Photograph Source: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos – Public Domain
The Democratic Party has forfeited every claim to moral and political credibility. It is not a bulwark against fascism but an accomplice to it, a party of cowardice and complicity that props up the most barbaric features of gangster capitalism-extending from staggering levels of inequality to its refusal to support national health care. Its leadership, craven, visionless, and drunk on Wall Street money, has become a machinery of war and despair. It is wedded to the military-industrial complex and normalizes through its silence a culture of war, misery, and cruelty. It sends billions in weapons to Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, fully aware those arms sustain a machinery of occupation and repression. With one act, fighting to cut off the flow of weapons, the Democrats could help end this slaughter. Instead, when Netanyahu recently visited the White House, they shook his bloodstained hand and smiled for the cameras, their shamelessness captured in a widely circulated, obscene photograph. This betrayal abroad mirrors the Party’s collapse at home.The Party’s cowardice is written into its very DNA.
It is a party of whiners, trapped in ideological smugness and a flaccid discourse of compromise. Given its political and ethical weakness, it is ironic that on occasion it drapes itself in the hollow language of “resisting Trump’s authoritarianism.” This becomes more obvious when it advocates, on occasion, working with the regime, even as it props up authoritarians abroad and tightens the screws of neoliberal cruelty at home. Moira Donegan writing in The Guardian is right in stating that the Democratic Party is the party of self-sabotage, that is, it has a vision of American politics in which (they] have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own.” Its neoliberal policies have hollowed out working-class communities, shredded social protections, remained largely moot in calling out Trump’s regime as a criminogenic organization, and left despair in their wake, conditions that became the breeding ground for Trump’s authoritarian ascent. They created the void that fascism fills, and now they tremble before the monster they helped unleash.
The racist bile and fascist rhetoric spewed by Trump’s loyal sycophants, especially Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, receives far less outrage than the criticism directed at progressive voices like Zohran Mamdani, now running for mayor of New York City. When Miller brands the Democratic Party not only a domestic extremist organization but “an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists,” the silence from Democratic leaders is deafening. No effort is made to expose such language as rooted in the poisonous legacies of fascism and white supremacy, or for that matter call for his resignation. Yet there can be no doubt that Miller’s discourse, and his influence in shaping Trump’s militarized immigration, education, and policing policies, is a five-alarm fire for democracy, one that demands unrelenting opposition. There is no effort on the part of the Democratic Party leadership to acknowledge that the Department of Homeland Security has become not only a domestic terrorist organization but a “white nationalist content, mill churning out bigoted, jingoistic schlock.”
This cowardice abroad is matched by their silence in the face of fascism at home. Matters of moral witnessing, addressing war crimes, calling out massive violations of human rights at home and abroad are rarely acknowledged by the Democratic Party leadership. This is especially true with respect to the genocide taking place in Gaza. Not only is it morally indefensibly silent about its own complicity in arming Israel, it also reveals itself too timid to confront Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, where more than two million people have been reduced to conditions resembling a “vast Ground Zero.” As a party wedded to Wall Street, it is too timid to challenge the predatory capitalism that now mutates into one of the most destructive and exploitative economic systems on the planet, an order that thrives on the obliteration of human needs, elevates profit as its only sacrament, and transforms the state into a corrupt crime syndicate.
At home, the Democratic leadership refuses to lift a finger for candidates who represent genuine hope. Their refusal to support Zohran Mamdani in New York is not an oversight but a betrayal. Schumer and Jeffries embody the Party’s moral bankruptcy: Schumer the coward, Jeffries the gutless tactician, both locked in servitude to corporate power, both content to preside over a politics of endless war, mass incarceration, obscene inequality, and the normalization of state terrorism. They are the pallbearers of democracy, not its defenders. Commenting on the fact that Jeffries and Schumer have so far refused to endorse Mamdani, journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in a Wednesday column for The Guardian, “If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.” Mehdi only gets it partly right: these two politicians embody not individual cowardice, but a party that supports genocide in Gaza, refuses to stand up to the military-industrial-academic complex, and could not care less about the future they are destroying for young people.
The American people deserve more than these moral zombies. What is needed is a new party, one unafraid to fight for radical democracy and the dignity of all. A party that calls for the end of staggering inequality, a universal wage, free health care, free quality education for all, housing for everyone, strict gun restrictions, the abolition of poverty, and the dismantling of the warfare state. A party that will slash the bloated defense budget and redirect those trillions into schools, hospitals, homes, and the expansion of social rights. A party that will name criminalized capitalism for what it is: a death-dealing order of greed, violence, corruption, and disposability.
Fascism does not arrive fully formed; it is cultivated in the soil of despair, in the immiseration engineered by Trump’s cruelty and the Democrats’ cowardice. Left unchallenged, it corrodes everyday life until cruelty appears normal and democracy becomes little more than a corpse draped in patriotic slogans of hate, disappearance, and lawlessness. The Democratic Party cannot halt this descent. It is too compromised by its allegiance to corporate power, too wedded to the financiers of misery, and too invested in the politics of fear to offer anything resembling resistance.
The time for illusions is over. The Democratic Party cannot be reformed, nor can it be trusted to halt the march of authoritarianism. What is required is not the rehabilitation of a party of cowardice, but the creation of a new political formation, one that does not tremble before fascism but confronts it head-on. A movement that refuses to confuse capitalism with democracy, that rejects the barbarism of endless war and the plunder of Wall Street, that refuses to sacrifice children in Gaza or in America’s streets on the altar of profit and power. Such a movement must be rooted in the struggles of ordinary people, grounded in solidarity and sustained by collective courage.
The future belongs to those who can imagine and fight for a radically different order: a socialist democracy grounded in solidarity, justice, and care. It belongs to those who demand free health care and education, who insist on housing and dignity for all, who struggle for racial, gender, and economic equality, and who reject the culture of disposability that treats lives as expendable. It belongs to those willing to rise up, organize, and fight for a world where freedom, justice, and equality are not a privilege of the few, but the common inheritance of all.
If fascism grows in the soil of despair, then resistance must grow in the soil of hope. Against a politics of fear, we must summon a politics of courage. Against the machinery of death, we must build a mass working-class movement with the power to imagine and fight for a future in which socialist democracy is not an empty slogan but a hard-won reality, hammered out in struggle, sustained by solidarity, and carried forward by those who refuse to be ruled by fear. Democracy will not be saved by the cowards of compromise or the apostles of war, but by those in the struggles of workers and the oppressed who risk everything for justice, equality, and hope.
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