It is safe to say that a growing number of Americans realize that radical change is needed in the United States. Millions of Americans know there is something deeply wrong with our endless wars and the trillions of dollars we waste on them.

Millions of Americans know there is something deeply wrong with our economy, democracy, healthcare system, criminal justice system and environmental policies. A growing number of Americans know that both parties are a big part of the problem.

To investigate this problem, it is instructive to dissect the recent election, and examine why defeat of the “lesser evil” is potentially beneficial to achieve radical change for peace, justice and human survival.

Kamala Harris lost for many reasons, including her campaign’s decision to lurch further rightward to become Dick Cheney Democrats. This was emblematic of her abandonment of the working class and anti-war left voting base. They chose to embrace Republican war criminal par excellence Mr. Torture and his pro-torture daughter Liz Cheney as “smart” electoral strategy.

Moreover, Kamala promised to put Republicans in her cabinet. This strategy of replacing a potentially vast working class coalition with a far smaller handful of wealthier anti-Trump Republicans proved an abject failure.

Democrats would have been wise to listen to Bernie Sanders, who recently stated: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them….Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?”

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi strongly disagreed that Democrats abandoned the working class, and Bernie responded again: “We have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour in America today…if you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the [D]emocratic party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no.”

We have a great deal more evidence of the Democrat Elite’s deeply held contempt for working class politics and the anti-war left. We witnessed the DNC regularly rigging primaries against popular populist candidates. The best example is their repeatedly cheating to keep very popular Bernie from party nomination, whose primary even Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren admitted was rigged. Furthermore, we also see how anti-democratic superdelegate party elites reliably put their thumb on the scale for candidates of Wall Street and war.

They also powerfully fight against progressive primary challengers for Congress, which can be seen clearly from the leaked audio of Democratic power broker Steny Hoyer making threats to a progressive challenger. We also see them going further to attack the anti-war left by anti-democratically suing to kick anti-war third parties off the ballot, and forcing these smaller budget parties to spend limited resources to defend ballot access instead of on their campaigns.

The Democrat Elite fight progressive anti-war leftists far harder than they ever fight Republicans, their “good friends” across the aisle who always join with them in passing more than $1 trillion annual war budgets, a figure that includes hidden budgets like the nuclear arsenal in DOE.

It is they who virtually canceled the 2024 primary to prop up Biden, with serious mental decline that was obvious for years before the presidential debate fiasco.  After the debate exposed Biden’s senility and it could no longer be hidden, the DNC undemocratically installed the unpopular, vapid Kamala who never won a single presidential primary. In a similar vein of brilliant Democrat electioneering, we also saw how Hillary Clinton helped nominate Donald Trump with her “pied piper” strategy.

Two of the biggest policy reasons for Kamala’s failure are as Democratic partisan hack James Carville once said, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and the Gaza genocide. It would have been far smarter strategy to mimic wildly popular Bernie Sanders-style leftist economic populism. They also essentially served Trump victory on a silver platter by refusing to stop supporting the livestream genocide.

Indeed, we are witnessing serious inflation of basic survival necessities and higher interest rates, and wages have been stagnant for decades; these were the top concerns for Trump voters and most Americans. As Newsweek reported, “[r]oughly 9 in 10 voters were very or somewhat concerned about the cost of groceries and around 8 in 10 were concerned about health care and housing costs as well as the price of gas.” People with higher incomes may have a harder time understanding that millions and millions of people are experiencing a severe economic crisis.

One of the biggest elements of the crisis is skyrocketing rent and home prices, and there are numerous capitalist reasons this is happening. Many Americans act like it is such a difficult problem, but it could be solved rapidly if we had sincere leftist, socialistic politics. Unfortunately, both parties are right-wing corporate capitalist with no serious interest in solving it. 

China meanwhile is superceding the U.S. in technological development and in areas like high-speech raid, public transport and providing low cost housing to its citizens.

As Forbes reports, “90% of families in [China] own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages…On top of this, north of 20% of urban households own more than one home.”

Americans love to clamor about “the land of the free” and waging wars for “freedom” but, in reality, the main freedom the poorer majority have is the freedom to become homeless. Does freedom to criticize the government that ignores poor people mean anything to a homeless woman freezing to death in the streets or a homeless veteran arrested for being mentally ill from killing for Democratic-Republican “freedom” wars?

Millions and millions of American families are experiencing a crisis to afford housing, food and other necessities; naturally and appropriately, they should punish the government in power that is not solving their problems. That government in power happens to be a Democrat-led administration that has prioritized sending more than $200 billion to wars of choice, most egregiously the genocidal war on Palestinians and the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Of course, that figure is on top of the more than $1 trillion military empire budget that both war profiteering parties always come together to support in their annual religious-like ritual.

How does that make poor American families feel when every month they are on the brink of homelessness and, instead of Biden and Kamala actually helping them, they celebrate sending billions more to Ukraine and Israel?  To reinforce this point, Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently announced that “every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed [to Ukraine] between now and January 20th,” i.e., before Trump takes office.

“Out of touch” is the best phrase to describe the electoral problem of the Democrat Elite.

For all of Trump’s faults, he was smarter politically in terms of at least attempting to show concern for the poorer working class; his acting like he was working at McDonald’s and riding around in a garbage truck was political marketing genius.

Wealthier folks who feel superior and look down on poor working class fast-food workers and sanitation workers may not comprehend this. Trump surely looks down on poor folks too, but he did a far better job of at least pretending he cared. And yes, Trump is also a right-wing corporate capitalist like Biden and Kamala, and is not going to be any better in solving poor people’s problems, but he represents change to them.

As to the other top reason Kamala lost, it is the Gaza genocide. This is the most well-documented genocide in human history, with experts calling it a “textbook case of genocide,” such as this top-ranking U.N. official and Jewish Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal. The top court in the world, the International Court of Justice, has issued a preliminary ruling regarding Israel’s genocide. 

Numerous major human rights organizations and leading international law scholars have called it a genocide. For example, the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner issued a statement with the following headline: “‘The international order is breaking down in Gaza’: UN experts mark one year of genocidal attacks on Palestinians”:

“The world faces the most profound crisis since the end of World War II. The atrocities which the world witnessed in World War II resulted in a collective determination to say ‘Never Again’ and to create the United Nations to achieve that goal. However, one year since the 7 October attack…the world has seen a brutal escalation of violence, resulting in genocidal attacks, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment of Palestinians, which risks breaking down the international multilateral system.”

And people talk about voting for Kamala for women and non-“white” folk, but Kamala and Biden have armed a genocide with thousands of massive bombs that have killed tens of thousands of non-“white” women and children of women. According to Oxfam, “More women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades.“ The United Nations Human Rights Office reports that 70% of the deaths in Gaza are women and children.

According to Reuters, “The Biden administration…has transferred at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions.” These massive bombs have been and are being dropped constantly onto one of the most densely packed cities in the world, in what Noam Chomsky and other reputable scholars have called the “world’s largest open air prison” or “concentration camp.”

They are bombing fish in a barrel, and those fish are defenseless women, children, and men. It is among the purest of evils we have ever witnessed, and deserves no consent whatsoever, direct or indirect. To give direct consent makes one, no matter how small one may be, also complicit in genocide.

Thankfully, we have witnessed a mass movement against the U.S.-sponsored genocide, with hundreds of thousands protesting across the nation.  A strong majority of 67% of Americans have wanted a permanent cease-fire, and an even stronger 77% of Democrat voters have wanted a permanent cease-fire.

Yet, what did out-of-touch Democratic Party elites led by Biden and Kamala do in response to this voting base? They ultimately expressed utter contempt for public opinion and the movement. They lied and pretended Kamala was working “round the clock” and “tirelessly” on a cease-fire. Everyone with functioning critical-thinking skills could see through their lies because, at that same time, they were approving $20 billion more in bombs and war machinery for Israel. This is akin to sending more Zyklon to the gas chambers while pretending they want Auschwitz to shut down. 

Numerous times protesters from the anti-genocide movement, promoting a cease-fire supported by a supermajority of potential Democrat voters, confronted Kamala to stop the genocide and to commit to stop arming Israel, but she refused.  Arguably, the historic moment Kamala lost the election was when she shut down protesters by forcefully saying, “If you want Trump to win say that, otherwise I am speaking!” She essentially told the mass movement to get lost, and now she is most certainly not speaking. She may have won if she had listened instead. 

Additionally, the supermajority of the world had proposed multiple UN cease-fire resolutions, and the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly vetoed them in the Security Council.  Biden and Harris are 100% guilty of complicity in genocide, the highest crime against humanity. If ever international law is restored, they and their Israeli partners deserve to be held accountable, just as Nazi war criminals were. Trump’s current criminal convictions are a petty joke compared to these high crimes. However, Trump is begging to join them at The Hague, as he is also promising to continue arming and supporting the genocide.

The most anti-genocide member of Congress, Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib, just won re-election with about 70% of the vote in Michigan. Conversely, Kamala earned perhaps a little over a half as much support in that district, and narrowly lost this key swing state, largely due to her support for Gaza genocide. You cannot arm a genocide of people’s kin, promise to keep arming said genocide, and then expect these people to vote for you.

And people correctly talk about Trump’s racism, but the genocide is extremely racist against Arabs and Muslims. Domestic hate crimes against Muslims have gone up 70% since the Biden-backed Israeli war on Gaza began. An especially appalling case is that of a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy from Chicago who was killed—after being stabbed 26 times—for being Muslim. The Democratic Party is absolutely a party of racist imperialism too, even if most of their voters would prefer otherwise. 

Younger generations that are on social media more have seen the real face of the genocide more than older generations, as this truth is massively censored by infantilizing mainstream corporate media. Every day we see pictures and videos of American bombs mass-murdering children and adults. We see kids decapitated or with their brains literally falling out, little girls, still alive, missing the bottom half of their face. We see others intentionally flattened into flesh pancakes by U.S.-backed Israeli bulldozers or tanks.  

This is why hundreds of thousands of—disproportionately young people—have been protesting across the nation. It is ethically impossible for many of us who have seen this to hold our noses and vote for a genocide-supporting candidate. Many voted third party, and far more just did not vote at all. Some 89 million people eligible to vote chose not to vote, with a large percentage knowing that neither party represents their interests.

According to the website Five Thirty Eight, “31 percent [of non-voters] said that they decided not to vote because they disliked the candidates or they thought nothing would change as a result of the election…[and the] sense that the candidates are too flawed to be worth voting for—or that the system is rigged, or can’t be fixed by voting—came up in many…conversations with survey respondents.” Kamala got 7.1 million less votes than Biden did in 2020, and the genocide is surely a significant reason for decreased turnout, especially for younger generations.

Now that the Democratic Party liberal imperialists and liberal imperialist mainstream corporate media have lost power, a power vacuum for opposition has appeared. Thus, now is the moment for revolutionary socialist leftists to work to defeat the capitalist imperialist dictatorship that the Democrat Elite defend as counter-revolutionary gatekeepers. The fake opposition party is on its knees and vulnerable, so now is the time to work to form real opposition. 

A great sign that this moment is being seized is a unifying mass movement event titled “We Fight Back,” The event is being organized by a growing list of excellent anti-war leftist organizations, third-party leaders, Free Palestine groups and socialist organizations.  They are all coming together in Washington, D.C., for protest on the day of Trump’s inauguration.

Based on past, comparable events, it is reasonable to expect that tens of thousands of people will come together. Perhaps a more powerful third party or other sincere oppositional force can come out of it. 

Yet, one may argue it is wishful thinking to imagine a third-party or mass movement force bringing radical change. Arguably, it is still less fantastical than thinking the Democratic Party will permit serious change toward a more socialistic and peaceful order. And, of course, the current MAGA crowd imagining Trump will bring serious positive, systemic change is even more delusional.

There is truly no hope in either corporate war party. They are both threatening us with nuclear omnicide and environmental collapse. Indeed, Biden has just made the decision to authorize American missile attacks into Russia. And they were used less than two days after authorization of their use became public. Most mainstream American media are catastrophically failing to report that it will be American military operators using American satellites to target deep inside Russia with American missiles. This is, de facto, the United States bombing a nuclear-armed Russia, and Russia has said it will interpret this as direct war and recently changed its nuclear-use doctrine to incorporate such attacks as justifying a nuclear response.

Despite all the misleading anti-Russia propaganda, there is some hope in that Russia has demonstrated itself to be comparatively more rational and restrained than the bloodthirsty lunatic “leaders” of our warfare-as-religion state. For example, Russia sought three separate peace agreements to stop the war in Ukraine after it broke out following the 2014 U.S.-backed coup, Minsk I and Minsk II, and the Istanbul agreement after the conflict escalated in 2022; all three were sabotaged by the West.

Untrustworthy Trump has said he will end the war, if we can avoid nuclear war for two more months, but he has selected pro-war-with-Russia individuals along with anti-war-with-Russia individuals. Of course, they all support continuing the genocidal Israeli war on Palestine and Lebanon, like the current administration.

Why are both parties so deeply revolting, warmongering and divorced from public opinion? In stark contradiction to the top Democrat voter concern, this can be understood when we truly acknowledge that the U.S. is not a democracy.

As a landmark 2014 study by two academics concluded, the United States is an oligarchy. The study found: “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

Considering the American imperialist oligarchy’s recent public record of killing millions in dozens of bloody coups, regime-change invasions, and via mass murderous economic warfare, we must acknowledge their deep capacity to unleash immense violence should the threat of radical change ever appear.

We have seen Democratic and Republican administrations brutally crack down on mass movements from Occupy Wall Street to Standing Rock, and to the current Free Palestine movement. We must conclude the bloody oligarchs have zero intention of ever allowing genuine democracy and socialism to dethrone them.

However, as even non-violent icon Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned us in his Beyond Vietnam speech, quoting President John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Most sane people would prefer non-violent revolution; we would prefer to be able to vote for peace, revolutionary socialistic policies or economic populist candidates like Bernie, or even better.

But we saw what the oligarchy’s DNC gatekeepers did to Bernie, twice. We see the power of Big Money dictating who wins elections over 90% of the time. We see how the AIPAC Israel Lobby publicly brags about spending more than $100 million to destroy progressive candidates and dictate primary elections. Meanwhile, we are told to worry about virtually non-existent, inconsequential Russian involvement in our elections which, like debunked Russiagate, ultimately serves as fuel for apocalyptic pro-war-with-Russia hysteria.

Most people would prefer non-violent mass movements that have some measurable effect on politicians, in a system where politicians actually listened to public opinion. But we saw how Bush ignored the mass anti-war movement, and mass-murdered Iraq on a pack of lies. We saw how Biden and Harris ultimately ignored the anti-genocide movement, and promised to continue sending bombs for genocide, even if it meant losing to “dictator Trump” whom they pretended to be supremely scared of.

On issue after issue, the American public is generally far ahead of oligarch-owned politicians in wanting more humane and sane policies for the public good, from marijuana legalization to Medicare for All to environmental policy.

The Ruling Class Elite who own both corporate imperialist war parties are repeatedly showing us that they choose to make non-violent revolution impossible. May divine or human intervention change their minds before they make violent revolution inevitable. Someone needs to shake and wake them to the fact that they will be first in line to face the wrath of millions of people who have been defecated on in almost every way imaginable, year after year for decades, and beyond.

Given the power of the ruling oligarchs and the numerous extreme barriers to democracy and socialism they have constructed, one could argue that change may be unlikely or impossible from mass civic engagement. This argument would suggest that radical change must come from outside, from the majority of the rest of the world.

Radical change could also become inevitable due to internal elements of the American economy and society that are inherently unsustainable. These external factors and internal elements promising radical change will be the subject of the second installment of this two part series.

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