by the Editorial Board
Harris Accepts the Presidential Bid
Vice President Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nominee on the fourth and final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday. While it was anticipated that she would provide a vision and policy agenda on the final day, which was themed “For Our Future”, her speech once again underscored the presidential election as a personality contest as she spoke at great lengths about her childhood experiences, attacking Donald Trump as “an unserious man”, while putting forward almost no concrete policies.
Her platform policies are contained in a 90-page document publicly released on Sunday prior to the start of the convention. The policy document was the same one written and approved for Biden weeks earlier while he was still in the race.
Throughout the convention, Democrats have repeatedly portrayed Harris as a candidate of “joy”, defending her laughter as something progressive in the face of attacks from Trump and the Republicans who, also basing themselves in identity and personality politics, have made a target of their campaign. Monopoly media sites have leapt at the possibility of further depoliticizing elections, with an article in Axios writing: “This election is about more than two very different ideologies. It’s about two very different moods: joy vs. rage.” Weeks ago the Harris-Walz campaign characterized the election as being between “weird” and normal people, and now they turn it into an emotional contest.
During her speech, the vice president pandered to those dealing with the brunt of the ongoing economic crisis by bringing “together labor and workers and small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs, to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like health care and housing and groceries.” The economic crisis is precisely the making of those “American companies”—the very ones funding her campaign as well—that she wants to bring workers and small-business owners behind.
She reiterated her support for Zionism by emphasizing that she “will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself” while also trying to appeal to the Democratic-sympathetic wing of the pro-Palestine movement by talking about the “innocent lives lost” in Gaza and how she and Biden are working to help “Palestinian people… realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.” This double-talk was united in her expression of hatred for Iran, stating: “I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”
Opportunism Inside the Convention
Throughout the DNC, the US-Israel genocidal war against the Palestinians was a contentious issue, with the “left”-wing of the Democrats trying to do damage control for the unprecedented support given to Israel by the Biden-Harris administration, and its less politically-savvy right-wing openly mocking the pro-Palestine protesters.
The topic was first brought up at the DNC on the first night in a speech by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who used her ebbing credibility among the youth (despite her own ties to Zionism) to comment that Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.”
This barefaced lie—Biden-Harris have provided the most money and military equipment to Israel within the last 6 months than any previous administration ever has, and even just last week approved a $20 billion sale of military equipment to Israel—was even too much for fellow “progressive” Democrat Ilhan Omar, who at a later protest outside the DNC implied that AOC and others “should be ashamed of themselves” for making such claims. As the “left”-wing of the Democrats, Omar too should be ashamed of herself, as just last month she argued that “it is important that we do everything that we can to help re-elect Biden.”
On the second night of the DNC, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders repeated the Biden-Harris message, stating: “We must end this horrific war in Gaza, bring home the hostages and demand an immediate cease-fire.”
President of the United Auto Workers Shawn Fain notably did not make a call for a ceasefire despite the UAW endorsing one. Instead, he chose to echo the unanswered calls of the “Uncommitted” bloc to secure a speaking slot for a Palestinian-American State of Georgia House of Representatives Democrat to speak. The Representative herself said her prepared remarks contained no criticism of Biden’s foreign policy—meaning his genocide—and instead focused on the spectacle of Palestinian suffering to further legitimize the Democrats and rally protesters behind Harris.
The DNC eventually rejected the proposal after stalling for some time, leaving the Uncommitted Movement with a hopeless task: convincing pro-Palestine protesters that the Democrats will pass an arms embargo on Israel when the very same party deemed it too radical to even have someone of Palestinian origin speak at their convention—even to sanitize the party’s image. A co-chair of the Uncommitted Movement rightly characterized it as “an embarrassment for those of us who had faith in the Democratic party that we still had voices here.” Realizing the impossibility of their task, the organization Muslim Women for Harris-Walz self-liquidated.
To compensate for their failures, the Uncommitted Movement changed tactics and staged a sit-in—outside of the convention, disrupting nothing and no one. Such a toothless attempt to save face was further exacerbated when AOC—who had just given a speech confidently endorsing Harris and her supposed work for Palestinians—“joined” the sit-in via FaceTime.
Opportunism Outside the Convention
The pro-Palestine protests continued throughout Thursday which, with few exceptions—such as the militant protest outside of the Israeli consulate Tuesday evening—remained within the law as protest organizers and marshals worked closely with the police. Chicago police superintendent Larry Snelling praised the organizers of the coalition protests for “want[ing] a peaceful protest” and for having “marshals who kind of policed the crowd themselves—so when they saw someone getting out of line, their marshals got people back in line.”
“They are policing their own people,” Snelling said during a media briefing on Thursday. “That was very helpful to us because it reduces the risk of conflict.” In one instance, when the police tried to prevent a protester from waving a Palestinian flag from a subway platform, the protest marshals stepped in and the police allowed them to take over and restrain the protester.
The Uncommitted Movement and the Democratic-sympathetic wing of the Palestine movement have done everything by their books and could not get the Democrats to even allow a Palestinian member of their own party to speak at the DNC. They rallied people to vote uncommitted in the primaries, they worked with the police and politicians, they policed their own rallies, they pressured the Democrats from within and without. They rode on the back of the militant Palestine Solidarity Movement in order to contain it, hoping that the Democratic Party would reward their efforts with the crumbs that the career activists and nonprofit leaders are accustomed to. They spent the whole year trafficking in empty rhetoric and now have gotten that for their reward.
It is no wonder that the Uncommitted Movement has support from within the highest ranks of the Democratic Party such as Tim Walz, a staunch and open supporter of Zionism. The Uncommitted Movement is a movement of the Democratic Party within the Palestine Solidarity Movement with the goal of rallying anti-genocide masses behind a genocidal party. They are politically tied to imperialism and find their economic basis in imperialist superprofits that trickle down in the form of nonprofit grants. Just as the imperialists have their labor lieutenants at the heads of the unions to manage the economic struggles of the masses, they also have their protest lieutenants equipped with their own peace police to handle political struggles.
The problem the peace police is that their methods are self-defeating—to the extent they contain the movement, they also enfeeble themselves. Under the guise of a “family friendly march” and “protest safety”, the peace police contained the movement at the DNC and lost their bargaining chip with the Democrats on the one hand, while having exposed themselves as traitors and enemies of the people on the other. When the movement grows once more, they will deploy identity politics to rehabilitate their image so that they can try to strangle the movement once again.
The victories of the Palestine Solidarity Movement grow from the roots of militant mass action that exceeds the bounds of legality. Concessions are made as a means to contain it. The movement has two responses: it can deescalate and disarm the movement and, like a dog on a leash, hope for more concessions by listening to their masters; or it can use the concessions as a means to escalate further, to use whatever is conquered to rally more people to their cause, educating them in their correct tactics and further exposing the hypocrisy and weakness of the imperialists and their lackeys. The failures at the DNC are the culmination of the former, reaching a dead-end, proving yet again the bankruptcy and rot of opportunism.
