“Never Trump” liberals, still hypnotized by the DNC spectacle, turn a blind eye to their candidate’s record and rhetoric.
Green Party vice presidential candidate Butch Ware recently posted this message to Twitter: “You can’t suspend basic morality because you like how it makes you feel ‘validated’ inside when someone that ‘looks like you’ is platformed. That is not cultural pride, it is your identity being weaponized to oppress others.”
Ware, who is Black, was presumably speaking about Kamala Harris’s appeal to Black voters and other voters of color, but what he said also applies to white liberals who feel validated because they see themselves reflected in Kamala Harris.
She represents their laudatory racial tolerance, even though she is now the standard bearer of Anglo-American supremacy, tasked with the destruction of the non-white Palestinian people.
She rails against the violence of the January 6 riot, during which one person, a protestor, was killed, even as she pledges allegiance to the military-industrial complex, which has contributed over $1,362,000 to her campaign, compared to $862,000 for Trump’s.
Unlike Donald Trump, she is well-mannered, well-spoken, and well-groomed. She has an elegant hairstyle, unlike the Orange Man’s bizarre dyed blonde mop. She represents the coasts, not the crude riffraff in the Red states whom Hillary Clinton called “a basket of deplorables.” Above all, and in greatest contrast to him, she is polite. She looks and acts like someone they would invite to dinner.
A mass spectacle worthy of Leni Riefenstahl
I watched some of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, including Kamala's acceptance speech, with liberals whose position is to back anyone who can beat Trump. It doesn’t matter what she’s done or what she says she'll do. Gaza doesn’t matter. Her environmental hypocrisy doesn’t matter. Her defiance of U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in California prisons doesn’t matter. Her refusal to prosecute foreclosure king Steven Mnuchin doesn’t matter. Her reversal on banning fracking doesn’t matter. Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales’s endorsements of her, three weeks later, don’t matter.
Nothing matters but stopping Trump. Kamala Harris reflects their sense of who they are, he doesn't, and that's all that matters. She seems up to the job. Indeed, my liberal friends got upset because I was spoiling the party by raising any of these issues, however calmly and quietly. Someone asked me to be polite and not mention any of my criticisms of Kamala when company called.
As Juan Gonzales said during Democracy Now’s coverage, “The level of choreographed mass spectacle of this convention would be really worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, the famous Nazi, Hitler’s filmmaker and propagandist, in terms of controlling the narrative that the American people receive about what the Democratic Party is about.”
American liberalism has become so extreme that it can’t incorporate contradiction. As social theorist Hannah Arendt wrote, “When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
I tried to say, citing Glen Ford, that I didn’t expect to persuade them not to vote for her, that I was only asking that they do so understanding who she is, what she’s done, and what she’s promising to do. That was spoiling the ultranationalist party beamed from inside the convention center where Democrats chanted “USA! USA! USA!”
I pointed out that, as Glen Ford also said, “People who oppose Republican wars cannot seem to bring themselves to oppose Democratic wars,” but again, that was impolite.
I was reminded of George Orwell’s 1945 essay “On Nationalism,” in which he wrote, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
Deep Blue Berkeley
I watched the Harris/Trump debate at a venue in the belly of the liberal beast, Berkeley, California, where people cheered loudly for Harris every time she opened her mouth, and the guy immediately in front of me kept chanting, “Cut him off!” in response to Trump. There was a quiet second or two when she pledged to make sure that Israel would have all it needs to defend itself, followed by cheers when she muttered a few meaningless words about supporting the dignity and self-determination of the Palestinian people.
People cheered when she said “two-state solution,” clearly unaware that the US always insists it must be negotiated between the two parties, not imposed from outside, and that Israel will, of course, never negotiate to create a Palestinian state. There are various legal arguments about what makes a state a state, but UN recognition is the widely received criterion—that was granted to Israel in 1949—and the US has made it clear it will veto that on the Security Council.
But never mind. This audience cheered for the two-state deception.
They cheered when she promised to ensure that “we have the most lethal fighting force in the world,” but stopped short of chanting, “USA! USA!”
They cheered when she appealed to the economic authority of Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs, which Obama rewarded with $10 billion for its role in the foreclosure disaster. This was presaged by Glen Ford in his Democracy Now debate with Michael Eric Dyson at the end of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, when he said, "I think what will probably go down as his [Obama's] biggest contribution to history is a kind of merging of the banks and the state, with $16 trillion being infused into these banks, into Wall Street, under his watch, and the line between Wall Street and the federal government virtually disappearing."
They cheered when she bragged, “I actually have the endorsement of 200 Republicans who have formally worked with President Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, including the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Congressmember Liz Cheney.”
The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the institutionalization of torture didn’t matter. The fact that Cheney came to power in elections stolen for George Bush in both 2000 and 2004 didn’t matter; she stands for the democracy that Trump’s feckless followers appeared to momentarily threaten on January 6.
When the spectacle was over and she had clearly carried the day, someone hollered, "Did anyone change their mind?" Someone else hollered back that she was going to work that much harder for Kamala, who reflected their sense of who they are, even though they were all white. She was well-groomed, well-mannered, and well-spoken. Above all, she was polite.
They didn’t want anyone spoiling the party.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. You can help support her work on Patreon.
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