Democratic leaders in the U.S. are more dangerous than Trump, using emotional manipulation and hollow rhetoric to maintain power while perpetuating harmful foreign policies. Despite claiming to uphold peace and justice, their actions in conflicts like Gaza and Ukraine expose their complicity in violence, revealing a deeply flawed political system controlled by entrenched elites.
by Elena Basile
I listened to the speeches of American Democratic Party leaders. I saw a crowd of U.S. citizens of different ages, men and women, white and people of color, shouting enthusiastically and moved. And I sensed the new fascism dominating the West. In the speeches of 20th-century autocrats, the same kind of people would cry and idolize the demagogues. The harangues, filled with clichés and sentimental platitudes, devoid of culture but capable of manipulating the primary emotions of ordinary and unaware citizens, were typical of past dictatorships. These are the hallmarks of the Democrats, who, in my view, are much more dangerous than the Republicans.
The electorate of the Old Great Party has radicalized, undergone a cultural regression, and votes for a controversial figure, a malevolent clown with dyed hair, money, and the vulgarity of a parvenu, who doesn’t disguise himself but openly professes his simplified ideology: anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, pro-Israel. The Democratic Party has captured the votes of the educated middle class, citizens who hold shared values of peace and justice, defend individual rights, and uphold the myth of the self-made man combined with social policies permitted by the market. Democratic leaders are graduates of the best U.S. universities, intellectuals like Obama, forming dynasties whose power has been rooted in U.S. society for decades and are much more useful to the arms and finance oligarchies in manufacturing consent and maintaining the status quo. The rhetoric that gives space to women allows Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama to steal the scene from their husbands. But nothing changes. How can one not think of Gaber and his imitation of the invincible superficiality and idiocy of Americans? Mothers are invoked with their good advice: “Don’t complain, do something!” and so, thanks to the holy values of an America that rolls up its sleeves, their daughters, good girls, have climbed the social ladder, with one becoming a presidential candidate and the other the wife of a former president and a possible candidate in future elections.
They spout these banalities in the 21st century, in a society where 1% holds the wealth, in a country that spends far more than it produces, declining economically compared to its strategic rivals and emerging nations, lacking infrastructure, decent schools, and accessible healthcare for the uninsured. The Democrats have been in power for an endless time, with the Clinton and Obama dynasties making the essential decisions in a corrupt party, whose intrigues were even depicted in the series House of Cards, in a fiction well inspired by reality.
The few mentions of foreign policy, ambiguous and propagandistic, speak of a Harris doing everything possible to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza. The slogan is shouted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the liberal who is supposed to embody the left wing of the party. Harris, Biden’s vice president, has effectively supported the policy of vetoing UN resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza. As everyone knows, the United States offers unconditional support to Israel’s policies of extermination of Palestinians in Gaza and favors colonization through forms of apartheid in the West Bank. Democratic leaders, just like Republican leaders but with greater hypocrisy, are complicit in the killing of innocents, women and children, the destruction of hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches, the killing of humanitarian workers, journalists, and UN officials, the blockade of humanitarian aid, and the martyrdom of two million people without assistance, threatened by epidemics like polio, without water or food, deprived of the UNRWA agency, whose funds many Western states, including ours, have blocked. These Democratic leaders have blood on their hands.
“There is something in the air,” Michelle Obama shouts to the delirious crowd. She has the audacity to speak of hope while the Democrats in power are responsible for two conflicts, in Ukraine and Palestine, ignorant of neoconservative policies, of the wars in Syria and Libya, of the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, of which they are the main architects, oblivious to the victims. “Do something,” her mother taught her. Yes, “do something”—let’s shout it to the Palestinian teenager who lost his parents and siblings in the ethnic cleansing carried out by Netanyahu, or to the Ukrainian mother who mourns her 18-year-old son sacrificed in a suicidal war fought to defend U.S. interests. This is the empire, intent on self-celebration, insensitive to the evil and destruction it spreads around the world. Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, how many victims on his conscience? I would ask Veltroni, who brought the example of the U.S. Democrats to Italy.
Il Fatto Quotidiano, August 24, 2024
