Looking ahead, a great need will be to overcome the ongoing culture of conformity that so badly damaged the Democratic Party in 2024 and helped Trump get back into the White House.

By Norman Solomon / Common Dreams

The saying “that’s history” is usually meant to be dismissive, but in politics the past casts a long shadow over the future. Now, two years after President Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the patterns that dominate the Democratic Party are damaging its prospects for the elections to come.

When Biden left CNN’s debate studio after an often-incoherent performance on the night of June 27, 2024, his re-election goose was cooked. With voting for president set to begin within three months, time was of the essence to replace Biden as the party’s presidential candidate. But excessive loyalty and outright denial kicked in immediately among top Democrats.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom was on MSNBC telling viewers that they didn’t see and hear what they’d just seen and heard. “I was very very proud that he was able to articulate the work that he has done,” Newsom said. He voiced transactional gratitude: “We have the opportunity to universally have the back of this president, who’s had our back. You don’t turn your back, you go home with the one that brought you to the dance.”

Such tap dancing was common among party operatives who stayed publicly stoic. “Joe Biden has always had our back,” Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said, “and we’re gonna have his.” Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina intoned, “Let’s just stay the course.”

Biden loyalist Heather Cox Richardson tried to reassure her several million readers via Substack, writing: “Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.”

Not all of the usual Biden boosters were disingenuous after the debate. Quite a few high-profile commentators were quick to say that Biden should drop out of the race. Among them, within hours, was the New York Times editorial board.

But five days passed before the first Democrat in Congress called for Biden to step aside. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas was alone among his colleagues when he said that Biden should “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times belatedly reported: “In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.”

It might seem clever to bait the president by casting him as submissive to Iran, but goading him to prove the opposite is just plain irresponsible.

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

The doubletalk coming from many congressional Democrats in response to President Trump’s peace initiative with Iran has been a political wonder to behold. While correctly declaring that Trump should not have started the war, they’ve routinely gone on to condemn the memorandum of understanding that offers a process to end it.

Instead of supporting peace efforts that could move the Middle East toward genuine diplomacy instead of nonstop warfare, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) opted for partisan sniping. He quickly decried the memorandum. “It is so bad,” he said, “that even Republicans who cringe and knock their knees before criticizing Trump have no choice but to say what a bad deal this is.”

Other Senate Democrats have gone over the top while taking aim at the set of sensible steps outlined in the memorandum of understanding.

Denouncing what he called “a disgraceful deal” and “unconditional surrender,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) vowed that “anything like this deal will be dead on arrival in the Senate.” Not to be outdone in throwing cold water on the peace scenario, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) slammed it as “a dangerous giveaway.” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said that it is “hard to imagine a more thorough capitulation.”

Even Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) — who has a long record of advocating for peace and disarmament — participated in this race to the militaristic bottom. He swiftly announced his flat-out opposition to the emerging Iran deal, tweeting, “Congress must review and reject this deal immediately.”

Markey is facing a challenge for his Senate seat in the Massachusetts Democratic primary from Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who claimed that the “terrible deal” was “basically a surrender document from Donald Trump to the supreme leader of Iran.” Not to be outdone with hyperbolic rhetoric, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) described the memorandum as “the most humiliating national security episode since the British burned the White House.”

For its part, the Democratic National Committee lost no time sending out a denunciation of the agreement as a “weak and shaky ‘deal’ with Iran.” The DNC approvingly quoted several Republican hardliners, in effect making common cause with some of the most hawkish Republican members of Congress. Such a tacit alliance could strangle the nascent peace effort in its cradle.

When Democrats claim that the memorandum of understanding amounts to surrender, they are playing with fire. Trump is already abruptly swerving between rational overtures for diplomatic dialogue and new bombastic threats. It might seem clever to bait the president by casting him as submissive to Iran, but goading him to prove the opposite is just plain irresponsible.

All of this is bad news for a world beset with the grim impacts of war, from carnage and refugee crises to spiking energy prices, trade disruption and environmental damage. It is also bad politics for the Democratic Party.

In US statecraft and warcraft, the president and Pete Hegseth are now saying previously quiet parts out loud

By Norman Solomon / The Guardian

The Department of Defense will soon officially become the Department of War, if Republicans get their way. Key committees in the House and Senate have approved the name change, and Donald Trump is eager to sign it into law. The rebranding is candid and ominous, offering a future of heightened zeal for killing, maiming and destroying.

Christened in 1949, the Department of Defense unified the military branches with the Pentagon as their headquarters. Since then, presidents have routinely promoted each new war as vital for the defense of the United States and its values, a pretense that has pervaded mainstream media and political discourse.

Belief in that pretense has now hit bottom, with US public support for this year’s war on Iran extraordinarily low from the outset. But Trump, defense secretary Pete Hegseth and their underlings are doing what they can to inculcate the idea that US warfare is not just superbly laudable but also inevitable. The unabashed fervor for catastrophic violence is fueling the momentum to replace “defense” with “war” department.

A switch to Department of War would undermine some of the deceptive marketing that has been central to the Department of Defense brand. Along the way, the new name could make it more difficult to perpetuate the assumption that US military actions spring from admirable motives.

Politicians and journalists drag the public down a misleading rabbit hole when they habitually refer to “defense spending” and a “defense budget”. Even antiwar activists do the same as they advocate for cutting the “defense” budget and thus – given the positive connotations of the word – undercut their position from the outset.

Of course, we can’t blame the sloppy and manipulative uses of the word “defense” for the illusions that drive public support for US foreign policy. But as George Orwell pointed out: “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

The plan to go with the Department of War is a symptom of what Martin Luther King Jr called “the madness of militarism”. Over time, the name change would further normalize such madness.

The Department of Defense has always functioned as the ultimate blunt instrument of a warfare state bent on leading the global arms race while frequently engaging in wars of aggression. Euphemisms like “defense”, in tandem with lofty rhetoric about seeking peace or spreading democracy, never spared anyone from the lethality of Pentagon firepower.

Boilerplate claims of peaceful intent have been automatic. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on 10 August 1964, greenlighting escalation of the Vietnam war that was to take an estimated 3.8 million lives, he declared: “Our one desire – our one determination – is that the people of south-east Asia be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their own way.”

The magazine writes: ‘Resisting Gen-Z socialism is therefore an urgent task.’ That urgency must outweigh any urgency of feeding hungry people

By Norman Solomon / The Guardian

A spectre is haunting Europe and America – the spectre of gen Z socialism.

That’s the urgent warning from the Economist in a new cover-story editorial, How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism. Alarmed by a youthful threat to the established order, the magazine is calling for heightened vigilance from defenders of private enterprise.

“Gen-Z socialism is a me-first doctrine,” says the editorial, unlike the selfless doctrine of capitalism. The young socialists have succumbed to “a zero-sum mindset, where a better outcome comes not from creating but from taking”.

Taking, we are to understand, is frowned upon in the capitalist system. And what better way to instill wisdom in gen Z than to set a good example by creating without taking?

Those with stakes in the Economist itself are cases in point.

The investment company Exor, controlled by one family with $38bn in net assets, has the biggest stake in the magazine. Meanwhile, the investor with more than a quarter interest in the Economist, the Canadian businessperson Stephen Smith, has a personal net worth of $6.9bn.

A new documentary issues an urgent warning about our dangerous nuclear delusions.

By Norman Solomon / The Nation

few days before Thanksgiving in 2021, Daniel Ellsberg looked directly into a camera lens and talked about nuclear preparations for annihilating almost everyone on Earth. “That is insane,” he said. “And you have to call it a kind of ordinary insanity, because it’s so widely shared.”

The new film An Ordinary Insanity condenses Ellsberg’s essential message into a half hour. It follows the acclaimed 2009 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Judith Ehrlich—who codirected that Oscar-nominated movie and is the director of An Ordinary Insanity—says that “as his understanding of nuclear war evolved, Dan confronted it for us and dug deep into its roots.”

By Norman Solomon / The Guardian

If Tom Steyer wins, that could send positive shock waves through the Democratic party

The next governor of deep-blue California will almost certainly be a Democrat. But what kind of Democrat?

The establishment favorite for overseeing the world’s fourth-largest economy, Xavier Becerra, has trod a traditional path. As governor, based on past performance, he would keep his party and the state on the rutted road of corporate-friendly liberalism.

Becerra’s top Democratic rival, Tom Steyer, is a threat to the status quo in a state where 7 million people live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are among the highest in the country. While Silicon Valley and AI boom, deprivation is widespread.

Steyer promises to upend corporate power and give California a sustained progressive jolt. If he wins, the country’s largest state party will probably go through a major ideological challenge. During the last 15 years, while Democrats have controlled the legislature and the governor’s office, they have avoided disrupting the status quo. State budgets have routinely failed to protect low-income Californians.

The California Democratic party is a corporate entity, as I saw up close for 10 years while on its state central committee. The party’s center of gravity is occupied by California’s two Democratic senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, mainstream liberals who rock few corporate boats and vote in harmony with the military-industrial complex that has massive footholds in the state.

Overall, Becerra – who went from Congress to serving as California’s attorney general and then Joe Biden’s secretary of health and human services – is central casting for the kind of political sensibilities that have dominated the state party, which internally boosts identity politics above (rhetoric aside) such considerations as economic justice, labor rights, public health, environmental protection or peace.

Scant policy differences exist between Becerra and outgoing governor Gavin Newsom. “While Steyer is vowing to raise taxes on corporations and his fellow billionaires, Becerra is skeptical of tax increases that could push businesses to leave California,” Politico reports. Preventing capital flight from the state is the same argument that Newsom has used in his vehement opposition to a ballot measure endorsed by Steyer for a one-time billionaire tax, while one study after another has shown such capital flight to be largely a myth.

Days before the 2 June primary, in which the top two vote-getters advance to the November general election, Steyer called his main Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, “a Maga extremist” and Becerra “a career politician backed by a deep roster of corporations and billionaires”. At the same time, Steyer – continuing to draw on his $2.4bn of wealth accumulated as a hedge fund operator – was on track to spend a record-shattering $200m on ads.

While many progressives have become enthusiastic about the prospect of a Governor Steyer, some say they can’t bring themselves to vote for a billionaire, especially one with a financial history that includes distasteful ventures. His much-criticized investment in private prisons has caused Steyer to respond with a tone of repentance.