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      Biden under renewed pressure to step aside as top Democrats make agonized appeals

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      Joe Biden came under renewed moral pressure on Wednesday to abandon his presidential candidacy amid agonised appeals by a succession of senior Democrats for him to consider the broader picture.Those calls came as the US president dug in his heels to make it hard to supplant him as the nominee.With the backlash over his 27 June TV debate fiasco refusing to abate, Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, became the most senior party member yet to subtly float the possibility of Biden stepping down while stopping short of explicitly telling him to do so.Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, gleefully sought to further tighten the screw by summoning three White House aides to testify about Biden’s mental fitness.The summons came in the form of a subpoena from James Comer, the GOP chair of the House oversight committee, who demanded testimony from Anthony Bernal, the top aide to the first lady Jill Biden; the deputy White House chief of staff Annie Tomasini, and the president’s senior adviser Ashley Williams, Axios reported.Pelosi, 84, who was speaker until Republicans regained control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “it’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run”, adding: “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”That remark came as the president seemed intent on running down the clock until next month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, to make it practically impossible to replace him. Pelosi later qualified her comments, claiming they had been subject to “misrepresentations”, while adding: “The president is great.”But they prefaced further critical interventions from Senate Democrats, who followed the lead of Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado in voicing doubts over whether Biden could beat Donald Trump in November.Bennet told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday evening that Trump was likely to win November’s poll in a landslide because of the widespread concerns over Biden’s age and mental acuity.“This race is on a trajectory that is very worrisome if you care about the future of this country,” he said in an impassioned interview. “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House. It’s not a question about politics, it’s a moral question about the future of our country.”He added: “I have not seen anything remotely approaching the kind of plan we need to see out of the White House that can demonstrate that he can actually beat Donald Trump, which is not going to be about the accomplishments that we all had, you know, three and four years ago. This is something for the president to consider.”Bennet’s comments stopped short of a full-blown appeal for Biden’s withdrawal, in contrast to Democrats in the House – where seven members have explicitly made such calls in the wake of the debate, where the president repeatedly appeared confused, mangled his words and allowed Trump to lie without effective contradiction.Soon after, Pete Welch of Vermont became the first senator to call on Biden to withdraw from the election. Welch said he was worried about the race because “the stakes could not be higher”.“I understand why President Biden wants to run,” Welch wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not.“For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race.”Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut, also voiced concerns.“I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this November,” Blumenthal told reporters, adding that the party “had to reach a conclusion as soon as possible” and that Biden still retained his support.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA similarly circumspect call to reconsider came from Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, a battleground state that was one of six moved by the Cook Political Report – a non-partisan election forecaster – in Trump’s direction following the president’s post-debate poll slide.“I want the president to look at the evidence and make a hard decision,” Hobbs told reporters, adding that Biden had “a lot to do to assure Americans and Arizonans”.And on Wednesday evening, Representative Earl Blumenauer, the longest-serving Democrat in Oregon’s House delegation, put it bluntly: “President Biden should not be the Democratic presidential nominee.”
      “The question before the country is whether the president should continue his candidacy for re-election. This is not just about extending his presidency but protecting democracy,” he said in an emailed statement.“It is a painful and difficult conclusion but there is no question in my mind that we will all be better served if the president steps aside as the Democratic nominee and manages a transition under his terms.”There were even signs of slippage within the staunchly loyal Congressional Black Caucus, which had pledged its support on Monday night. On Wednesday one of its members, Marc Veasey of Texas, became the first to break ranks by telling CNN that Democrats running in tight races should “distance themselves” from Biden in an effort to “do whatever it is they need to do” to win.The public agonising illustrated how Biden’s debate failure has plunged the Democrats into paralysis as the campaign approaches a key phase.Yet there seemed little imminent sign of Biden – who has already written to the party’s congressional group en masse telling doubters to challenge him at the convention – yielding to pressure to bow out.Far from Biden retreating, plans were announced for a second primetime television interview – this time with NBC’s Lester Holt next Monday in the symbolic setting of the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas – to follow last Friday’s with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.The latest interview, coming on the heels of Biden’s hosting of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week – where he has been meeting a succession of world leaders – appeared designed to reinforce the message that he intends to stay the course.On Wednesday, the president visited the Washington headquarters of the main US trade union body, the AFL-CIO, an important Democrat constituency.The trade union visit followed a virtual meeting from the White House on Tuesday evening with about 200 Democratic mayors, in which he restated his determination to remain and reportedly won their support. More

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      Democrat calls for congressional leaders to denounce Trump loyalist’s ‘target list’

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      A senior Democrat called for congressional leaders to denounce a Trump loyalist’s claim to have compiled a “deep state target list”, of public figures to be detained if the former president returns to power next year.“This is a deadly serious report,” Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, told Raw Story, regarding its extensive discoveries about Ivan Raiklin, a former US army reserve lieutenant colonel and US Defense Intelligence Agency employee the site said was seeking to enlist rightwing sheriffs while calling himself Donald Trump’s “future secretary of retribution”.Raskin has spoken extensively of his own harrowing experiences on 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win.Nine deaths, about 1,300 arrests and hundreds of convictions are now linked to the attack.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection but escaped conviction when Senate Republicans stayed loyal. Now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump leads Biden in polling and has made pardons for January 6 prisoners a key campaign promise.In its report about Raiklin, Raw Story noted Trump’s words at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last year, when he told supporters: “I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”By his own description, in a video posted to X in May, Raiklin wants to implement that retribution with “‘live-streamed swatting raids’ against individuals on his ‘deep state target list’.”The deep state conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats and operatives exists to thwart Trump. The theory was popularised by Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign chair and White House strategist now in prison for contempt of Congress over the January 6 investigation.Bannon has said the deep state theory is “for nutcases”.Nonetheless, Raw Story’s report about Raiklin’s plans contained chilling details.According to the site, the target list Raiklin has circulated since January includes “Democratic and Republican elected officials; FBI and intelligence officials; members of the House January 6 committee; US Capitol police officers and civilian employees; witnesses in Trump’s two impeachment trials and the January 6 hearings; and journalists from publications ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Reuters and Raw Story”.Raiklin has described his plans in “in podcast interviews, multiple posts on X, a press conference and conversations with prominent far-right extremists”, Raw Story said, adding that he acknowledged but did not answer its questions.Claiming to be being hounded, he told the site: “Look at my entire Deep State target list. That is the beginning. This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalised for their treason, OK?”Citing public records requests, the site said Raiklin had pitched his plans to far-right sheriffs who met in Las Vegas in April, without take-up.He has also “attempted to build relationships with conservative members of Congress”, the site said, efforts leading to Raiklin being seen sitting behind witnesses at “at least five House committee hearings over the past year”.In a May podcast, Raw Story said, Raiklin said he had sent his “Deep State target list” to James Comer of Kentucky, chair of the oversight committee; Jim Jordan of Ohio, chair of the judiciary committee; and to the administration oversight committee, led by Barry Loudermilk of Georgia.None of the congressmen responded to requests for comment, Raw Story said, adding that aides to Loudermilk and Comer said they were familiar with Raiklin.Meanwhile, Raskin sought to sound alarm bells.“A retired US military officer has drawn up a ‘deep state target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff,” Raskin said.“His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, should “denounce this dangerous plot and repudiate threats of, and planning for, political violence from any quarter”, Raskin said.“Bipartisan opposition to vigilante violence and assassination plots is essential for American government to continue.”In its reporting, Raw Story also said Raiklin was linked to Michael Flynn, the retired general who was briefly national security adviser to Trump before emerging as a prominent figure on the Christian nationalist far right.The site also described Raiklin’s involvement in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, through a memo claiming Mike Pence, then vice-president, could block electoral results, and via links to Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia extremist then a congresswoman-elect.Raiklin was at the US Capitol on January 6. He has not been charged in relation to the attack. The Army reserve cleared him of wrongdoing.The Trump campaign did not comment.A spokesperson for the New York Times, employer of five journalists reportedly on Raiklin’s list, said: “The conspiracy theories underpinning this list are baseless, and the calls for targeted harassment are dangerous … In the event of any instances directed at our employees, the Times will work with law enforcement to prosecute those responsible.”Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, told Raw Story: “The idea that you would target anyone … on the basis of allegiance to the rule of law and the constitution is really scary.” More

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      Giuliani may face defamation and sexual harassment lawsuits if bankruptcy is dismissed

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      A US judge on Wednesday said he is likely to discontinue Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy process, which would enable lawsuits for defamation, sexual harassment and other claims to proceed in other courts against Donald Trump’s former lawyer.Sean Lane, a US bankruptcy judge, said at a court hearing in White Plains, New York, that he would rule on Friday on competing requests from Giuliani and his creditors about the future of his bankruptcy case.Giuliani, 80, filed for bankruptcy protection last December after a Washington DC court ordered the former New York City mayor to pay $148m to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, whom he had falsely accused of rigging votes in the 2020 presidential election, following Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.The women had described how such public lies and hounding by the powerful Republican operative wrecked their lives.The bankruptcy process had prevented the election workers from collecting on that judgment, while freezing other lawsuits stemming from Giuliani’s work for Trump, the former Republican president, as he sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.Last week, Giuliani asked to convert his personal bankruptcy case into a straightforward liquidation, which would force him to sell nearly all of his assets. One group of creditors asked Lane to appoint a trustee to take over Giuliani’s finances and businesses, which could lead to a lengthy and contested bankruptcy liquidation, while another group said Giuliani should be kicked out of bankruptcy altogether.All three options pose significant risks for Giuliani.Lane said dismissal was likely the best option, given the difficulties the court has had in getting straight answers from Giuliani about his finances. A dismissal of his bankruptcy would allow Giuliani’s creditors to resume lawsuits against him, but it would also give him more freedom to appeal the $148m defamation judgment that prompted him to seek the legal protection afforded by a bankruptcy filing.“We believe that the debtor’s best chance of getting an appellate determination would be dismissal,” Giuliani attorney Gary Fischoff said during Wednesday’s court hearing.Rachel Strickland, representing Moss and her mother, Freeman, said Giuliani should be kicked out of bankruptcy so her clients can try to collect against him.Giuliani “regards this court as a pause button on his woes while he continues to live his life unbothered by creditors”, Strickland told Lane.A committee representing Giuliani’s other creditors asked Lane to instead appoint a trustee to take over Giuliani’s finances and businesses. Committee attorney Phil Dublin said ending the bankruptcy now would create a “race to the courthouse” among the many people who have sued Giuliani.Giuliani’s other creditors include former employee Noelle Dunphy, who has accused Giuliani of sexual assault and wage theft, and the voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic, who have also sued Giuliani for defamation. Giuliani has denied the allegations.In addition to the civil lawsuits, Giuliani denies criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona relating to election interference.Reuters contributed reporting. More

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      Bearded JD Vance remains a contender for Trump VP – by a whisker

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      JD Vance is still in contention to be named Donald Trump’s running mate, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee indicated on Wednesday, despite the Ohio senator committing what Trump is reported to consider a heinous faux pas.According to multiple reports, Vance’s offence does not lie in past decisions to call Trump “America’s Hitler” and Trumpism the “Opioid of the Masses”.Vance’s mistake, according to a bristling mass of pundits, is to have a beard.“JD has a beard,” an unnamed “Trump confidant” and Vance supporter told the Bulwark this week. “But Trump is a clean-shaven guy. He just doesn’t like facial hair.”That judgment seemed to check out, given proliferating reports about Trump’s dislike for beards, as sported by his sons Donald Jr and Eric and senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and indeed for the moustache sported by John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser.But on Wednesday, in an interview with the Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade, Trump brushed off the subject.“Real quick,” Kilmeade said, “on your vice-president candidate, word is that you won’t pick JD Vance because of his facial hair. Is that true?”Trump said: “No.”“He looks good,” Trump added. “Looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.”Trump did not discuss Vance further. But he also said he would announce his running mate – with the Florida senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum both empirically clean-shaven and reportedly in contention – “close to” the Republican convention in Milwaukee next week.“It used to be picked during the convention,” Trump said, “and it made the convention frankly, more interesting. The pick used to be during the convention – that’s what I’d like to do.”Unsurprisingly, Trump’s comparison of Vance to “a young Abraham Lincoln” was not strictly accurate.At 39, Vance is a former “public affairs marine” turned venture capitalist and bestselling author who first resisted Trumpism but then adopted it as he won a Senate seat in 2022, emerging as a fiery rightwing populist voice.When Lincoln was 39, in 1848, he was a clean-shaven lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, a former Whig congressman ejected from Washington after one term.Lincoln grew his beard – but not a moustache – when he was well into middle age, at 51, after winning the presidency as a Republican and apparently at the suggestion of a correspondent 40 years his junior.“I have got four brothers,” Grace Bedell, 11 and of Westfield, New York, told Lincoln in a letter in October 1860, “and a part of them will vote for you anyway, and if you will let your whiskers grow, I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you.“You would look a great deal better, for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, and they would tease their husbands to vote for you, and then you would be president.”Vance may have a similar motive for keeping his beard, as he seeks to project the necessary experience and toughness to appeal to Trump and voters.“Without the beard, Vance looks like he’s 12,” an unnamed Trump adviser told the Bulwark this week. More

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      AOC launches effort to impeach Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito

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      Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced articles of impeachment against the conservative US supreme court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on Wednesday over the justices’ “pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court”.The articles of impeachment are unlikely to gain traction in the US House, which is controlled by Republicans. The effort follows calls from two US senators, Sheldon Whitehouse and Ron Wyden, for the US attorney general to appoint a special counsel to investigate potential criminal violations of federal ethics and tax laws by Thomas.“Justice Thomas and Alito’s repeated failure over decades to disclose that they received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with business before the court is explicitly against the law. And their refusal to recuse from the specific matters and cases before the court in which their benefactors and spouses are implicated represents nothing less than a constitutional crisis,” Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, said in a statement.The articles were supported by seven other Democrats in the House.Ocasio-Cortez continued: “The unchecked corruption crisis on the supreme court has now spiraled into a constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large.”Reporting by the news outlet ProPublica revealed that Thomas failed to disclose several luxury vacation trips that were paid for by Harlan Crow, a conservative megadonor. Thomas has also been pressed to recuse himself from cases involving the January 6 US Capitol attack and Donald Trump because his wife, Ginni, is involved with groups that were connected to the insurrection.The resolution filed against Thomas contains three articles of impeachment. The first focuses on his failure to disclose gifts from Crow. The second two involve his refusal to recuse himself from cases connected to his wife.Alito also took a vacation with and flew on a private jet chartered by Peter Singer, a Republican billionaire. Additionally, Alito refused to recuse himself from cases involving the attack on the US Capitol after it was reported that his wife, Martha-Ann, flew an upside-down American flag associated with the insurrection at their Virginia home. Further, the Alitos flew a flag associated with Christian nationalism at a beach home in New Jersey.Ocasio-Cortez filed two articles of impeachment against Alito. One focuses on his failure to disclose luxury travel and the other on his refusal to recuse himself from January 6 cases.Alito and Thomas were both part of a majority opinion earlier this month saying that former presidents have immunity from prosecution for official acts, a major win for Trump. They both also were in the majority in a case narrowing the grounds under which January 6 participants can be criminally prosecuted.Supreme court justices have wide discretion over whether to recuse themselves from a given case – something that sets them apart from other justices. Facing pressure after ProPublica’s reporting, the court’s nine justices formalized a code of conduct last November, a move that was seen as a step in the right direction, but still weak. More

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      George Clooney implores Biden to step aside in opinion article

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      The Hollywood actor George Clooney, one of the Democratic party’s biggest fundraisers, has called on Joe Biden to step aside to save democracy from Donald Trump.In an opinion article in the New York Times, Clooney expressed deep affection for the US president but said that personal interaction with him at a recent fundraising event in Los Angeles – the Democratic party’s most successful ever, raising more than $30m – suggested that the stumbling performance in last month’s debate in Atlanta was not an aberration.“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” the actor and longtime Democratic party member and fundraiser wrote.“He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw,” he said, referring to explanations from the White House and Biden himself for his bad debate performance.More bluntly, he said explicitly that Biden could not prevail in an electoral rematch with Trump: “We are not going to win with this president.”Stressing that his call was made reluctantly, Clooney paid tribute to the political battles that Biden had won throughout his career but said his age represented an insurmountable adversary.“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” he wrote.Clooney’s plea came as Biden continues to insist on staying in the race while senior Democrats agonise about how to apply pressure on him to change his mind, and serious questions continue over Biden’s health and viability for re-election.The actor called on leading party figures to come off the fence and make the case to Biden, while dismissing as “disingenuous” the president’s argument – stated in a letter to Democrats in Congress this week – that the party’s membership had already chosen the nominee in the primaries.‘Most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks,” he wrote in remarks clearly critical of continuing inaction. “But the dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe concluded: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”Clooney’s intervention comes weeks after a disagreement with the White House over Biden’s criticism of the international criminal court’s move to issue an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over allegations of war crimes in Gaza.The actor’s wife, Amal Alamuddin Clooney, worked on the case. Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, the president’s counsel, to complain about Biden’s labeling the warrant as “outrageous”.Warrants were being sought for the arrest of Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, and three leaders of Hamas, which controls Gaza.Shortly afterwards, however, Clooney appeared at a huge fundraising event in Los Angeles for the campaign, which headlined with Biden and Barack Obama. More

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      ‘What we’ve been saying all along’: where do critical voters stand on Biden dropping out?

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      Concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness for re-election on the left may have been muted over the last year. But they were not absent.“There’s a lot of people, especially on the left, that have been talking about this,” said Alex Johnson, an IT worker in Atlanta.Democrats in the center of the party would chastise critics on the left as ageist or radical when bringing up the president’s age before the disastrous debate, he said. “They’re telling everybody that they were crazy. And then one thing happened, and all of a sudden, all of the people who have been calling progressives crazy, they’re like: ‘You know, maybe they were right.’”Biden has repeatedly reiterated that he will not withdraw from the race. Democratic party leaders are locking arms behind the president, instructing their ranks to be circumspect in conversation with news reporters and are strategizing ahead of the Democratic national convention.The conversation about Biden’s fitness ratcheted up after his debate performance last month. But they did not begin then, even among Democrats. Editorials from David Ignatius at the Washington Post and Mark Leibovich at the Atlantic last year called for Biden to refrain from running. Cenk Uygur, progressive co-creator of The Young Turks program, wanted Biden to give up re-election for more than a year and has been more than vocal about it, describing Biden’s supporters on the left as dead-enders.“At this point, eight out of 10 Americans think that Joe Biden’s mental health is not sufficient to be president,” Uygur said. “That’s what we’ve been saying all along. That number was already sky high before the debate.”Uygur has been arguing that it’s more than Biden’s age; no president with poll numbers in the 30s at this point in the election cycle has won re-election. Uygur tried to run as a candidate himself, despite being born in Istanbul – a constitutional disqualification for the office – simply to make the point.Karl Olson in St Louis Park, Minnesota, generally votes for Republican candidates. In 2020, “to save democracy”, Olson made the maximum possible legal contribution to the Biden campaign, he said. He voted for Biden in 2020, but has been calling for Biden not to run for re-election for years.He voted for Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he is considering a vote for Trump.“I have long held that [Biden] should quit while he’s ahead,” Olson said. “I have concluded that if the Democrats insist on renominating Biden and Harris, they deserve to lose.”“Here’s the thing,” he added. “If Donald Trump is a political antichrist who will destroy democracy, then why are Democrats insisting on renominating Biden-Harris when he’s too old and she’s not enough of a leader to win?”Much of the anger today is being directed at the media, both for ignoring the substance of concerns about Biden’s age before the debate, and now the seeming pile-on after it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe headlines may be overdue, said Blue Tannery, a radio engineer in Atlanta. But they are not helpful.“The age thing in particular; yes, it’s an important problem. I’m really, really, really sick of seeing headlines about it,” Tannery said. The one thing that Biden said that makes any sense: you should all shut up about how old that I am and start talking about what I’ve done over the last four years.”Tannery said he had wanted Biden not to run, but also said the standard the media applies to Biden is unfair. “This is eight years of being in this country, watching Trump just open his mouth onstage and exhale a horde of locusts and the headline is about Biden,” Tannery said. “Because that’s what Trump does every time. That’s not news anymore. It is exhausting.”Samantha Ruddy, a comedy writer in Philadelphia, may be typical of reluctant Biden voters. She’s still voting for Biden. But now she also thinks he’s going to lose.“I have wanted Democratic candidates more politically aligned to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders during the past two election cycles,” Ruddy said. “In 2020, I felt Biden was better than Trump. I still feel he’s better than Trump. However, I don’t think he can win in 2024. I believe the best move is to replace him on the ticket. That being said – much like Donald Trump – I’m an entertainer who looked at the eclipse, so what do I know?” More

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      For US democracy to survive, it needs progressives like Sanders and AOC | Judith Levine

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      In France, more than 200 candidates dropped out of their races to consolidate the left-center vote and defeat the extreme right. In Israel, Labor and the leftwing Meretz party are merging to offer “a real alternative to the path of the failed and dangerous government”.And in the US, the Democrats are on a death march behind the zombie Joe Biden, more worried about looking disunited than winning the election.They are disunited – and that may be their last hope. If they’re going to try to save democracy, Biden’s stated campaign goal, they must look to the faction they’ve distanced themselves from: the left. And if the left cares about democracy, it needs to get onboard with the Democrats.The only excitement that the Democrats have generated since Barack Obama’s presidency has come from its further-left members: people such as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent senator, and erstwhile Democrat; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York City representative; and Jamie Raskin, the left-of-center Maryland representative, who brilliantly orchestrated Donald Trump’s impeachment for attempting to overturn the election.Yet the party establishment is intent on sidelining its progressive wing. Before the 2020 elections, the Democratic congressional campaign committee changed its rules to cut business ties with any consultant who worked with primary challengers – who were coming, not coincidentally, from the left. The party has sat on its hands as the rightwing American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) pours $100m into defeating seven members of Congress’s progressive “Squad” because of their vocal opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza.All this effort represents a suicidal denial of the politics of the Democratic base. More than three-quarters of Democrats oppose the war. As many as 750,000 presidential primary voters chose “uncommitted”, “no preference” or a blank ballot to protest against Biden’s unconditional support for Israel. In early June, the Nation predicted that the uncommitted delegates, a substantial number of them from the battleground states of the upper midwest, would be a critical constituency at the Democratic convention. If Biden finally throws in the towel, that faction will become much more critical.Pundits are calling the trouncing of Jamaal Bowman, the progressive Democratic incumbent from New York’s congressional district 16, a sign of Democratic voters’ swing to the center, even though it was money from the right – Aipac’s $15m to his moderate primary opponent – that defeated him. Yet elsewhere in New York state, progressives, including socialists, running as Democrats handily fought off primary challenges, thanks not to the Democratic party but to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Working Families party (WFP).A 2022 Pew poll found that Democrats under 30 view socialism positively at twice the rate as they favor capitalism. In fact, all Democrats under 65 – Black and brown people more than white, women more than men, poor more than rich – have a better opinion of socialism than of capitalism.While the Republicans cede all power to the radical right, the Democrats, since Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” of the party in the 1990s, have clung to the middle. By simultaneously marginalizing the left and depending on its votes, the party has courted only mistrust and cynicism from the social justice movements whose ideas, in milder form, they eventually co-opt.The problem is not just that the Democrats snub progressives. The progressives are carrying on as if no more were at stake in this election than in the last one, when a lot was at stake. Jill Stein and Cornel West, presidential candidates of the Green party and the People’s party, respectively, keep campaigning – and sparring with one another – knowing that they might scrape off enough votes to give the election to Trump.Since the debate, both are sounding delusional. “Biden’s dropping out, Trump is on his way to jail. I could be the last one standing constant and consistent,” West told the talkshow host Tavis Smiley. On the media circuit, Stein is describing the exchange as “zombie versus psychopath”, proof of the two-party system’s dysfunction – and claiming a surge of support for her campaign. Surge or not, Stein is on the ballot in five swing states; according to Politico, she could determine who wins.In spite of the animosity, progressives and progressive organizations – MoveOn, Lean Left, the DSA, the WFP – continue to pitch in. Most of the people I’ve met making get-out-the-vote phone calls for whatever mediocre candidate the Democrats put on the ballot come from the old, New, Labor, feminist, anti-war or antiracist left. The Democratic party needs the left.And as much as the Democrats need the left, the left needs democracy. In June 2020, under Trump’s orders, national guard troops in riot gear fired teargas and rubber bullets at citizens peacefully protesting George Floyd’s murder in Washington’s Lafayette Park so that the president could have his picture taken holding up a Bible in front of a church. When Trump lectured governors to “dominate” – arrest, prosecute, jail and “do retribution” to – demonstrators in their cities, only the Illinois Democrat JB Pritzker, whose name has been floated to replace Biden on the ticket, objected.In an extraordinary move, Trump’s defense secretary, along with other active and retired military officers, condemned the deployment of the military against non-violent domestic protest. The next time, surrounded by vetted loyalists, Trump will not be constrained.For the people who braved Covid and the cops, it’s more than distasteful to canvass for the party that named its reform bill after Floyd, then spent hundreds of millions to put more cops on the streets. West and Stein are right: unlike parliamentary systems, where parties large and small represent proportionate popular support within government, the US electoral duopoly fails democracy. But the duopoly is what we’ve got. And this time, the greater of two evils is far eviler than the lesser.Overlapping crises – a US supreme court that has (most recently) coronated all past and future presidents, and the flameout of the already sputtering Democratic nominee – have muddled the rescue of democracy with the election of Democrats. If they win, they’re unlikely to do better than resuscitate the white supremacist minority-ruled oligarchy we have now.Still, the prospect of Trumpian fascism ought to stir our fealty to the good old American oligarchy we call democracy. If the left values democracy, it must help the Democrats. And if the Democrats prevail, they must look to the left to make democracy worthy of its name.
      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More