Vice President Kamala Harris has reminded us all of a key insight into social and political analysis. In what has become a signature catchphrase, none of us just “fell out of a coconut tree.” We “exist in the context of everything that has come before us.” Karl Marx himself couldn’t have said it better.
In Harris’s case, that context includes serving as number two to President Joe Biden and thus being tarnished by his disastrous foreign policy. Biden has given a blank check of support to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, offering massive material assistance and diplomatic cover to Netanyahu’s government as it has engaged in genocidal crimes. Millions of Gazans have been displaced. The Israel Defense Forces has indiscriminately bombed schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, universities, and apartment blocks full of children. There are credible reports of mass executions of unarmed Palestinian civilians during house-to-house raids. According to a “conservative estimate” published in the Lancet, 186,000 people have died as a direct or indirect result of the carnage.
The policy of assistance for these crimes has disgusted much of the Biden-Harris base. In one poll, only 20 percent of the voters who elected Biden in 2020 were confident that what was happening in Gaza wasn’t a genocide. Crucial swing states like Michigan may have been lost to Biden because of the fury over Gaza felt by crucial elements of his base.
Key to Harris beating Donald Trump is winning these voters back by decisively breaking with Biden’s policy and promising, as Sen. Bernie Sanders told the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner last week, “not one more nickel” of aid for Netanyahu’s war if she becomes president this January.
On the domestic front, the best way to counter the pseudo-populist siren song of Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance would be with a full-throated embrace of actually populist economic policies.
She could…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Ben Burgis
