Where Does Empire Turn When Brutality-Theater Fails?

The clear national distaste for continued violence - both at home and abroad - has soured the 2024 election prospects for war hawk Democrats.

Caption: Illinois delegates at the Democratic National Convention of 1968, react to Senator Abraham Ribicoff's nominating speech for George McGovern in which he criticized the tactics of the Chicago police against anti-Vietnam war protesters.

If there is one thing we have learned about the state of United States public opinion since the latest iteration of Palestine’s attempts at emancipation, it is that the general citizenry has no taste for continued bloodshed in the name of imperial conquest. They do not want to spend another twenty years in a foreign country, sending our children to throw their bodies on the bayonets of oppressed Peoples 10,000 miles away from home.

Following the rather unconventional foreign policy goals and achievements of the Trump administration, it has been easy for Biden to pivot back to the Obama-era policy of “force over distance” under his guise of a “return to normality” that pushed him barely over the edge in 2020; adopting and cementing use-of-force policies which, under his Vice Presidency, led to such proud moments for the country as air-striking a wedding procession, bombing an international hospital, and the repeated use of double-tap airstrikes; a war crime in which a target is secondarily bombed after time has been allowed for first responders to gather at the scene. And while Joe Biden did limit the use of drone strikes on paper, perhaps we can look to Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and, of course, Gaza to see if deaths by these immoral weapons have decreased, their rain onto Middle East homes, shops, and mosques/churches only impeded insofar as they must first be transported to Israel, Jordan, or Cyprus.

The first true indication of the national-level reticence was, perhaps, following the commitment to and execution of the disastrous withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan by Biden in 2021; the people of the country seeing the fruitlessness of twenty-odd years and $2,313,000,000,000 sent to one country alone and who, if asked, would likely have trouble identifying which US project this was on a map. The people were rightfully incensed, the deaths of civilians and soldiers live-streamed to millions hours before the talking heads began blaming the Trump administration’s planning despite the Biden team having universal oversight of the withdrawal for three months, and the capabilities to plan for more than a year.

Attempting to capitalize on his predecessor’s anti-war populism - whether real or fabricated - to buoy already flailing public support following a sodden campaign season, the senior Democrat leaned against the “Buck Stops Here”-standard of the Presidency and instead passed it backwards. In so doing, the already weakened foreign policy agenda of the incoming administration set a standard; every subsequent military intervention or decision meeting resistance that, no matter the spin and revisionism, only grows larger in proportion to every bullet, bomb, or crate of kinetic aid bombarded on Gaza.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine the next year has ultimately met the same noncommittal from the US population. Despite a strong, meritorious case at the beginning of the conflict, resistance to calls to continue funding the war of attrition we have enabled there grow with each failure to pass additional monies through Congress in defense of the Western project-State. Already, Ukraine looks to us like another Afghanistan, and while that may be the ideal outcome for some, for most it looks like another multi-trillion dollar quagmire we can’t afford.

The result has been, as articulated by Trump and enabled by his GOP allies in media and government, a pivot to more localized responsibility for NATO expansionism and a slow starving of the people who have been duped into dying between two decrepit empires once again. Here, once more, Biden ceded responsibilities as an international leader to not only his domestic counterparts, but enabled those abroad as well, the Russian state freely trading outside once non-negotiable boundaries to avoid sanctions and aspirational empires choosing to hedge their bets against a weakening petro-dollar.

It is no surprise then that the Israeli government committed to fully executing Palestinian erasure that began under British Mandatory Palestine, no doubt feeling emboldened by the weakness of our leadership and the keen awareness of the temporality of the moment in US opinion and the election season. And despite a tsunami of pro-Israeli support following the attacks of October 7th, the firings, cancellations, and reassignments of Muslim (or just Brown) people and those too sympathetic to the humanitarian cause of the Palestinians, the people of the United States are rising up daily to protest the gross injustices happening in our name, the sale and use weapons created of our labor to murder tens of thousands.

In response, the Biden administration has consistently and aggressively pursued Zionist goals within their own agenda, sending $12.5b in military aid since the beginning of 2021 and pushing an additional $10b-$14b since last November. This is in direct contravention of the long-growing Leftist movement within the Democratic Party, tens of millions of voters buying into the Progressive performativity and now demanding action on what many see as an existential issue for the United States and the many communities it allegedly represents. Where the people demand a stop to weapons sales to Israel, understanding clearly the link to the death and destruction even if it isn’t explicitly US fingers pulling the triggers, Biden instead approves hundreds of weapons sales to the belligerent State in the dark of night and under obscure legalese.

To the general population, the average person, the action can have no meaning than that our government is willing to sell the lie of peace and moderation while actively profiting from the chaos, destruction, and depravity the weapons he sends abroad will ultimately cause. To the Progressive base of the Democratic Party, the youth, Black/Brown, LGBT+, and feminist voters who have pulled every one of their presidential candidates over the popular vote line since Obama (and probably Gore too) in 2008, the message is clearer still:

The Democratic Party only values your opinion insofar as it directly translates into a vote for them, every time. Looking to BlueMAGA – soon to be the Blue Tea Party – as it emerged from the post-Trump political order shows clearly the outcome of such ad hoc revisionism of the Party identity, the Left-leaning members brutally outflung and ostracized from the arms that promised support the moment something which should be ideologically simple is exposed as anything but. The Democrats, courting power which does not belong to them in an effort to squeeze a few more years from ancient, anachronistic politicians who thought the could dress in the colors of the Left without paying the bill at the end.

So what do the Democrats and Joe Biden do when drawing the US into foreign theaters of war doesn’t positively motivate the population like it used to; the well of prosperity that empire brings no longer satiating a population that, once well provided for, are no longer able to feed families, protect health, ensure work, buy shelter, or provide any guarantee whatsoever for the very grounds we stand on. Looking to the disastrous 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention in which the National Guard, at the behest of incumbent-President Lyndon B. Johnson (D) arrested and injured hundreds, the US-backed massacre of students in Mexico a few weeks later, I think we can make a few guesses.

“I went because we were for human rights and against this damn war. We, the black people, shouldn’t have to be fighting this war, dying in Vietnam, if this country isn’t recognizing our civil, democratic, human rights.” -Bobby Seale; Time Magazine

  Photo: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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