It's Still a Genocide If Kamala Harris Does It

Progressives cannot get distracted in this moment…

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

The New York Times describes a phenomenon occurring on parts of the American left in reaction to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign: “The progressive wing of the [Democratic] [P]arty is already becoming less vocal in its criticism over Gaza, believing the vice president is inching toward them on Israel and Palestine with her forthright calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, her acknowledgment of ‘catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity’ in the territory and her pledge to ‘not be silent’ on Palestinian suffering.”

The swift rise of this sentiment on the left has indeed been noticeable – and it would be a major mistake to allow it to continue to spread. If progressives across the board succumb to this kind of weak-willed thinking, it will mean they have learned absolutely nothing from past experience.

To see what I mean, we have to go back a few administrations.

When George W. Bush was president, a sort of “popular front” consisting of ordinary liberals as well as more seasoned radical activists to their left mobilized against his policies. Mass protests erupted when the Iraq War was announced, and as the US became further entrenched in the Middle East, the antiwar movement kept up the pressure on his administration. Bush’s catastrophic, racism-infused handling of Hurricane Katrina, bank bailouts during the 2007-2008 Great Recession, use of torture, plan to invade seven countries in five years, tax cuts for the wealthiest, opposition to gay rights, abortion, and stem cell research, and much else, only served to increase his unpopularity. That Bush was heavily promoted as an anti-intellectual, fundamentalist evangelical Texan made it inevitable that everyone but the most fanatical Republicans would despise him. So did the machinations of his Vice President Dick Cheney, which at times approached “comic book supervillain” levels of evil.

But then a messiah figure named Barack Obama rode in on the clouds to deliver the nation from evil. At least, that was how a good number of progressives saw it, although they should have known better.

On the surface, Obama was everything Bush was not: well-educated, cosmopolitan, a charismatic speaker, and of course, black. For those whose concept of politics went no deeper than such considerations, Obama was the anti-Bush; the man who would right the many wrongs of the past eight years, and on top of that, vanquish centuries of American racism by becoming the first African American president.

This may seem silly in retrospect – indeed, it should seem that way – but it must be recalled that this was how a lot of people, especially white liberals, actually thought in those days.

To anyone paying closer attention, it was obvious that Obama was going to be a continuation of Bush, just with a new gloss designed to appeal to the Democratic Party base. The radical scholar and organizer Adolph Reed had easily seen through Obama’s rhetoric and identified his underlying corporate-friendly politics at the outset of his career in mid-1990s Chicago. Reed dismissed Obama as “a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Obama received more corporate campaign cash during his first presidential run than his opponent John McCain (whose own war chest was hardly inconsiderable). Later, his campaign would go on to win an award from the advertising industry for best marketing. The incessant euphoria and empty rhetoric of “hope and change” (a meaningless slogan) did not go unnoticed, it seemed. Noam Chomsky remarked about this to an interviewer, “It was politicians being marketed as a product, like toothpaste. What does that have to do with democracy?...[Y]ou find yourself asking what was the hope? What was the change? These were empty words.”

Then as now, too many people were fooled by such lofty oratory. This allowed Obama to get away with murder – in many cases literally. Obama refused to prosecute Bush administration officials for torture and failed to shut down Guantanamo Bay, ensuring that the worst abuses of the previous administration would continue. He launched a campaign of assassination by drone across swathes of Africa and the Middle East, subjecting populations there to a reign of unrelenting terror, which also had the effect of breeding countless more terrorists than the program had supposedly been set up to kill. Obama appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner, including of American citizens, of whom he murdered several, including a 16-year-old boy. Chillingly, there is no legal obstacle that prevents future presidents from doing the same.

As promised, Obama withdrew US troops from the transparently idiotic and illegal Iraq War.¹ But he had campaigned on escalating the war in Afghanistan (something many progressives either overlooked or even supported), and he proceeded to do just that, as well as launch a few wars of his own. Obama showered Israel and Saudi Arabia with weapons, not to mention support for their numerous crimes against Palestinians and Yemenis, respectively - including the Saudi invasion of Yemen, where Obama and his “liberal humanitarian” UN advisor Samantha Power actively supported crimes of genocidal proportions. He also greenlit an antidemocratic coup in Honduras in 2009. Perhaps worst of all, he spearheaded the NATO destruction of Libya, the consequences of which continue to wreak havoc across the region.

Domestically, Obama waged the harshest crackdown against whistleblowers and leakers ever seen, including against Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange. Despite campaigning as a vaguely anti-nuclear candidate, in office he presided over a trillion-dollar modernization of the nuclear arsenal (that’s trillion, with a “t”). He also continued the Bush administration’s bank bailouts, and ensured that no one on Wall Street was punished for destroying the world economy and ruining countless lives. His generosity to the banks did not extend to those who lost their homes because of them. And Obama’s over-hyped health care reform refused to even consider doing away with private health insurance, acting instead as a giveaway to both that industry and the pharmaceutical companies while being disguised as a progressive victory.

Obama was able to do all of this in the face of very little opposition from the left (the right were busy convincing themselves he was a closeted Muslim socialist). Historian Samuel Moyn observed that “Obama expanded the war on terror to an awesome extent, while making it sustainable for a domestic audience in a way his predecessor never did.”² The reason for this is obvious – Obama was marketed to the kind of people who hated Bush. The radical journalist Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report had identified this from the outset: “in a thoroughly racialized society the candidate’s blackness was perceived as inherently progressive and war-averse,” a perception aided by the fact that Obama was “shed of the Bush-Cheney ‘cowboy’ baggage.”³

Moyn observes that “Obama’s election itself dealt the antiwar movement its most grievous blow.” This was due in part to partisan reasons – “those who opposed Bush’s conflicts only because they were led by a Republican dropped their concerns” once Obama was inaugurated. “But the main cause was faith that Obama would change America’s ways.”⁴ Then as now, too many people with progressive convictions implicitly believed that if someone other than a white male Republican oversaw the American empire, then there was no issue with the existence of an American empire. Those on the receiving end of the bombs likely had a different perspective.

Throughout the Obama years, hardened leftist activists admonished their colleagues who fell for Obama-mania and gave him a free pass, and a few radical journalists continued to shine a light on his administrations’ atrocities. But by and large these were the exceptions to the rule. It did not help that the right wing loudly embraced a series of overtly racist attitudes toward Obama for the better part of a decade, necessitating rebuttals in his defense. It was only as the Obama years came to an end, and Donald Trump’s candidacy began to come in to view, that more mainstream progressives began to acknowledge their dereliction of duty during his reign.

In Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, Princeton University’s Eddie Glaude offered a devastating indictment of progressive inaction under Obama, which deserves to be quoted at length:

We’ve been duped, and we’re angry with ourselves. Many progressives “green-screened” him. We made Obama whatever we wanted him to be. If we wanted an anti-war candidate, he was it. If we wanted someone who supported universal health care he was it; someone who would challenge Wall Street, he was our guy; a candidate committed to the poor, Obama was our man. He was our political Play-Doh. And he obliged our fantasies all the way to the White House…We should have known better. Nothing Obama said actually confirmed the belief that he was some progressive savior…[yet] [m]any progressives willfully ignored who he was, because we so desperately wanted someone to deliver us from the political sins of our times. That wish revealed how limited our political imaginations have become.⁵

The lesson barely had time to sink in before progressives were bombarded with another version of the same fallacy during Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for the presidency in 2016. Clinton’s record on virtually every issue was atrocious, from her racist rhetoric around “superpredators” and support for the “free-trade” policies that devastated the American working class during her husband’s presidency, to support for the Iraq War, to orchestrating the obliteration of Libya by NATO, to having essentially taken bribes from banks like Goldman Sachs, to her friendship with Henry Kissinger, among much else. By every measure, Bernie Sanders was the only choice for people of conscience. Accordingly, a mass movement, consisting largely of young people eager for change, organized around him.

How did Clinton supporters react to this? By insisting that anyone who didn’t agree that it was “her turn” was engaging in a form of sexism. Wildly exaggerated claims about mythical hordes of misogynist “Bernie bros” supposedly dominating the Sanders campaign began to appear. And prominent “feminist” figures disparaged Sanders supporters, particularly women, in terms that were downright condescending.

Gloria Steinem thoughtlessly dismissed younger women who supported Sanders over Clinton on the grounds that “when you’re younger, you think: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” The Guardian reported on the dismay this remark caused amongst women campaigning for Sanders, one of whom lamented, “I’m not sure how she could admit us young women are graduating with more debt and earning less money, then say young women are supporting Bernie Sanders to impress all the boys.”

Madeleine Albright was even more ridiculous, insisting to “a lot of you younger women” that “Hillary Clinton will always be there for you,” and threatening that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other” – the implication being that women were obliged to support Clinton because she was a woman, with her actual policy record apparently of little concern.

Albright herself was a paradigmatic example of the pitfalls of prioritizing identity over ideology in this way – the hawkish former Secretary of State once proudly defended her role in the mass starvation of 500,000 Iraqi children via US-imposed sanctions, sanctions that were so harsh the UN diplomats tasked with enforcing them resigned rather than be complicit with what they called a “genocidal” policy. This is just one of the many reasons why, upon her death, the socialist magazine Jacobin titled its obituary “Madeleine Albright Was a Killer.” Yet aside from such radical circles, in the United States Albright has continued to be associated with “girlboss” feminism, held up as a role model for younger generations of women and given cutesy cameos on Parks and Recreation.

But with Obama and Clinton’s careers now thankfully in the rearview mirror, there have been indications that the left has finally learned this lesson – that empire can easily accommodate diversity, and that they have to be on guard against this trick. The pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protests sweeping the nation have been an example of this. My own university’s encampment routinely featured discussions wherein younger students, many of whom were Palestinian Americans, openly disparaged Obama’s record and declared that they would not be fooled again by similar rhetoric. Hillary Clinton’s students at Columbia have walked out of her lectures over her support for Israel. And in her powerful 2024 convocation speech at the historically black Spelman University, professor Ruha Benjamin declared that “Our blackness and our womanness are not in themselves trustworthy if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo,” citing among several examples the current American UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield routinely “voting against a ceasefire in Gaza.”

If nothing else, the Palestine protests have shown that younger progressives won’t be silent simply because a democrat is in the White House. This harkens back to the protests of the Vietnam War era – they culminated under Richard Nixon, yes, but they began under Lyndon Johnson, a democrat whose Great Society reforms appealed to many of the protesters’ domestic concerns. This did not stop them from chanting, “hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Such commitment to principle tragically lapsed under Obama, but it seems to be back now. Today’s antiwar groups have not been cowed by Biden’s relatively decent track record on antitrust and labor issues – the “genocide Joe” label has stuck, and an “Uncommitted” campaign, rapidly organizing itself from nothing, managed to mobilize voters across the country to cast protest votes against him during the primary.

Yet now everything has changed. After a disastrous debate with Donald Trump, Biden’s team was finally unable to continue concealing the obvious – that the man is largely incoherent – and he was forced out of the race shortly thereafter. Kamala Harris was instantly coronated as his replacement, with no democratic process needed for the party which paradoxically claims to be deeply concerned with preserving democracy. That dilemma aside, the left has been pondering how to respond to this turn of events.

One major trend has been exactly what the New York Times observed in the quote at the outset of this article: “The progressive wing of the party is already becoming less vocal in its criticism over Gaza” because they believe that Kamala Harris “is inching toward them on Israel and Palestine,” on the grounds that she’s pledged to “‘not be silent’ on Palestinian suffering.” And it would not be wild to speculate that some of the enthusiasm for Harris, and some of the accompanying tamping down of the Palestine activism, comes from the subconscious belief that as a woman of color, she will somehow automatically be better than Biden on this and other issues.

This “thought” process has to stop, and fast. There is absolutely no evidence that Harris plans to carry out any kind of policy change regarding Israel-Palestine. Her record in the Biden administration shows her to be a staunch ally of the Jewish-supremacist ethnostate. Just last month, when arch-war criminal Benjaman Netanyahu went before Congress in one of the most shameful moments in American history, Harris commendably skipped the speech. But then she came out with one of the most tone-deaf, misleading statements imaginable in response to the “arrest Netanyahu” protests occurring across DC:

I’m sorry, but this late in the game, only an imbecile or a liar continues to conflate anti-genocide protestors with supporting Hamas and/or antisemitism. This is simply unacceptable. The left needs to demand more, now.

There’s some evidence that they are doing so. The remnants of the Uncommitted Campaign are attempting to obtain an audience with both Harris and her Vice Presidential pick Tim Walz (whose record on this issue is dubious at best), in order to demand a ceasefire, backed up by an arms embargo against Israel.

It’s conceivable that such efforts could bear fruit. It’s a good sign that Harris resisted pressure to select literal IDF soldier and anti-Palestinian racist Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her VP. But her implacable opposition thus far to an arms embargo, her awful statement on the Netanyahu protests, and the flippant manner with which she has dismissed other pro-Palestine demonstrators (and the corresponding cheers from her clueless audience) are far less encouraging.

The left needs to recognize this and act on it. There’s no time to be distracted by the wave of good vibes that the Harris-Walz campaign has been riding. “Vibes don’t save lives,” in the words of Minnesota Uncommitted organizer Asma Mohammed, as she implored progressives to continue to pressure Harris on cutting off support to Israel. People should know by now that the Democratic Party loves to put forward diverse candidates whose political ideology is in lock-step with the rigid neoliberal-neoconservative orthodoxy that dominates inside the DC beltway. This should not be news to anyone, especially given the fairly recent history reviewed above.

After all, even on domestic policy, Harris is terrible from a leftist standpoint. Remember, the only reason anyone knew who she was in the first place was because of her disastrous run in the 2020 campaign. Back then she was one of a million democrats who leapt at the chance to weaken Bernie Sanders’ second campaign by running against him, on platforms consisting largely of his own policies (policies they’d all opposed until a few moments prior), then dropped out to endorse Biden in what looked like another coordinated DNC attempt at sabotaging Sanders. Biden, of course, wound up supporting exactly zero of Sanders’ core policies (Medicare For All, free public college, the Green New Deal).

Harris’s 2020 run ended with her dropping out in humiliation. One of the more memorable moments from that ill-fated campaign was when she was confronted by Tulsi Gabbard over her record as Attorney General for the state of California, which involved jailing people for smoking pot, jailing people if their kids skipped school, using prisoners as cheap labor for the state, and withholding evidence that would have spared someone the death penalty until she was forced to do so. That debate moment has started going viral again in recent days.

Her 2020 campaign also resulted in some of the cringiest content ever, such as when she fiercely criticized Joe Biden for his friendship with segregationists and opposition to school busing – then immediately pretended she didn’t really mean it after she became his running mate and Stephen Colbert asked her to clarify. It’s beyond painful to watch.

This, combined with the fact that she’s already been distancing herself from her 2020 campaign’s Bernie-lite policies (which she was pretty spineless about defending even back then), creates the impression of someone who will say anything at any time depending on what is politically expedient. Current Affairs argues that this makes her look unprincipled; but I go further – it shows that she is unprincipled.

And of course, her many Selina Meyer-esque word salads, compiled by The Daily Show, simply make her look like a moron:

Look, I’m human. Like everyone else, I smiled when I heard about Tim Walz labeling Republicans “weird.” It’s funny, and it’s true. They are. They are weird. Mike Johnson and his son monitoring each other’s porn consumption is very fucking weird.

But that kind of horse-race stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are no schools or hospitals left in Gaza, that Israel is trying to provoke multiple wars and to get the US sucked into them, and that we have two presidential candidates who appear steely in their determination to allow it all to happen. Donald Trump is an unhinged Zionist who has shown himself willing to give Israel everything Netanyahu wants and more, and Harris has been actively complicit in the Biden administration’s policies and shows zero signs of making any changes.

That is why progressives cannot afford to take their eyes off the ball. Harris’ feet need to be held to the fire, now (there’s no point wasting any time trying to reason with Trump). It would be criminally stupid for the left to be taken in by Harris’s promise to “not be silent” about Palestine. If she wins the election, what’ll happen is she won’t be silent – she’ll continue to make flowery statements, which is very easy – while leaving current policy unchanged.

If progressives reflexively go back to their posture from the Obama years, they’ll give her a free pass for this. But if they want to be morally consistent, they’ll have to return to their stance during LBJ’s presidency. If Harris wins, the only acceptable action for progressives will be never letting her appear in public without demanding to know how many kids she killed that day. It’ll be exhausting, but it’s the only way that has a chance of doing something for Palestine.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

1. Although in a little-known incident he tried to backtrack on this. See Kuzmarov, Jeremy, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019, 178.

2. Moyn, Samuel. Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021, 268.

3. Ford, Glen. “Foreword,” in Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019, 13-14.

4. Moyn, Humane, 275

5. Glaude Jr., Eddie S. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. New York: Broadway Books, 2017, 147-148