After the election, what are we going to do?

Or why AOC embodies the tragedy of the Democratic Party

Whatever happens in November, the Democratic Party faces a tragedy. It will be a national tragedy if Trump wins the election. The Democrats will participate and suffer along with everyone else. If Harris wins, it will be a tragedy in another form that the party is ill-equipped to handle. The Democrats’ tragedy is their Progressive wing, which failed a critical test of moral seriousness.

The Progressive wing faced the trial starting on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas crossed an international boundary between Gaza and Israel, slaughtered innocent civilians in large numbers, committed extensive sexual crimes, destroyed property, and only stopped because their Israeli neighbors/victims finally got their act together and forcefully counter-attacked. The moral test the Progressives faced was not easy, but that is why it is such an important one.

Here is the Progressive dilemma since October 7th: Almost by definition, Progressives find the current Israeli government objectionable. They hold Likud in contempt and anyone to the right of Likud all the more. The test comes when a political group like the Progressives faces a challenge to differentiate between a government it despises, whose policies it condemns, and a people who live under that government, when they, the people, are abused by a third party.

Unfortunately, reflecting a kind of grizzly zeitgeist articulated by people from the Secretary General of the UN (the Hamas attack on southern Israel “did not happen in a vacuum”) to the university presidents (condemnations of calls for genocide of Jews would depend upon “context”) to the demonstrators (“from the river to the sea”) to the anti-Zionist media, the Progressives are now ineradicably compromised by their inability to deal with the need to combat a terror-based movement that hides behind its civilian population. The Progressives’ failure to accept any level of unintended but unavoidable civilian losses amounts to a vote in support of Hamas’ military strategy. United States Senator Sanders, one of the Progressives most morally compromised in this regard, wants to use the unavoidable civilian losses as a reason (excuse?) to cut military aid to Israel. Such a cut cannot have a result other than meaningful support for Hamas in its military efforts. Following October 7th, he first suggested this in December 2023 and is currently pursuing a new initiative.

The moral test, of course, is heightened by the fact that the violent Hamas invasion of Israel came on behalf of an ideology that preaches everything the Progressives detest. It includes supremacism (in this case, for Arabs, Islam, and Muslims in general), oppression of gays, opposition to free speech, rejection of religious freedom, denial of equality in status between men and women, antisemitism (of course), and so much more. Those stances are not in dog whistle style or even masked as evaluations (“…in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40%” – Donald Trump), as is so often the case when right-wing Americans speak badly of immigrants, non-whites, or Jews. No, Hamas is quite forthright and honest about its values.

And so, we must ask: What values and policies do Progressives claim to guide them? AOC’s "issues" web page lists her key issues:

Whatever your opinion on these issues, they are all worthy of a place in the American public square. They reflect interpretations of American values about which Americans have the right, and speaking in historical terms, the privilege to exchange views and debate.

At the same time, there is an unresolvable cognitive dissonance between the values reflected on AOC’s “issues” web page and her outspoken attempts to libel Israel with the “genocide” libel, to treat the suffering of the Gazan population as if it happens in the absence of Hamas, to neglect events like the Hizballah rocketing of the soccer game in Majdal Shams that killed 12 Israeli youngsters, and most recently her shockingly knee-jerk, condemnatory, morally vapid and legally ignorant response to the pager explosions in the pockets of Hizballah activists. All of these excesses have the morally unsustainable result of encouraging Hamas in its current military strategy.

The overwhelming problem is that you cannot put these together in a consistent expression of responsible, informed, deeply thought-out values that lead to policies. Here, then, is the tragedy of the current Democratic Party. Its Progressive wing has lost its way and is dragging the rest of the party into a moral quagmire.

VP Harris and her team show no sign that they realize that they have a problem. Recall Walz’s appalling suggestion, about which I wrote, when he erased the significant antisemitic aspects of the campus protests, that the protesters demonstrated “for all the right reasons.” Not recognizing the problem, they are unable to address it. If the Democrats win the election, this will not end well.