Brian Beutler has an excellent piece up today that frames our current situation perfectly. He first makes the case that we need to be much more relentless in “stopping or slowing the process of public forgetting [and] … for mobilizing well in advance of harmful policy changes, so that we stand a better chance of stopping them.”
Then he focuses on Venezuela:
The last antiwar movement in the United States did not win the argument, but it won the battle for historical memory, and birthed a real progressive movement. It provided a moral foundation for ambitious and dissident politicians, one of whom would become America’s most unlikely president just a few years later. It is conceivable that absent mass, vocal, but unpopular opposition to the war, there would be no Affordable Care Act for Republicans to sabotage.
But in 2001 and 2002, the country was vengeance-minded. War was likely unstoppable. Strange as it sounds almost a quarter-century later, George W. Bush was as popular as any president had ever been, and his party had spent the past decade refining the art of partisan demagogy.
Most Democrats in Congress (thus) joined the march to war, rather than stand athwart it. They had elections to win. They wanted to be associated with the American flag, rather than the radical and iconoclastic ones scattered about antiwar rallies that attracted tens and hundreds of thousands of citizens.
Today is nothing like that.
Trump is terribly unpopular. The very idea of going to war with Venezuela is more unpopular still. The question of whether we should be murdering boaters in the Caribbean and Pacific is sensitive to question wording, but the fact that Trump’s policy of indiscriminate extrajudicial killing has engulfed his administration in a war-crimes scandal suggests Republicans don’t feel very sure-footed. And it is the opposition that has claimed the mantles of patriotism and freedom.
We’ve come a long way since, ‘you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.’
The broad left should thus foster another antiwar movement, isolating Trump and his vicious regime as the lawless aggressor, and nobody in Democratic politics should be afraid of it. If anything, the first ambitious Democrat to take a leadership role in galvanizing an antiwar movement will credential themselves for the next presidential primary.
He points out that this attack on Venezuela is as unpopular as Iraq was popular, nobody can figure out just what it has supposedly done to America and the administration isn’t even trying to get congressional fig leaf to authorize its action. It is out on a limb.
Beutler believes that it is both morally and politically right to oppose this war (of course) and that Democrats should not fall for the idea that it is a “distraction” from what people care about: affordability. It is part and parcel of the MAGA power grab and we should oppose it on principle but also for the political purposes he writes about above.
His headline “No Kings Means No Colonial Wars” is excellent and suggests that the No Kings movement might be a good platform for this message. It just rings true and reminds people that Trump is acting like one in every way.