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matt duss
Progressive Foreign Policy Expert Says Americans Are Tired of Democrats Being 'Party of War'
"It's time for Democrats to offer Americans a new and affirmative vision of U.S. foreign policy, one that boldly and unashamedly embraces global peacemaking as an essential component of our own security and prosperity."
Jan 09, 2025
"Democrats have become the party of war" and "Americans are tired of it."
That's the message that Matt Duss, a former top aide to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who is now the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, imparted in an opinion piece published Thursday in The Guardian.
"In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans," Duss wrote. "As they enter the political wilderness, it's time to reckon with what they got so wrong."
Among other things, what they got wrong during Vice President Kamala Harris' failed 2024 Democratic presidential bid, according to Duss, was embracing figures like former CIA director Leon Panetta and "torture advocate" Liz Cheney in a bid to woo right-wing and moderate voters.
As President-elect Donald Trump's campaign painted the Republican nominee—who fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to "bomb the shit out of" Islamic State militants and "take out their families" with devastating results—as the "
candidate of peace," Democrats "left the anti-war lane wide open for him by leaning into a tired, curdled militarism as a substitute for an actual foreign policy vision," Duss said.
"It's time for Democrats to offer Americans a new and affirmative vision of U.S. foreign policy, one that boldly and unashamedly embraces global peacemaking as an essential component of our own security and prosperity," he wrote. "One that insists that keeping Americans safe does not require spending more on defense than the next 10 countries combined."
Duss continued:
Our leaders should be clear about the genuine security threats that our country faces, but decide, at long last, to stop being drawn into dumb bidding wars about being "tougher on Russia/terrorism/China/whatever"—a framing designed to sustain the hawkish status quo. They should broaden the national security conversation to include the challenge of domestic and global inequality and the grievances it powers. They should articulate not just a domestic but a global pro-worker agenda—in addition to a global corporate minimum tax, a global minimum wage, for example. Make clear that a foreign policy fit for this era doesn't pit the security and prosperity of Americans against workers in other countries but recognizes that our security and prosperity are bound together.
"All of this will of course require confronting the various defense, business, and foreign lobbies that distort and constrain our policy discussions, which is why a strong anti-corruption plank is essential for any such platform," Duss said.
That's a tall order. Reflecting on President Joe Biden's term, Duss asserted: "I never imagined I would write this, but by the end of his presidency he will have done more damage to the so-called 'rules-based order' than Trump did. Fifteen months and counting of support for Israel's horrific assault on Gaza has violated virtually every international norm on the protections of civilians in war and left America's moral credibility in tatters. Biden showed that international law is little more than a cudgel to be used against our enemies while being treated as optional for our friends."
"In his 2020 election victory speech, Biden proclaimed: 'I believe at our best America is a beacon for the globe. And we lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example,'" Duss recalled. "It's a nice line, but Biden showed that he sees it as little more than that. The question now for Democrats is whether they can actually mean it, or if they even want to."
Addressing the recent phenomenon of Republicans being perceived as the anti-war party of the working class—even if such perception is divorced from reality on both fronts—Duss lamented that "this year's Democratic ticket failed to provide a sufficient response."
"Instead of responding to the right's tech oligarch-funded faux-populism by offering a genuine alternative and attacking the real sources of our country's insecurity, they leaned into a defense of a militarist status quo that most Americans rightly recognize as broken," he added. "They must not make that mistake again."
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'Sick Joke': Progressives Roundly Reject Idea of Rahm Emanuel as DNC Chair
"No amount of rebranding can change the fact that Rahm Emanuel's political career has been an abject failure—neoliberal centrism is exactly the wrong direction for the Democratic Party," said one critic.
Nov 15, 2024
Progressives were left fuming and flummoxed over reporting Friday that Rahm Emanuel is considering running for chair of the Democratic National Committee, with many leftists wondering whether the party has learned anything from its loss of the White House, Senate, and, arguably, the country's working-class voters.
Axiosfirst reported that Emanuel—President Joe Biden's ambassador to Japan and a former congressman, Chicago mayor, and chief of staff to former President Barack Obama—is mulling whether to seek the top DNC post. Current DNC chair Jamie Harrison, who was elected to the post in 2021, is unlikely to seek a new term, which would begin in March.
Emanuel has some powerful backers among the war-and-Wall Street wing that has dominated the Democratic party for decades.
"If they said, 'Well, what should we do? Who should lead the party?' I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, and I would bring him back from Japan, and I would appoint him chairman of the Democratic National Committee," prominent political consultant David Axelrod, who ran both of Obama's successful presidential campaigns, said Wednesday on his podcast.
Axelrod followed up the next day with a post on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, in which he wrote of Emanuel, "Dude knows how to fight and win."
Reaction came fast and furious, with Jonathan Cohn, policy director at the group Progressive Massachusetts, asking on the social network Bluesky, "How is this not a sick joke?"
Center for International Policy executive vice president Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) writing on X that "if you assembled a team of top scientists and told them to come up with a plan to ensure that the Democratic Party continues to lose working-class voters, I doubt they could do better than 'Make Rahm Emanuel head of the DNC.'"
Comedian, author, and podcaster Kate Willett
said on X: "If I had to pick one individual who set the stage for what seems like it may be decades of Trumpism, it's Rahm Emanuel. Imagine if Obama had saved peoples' homes in 2008 and put the bankers in jail? Truly fixed healthcare? Rahm worked diligently to make sure that didn't happen."
Miles Kampf-Lassin, the senior editor at the progressive website
In These Times, wrote, "I've said it before and can't believe I have to say it again: No amount of rebranding can change the fact that Rahm Emanuel's political career has been an abject failure—neoliberal centrism is exactly the wrong direction for the Democratic Party."
Hafiz Rashid argued Friday in a
New Republicarticle that, if he wins the post, Emanuel could be "the worst possible DNC chair."
"The fact that Emanuel has been disconnected from local and state politics for years... seems unlikely to help," Rashid asserted. "Democrats are currently expected to tap someone with expertise at the grassroots level and an understanding of how Democrats are winning elections now—two things Emanuel sorely lacks."
Apparently questioning the strategic wisdom of Vice President Kamala Harris' failed Democratic presidential run, Warren Gunnels, a staff director for Sanders,
said on X, "Ruling Elite: Let's get Dick Cheney's endorsement and anoint Rahm Emanuel as DNC Chair."
"One word," he added. "No."
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Did Plutocrats Like Mark Cuban and Tony West Help Sink Harris?
"We could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in," said one critic. "They'll be fine though."
Nov 07, 2024
While much ink has been spilled on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's relationship with the world's richest person, tech billionaire Elon Musk, the Republican's electoral victory this week has also provoked conversations about how the very wealthy plutocrats behind Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris may have contributed to her loss.
After Trump's win, The Atlantic's Franklin Foer reached out to folks in the inner circle of President Joe Biden—who passed the torch to Harris after a disastrous debate this summer—for their postmortem. The staff writer reported Thursday that although Biden advisers "were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign."
According to Foer:
One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump's oligarchical allegiances. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, "We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends."
While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.
Responding on social media, Drop Site News' Ryan Grim said: "Reporters always heard that Tony West was functionally one of Kamala's most important advisers. Still galling to read this. I wonder who West even voted for."
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, declared that "we could see it happening in real-time, right after the convention, when the party consultants and the big donors got their hooks in. They'll be fine though. They're already onto their next contracts, or their next vacation home. And that should piss you off."
Progressive organizer Aaron Regunberg argued that "if we want to get out of this wilderness we need to purge every one of the Tony West crony corporatists in this party. Democrats need to be able to point to and talk about villains. Tony West is one of those villains."
Revolving Door Project founder and executive director Jeff Hauser put out a lengthy statement in response to the reporting that, as he summarized, "West convinced Vice President Harris to ratchet down her populist messaging lest it upset the Silicon Valley and Wall Street elites he was courting on her behalf."
Hauser highlighted that Foer's article also came after Cuban last month "bragged about his role in exiling a Harris surrogate" and former staffer of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) "for the sin of supporting a wealth tax during a television appearance."
Harris on Tuesday "ran far stronger in the states that she saturated with television ads than the ones she did not. Those TV ads were, as Semafor's David Weigel observed, 'grinding on this economic message (anti-price gouging, Medicare covering home care, etc),'" he noted. "It's impossible to know whether the additional two points or less needed by Harris in the pivotal states would have been secured by basing her public 'earned media' and social media messaging on the same populist economic platform which informed her television ads."
"However, it is clear that the more successful paid media message was more populist and less informed by plutocrats like Cuban and West," Hauser continued. "Further, it seems exceedingly likely that downballot Democrats outside the swing states would have benefited from an ecosystem featuring the type of messaging we heard at the Democratic Convention."
"In a populist moment in which the candidates were battling for the mantle of change, the sitting vice president had to be identified as clearly against some powerful institutions," he added. "Her campaign showed early signs of an aggressive message, arguing that her record as California attorney general included taking on crooked big banks and shady student loan servicers."
"While VP Harris stuck to a comparably anti-plutocratic message in her television ads, she did not in her interviews and public appearances. This divergence appears to have been based on the advice of plutocrats," Hauser concluded. "Hopefully future candidates will learn from this, and oppose plutocrats consistently."
Appearing on CNN this week, Kate Bedingfield, Biden's former White House communications director, suggested the issue is not confined to Harris.
"I think Democrats across the board clearly have a challenge connecting with working-class voters. This is not unique to Vice President Harris' campaign," she said. "This is a demographic shift, a realignment in this country that's happened over the course of the last 10 years."
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020 but spent this cycle campaigning for Harris—said Wednesday that "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."
Sanders also asserted that "the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control" the party are unlikely to "learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign" or "understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing."
Proving his point, Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for giant companies who now chairs the Democratic National Committee, claimed Thursday that Sanders' analysis was "straight up BS" and listed achievements of the Biden-Harris administration.
Responding to Harrison on social media, Michael Sainato, a labor reporter with The Guardian, said that "being pro-worker means being clear about who and what is anti-worker and the Democratic Party has failed miserably at that."
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