A few days ago, while posting on Facebook, a post from a friend popped up, as they'll do. It was someone I actually know in real life, who I think tremendously highly of, sharing a post by Liz Cheney. If it hadn't been recommended by my friend I wouldn't have read it, but I had to see why he liked it so much. And indeed, I liked it, too, but I was immediately suspicious that it had not, in fact, been written by Liz Cheney, because she would know better than even to fantasize about some of the things in that letter.
The letter sparked excitement in millions of other people, according to the stats. It was shared tens of thousands of times, seen by millions over the course of a few days, and that, in itself, makes it worth dwelling on for a little while.
It began, "Dear Democratic Party," and proceeded to complain eloquently about what a dead horse the whole thing is, and then to make a number of excellent recommendations about the sorts of things the party could do to resist the terrifyingly fascistic future Trump and friends seem clearly to have in store for us all.
What the real Liz Cheney surely already knows, unlike the pretend one who wrote this letter, is that these ideas about what the Democrats could do if they wanted to be part of some kind of resistance are fantasies.
I don't want to diminish the enthusiasm of anyone who is seeking to figure out how to build a future for our society that isn't fascist. We need a lot of vision and enthusiasm in that direction. And we also need to know where we won't find such vision, and why we won't find it there, so we can hopefully find a different source for all that, where it might actually exist.
A lot of people have just come home from rallies across the US with a feeling that this resistance they so desperately want to see isn't materializing. The issues folks are raising at these protests don't seem to be getting to the heart of most of the problems we face. Folks who went to rallies with signs about things that no one on stage was talking about felt dejected. Folks who went to rallies where there was no live music at all -- the vast majority of them -- also felt dejected, because that's what happens with rallies where you're just listening to people tell you things you already know too well. It's depressing. Now, predictably after that kind of experience, people are staying home, with the rally sizes having precipitously shrank.
I don't know whether the "hands off" theme will be a thread that continues to weave its way into the future of these protests. But at the April 5th and the April 19th protests, many people were left to wonder about which things we want the administration to keep its hands off of, and which ones we're not particularly concerned about.
So we say hands off Social Security, hands off the EPA, hands off the courts and due process, hands off abortion rights, hands off the LGBTQIA+ community, perhaps hands off USAID, and even hands off NATO.
What other "hands off" signs and speakers did we not see at these rallies, which represent issues that are of vital interest to so many of us? And why did we not see those signs, or hear from speakers representing so many other pressing issues?
In the interest of helping to clarify the nature of the political moment we find ourselves in, I'll explore some of the "hands off" themes you probably didn't hear addressed at one of these rallies, and why that is the case.
Hands Off Gaza
The now-openly fascist state of Israel is actively committing genocide. It has now been 7 weeks since Israel allowed any food, water, medicine, or anything else to enter Gaza, where there is now a full-blown famine to add to the complete lack of clean water, lodging, electricity, etc. The genocide, however, has been ongoing since October, 2023, and has been funded and otherwise supported by the leadership of both of our political parties.
Hands Off the ICC
Although both Republican and Democratic administrations are often enthusiastic about bringing various African and eastern European heads of state to the Hague, the US is itself not a member of the International Criminal Court. There has never been enthusiastic support for joining the ICC from the leadership of either party. Democrat-led governments in the US have not sanctioned the court the way the Trump administration has, but they have also never wanted to subject the US to the scrutiny of international law.
Hands Off UNRWA
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have uncritically supported the most outlandish and unsubstantiated claims the Israeli fascists have made about the UN agencies that have been essential in allowing Palestinians in Gaza to survive over the past 80 years. Now the Israeli fascist regime claims UNRWA, by far the biggest organization distributing food and running schools in Gaza, is a terrorist group. The response to these wild accusations by the Biden administration was to cut off funding to this critical UN agency.
Hands Off Journalists
While the US client state of Israel has killed over 200 journalists in the course of its war against the entire population of the Gaza Strip, many of them obviously targeted for assassination along with their extended families, the US government has remained silent about these crimes, and has just sent more weapons and money to Israel. The Democratic Party leadership supports Israeli fascism and genocide, and this is incontrovertible, judging from how they continually vote for sending more weapons systems and ammunition of every kind to support Israel's genocidal war. Additionally, the leadership of both parties has supported the case against Julian Assange, which was, fundamentally, punishing a journalist for being too good at his job.
Hands Off the Independent Media
Long before the Democratic Party became complicit in the slaughter of hundreds of journalists in Gaza, the Democratic Party has been working hard to undermine whatever has remained of independent media in the US after the deregulation of the industry. The deregulation of media in the latter days of the twentieth century began with Ronald Reagan, and then continued with Bill Clinton, who took Reagan's deregulation and made it much, much worse. No administration following Clinton has tried to re-regulate journalism, or tried to reverse the trend of ever-increasing concentration of media ownership by a handful of billionaires.
Hands Off Whistle-Blowers
The persecution of whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, or facilitators of whistle-blowers such as Julian Assange, has been an entirely bipartisan affair. Democratic Party leadership has condemned these whistle-blowers with the same sort of enthusiasm as their Republican colleagues have, and Democratic administrations have pursued the legal cases against all of them. While it is also true that it was under Democratic administrations that Chelsea Manning's sentence was commuted and Julian Assange was released from maximum-security prison, the damage to whistle-blowing and to press freedom had already been done.
Hands Off Public Housing
We have been in the midst of a full-blown housing crisis in the USA for the past twenty years or so, but there is no widespread effort anywhere in the country for the government to start building housing again, or for the government to effectively regulate the housing market. This is obviously because the politicians of both parties are ruling on behalf of the wealthy landowners, or at least on behalf of the "mom and pop landlords," not on behalf of their tenants. The decline in funding for housing that began in earnest with Reagan, as with so many other things, got worse under Clinton, and never recovered under any future administrations. At this point "hands off public housing" sounds more like a joke than a demand. What public housing?
Hands Off Rent Control
By the 1980's, rent control, which used to help make housing affordable for people across the US, was done away with by the landlord lobby, which took its policy proposals from one state legislature to the next. State legislatures dominated by both parties voted to ban rent control in most of the US. The results for affordable housing access have been an unmitigated disaster, and the leadership of both parties likes to maintain the unsubstantiated fiction that rent control doesn't work. Hands off rent control? What rent control?
Hands Off China
Bill Clinton and the next several administrations after him, along with the vast majority of the Congress of both parties, were enthusiastic supporters of what they called "free trade," which meant subsidizing US industry to export itself to China and other countries, in order for the owners of industry to make bigger profits at the expense of the American working class and the Chinese working class, both. At the same time as this process was taking place, various politicians saw fit to blame China for what was happening. This "blame China" phenomenon became more and more popular on both sides of the aisle. Trump imposed huge tariffs on China during his first term in power, and Biden never lifted them.
Hands Off Yemen
The Saudi Air Force was bombing Yemen and killing huge number of people with American weaponry for years before both the Biden and Trump administrations got into the act of bombing Yemen themselves. Both administrations believe Yemen must be punished for opposing Israel's genocide, and both have engaged in destructive bombing campaigns as a means of trying to bring the Yemenis to heel.
Hands Off Iran
The treaty that had been negotiated with Iran under Obama to limit Iran's nuclear development which was torn up by the first Trump administration was never re-established under Biden. Instead, the Biden administration worked closely with Israel, siding with the client state committing genocide, and against the only country that took military measures in response to it.
Hands Off Undocumented Immigrants
The fact that the US has millions of undocumented workers within its borders at any given time has long been a strategic "failure" of the system. This "failure" guarantees a large, super-exploited workforce, which is the workforce the US has relied on for running most of the country's agricultural sector and most of the meatpacking industry as well. Since the post-World War 2 era, as this system of exploitation has become further institutionalized and normalized in the US, there has never been an administration with an alternative vision for how to reform this black market.
Hands Off Student Protesters
The war against academia and against free speech in the USA has been led by both parties. Chuck Schumer just wrote a book about his fantasies that people who are opposed to Israeli fascism are really secret Jew-haters, just pretending to oppose fascism and genocide because the ones committing these crimes against the Palestinians today happen to be Jewish.
Hands Off Free Trade
For many decades there was bipartisan support for what they called "free trade," as represented by the rules of transnational entities such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In more recent years, tariffs against China have become popular, on a bipartisan basis. Neither party is led by free traders anymore, and both parties are led by people who would prefer to blame China for the problems the US has created for itself over decades of failed bipartisan policies.
Hands Off Culture
For most people around the world who have not been part of the mind control experiment we usually call "America," the idea of going to a protest on a regular basis where all that happens is people wave signs, shout slogans they learned on documentaries about the Sixties, and no one on the stage plays any music at all, seems completely preposterous, like a strange joke. But here we are. If anyone is going for the bread and circus, they will find neither one, at one of these protests. Yes, Bernie and AOC are, thankfully, often combining their appeal with that of some well-known musicians, but they are the oft-sabotaged exception to the rule, not representative of party leadership, as much as they may hopefully intimate.
We need a movement against fascism in the USA, desperately. But the idea that this movement will be led by a party that today actively supports an openly fascist regime in Israel that is openly committing genocide, or a party that has a decades-long track record of pretending to be in opposition, while supporting every self-destructive reform the Reagan administration ever dreamed of -- the party that eviscerated the ranks of once-useful federal agencies thirty years ago, while supporting the idea that nations around the world should give over more and more control to anti-democratic transnational entities in the relentless pursuit of "free trade" -- is a fantasy.
We desperately need a social movement with optimism, but this optimistic social movement needs to be born out of reality, not patriotic-sounding daydreams about an opposition that is only such in name, not in deed.
A social movement led by such a party isn't a social movement. How could it be? The potential for that kind of movement exists, always. But as far as I can tell, manifesting a movement like that first requires having a popular understanding that such a movement won't be led by a party that primarily represents the interests of capitalism and empire. Any united front to be found with capitalism and empire could only result in a nightmare, as far as I can tell.
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