If you’re waiting for America to end Israel’s genocide, you’re condemning many thousands more Palestinians to death

Yes, U.S. public opinion is shifting, as are the clear and immediate rulings of international law. That would matter only the U.S. was a genuine democracy and law-abiding global citizen

If you’re expecting shifts in U.S. public opinion to prompt Washington to see the error of its ways and act to halt Israel’s genocide, you’re condemning many thousands more Palestinians to death, and their survivors to lives of brutal oppression. Biden, a self-proclaimed Zionist and de facto neo-conservative, has shown himself wholeheartedly committed to a project that requires violent subordination and erasure of the Palestinian people, and to their long-term subjection to colonial or neocolonial rule.

Of course the grotesquerie of the Biden Administration’s criminal abetting of genocide and shameless contempt for international law and its institutions make it natural to want to seek straws of hope. One such straw I’ve detected in countries appalled by Washington’s actions is the idea that shifting U.S. public opinion will eventually compel a course correction, i.e. that the shift in the balance of U.S. public sympathy towards the Palestinians suffering Israel’s war crimes will make it untenable for the U.S. government to continue enabling those crimes.

I’d be more persuaded by this case for optimism if the U.S. was genuinely a democracy. But the U.S. political system, by constitutional design, falls far short of what most of us imagine by that term, i.e. that the will of the majority of citizens ultimately dictates the policies of their rulers.  

For reasons too tedious to recount, the bipartisan U.S. political class is as united behind Israel as it is distant from the majority of the electorate. And the power of that establishment — reflected in a presidential election in which the only viable options are two widely loathed aging white men (who, by the way, offer nothing substantially different from one another on Palestine) — is a reflection of the deliberate restrictions on democracy baked into the U.S. Constitution. “The system,” as Bernie Sanders once memorably warned us, “is rigged.”

Judging America by what it says about itself on the tin would be a fatal mistake

The U.S. today remains governed under an 18th Century Constitution written for a settler-colonial republic, which created a system of representative government for resolving disputes among the wealthy white settlers to whom it granted the right to vote. Even within the population it deemed white, the Founders explicitly aimed to limit democracy lest it threaten their interests. And it took many decades of social disruption to expand that system to grant full (though not necessarily entirely equal) citizenship to first to the rest of the white population, and then to the descendants of the enslaved people whose labor built their capital, and to the descendants of the indigenous people whose land they stole.

As an esteemed journalist not known for Marxisant nomenclature once told me in conversation, “America completed its bourgeois revolution but not it’s democratic one.”

That’s why, even today, the U.S. Constitution still functions to restrain, dilute and even allow its government to bypass the will of the majority of citizens.

Consider, for a moment, if in any African or Asian country, the candidate who finished second by 3 million votes was declared the winner, Western media and political institutions would deem this to have been a result of cheating. (Yet that’s exactly what happened here in 2016, and in 2000 – though in that year the winner had finished only half a million votes behind the loser.)

Yes, but that’s the Electoral College, say those weaned on the narrative of American “democracy”. But the Electoral College, which literally elects the president, is designed as a restraint on democracy: For example, it gives California one seat for every 709,000 residents, while Wyoming has one for every 193,000 residents, making a single presidential vote in Wyoming three times as powerful as one in California.

Joe Biden won 7 million more votes than Donald Trump in 2020, but he was the winner only because of the 10,000 votes by which he won Arizona’s Electoral College seats, the 11,000 votes that handed him Georgia’s, the 80,000 votes that won him Pennsylvania, and the 20,000 by which he won Wisconsin. Those 120,000 votes made him president; Trump would have won if he’d won those, i.e. even if, nationally, he finished 6.9 million votes behind Biden.

American democracy, then, to borrow from Gandhi, would be a good idea.

But existing patterns within in the distorted democracy bequeathed by the Founding Fathers mean that the winner of the 2024 election will likely be decided, again by a measure of tens of thousands of votes, in just seven of the country’s 50 states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina — whose combined population is just one fifth of the nation’s total.

Do all U.S. citizens have the right and opportunity to cast a vote of equal value? No, they clearly don’t. And not only because of the Electoral College.  

The U.S., bizarrely for a modern nation state, has no single national set of voting laws or national election commission; voting laws vary from “state” to “state” (provinces, really, in international terms). And state authorities are able to make it difficult for voters they suspect will vote against them to actually get to the polls to cast their votes. The U.S. Supreme Court last week ruled that a South Carolina move to redraw districts to dilute the power of local Black voters was legal — because it was motivated by partisan Republican goals, not, the judges ruled, by racism. Those whose power at the ballot box by the move were targeted not because they were Black, but because they would likely vote Democrat. And that was fine, according to the body responsible for interpreting the Constitution.

Republicans have leveraged their state-level majorities to place a thicket of legal and logistical obstacles between the ballot box and poorer Black, brown and indigenous citizens: voter ID laws, a dysfunctional voter registration system, reduced numbers of voting locations, etc. Rolling back the voting rights won by Black people in the bitter civil rights struggles of the 1960s has been a core part of the GOP strategy for years. Another key plank has been taking control of the Supreme Court, which liberals refuse to understand is a partisan political chamber even if it conducts its business in the language of jurisprudence.

Republican-controlled U.S. states have actively and aggressively used their powers to limit and suppress the Black vote. More on this another time. And, of course, Trump’s Big Lie of a “stolen election” is heavily coded with this racist agenda. It was eloquently explained by Adam Serwer a few years ago:

“The majority of people who make such declarations [of a stolen election] understand that in fact, Trump did not win, that he received fewer votes than his opponent, and that the Electoral College result reflects that loss. But they support Trump’s claims that the vote was fraudulent, and his efforts to pressure Republican officials in key states to overturn the result. To Trump’s strongest supporters, Biden’s win is a fraud because his voters should not count to begin with, and because the Democratic Party is not a legitimate political institution that should be allowed to wield power even if they did.

“(They believe) the true will of the people is that Trump remain president, (and) forcing that outcome, even in the face of defeat, is a fulfillment of democracy rather than its betrayal. The Republican base’s fundamental belief… is that Democratic victories do not count, because Democratic voters are not truly American. It’s no accident that the Trump campaign’s claims have focused almost entirely on jurisdictions with high Black populations… Black votes are considered illegitimate even if they are legally cast... (They believe that) demanding that Black votes be tossed out is not antidemocratic, because they should not have counted in the first place.”

And if the Electoral College is a distortion of democracy, the U.S. Senate — the most powerful legislative body, which of course also effectively picks the Supreme Court — is an even more grotesque example. That’s because the U.S. Constitution awards two Senate seats to each state, regardless of population size. Wyoming’s half-million residents pick two Senators, as do California’s 39 million — meaning, of course, that a single vote in Wyoming has the same value as 78 votes in California. The U.S. Senate can, in fact, be controlled with the support of less than 20% of the nationwide vote. Etc. etc.

So, imagining that the U.S. electoral system is going to tip the scales against either of their presidential options continuing to abet Israel’s genocide is, sadly, a false hope.

Contesting elections remains an important tactic of progressives in America, but also a limited one: There’s little prospect of being able to legislate their way to transforming the structurally racist, violently unequal and profoundly undemocratic system that is capitalism in the U.S. today; but electoral politics does provide platforms for disrupting the narratives of those in power, and for messaging the information and perspective necessary to build the social movements that have historically driven American progress towards a more democratic and egalitarian society.

So, electoral politics right now provides limited, though important, avenues to disrupt U.S. enabling of Israel’s genocide, but it won’t by itself end that enabling of genocide. That’s why the bulk of that work is being done outside of the electoral system, often in disruptive forms reminiscent of how white women and Black people won the right to vote, or of how young Americans moved to end their country’s war in Vietnam.

The trend of growing U.S. sympathy for Palestinians is in line with the global consensus, also. Again, though, sadly there’s no reason to expect that the U.S. will somehow be pulled into line by the international consensus or by the rulings of those courts mandated to adjudicate in matters of international law. The U.S. political class is clearly agreed in the belief that the U.S. is the law.

The spy novelist John Le Carre remarked sometime in the ’90s that while right side had lost the Cold War, the wrong side had won. Nowhere has that judgement been better illustrated than in Gaza, today.

Washington’s support for Israel has left it globally isolated, with most of its allies in the Global South aghast at its indifference to Palestinian life, and the hollow cynicism of Biden proclaiming a “rules-based international order” while attacking international courts for doing their job. And, of course, it has created the permissive, consequence-free environment for Jewish-nationalist fascism to take control of the institutions of state in Israel, and pursue the settler-violence that has reached its apex in Gaza.

But the bipartisan consensus in the White House has long been that a “rules-based international order” means the U.S. arrogates for itself both the job of making the rules, playing the sheriff who enforces them, and waiving accountability when it comes to its own actions and those of allies. And, of course, the political class inadvertently confesses its own nature by proclaiming Israel nothing less than an expression of “shared values”. What the world sees plain as day in the Gaza context is that the U.S. — either directly, or indirectly via clients like Israel — wield unparalleled destructive power and a willingness to unleash that power, but its ability to shape the resulting outcomes has diminished considerably, even from its nadir of its catastrophic failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. The 21^st Century U.S. and its key client have no peer when it comes to breaking stuff; neither is capable of building anything durable.

Biden may be able to stage Zoom convocations of “democracies” to rail against “authoritarianism”, but even many of those who show up to these events are equally dutiful in attendance when summoned by China or other hosts. The fantasy of imagining U.S. “leadership” is laid bare when the only eight of the UN General Assembly’s 192 member countries jointed its no-vote on Palestinian statehood: Czechia, Hungary, Argentina, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Israel.

Indeed, Biden’s effort to revive a Cold War imaginary may have been a (failed) attempt to restore a disciplined governing consensus in Washington — in light of the collapse of that consensus following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its short-lived resurrection of the “War on Terror” notwithstanding. Biden’s fantasy of restored ‘civility’ and consensus on Capitol Hill simply highlighted his inability to comprehend the nature of the changes that had taken root in the U.S. system in his dotage.   (More on that in a later post)

Most Western and Arab states concerned with seeing a political solution in Palestine have, since the days of the Clinton Administration, accepted an exclusive U.S. control over international responses to the situation in Palestine. Those countries then largely accepted U.S. insistence that they take no steps to restrain Israel’s expanding occupation, lest such actions destabilize a largely fictional “peace process”.

But today’s genocide is a direct result of leaving the Palestine file in U.S. hands; it reflects the reality that as a matter of fixed bipartisan policy consensus, Israel has faced no consequences or even disincentives for its apartheid and now genocidal policies.  

Bluntly put, the U.S. political class cannot be trusted to enforce international law or restrain even the most criminal behavior by the Israeli state. Enforcing international law and consensus will require forceful action by the rest of the world to compel U.S. and Israeli compliance by creating credible consequences for failure to comply.