a leftist; I couldn’t hide that even if I tried.) But I am not over here railing against Biden just to be a thorn in his side or to turn people against him. Indeed, I’m hoping that he will do right by the party and realize that he’s put the party into a clusterf-ck that it will not be able to escape by November.
One of the things I noted in my previous essay was that Biden himself had hinted pretty heavily that his time in office would be a single term. I’m not the only one who recalls that: the New York Times just had an article by Ezra Klein that referenced this very point.
“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Joe Biden said at a rally four years ago in Detroit, flanked by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw standing behind me. They are the future of this country.”
That was the line then. Biden was the old warrior strapping on his armor one last time. Once Donald Trump was vanquished, the new guard could take over. “If Biden is elected,” a Biden adviser told Politico in 2019, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years, and he won’t be running for re-election.”
As for being conflicted about what to do with one’s vote this November, just in the last week Amanpour & Company ran an interview with Reverend Frederick Haynes, one of more than a thousand Black pastors who’ve written an open letter urging Biden to change course in the Middle East and to take definite steps to end the U.S.’s involvement. The senior pastor of a large African-American church in Dallas, the reverend detailed some of the conversations his congregants are having with him and among each other. They too are conflicted.
“During forty years or so, I’ve seen a number of presidential election years. This is the earliest I have experienced an energized conversation about the election. . . . And I have to be honest, it’s, it’s—I won’t say it’s frightening, but it’s concerning, in light of the stubbornness as it’s perceived as it relates to the administration and their posture in the Middle East.
“So I’m hearing conversations, and there are those who are saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to vote, and I’m not crazy enough to vote the other side. I’m not going to vote for Mr. Biden, I’ll go third party.’ Well, my clapback is, well, they don’t have enough money to mount a serious threat, so a vote for a third party is a vote for who you really, really don’t want. And so that escalates the conversation: ‘Well, I’m still not going to vote for Mr. Biden.’
“And, you know, so it’s—I mean, the conversations are—how should I put it? — the temperature is a lot higher than it normally is, because there are those who are really, really concerned. I also have members who will say, ‘Well, it’s back to voting for the lesser of two evils.’ I hope Mr. Biden does not want to be considered the lesser of two evils. But that’s what many are saying.”
These sentiments are bubbling up to the surface. Biden needs to understand: without dedicated leftists, the heart of the grassroots; without students on college campuses; without large swaths of the minority vote, he doesn’t have a coalition. 2024 will be lost.
These moves by major Democratic figures mean to alienate a large portion of the base from the rest of the party. Make no mistake: the Democratic Party would be a shell of itself without its active and fiery grassroots. Biden must understand—he must—that what he direly needs this election season is enthusiasm. That’s exactly what he’s dampening.