Democrats Should Stop Praising Republican Warmongers
SEP 03, 2026
I know: this is old news. But I was going through my notes from September of 2024 on the Harris/Trump presidential debate and came across Kamala Harris’s gushing praise of the “late great John McCain,” American hero. And I thought again to myself: this is how the Democrats run for office, by praising Republican warmongers like McCain?
I get it: Harris was trying to rattle Trump, who had no love of McCain. But as I wrote in my notes at the time, Harris came across as a moderate Republican against a madcap one in Trump. And when you offer voters a “choice” between a moderate rightist and a more extreme one, they tend to go for the extreme one.
A few reasons why Harris struck me as a moderate Republican in that debate:
- Her high praise for McCain.
- Her tight embrace of military lethality.
- Her rejection of Medicare for All and her support for private health insurers.
- Her willingness to quote Goldman Sachs with approval.
- Her boasting of personal endorsements from Dick and Liz Cheney.
- Her strong support of NATO and Ukraine in its war with Russia.
- Her unchecked support for Israel despite the genocide in Gaza.
My Democrat friends will likely respond that she was “moving to the center” to win more votes. How did that work out for her?
Yes, I know Kamala wasn’t as crazy as Trump. If she’d been elected in 2024, we wouldn’t have been subjected to the DOGE, or absurdly high tariffs, or ICE goons, or the idiocy of Pete Hegseth. I get that.
But Harris did support “military lethality,” so the Pentagon budget would have increased (though not nearly as much as under Trump). She said Iran was America’s greatest threat, so her foreign policy vis-a-vis that country may have been as bellicose (though whether she would have started a disastrous and illegal war with Iran is unknowable but I think unlikely).
Looking through my old notes from that debate, I’m struck again by the grim vision Trump offered of America. Our country has gone to hell, he said. The nation is in decline, or dying. Other countries are laughing at us, Trump said. They don’t respect us. Migrant crime is killing America. Immigrants are eating your pet dogs and cats. Babies are being aborted (“executed”) at nine months. Biden doesn’t know he’s alive and Harris hates Israel. Or so Trump claimed.
Trump wasn’t wrong about America’s decline. What he fails to see is how rapidly he has accelerated that decline since he was reelected in 2024.
Trump is America’s first declinist president, as Tom Engelhardt has noted. Hence the whole MAGA ideal of a national revival, which resonated with so many people. The problem of course is how Trump is worsening that decline even as he uses the office of the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies.
It shouldn’t be that difficult for Democrats to beat a corrupt and venal blowhard like Trump, except the Democratic establishment thinks the way to do that is to praise John McCain and to hug the Cheneys. And even while Democrats today criticize Trump for the Iran War, they rarely do so on moral terms, even as they typically put forth their own preferred military action plan against Russia or China or both. Trump actually makes occasional antiwar noises, which is more than can be said for many Democrats.
If Democrats really want to gain the upper hand on Trump, they had best stop praising the McCains and Cheneys of America and reject constant warmongering. And they should be much stronger in their criticism of Trump and Company as WMD, as weapons of mass destruction to democracy, for that is exactly what they are proving to be.
The DSA candidates in 2026 get it: American voters really want alternatives rather than Democrats wearing John McCain and Liz Cheney masks.
Bracing Views 
“The DSA candidates in 2026 get it: American voters really want alternatives rather than Democrats wearing John McCain and Liz Cheney masks.”
That’s for sure. And the Dem Party establishment still doesn’t get it, no sign that they will. And the DSA isn’t all that leftist at all, just pretty much basic, New Deal and Great Society kind of stuff. All worthwhile, all necessary, but nothing to panic over insofar as “radical” politics go.
We lack a true Left in this country, those in it were largely eliminated during the McCarthy era, then the monitoring by the FBI, assassinations of Black leaders and breaking up of groups like the Black Panthers. A couple of passages from https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/black-panther-party-challenging-police-and-promoting-social-change
To Serve the PeopleLocal chapters of the Panthers, often led by women, focused attention on community “survival programs.” They organized a free breakfast program for 20,000 children each day as well as a free food program for families and the elderly. They sponsored schools, legal aid offices, clothing distribution, local transportation, and health clinics and sickle-cell testing centers in several cities. These activities provided concrete aid to low-income communities and drew support for the Panthers.
Advocating for Community ReformsAlthough created as a response to police brutality, the Black Panther Party quickly expanded to advocate for other social reforms. Among the organization initiatives, they campaigned for prison reform, held voter registration drives, organized free food programs which included food giveaways and a school breakfast program in several cities, opened free health clinics in a dozen cities serving thousands who could not afford it, and created Freedom Schools in nine cities including the noteworthy Oakland Community School, led by Ericka Huggins from 1973 to 1981.
For this “In 1969, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), described the Black Panther Party as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country [Wikipedia].”
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