Kamala lost for a lot of reasons. Having the vibrant personality of a power-hungry high school principal in a cheesy 80s movie and playing second banana to a poorly reanimated racist come to mind. Cackling like an animatronic banshee flunking the Turing Test every time she was asked a question harder than 'what's your favorite color?' probably didn't help either.
A little humility might actually come in handy in a situation like this but since the Democrats don't do that dance anymore they've chosen a bit of a different direction, calling everyone who didn't vote Harris a swastika licking white supremacist while they shamelessly gaslight young Black men reluctant to vote for a crooked cop who spent the better part of three decades feeding them to the prison industrial complex.
No one, however, not even the most hardcore MAGA Republicans, seem to be putting much focus on the fact that while there were indeed plenty of reasons not to vote for Kamala Harris, war was a big one of them and it was an issue that helped sink Hillary too. In fact, Donald Trump seems to win every time that he can successfully present himself as an isolationist and the Democrats just fucking handed him this costume in 2024.
Even after over 100,000 registered Democrats voted uncommitted over Joe Biden in protest of his genocidal policies in Gaza, the DNC still insisted on running a candidate with virtually zero foreign policy skeletons in her closet as a neocon with gay friends. During the final weeks of the campaign, while Trump was wisely ramping up his antiwar rhetoric at every stop, Kamala was busy barnstorming Michigan hand-in-hand with the Cheney's and sending Bill Clinton to Benton Harbor so he could shout Zionist propaganda at disloyal Arab activists.
Racism, sexism, and all manner of cultural phobias may very well have played some role in Trump's victory on certain sections of the map but that clearly wasn't true in Dearborn, Michigan, where Trump walked away with 43% of the vote and Rashida Tlaib, the Arab feminist backbone of the Squad, was reelected to the same damn district with 62% of the vote. In fact, our 47th President only won Michigan by 82,000 votes in an election where he got less votes than he did when he lost to a virtually comatose Joe Biden in 2020, and this is far from an anomaly.
I have said it before and I will say it again, having spent my entire life in the post-industrial graveyard of Pennsyltucky, I know for a fact that the people I know who voted for Trump in the first place back in 2016 voted to chuck a screaming orange brick into the stained glass window of the Clinton Dynasty that sold everything they had to NAFTA and then sent their sons to die in Iraq.
In fact, a lot of this shit can be traced directly back to Bill and Hillary's front door. These are the assholes after all who revamped the Democratic Party's image in the nineties, transforming Reagan's commie pinko foils into a globalist juggernaut of pantsuit-clad crony capitalist thugs slinging Hellfire missiles into Somalian tent cities in the name of equity and inclusion. With that being said, the Democrat's term as America's designated hippie peace party was a dismally short one pock marked by little commitment to peace beyond flowery rhetoric.
In fact, the Democrats were the original war party of the Twentieth Century, the party of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman, jumping into every world war with a trench knife in their teeth to remake the global order in their sparkling secular progressive image. On the flipside, the old school, old right Republicans were actually once the real isolationists calling for the preservation of conservative values in this country by avoiding reckless foreign entanglements.
This script only flipped during the Cold War when the GOP's bible thumping base became terrified of the semitic scourge of global Bolshevism, and the Democrats tried on love beads and patchouli for a while to shore up the youth vote. But even here, the Democratic devotion to dovishness was paper thin at best.
The closest thing that either of these parties has ever come to running an antiwar candidate in the post-world war era was Senator George McGovern who only went hippie after voting for every military appropriations bill sought by the founding fathers of the Vietnam War, JFK and LBJ.
Jimmy Carter, the one term dove that even Democrats use as a scarecrow against military restraint, actually armed the Mujahedeen so they could suck the Soviets into their own Vietnam in Afghanistan and OK'd the use of American tanks to crush pro-democracy protestors in South Korea during the Kwangju Uprising.
And even during the Bush-era antiwar revival that radicalized a lot of kids on the left like me, the closest thing the Democrats could come to pushing an antiwar candidate was John Kerry, a mealy-mouthed flip-flop artist who marched for peace for exactly fifteen minutes between committing war crimes in Vietnam and facilitating them in the Washington career that posing as a reluctant warrior afforded him.
So, the Democrats embracing their increasingly unpopular role as the custodians of globalism is less of a sea change and more of a return to form after a brief stint as an Uzi-packing Beatles cover band that always followed "All You Need Is Love" with "Helter Skelter." This wardrobe change may hand the GOP back the title belt of isolationism on a silver platter but anyone who actually buys the Donald as a babyface peace candidate is a rube with a very short memory.
While Trump may have made his triumphant return to the Oval Office billed as a man who managed the mild miracle of not invading a single country during his first term, the cold hard reality is that every single foreign policy disaster that Biden and Harris have recklessly inflamed was made possible by the policies of the "isolationist" elected before them to make America great again.
In spite or perhaps even because of the DNC's campaign to paint Donald Trump as a Kremlin puppet, the man's actual policies regarding Russia were bombastically hawkish and likely led Putin to decide to invade Ukraine. Trump actually ramped up sanctions on Moscow while increasing NATO's presence in Ukraine exponentially, providing Kiev with offensive weaponry to fling at babushkas in the Donbass and buzzing the shores of Crimea with nuclear compatible battleships.
As if all this weren't demented enough, "Putin's puppet" also sabotaged multiple Reagen-era arms control agreements that have essentially given Vlad the license he needs to jam ICBMs into Europe's temple every time shit goes south in the bloodlands.
As for Israel-Palestine, the only reason why the Al-Aqsa Flood was even possible was because Trump encouraged Israel to shift nearly half of their hardware to the West Bank when he the greenlit the largest expansion of illegal settlements in thirty years with a pu pu platter of policies tailor made to please his MAGA Zionist overlords over at the House of Adelson.
Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. Recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights. Declaring moonlight pogroms against Arab villages to be consistent with international law... This is the kind of batshit lunacy that Donald's old buddy Bill Clinton could only dream of being able to get away with back in the day. Just add ripping up the JCPOA and assassinating Iran's top general and you have the perfect recipe for world war inducing blowback.
Trump doesn't appear to be taking his antiwar rhetoric any more seriously the second time around either, at least not if his cabinet picks are any indication. While wisely resisting hiring more obvious neocon battle junkies like Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, and former flunkies like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, the Donald's new White House hit squad still reads like a rogue's gallery of rabid hospital bombers.
Marco Rubio, the Contra-style neocon who was being groomed to be the next Bush when the Donald crashed his party in 2024, will finally have his opportunity to make Latin America bleed again as Secretary of State. Elise Stefanik will be sent to the UN to declare any nation that refuses to kick up to the new Nakba antisemitic. And don't even get me started on Michael Waltz, a National Security Advisor who has openly called for reinvading Afghanistan and putting boots on the ground in Ukraine.
Of course, all my isolationist friends on the right will roll their eyes and say, "What about Tulsi?" and I'm more than a little ashamed to admit that the bitch once had me fooled too, but Miss Gabbard has spent the last four years proving that her antiwar credentials come with a shit ton of asterisks, the biggest one being Israel which she seems to think America owes enough military hardware to cripple Cthulhu just so long as they use it to rid the deserts of every Muslim man, woman, and child that offends her weird brand of Hindu nationalism.
This is also a woman who supports torture, drone strikes, and "very limited" counter-terrorism campaigns which basically makes her about as antiwar as Jimmy Carter and that is exactly as antiwar as any Democrat or Republican is allowed to get in this country without being excommunicated.
So, the Republicans have indeed replaced the Democrats, just not as the new antiwar party. Donald Trump's GOP has merely become the new "antiwar" party, and this is actually a very important dance move in America's bipartisan imperial hustle. There needs to be at least one party who pretends to be antiwar in this country because more than half of Americans are smart enough to realize that a globalist foreign policy offers absolutely nothing of value to a nation with only two borders and two oceans dividing it from the rest of the world.
The fact is that Manifest Destiny is completely illogical to any sentient creature who doesn't make a living selling missiles, so, somebody has to sing "Give Peace a Chance" just so long as all they're doing is singing. But when it's all said and done, both parties in this country are owned by the same military industrial complex.
Donald Trump hasn't changed that fact just because he shakes his fist at his fellow swamp monsters in between chumming the waters. That's just another twist in the isolationist shuffle.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* Give Peace a Chance by the Plastic Ono Band
* Sonnet by the Verve
* Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival
* Peace Sells by Megadeath
* You Don't Know the Shape that I'm In by MJ Lenderman
* Helter Skelter by the Beatles
* Just Like Kicking Jesus by the Brian Jonestown Massacre
* War Pigs by Black Sabbath
* What's the Frequency, Kenneth? by REM
* Last Caress by the Misfits
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