The past few months of student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and the way they were suppressed by the authorities and maligned as “violent” and terror-adjacent even by supposedly left-leaning, progressive political leaders exposed an important truth: the United States is in desperate need of a viable, left-to-centre-left third party committed to democracy.
It’s not just the Republicans and their open embrace of fascism that is the problem any more. The response of President Joe Biden and other leading Democrats to the student protests made clear that these days even the party supposedly representing the left in America is leaning right, and has an obvious anti-democratic bent.
“Order must prevail … Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” Biden said referring to the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia University on May 2. “Smashing windows with hammers and taking over university buildings is not free speech. It is lawlessness,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had said a few days earlier.
Not only are their characterisations of what has occurred at Columbia and dozens of other universities just plain wrong, but their words sound like they may have been lifted directly from Richard Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech from 1968. “When the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness,” Nixon had said then, “when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration – then it’s time for new leadership for the United States of America.”
Democrats today are sounding like the Republicans of the past for one simple reason: both parties have moved significantly to the right in the past 50 years.
Indeed, since Nixon’s time in power, administrations from both parties pushed for laws and policies that favoured corporations over working people and created the conditions for “dark money” to shape and dominate American politics. They allowed large corporations and the billionaire set to avoid paying their fair share in taxes, deepening inequality and enhancing societal divisions.
Now and again, the Democrats did criticise the Republicans for their ruthlessness on social welfare entitlements and public spending, but they always supported the annual near-trillion-dollar defence appropriation with enthusiasm, exposing their right-wing tendencies.
Democratic leaders still talk about “empathy” and how they “feel the pain” of everyday Americans. They still claim to be the party of democracy and justice – the only force that could “protect” America from the increasing authoritarianism of Trump’s far-right Republicans. But their continued military and political backing of Israel’s apartheid regime amid its war on Gaza and insistent characterisation of antiwar protests as a national security threat says more about their priorities, and approach to justice and democracy, than any of their speeches.
And its approach to the war in Gaza and protests against it in the US is just one issue among many that underscores the Democratic Party’s massive leap towards the right.
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