Students revolting, Trump’s conviction, Genocide Joe’s continued support for Israel and an Unholy Alliance on the far right, Bill V. Mullen, analyses the various political processes at work in the US today.
The Global Student Intifada launched on U.S. university campuses this Spring has shaken the U.S. political system to its core. It also promises to play a role in the U.S. presidential election in November.
Despite the arrests of at least 3,000 student activists, and the unleashing of police violence at campuses across the U.S., the encampment movement has successfully exposed the American two-party system as unified in its murderous support for Israel. “Genocide Joe” Biden is now as unpopular as Donald Trump among student radicals. His approval rating as President is 36 percent, a shockingly low figure. That number is only slightly lower than the percent that likes Trump.
Disaffection
These numbers translate into a stalemate of disaffection with the political system and its choices this November. In the Democratic primary in February of this year, a majority of voters in the city of Dearborn, Michigan—with a vast Arab majority—voted “uncommitted” rather than support Biden. Polls shows that Biden is either tied or slightly behind Trump at the national level. The war against Palestine is one reason, but U.S. voters remain profoundly pessimistic about the state of the country and economy after years of declining living conditions, deteriorating health care, and increased rates of addiction, suicide and premature death—even among white voters.
At the same time, outside of his base, Trump remains an intensely disliked and divisive figure, especially among those committed to Palestinian liberation. His decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as President is bitterly remembered. Trump has also referred to the Gaza encampment protesters as “raging lunatics” and praised the police dismantlement of the camps in New York City.
Just recently, Trump was convicted on all 34 counts in a “hush money” case in New York courts. He is subject to up to four years in prison, but could receive a sentence as light as probation. However, even a Trump prison sentence would not preclude him from continuing his run for the Presidency, winning, or even serving as President from prison. Trump also faces two more possible criminal trials before the November election.
Cumulatively, these conditions are reflected in a recent poll of young U.S. voters describing the U.S. as a “dying empire run by bad people.”
The Gaza encampments then have exacerbated what might be called a negative polarization: they have deepened and widenedexisting cynicism and rage about U.S. electoral politics, the state of U.S. capitalism, and the dead-end costs of U.S. imperial support for Israel’s genocidal war.
Gaza Encampments
Yet the encampments have also illuminated an increasingly dangerous opening for the far right in the U.S. to exploit these circumstances. At the University of California at Los Angeles, pro-Zionist goons teamed up with far right white nationalists to commit a vicious two-hour attack on non-violent encampment protests. Campus police and city police both stood by and did nothing.
What Robin Kelley calls this “unholy alliance” requires some explanation. State-level support for Israel often appeals to white Christian evangelicals and far right nationalists who believe that a Jewish population returning to live in the Holy Land foretells Armageddon and the return of Christ to earth. Thus white nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism can go hand in hand in the U.S. It was this particular conjuncture that Trump—himself an antisemite—exploited as President with his embassy move to Jerusalem. Trump currently retains the support of most Christian fundamentalist voters in the U.S. in part for that reason.
The Move Rightwards
The encampment movement has also energized a far right which since Trump’s 2016 election has sought to infiltrate and use the state apparatus to carry out its agenda. This includes an attack on “wokeness,” that is to say, anti-racism, pro-LGBTQ+ rights, abortion rights, and a commitment to diversity and equality. More than 30 states in the U.S. currently have passed or are considering legislation to eliminate “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) offices at all state-funded institutions, including universities.
This strategy reflects the far right’s significant achievements in taking control of both the political agenda in the U.S., which has moved decisively right, and institutions of power, like the Supreme Court. A revealing dust up in recent days was news that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito was seen flying “Stop the Steal” Trump flags and a white nationalist flag above his residences and beach houses, respectively. The same Supreme Court has already cleared the way for Trump to remain on the presidential ballot despite challenges from some liberal states.
Thus heading into the Presidential election, we have the most radicalized and politically disaffected generation of Americans since the Vietnam War, on one side, and on the other, two teetering parties and leaders committed to a decrepit, reactionary, hollowed-out version of American democracy.
Left Organisations
For the Left, this set of circumstances presents formidable challenges. Since the break-up of the International Socialist Organization in 2019, there is not a sizeable revolutionary socialist organization holding any kind of prominence on the political landscape. Smaller Left groupings like the Party for Socialism and Liberation continue working with some success in alliance mainly with Palestinian organizations.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of American (DSA) whose membership skyrocketed with the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, has mostly stalled, stuck between a series of electoral disappointments, declining membership and revenue, and a notable failure to attract the most radical people in this new generation. No matter the outcome of this autumn’s election, the wholesale identification with the Democratic Party of 36,000 dead Palestinians is likely to make it much harder for the DSA to position itself as an organization capable of “reforming” the party—its tacit if often disguised strategy since 2016.
Palestinian Solidarity Groups
Then there is the broader chrysalis of Palestinian-led and affiliated organizations which have coalesced with and around the encampment movement since last October. These groups –which include Students for Justice in Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), In Our Lifetime, Young Democratic Socialists of America, Jewish Voice for Peace – function right now as a kind of popular united front in sustaining opposition to the Gaza genocide.
PYM took the lead recently in organizing a “People’s Conference for Palestine” in Detroit, another Michigan city like Dearborn with a large Arab community. Keynote speakers including Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative calling for an intensified commitment to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction Movement. Several thousand organizers, many of them Palestinian, and many of them young, promised to carry the encampment spirit forward into the summer and autumn, even if the form that spirit will take is still undetermined.
One protest that is determined is against the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this August. A coalition began forming last year including groups like the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Black Lives Matter Chicago, Freedom Road Socialist Organization (another small group), and Chicago SJP. Labour groups are conspicuously in short supply, in the coalition. The Coalition’s primary demand is to stop the war.
The city of Chicago, led by a Black Democratic mayor, meantthe convention to be a showpiece for a Biden victory, and has refused to give permits to protest. But the Coalition has vowed to march. So too has the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine, a broad-based Palestinian-led group also centering on ending the war, which has scheduled a march for the third day of the convention when Biden is said to be arriving to receive his nomination.
Elections and Organisation
How the election itself plays out is a difficult guess, compounded by Trump’s New York legal conviction. Turnout is likely to determine. Thousands of voters in differing states have already pledged ‘uncommitted’ rather than vote Biden. Of perhaps more interest and importance for the Left is the Palestinian war protests.
The U.S. has experienced bursts of mainly horizontal social movements in the past decade, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter to the Gaza encampments. A student-led movement may be sufficient to push the U.S. state eventually away from support for Israel’s immediate war, as it did with Vietnam. But a far more robust Left, working-class upturn, and a significant, enduring political reformation of revolutionaries—whose numbers have certainly grown through the encampment movement will be necessary to achieve more.
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Bill V. Mullen is co-author with Jeanelle Hope, of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books). He is a member of the USACBI collective (United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).
