"The Green Human Rights Agenda and the Future Democratic Majority: An Unpublished Message from August 2024. Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle does not require abandoning all other groups and issues harmed by extremist Republican policies and governance," Substack, Feb. 13, 2025.
In a better world, leftists would have a majority party all our own to rally behind that adequately represents the outrage we feel about the criminal conduct of Israel in its expanding war, which appears determined to wipe out the possibility of Palestinian life within the territory it controls. That ideal party would endorse principles we hold to be sacrosanct and non-negotiable, such as human rights, the right to political representation, housing, and health care, and the prosecution of war crimes. But it would also have the realistic capacity to gain and exercise power. By this means, far before the current catastrophe, a government run by such a leftist party would have been withholding arms and aid to Israel, as well as to any power that systematically violated human rights.
France, for instance, has such a leftist party in La France Insoumise. Despite a functionally multiparty system and a substantial bloc of adherents, Les Insoumis have remained completely outside of power, with little influence on policy or governance. This makes voting for Les Insoumis, as a practical matter, an empty symbolic gesture. We should demand more from politics than performative gestures. We owe progressive allies more than symbolic votes that feel good to us personally and are ostensibly moral but have catastrophic consequences for them. Our political choices have the capacity to bring about specific changes, further higher principles, and prevent harm to billions of people. To act in a way that feels good personally but does irremediable harm to others is not moral behavior.
We should think strategically about political organizing. We need to be taking actions that have a probability of having an impact. We need to stop mindlessly marching and squatting in public space without a theory of how these actions bring about a change. Progressives, socialists, and anarchists of the past were deeply involved in movement building, going door to door for candidates, registering voters, and organizing coalitions of voters, even within coalitions with which they had profound disagreements, not sitting on the sidelines of electoral politics. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 candidacy left an important legacy of social democrats who form a powerful coalition in the House, despite some recent billionaire-funded defeats. This coalition should be supported and strengthened, not abandoned because of the impossibility—because of a lack of a governing majority and the current limited number of progressive congresspersons—of transforming the entire political system.
In the abstract, we always think better policies might pass if the Democrats had more “guts” when in power. Yet in practice, the Democrats’ governing majority in the last few decades has always been narrow, when it has existed. It has depended on conservative caucuses and center-right senators like Joe Manchin who were relatively pro-labor and populist, supplying the key majority vote for passage of health care reform, but whose reliance on local industries and conservative voters for political survival always blocked important green legislation. If we want to build a leftist governing majority, it will not be through a third-party candidacy but by building a bloc of leftist Democrats who caucus together—uniting together to influence policy—and who do so in a Democratic-majority context, in which Democrats have a majority in both houses of Congress and hold the presidency.
This may sound a bit obvious. Yet these political facts of life are frequently ignored and drowned out by leftist impetuousness and mysticism. The horrible failure of the Biden administration to restrain an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip and now Lebanon make it even more urgent to clearly articulate how a Democratic-majority government would function with a substantial governing majority, producing probable outcomes that can be strategized and realized within its apparatus. Put simply, the concept of a strong Democratic governing majority in all branches of government with a green social democratic pro-human rights caucus pushing for more radical changes is absolutely essential for leftist voters and activists to grasp and work toward. If you believe in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, it is absolutely irresponsible to abandon politics and advocate not to vote, or to vote for a third party. This is the clearest way to further embolden far-right-wing authoritarian governments like Netanyahu’s in Israel.
We need to talk about how a lack of a governing majority limits or makes possible progressive, leftist policies, and how failing to achieve a governing majority—or turning against the Democrats for their failures in its absence—makes things irremediably worse. We need to organize for a solid governing majority with a progressive, leftist wing, not just for one term but through a series of elections every two years, in order to produce lasting changes over multiple generations.
