Remember the DNC?
In August, on the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, I found myself in an Uber on the way to the official DNC afterparty. T-Pain would be performing, a friend had told me, so we piled into the back of the SUV, squeezed between Uncommitted campaign organizers fresh from their unsuccessful sit-in, lost in talk of mentors and offramps and points of leverage. The line to get into the venue snaked around the block. There were more police than we’d expected, and as we stepped out onto the sidewalk, we saw why. A small contingent of keffiyeh’d protesters clustered around the entrance, chanting and condemning. A young Arab American man was yelling, his voice hoarse as he looked attendees dead in the eyes and told them the truth: “You’re complicit, you have blood on your hands.” I watched as one of the lanyarded men in line replied with a forced, smug “What, what did I do?” His smirk looked more like a wince. The cops moved in, slamming black-clad young people onto the pavement and bundling them off into waiting transports while the tuxedos shifted uncomfortably, cracking jokes. It was time for us to leave.
I hadn’t been inside the convention itself. I came for the protests, to see how things would play out on the ground. “Make it great like ’68,” some posters commanded, “shut down the DNC!” High hopes, but it didn’t play out that way. The crowds were small and majority activist. One larger march I attended toward the end bristled with logos and acronyms; almost everyone there seemed to be firmly affiliated with some left org or tendency. Largely gone were the strollers and grandmas of marches earlier in the year. In their absence, the militants squabbled. Some, driven by the urgency of the situation, wanted to escalate into more confrontational protest—either on their own or to rally the masses into joining them. Others, worried about alienating those same masses and with one eye on the overwhelming police presence, tried to keep things at a milder simmer (earning them bitter denunciation from the escalators). It was a bit of a moot point, because the masses weren’t really there.
Inside and outside the convention, the sense of doubt was palpable—as were the attempts to overcome that doubt through sheer force of will. The genocide, and the Democratic Party’s involvement, was on everyone’s mind, and no one knew what to do about it. This was true before the convention, and it’s true now.
Electoral cretinism?
Between August and November, in the absence of solutions or mass mobilization, the general impasse instead crystallized into a brutally familiar single point: “electoralism.” At its most neutral, the term refers to efforts at radical social transformation centered on the ballot box. It’s usually pejorative, paired with “reformist” and counterposed to an ostensible truly radical strategy. A distant cousin of the Old Left’s “parliamentarism” (or Marx’s own “parliamentary cretinism”), it entered circulation in its current form during the tail end of the New Left, regaining new life during the Sanders era and then pressing urgency during the leadup to the 2024 election.
Arguments about electoralism (or parliamentarism) have emerged when, for whatever reason, radicals and moderates have occasion to confront each other strategically. Ensuing discussions tend to get bogged down in Germany or Russia in the early 20th century, in accusations of liberalism or LARP. Ultimately, though, we are never really arguing about elections in general, or voting in general, or even “the state” in general. Between August and November we were arguing about voting in the 2024 US presidential election. We were arguing about the actually existing US federal government, and about whether and how it might help us achieve certain goals. Most pressingly, we were arguing about how to get it to stop providing invaluable military, financial, and diplomatic support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. These arguments are much more concrete, and raise much more answerable questions, than abstract arguments about “electoralism.” But it’s not surprising that we would be drawn to generalization and dubious historical analogy when we’ve been repeating the same non-debates for roughly a half-century.
Summer’s DNC in Chicago made comparisons to 1968 unavoidable. More than mere parallels, however, the superficial similarities distract from a deeper continuity. While the electoralism debate we had last fall may feel tediously perennial—and does, indeed, have antecedents that stretch back two centuries—the specific version of it we’re having today was born at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Chicago 1968 was where the New Left anti-war movement’s increasingly radical trajectory finally crashed headlong into the Democratic Party, setting the terms of a debate we’ve been stuck in ever since—a debate that’s grown particularly acute in the past several months. Our generation’s convention playing out as a geographic rerun of the older one is just an uncanny coincidence. As the renascent (and already faltering) US Palestine solidarity movement struggles for direction more than a year into Gaza’s martyrdom, revisiting our history is a necessary—but by no means sufficient—step toward finally escaping its limits and building a movement with teeth.
State of the movement
The latest incarnation of the Palestine Solidarity movement in the US is far larger and more central to national politics than it’s ever been, but also far thinner. It has no overarching organization and multiple rival centers of leadership. Its constituent coalition is fragile and wracked by contradictions. Initially difficult to identify, these contradictions matured over the first several months of Israel’s genocidal operation in Gaza and came to the fore this summer with the end of the student encampments and the approach of election season. While Biden’s patent unfitness for office briefly served as convenient common ground, Harris’s nomination in August had the opposite effect, driving a sharper wedge than ever between moderates and radicals in the movement and reigniting a new round of bitter infighting.
The DNC confirmed and deepened the confusion, and the election certainly hasn’t helped. No one’s strategy is working, and everyone has begun to suspect theirs is incompatible with the others. Those taking an inside-party approach have failed to budge the Democrats an inch even as they denounce radicals for protesting electeds too aggressively or engaging in direct action that might alienate voters. Radicals have broken hard with the Democrats in favor of confrontation and sabotage, but their actions have been sporadic, isolated, and quickly repressed. Trump’s inauguration looms, but the basic conflicts that the election exposed remain.
Immediately before the election, the podcast Know Your Enemy hosted a roundtable discussion under the heading “Voting: what is it good for?” with Malcolm Harris, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Astra Taylor. Host Sam Adler-Bell introduces the episode as a way to “stop feeling the despair and frustration . . . watching these debates [about voting] play out online, where they play out not usually in good faith, often with a lot of suspicion, a lot of unnecessary contempt and moral outrage at small differences of tactical or strategic vision on the part of people who basically share the shame hopes and dreams for the future.” But how small are the differences, really? Do all relevant parties in the US Palestine solidarity movement, for example, share the same hopes and dreams for the future?
Compare Adler-Bell’s framing to the following from a recent interview with Paige Belanger, a member of Palestine Action US:
The ideological split in the movement about tactics, in my view, is more about the aims of those on either side of the divide and less about the tactics per se. What really differentiates these two conflicting tendencies is that one seeks to realize socialism in the imperial core, and rallies primarily about the injustices of capitalism and their effect on the American proletariat, and the other represents a staunch anti-imperialist position and seeks to open up a front of resistance against imperialism at home, in order to stand in actual solidarity with the national liberation struggles around the world that are casting off the yoke of the US empire and bringing about a global revolution that frees everyone from capitalism, imperialism, and fascism.
Here Belanger makes clear that she and Adler-Bell do not, in fact, share the same hopes and dreams for the future, at least not in the middle run. Social democracy, like most other historical socialist traditions, focuses on the nation-state as its basic political arena and on (democratically won) state power as its primary tool for social transformation. Globally, a democratic socialist world is won by the country-by-country accrual of democratic socialist governments (ideally aiding one another once in power). The natural priority, then, for an American social democrat is building towards a socialist America, achieved through a national electoral majority won over to such a project. Adler-Bell, insofar as he is an American democratic socialist, is—almost definitionally—thinking in terms of American politics as such.1 Belanger is not. Without wading into who’s right or whether the two positions could be reconciled, we can say with some confidence that these are substantially different worldviews and political projects, not just minor variations on a theme.
In the roundtable, Malcolm Harris’s position is closest to Belanger’s. He has little patience for voting for Kamala and is actively opposed to doing so on solidaristic grounds: if Arab voters in Dearborn are voting Stein in protest of the party abetting the murder of their families abroad, with full knowledge of the threats they will face under Trump, why would he do differently? Instead, Harris cites the example of PA-US and advocates further sabotage efforts directed against the US arms industry supplying Israel—an approach that entirely sidesteps the Democrats and any attempt to influence state policy from within. Without opposing this proposal, Adler-Bell insists that voting for Kamala is pragmatically vital: it doesn’t preclude direct action, it shapes the terrain on which all other tactics would take place, and a Democratic victory would be far better for the US left across the board, beyond Palestine. Harris is unconvinced, stressing that a Kamala presidency would come with its own dangers—things are getting worse either way. Throughout the discussion, Táíwò and Taylor fall somewhere between the two: more enthusiastic about independent, non-electoral organizing and direct action than Adler-Bell, more open to the necessity of defeating Trump at the ballot than Harris. The conversation is open and productive and clearly proceeds in good faith, but still seems to end with some lingering frustration for all involved. Why?
I’d like to suggest that, while it appeared straightforward (“vote for Harris: yes or no?”), the discussion fell victim to a slippage between two different types of question. One type of question is short-term, narrowly defined, and strictly instrumental. How do we, from our position in the US, meaningfully limit or stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza? If our goal is an arms embargo, what tactics will achieve that? How important is voting for Kamala Harris as one such tactic, alone or combined with others? The other type of question concerns the medium-to-long term and is much broader, and it concerns basic differences of worldview. What is the world situation and where is it heading? What is the world we’d like to see and how do we plan to get there? What is the place of the Gaza genocide and the US Palestine solidarity movement within this overall picture?
While those of us in the US who want to stop Israel’s genocide might well still find common ground between radicals and moderates on the first type of question, with each passing day it looks less likely that we will be able to find common ground on the second. As Belanger suggests, the most salient worldview question raised by the movement in this moment is about its relationship to the US as a society, nation, and state: is the US the movement’s basic political arena, or is it just one front in a global struggle? Are we fighting within the American national project, American society itself, or beyond it, against it? Both? Neither? This is the essence of the developing divergence in worldview between moderates and radicals in the movement, regardless of whether they realize it or articulate it in these terms.
1968
This is also the exact divergence we saw at the explosive crest of the Vietnam anti-war movement in the late 1960s and early ’70s. By 1968, the anti-war movement’s rapid growth and partial successes had, for many, also exposed its limits more starkly than ever. The movement had mobilized thousands and dragged a once-marginal issue to the center of American political life, forcing the sitting President to end his reelection campaign and provoking a substantial crisis within his party. Yet the bombs continued to fall. What did the protests amount to? What were they good for?
The 1968 DNC threw these questions into even harsher relief by directly raising the issues of electoral participation and how to relate to the Democratic Party—both proxies, ultimately, for the nature and utility of the US state. Partisans of Eugene McCarthy, heirs of Allard Lowenstein’s Dump Johnson campaign, sought to reshape the character of the party from the inside. The goal was a Democratic Party more reflective of (or receptive to) the anti-war movement’s positions, which would eventually translate to a more anti-war US government, and therefore an end to the war.
Protesters in the streets were already beginning to have their doubts. First and foremost, the long game proposed by the anti-war factions of the Democrats increasingly seemed like a mirage as Johnson’s appointed successor, Hubert Humphrey, briefly stopped vacillating, endorsed Johnson’s pro-war stance, and rallied the party establishment against the “peace plank.” Alongside institutional resistance, legal and extralegal repression of the protest movement was escalating at an alarming rate, and suspicion of state involvement in the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy circulated widely. Maybe the US state itself—and, by extension, the Democratic Party, which aimed at power within it—wasn’t a potential tool or vehicle for the movement. Maybe, by virtue of their being welded to the war machine, the Democrats were not merely insufficient allies. Maybe they were the enemy, pure and simple. And maybe the US’s commitment to the war was not contingent policy, but structural, likely to be adhered to by anyone who found themselves in office.
The DNC sealed the split through the nomination of Humphrey and the brutal beating of hundreds of protesters by Chicago police at the behest of Democratic mayor Richard Daley. As Kirkpatrick Sale put it in 1974, for the movement, “the lessons of Chicago were profound, and each of them seemed to confirm the rightness of the move into revolution. Chicago proved once and for all, for those still needing proof, that the country could not be educated or reformed out of its pernicious system, even by establishmentarian reformers like McCarthy.” The establishmentarian reformers, conversely, were horrified by the spectacle of the rioting commie-hippies compromising party unity and alienating middle America. Both sides felt that the years that followed—escalating repression of activists, expansion of US bombing to Laos and Cambodia, antiwar McGovern’s loss to Nixon—confirmed their conclusions.
Students against the Democrats (and Society): Breaking with the US state
This familiar story is worth retelling to emphasize that what was at stake was no longer strategy per se, but rather a deeper analytical disagreement. Each side had drawn different objective conclusions about what was practical based on different conceptions of the world and the US’s place within it. One side continued to think that US state power could be wielded by the movement to achieve its ends, from the inside, and that the goal was best achieved through the Democratic Party. The other concluded that it was unlikely or impossible that such a plan would succeed.
The example of Students for a Democratic Society and its successor organizations is instructive. While the larger movement and counterculture always exceeded SDS itself, SDS was where the debates were happening, and it provides the best means of taking the temperature of wider attitudes. In the second half of the ’60s, SDS rocketed to national prominence as the key organizational manifestation of the anti-war movement (as well as white student support for civil rights). By the end of the decade, the organization was struggling to develop intellectual frameworks adequate to the new, more confrontational attitude that the protest movement had taken as it faced institutional resistance and spread beyond elite campuses and into community colleges. The carefully cultivated moral prestige of civil disobedience and measured debates about the future of American democracy gave way to campus strikes, clashes with police, fire-bombings of ROTC buildings, and a growing embrace of the counterculture.
In this climate, SDS adopted a worldview best summarized by the term Third World Marxism. While avowedly Leninist, this was a Marxism inspired more by China than the Soviet Union, with a strong emphasis on anti-imperialism and support for the era’s Marxism-infused anticolonial guerrilla struggles (first and foremost in Vietnam). Its adoption was often framed, as in Sale’s gloss, as a turn from “reform to revolution,” but that well-worn phrase can be deceptive.
As with electoralism, we need to set aside our habitual, cliched understanding of the word “revolutionary” to see what was really at stake. More important than reform versus revolution per se, Third World Marxism allowed activists to “name the system,” identifying both the war abroad and the racial caste system at home as features of the same US-led, capitalist-imperialist world order: a single global system of domination and exploitation. Rather than issues of US domestic politics, the Black Liberation movement and the anti-war movement were just small parts of a worldwide anti-imperialist struggle against the international system the US had rebuilt and presided over since the end of World War II and its concomitant international color line. No wonder, then, that attempting to work within the US state had proven to be a dead end. What did revolutionaries propose instead? Broadly, action independent of the existing state: either mass organizing aimed at one day taking it over or militant direct action aimed at impeding its operation, or some combination of the two.
Within SDS’s Third World Marxist consensus, two main factions emerged. These would eventually split the organization. The Progressive Labor Party, an early-’60s Maoist offshoot of the CPUSA, gained a sizeable foothold as a faction in the group by offering a clear vision of a “worker-student alliance” where a clean-cut, highly disciplined cadre would take the movement off campus and into the factories, merging with the industrial proletariat and building a new mass communist party. In their turn to the traditional American working class, they opposed two major strains of the New Left, dismissing both the youth counterculture and third-world national liberation (as represented by the Black Panther party and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam) as petit-bourgeois distractions from true class struggle.
Their opponents, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, took the opposite approach. While they too aimed to take the movement off campus and wanted something like working-class revolution, they planned to lean into the youth counterculture as an organizing base. They also prioritized national liberation struggles over traditional Old Left workplace struggles—meaning that, unlike PL, they supported the Panthers and the NLF. Elements of RYM were also far more supportive of escalation of direct action, up to and including “taking up the gun” to wage guerrilla war within the metropole. The divide came to a head at SDS’s 1969 national conference, where the factions split entirely, effectively ending the organization.
While now addressed to the much more ambitious goal of world communism, these heady debates about revolutionary strategy remained rooted in the basic problems that had prompted radicals to turn to Marxism in the first place. As we’ve seen, the break with moderates was driven in large part by whether the movement could use the state to end the war via elected representatives—specifically the Democrats. The second split came with the recognition that students alone couldn’t end the war. They needed a wider, more powerful social base. But where would they find it, and how?
Two, three, many splits
Throughout most of the decade, radicals and moderates had had some basic assumptions and long-term goals in common. They were committed to the American project, concerned about the future of America. The war in Vietnam was bad foreign policy, it harmed American society. They wanted what was best for America and thought ending the war and Jim Crow was in America’s best interest, they just differed on means and timeframe. Some within the revolutionary turn retained this common ground in some form, hoping to overthrow the imperialist state to save America from itself. Others did not.
On top of their break with the existing US state, we might say many radicals now broke with American society as well. They were no longer struggling over the direction of the American project—they were struggling against the American empire. Chants for peace were replaced with chants of “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF are gonna win.” Civil rights turned to Black Power. When conservatives said the protesters were “Anti-American,” fewer and fewer radicals would have taken that as an insult.
The loss of the implicit common ground of American national interest was never explicitly thematized other than in a mutual recrimination that largely fell on deaf ears. Why would accusations of hurting electoral prospects by alienating voters matter to protesters who no longer hoped for any form of power within the existing state? Why would accusations of being part of the system matter to concerned citizens who believed in the system enough to want to save it from itself? But even if the goal was no longer winning elections, former student revolutionaries still agreed they needed some sort of mass social base beyond their own narrow sphere.
If the revolutionary turn of SDS—shared by PL and RYM—meant breaking with liberals on the question of the existing US state, the subsequent split between PL and RYM embodied the second break with US society and the question of constituency. Both factions had determined that the movement’s student base was too weak on its own. They agreed they needed to take things off campus. As newly minted Marxists, everyone agreed that the working class was the real engine of social change. But where PL’s approach demanded abandoning the New Left’s antagonism toward Middle America, RYM leaned into it.
PL wanted to win over the American working class as conceived of by the Old Left, which meant implicitly prioritizing the portion—white, male, industrial, unionized—that had been successfully integrated into the postwar Fordist social compromise. Defeating racism and imperialism required a united American working class, so if prioritizing black liberation or the anti-war movement jeopardized that unity by alienating white workers, it was ultimately counterproductive. The student movement was essentially made up of defectors from the bourgeoisie and therefore useless without these workers.
RYM, on the other hand, continued the New Left emphasis on precisely those populations who had been excluded from the benefits of the Fordist compromise, both inside and outside the country’s borders: colonized (racially subordinated) workers, the non-unionized, the unemployed, non-college youth, and women, among others. Alienating the privileged parts of the American working class mattered less if they were just one part of a revolution that cut across national boundaries and centered guerrilla fighters across the Third World. Rather than repudiating their campus origins like PL, they tried to embrace and transcend it with the shift from student movement to youth movement. This split was followed by many more along similar lines—within SDS’s direct successors, within the amorphous counterculture, and within other organizations like SNCC. The various sides of the ‘60s revolt engaged in a dizzying organizational reshuffling, trading members and positions and producing formations like the Weather Underground, the Revolutionary Union, the Young Lords, and the Republic of New Afrika alongside countless experiments that escape easy organizational definition.
Here, in fact, we hit the limits of an intellectual-organizational approach to this history. The political evolution under discussion was by no means one internal to SDS or its successors, especially at this point in the story. Our focus has been on SDS only insofar as it serves as a workable organizational-ideological stand-in for one component of the broader ferment—the anti-war movement—allowing us to trace its political evolution according to a sort of internal logic. Developments within the black liberation movement as it turned from civil rights to Black Power aren’t a separate story, but another component of the same dynamic that established an explosive short-circuit between domestic and global politics.2
However varied its sources, this short-circuit meant that US society, even the US working class, were no longer self-evident as the main potential constituencies for radicals to win over or represent. Sometimes they were. But just as often—whether the goal was winning independence for New Afrika, gestating small, self-sufficient communes that would quietly exit capitalism one by one, or building an armed clandestine underground network to sabotage the imperialist war machine—the efflorescence of sub-national and supra-national radical projects raised the question of sub-national and supra-national constituencies and audiences in ways totally alien to national electoral campaigns. Across all these projects, however, radicals were ultimately continuing to explore the same limits they had encountered back in the ‘60s during their time in the civil rights and antiwar movements: if we can’t use the Democrats (or the US state itself) to accomplish our goals, then what can we use? Can we win over a majority of American as such to meaningfully support our cause? Do we need to? And if not, then who do we turn to, and what do we want them to do?
A case of professional-managerial class radicalism
Who were these people who found themselves in a position to ask such questions? Students, for starters: it’s impossible to miss the centrality of two specifically student projects, SDS and SNCC, in the organizational history sketched above. But as much as this campus background preoccupied these activists, it was more often treated as something to overcome rather than understand.
Barbara and John Ehrenreich provide a notable exception. In a series of articles in Radical America in 1977, they coined the now-infamous concept of the Professional Managerial Class to describe the large intermediary social stratum—between capital and labor—tasked with managing the social contradictions generated by the accumulation process: “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production” such as “scientists, engineers, teachers, social workers, writers, accountants, lower- and middle-level managers and administrators, etc.—in all some 20 to 25 percent of the US population.”
They associated the growth of this stratum with the advent of the era of monopoly capital, when rapid centralization and concentration of production processes demanded the expansion of state and non-state bureaucracies. They also saw it as highly politically ambiguous. The PMC’s roles involved both helping to ameliorate the worst of the suffering of workers (for instance, through the administration of welfare programs) and policing their more rebellious or socially destabilizing tendencies (often through the same means). They were also often required to save the capitalists from themselves, pushing for reforms that might hurt profitability in the short term but encouraged long-term systemic stability. They therefore served an essentially conservative function overall, while also operating as a major driving social force behind progressivism.
The Ehrenreichs developed the concept of the PMC in trying to make sense of the radical turn of the student New Left and its attempts to leave campus. They themselves had experienced this turn as participants and thought the intervention might help their comrades find their bearings. The culminating article in the series, “The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism,” argued that the New Left had begun as a familiar movement of PMC progressivism, opposing racial segregation and the war as ultimately destabilizing forces that threatened the long-term functioning of American society. By the end of the ’60s, however, it tipped over into something far more radical. Students, as prospective members of the PMC, became disillusioned with the establishment they were being trained to administer. The brutality of the US assault on Vietnam stained the federal government, the university system, and any other institution tied to or complicit in the war. Mass urban black militancy, meanwhile, challenged PMC progressivism by replacing expectations of passive recipients of welfare services with an active, assertive class insurgency. Finally, these destabilizing influences came at a time when the professions—and higher education—were rapidly expanding, opening them to an influx of formerly working-class students and providing leeway ripe for challenge and experiment.
In the Ehrenreichs’ understanding, then, the student New Left was a portion of the American PMC amputating itself from the rest of its class. With these social origins, the movement-strategy deadlocks that animated its radical turn aren’t surprising. They were still questions characteristic of the PMC, a class tasked with representing multiple other classes, as well as the functioning of society as a whole. Their founding gestures of rejecting the existing state and liberal progressivism (revolution) and their anxiety about constituency (who will make the revolution: the traditional unionized working class, racial minorities, the third world?) were expressions of the shearing forces that knocked them loose in the first place. No longer occupying their designated niche in the postwar American project, they struggled to articulate a new project of their own beyond it, and this struggle continued to raise the old PMC questions in new forms, with increasingly divergent answers.
White-collar warfare
Conflict in the US around the Gaza genocide has played out most visibly as a civil war within its professional-managerial class. Campus politics are once again central, with encampments and building occupations like the one at Columbia taking center stage. Beyond campus, headlines have centered on doxing and blacklisting, coveted job offers rescinded, progressive NGOs, newsrooms, and white-collar workplaces of all kinds divided.
The PMC has been thrown into an acute crisis, but the ground was already prepared for it. As the Ehrenreichs identified in “Death of a Yuppie Dream,” a 2012 follow-up to their 1977 articles, the PMC has spent years in the midst of a slow-moving disintegration. The quintessential “middle class,” the American PMC has been bifurcating since the 1980s, when national inequality began to skyrocket and the middle fell away. Its upper echelons have been promoted, merging ever more closely into the capitalist class they always abutted; the lower rungs are being deskilled, outsourced, and forced into a race-to-the-bottom competition for ever more precarious positions sought by more and more degree-holders. The positions (and salaries) that provided the material basis of the PMC’s prestige, security, relative autonomy, and reformist idealism have steadily eroded. The Occupy moment expressed one response to this development; the Sanders campaigns and the growth of DSA expressed another. The overall trajectory has stayed the same. Splinters and class-fractions are once again ready to be pried loose.
No wonder, then, that the electoralism question came back with a vengeance, in uncannily similar terms to the way it was raised in 1968. Now, as back then, the progressive wing of the PMC, already in flux, faces a Democratic Party actively participating in a brutal imperial military venture that directly contradicts what the progressives thought they stood for. Now, as back then, the establishment seems intransigent, and conventional tactics from lobbying to protest seem woefully ineffective. The protest movement is isolated within the PMC, with encampments and banner drops provoking generally hostile reactions from the wider public even as polls indicate the popularity of an arms embargo. 2024 wasn’t 1968, but the resemblances are substantial and structural—beyond mere coincidence. Since the Democrats wouldn’t break rank on such a key issue, breaking with the Democrats itself became key, and a new generation was pushed into the search for new political worldviews.
Even as it bifurcates, the PMC has become a far more decisive electoral base for the Democrats than it was in the ’60s, raising the stakes both for the party and for those portions of the PMC attempting to influence or break with it. And if the PMC was in flux both yesterday and in the ‘60s, today’s disintegration is very different than the turbulent expansion of the past. A declining class is a very different beast than a rising one—in this case, less secure, less stable in its allegiances and willingness to take risks, less predictable. The point extends to the historical moment in general. An America in decline is not the same battleground as an America at the height of its postwar affluence and global hegemony, nor does the world situation we face now have much in common with the golden age of decolonization. We’re faced with just as many points of short-circuit between the global and the local, but they’re not like those from back in the day. The most salient, of course, are Zionism (its hegemony in post-’67 American Jewish life, Israel’s centrality to US grand strategy) and the transnational linkages of both the Arab diaspora and of global Islam (as shaped by decades of the global war on terror). These are very different short-circuits than those created by Vietnam and Black Power, involving very different segments of the population, with very different implications for grassroots organizing.
This is not, in other words, our 1968. Nonetheless, despite the differences, the Gaza genocide has produced a dynamic in the PMC-based US left remarkably similar to the one produced by Vietnam. While the scale of today’s movement is much smaller, and the national and global context very different, we have good reason to believe it has this trajectory in common. Attention to this shared trajectory might be the best basis we have for understanding and overcoming some of its limits this time around.
Where now?
Which brings us back to the 2024 DNC, with its fragmented protests and feuding grouplets—many of whom are direct organizational successors to the radical splinters of 1968, all of whom are still reenacting that splintering. As we’ve seen, the movement itself is generating the radicalization (and moderate backlash) tearing it apart. If we rebuild it, the same pattern will continue. Trump may force some degree of rallying-together, but even a Republican in the White House is unlikely to put the genie back in the bottle. Since the worldviews and long-term goals of coalition members will diverge further with time, these are the limits within which a viable strategy would have to be found.
Developing such a viable collaborative strategy is in the interest of both the radicals and the moderates so long as neither has a truly independent strategy of their own—and right now, neither do. The moderates are still regrouping from the collapse of the Uncommitted campaign and will need time to formulate a way of engaging with a Republican presidency, Senate, and House. The radicals are still reeling from state repression that will certainly get worse under Trump, a risk that only deepens the more isolated they become from a wider movement base. Perhaps most pressingly, there just aren’t enough of us right now, on either side.
With some exceptions, both sides seem to object more to one another’s worldviews and priorities than to their tactics. In the Know Your Enemy discussion, Adler-Bell, Taylor and Táíwò were all open to Harris’s call for sabotage—but nor do they discount the importance of lobbying and engagement with the establishment (or at least the Democratic Party). Calla Walsh, another founding member of Palestine Action, concedes that “in any liberation struggle there is a time and place for mass rallies, for economic boycotts, for political education, for petty vandalism, for sabotage, for urban guerrilla warfare, for all of the above,” but insists that “direct action, community organizing, confrontation with the police, and secondary/tertiary targeting” are essential (citing the example of these tactics being used to shutter an Elbit Systems facility in Cambridge). While Adler-Bell and Walsh would find little to agree on in their hopes for where the US left goes in the next decade, this doesn’t necessarily preclude them from working meaningfully towards a common short-term goal. If there’s still a place for the inside track approach, for lobbying and humanitarian NGOs and lawfare, it will always be the moderates who are best equipped to do it; if there’s a place for high-risk direct action, conversely, it’s the radicals with the required temperament and know-how. Many on both sides are well-equipped, in different ways, for various forms of grassroots organizing. If each camp concedes that there’s likely a place for all these approaches in the short term—since no single approach has made much of a dent so far—then each would also benefit from finding a way to work with the other. But how could they, when the worldviews and long-term goals that come with their respective strong suits really are incompatible?
The only way forward would be a goal specific and concrete enough that broader differences are beside the point. The call to stop the flow of US arms to Israel could serve this function if all parties continue to find it worthwhile and achievable, regardless of what they hope happens after and regardless of how they think it might be achieved: a narrowly tailored popular front. Whether embodied in a coordinating council, umbrella organization, or just the bare slogan itself, the only type of coalition available to us right now would be one organized around such a narrow goal. Distinct from any Palestine Solidarity, antiwar, or anti-imperialist movements with which it might overlap, this would be something like more like a No Bombs for Israel movement. Even “movement” may still imply too much broader political unity—call it a campaign. A campaign like this would, of course, still be difficult to build. The issue of constituency would likely remain a wedge: do we go to the masjids or the ports? The campuses or the town halls? But as with other question of tactics and strategy, a narrow enough goal would anchor the conversation, allowing for collaboration between at least some moderates and some radicals, both of whom could engage with an understanding of exactly how far they could trust the other: up until the arms shipments stop, and no further.
A recent example of such a coalition is the campaign to Stop Cop City in Atlanta.3 The comparison is limited. The movement was municipal in focus, not national, and appears to have failed to prevent to construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. At its height, however, it took a small activist core with wildly diverging worldviews and long-term goals and united them around a narrow, short-term one they shared. This core was then able to build out into a substantially popular movement that incorporated a true diversity of tactics, from canvassing to sabotage. Even if it ultimately failed, it delayed the construction of Cop City for over a year, with tactical flexibility enabled by the simplicity and clarity of its goal. The moderates refused to denounce the radicals and made tactical use of their sabotage and confrontation even when they didn’t expect or approve of it. The radicals refused to denounce the moderates and tailored their actions to meet movement goals even when they might have otherwise wanted to do things differently. All this proceeded indirectly, autonomously, with no overarching leadership. Whether one loves this loose form of organization or hates it, for that type of coalition, for that type of goal, for an impressively long few years in an inhospitable political moment, it worked remarkably well. Veterans of that movement—of which there’s no shortage now involved in Palestine solidarity work—are an important source of both positive and negative lessons.
To say that we should focus on such a goal and bracket broader questions of worldview is not to say those questions don’t matter. The nature of American state and society, its place in the transition to a better world, the role of activists who find themselves within its borders—all of these are urgent questions with practical consequences. The type of coalition I’ve gestured at here would allow new radical tendencies to develop around these questions, hopefully even encourage them.
As things stand, however, they won’t mature into effective organizations in time to intervene meaningfully in a genocide paid for by our tax dollars whose death toll continues to rise every day. How much energy have we wasted, how many approaches remain untried because of our confusion? If we want to be effective instead of just right, we need to hold goal-specific tactics and larger political projects separate. The inability to consistently make this distinction rendered the Vietnam anti-war movement far less effective than it could have been in its later years (whatever its other merits, and whatever the value of the radical turns it produced). Structurally and intellectually, we’ve inherited the same problem. The past, as usual, is weighing like a nightmare on the brains of living, and a prerequisite for getting out from under it is to understand it. If we do, we might still have a shot at building a movement that can meaningfully intervene in the horror being unleashed on Gaza. It might not be too late.
“Democratic socialist” seems like a fair label given the rest of Adler-Bell’s oeuvre, but if this is a mischaracterization I welcome correction. The same goes for the focus on American politics I take that label to imply. ↩
To take one example: SNCC’s ejection of white members with the turn to Black Power had a huge impact on SDS’s own trajectory. The Panthers’ fatal split was between Huey Newton’s West Coast faction (newly advocating multiracial community organizing and electoral participation) and an East Coast faction identified with Eldridge Cleaver (more hardline black nationalist, third-worldist, pushing for immediate armed struggle). The debates were so closely entangled, in fact, that 1975’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying refers to Cleaver’s line as “the Black Panther-Weatherman thesis” and identifies the similar tensions developing within the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a major radical autoworkers’ organization in Detroit. ↩
I wrote about Stop Cop City last year. ↩
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