WAR MADE INVISIBLE
"A powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy."
– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
WAR MADE INVISIBLE
"A powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy."
– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
August 11, 2024 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Twenty years ago, one day in June 2005, I talked with an Iranian man who was selling underwear at the Tehran Grand Bazaar. People all over the world want peace, he said, but governments won’t let them have it.
I thought of that conversation on Saturday night after the U.S. government attacked nuclear sites in Iran. For many days before that, polling clearly showed that most Americans did not want the United States to attack Iran. “Only 16 percent of Americans think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran,” YouGov pollsters reported, while “60 percent say it should not and 24 percent are not sure.”
But as a practical matter, democracy has nothing to do with the chokehold that the warfare state has on the body politic. That reality has everything to do with why the United States can’t kick the war habit. And that’s why the profound quests for peace and genuine democracy are so tightly intertwined.
On Saturday evening, President Trump delivered a speech exuding might-makes-right thuggery on a global scale: “There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days.”
More than ever, the United States and Israel are overt partners in what the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 called “the supreme international crime” – “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.”
Naturally, the perpetrators of the supreme international crime are eager to festoon themselves in mutual praise. As Trump put it in his speech, “I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.” And Trump added: “I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they’ve done.”
A grisly and nefarious truth is that, in effect, the Israeli military functions as part of the overall U.S. military machine. The armed forces of each country have different command structures and sometimes have tactical disagreements. But in the Middle East, from Gaza and Iran to Lebanon and Syria, “cooperation” does not begin to describe how closely and with common purpose they work together.
More than 20 months into Israel’s U.S.-armed siege of Gaza, the genocide there continues as a joint American-Israeli project. It is a project that would have been literally impossible to sustain without the weapons and bombs that the U.S. government has continued to provide to the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces.
The same U.S.-Israel alliance that has been committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has also enabled the escalation of KKK-like terrorizing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people in the West Bank. The ethnocentric arrogance and racism involved in U.S. support for these crimes have been longstanding, and worsening along with the terrible events.
The same alliance is now also terrorizing Iranian society from the air.
As we have seen yet again in recent hours, the political and media culture of the United States is heavily inclined toward glorifying the use of the USA’s second-to-none destructive air power. As if above it all. The conceit of American exceptionalism assumes that “we” have the sanctified moral ground to proceed in the world with a basic de facto message powered by military might: Do as we say, not as we do.
While all this is going on, the word “surreal” is apt to be heard. But a much more fitting word is “real.”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” James Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Now, people in the United States have real-time historic opportunities – to do everything we can to take nonviolent action demanding that the U.S. government end its monstrous role in the Middle East.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
June 22, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
The huge decentralized turnout for No Kings Day has shown that grassroots power can be a major force against the momentum of the Trump regime. The protests were auspicious, with 5 million people participating in 2,100 gatherings nationwide. Activists are doing what the national Democratic Party leadership has failed to do – organize effectively and inspire mass action.
What we don’t need now is for newly activated people to catch a ride on plodding Democratic donkeys. The party’s top leadership and a large majority of its elected officials are just too conformist and traditional to creatively confront the magnitude of the unprecedented Trumpist threat to what remains of democracy in the United States.
Two key realities are contradictions that fully coexist in the real world: The Democratic Party, led by the likes of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, is in well-earned disrepute, having scant credibility even with most people who detest Trump. And yet, Democratic Party candidates will be the only way possible to end Republican control of Congress via midterm elections next year.
Few congressional Democrats have been able to articulate and fight for a truly progressive populist agenda – to directly challenge the pseudo-populism of MAGA Republicans. Instead, what implicitly comes across is a chorus of calls for a return to the incremental politics of the Biden era.
Awash in corporate cash and milquetoast rhetoric, most Democratic incumbents sound inauthentic while posturing as champions of the working class. For activists to simply cheer them on is hardly the best way to end GOP rule.
With top-ranking Democrats in Washington exuding mediocrity if not hackery, more and more progressive organizers are taking matters into their own creative hands, mindful that vocal reframing of public discourse can go a long way toward transforming public consciousness and the electoral terrain. The Occupy movement did it early in the 2010s. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns did it later in the decade. The Black Lives Matter movement did it several years ago.
In contrast, playing follow-the-leader by deferring to the party hierarchy is a trip on a political train to further disaster. The kind of leadership now exemplified by Schumer and Jeffries amounts to the kind of often-devious partisan maneuvering that dragged this country into its current abyss, after protracted mendacity claiming that President Biden was fit to run for re-election.
June 15, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Guardian
People with the power to change the direction of the Democratic party – the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) – met last Friday for the first time in five months.
They took no action.
The party’s bylaws make the executive committee “responsible for the conduct of the affairs of the Democratic party” between the meetings of the full committee, which isn’t scheduled to gather until late August. But taking responsibility wasn’t on the agenda. Instead, committee members and staff kept praising each other and committee leaders. Many talked about improving the party’s infrastructure and vowed to defeat Republicans. Deliberation, proposals and debate were completely absent. So was a sense of urgency.
After so many months without a meeting, you might think that the executive committee would have a lot to talk about. But it was scheduled to meet for only three hours, which turned out to be more than adequate for what anyone had to say. The committee adjourned after an hour and a half.
If obscurity was a goal for the national meeting, held in Little Rock, Arkansas, it was a success. The DNC’s website didn’t mention the meeting. Media coverage was close to nonexistent.
The committee leadership remains largely within a bubble insulated from the anger and disgust – toward the party – that is widespread among countless Democrats and other Americans. They want the Democratic party to really put up a fight, while its leaders mainly talk about putting up a fight. The Trump regime is setting basic structures of democracy on fire, while Democratic leaders don’t seem to be doing much more than wielding squirt guns.
A week ago, the new chair, Ken Martin, received a petition calling for an emergency meeting of the full 448-member committee. The petition, co-sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America and RootsAction (where I’m national director), includes more than 1,500 individual comments. They’re often filled with anguish and rage.
The California representative Ro Khanna has joined in the call for an emergency committee meeting. “I’ve supported it, I’ve spoken directly to our chair, Ken Martin, about it,” Khanna said last week. “Look, what’s going on is chilling … They’re banning all international students from coming to Harvard. I mean, think about that – all foreign students banned. They could do this in other universities. They have fired, or let go of, seven of the 18 directors at the NIH, totally dismantling future medical research in our country. They have dismantled the FDA, firing people who approve new drugs. They are systematically firing people at the FAA … They’re openly talking about defying United States supreme court orders, [JD] Vance has said just defy the orders. They’re calling universities ‘the enemy’. This is very chilling.”
Khanna then zeroed in on a crucial point that party leaders have so far refused to acknowledge, much less heed: “It’s not enough for us to have individual responses. I’m out there doing my town halls in red districts, Bernie [Sanders] is inspiring the country with his oligarchy tour, but they’re all individual efforts. We need concerted effort, we need a battle plan. And that’s what an emergency DNC meeting would do – it would acknowledge the stakes, and it would say ‘here is our plan’ – to make sure that they’re not degrading and chipping away at every institution of American democracy.”
Refusal to call an emergency meeting is a marker of deeper problems, with Democratic party leadership remaining in a political rut – spouting mildly liberal rhetoric while serving the interests of big donors, high-paid consultants and entrenched power brokers. Along the way, such business as usual is a gift that keeps on giving power to the pseudo-populist messages of Maga Republican politicians, who don’t have to go up against genuine progressive populism at election time. No wonder the Democratic party has lost most of the working-class vote.
June 08, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Midway through this month, Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries sent out a fundraising text saying that he “recently announced a 10-point plan to take on Trump and the Republicans.” But the plan was no more recent than early February, just two weeks after President Trump’s inauguration. It’s hardly reassuring that the House minority leader cited a 100-day-old memo as his strategy for countering the administration’s countless moves since then to dismantle entire government agencies, destroy life-saving programs and assault a wide range of civil liberties.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is so unpopular with the Democratic base that a speaking tour for his new book – abruptly “postponed” just before it was set to begin more than two months ago – still hasn’t been rescheduled. The eruption of anger at his support for Trump’s spending bill in mid-March made Schumer realize that being confronted by irate Democrats in deep-blue states wouldn’t make for good photo ops.
Last month, a Gallup poll measured public confidence in the Democratic congressional leadership at just 25 percent, a steep drop of nine points since 2023 and now at an all-time low. Much of the disaffection comes from habitual Democratic voters who see the party’s leaders as slow-moving and timid while the Trump administration continues with its rampage against democratic structures.
Away from the Capitol, the party’s governing body – the Democratic National Committee – is far from dynamic or nimble. Maintaining its twice-a-year timetable, the 448-member DNC isn’t scheduled to meet until late August.
In the meantime, the DNC’s executive committee is set to gather in Little Rock, Arkansas on Friday for its first meeting since December. That meeting is scheduled to last three hours.
The DNC’s bylaws say that the executive committee “shall be responsible for the conduct of the affairs of the Democratic Party in the interim between the meetings of the full (Democratic National) Committee.” But the pace of being “responsible” is unhurried to the point of political malpractice.
The extraordinary national crisis is made even more severe to the extent that top Democrats do not acknowledge its magnitude. Four months into his job as the DNC’s chair, Ken Martin has yet to show that the DNC is truly operating in real time while the country faces an unprecedented threat to what’s left of democracy. His power to call an emergency meeting of the full DNC remains unused.
This week, Martin received a petition co-sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America and RootsAction, urging the DNC to “convene an emergency meeting of all its members – fully open to the public – as soon as possible.” The petition adds that “the predatory, extreme and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party.” Among the 7,000 signers were more than 1,500 people who wrote individual comments (often angrily) imploring the DNC to finally swing into suitable action.
As several dozen top DNC officials fly into Little Rock’s Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, they will bring with them the power to begin shifting the direction of the Democratic Party, but the chances of a positive course correction look meager. The DNC’s current executive committee is a bastion of the party establishment, unlikely to signal to grassroots Democrats and the general public that the party is no longer locked into automatic pilot.
The pattern is a sort of repetition compulsion, afflicting Democratic movers and shakers along with the party as an institution. While many journalists focus on the ages of congressional leaders, the lopsided power held by Democrats in their 70s and 80s is merely a marker for a deeper problem. Their approaches are rooted in the past and are now withering on the political vine.
Even with the rare meeting of the DNC’s executive committee just a couple of days away, the official Democratic Party website was still offering no information about it. The apparent preference is to keep us in the dark.
But anyone can sign up to watch livestream coverage from Progressive Hub, during a four-hour feed that will begin at 12:30 pm Eastern time on Friday. Along with excerpts from the executive committee meeting as it happens, the coverage will include analysis from my RootsAction colleagues Sam Rosenthal, who’ll be inside the meeting room in Little Rock, and former Democratic nominee for Buffalo mayor India Walton. The livestream will also feature an interview with Congressman Ro Khanna, who has endorsed the call for an emergency meeting of the full DNC.
Right now, the Democratic Party appears to be stuck between Little Rock and a hard place. The only real possibilities for major improvement will come from progressives who make demands and organize to back them up with grassroots power.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
May 27, 2025 | Permalink
By Richard Eskow and Norman Solomon
RICHARD ESKOW: In a recent column you asked, “What’s preventing a united front against the Trump regime?” You say, “America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime.” I get the “wrecking ball,” but why do we need a united front? What’s wrong with a multi-pronged approach from various groups and actors?
NORMAN SOLOMON: There’s a serious lack of coordination at the political level. The Democratic Party is a constellation of 50-plus state and other local parties, and there are many organizations which are—or should be—independent of the party.
To the extent there is any governing body, it's the Democratic National Committee. The DNC should provide leadership at times like these. But there’s still no leadership, several months into a second Trump regime that’s much worse than the first. There's energy to oppose, but it’s uncoordinated.
Rethinking the Left and the Party
ESKOW: Here’s a challenge. For too long, the American left looked to the Democratic Party for leadership and guidance instead of considering it an instrument that’s available to movements. I think a lot of people assume that “a united front” against Trump means making the left fall in line yet again behind the institutional party’s corporate, so-called “centrist” politicians.
SOLOMON: It’s dubious, and not very auspicious, to follow “leadership” that isn’t leading. I think your word “instrument” is an excellent one. The left should consider the Democratic Party a tool that not only can be used but, under this electoral system, must be used to stop the right and advance progressive causes. No other party can win federal elections and stop what has become a neo-fascist Republican Party.
Most of the people who serve as administrative or elected Democrats consider social movements subordinate to their electoral work. They see progressives—the grassroots activists, the ones with deep concerns, who do research, who communicate, who organize in local communities, who provide hope—as fuel for them to win elections.
That's backward. Campaigns and candidates should be subordinated to progressive social movements, not the other way around. That's how we win. Change doesn't come from the top. The great advances—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, antiwar, gay rights, civil rights, women's rights, reproductive freedom—came from people who weren’t held into check by the party apparatus. They came from the grassroots, the social movements.
Big Money, Big Problems
ESKOW: Progressives inside the party have told me how complicated it is to work within the party. Each state party has its own rules and its own representatives to the DNC, and there are also other appointed members and other centers of power. They’re up against complex machinery whenever they try to change anything.
Worse, the party allows dark money in its primaries and is heavily reliant on it in general elections. Party operatives—thousands of them, in think tanks and consulting firms and so on—depend on that money for their livelihood.
Kamala Harris raised more money than perhaps any candidate in history. I think that money actually hurt her. It dissuaded her from saying the things she needed to say to win, whether she meant them or not.
How can a popular front incorporate and influence a party that’s dominated by big donors? Isn't that the elephant in the room?
SOLOMON: Well, certainly the money is huge, but we want to be realistic without being defeatists. With the state supreme court election in Wisconsin a few weeks ago, Elon Musk literally tried to buy the election and failed. That was a victory against the tide of big money. But yes, money typically correlates with victory.
I attended the DNC’s so-called Unity Reform Commission meetings in 2017, when the power of the Bernie Sanders forces was at high ebb. The party’s centrists, corporatists, and militarists felt it necessary to give the left some seats on that commission. But they kept a voting majority, which they used to kill some important reforms for transparency and financial accountability.
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who was then the Clinton-aligned chair, helped defeat those proposals. And what happened to her? She became deputy chief of staff in the Biden White House, then effectively ran Biden’s reelection campaign. And, after Biden belatedly pulled out and left chaos behind, suddenly Jen O’Malley Dillon was running the Harris campaign.
As you said, a lot of money was sloshing around. It’s hard to spend a billion dollars-plus in a few months and not have a lot of pockets being lined. Lots of it goes to consultants who broker deals, hire other consultants, and arrange TV advertising. They love advertising because it's easy and you don't have to relate to people. (Note: Many consultants are also paid a percentage of each ad buy.)
Meanwhile, we heard afterwards that African-American organizers in places like Philadelphia had been asking Where's our help? Where are our resources?—while TV stations in their states were filled with Harris ads.
That’s not to villainize Jen O’Malley Dillon. She's just an example. Certain people will always win. They’ll always make tons of money, no matter what happens on Election Day.
Continue reading "How to Fight Trump Without Caving to Corporatists" »
May 18, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Nation
Original Sin is out after several months of drumroll, setting out to be the definitive book about—in the words of its subtitle—President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. The publisher has trumpeted a media report that it is “the book Biden allies fear the most,” promising revelations while keeping the contents so tightly under wraps that a nondisclosure agreement was required to get an advance copy. (The New York Times broke the embargo today.)
Written by CNN lead anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, the book recounts some notable moments, but what it mainly offers is a slow burn. The facts and anecdotes have cumulative impact, showing how intently the Biden family, top White House aides, and reelection strategists worked hard to conceal the president’s worsening cognitive state. They dutifully lied to journalists and strove to gaslight the public. While Original Sin doesn’t provide some single sensational reveal, it sheds light on official deception.
Biden relied on senior adviser Mike Donilon and counselor Steve Ricchetti, a former corporate lobbyist who chaired Biden’s 2020 campaign. Their systematic denial of the president’s impairment was pivotal in wrecking prospects that a viable 2024 Democratic presidential nominee would have enough time to gather momentum against Donald Trump.
The fear-driven conformity of party loyalists festered in both the White House and Congress, while Biden’s approval rating remained stuck at around 40 percent during the two and a half years that began in January 2022. “No Democrats in the White House or leaders on Capitol Hill raised any doubts, either privately with the president or publicly, about Biden’s second run,” Original Sin reports, adding: “Democrats knew that the White House watched closely for any signs of dissent. They kept quiet and went along.”
The silence continued with almost no exceptions while Biden became more frail and disoriented. At the White House Christmas party for members of Congress in December 2023, the authors write, longtime Washington Representative Adam Smith “was stunned by what he encountered. Interacting with guests and standing in the photo line, Biden seemed completely out of it.” Four months later, when cohosts of the Pod Save America podcast visited Biden at the White House, “He was incoherent. His stories were meandering and confusing.”
But the Democratic leadership was bent on a deceptive course. Unmentioned in the book is what the party’s Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, said from a podium on Capitol Hill in mid-February 2024: “I talk to President Biden regularly, sometimes several times in a week, or usually several times in a week. His mental acuity is great, it’s fine, it’s as good as it’s been over the years.… He’s fine. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.”
(Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press in early 2025, Schumer was shown a video clip of that 11-month-old statement before being asked, “What do you say to Americans who feel as though you and other top Democrats misled them about President Biden’s mental acuity?” Schumer replied, “Look, we didn’t,” and then instantly changed the subject.)
May 13, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Guardian
The last helicopter liftoff from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon on 30 April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam war. Fifty years later, mythology about US media coverage of the war is locked into the faulty premise that news outlets were pivotal in causing Americans to turn against it. Some say that mainstream media undermined a noble war effort, while others say that coverage alerted the public to realities of an unjust war. Both assertions are wrong.
Scapegoating the media fits neatly into “stab in the back” theories of Americans who can’t stand the fact that their country lost a war to impoverished Vietnamese fighters. And praising the media as catalysts for the nation’s roused conscience gives undue credit while fostering illusions about mainstream news coverage of America’s wars.
Today, the bulk of the populace remains nearly clueless about what the Pentagon is up to on several continents. Fleeting news reports about US missile strikes on various countries – including Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Somalia since last year – habitually rely on official sources. In addition, the Costs of War project at Brown University reports, the United States has “military operations and programs run out of civilian departments for military purposes in at least 78 countries”.
When US military action is involved, the reporting routinely amounts to stenographic services for the White House and Pentagon. The pattern for the Vietnam war was set in early August 1964, when American media credulously reported claims from President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, that North Vietnamese gunboats had made “unprovoked” attacks on two US Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The official narrative, filled with deception, led Congress to quickly pass (with only two dissenting votes) the Tonkin Gulf resolution – providing an unconditional green light for war on Vietnam. Reporting absolute lies as absolute truths, the country’s most esteemed news media cleared the way for escalation of a war that took upward of 3 million lives in Vietnam.
Typical coverage came from the Washington Post, which ran this banner headline on 5 August 1964, two days before passage of the war resolution: “American Planes Hit North Vietnam After 2nd Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression.” Twenty-four years later, I inquired about whether the newspaper had ever retracted its bogus reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin events. When I reached the reporter who had written much of the Post’s political coverage of those events, the former chief diplomatic correspondent Murrey Marder, he said: “I can assure you that there was never any retraction.”
When I asked why not, Marder’s voice was tinged with sorrow. “If you were making a retraction,” he said, “you’d have to make a retraction of virtually everyone’s entire coverage of the Vietnam war.” He added: “If the American press had been doing its job and the Congress had been doing its job, we would never have been involved.”
May 01, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest antiwar protest so far. An early edition of the next day’s New York Times arrived on newsstands with a big headline at the top of the front page that said “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War.” I heard someone say, “Johnson will have to listen to us now.”
But President Lyndon Johnson dashed the hopes of those who marched from Central Park to the United Nations that day (with an actual turnout later estimated at 400,000). He kept escalating the war in Vietnam, while secretly also bombing Laos and Cambodia.
During the years that followed, antiwar demonstrations grew in thousands of communities across the United States. The decentralized Moratorium Day events on October 15, 1969 drew upward of 2 million people. But all forms of protest fell on deaf official ears. A song by the folksinger Donovan, recorded midway through the decade, became more accurate and powerful with each passing year: “The War Drags On.”
As the war continued, so did the fading of trust in the wisdom and morality of Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Gallup polls gauged the steep credibility drop. In 1965, just 24 percent of Americans said involvement in the Vietnam War had been a mistake. By the spring of 1971, the figure was 61 percent.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam gradually diminished from the peak of 536,100 in 1968, but ground operations and massive U.S. bombing persisted until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in late January 1973. American forces withdrew from Vietnam, but the war went on with U.S. support for 27 more months, until – on April 30, 1975 – the final helicopter liftoff from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon signaled that the Vietnam War was indeed over.
By then, most Americans were majorly disillusioned. Optimism that public opinion would sway their government’s leaders on matters of war and peace had been steadily crushed while carnage in Southeast Asia continued. To many citizens, democracy had failed – and the failure seemed especially acute to students, whose views on the war had evolved way ahead of overall opinion.
At the end of the 1960s, Gallup found “significantly more opposition to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies” among students at public and private colleges than in “a parallel survey of the U.S. general public: 44 percent vs. 25 percent, respectively.” The same poll “showed 69 percent of students in favor of slowing down or halting the fighting in Vietnam, while only 20 percent favored escalation. This was a sharp change from 1967, when more students favored escalation (49 percent) than de-escalation (35 percent).”
Six decades later, it took much less time for young Americans to turn decisively against their government’s key role of arming Israel’s war on Gaza. By a wide margin, continuous huge shipments of weapons to the Israeli military swiftly convinced most young adults that the U.S. government was complicit in a relentless siege taking the lives of Palestinian civilians on a large scale.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in June 2024 found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61-39 percent. Opposition to the arms shipments was even higher among young people. For adults under age 30, the ratio was 77-23.
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington. No civics textbook could prepare students for the realities of power that kept the nation’s war machine on a rampage, taking several million lives in Southeast Asia or supplying weapons making possible genocide in Gaza.
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Trump now, President Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without letup.
No campaign-trail platitudes about caring and joy could make up for a lack of decency. By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents – Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris – damaged their efforts to win the White House.
A pair of exchanges on network television, 56 years apart, are eerily similar.
In August 1968, appearing on the NBC program Meet the Press, Humphrey was asked: “On what points, if any, do you disagree with the Vietnam policies of President Johnson?”
“I think that the policies that the president has pursued are basically sound,” Humphrey replied.
In October 2024, appearing on the ABC program The View, Harris was asked: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
Young people’s votes for Harris last fall were just 54 percent, compared to 60 percent that they provided to Biden four years earlier.
Many young eyes recognized the war policy positions of Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris as immoral. Their decisions to stay on a war train clashed with youthful idealism. And while hardboiled political strategists opted to discount such idealism as beside the electoral point, the consequences have been truly tragic – and largely foreseeable.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
April 29, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch
America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime. While outraged opposition has been visible and vocal, it remains a far cry from developing a capacity to protect what’s left of democracy in the United States.
With the administration in its fourth month, the magnitude of the damage underway is virtually impossible for any individual to fully grasp. But none of us need a complete picture to understand that the federal government is now in the clutches of massively cruel and antidemocratic forces that have no intention of letting go.
Donald Trump’s second presidential term has already given vast power to the most virulent aspects of the nation’s far-right political culture. Its flagrant goals include serving oligarchy, dismantling civil liberties, and wielding government as a weapon against academic freedom, civil rights, economic security, environmental protection, public health, workers’ rights, and so much more.
The nonstop Trumpist assaults mean that ongoing noncooperation and active resistance will be essential. This is no time for what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the paralysis of analysis.” Yet the past hugely matters. Repetition compulsions within the Democratic Party, including among self-described liberals and progressives, unwittingly smoothed the path for Trump’s return to power. Many of the same patterns, with undue deference to party leaders and their narrow perspectives, are now hampering the potential to create real leverage against MAGA madness.
“Fiscal Conservatism and Social Liberalism”
Today, more than three decades after the “New Democrats” triumphed when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, an observation by Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowen days after that victory is still worth pondering: “Fiscal conservatism and social liberalism proved to be an effective campaign formula.” While campaigning with a call for moderate public investment, Clinton offered enough assurances to business elites to gain much of their support. Once elected, he quickly filled his economic team with corporate lawyers, business-friendly politicians, lobbyists, and fixers on loan from Wall Street boardrooms.
That Democratic formula proved to be a winning one — for Republicans. Two years after Clinton became president, the GOP gained control of both the House and Senate. Republicans maintained a House majority for the next 12 years and a Senate majority for 10 of them.
A similar pattern set in after the next Democrat moved into the White House. Taking office in January 2009 amid the Great Recession, Barack Obama continued with predecessor George W. Bush’s “practice of bailing out the bankers while ignoring the anguish their toxic mortgage packages caused the rest of us,” as journalist Robert Scheer pointed out. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, journalist David Dayen wrote, he had enabled “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million U.S. homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century.”
Two years into Obama’s presidency, his party lost the House and didn’t regain it for eight years. When he won reelection in 2012, Republicans captured the Senate and kept control of it throughout his second term.
During Obama’s eight years as president, the Democrats also lost upward of 900 seats in state legislatures. Along the way, they lost control of 30 legislative chambers, while the Republican share of seats went from 44% to 56%. So GOP state legislators were well-positioned to gerrymander electoral districts to their liking after the 2020 census, making it possible for Republicans to just barely (but powerfully) gain and then retain their stranglehold on the House of Representatives after the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024 ran for president while sticking to updated versions of “fiscal conservatism, social liberalism,” festooning their campaigns with the usual trappings of ultra-mild populist rhetoric. Much of the media establishment approved, as they checked the standard Democratic boxes. But opting to avoid genuine progressive populism on the campaign trail meant enabling Trump to pose as a better choice for the economic interests of the working class.
Mutual Abandonment
The party’s orientation prevents its presidential nominees from making a credible pitch to be champions of working people. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted immediately after the 2024 election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
But there’s little evidence that the party leadership wants significant change, beyond putting themselves back in power. Midway through April, the homepage of the Democratic Party seemed like a snapshot of an institution still disconnected from the angst and anger of the electorate. A pop-up that instantly obscured all else on the screen featured a drawing of a snarling Donald Trump next to the headline: “We’re SUING Trump over two illegal executive orders.” Underneath, the featured message proclaimed: “We’re rolling up our sleeves and organizing for a brighter, more equal future. Together, we will elect Democrats up and down the ballot.” A schedule of town halls in dozens of regions was nice enough, but a true sense of urgency, let alone emergency, was notably lacking.
Overall, the party seems stuck in the mud of the past, still largely mired in the Joe Biden era and wary of opening the door too wide for the more progressive grassroots base that provides millions of small donations and volunteers to get out the vote (as long as they’re genuinely inspired to do so). President Biden’s unspeakably tragic refusal to forego running for reelection until far too late was enabled by top-to-bottom party dynamics and a follow-the-leader conformity that are still all too real.
Continue reading "What’s Preventing a United Front Against the Trump Regime?" »
April 28, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Guardian
Joe Biden’s insistence on running for re-election was certainly disastrous. It kept credible contenders out of the Democratic presidential primaries and prevented the selection of a nominee who had gained momentum in the winnowing process. Even after his stunningly feeble debate performance on 27 June last year, Biden took several weeks before finally opting out of the race. That left Kamala Harris a mere 107 days between the launch of her campaign and election day.
Ample evidence shows that the Biden team was riddled with obstinate denial and misrepresentation aimed at the public. But tales of tragic egomania in high places can take us only so far. What’s essential is to scrutinize how – and why – the Democratic party, its leaders and its prominent supporters enabled Biden and his inner circle to get away with such momentous stonewalling for so long.
Democrats in Congress, with few exceptions, refused to jump off the Biden 2024 bandwagon until the debate disaster. Similar enabling also came from state party chairs and Democratic governors. Likewise, a wide range of party-allied organizations toed the Biden party line. Meanwhile, many activists took on the role of spectators, if not cheerleaders for another Biden campaign, in an unfolding tragedy of vast proportions.
A common denominator was fear. Fear of being accused of disloyalty to the Democratic president. Fear of being ostracized by fellow Democrats or denounced by anti-Trump commentators. Fear of being accused of weakening the party by pointing out Biden’s evident frailty. Fear of damaging personal ambitions or future access to halls of power. And on and on.
The silence and compliance helped Biden to coast toward renomination. Yet by midway through his term, polling numbers and increasingly shaky public behavior were clear signals that he would be a weak candidate. Support from working-class voters, the young, and people of color drastically eroded.
Notably, leading progressives in Congress assisted Biden in fending off a serious primary challenge. Representative Pramila Jayapal, then chair of the congressional Progressive caucus, made a very early endorsement. “I never thought I would say this, but I believe he should run for another term and finish this agenda we laid out,” she said in November 2022. Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden in April 2023. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed him three months later.
Polls routinely showed that most Democratic voters did not want Biden to run again. But party leaders were on autopilot, choosing discretion over valor, benefitting their relations with the White House but undermining the party’s prospects of retaining it – as is now painfully and undeniably clear.
April 04, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Hill
Former President Joe Biden “has told some Democratic leaders he’ll raise funds, campaign and do anything else necessary for Democrats to recover lost ground,” NBC News reported last week. Some prominent party supporters reacted with skepticism while insisting on anonymity, but Jane Kleeb, a new vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, voiced open enthusiasm.
“If you were to call any state party chair and ask them if they wanted Joe Biden to be a keynote speaker for their annual dinner, the answer would be yes,” Kleeb said. “He is beloved by the party and beloved by the voters.”
Kleeb is a rising star on the national stage, after many years as the innovative head of the Nebraska Democratic Party. In February, state party chairs elected her to a four-year term as president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, replacing Ken Martin when he became the new DNC chair. The two are close allies.
Does Kleeb truly believe that all state Democratic chairs would want Biden to keynote their annual dinner? The claim seems dubious. Her description of Biden as “beloved by the voters” is quite a stretch; Gallup polls show that Biden’s approval remained in the vicinity of 40 percent during the last three years of his presidency.
As the Democratic Party struggles to regroup after its disastrous 2024 election, what is needed from leadership is candor, not more politician-speak that touts Biden as some kind of guiding light for the future. Kleeb’s depiction of him is disconnected from the outlooks of grassroots Democrats.
Today, few Democrats agree that Biden is a fitting exemplar for their party. This month, when a CNN poll asked Democratic voters “which one person best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party,” only 1 percent chose Biden.
Pretending otherwise is politically foolish. Biden might appeal to the more hidebound party leaders, but it’s a whole different story for the voters that the party needs to mobilize. The reflex to do implausible public relations has been chronic among Democratic leaders, often undermining their credibility and damaging the party’s electoral prospects.
April 04, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while their silence and denials scream out complicity.
In a New York Times interview last weekend, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put deep moral evasion on display. Among the “slogans” that are used when criticizing Israel, he said, “The one that bothers me the most is genocide. Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”
Schumer is wrong. The international Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” -- with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
Such actions by Israel have been accompanied by clear evidence of genocidal intent -- underscored by hundreds of statements by Israeli leaders and policy shapers. Scarcely three months into the Israeli war on Gaza, scholars Raz Segal and Penny Green pointed out, a database compiled by the Law for Palestine human rights organization “meticulously documents and collates 500 statements that embody the Israeli state’s intention to commit genocide and incitement to genocide since October 7, 2023.”
Those statements “by people with command authority -- state leaders, war cabinet ministers and senior army officers -- and by other politicians, army officers, journalists and public figures reveal the widespread commitment in Israel to the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”
Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.” Now, Israel’s horrendous crusade to destroy Palestinian people in Gaza -- using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians -- has resumed after a two-month ceasefire.
On Tuesday, children were among the more than 400 people killed by Israeli airstrikes, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “this is only the beginning.”
It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress willing to criticize the pivotal U.S. backing for Israel’s methodical killing of civilians. It’s much easier to find GOP lawmakers who sound bloodthirsty.
A growing number of congressional Democrats -- still way too few -- have expressed opposition. In mid-November, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted against offensive arms sales to Israel. But in reality, precious few Democratic legislators really pushed to impede such weapons shipments until after last November’s election. Deference to President Biden was the norm as he actively enabled the genocide to continue.
This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.
For “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, the largest and most influential liberal Zionist organization in the United States, evasions have remained along with expressions of anguish. On Tuesday the group’s founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, issued a statement decrying “the decision by Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war” and calling for use of “all possible leverage to pressure each side to restore the ceasefire.” But, as always, J Street did not call for the U.S. government to stop providing the weapons that make the horrific war possible.
That’s where genocide denial comes in. For J Street, as for members of Congress who’ve kept voting to enable the carnage with the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline, support for that pipeline requires pretending that genocide isn’t really happening.
While writing an article for The Nation (“Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?”), I combed through 132 news releases from J Street between early October 2023 and the start of the now-broken ceasefire in late January of this year. I found that on the subject of whether Israel was committing genocide, J Street “aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.”
J Street still maintains the position that it took last May, when the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.
It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide. That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
March 18, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Nation
Since its founding in 2008, the advocacy group J Street has had a consistent motto: “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy.” In practice, this has meant resolute backing for a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, and consistent criticism of the extremist policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Along the way, J Street has remained closely allied with the Democratic Party, raising almost $15 million for Democratic candidates during the last election cycle and taking credit as the “largest Jewish organizational fundraiser for Kamala Harris.”
But J Street’s importance goes far beyond the group’s fundraising prowess. Its status as an unabashedly liberal Zionist group—in contrast with the ever-more-hawkish AIPAC—has allowed it to play a unique political role on Capitol Hill. Whether accused of being insufficiently or excessively loyal to Israel, Democratic lawmakers can use their alignment with J Street as a handy shield. Notably, during President Obama’s second term, J Street helped push the Iran nuclear deal through Congress despite intense opposition from AIPAC and other hawks. The White House official in charge of gaining approval for the agreement, Ben Rhodes, later recalled that “J Street was one of the most effective organizations that supported the Iran deal because they had a large grassroots network and growing clout on the Hill.”
But, as with liberal Zionism itself, the flaws in J Street’s approach have become more and more apparent over the years. The group rarely used its aforementioned clout to raise critical questions about recurring Israeli assaults on Gaza. And the relentless brutality of the Israeli assault on Gaza that began in response to the October 7 Hamas attack left J Street floundering for a coherent message.
Routinely, while calling for the release of the Israeli hostages, the organization also expressed concern about the deaths and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But none of J Street’s 132 news releases between October 7 and the start of the ceasefire in late January 2025 called for an end to shipments of the US bombs and weapons that were killing those civilians while enforcing Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war—a glaring omission for a group that declares itself to be “pro-peace.” It was as if J Street thought that vague humanistic pleas could paper over these gaping cracks in its stance.
However, J Street felt comfortable taking a firm line on the question of whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Here, it aligned itself completely with the position of the US and Israeli governments. In mid-January 2024, when oral arguments ended at the International Court of Justice in the case brought by South Africa that charged the Israeli government with violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza, a news release declared that “J Street rejects the allegation of genocide against the State of Israel.” Four months later, on May 24, J Street responded quickly when the ICJ ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.
That statement from J Street came ten days after the publication of an article by Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch, who wrote: “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” Many other experts, including Omer Bartov, the Israeli-American professor seen as the world’s leading scholar of genocide, agreed. But this was a bridge too far for J Street.
In a statement last December, J Street’s founder and president Jeremy Ben-Ami harked back to what he described as Israel’s “promise as a proud, just, peaceful democratic homeland not just for the Jewish people, but for all who live there.” He called for following “the path that allows Israel to remain true to its founding values of pluralism, equality, freedom and justice, and a commitment to liberal democracy.” Such messages are not only conveniently unmoored from history (Palestinians would, to say the least, likely take issue with the idea that Israel was ever conceived as a homeland for them). They are also, crucially, in sync with denial about the present-day realities of Israel, a state that grows more committed to apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing with each passing year.
March 01, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch
Donald Trump’s power has thrived on the economics, politics, and culture of war. The runaway militarism of the last quarter-century was a crucial factor in making President Trump possible, even if it goes virtually unmentioned in mainstream media and political discourse. That silence is particularly notable among Democratic leaders, who have routinely joined in bipartisan messaging to boost the warfare state that fueled the rise of Trumpism.
Trump first ran for president nearly a decade and a half after the “Global War on Terror” began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The crusade’s allure had worn off. The national mood was markedly different than in the era when President George W. Bush insisted that “our responsibility” was to “rid the world of evil.”
Working-class Americans had more modest goals for their government. Distress festered as income inequality widened and economic hardships worsened, while federal spending on war, the Pentagon budget, and the “national security” state continued to zoom upward. Even though the domestic effects of protracted warfare were proving to be enormous, multilayered, and deeply alienating, elites in Washington scarcely seemed to notice.
Donald Trump, however, did notice.
Pundits were shocked in 2015 when Trump mocked the war record of Republican Senator John McCain. The usual partisan paradigms were further upended during the 2016 presidential campaign when Trump denounced his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “trigger happy.” He had a point. McCain, Clinton, and their cohort weren’t tired of U.S. warfare — in fact, they kept glorifying it — but many in non-affluent communities had grown sick of its stateside consequences.
Repeated deployments of Americans to war zones had taken their toll. The physical and emotional wounds of returning troops were widespread. And while politicians were fond of waxing eloquent about “the fallen,” the continual massive spending for war and preparations for more of it depleted badly needed resources at home.
Status-Quo Militarism
President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represented the status quo that Trump ran against and defeated. Like them, he was completely insulated from the harsh boomerang effects of the warfare state. Unlike them, he sensed how to effectively exploit the discontent and anger it was causing.
Obama was not clueless. He acknowledged some downsides to endless war in a much-praised speech during his second term in office. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he affirmed at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”
New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer hailed that instance of presidential oratory in a piece touting Obama’s “anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society.” But such concerns were fleeting at the White House, while sparking little interest from mainstream journalists. Perpetual war had become wallpaper in the media echo chamber.
Continue reading "How the Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy" »
March 01, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon
The Capitol’s phone lines have been overwhelmed this month, and some Democrats are complaining about the deluge of calls from voters who implore them to fight the Trump administration. Too often the responses to the calls have amounted to passing the buck rightward.
“It's been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans,’" Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer explained. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) is offended by what he’s hearing from constituents. “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” he said.
Such reactions are political copouts. Those two congressmembers represent deep-blue districts, and both of their states are represented by Democratic senators. Responding to outraged constituents by telling them to “call the Republicans” is a way of dodging responsibility and accountability.
It's easy enough for Torres, Beyer and others in the Democratic caucus to gripe about the volume of irate calls to their offices. And at first glance, telling constituents to contact Republicans instead might seem logical. But that’s actually a way of telling an angry Democratic base not to be a nuisance to Democratic lawmakers.
What’s more, as a practical matter, their constituents often have no way to message GOP members of Congress. The congressional email system doesn’t allow non-constituents to send a message to a representative or senator. And the first thing that a staffer wants to confirm on the phone is whether the caller is in fact a constituent.
Fully half of the nation’s citizens -- and a large majority of Democrats -- live in states with two Democratic senators. And so, routinely, when Democratic officeholders say that their agitated constituents should leave them alone and “call the Republicans,” it amounts to a brushoff that can be translated from politician-talk as “Stop bugging us already.”
But in primaries next year, some are liable to be held accountable. Few serving Democrats with blue electorates will face tight races in the 2026 general election -- but if they’re perceived as wimps who failed to really put up a fight against President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, incumbents risk facing primary challenges propelled by grassroots anger.
The anger might seem overheated inside Capitol Hill bubbles. But it’s real for millions of engaged activists -- the ones who volunteer in droves and can get behind insurgency campaigns with plenty of fundraising, canvassing power and social-media impacts.
Mere shrugs from Democrats that they’re in the minority won’t wash. “The rules of the Senate are designed to protect the rights of the minority, and Democrats have tools to grind Senate business to a halt to delay and defy the Trump-Musk coup,” the activist group Indivisible points out. “The three biggest weapons? Blanket opposition, quorum calls, and blocking unanimous consent -- parliamentary guerrilla tactics that can slow, stall, and obstruct at every turn.”
The needed opposition goes way beyond procedural maneuvers. The tenor and vehemence of public statements every day, from the hundreds of Democrats in the House and Senate, set a tone and convey messages beyond mere words on paper and screens.
The week after Trump’s return to the Oval Office, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) traveled to California and met with donor powerhouses in Silicon Valley, where he reportedly “said Democrats were reaching toward the center, while Trump will swing harder right.” Here we have the prospective next House speaker pledging to move in the direction of a president whom Gen. Mark Milley has described as “fascist to the core.”
Jeffries’ goal of hugging “the center” may play well with rich tech executives, but it shows notable indifference to the large bulk of Democratic voters. Early this month, CBS News reported that its polling shows “the nation's rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly looking for more opposition to President Trump from their congressional delegation.” The trend has been emphatic. Only 35 percent want Democrats in Congress to “try to find common ground with Trump,” while 65 percent want them to “oppose Trump as much as possible.”
Continue reading "Democrats Irritated by Voters Who Elected Them Need an Attitude Adjustment" »
February 23, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Hill
The Democratic National Committee has just elected a new chair, but the old guard that has long dominated the party will not go quietly. Although there are some reasons for cautious optimism, the road ahead will be steeply uphill for the Democratic Party.
Ken Martin, longtime chair of the party in Minnesota, is replacing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, whose four-year term was marked by steady subservience to his patron, former President Joe Biden. Martin has the opportunity to be a leader instead of merely following self-focused directives from the president. It shouldn’t be difficult to improve on Harrison’s job performance.
The DNC headquarters has functioned as a fortress, notorious among grassroots party activists as an unwelcoming place. Martin might be inclined to change that.
Many top executives at the DNC do not like Martin. Given their hidebound behavior, it’s an indication that badly needed change might be in the offing. What’s more, it is encouraging that the new chair overcame the opposition of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who all publicly endorsed Ben Wikler, Martin’s main rival for the post.
The national party has remained in the grip of leaders who have never acknowledged their abject failure. That failure can be summed up in a notorious statement Schumer made a few months before Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Rather than dissipate after Clinton’s shocking loss, this elitism lingered on and guided the strategy of former Vice President Kamala Harris eight years later. “The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Times fatefully reported less than three weeks before the election.
Although countless party officials and pundits have scratched their heads over the drastic fall-off in working-class support for the 2024 Democratic ticket, the main reasons should not be mysterious. The faux populism of Trump’s Republican Party cannot be effectively countered by warmed-over liberal bromides and calls for incremental reform.
To shed its well-earned reputation for elitism, the DNC should stop running away from populism and instead embrace it — not by making peace with Trumpism, but by moving toward genuine progressive populism. That means showing that the party actually means business about siding with the interests of low- and middle-income Americans against the rapacious effects of unfettered corporate power — from systematic price gouging to regressive tax rates to runaway military spending — at the expense of programs that meet human needs.
February 06, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / The Hill
More than 800 Americans in Northern California have now joined in a class-action lawsuit against their Democratic congressional representatives, charging them with illegally helping to provide weapons to Israel for use in committing genocide in Gaza. News of the suit has caused a stir in the Bay Area, with media coverage putting the pair, Rep. Jared Huffman and Rep. Mike Thompson, on the defensive.
Legal experts may be correct that the suit is destined to be thrown out of court. The judicial branch has rarely been willing to interfere with the foreign policy decisions of the legislative or executive branch, and issues like legal standing and the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause have routinely shielded legislators. But harping on the steep uphill climb for the lawsuit — and others like it now being prepared by plaintiffs elsewhere in the country — misses the political point.
I decided to join the lawsuit as a plaintiff and to help publicize it because I think that even if the action loses in court, it will win in public discourse. And that will, justifiably, make the congressional defendants the losers.
Like other plaintiffs in the Northern California case, I believe that our lawsuit is on solid ground of justice. The arms shipments to Israel’s military have violated the Constitution, the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and U.S. federal laws — including the Leahy law, which prohibits the government from “using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.” The namesake of the law, former Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), says it is being violated.
In effect, by enabling approval of $26.38 billion in military aid to Israel last spring, 366 members of the House voted to force constituents into being complicit in genocide. No amount of rhetoric can change that overarching reality. And no amount of legalistic arguments will deflect the profound effects that moral revulsion can have on politics.
Before the winter ends, dozens of members of Congress, mostly Democrats, are likely to be facing class-action lawsuits from constituents accusing them of illegal and immoral complicity in genocide. Such lawsuits promise to spotlight what many of those lawmakers would much prefer to keep in the shadows.
Legalistic issues of standing and the like avoid far deeper questions. Anyone who contends that the federal court system is immune from an era’s politics might want to ponder the difference between the Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson and its 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.
Drawing media attention to congressional votes for massive arms shipments to Israel will expose lawmakers who staked out positions opposed by the majority of voters. While the defendants may triumph legally, victory will tend to be Pyrrhic — winning in federal court, but losing in the court of public opinion.
What’s more, as with the lawsuit against Huffman and Thompson, the plaintiffs will be largely organized by congressional district while pursuing community outreach strategies — a potentially ominous prospect for politicians seeking reelection. Liberal members of the House who have voted to arm Israel’s military would be wise to recall that entrenched liberal Democrats like former Reps. Eliot Engel, Michael Capuano and Joseph Crowley have fallen to primary challengers who were in part propelled by antiwar sentiment.
January 17, 2025 | Permalink
By Norman Solomon / Media North
A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”
The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972 -- in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media -- has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.
+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information” -- which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.
Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:
The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.
Continue reading "How U.S. Media Hide Truths About the Gaza War" »
January 12, 2025 | Permalink