I Agree With Mehdi Hasan
For years, Democrats have argued against voting for the Green Party on the grounds that they’re unlikely to win, and at the end of the day it’s better to organize under Democrats, who can at least be “pushed left,” unlike Republicans. Now, nearly four years into the Biden administration, at least some Democrats are arguing the opposite: There’s no point in voting Green, they say, because Democrats cannot be pushed.
This argument has been raised in response to significant numbers of voters, who say they want to punish the Biden/Harris administration for funding and enabling Isreal’s genocide in Gaza.
The democrats need to learn a lesson, they’ve argued. You can’t expect to win an election and prosecute a genocide. You have to pick: American voters or Israeli war criminals.
In response, left leaning pundits, like Eric Levitz at Vox, have defended voting for Harris on the grounds that, well, regardless of who wins, Democrats will move right anyway! What a time to be alive.
As evidence, Levitz points to the fact that despite the popularity of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, Harris is running to the right of Biden 2020 on the economy & on the border, is promising to include Republicans among her advisory council, and is actively campaigning with Dick Cheney -- the architect of the Iraq war.
And while Sanders’ presence in the 2020 race forced the rest of the field to at least feign interest in progressive policies, Harris’s commitment programs like Medicare for all and a Green New Deal didn’t even last through the primary.
Levitz is far from the only one making this argument. Former MSNBC pundit Mehdi Hasan recently did so as part of a monologue intended to pressure Muslim American voters to vote for Harris over Dr. Jill Stein who, with her Muslim VP pick, is polling significantly ahead of both Harris and Trump in Michigan among Muslim voters:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/muslim-americans-moving-jill-stein-potential-blow-kamala-harris-2024-09-19/
Mehdi just admits it: The Democrats don’t care about Muslims, or the rest of their coalition for that matter. Mehdi and I may have our differences, but I completely agree on that front. My follow up question to Mehdi is: Why are you pledging fidelity to a party that you admit would completely abandon Muslim Americans to the worst of Trump’s oppression out of some kind of electoral revenge? Why are you pushing Muslim voters to vote for someone who you described in that very monologue as one of two genocidal candidates?
What Mehdi and Eric are unwittingly doing here isn’t making the case against voting Green. They’re making the case for why America needs a new party.
Israel First
Medhi and Eric’s arguments both acknowledge that Democrats would rather lose to Trump than move left on Gaza. (Ironically, the Democratic Party seems to want voters to be more invested in beating Trump than they are.) Polls show that in three key swing states, Harris’s support would jump if she were to support an arms embargo.
In Pennsylvania, 36% of voters say they’d be more likely to vote for Harris if Biden secured a ceasefire compared to mere three percent who would be less likely to vote for her. Thirty-four percent would be more likely to vote for Harris if she supported a weapons embargo. The numbers are similar in Georgia and Arizona both.
Yet despite this, when asked about the possibility that she could lose due to Arab and Muslim American anger over Israel's America-funded genocide, Harris chose to respond by imposing a hierarchy of life - hundreds of Israelis over hundreds of thousands of Palestinians: “The first, most tragic story is October 7th,” she said":
https://x.com/yashar/status/1847736416148869164
Harris is refusing to even acknowledge this is a genocide, much less end it.
Yet what liberal pundits take from this is that voters should vote for Democrats anyway, and provide them with a mandate to throw working class people under the bus, and pursue foreign interventionism that may very well escalate into a civilization ending conflict.
Ironically, Mehdi argues that voting Green throws away your leverage. But that’s exactly backward. In a world where labor power has been significantly diminished in part because of the Democratic party’s choice to abandon labor, voting is one of the few clear points of leverage the average person, who’s not in a union, has at their disposal. Democrats ignore you precisely because you vote blue no matter who: You know the adage “a squeaky wheel gets the grease? How about “power concedes nothing without demand?” Your compliance is *guaranteed* to get you nothing.
Mehdi called green voters naive and simplistic, but it’s comically naive and simplistic of him to expect to have leverage over a party who he’d vote for even as they’re slaughtering his fellow Muslims.
But here's the more important point: Democrats like Mehdi assume that the sole purpose of a Green Party vote is to influence one of the two corporate parties. But in truth, the goal for many of us is to destroy the corporate duopoly by building a viable third party.
By getting 5% of the vote nationally, Greens could access millions in federal funding to compete with the Democratic Party, which has more billionaire donors than even billionaire Donald Trump, and as a consequence, is running on a billionaire agenda.
It’s The Billionaires, Stupid
This is the key point: Mehdi and Levitz are right that the democrats probably won't move left. They simply misidentify the reason why: It’s being paid not to.
The Democratic Party is completely captured by their donors. And the only way out is to abandon it.
Take for example the battle over whether FTC chair Lina Kahn will keep her post under Harris. Her appointment is considered to be one of the only progressive bright spots of the Biden administration. Relatedly, she’s come under attack from Harris’s billionaire donors, who don’t take kindly to antitrust law, which breaks their economic power over American consumers, being enforced.
(Just listen to billionaire Reid Hoffman respond to a question about whether his enormous donations to the Harris campaign will, quid pro quo, push Harris to fire Kahn.)
Gaza is the ultimate example of how open this corruption is: Democrats have spent the last four years crowing about how Trump poses an existential threat to our democracy, so why risk it all for Israel?
Here’s a clue: Defense manufacturer Raytheon spent over 18 million dollars on lobbying over the last two years alone.
Not to mention nearly 3 million in political contributions. Have any guesses as to who the top recipient of Raytheon’s largess is?
That’s right, Kamala Harris. No wonder she keeps vowing to have the “most lethal” military in the world. She’s being funded by the people who make the bombs. Just weeks after October 7th, Raytheon's CEO was celebrating the profits that would come along with increased U.S. aid to Israel.
Raytheon builds the missiles used in Israel's iron Dome defense system. Israel instigates a regional war, neighboring countries retaliate, and Israel writes another invoice for defense funding. Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary served on the board of Raytheon right up until he started to command our military.
The conflict of interest could not be more clear. It’s obvious why Democrats are structurally unable to change. You don’t have to tell me twice that the Democrats can’t be pushed.
But this is the point: The fact that Democrats will never move left because they’re paid to be right where they are exactly *why* the party should be abandoned.
DEM EXIT
The existence of the Democratic Party as a superficially better alternative in a two party system artificially lowers the expectations of the electorate. They hide behind “pragmatism” as a justification for betraying the public's interest -- even as mountains of evidence show that the moral choice is often the popular one.
There have been innumerable moments during the Biden administration alone that have exposed the lie that Democrats really want to do better, but perhaps none more so than Biden and Harris’s commitment to Israel’s genocide. This is why AOC’s choice to take the stage at the Democratic National Convention and tell voters that Kamala Harris was working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire was one of the most galling betrayals in modern political history.
As criminal justice advocate Alec Karakatsanis recently argued, after years of gaslighting from democrats,
“People become unable to distinguish between someone who supports lofty values but who is wisely playing 4D chess by pretending not to support them for years, versus someone who actually doesn’t support, say, universal health care, social security, peace, economic equality, etc. For years, this euphemism, pragmatism, has been weaponized to tell progressives: look, this powerful establishment politician agrees with your values but they are just being smart. Not only does this constrain the imagination for what is possible with organizing, but it’s often just a lie…
It’s like “when you keep running into someone at dinner parties and they keep saying they’d lOVE to get together with you but every time you text them they are busy. After a few decades of this you might want to consider other explanations.”
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