The Democratic votes on the pair of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., were not enough to overcome universal opposition from Republicans.
Still, the votes represented a watershed moment in the party’s relationship with Israel and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel had continued to enjoy strong support from Democratic leaders, despite outrage from the base over the war on Gaza. Sanders said the votes signaled that party leaders are finally taking note.
“This is where the American people are. The polls are very clear: The overwhelming majority of American people do not want to continue to give weapons to Netanyahu and his horrific wars in the Mideast,” he said. “I think the Democrats have caught on to that. It took a little while, but they caught on to that. But Republicans, I think, are standing in opposition to millions of their own supporters.”
Both things can be true. The DNC could court progressives instead of centrists and “moderate republicans.” They don’t, and that’s on them. (But again, that’s no reason why leftists shouldn’t participate and try to steer the DNC towards the left).
At the same time, the US has a two-party, FPTP system. It’s fundamentally broken and we can’t expect it to give us perfect candidates. The electoral system itself needs to be drastically reformed before it can truly serve the people’s interests rather than the elites, and encourage quality candidates rather than bombastic mudslingers.
In the meantime, leftists shouldn’t abandon pragmatism. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and take a harm-reduction approach. Sometimes you can bargain for incremental progress, and absolutely should whenever the opportunity presents itself, but that’s not always the case.
But this idea that “I won’t settle for anything less than perfect” is really defeatist in addition to being idealistic, and not the mentality we should embrace. It leads to burnout and nihilism, not progress.
We have all interacted with tankies that act like that, but they were never going to vote anyways. For everyone else, not supporting a genocide is not asking for perfection. Characterizing it as such is only going to push those voters towards the tankies.
Yep. This guy could try to characterize people however he wants but it’s reductionist and silly. Harris didn’t get elected because she refused to stop supporting the genocide. Full stop. The heart of the issue is policy and refusal to represent the American people.