Find Me Someone Better

I’ve long deployed what I consider a simple viewpoint about US elections (congressional and presidential):  if leftists choose to participate, they should do it without making certain people disposable.  In other words, don’t commit to movements that require the downtrodden anywhere in the world to remain in states of hardship or dispossession.  US electoralism, by design, assiduously elides the needs and aspirations of communities whose freedom would disrupt imperial and colonial accumulation.  Few groups are more familiar with this culture of disposability than Palestinians. 

Many leftist advocates of electoralism conceptualize Palestinians not as a colonized people in need of relief, but as impracticalities best relegated to the periphery of grown-up politics.  (Any talk about freeing Palestine is meaningless if the Westerner’s gratification comes first.)  Support of Palestine certainly impedes electoral success.  It’s a serious problem.  But a greater problem is prioritization of electoral success at the expense of a decolonial politics. 

Relief for Palestinians is coming, we’re told.  Just wait until this person with a history of selling out Palestine acquires an obscene amount of power.  The narrative is neither praxis nor analysis.  It is petulant grotesquerie.  No oppressed person wants to hear more nonsense from the white moderate. 

Purveyors of this grotesquerie have a plan:  they’ll “educate” the candidate.  This plan has an unacknowledged problem, though:  the candidate doesn’t listen.  When Palestinians express dismay about congressional aspirants or congresspeople who affirm ethnic cleansing (directly or implicitly), it’s hard to imagine a more vacuous, callous response than “you need to educate them!”  It shifts the onus of moral negligence from elites articulating a fundamentally violent position onto the recipients of that violence. 

Convincing allies to quit disposing of us in order to expedite their electoral fantasies is enough of a time-suck without the burden of yelling into a void.  Besides, politicians aren’t ignorant; they function within a milieu that rewards meticulous selectivity.  Anybody who runs for Congress or president knows that Palestine/Israel will come up.  The candidate will have spent plenty of time rehearsing answers and honing avoidance tactics, usually with the help of professional Zionists.  An unwillingness to speak isn’t ignorance.  And a halting presentation of safe talking points isn’t naivete.  They are textbook dissimulation, easy to recognize by anyone uninterested in excusing opportunism.  Exhorting the colonized to enlighten agents of the state as a way to mitigate oppression betrays a severe misunderstanding of the US political system. 

In any case, these eager teachers fail to explain how education is possible when they treat both criticism and inquiry (i.e., “education”) as sacrilege. 

When education fails, other rationalizations emerge.  “If He speaks in favor of Palestine, He won’t be elected,” adherents of conciliation proclaim, as if a Western politician’s career is more important than a national community suffering incalculable horror.  Please remember that you’re not choosing officers for a local DSA chapter.  You’re electing to empower a person who will vote on military budgets, foreign appropriations, and policy resolutions.  That person will be in a direct position of authority vis-a-vis Palestinians and other victims of US depravity.  Capitalist politicians toil under obligations that don’t cohere to social media thought bubbles. 

I proceed from the assumption that no matter the context, disposal of colonized peoples is unacceptable.  Arguments in favor of voting Democrat can’t match the ethical and theoretical rigor of liberatory thinking on display in slums, ghettoes, reservations, and refugee camps.  Those arguments are boring bromidic delusions of a self-obsessed culture.  They are also achingly short on empathy. 

Let’s return to Palestinians since the norm is to avoid us when pretending to be serious.  We continuously suffer the trauma of dehumanization:  decades of land theft, murder, displacement, segregation, pollution, imprisonment, and home demolition, every awful deed a bipartisan US procedure.  Meanwhile, our oppressor expertly hoards a victim position, demanding that we assuage Zionist disquiet and affirm the sanctity of white life at the expense of our own survival. 

In North America, we are subject to intense racism, talked over and around, fired from jobs, sanitized by social climbers, treated as radioactive, systematically defamed, ineligible for major awards, and virtually absent from public life.  Enterprising writers understand that using our necks as footstools is a surefire path to lucrative careers in corporate media.  And no national politician breaks into the system without accommodating Zionism. 

Elections are supposedly a placeholder to alleviate disaster until the revolution, but for Palestinians the timeline means waiting even longer for an uncertain outcome.  If we aren’t in the current plans—indeed, if the current plans pointedly omit Palestine—then why should we be optimistic about making the cut in the future? 

Instead of lecturing us about civic responsibility, or bemoaning the damnable inconvenience of our voices, some compassion might be in order.  Generational pain and hardship inform our skepticism about the probity of US electoralism.  Pragmatists need to reckon with that skepticism, to think through the dynamics of power that condition our sensibilities, rather than defaulting to lazy tactics of discipline and derision.  Consider that perhaps our recalcitrance isn’t irrational or conspiratorial.  Consider also the Orientalist connotations of that perception.  Of what value is a politics that renders its champions incapable of grace? 

Palestinians are painfully familiar with the mendacity of Democratic politicians, who betray us with disgusting regularity.  Expecting a different result is goofy superstition.  Racism is the only force strong enough to make our skepticism appear incomprehensible. 

Against these terrible odds, and in these hostile conditions, we fight.  Pushed aside, ridiculed, misunderstood, we fight.  Dispossessed, insulted, ostracized, we fight.  Our attempts to stake a claim to this world are met by a disheartening number of allies and interlocuters with a disaffected shrug:  sorry, this dissembling Zionist is the best you’re getting. 

“Find me someone better” is the most troublesome response to electoral recalcitrance.  It aggravates as both a political sensibility and an empirical proposition.  The statement is a telltale sign of intellectual captivity, wielded with uncanny confidence by people conditioned to accept mediocrity as some great satisfaction.  And why is the mandate to find someone better rendered with such defiance, as if it decides the argument?  The entire point of a compassionate politics is finding someone better. 

Are you really so certain about nobody being better?  Motherfucker, please.  I know hundreds of people who are better.  So do you.  Millions of people we don’t know are undoubtedly better, as well.  Let’s not confuse familiarity with virtue, or fame with integrity.  Not everyone is a politician in the Democratic Party, and nobody is obliged to rep the state as a path to decency.  If a desire to serve the government requires disposal of Palestine (and other colonized nations), then it tells us less about the nature of the job than about the dubious provenance of congressional ambition.  When you declare that nobody’s better, you haven’t scored a rhetorical victory; you’ve stated the case for rejecting electoral politics. 

A cognate of “find me someone better” is “He’s the best we have,” which is equally asinine.  “He” isn’t the best we have.  He’s the best a shitty bourgeois system affords us.  The distinction is important.  I have no quibble with anyone content to navigate extant parameters of US political life, but I’ve come to detest people who consider those parameters sacrosanct.  Insistence on the system’s sanctity isn’t a byproduct of naivete or cynicism.  To the contrary, it often arises from self-interest—and reinforces an unctuous media culture—because celebrity politicians are little economies in themselves, with publications invested in their glory, a speakers’ circuit promising honoraria and attention, and cadres of Lilliputian pundits busily restraining life forms larger than their puny imagination. 

How can you carry out an honest debate with somebody about the merits and limitations of a politician if the person you’re debating has made a career of that politician’s success?  

Rather than policing the limits of dissent, missionaries of pragmatism who insist that revolution must be voted into existence should explore correlations between US accumulation, the substructure of Nordic-style welfare pretending to be socialism, and economic misery in the Global South.  It’s one thing to vote as a concession to limited possibilities or even as a principled intervention, but mythologizing a succession of over-branded ciphers invariably diminishes a world of people struggling for freedom. 

The politicians who supposedly represent the best can ostensibly be made better, for another appeal to electoralism is the mandate that we, constituents and concerned citizens, need to move Democrats left.  This mandate is nonsensical in two ways.  First, those who proffer it are usually insincere; they have no intention of pressuring their chosen leadership in any meaningful way, though they’ll make time to berate anyone who tries.  Second, expecting a Democrat with grand aspirations to move left is like waiting for corporations to socialize their assets.  Decades of history show us that Democratic Party movement overwhelmingly happens in the other direction. 

“Move them left” has a more proactive form:  “hold their feet to the fire.”  It sounds like a good plan, but rarely evolves from slogan to event.  How can this valuable initiative occur if reproach—you know, the holding-their-feet-to-the-fire component of the strategy—is met with sanctimonious howling about purism and immaturity?  When activists and intellectuals conceptualize a candidacy as imperative, dissent isn’t an option.  We either conform or initiate social death.  While it’s rare to see elected officials move left, we regularly see their fans, in risible efforts to soft-pedal capitulation, inching to the center.

Of course, as the recalcitrant hear regularly, “There’s no such thing as a perfect candidate.”  No line better illuminates the problems of electoral discourse in the United States.  Marxist, anarchist, and decolonial traditions don’t frame aversion to voting Democrat as a quest for individual perfection.  Nor do those traditions covet ideal representation.  The notion of a “perfect candidate” exists to minimize inhumane levels of atrociousness, and is used in equal measure by centrist Democrats and their Bernie-wing enemies; both groups also share a talent for waving away centuries of revolutionary thought. 

If there’s an anti-intellectual culture in the USA—something that’s hard to determine because intellectuals tend to confuse being ignored with ignorance—it’s as much the fault of progressives who sloganeer during election season (and in between) as it is of the reactionary culture warriors who demand a vote for the other team.  The system isn’t conducive to thoughtfulness.  From a ruling class perspective, thoughtlessness is one of its greatest features.  Even better, thoughtlessness is often voluntary.  Many writers and scholars intimately know revolutionary ideas; many of them have built lucrative careers through that knowledge.  Yet many also choose to abandon that knowledge when the moment calls for obeisance (i.e., amid the prospect of an economic or psychological reward). 

The “perfect candidate” we’re meant to disavow only exists because He’s relentlessly summoned as a disciplinary force; that is to say, He comes into existence through an absence of structural analysis.  Self-described leftists stanning for duds and posers are the only people thinking about Him.  

Variants of “socialism” in North America devoted to reform of the Democratic Party are infused with exceptionalism and are thus beholden to the grandiose promises of settler colonization.  They are at odds with most socialist groups in the Global South, which rightly perceive the North American variants as overheated with reverential self-regard and prone to messianic compulsion, a hot-take about the importance of borders or apologia for US militarism always at the ready. 

While Westerners decide which imperialist is most likely to deliver socialism to the masses, there are untold people around the world—hungry, abject, struggling, forgotten—absent in US electoral discourses.  Their absence isn’t accidental.  Acknowledging their existence would require hard conversations about fidelity to an irredeemable colonial project. 

Let’s again return to Palestine because, frankly, the Western left is exceptionally dull without it. 

When you introduce Palestine into the US electoral arena—that is, when you demand that progressives include Palestinians in their paeans to opportunity, that leaders who extol the grassroots stop prioritizing Zionist comfort at the expense of principled activism, that presidential candidates answer to their substantiation of a vicious settler colonial entity—fans of those progressives will make you feel as if you’re ruining a vision of the world that is sacred and precious.

When you ask what happens to Palestinians, to Black people, to Natives, to the global poor, to the humans around the world on the receiving end of the imperialism we’re supposed to ignore for the good of our political satisfaction, or to the benefit of a politician’s career, online canvassers for Democratic candidates will understand you to be saying, “I exist to mindlessly disrupt human progress.” 

It’s truly one of the ugliest spectacles in US politics when progressive luminaries shame and rebuke Palestinians who decline to celebrate an electoral system that ritually excludes us (or that treats us with arrant hostility).  It’s a regular feature of an already-noxious discourse. 

When you point out that [progressive hero du jour] materially supports ethnic cleansing, the online canvassers hear, “I’m an infantile philistine who doesn’t understand politics.” 

Fuck that. 

Palestinian Americans ought to make it clear to the liberal electorate: you want respect, learn to practice it first.