Empire’s True Believers
Congressional staffers placed flowers outside the Capitol on Wednesday, November 8, 2023. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images)
Last week, over a hundred Congressional staffers walked out in protest of the Biden administration’s refusal to countenance a ceasefire in Gaza. The past weeks have also seen hundreds of former staffers for the Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders campaigns sign open letters condemning those politicians for their roles in the ongoing genocide. Even the New York Times, imperialism’s Dictaphone of choice, hosted an editorial fretting (in carefully couched terms, of course) about US strategy in the region.
What does this growing chorus of mainstream liberal calls for ceasefire tell us? Has Washington been infiltrated by a generation of anti-imperialists? Did Kathleen Kingsbury wake up one morning and decide to support the global anti-colonial liberation movement? The answer, naturally, is no. Rather, this trend is the latest instance of the heightening contradictions facing neoliberalism in an age of expanding crises.
Liberal ideology, particularly the sort which dominates American society, is deeply cynical, possessing only the thinnest veneer of sincerity. Its gaudy self-mythology has steadily eroded to a near vanishing point after successive buffoonish, scandal-ridden presidencies. Yet, for all its cynicism, American liberalism nevertheless occasionally commits the Machivelian’s greatest sin of all: it believes its own lies. Not Biden, of course. The man who never met a war he didn’t like surrendered long ago whatever genuine aspirations of do-goodery he may have once possessed. He has long expressed a sociopathic lust for Israeli dominance that would make Meir Kahane squeamish.
No, the American gerontocracy is well aware of its crimes. It is instead the bureaucrat class, freshly minted by Johns Hopkins and Harvard grad programs, who are only now being let in on the joke. For them, bourgeois propaganda has worked rather too well. Many of these striving functionaries came of age during the Obama administration, which adeptly sanitized its wanton murder and immiseration. These are the types whose primary objection to Trump was his antics and uncouthness, rather than any consistent, fundamental disagreement with his politics. In many ways, Trump served for them as the exception which proved the rule. All the cracks in the American façade, in reality the logical results of ravenous late capitalism, were ascribed to Trump, the convenient jester figure whose timely ouster restored their vision of a West Wing-style pragmatic order.
One can only imagine their dismay upon seeing the horrifying images coming out of Gaza. Here was the rubble that lay beneath their anodyne memos and press releases. In a flash, the tremulous mirage of policy statements vanished, revealing the material reality of slaughtered children. Waking from a decades-long binge of liberal self-righteousness, they squinted aghast at the destruction they had wrought. One suspects, in essence, that they recoil not from Biden’s lies about Israel, but from the broader truth about US empire that those lies reveal.
This is not to say that any hope should be placed in the bureaucrats. One only needs to notice that their statements of protest are signed anonymously to surmise the shallowness of their convictions. Like Bernie Sanders and John Kerry before them, those walking out today will become the warmongers of tomorrow.
The walkouts nevertheless put into sharp relief the bourgeois state’s struggle to deduce and disseminate a viable strategy with regard to Palestine. They reveal a political class so obsessed with cable news theater and thinktank doublespeak that it forgets even how to tell the truth to itself.
Take, for instance, Graeme Wood in the Atlantic (Editor in Chief: former IDF prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg) offering up the asinine notion of Palestinian Authority control over Gaza, simply because it seems the least absurd of all conceivable possibilities. Nevermind the Israeli pronouncements about the assault on Gaza being limited “anti-terror raids,” Wood knows full well that Israel plans on seizing and occupying Palestinian land. What he doesn’t know is what comes after. He and his ilk nervously deflect attention to the ludicrously inflated specter of “campus antisemitism” as the all-too-real specter of nuclear war in the Middle East looms in the background.
During the invasion of Iraq, the bourgeois media gleefully repeated lies about “spreading democracy” precisely because they knew that the true aim of the invasion was the creation of a US puppet state. Their lies served a larger truth: a future of oil riches and fat defense contracts. That imperial fantasy evaporated, as it did again in Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Like a gambler betting on one more roll of the dice, capitalist firms have bought up shares in Gazan gas licenses.
This time, though, the excitement shared by BP and the arms industry is tempered by the reticence of even hardened war hawks. Longtime war propagandist Thomas Friedman wonders aloud stupidly at the “strategic contradiction” between the apparent need to establish a “friendly” Palestinian regime in Gaza and the Israeli campaign of annexation and delegitimization of what is left of the Palestinian rump state. Friedman himself is among those to blame, of course, for enabling the very destructive path that he now sweats his brow over.
Ours is an historical moment characterized by the pesky intrusion of material reality into the comfortable lies of liberal idealism. Unfettered military support for Israel’s crimes, turning a blind eye to its nuclear program (or, in all probability, assisting in its creation), fomenting Evangelical Christianity’s obsession with the “Holy Land”—all this was acceptable, so long as the status quo held. Central to that status quo was the silent, obedient suffering of the Palestinians and the complicity of the Arab bourgeoisie. Now that the hellish endgame ginned up by Biden, Netanyahu, and generations of AIPAC loyalists is here, many of its architects and propagandists are befuddled.
Those who dutifully parroted establishment platitudes about Israel over the years to secure a job on the Hill or at the Times cannot absolve themselves of their complicity any more than they can stop the horrors to come. Only the international working class can do that. The lies of war have spun out of control. Only the truth will set us free.