t’s perpetually election season in the United States, but this one has been especially bizarre and intense. Donald Trump was shot in the ear. Joe Biden mumbled his way through a debate that was his downfall. Kamala Harris fell from a coconut tree and became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. But Harris’s campaign quickly squandered the initial burst of enthusiasm and momentum as it pivoted to courting centrists and trying to outflank the opposition on the military and border security. The first Black and South Asian woman to have a chance at the Oval Office, Harris has tried to position herself as a transformative candidate in the mold of Barack Obama while actually running more like Hillary Clinton, pandering to Wall Street and vowing to include Republicans in her cabinet. This rearranging of the deck chairs on the sinking Democratic ship has unfolded against the backdrop of racist anti-immigrant fearmongering, conspiracy theories and threats of post-election violence, catastrophic heat waves and hurricanes, and the unceasing, enraging, heart-rending genocide in Gaza and devastating strikes across the region.

We don’t know what will happen on Nov. 5, but we do know we can’t afford to ignore elections. Political power matters, and it’s important to understand how it operates — and how we might influence it. That’s why the writers in this issue have taken the time to examine the electoral dilemma from multiple angles. They 

 why this presidential race is so close, 

 Harris’s reactionary appeals to Black men, and 

 the strategy that drove the Uncommitted movement. We 

 to two former Biden officials who resigned in protest over the administration’s policy toward Israel and Palestine and also 

 at more participatory alternatives to elections that allow people to vote for policies instead of voting for personalities.

In the end, we know our collective liberation won’t come from the ballot box. There are many other forms of power we need to build and wield if we want to transform society: power in unions, power in the streets, power in deeply rooted community organizing and coalition building. This is the power displayed by the 

 aiding their western North Carolina neighbors in Hurricane Helene’s aftermath and by the patient organizers who have built a 

 that has helped make Minnesota a progressive stronghold. It’s the power 

 and faculty are forging on campuses as they begin to repair movement infrastructure destroyed by the far right and band together to fight administrators hellbent on squeezing workers.

There is also power in alternatives, in beginning to build the world we want out of the rubble, planting seeds for future harvests by constructing cooperative enterprises, reconnecting with the land, and trying to create a future free of incarceration. We see this kind of visionary power in the 

, where people are creating new systems of agriculture and exchange in order to resist colonization and exploitation. This is the power sought by 

 who are working to dismantle the prison industrial complex, one of the pillars of the fascist threat now threatening to engulf us.

As essays in this issue reveal, building small-d democratic power — power rooted in solidarity — is never easy. Our organizing efforts have to contend with racism, sexism, mistrust, external attacks, internal conflict, and the common but misguided view that outcomes are always zero-sum. But as an account of the deep connections between Palestinian and Black liberation argues, this kind of solidarity isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a strategic one. We can save ourselves only if we do the work to save one another.

As academic and activist Donna Murch writes, “Winning is hard, but it is absolutely necessary.” Even if the worst outcome of an all-out takeover by the far right is avoided in the weeks and months ahead, the left can hardly begin to claim victory. To have any hope of actually creating change on a scale that meets the crises that define our time, we need to organize everywhere, building power person by person, day after day in our workplaces, schools, faith centers, neighborhoods, rural communities, local governments, and more. We need a plan that extends far beyond one election cycle, and we need to be realistic and relentless about the monumental effort, insight, compassion, and courage this task requires. Let’s get to work.

Illustration by Golnar Adili. Photographs by Abbas Momani/AFP and Erin Lefevre/NurPhoto, via Getty Images.

Elections Matter, but We Need More Than the Ballot Box to Achieve Collective Liberation

n the days and weeks before Americans vote for their next president, Donald Trump has reached deep inside the gutter for his latest stump speech material. He spent much of September insisting that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating the pets of locals. “Illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life,” Trump said at a California press conference in September. In his lone presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump claimed, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Even as local officials insisted that nearly all of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally, Trump promised to organize a large-scale deportation of them anyway. More recently, at a rally in early October, Trump traveled to Aurora, Colo., to rail against immigrants he described as “animals,” “barbaric thugs,” and “sadistic monsters.” As if to make Trump’s point, the campaign adorned the stage with life-size photos of the faces of Latino men.

Trump’s campaign has been fueled by racism, misogyny, and homophobia, a consistent and extraordinary display of bigotry in person and via commercials bombarding swing states across the country. And yet this race is razor close, leaving us to guess who may eventually win. Even as Trump’s campaign has offered little more than racist rants, lies, and a few incoherent economic policies (higher tariffs and eliminating taxes on tips for service workers), he stands as good a chance as Harris of winning the presidency.

How can this be? There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also 

 that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters 

 with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, 

 found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

But even with these stark distinctions between the candidates, and also between Trump and voter preferences, Harris has struggled to rise in favorability or distinguish herself from Trump in this race, which remains a toss-up. Beyond identity, Harris was slow to fill out her presidential platform with programming to indicate how she would be different from Trump and the president she currently sits behind. When asked on a recent talk show how she diverges from Biden, Harris distinguished herself by highlighting her intention to appoint a Republican to her future cabinet. These kinds of antics threaten to undermine her support with Democratic voters who see themselves as progressives. While Democrats describe Trump as a fascist and Joe Biden went so far as to 

 that Trumpism and elements of the Republican Party seemed akin to “semi-fascism,” it is odd, as some kind of gesture toward bipartisanship, to insist on putting a Republican in the cabinet. Yet she is reaching for political gimmicks because even with what one could point to as the successes of the Biden administration, like its aggressive efforts to recover from the catastrophic economic effects of the pandemic, these issues have not earned Harris voters any more than they did for Biden.

Since Biden delivered his last State of the Union address in January, the U.S. has enjoyed the highest rate of economic growth, its lowest inflation in the past year, and the strongest wage growth among its peer nations in the G7. Rates of poverty and unemployment have fallen and remain at historic lows. This includes Black workers, who are also experiencing historically low rates of poverty and low rates of unemployment — though they are still higher than for white people. Biden’s presidential campaign was impervious to this supposed economic good news. Indeed, Harris’s run was made possible by the national shrug about Biden’s economic recovery — the so-called vibecession. But the problem was never just vibes. Much of those real material gains were undone by historically high inflation in 2022 that ate into the rising wages that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the worst of the pandemic as businesses tried to lure workers back. Almost half of Americans say they are not as “well-off now” as they were when Biden took office. Nearly 60 percent say the economy is getting worse. Given the ever-rising costs of essential goods — especially housing, health care, and education — they are not wrong.

Economic uncertainty and insecurity are underwriting some measures of the skepticism confronting Harris’s historic run. She has attempted to distance herself from Biden’s record, but it is difficult to do so when you are the vice president. But the reluctance of some segments of the Democratic Party’s core constituency to embrace Harris points to deeper problems for the Democratic Party. Harris’s weak support among Black voters has been a canary in the coal mine for months but has been ignored on the assumption that Trump’s bigotry would cohere these voters into alignment with Harris. Instead, Black support has continued to be a drag on Harris’s momentum.

Harris continues to poll lower among Black voters compared with Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. She has been stuck at around 80 percent with Black voters who say they will cast ballots for the Democratic candidate in the coming election. Black women are Harris’s biggest supporters, but the 83 percent who say they will vote for her is a notable drop from the historic high of 96 percent who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and even the 91 percent who voted for Biden in 2020. All the efforts of the Democratic Party to cast Harris’s campaign in the same light as Obama’s run in 2008 miss the ways that Obama’s legacy had changed by the end of his second term. By the time Obama left office, he and Michelle Obama might have been personally revered, but many Black voters were disappointed with his underwhelming presidency.

In 2016, with Trump challenging Hillary Clinton, 51 percent of Black people agreed that Obama’s presidency was “one of the most important advances” for Black Americans, but that was down from 71 percent in 2009. Only 37 percent of African Americans thought his administration had improved “race relations.” Last, 52 percent of Black people polled said that Obama’s policies had “had not gone far enough” to help Black people. But the most important barometer of disappointment with Obama’s presidency was the eruption of the Black Lives Matter social movement during the twilight of his administration. The idea that Harris is a revival of the spirit of Obama in 2008 fails to comprehend how the persistence of economic inequality and police abuse and violence created disillusionment at the end of his term. Of course, no one believed that it was Obama’s responsibility to single-handedly undo generations of racial discrimination during a two-term presidency, but when he was running for president in 2007, he obliquely presented his candidacy as the fruition of generations of civil rights struggles. When he traveled to Selma, Ala., in 2007 to give a speech to former leaders of the movement, he said, “We’re in the presence today of giants whose shoulders we stand on, people who battled not just on behalf of African Americans but on behalf of all of America; that battled for America’s soul, that shed blood, that endured taunts.” He added, “I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Of the previous generation, which he called “the Moses generation,” he said, “They took us 90 percent of the way there. We still got that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side.” But by 2012, when a chastened Obama was asked whether his administration had done enough for Black businesses in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, he said, “I want all businesses to succeed. I want all Americans to have opportunity. I’m not the president of Black America. I’m the president of the United States of America.”

Supporters waiting for the arrival of Kamala Harris during a campaign rally at the McHale Athletic Center in Wilkes Barre, Pa., Sept. 13, 2024. Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

 of 589 Black voters, 84 percent of Democrat-affiliated respondents affirmed that their party “understands the problems of people like me” and 75 percent agreed with the statement that the Democratic Party “can fix the problems facing people like me.” But when confronted with the statement that the Democratic Party “keeps its promises,” only 60 percent agreed. The unresolved crises of both the Obama and then the Biden administrations — namely, persisting economic inequality and the continuing problem of police brutality in Black communities — have shaped many Black voters’ concerns and substantiated the claims that Democrats don’t keep their promises. Consider that nearly three-quarters of Black people in the U.S. believe that the “prison system” was designed “to hold Black people back” and almost 70 percent believe the same thing about the police, 

 that “the economic system was designed to hold Black people back.” The numbers are even higher among Black adults with a college degree. The lack of resolution of or even serious engagement with these issues in the race for president has turned into a political crisis that now threatens to undermine Kamala Harris’s campaign. History is not cyclical but is in fact cumulative.

This is a better context with which to understand the small but clearly significant appeal of Trump to some Black men and a modestly increasing number of Black women. Instead of addressing the specific concerns Black voters have with the Democratic Party, Obama took it upon himself to intervene with one of his infamous scolds of a Black audience. In early October, during an election appearance in the swing state of Pennsylvania, he dismissed the erosion of support for Harris among Black men as sexist: “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” That may be a part of the mix, but the underlying assumption that Democrats are simply entitled to Black votes without having to account for their record is part of a larger political problem that is coming home to roost. The bigger issue for the Democrats is not the defection of Black voters to Trump but the potential indifference of Black voters to the election more broadly.

In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

It is a strategy that risks Harris’s standing among the core constituents of the Democratic Party, and it may threaten her influence among other voters as well. In focusing on the future, Harris avoids talking about the past. She has defined her campaign as a “new way forward,” but this framing — intended both to distinguish her campaign from Trump’s while also distancing herself from Biden — has left her campaign unable to politically contextualize and explain the inflation experienced during Biden’s term, which Republicans have blamed on his excessive spending. Instead of embracing the popular pandemic-era programs and the bolder aspects of Biden’s legacy — expanded unemployment insurance, student loan relief, antitrust measures, climate investments, and pro-union stances — and pledging to reintroduce or expand them, Harris acts as if it were all a mistake to move beyond in favor of some nebulous future.

Not just a poor strategy, it reflects the natural resting place of the Democratic Party. Biden’s gamble on a big welfare state in 2020 was the product of the combination of an unprecedented protest and a devastating pandemic, not a real commitment to using public money to break with decades of neoliberal austerity. The previous two presidential races unfolded against a backdrop of an insurgent Black Lives Matter movement and the leftward pull of Bernie Sanders placing uncomfortable demands on the party. In this race, though, activist currents in the dormant BLM movement quickly fell in line to back Harris with no demands and a narrow focus on simply getting out the vote. Sanders, along with many members of the Squad, are also marching in lockstep with the Harris campaign, despite her retreat from the more progressive positions she took in 2020. Harris’s consultants and campaign operatives have restored the Democrats’ messaging around policing, market economics, and reactionary immigration policies while dropping any pretense of social democratic programs that made Sanders’s run for president so popular. Moreover, Harris’s refusal to consider any deviation from Biden’s commitment to Israel has also undermined her support from constituencies she needs to win this year’s race.

The irony is that when Sanders ran in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party primaries, his candidacy set the terms for a broad field. In a race to catch up with the front-running Sanders, Harris even adopted his policy proposals around free public health care and college. But in this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters.

It remains to be seen how many of these voters — Black, brown, young, working-class, without college degrees — can be mobilized to vote for Harris. But the Democratic Party’s dependence on the charisma of its older cohort, particularly Obama, relies on a stagnant image of history, one where we never learn the lessons of the past. In reality, voters carry their political resentments and disappointments into the future — not for the sake of cultivating political villains, but because their circumstances have not improved enough that they can afford to forget.

Supporters of Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Crotona Park in the Bronx, N.Y., May 23, 2024. Photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis, via Getty Images.

Why Is the Election Between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris So Close?

n Jan. 20, 2009, the United States of America inaugurated its first Black president, Barack Obama. In November, the U.S. may elect its second. Does this mean anything?

One reason to think so, as New York City mayor Eric Adams reminds us: “Representation matters.” This election year we are confronted with the question of whether or not to support the possible election of Kamala Harris — as good a time as any to return to the question of what representation means and what it’s good for.

We of course needn’t focus on the highest political office in the country to revisit the perennial question of what “Black faces in high places” means politically. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in 

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

, the emergence of a Black political class has slowly developed over the past 50 years, which she describes as “the most significant transformation in all of black life.” In that book, she discusses the Baltimore protests over the police murder of Freddie Gray: “When a Black mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a Black woman to suppress a Black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle.”

” has not turned over much of a new leaf. When Adams said, “Representation matters,” in 2021, he had just been elected the 

 of a historic all-women team of five deputy mayors. If it sounds less inspirational now, maybe you’ve been following the news: his administration has been mired in a scandal of 

 that produced the top man’s federal indictment alongside arrests of senior officials. Meanwhile, the city of Atlanta essentially 

 — printing the names and addresses of signatories to “Stop Cop City” petitions — rather than engage in the barest pretense of democracy and allow public challenge to its attempts to divert yet more land and funding to policing.

Perhaps in response to these episodes and countless others has come yet another resurgence: reminders of the 

 at the heart of the Democratic Party in particular, the fact that 

 from capitalism or its consequences, and also that voting may even be an irresponsible symbolic concession to a system that refuses to 

. Some have responded to this malaise by trying to play defense in response to electoral politics, insisting to leftists that participation in electoral politics allows you to “

 that one’s worse opponents might commit.

One way to move beyond the basic set of assumptions is asking how we could get better representatives: if we had a genuine 

 that could break the Democratic-Republican stranglehold over the shape of U.S. politics. We could try for new rules to shape the contest between political parties: 

 to change how candidates craft their appeal to voters or 

 to change how parties share power after elections from a winner-take-all system to one that splits seats between parties. But while we ask those questions, it’s worth adding another, parallel set: What if elections were different? What if we could vote directly for plans rather than representatives of 

 party? What if we could represent ourselves?

 is not some thought experiment or conceptual exercise (though, as a philosopher, I’m not above those!). Direct democracy already exists, albeit in limited forms, but those forms could in principle scale up. Here in the United States, abortion rights have already been 

 a direct democratic strategy for their defense this election season: holding referenda on abortion laws that would allow their voters to 

 California, Michigan, Ohio, and Vermont in enshrining reproductive rights guarantees into law, including amending state constitutions. “

” doesn’t have to be only a dangerous and irresponsible failure to defend reproductive justice.

In Ireland structures facilitating direct democracy won a constitutional amendment to defend 

through a Citizens’ Assembly and then a referendum. 

 to discuss and decide matters of public importance, bringing in panels of experts to inform the process. When given a chance to decide together — not as atomized individuals at a polling booth but as an organized body with responsibility to the public good — a randomly selected group of Irish people did something that surprised the world. After a year and a half of informed and careful deliberation, the group came out in support for reproductive rights and called for a national referendum on legalizing abortion. Shortly thereafter, in May 2018, an overwhelming majority of the Irish public voted their agreement, enshrining reproductive rights into law.

Another form of public direct democracy is participatory budgeting, which allows residents of an area to exercise direct democratic input over how city funds get used. The process was 

developed by the Brazilian Workers’ Party

This model has already taken hold in some places in the United States. In the aftermath of the protests against police violence in the summer of 2020, a coalition of organizing and activist groups proposed a “

” for Seattle that aimed to “transform our city budget away from one that invests heavily in policing, prosecuting, and jailing BIPOC communities, toward one that invests in building self-determined, dignified, productive and ecologically sustainable livelihoods, democratic governance, and ecological resilience.” After 

, Seattle’s mayor finally announced over $27 million in funding for initiatives chosen through the participatory budgeting process. The selected projects include funding to establish mental health specialists as first responders, potentially displacing police, and emergency youth shelters. Seattle was not just one of the 

 to move toward de facto cuts to police budgets but one of the even fewer cities to do so by direct democratic means.

Eric Adams was right about one thing: representation does matter. Elections and electoral politics are ultimately a form of deciding together, and much of what’s wrong with how elections function in our political system can be traced to whom elections empower and how. From national figures like Harris to local ones like the Atlanta City Council members, representatives have to run for office, which means they have to court big campaign donors and avoid confrontation with a well-resourced opposition. We have seen what that kind of confrontation can look like: AIPAC and its allies spent $14 million and $8 million to oust 

 for the crime of being insufficiently deferential to Israel.

The job of any elected official in a nominally democratic society involves the attempt to unify in one person the various interests of a diverse constituency with needs and goals that often conflict. It’s no surprise, then, that the usual strategies for walking this tightrope often and perhaps necessarily involve some measure of waffling or duplicity. What the specific job of the presidency adds to this predicament — beyond operating at a national scale where social conflicts are even more hopelessly irreconcilable — is the weight of the additional stakes presented by the country’s unilateral control over the world’s 

, a global intelligence and espionage network of 

 proportions, and launch codes for an arsenal encompassing 

 of the world’s available nuclear weapons. It’s no wonder that corruption, influence peddling, and elite capture result from a political decision-making process that is so heavily reliant on the whims, idiosyncrasies, and personal incentives that our representatives must negotiate.

But skepticism about how elections function and whom they empower is compatible with recognizing the 

 of direct democratic votes and decision-making. Unlike city council members, participants in citizens’ assemblies or participatory budgeting processes are not running for office. People who own homes or businesses or worship in an area might well have outsize economic interests on some questions relative to others. Under the present system, these people often organize against causes like 

 for their efforts. In a participatory budgeting system, their interests wouldn’t grant them any more votes. The shop owner, homeowner, or landlord has the same means of influencing the outcome of a participatory budgeting process that a low-wage employee or renter does: convincing other people. One reason to have confidence that we can do better than elected representatives in making sure that democratic processes run this way will safeguard the common good is that our neighbors — unlike AIPAC and other lobbies — will have to live with the decisions made.

We should understand the scale of what direct democratic procedures have so far accomplished against the sobering backdrop of the status quo. Referenda can be used 

 for the powerful to legitimize their control, especially when done in the absence of genuine public deliberation and consideration of proposals. Even when such consideration happens, as in Ireland, the question of power is paramount; Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly officially had only an 

 role, meaning that elected representatives could have simply ignored their proposals (and the Irish are able to amend their constitution via referendum, something we in the U.S. cannot do). Even where directly democratic processes ensure that people have power over funding, the scale of that power often is dwarfed by the power the system keeps for itself. While Seattle’s participatory budgeting processes distributed some $27 million, the government of King County, which includes Seattle, operates on a two-year budget of more than 

. While direct democratic control over tens of millions of dollars is not quite a rounding error, neither is it, in its current form, as significant an existential challenge to an entrenched political structure that was perhaps hoped for during the height of the 2020 protests.

Yet we should also recognize the potential promise of direct democracy, especially working in tandem with other dimensions of struggle rather than as a substitute for them. At least some of this promise is visible in Seattle. While many cities ignored defund demands entirely, and defund measures were rolled back in cities like Austin and Los Angeles, Seattle’s progress remains. King County is now slated for a 

of participatory budgeting to decide on the use of some $11.8 million. Anyone who “lives, works, owns a business, receives services, goes to school, or worships” in one of the five areas of the county targeted in this round can enter the selection process. The range of organizations that had supported the Solidarity Budget — from the activist groups Black Collective Voices and Decriminalize Seattle to labor union locals SEIU 925 and UAW 4121 — most likely has something to do with this success. And the stronger these groups are, the greater the possibility that future iterations of struggle could deliver more serious and weighty direct democratic results.

Making political decisions by choosing which Democrat, Republican, or third party will make those decisions for us deserves just as much reconsideration as the two-party system itself. We could make decisions by direct vote or 

, or we could decide who occupies public office by 

 rather than elections. Any of these can be run better or worse, and some may fit the political and cultural circumstances better than others. But in this time of nationalized politics where spectacles and celebrities reign, it’s helpful to remember that representation matters. Maybe we should have more opportunities to represent ourselves.

Vice President Kamala Harris campaigning at Washington Crossing Historic Park in Washington Crossing, Pa., Oct. 16, 2024. Photograph by Hannah Beier/Bloomberg, via Getty Images.

The Potential Benefits of Direct Democracy and Voting for Policies, Not Personalities

alik and his brothers farm an ample spread of land in the village of Al-Nasseriya, about 14 kilometers east of Nablus. As he walked through their crops in August 2024, he recounted his good fortune: “We have around 600 dunams [150 acres], a good water supply, and some of the best produce in this part of the valley.” But as he spoke, his eyes strayed to the high ground above us, where we could see the outlines of a makeshift settlement. “The ‘shepherds’ up there are always coming down to harass us,” he said, meaning the unkempt, roving settlers who look as if they just stepped out of the pages of the Bible and started arriving in the area in 2023. “They send drones, and they release their wild boars to ravage our fields.” Yet he also told us that on the other side of that hill, there were more than 1,500 dunams of greenhouses and farmed plots, newly erected and cultivated by Palestinians since Oct. 7. Even though these new farmers might be in competition with him, he seemed to welcome their cultivation of the land.

There are very few positive stories coming out of Palestine. One candidate is the return to the land that is happening in various forms and locations in the West Bank. 

, Israeli authorities rescinded the ability to work for as many as 

 who had been engaged in waged labor inside the Green Line. Many of those cut off from well-paying jobs are opting to work on their ancestral lands, either to keep themselves busy or to eke out an alternative livelihood. The move to integrate Palestinians into the Israeli economy from 1967 onward through the permit system resulted in the progressive abandonment of farms, making it easier for Israeli settlers to seize their land. Reclaiming what remains of their West Bank acreages and reviving the deep heritage of Palestinian agriculture is something to applaud, especially when it draws on the belief that returning the land to productive use is also a form of protection from further seizures.

But this promising new development, as with almost all things Palestinian, has opened up a new field of conflict with the colonizers. At a time when settlers are running rampant on the West Bank, any effort on the part of Palestinians to preserve or defend their smallholdings from theft attracts aggressive attention from Israeli Jews who believe they have an archaic and divinely ordained right to all of the Promised Land. Every square inch of the 

 in particular is up for grabs; the benign climate and fertile terrain of this natural greenhouse make for a bountiful agricultural prize, and it is being ethnically cleansed at a rapid rate. Many of those displaced are recruited as day laborers on the newly established settlement farms, well supplied with water from Israel’s own national grid while Palestinians are forbidden from digging wells to access their own groundwater.

In addition, the occupation authorities are primed to crack down on any attempt to create an alternative economy, independent of the monopoly enjoyed by Israeli suppliers of goods and services. Most Palestinian grocery stores are stocked with highly subsidized Israeli products, and local farmers are at a competitive disadvantage with their Israeli counterparts, who enjoy discounted water, superior technologies, and better economies of scale and are usually able to get their produce to market first. Yet one of the steps on the road to national liberation is winning the capacity for self-sufficient production — in this case, for Palestinians to grow and put food on their tables by and for themselves.

 in the 1990s as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” The principles were devised as a bottom-up, global south corrective to the accommodationist idea of “

,” adopted and widely embraced by the corporate agribusiness industry. Unlike in Gaza, where dehydration and famine have been deployed as weapons of genocidal war, there is no imminent threat of famine in the West Bank, but neither is there any guarantee that the far-right Israeli government will not resort to starvation tactics to drive people out in the future. For the time being, most residents enjoy food security, to the benefit of Israeli producers and middlemen for whom the West Bank is a captive, and lucrative, market. But what are the prospects for food sovereignty heralded by the recent return to the land? Is there any evidence, or hope, that an alternative economy can take root, one grounded in solidarity?

If so, it will be because the groundwork has already been laid, over the past few years, by an emergent network of small agricultural cooperatives, many of whose members are politically intentional about the need to create a new kind of social relationship through food production and provision. One of us (Nadine) is a volunteer with 

 (PSF), a grassroots fundraising platform aimed at supporting cooperative farms. The other (Andrew) visited several of the farms this past summer. Aside from the heritage of the fellaheen (smallholder farmers), the cooperatives draw upon a lineage that dates to the 

 (1987–93), when the interfactional front of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees 

 to boycott Israeli goods and to participate in the production of homegrown alternatives. The urgent need for locally produced food and clothing prompted a wave of cooperatives involved in home gardening, food processing, handicrafts, animal husbandry, and the reclamation of unused or abandoned land.

This drive to set up a resistance economy, free from the occupation’s clutches and based on a return to the productivity of the land, sprang up under emergency conditions, but it proved to be one of the slow-burning legacies of the intifada years. Whenever labor was withheld as part of a boycott or when Israel canceled work permits as a form of collective punishment for some civil uprising, the land and the promise of autonomy beckoned as both a practical alternative and a political cause.

Alternative agriculture has adherents worldwide, some attracted by the romance of agrarianism or the appeal of healthy lifestyles and others motivated by the urgent need to decarbonize food production and consumption, which accounts for up to 

30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions

. In the U.S., a new generation of young and BIPOC farmers 

, many of them dedicated to sustainable, chemical-free growing under the aegis of agro-ecology. As elsewhere, the cooperatives in Palestine have been founded by college-educated youth. A scarcity of jobs has led them to choose cooperative labor in the fields over nonproductive opportunities in the West Bank’s saturated service sector or the humiliations of waged labor in Israel and the settlements.

Samer Karajah, a member of this new generation, is from the West Bank village of Saffa, whose 5,000 or so inhabitants live in proximity to the 

. Illegal Israeli settlements lie just to the north. Most of the village’s surrounding agricultural lands fall under what is designated Area C and are subject to Israeli military control. Area C currently represents the active frontier for settlers: the largest swaths of cultivable land with the fewest Palestinian inhabitants and the easiest to expropriate. Karajah, a dabke dancer with the formidable 

, is part owner of a bohemian Ramallah cafe and a member of the cooperative known as Ard Al-Ya’s, or Land of Despair. He explained that the name, derived from Nietzsche, speaks to the need felt by many young Palestinians to try to transform their 

 into “a productive path towards the future.” In that spirit, the collective employs environmentally conscious cultivation techniques, such as homemade fertilizer and native seeds, as a direct response to colonial conditions not of their choosing.

Established in 2017, Land of Despair began as an agroecology experiment on a small plot belonging to the family of one of the founders. It has expanded to include some 16 members: young men and women, disillusioned by the prospect of working for banks or corporations, who have turned to the nascent cooperatives for a source of income and a sense of political purpose. They serve their own village community of Saffa with discounted produce and donations to low-income families, bringing the rest of the crop to a newly established biweekly popular market in Ramallah. Given the precarious location of their plots, they are doing “

” inside the open jaw of the occupation. But Karajah insisted, “This is not a romantic effort — we have to show we are economically successful if we want to persuade others to follow suit.” He pointed out that their mission of sustainable farming might even be helped along by Israel restricting access to chemical fertilizer to prevent its use in making explosives.

Land of Despair is one of about 30 cooperatives now operating in the Nablus, Tulkarem, and Ramallah regions. Networked through civil society organizations like the 

, the cooperatives share technical agricultural knowledge and innovative organizational ideas about how to secure the kind of community involvement that will be needed for the projects to thrive over the long term. Culture plays no small role in these initiatives. Aside from mobilizing volunteer work, such as the communal labor that Palestinians perform around the yearly olive harvest, dance and music traditions are an integral part of their work. Karajah said, “We plan to do dabke dance workshops” on one of the Land of Despair plots, reminding us that the dance originated in labor: the stomping of feet firmed up the soil.

The growing co-op movement is a political response to everyday life choices. These new farmers are opting out of the culture of ultra-consumerism and debt leveraging introduced by the Palestinian Authority’s experiment with 

. The outcome of that economic gamble has further subdued an occupied people through the crushing burden of paying down loans taken out to sustain their middle-class aspirations. By comparison, and despite the lip service paid by PA leaders to the nationalistic value of the land, only 1 percent of its budget goes to agriculture, while 

 is allocated to security services as of 2015.

Palestinian civil society, particularly the 

, has long sought to escape its servitude to international NGOs that distribute funding with stringent conditions attached. This restrictive donor mentality has only intensified since Oct. 7, through stepped-up threats to withdraw essential aid for organizations that refuse to tone down their support for resistance. A 

 by 32 Palestinian community organizations calls for “disengaging from ... dependence on foreign aid, replacing it with mobilizing and employing resources at our disposal while nurturing the spirit of participatory work, volunteerism, and giving.” How is this shift manifested in “return to the land” initiatives? The agricultural cooperatives require inputs for the purchase of necessary infrastructure like greenhouses and irrigation equipment. One way of securing these resources is through grassroots fundraising efforts in the diaspora.

Established by Palestinian activists in North America, the Palestinian Social Fund is an organic outgrowth of the cooperative movement. As founder Adam Albarghouthi explained to us, “The Palestinian diaspora once played an active role in supporting the movement for liberation, but the establishment of the Palestinian Authority effectively cut off this crucial link.” The PSF seeks to restore that responsibility by providing financial support for projects that protect and nurture the land. The fund has supported the construction of greenhouses, including at Land of Despair, and the rehabilitation of agricultural infrastructure destroyed by Israeli forces. The PSF’s model relies on a large number of small recurring monthly contributions from Palestinians and allies primarily based in North America. The PSF is oriented toward outlasting the aid generated by humanitarian news cycles tied to outbreaks of extreme military aggression and supporting civil society initiatives that take a principled stance of rejecting conditional donor funding. The goal is to build a grassroots financial infrastructure that, like the cooperatives themselves, can sustain politically grounded work in the long term. 

 The cooperatives are building communal bonds that prefigure what a free society could look like in the lands between the river and the sea. In line with the global movement for food sovereignty, their members adhere to the credo that there can be no liberation without sovereignty over daily bread. The reverberations of this sentiment can be heard on the streets of cities around the world, where protesters chant, “Eish, hurriyya, Falastin Arabiyya” (Bread, freedom, and an Arab Palestine). As frontier 

 across the West Bank and Israel’s military launches more 

 into the core residential enclaves of Areas A and B, it remains unclear how the cooperatives, or more generally, the return to the land will fare. In the face of such widespread violence and destruction, there is a tremendous amount of despair, but some remain condemned to hope.

A Palestinian couple harvests olives in Jifna, a village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Oct. 14, 2024. Photograph by John Wessels/AFP, via Getty Images.

An Alternative Economy Takes Root in the West Bank

had been buzzing in the days leading up to the May 19 Illinois presidential primary with discussions about how to vote. Word spread of an effort urging those eager to protest Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel — which included many people in Cook County, home to the largest population of Palestinian Americans in the country — to participate in a write-in campaign, casting a ballot for “Gaza” rather than the incumbent president or any of his challengers. Jimmy Rothschild, an organizer with progressive Jewish groups in Chicago, told me, “The collective was moving towards this feeling of, I’m not ticking the Joe box.” By the end of the day,

more than 67,000 Cook County Democratic voters refused to choose between the candidates on offer. (How many wrote in “Gaza” or something else, or had simply left their ballots blank, is impossible to know because Illinois doesn’t count write-ins and blanks.) In Chicago, almost one in four Democratic voters rejected the incumbent, dubbed by the movement for Palestine as “Genocide Joe.”

Chicago-based activists had learned from a similar campaign organized in the state next door, Listen to Michigan, that pushed for “uncommitted” primary votes — a more unambiguous protest vote, since those votes are tallied by local election boards. Democratic primary voters in nearly half of the country can cast a no-confidence vote that is “uncommitted,” “uninstructed,” or a similar designation. The Listen to Michigan coalition tapped progressive networks and mobilized hundreds of volunteers to hand out fliers, call and text voters, and organize rallies at college campuses alongside student activists. The campaign won more than 101,000 votes, about 13 percent of all votes cast in the state’s Democratic primary.

To organizers’ surprise, they even won two delegates to the convention.

In Dearborn, the first U.S. city with an Arab American majority, and Hamtramck, the first majority-Muslim U.S. city,

“uncommitted” votes outnumbered those cast for Biden. But when polling locations closed in Michigan on Feb. 27, the first numbers to roll in came out of Macomb, Washtenaw, and Oakland, which includes one of the country’s largest Jewish populations.

The votes from these counties more than tripled Listen to Michigan’s goal of 10,000 votes. For many Arabs and Muslims, the war was at the forefront, but so too for many progressive Jews, students, people of color, and other core parts of the Democratic base. Rothschild explained, “Between myself and a lot of the people who I organize with, it is very close to the top of the list, if not the top of the list, of driving concerns.” Layla Elabed,

Listen to Michigan’s campaign manager, told me she was on the phone with her sister, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, when the numbers started coming in: “It was such an emotional time. I don’t want to cry about it.” She continued, “But we were able to accomplish something that I don’t think anybody expected us to accomplish.”

When I met with Elabed in May, she described her path to the Uncommitted campaign as rooted in her experience as a lifelong Democrat. Elabed’s father was a Palestinian immigrant who worked on the Ford Motors assembly line outside Detroit, a proud member of the United Auto Workers. Through him, Elabed and her siblings learned the importance of voting, of engaging in politics and doing so through the vehicle of the Democratic Party, which her father had taught “provided me and my community a voice at the table.” She has been volunteering and working in local politics since she was 12.

Last year Elabed had been organizing against utility rate hikes and power outages in Detroit. But after Oct. 7, it became hard, she told me, “to have conversations about holding our utility company accountable and not recognize that we need to talk about what’s happening to Palestinians.” In house meetings organized to talk about the energy company, the conversations just kept coming back to Gaza. She said that people were asking, “What do we do in November? How can we vote for somebody like Joe Biden who’s complicit in this genocide, but we can’t vote for Trump?” Many people were feeling deep disillusionment with electoral politics, betrayed by the Democratic Party, and saying that they would not vote come November. In those conversations, Elabed recounted, she would respond, “We cannot do that. We cannot have that be the way we’re going to build any power. This is not the way that we can actually accomplish anything for Palestinians.”

In the weeks that followed, Listen to Michigan gave rise to an Uncommitted National Movement. In nine states, those complaints received over 10 percent of the vote.

Nearly a fifth of primary votes in Minnesota went uncommitted, sending 11 more delegates to the DNC. Another 29 percent voted uncommitted in Hawaii,

and in Wisconsin a similar “uninstructed” vote totaled more than twice Biden’s margin of victory over Trump in the state in 2020.

Elabed believed that she and other leaders of Uncommitted were doing “the most democratic thing that we could ever do” by making their voices heard in the ballot box. They were not naïve about the ability to shift the Democratic Party’s leadership in the short term, but with hundreds of thousands of votes registered as uncommitted, they felt the wind at their backs — even more so after Biden stepped down as the party’s nominee and Harris initially exhibited a more open posture toward the Palestine movement. Some Democratic Party insiders thought that the current morass might be tied to Biden’s personal commitments and ideology. Tariq Habash — the second Biden administration official to resign over its Gaza policy and a supporter of Uncommitted —

told me in August that based on private conversations, he concluded that it seems “like there is a willingness to actually address the failed policies” by the vice president and those around her.

The unexpected win of 30 Democratic delegates positioned Uncommitted organizers to orient the next phase of their movement around Cook County, where the Democratic Convention was scheduled to convene at the end of the summer. Uncommitted activists took their inspiration from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)’s delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention, which sought to force the Democratic Party to commit to desegregation. The Uncommitted organizers developed two central goals. The first objective was to cut through the “pomp and circumstance” of the convention and to make sure that not a day of the DNC went by where Gaza went unmentioned by the media or inside the United Center. The second was to engage Democratic Party loyalists at the convention and create pathways for them into the movement, building a stronger coalition of forces that could push the party from within to cut aid to Israel.

Uncommitted delegates hold a press conference outside the United Center before the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Aug. 22, 2024. AP Photo/Matt Rourke.

The Uncommitted delegation and supporters spent every day talking to other delegates, like the MFDP activists who had lobbied delegates day and night to win over sympathizers at the 1964 DNC. Uncommitted succeeded in

who were pledged to nominate Harris to sign a letter urging the vice president to promise an arms embargo and support a permanent cease-fire.

Some Harris delegates took shirts, pins, or “Democrats for Palestinian Rights” keffiyeh-patterned scarfs, and many said encouraging words to the uncommitted delegates.

“I didn’t meet any delegates who agreed with what Israel was doing,” Daniel Denvir, the host of The Dig podcast and the alternate Uncommitted delegate from Rhode Island, told me. “Not one, zero.”

Instead delegates’ views ranged from those who signed the letter and those who agreed but were unwilling to take a political risk to sign on to those who mistakenly believed that Biden and Harris were already doing as much as they could do to end the war.

The Uncommitted delegation also made a related, lesser ask: for a Palestinian American to be given a two-minute speaking slot. They engaged in weeks of negotiations with the party leadership, which waited until the penultimate night of the convention to answer no — the grim horrors ongoing for nearly a year in Gaza were not meant to ruin the “joy” and “unity” vibes ringing through the convention. Uncommitted responded with a sit-in on the pavement outside the

that recalled the MFDP’s convention protests 60 years ago, after the Democratic Party leadership continued to side with the racist, all-white Mississippi delegation, fearing that drifting from the status quo would dampen Dixiecrat turnout in November. Like today’s party leadership who ignored and silenced pro-peace voices, Lyndon B. Johnson characterized the 1964 convention as “a place of happy, surging crowds and thundering cheers” in his memoir. The “display of unity” he described did not include the freedom delegation.

At an Uncommitted press conference the following morning,

appeared via FaceTime, saying through tears, “We shouldn’t have to beg our own party to be heard.” Reiterating the importance of telling the stories of Palestinian lives lost, she said, “We are going to learn from those before us, from Emmett Till’s mother, who … made sure that casket was open so that no one could look away.”

When I followed up with Elabed on the phone in the aftermath of the DNC, she expressed a bittersweet sense of pride at what the movement had achieved at the convention. The potency of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism was on full display — and not only through the suppression of Palestinian American voices on the convention’s stage, where the Israeli war facilitated financially, militarily, and politically by the Biden-Harris administration was rarely mentioned. Elabed described the crowd’s response to the heartbreaking speech by the parents of American Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was found dead in Rafah later in August.

His parents spoke of the desperate need for a cease-fire deal that would release the hostages and end the suffering in Gaza.

“In a competition of pain,” Jon Polin said, “there are no winners.”

Yet other Uncommitted delegates told Elabed that when the crowd started chanting, “Bring them home,” some delegates “started to point at our Palestinian American Uncommitted delegate and gesturing that they are somehow guilty or at fault.” The implication was reminiscent of the heights of anti-Arab racism following the Sept. 11 attacks, when anyone who looked Arab was seen as guilty of terrorism and a potential target for hate crimes. It was “incredibly heartbreaking — we’ve been playing the part of good Democrats,” Elabed said, pointing out that they mobilized many unlikely and first-time voters to support the Democratic ticket.

On its surface, the Uncommitted movement failed in its mission to shift the policy positions of the Harris campaign during or after the convention. The vice president’s team declined to meet with leaders of the movement in the weeks following the convention, and Harris has reiterated her

If anything, Elabed told me, “the more we try to move them left, the more they push right.”

Yet given the difficulty of the task — demanding an arms embargo challenges not only the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

and the military-industrial complex but also a deep U.S.-Israel alliance that has been at the core of the American imperial project for decades — the movement’s gains were significant. If Uncommitted hadn’t been in Chicago, the genocide in Gaza would have barely been mentioned at the convention center or in news coverage. The delegates remained an irritant to the party leadership and its pep rally vibes.

“The pro-war forces do not want us inside the DNC,” Abbas Alawieh, one of the Uncommitted campaign’s co-founders, said at a press conference. “They do not want us in Congress, they don’t want us in the White House, they don’t want us advocating from inside for what we want.” Yet Uncommitted activists continued to organize among party loyalists, coming out of the convention with a deeper coalition among elected officials, labor unions, racial justice organizations, progressive organizations, and Jewish organizations. Their intervention should be understood as a critical piece of a longer-term strategy to force a realignment within the Democratic Party — a goal that could take years to achieve.

This approach is not without its critics, and the refusal of the Democratic Party to feature a Palestinian speaker, much less promise policy change, fueled acrimonious debates about the way forward for the pro-Palestine left, with some arguing for defection to third parties, independent candidates, or abstention. Some Uncommitted delegates interviewed by Mondoweiss expressed frustration that the effort didn’t achieve more, feeling that movement leaders’ loyalty to the Democratic Party ultimately diluted their message and forestalled a more disruptive approach at the DNC. Does working within the Democratic Party lend tacit support to genocidal policies or surrender leverage to force them to the left? Or is continuing to fight for influence within the Democratic Party the most pragmatic way forward?

Signs at a Palestinian solidarity demonstration before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Union Park, Chicago, Aug. 19, 2024. Photograph by Alex Wroblewski/AFP, via Getty Images.

he initial vision of the Uncommitted campaign was outlined in a memo by progressive Democratic strategist and movement organizer Waleed Shahid.

Shahid was a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, helping to recruit and elect members of the congressional Squad: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Summer Lee.

For Shahid and other co-founders of Uncommitted, the movement is part of a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party at a moment when the party leadership is increasingly at odds with much of its base on this issue.

 found that 77 percent of Democrats oppose sending weapons and supplies to Israel.

As Shahid explained to me, a coalition of progressive and pro-Palestine organizations and movements could eventually occupy a majority within the Democratic Party and push out or at least diminish the influence of AIPAC and the Israel lobby —

much as the civil rights movement did in forcing Dixiecrats out of the party. The alliance Shahid envisions would act like an “anchor group” within the party. That term was coined by political scientist Daniel Schlozman in 2015 to describe movements that have organized themselves to exert long-term influence on the establishment parties, such as the Christian right and the 

. In exchange, anchor groups offer the parties mobilizing or fundraising capacities to grow the parties’ bases. In the context of our two-party system, an antiquated Electoral College, and first-past-the-post elections, Schlozman argued, policy change takes place largely within the establishment parties. “We have a political system that is stacked against big change,” he 

 in a 2021 interview with The Nation. “And in this system, conflict largely takes place inside parties.”

As part of building a progressive and pro-Palestine anchor group, the Uncommitted movement’s overture to the party leadership was therefore an offer to turn out hundreds of thousands of pro-peace votes for the Harris campaign if it would commit to a policy change on Gaza. “Put me in, Coach,” Alawieh said on the podcast 

 after the convention. “Let me mobilize a community that you have left behind.”

The movement’s tremendous success at turning out uncommitted votes during the Democratic primaries proved its ability to mobilize Democrats while simultaneously highlighting the political risk of 

 promising a substantive policy shift. An August YouGov/IMEU Policy Project poll of Democrats in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania found that over a third of swing state voters said they would be more likely to vote for a nominee who pledges to stop sending weapons to Israel.

But an October Arab American Institute poll 

 Trump and Harris virtually tied among Arab American voters. The Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Mich., has since endorsed Trump, and other frustrated Arab voters seem to be going that way.

Ultimately, Harris’s commitment to providing weapons unconditionally to Israel forced the Uncommitted movement to release a statement of non-endorsement on Sept. 19. For some within the Palestine movement, the statement didn’t go far enough; they want a strategy that would punish Harris at the polls. Given the Democratic Party’s maddening intransigence on Gaza, it’s understandable that many people would feel queasy about casting a ballot for Kamala Harris and are looking for alternatives. Her party takes left and antiwar votes for granted while celebrating war criminal Dick Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans. Hassan Abdel Salam, a co-founder of the Abandon Harris campaign and a supporter of Jill Stein, 

 a Guardian reporter: “The former president prevented our families, our friends, our colleagues from entering the country. But the vice president killed them.”

But the United States’s two-party, winner-take-all political system makes it very difficult to punish Democrats without aiding Republicans. As Alawieh put it, “I have family that is currently in Lebanon, seeing people around them at grocery stores, walking down the street, blow up right in their faces … so excuse me if my priority is not punishing Harris … I care if our movement is well positioned to save some lives.” Donald Trump has declared himself Israel’s “protector,” claiming that it will cease to exist if he isn’t elected. He has promised to remove “Jew haters” and

“deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again” and indicated that he’d support Israel going even further. “Biden is trying to hold [Netanyahu] back,” Trump said, “and he probably should be doing the opposite, actually. I’m glad that [Netanyahu] decided to do what he had to do.”

This is the bind antiwar organizers now find themselves in: caught between two genocidal parties. It’s not a new predicament. The two establishment parties have collaborated in erecting near-impossible barriers to entry for third parties at a local, state, and national level. As a result, the U.S. elite has never faced a serious, sustained challenge to the two-party stranglehold over electoral politics on a national level. The Populist and Socialist Parties began to achieve electoral breakthroughs in the 19th century, but even those gains were extremely limited and never approached viability on a national level. The most vibrant third-party campaign in almost a century was that of Ralph Nader in 2000, yet it ended with less than 3 percent of the vote and a George W. Bush victory that many blamed on Nader supporters, arguably setting back the possibility of an alternative to the Democratic Party. Some on the left nevertheless remain committed to the strategy as an ostensibly more dignified path than having to work within a hidebound Democratic Party.

But efforts within the party have netted results, which — unsatisfactory as they may be, given the unrelenting horrors still happening — have the potential to lay the groundwork for more profound shifts. In large part due to the work that Shahid and left-wing insurgents have done within the Democratic Party, the past few years have brought a breakup of the pro-Israel consensus on Capitol Hill. Three years ago, amid Israel’s 2021 assault on Gaza, members of the Squad and other progressives organized a bloc of representatives to break out of the 

 of elite conversation about the region, 

 apartheid and ethnic cleansing by name and helping to mainstream a growing movement.

A Palestinian solidarity rally during the 2024 Democratic National Convention at Union Park, Chicago, Aug. 19, 2024. Photograph by Wu Xiaoling/Xinhua, via Getty Images.

That political trajectory intensified over the course of the past year. In the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks,

the White House press secretary called the small handful of House  representatives in favor of a cease-fire “repugnant and disgraceful.”

But in the months that followed, movement activists used the congressional cease-fire resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush as an organizing tool, rallying around the demand to sign on to the resolution as they bird-dogged elected officials around the country. Increasing numbers of Democratic politicians came out for a cease-fire, and city government resolutions popped up around the country calling for the same. In the spring, more than 50 Democratic politicians — Rep. Nancy Pelosi among them — signed a letter that called for conditioning aid. Overt tensions between Biden’s and Netanyahu’s governments emerged, though Biden refused to draw a “red line” no matter the extent of Israeli atrocities.

Bipartisan support for Israel has remained stubbornly resilient for decades. And the strategy to build a progressive bloc within the Democratic Party has suffered some significant defeats, among them the primary losses of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman after unprecedented spending by AIPAC. The lobby spent nearly $15 million over the course of a few weeks to drown out Bowman’s campaign with attack ads that painted him as an out-of-touch radical. And while members of the Shave become increasingly vocal in calling for an arms embargo, discussion of even conditioning aid have quieted among centrist Democrats.

James Zogby, a longtime Democratic insider, founder of the Arab American Institute, and a supporter of Uncommitted, called the DNC’s rejection of a Palestinian American speaker an “unforced error.” But the callousness of the party leadership at the convention and the Harris campaign’s refusal to meet with Uncommitted organizers since indicate a deliberate posture by Democratic Party leaders. The genocide not only continues unabated but also has expanded. Refusing a Palestinian speaker was part and parcel of normalizing mass violence in Palestine and justifying ongoing U.S. support.

Shahid and supporters of Uncommitted say that any significant policy shift takes time, and the changing demographics and politics of the Democratic Party make the current misalignment on this issue unsustainable. Younger Democratic voters are consistently to the left of the party leadership on Israel and Palestine and a host of other political issues, such as immigration and climate change. “The party is changing from below, and it’s always the top of the party that is last to get onboard,” Shahid told me. Just as President Biden eventually oversaw progressive economic and climate policies, a Harris administration could break from the foreign policy positions of earlier administrations, given sufficient pressure.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), for instance, was driven by a diverse set of actors, Shahid pointed out, “but there were labor unions at the table, environmental organizations at the table,” as well as progressives, youth organizations, and civil rights organizations.

For this coalition to be able to exert influence within the electoral arena, movements on the outside must grow strong enough to make the political price of ignoring them impossible. The scrappy and fragmented antiwar movement needs to build the kind of robust coalition that came together to push for the IRA in order to amass the kind of power necessary to force a pivot on foreign policy. A microcosm of that inside-outside strategy was at play at the DNC as protesters rallied on the streets throughout the week and Uncommitted activists called for a sit-in the night they found out their speaker suggestions had been rejected. But while battles to shift Democratic policies around evictions or climate have proved immensely difficult, the party’s commitment to Israel is even less vulnerable to pressure from below because of the geopolitical interests at stake.

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Fall 2024

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No. 5

Fall 2024

Thank You

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Previous Article

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More From This Issue

1

Elections Matter, but We Need More Than the Ballot Box to Achieve Collective Liberation

2

Why Is the Election Between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris So Close?

3

The Potential Benefits of Direct Democracy and Voting for Policies, Not Personalities

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