Feeling Good Doesn't Require the Democrats

Or: you absolutely don't have to hand it to them

Over the last couple weeks, and for the first time in my adult life, the Democratic Party has risen to the historical moment, seeming to wake from the fever dream of appeasing Republican Christofascism and shake off decades of accumulated bullshit about "reaching across the aisle". They are acting as if they actually believe their claim that the very Republic is at stake this November. And there has been a tremendous shift in enthusiasm, attitudes, and indeed poll numbers, both on the Democratic side and among the fascists, who are suddenly caught pants down fucking the furniture on the deck of the Titanic.

This reversal has been very fast. Three weeks ago today Genocide Joe tested positive for COVID. An appropriately ironic way for his candidacy to finally collapse, considering before he was the butcher of Gaza, he had perpetrated slower genocide against the American people and the rest of the world through COVID denialism and dismantling COVID welfare, which involved the largest concentrated loss of healthcare coverage in history. By Sunday, which, again, only seventeen days ago, he was out, and while the neolib ghouls on the right flank of the party who helped shove him out tried to position their preferred candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris, with a swiftness and alacrity we're not used to seeing in the Democratic Party, locked down the nomination with high-level endorsements, proclaimed inevitability and grass-roots enthusiasm.

Her campaign has continued to demonstrate solid political maneuvering. This week, in what might have been a bit of plausibly deniable dirty politics, the campaign deflated the career of the Dems' most ambitious empty-suited creep, PA governor Josh Shapiro, by letting the pundits believe he was front-runner and getting his many enemies to dump their oppo research and tarnish his image on the national stage (with a special Philly bonus of making Mayor Cherelle Parker look like an absolute ass), all the while keeping Kamala's hands clean and building party consensus and indeed excitement for liberal Minnesota governor Tim Walz.

Then, a coup de grace, the campaign's first event with Walz occurred in Philly and they asked runner-up Shapiro to open the event, so that Shapiro kissed the ring and squashed any beef the party's right might try to stir up. Even if these moves were more improvisatory and accidental than strategic, by keeping the news cycle focused on the pick and announcing it ahead of the Chicago DNC, the campaign has managed to more or less extend the Democratic Convention into a weeks long celebration of the campaign.

The vibe shift has been remarkable. The Democratic base, celebrities, influencers as well as a surprising number of folks on the left, have gone from demoralized and miserable to electoral activists overnight. They've been adding coconuts to their social media handles and memeing about Kamala and Walz. The swift and total success of ridiculing and disdaining the fash, calling them "creepy" and "weird", has been equally head spinning. Of course, it is a strategy antifascists have been demonstrating would work since the video of Richard Spencer getting punched ended his career. Better late than never, I suppose, and it is delicious to watch them melting down, Trump's image going overnight from presumptive duce of a new American dictatorship to racist grandpa in a narcissistic fugue, posting fan fiction about how Biden is going to suddenly reemerge as the Democratic candidate and Trump will sail to victory.

Part of why this has been so effective is that anyone in the Republican Party who might have institutional memory of a fighting Democratic campaign has long since been purged by MAGA loyalists. But this move is also capturing the excitement of folks on the left who should know better. The left has gotten just as used to a Democratic party that swings right and spits in their face at every opportunity – just like the neolibs, they were convinced Kamala would choose Shapiro and fuck over the activist base – and so are quite susceptible to recuperation by the spectacle of representation.

A divide has quickly emerged between them and people who have not been sucked up in the emotion, activists and radicals who are incredulous at the enthusiasm, trying desperately to remind these Walz-pilled posters that Democrats are currently behind the genocide in Gaza, that Kamala is in fact already in power. Comrades from Minnesota have pointed out that Walz, who was a national guardsman himself, was the one who sent in the National Guard to put down the George Floyd Uprising in Minneapolis, and that Walz, despite getting to the governor's mansion on a campaign focused on climate and ecological justice, crushed an indigenous led water-protector movement to push forward the Line 3 Fracking Pipeline. The aforementioned enthusiastic supporters are responding with some variation of "yeah, we know, but stop killing our vibe".

These two groups are talking past one another. The memers are responding to a structure of feeling, an experience of hope and joy, an affect, one that I sometimes share. On multiple occasions I have been moved by seeing the nominees actually stand up to these creeps and call them what they are, by witty and dismissive press releases or in front of cheering crowds. It's a powerful image, it feels good, at least in the moments where the crowd isn't chanting "USA! USA! USA!" And many of the memes have been really fucking funny.

The Cassandras, meanwhile, are speaking with hard-won-knowledge and wisdom from decades in the fight, and are trying to stop people from rushing into the same mistake made during Obama's campaign, or indeed Bernie Sanders' (or Corbyn's, or Syriza's, or Podemos' etc. etc.) They're trying to protect these erstwhile friends from throwing themselves behind a campaign that can only ever betray them. But because they're not acknowledging the power of the affect shift, perhaps because they genuinely don't share it, they are left sounding to the memers like they're arguing against feeling good itself.

The thing the memers have right is that stopping Trump is an absolute necessity. This is not because the Democrats will have good politics in office – Biden and Harris have adopted Trump's border policies and are looking to flank him from the right on law and order (she's a prosecuter, he's a felon etc), and, lest we forget, they are currently committing the most heinous atrocity of the 21st century, an atrocity they could stop at any moment, but which instead is currently threatening to drag the entire world into broader war.

It's not even Trump's particular plans that are necessarily what must be stopped: even if he fails to put Project 2025 into place, even if he fails to permanently end elections or round up journalists and the left or put 15 million people into internment camps awaiting deportation, even if he fails, in other words, to go full Mussolini, Trump would be a disaster because of the fascist power that blooms fungal in his shadow, because of the street movements here and abroad that are emboldened by his leadership. And those far right movements are as weak in the US as they have been since 2015.

The entire Republican party, indeed the entire American far right, has congealed around Trump like aspic around a jellied eel. Remove Trump and they're little more than a fetid pile of transparent beef tallow. Ending Trump's political career will be a generational blow to the far right, and the fact that the tables are turning, that the pundits and enablers and fascist goons and creeps are being revealed for the pathetic miserable cowards they've always been is a genuine relief.

For the THIRD TIME in a row, the Dems were poised to run one of the handful of people in national politics more disliked than Donald Trump, they were going to help a fascist come to power and they were going to do it on behalf of a world historical monster, a man with a soul so ugly that most of us felt loathe to engage in basic resistance against MAGA. And all the while they told us that if Biden lost the election it would mean the end of democracy. The end of all that in Biden's stepping down removed a surprisingly large enervating weight from my shoulders and I know I'm not alone.

While some of the victory laps people are running are incredibly embarrassing, there is no denying that the Palestine Solidarity movement, including the powerfully organized, overwhelmingly black and Muslim Uncommitted primary voters, were crucial components in demonstrating Biden's unelectability and pushing him out the door.

But all of that good feeling, that sense of victory, of hope and possibility, do not come from or belong to Harris and Walz. While it is a relief that the Democrats finally brought a knife to the knife fight (instead of their traditional book of etiquette), they could and should have already done this a dozen times before.

In 2016 the Dems actively worked to make Trump the frontrunner because they considered him beatable, thereby making him the central political figure he is today. Even still they could've put forward a candidate that wasn't already loathed by half the country, or she could've actually run a GOTV ground campaign instead of smugly assuming her victory. Between 2016 and 2020 the #Resistance could have organized actual, meaningful opposition to Trump, his policies, his judicial nominees and his cronies in congress, rather than using his atrocities as fundraising material. Obama and Ruth Bader-Ginsburg could've gotten over their arrogance and their love for the system and actually tried to replace Justices when they had the chance, or Biden and the Dems could've proposed Supreme Court reform earlier, or tried to do away with the electoral college.

The Democrats could have embraced Sanders instead of ratfucking him for Biden, and Sanders likely would've likely stomped Trump in the general, making the attempted election steal/coup much less viable (and, bonus for them, might have coopted a huge amount of the energy that went into the 2020 uprisings). Biden and his administration could have prosecuted Trump and his fellow conspirators immediately in January 2021. Biden could have extended pandemic healthcare and benefits, instead of kicking everyone off the rolls, or simply not ended all COVID information tracking and infrastructure, thereby making the CDC and federal government literally less well poised to combat a pandemic than it was in 2019, he could've avoided calling disability activists crazy and telling us to get back to work. He could have reshaped the immigration debate and put forward a positive case for refugees, passed abortion legislation, or actually pursued green policy instead of betraying the future of the very planet by turning America into the world's largest oil producer. And of course he could have stopped Netanyahu and the IOF at any point in the last ten months, or even just stopped giving them weapons.

It's not just that all of these things would've been the right thing to do. As his ignoble campaign end demonstrated, none of these choices helped Biden or the Dems' political capital – their ostensible "pragmatic" reason to make them. What these choices have done is maintained Trump as a viable political force, kept fascism humming and thrumming here and abroad.

So while we might be relieved that someone in national politics is finally changing course and revealing the absolute weakness of the strong man, and I know I am, we do not need to turn that relief into gratitude to the people doing it. They could have been doing this all along. But they refused to do anything over and over and over and now we've entered cascading climate doom, settler colonial genocidal apocalypse and potential global war while America's two party system is home to a full-fledged fascist party, and the people who've propped that up have finally realized maybe they should try and slow things down a bit and you want me to thank them? As Malcolm X said

"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that's below, that the blow made. And they haven't even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound...They won't even admit the knife is there.”

The Democrats, the media and the establishment have spent the last nine years gaslighting us: calling people protecting trees, forests and waterways unhinged extremists and calling nazis misunderstood citizens with real concerns; responding to cops murdering black people by giving them raises but calling the friends and loved ones who light those pigs' cars on fire violent criminals; exonerating Kyle Rittenhouse driving dozens of miles across state lines with an AR to murder activists as "self-defense" and letting him tour the country as a celebrity but sending out a federal death squad to gun down Michael Reinoehl in the street days after he actually defended himself against a Nazi attack; etc. etc.

The fact that the Dems have stopped telling us the most vicious of these lies, that they've taken on a strategy other than slapping us in the face and telling us we better like it because the other guy is worse, this fact gives us more psychic, emotional and political room to maneuver, to fight them, the bastards who've abused us and done this to us for nine years going on five hundred and thirty two. As Talia Lavin wrote this week, it will be an incredible relief when we no longer have to hear Trump, think about the man, or watch all the serious minded liberals and pundits pretend that its important we take him seriously.

We can also recognize that some of the people feeling joy and relief aren't necessarily "back to brunch" liberals, are comrades who have gotten a little bit carried away, that here at perhaps the end of this absolutely miserable decade-long 2016, we can understand taking what succor we can whatever way we can. It is not weak or liberal or wrong to feel joy, or hope, or believe that things might change for the better for once. It has only been two weeks.

But the thing is we do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to them. We don't have to thank the Dems for turning around and doing the most basic thing they tell us politicians should do, pretending to listen to their constituents and pushing back against a sundowning rapist bragging that he is going to be dictator.

And if we really want to enjoy the feeling of Trump's political destruction – assuming we actually are witnessing the beginning of his end – the Democrats are a trap. Transferring our feeling of joy at fascism's faltering into gratitude and affection for Harris and Walz may feel easy and satisfying now, after all, there's momentum, a massive apparatus of spectacle ready to capture your attention and your affect via rallies, speeches and memes. But the Dems have been just as complicit in producing the crushing despair, hopelessness and violence of the last decade, and we shouldn't offer them the gift of our joy, this little flame of love and hope we've kept alive despite all their violence.

If we take that flame and instead spread it among our peers, point it towards the people who have fought by our side, if we can use that relief and that mental space and capacity as the spark for new projects, if we do everything we can to send it to Gaza, to double down on our resistance to this ongoing genocide, to protect support and care for one another, then and only then might we build a world where such joy might flourish at all times and in all places, a world beyond, against and without Republicans, Democrats, states or capital.

UPDATE (8/8/24): Less than 8 hours after this article published, Palestine Solidarity protestors interrupted a Detroit Harris rally chanting "Kamala Kamala you can't hide, we won't vote for genocide". Kamala responded from the stage “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking." Activists are understandably furious. This piece was written to try and prevent this inevitable behavior from feeling like heart break, from taking away the relief and joy in Trump's faltering. Liberals can't stab you in the back if you don't let them stand behind you.