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Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germany. (Photo: National Archives)
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power.
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power.
I just read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler's and Mussolini's rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.
His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.
Once they had control of the machinery of the state, the fascists were able to control those mainstream abettors through fear and intimidation. Fascist parties were able to mobilize supporters to engage in violent intimidation in the streets, and their inside conspirators intimidated other members of the ruling coalitions through violence and threats to violence.
While this may not be the exact situation we are in right now, there are important resonances. Trump has offered the right wing in this country a path to power. He has offered a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which would likely have been pushed to margins by a Clinton administration. And he was able to offer popular support for a whole set of policies promoted by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and super rich bad actors such as the Koch brothers, policies which are in the interest of no one outside the 1%.
And the Republican Party has done a masterful job distorting the electoral system such that the machinery of the state is already stretched against the limits of what could plausibly be considered constitutional. Millions of people have been disenfranchised through a variety of forms of voter suppression: from mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement, to blatantly discriminatory voter identification laws. Republicans have also engaged in gerrymandering of congressional districts, redistricting with scientific precision and leaving many states with majority Democratic voting populations and strongly Republican majority congressional delegations.
One of the lessons we need to draw from the experience of early Twentieth Century Fascism is that we need to be very vigilant about protecting our constitutional system. People who live under the new right wing nationalism, such as Hungarians under Orban and Italians under Berlusconi have been telling us to not be smug about the stability of our constitutional system. Just as an earthquake can turn what seems like firm ground into a runny liquid in a matter of moments; so too can constitutional systems, which have seemed well rooted and stable, under the right conditions, come to allow for all sorts of horrors.
The other lesson to be drawn from early twentieth century fascism is that people need a sense of belonging, and if the fascists are successful at offering that to people, then they will get support. Fascism in Germany and Italy ran those countries into the ground. Any yet support for those regimes and the parties that led them rose as the regimes became more extreme.
The German population at the turn of the twentieth century were highly educated, and had pride in a rationalist enlightenment worldview. They did not fall for fascism because they were uneducated. And it is important for us to not be fooled by what is attractive to people in the US about our country's emerging right-wing nationalism.
In his classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the ways that people become a nation by telling themselves stories that weave a sense of common purpose and meaning. Those stories often focus on heroic past accomplishments and mistreatment on the part of others outside the boundary of the imagined community of the nation.
One problem for the left in Europe at the dawn of the fascist period is that leftists were seen as supporting an internationalist ideology over a nationalist one. And when people felt that their homelands were being mistreated in the aftermath of World War I, they were open to the narratives of belonging that the fascists offered.
Fascist leaders offered a sense of pride and purpose to people in societies with a sense of chaos. The left tried to engage people with an alternative narrative of belonging to an international working class. That narrative did have a lot of support. In the early days of German fascism, more people were on the left than were fascists. But the left was divided between different competing parties. And support for the left was not enough to fight off the growing power of the coalition of fascists and pro-capitalists. As street violence of the fascists and the more organized violence of the police were unleashed against the left, the left became the first victims of fascist power.
The people who supported Trump based on the desire to "Make America Great Again" have a lot in common with Europeans who support Le Pen in France, Farage in Britain, and Orban in Hungary. On both sides of the Atlantic, people see their future prospects diminishing. The new right-wing nationalism is a mixture of two major strands of resentments. One has to do with a sense of displacement from cultural centrality that many white people feel as their countries become more multicultural. The other key ingredient is something that many on the left have more sympathy with: the sense of a lack of control over the conditions one one's existence under neoliberal capitalism.
We are living in a world where communities have been destroyed by global capitalism, and where mainstream liberals and the mass media do little to help people to understand the complex conditions under which they live.
In The origins of Totalitarianism, a reflection on the Nazi rise to power, the great German Jewish Philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote,
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
People who feel displaced and dishonored and who have no understanding of the complex processes that impact their lives are ripe for fascist ways of thinking. Those of us who want to oppose the drift toward fascism, need to engage in work to help people understand the complex conditions of their lives, and we need to build ways of understanding the world that give people a sense of meaning and purpose in life that is emotionally satisfying and helps people to see the realities of our political situation. Many people live in communities that have been devastated by neo-liberalism. Vague calls to be kind and tolerant and multicultural will not resonate as the way out of that problem. A plausible story about the current situation needs to include an honest description of the ravages of global capitalism.
Part of rebuilding our social fabric involves building our civic culture. Consumer culture promises that we all deserve an unlimited and effortless satisfaction of our individual desires. Advertisers feed that story every day, and everywhere we turn. The right wing media has fed a compatible story about government. Grounded in the Reagan revolution, it claims that government, and therefore civic life, is corrupt and pointless. Missing is any idea of a civic life through which we build a common social fabric that can meet our ever changing needs. People are moved from being citizens who feel an obligation to be informed, engaged, and make thoughtful choices, to becoming consumers who feel entitled to have their needs met, and are ready to rail against the incomprehensible structures that get in the way of those satisfactions.
We need to explain how people's communities, sense of purpose, and sense of a possible desirable future have been destroyed, and what can be done to reverse that damage and rebuild people's communities and their sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. According to Anderson, newspapers were an important part of what wove together a sense of belonging to a common community in the early part of the twentieth century. An important question for our time is: how can the forms of media that people now use connect them with a world greater than themselves and their sphere of private concerns. How can we build a progressive and satisfying public sphere?
Social media are likely to be a part of that, but our habits of how we validate information, what we share, and how we build a shared and common understanding of the world all need to improve drastically.
One advantage we have in the United States over the early Twentieth Century German and Italian left is that we live in a very multicultural society. The demographics do not actually bode well for the Republican Party. We don't need to win over all of the people who are inclined toward right-wing nationalism to keep them from destroying our country. But we do need to have political narratives that will motivate enough people to stand up for something else in the way they engage the government: through street action and pressure campaigns, as well as through running for election, helping progressives get elected, and challenging the political structures of disenfranchisement. And we need to understand and promote the many real alternatives that exist to the global capitalist framework that is in fact destroying the economic future of people in our country.
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Cynthia Kaufman is a writer and educator. She is the author of five books on social change: Consumerism, Sustainability, and Happiness: How to Build a World Where Everyone Has Enough (Routledge 2023), The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook (PM Press 2021), Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury 2020), Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books 2012), and Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change (2nd Edition PM Press 2016). She is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at De Anza College. Visit her website.
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power.
I just read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler's and Mussolini's rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.
His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.
Once they had control of the machinery of the state, the fascists were able to control those mainstream abettors through fear and intimidation. Fascist parties were able to mobilize supporters to engage in violent intimidation in the streets, and their inside conspirators intimidated other members of the ruling coalitions through violence and threats to violence.
While this may not be the exact situation we are in right now, there are important resonances. Trump has offered the right wing in this country a path to power. He has offered a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which would likely have been pushed to margins by a Clinton administration. And he was able to offer popular support for a whole set of policies promoted by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and super rich bad actors such as the Koch brothers, policies which are in the interest of no one outside the 1%.
And the Republican Party has done a masterful job distorting the electoral system such that the machinery of the state is already stretched against the limits of what could plausibly be considered constitutional. Millions of people have been disenfranchised through a variety of forms of voter suppression: from mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement, to blatantly discriminatory voter identification laws. Republicans have also engaged in gerrymandering of congressional districts, redistricting with scientific precision and leaving many states with majority Democratic voting populations and strongly Republican majority congressional delegations.
One of the lessons we need to draw from the experience of early Twentieth Century Fascism is that we need to be very vigilant about protecting our constitutional system. People who live under the new right wing nationalism, such as Hungarians under Orban and Italians under Berlusconi have been telling us to not be smug about the stability of our constitutional system. Just as an earthquake can turn what seems like firm ground into a runny liquid in a matter of moments; so too can constitutional systems, which have seemed well rooted and stable, under the right conditions, come to allow for all sorts of horrors.
The other lesson to be drawn from early twentieth century fascism is that people need a sense of belonging, and if the fascists are successful at offering that to people, then they will get support. Fascism in Germany and Italy ran those countries into the ground. Any yet support for those regimes and the parties that led them rose as the regimes became more extreme.
The German population at the turn of the twentieth century were highly educated, and had pride in a rationalist enlightenment worldview. They did not fall for fascism because they were uneducated. And it is important for us to not be fooled by what is attractive to people in the US about our country's emerging right-wing nationalism.
In his classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the ways that people become a nation by telling themselves stories that weave a sense of common purpose and meaning. Those stories often focus on heroic past accomplishments and mistreatment on the part of others outside the boundary of the imagined community of the nation.
One problem for the left in Europe at the dawn of the fascist period is that leftists were seen as supporting an internationalist ideology over a nationalist one. And when people felt that their homelands were being mistreated in the aftermath of World War I, they were open to the narratives of belonging that the fascists offered.
Fascist leaders offered a sense of pride and purpose to people in societies with a sense of chaos. The left tried to engage people with an alternative narrative of belonging to an international working class. That narrative did have a lot of support. In the early days of German fascism, more people were on the left than were fascists. But the left was divided between different competing parties. And support for the left was not enough to fight off the growing power of the coalition of fascists and pro-capitalists. As street violence of the fascists and the more organized violence of the police were unleashed against the left, the left became the first victims of fascist power.
The people who supported Trump based on the desire to "Make America Great Again" have a lot in common with Europeans who support Le Pen in France, Farage in Britain, and Orban in Hungary. On both sides of the Atlantic, people see their future prospects diminishing. The new right-wing nationalism is a mixture of two major strands of resentments. One has to do with a sense of displacement from cultural centrality that many white people feel as their countries become more multicultural. The other key ingredient is something that many on the left have more sympathy with: the sense of a lack of control over the conditions one one's existence under neoliberal capitalism.
We are living in a world where communities have been destroyed by global capitalism, and where mainstream liberals and the mass media do little to help people to understand the complex conditions under which they live.
In The origins of Totalitarianism, a reflection on the Nazi rise to power, the great German Jewish Philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote,
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
People who feel displaced and dishonored and who have no understanding of the complex processes that impact their lives are ripe for fascist ways of thinking. Those of us who want to oppose the drift toward fascism, need to engage in work to help people understand the complex conditions of their lives, and we need to build ways of understanding the world that give people a sense of meaning and purpose in life that is emotionally satisfying and helps people to see the realities of our political situation. Many people live in communities that have been devastated by neo-liberalism. Vague calls to be kind and tolerant and multicultural will not resonate as the way out of that problem. A plausible story about the current situation needs to include an honest description of the ravages of global capitalism.
Part of rebuilding our social fabric involves building our civic culture. Consumer culture promises that we all deserve an unlimited and effortless satisfaction of our individual desires. Advertisers feed that story every day, and everywhere we turn. The right wing media has fed a compatible story about government. Grounded in the Reagan revolution, it claims that government, and therefore civic life, is corrupt and pointless. Missing is any idea of a civic life through which we build a common social fabric that can meet our ever changing needs. People are moved from being citizens who feel an obligation to be informed, engaged, and make thoughtful choices, to becoming consumers who feel entitled to have their needs met, and are ready to rail against the incomprehensible structures that get in the way of those satisfactions.
We need to explain how people's communities, sense of purpose, and sense of a possible desirable future have been destroyed, and what can be done to reverse that damage and rebuild people's communities and their sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. According to Anderson, newspapers were an important part of what wove together a sense of belonging to a common community in the early part of the twentieth century. An important question for our time is: how can the forms of media that people now use connect them with a world greater than themselves and their sphere of private concerns. How can we build a progressive and satisfying public sphere?
Social media are likely to be a part of that, but our habits of how we validate information, what we share, and how we build a shared and common understanding of the world all need to improve drastically.
One advantage we have in the United States over the early Twentieth Century German and Italian left is that we live in a very multicultural society. The demographics do not actually bode well for the Republican Party. We don't need to win over all of the people who are inclined toward right-wing nationalism to keep them from destroying our country. But we do need to have political narratives that will motivate enough people to stand up for something else in the way they engage the government: through street action and pressure campaigns, as well as through running for election, helping progressives get elected, and challenging the political structures of disenfranchisement. And we need to understand and promote the many real alternatives that exist to the global capitalist framework that is in fact destroying the economic future of people in our country.
Cynthia Kaufman is a writer and educator. She is the author of five books on social change: Consumerism, Sustainability, and Happiness: How to Build a World Where Everyone Has Enough (Routledge 2023), The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook (PM Press 2021), Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury 2020), Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books 2012), and Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change (2nd Edition PM Press 2016). She is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at De Anza College. Visit her website.
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power.
I just read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler's and Mussolini's rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.
His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.
Once they had control of the machinery of the state, the fascists were able to control those mainstream abettors through fear and intimidation. Fascist parties were able to mobilize supporters to engage in violent intimidation in the streets, and their inside conspirators intimidated other members of the ruling coalitions through violence and threats to violence.
While this may not be the exact situation we are in right now, there are important resonances. Trump has offered the right wing in this country a path to power. He has offered a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which would likely have been pushed to margins by a Clinton administration. And he was able to offer popular support for a whole set of policies promoted by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and super rich bad actors such as the Koch brothers, policies which are in the interest of no one outside the 1%.
And the Republican Party has done a masterful job distorting the electoral system such that the machinery of the state is already stretched against the limits of what could plausibly be considered constitutional. Millions of people have been disenfranchised through a variety of forms of voter suppression: from mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement, to blatantly discriminatory voter identification laws. Republicans have also engaged in gerrymandering of congressional districts, redistricting with scientific precision and leaving many states with majority Democratic voting populations and strongly Republican majority congressional delegations.
One of the lessons we need to draw from the experience of early Twentieth Century Fascism is that we need to be very vigilant about protecting our constitutional system. People who live under the new right wing nationalism, such as Hungarians under Orban and Italians under Berlusconi have been telling us to not be smug about the stability of our constitutional system. Just as an earthquake can turn what seems like firm ground into a runny liquid in a matter of moments; so too can constitutional systems, which have seemed well rooted and stable, under the right conditions, come to allow for all sorts of horrors.
The other lesson to be drawn from early twentieth century fascism is that people need a sense of belonging, and if the fascists are successful at offering that to people, then they will get support. Fascism in Germany and Italy ran those countries into the ground. Any yet support for those regimes and the parties that led them rose as the regimes became more extreme.
The German population at the turn of the twentieth century were highly educated, and had pride in a rationalist enlightenment worldview. They did not fall for fascism because they were uneducated. And it is important for us to not be fooled by what is attractive to people in the US about our country's emerging right-wing nationalism.
In his classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the ways that people become a nation by telling themselves stories that weave a sense of common purpose and meaning. Those stories often focus on heroic past accomplishments and mistreatment on the part of others outside the boundary of the imagined community of the nation.
One problem for the left in Europe at the dawn of the fascist period is that leftists were seen as supporting an internationalist ideology over a nationalist one. And when people felt that their homelands were being mistreated in the aftermath of World War I, they were open to the narratives of belonging that the fascists offered.
Fascist leaders offered a sense of pride and purpose to people in societies with a sense of chaos. The left tried to engage people with an alternative narrative of belonging to an international working class. That narrative did have a lot of support. In the early days of German fascism, more people were on the left than were fascists. But the left was divided between different competing parties. And support for the left was not enough to fight off the growing power of the coalition of fascists and pro-capitalists. As street violence of the fascists and the more organized violence of the police were unleashed against the left, the left became the first victims of fascist power.
The people who supported Trump based on the desire to "Make America Great Again" have a lot in common with Europeans who support Le Pen in France, Farage in Britain, and Orban in Hungary. On both sides of the Atlantic, people see their future prospects diminishing. The new right-wing nationalism is a mixture of two major strands of resentments. One has to do with a sense of displacement from cultural centrality that many white people feel as their countries become more multicultural. The other key ingredient is something that many on the left have more sympathy with: the sense of a lack of control over the conditions one one's existence under neoliberal capitalism.
We are living in a world where communities have been destroyed by global capitalism, and where mainstream liberals and the mass media do little to help people to understand the complex conditions under which they live.
In The origins of Totalitarianism, a reflection on the Nazi rise to power, the great German Jewish Philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote,
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
People who feel displaced and dishonored and who have no understanding of the complex processes that impact their lives are ripe for fascist ways of thinking. Those of us who want to oppose the drift toward fascism, need to engage in work to help people understand the complex conditions of their lives, and we need to build ways of understanding the world that give people a sense of meaning and purpose in life that is emotionally satisfying and helps people to see the realities of our political situation. Many people live in communities that have been devastated by neo-liberalism. Vague calls to be kind and tolerant and multicultural will not resonate as the way out of that problem. A plausible story about the current situation needs to include an honest description of the ravages of global capitalism.
Part of rebuilding our social fabric involves building our civic culture. Consumer culture promises that we all deserve an unlimited and effortless satisfaction of our individual desires. Advertisers feed that story every day, and everywhere we turn. The right wing media has fed a compatible story about government. Grounded in the Reagan revolution, it claims that government, and therefore civic life, is corrupt and pointless. Missing is any idea of a civic life through which we build a common social fabric that can meet our ever changing needs. People are moved from being citizens who feel an obligation to be informed, engaged, and make thoughtful choices, to becoming consumers who feel entitled to have their needs met, and are ready to rail against the incomprehensible structures that get in the way of those satisfactions.
We need to explain how people's communities, sense of purpose, and sense of a possible desirable future have been destroyed, and what can be done to reverse that damage and rebuild people's communities and their sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. According to Anderson, newspapers were an important part of what wove together a sense of belonging to a common community in the early part of the twentieth century. An important question for our time is: how can the forms of media that people now use connect them with a world greater than themselves and their sphere of private concerns. How can we build a progressive and satisfying public sphere?
Social media are likely to be a part of that, but our habits of how we validate information, what we share, and how we build a shared and common understanding of the world all need to improve drastically.
One advantage we have in the United States over the early Twentieth Century German and Italian left is that we live in a very multicultural society. The demographics do not actually bode well for the Republican Party. We don't need to win over all of the people who are inclined toward right-wing nationalism to keep them from destroying our country. But we do need to have political narratives that will motivate enough people to stand up for something else in the way they engage the government: through street action and pressure campaigns, as well as through running for election, helping progressives get elected, and challenging the political structures of disenfranchisement. And we need to understand and promote the many real alternatives that exist to the global capitalist framework that is in fact destroying the economic future of people in our country.
"The time is long overdue for Congress to use the leverage we have—tens of billions in arms and military aid—to demand that Israel end these atrocities," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders said he intends to force votes on Wednesday to block the Trump administration's effort to send billions of dollars' worth of additional bombs and assault rifles to Israel as the country's military starves and massacres Gaza's population.
Sanders (I-Vt.) first introduced the resolutions in March after the Trump administration notified Congress of its plans to send Israel more weaponry, including thousands of 1,000-pound bombs and tens of thousands of assault rifles.
The senator's resolutions, S.J.Res.34 and S.J.Res.41, aim to prohibit the sale of 1,000-pound bombs, Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits, and assault rifles, as well as related logistical support. The joint resolutions are privileged, meaning they cannot be amended and are not subject to the Senate filibuster, requiring just a simple-majority vote to pass.
"U.S. taxpayers have spent tens of billions of dollars in support of the racist, extremist Netanyahu government. Enough is enough," Sanders said in a statement Tuesday. "We cannot continue to spend taxpayer money on a government which has killed some 60,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 143,000—most of whom are women, children, and the elderly. We cannot continue supporting a government which has blocked humanitarian aid, caused massive famine, and literally starved the people of Gaza."
"The time is long overdue for Congress to use the leverage we have—tens of billions in arms and military aid—to demand that Israel end these atrocities," the senator added.
"Continuing these arms sales would violate U.S. laws that prohibit assistance to governments engaged in gross human rights abuses and obstruction of aid."
Since the start of President Donald Trump's second term, his administration has approved around $12 billion in arms sales to Israel and lifted a Biden-era block on the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs that Israeli forces have used to commit atrocities against Palestinians.
Earlier this year, Sanders led an unsuccessful effort to block the Trump administration's sale of nearly $9 billion in weapons to the Israeli government. Just 14 senators, all Democrats, backed the resolutions.
But there are some indications that support for blocking arms sales could grow as the starvation crisis that Israel has imposed on Gaza intensifies. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who did not support the resolutions Sanders tried to pass in April, said earlier this week that he would vote for "an end to any United States support whatsoever" for Israel "until there is a demonstrable change in the direction of Israeli policy."
"My litmus test will be simple: No aid of any kind as long as there are starving children in Gaza due to the action or inaction of the Israeli government," said King.
Sanders argued that cutting off offensive U.S. military support for Israel is both a moral and legal necessity. In a press release announcing the impending votes, the senator's office noted that "the arms sales in question clearly violate the criteria laid out in the Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act."
"Reliable human rights monitors have documented numerous incidents involving the use of 1,000-pound bombs and JDAMs in illegal strikes leading to unacceptable civilian death tolls," Sanders' office explained. "These include strikes in which hundreds of civilians have been killed and strikes on humanitarian facilities, including U.N. schools. The rifles in question will go to arm a police force overseen by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who advocates for the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from the region, who has been convicted of support for terrorism by an Israeli court, and who has distributed weapons to violent settlers in the West Bank."
Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, applauded Sanders for moving once again to block U.S. arms sales to Israel "in light of its devastating conduct in Gaza."
"The Israeli military has used U.S.-origin weapons in attacks that have killed Palestinian civilians, destroyed civilian infrastructure, and deepened an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe," said El-Tayyab. "Continuing these arms sales would violate U.S. laws that prohibit assistance to governments engaged in gross human rights abuses and obstruction of aid. This resolution rightly affirms that U.S. weapons must not fuel further atrocities, and that only diplomacy, not more bombs, can bring an end to this crisis."
"Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires," said one critic. "It is as malicious as it is absurd."
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration faced an onslaught of criticism on Tuesday for starting the process of repealing the 2009 legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people—which has enabled federal regulations aimed at the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency over the past 15 years.
Confirming reports from last week, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled the rule to rescind the 2009 "endangerment finding" at a truck dealership in Indiana. According to The New York Times, he said that "the proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States."
If the administration succeeds in repealing the legal finding, the EPA would lack authority under the Clean Air Act to impose standards for greenhouse gas emissions—meaning the move would kill vehicle regulations. As with the reporting last week, the formal announcement was sharply condemned by climate and health advocates and experts.
"Greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and are the root cause of the climate crisis," said Deanna Noël with Public Citizen's Climate Program, ripping the administration's effort as "grossly misguided and exceptionally dangerous."
"This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
"Stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases is like throwing away the fire extinguisher while the house is already burning," she warned. "The administration is shamelessly handing Big Oil a hall pass to pollute unchecked and dodge accountability, leaving working families to bear the costs through worsening health outcomes, rising energy bills, more climate-fueled extreme weather, and an increasingly unstable future. This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
Noël was far from alone in accusing the administration's leaders of serving the polluters who helped Trump return to power.
"Zeldin and Trump are concerned only with maximizing short-term profits for polluting corporations and the CEOs funneling millions of dollars to their campaign coffers," said Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch. "Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires. It is as malicious as it is absurd."
Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign, similarly said that the proposal is "purely a political bow to the oil industry" and "Trump is putting fealty to Big Oil over sound science and people's health."
Earthworks policy director Lauren Pagel also called the rule "a perverse gift to the fossil fuel industry that rejects yearslong efforts by the agency, scientists, NGOs, frontline communities, and industry to protect public health and our environment."
"Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin are playing with fire—and with floods and droughts and public health risks, too," she stressed, as about 168 million Americans on Tuesday faced advisories for extreme heat made more likely by the climate crisis.
🚨 The Trump administration just took its most extreme step yet in rolling back climate protections.
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— Sierra Club (@sierraclub.org) July 29, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Justin Chen, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents over 8,000 EPA workers nationwide, said that the repeal plan "is reckless and will have far-reaching, disastrous consequences for the USA."
"EPA career professionals have worked for decades on the development of the science and policy of greenhouse gases to protect the American public," he continued, "and this policy decision completely disregards all of their work in service to the public."
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) highlighted that Chris Wright, head of the Department of Energy, joined Zeldin at the Tuesday press conference and "announced a DOE 'climate science study' alongside remarks that were rife with climate denial talking points and disinformation."
UCS president Gretchen Goldman said that "it's abundantly clear what's going on here. The Trump administration refuses to acknowledge robust climate science and is using the kitchen sink approach: making every specious argument it can to avoid complying with the law."
"But getting around the Clean Air Act won't be easy," she added. "The science establishing climate harms to human health was unequivocally clear back in 2009, and more than 15 years later, the evidence has only accumulated."
Today, Zeldin’s EPA plans to release a proposal to revoke the Endangerment Finding, which is the legal & scientific foundation of EPA’s responsibility to limit climate-heating greenhouse gas pollution from major sources.
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— Moms Clean Air Force (@momscleanairforce.org) July 29, 2025 at 12:58 PM
David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, was a lead attorney in the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts vs. EPA, which affirmed the agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and ultimately led to the endangerment finding two years later.
Bookbinder said Tuesday that "because this approach has already been rejected by the courts—and doubtless will be again—this baseless effort to pretend that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change are not harmful pollutants is nothing more than a transparent attempt to delay and derail our efforts to control greenhouse pollution at the worst possible time, when deadly floods and heat waves are killing more people every day."
In a statement from the Environmental Protection Network, which is made up of ex-EPA staff, Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the agency's Office of Air and Radiation, also cited the 2007 ruling.
"This decision is both legally indefensible and morally bankrupt," Goffman said of the Tuesday proposal. "The Supreme Court made clear that EPA cannot ignore science or evade its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act. By walking away from the endangerment finding, EPA has not only broken with precedent; it has broken with reality."
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, responded to the EPA proposal with defiance, declaring that "Donald Trump and his Big Oil donors are lighting the world on fire and fueling their private jets with young people's lives. We refuse to be sacrifices for their greed. We're coming for them, and we're not backing down."
Israel has already summarily rejected the U.K. leader's ultimatum to take "substantive" steps to end the war on Gaza by September, agree to a two-state solution, and reject West Bank annexation.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer was accused of "political grandstanding" after he said Tuesday that his country would recognize Palestinian statehood if Israel did not take ambiguously defined steps to end its war on Gaza—conditions that were promptly dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Today, as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the U.K. will recognize the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September, unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a cease-fire, and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution," Starmer said during a press conference.
"This includes allowing the U.N. to restart the supply of aid and making clear that there will be no annexations in the West Bank," the prime minister continued, adding that "the terrorists of Hamas... must immediately release all of the hostages, sign up to a cease-fire, disarm, and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza."
Member of Scottish Parliament Scott Greer (Scottish Greens-West Scotland) responded to Tuesday's announcement on social media, saying, "Starmer wouldn't threaten to withdraw U.K. recognition of Israel, but he's made recognition of Palestinian statehood conditional on the actions of their genocidal oppressor?"
"Another profoundly unjust act from a Labour government thoroughly complicit in Israel's crimes," Greer added.
British attorney and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu asserted that "Keir Starmer knows his time is up and pivots to save his career but it's too late."
"By placing a condition on recognizing Palestine this declaration is performative and disingenuous because before September he can claim Israel has substantively complied with the condition," she added.
Leftist politician and Accountability Archive co-founder Philip Proudfoot argued on social media that "decent" Members of Parliament "need to table a no-confidence motion in Starmer now."
"He has just used the recognition of Palestine as a bargaining chip in exchange for Israel following its BASIC LEGAL OBLIGATIONS," he added. "This is one of the lowest political acts in living memory."
Media critic Sana Saeed said on social media, "Using Palestinian life and future as a bargaining chip and threat to Israel—not a surprise from kid starver Keir Starmer."
Journalist Sangita Myska argued that "rather than threatening the gesture politics of recognizing a Palestinian state (that may never happen)," Starmer should expel Israel's ambassador to the U.K., impose "full trade sanctions" and a "full arms embargo," and end alleged Royal Air Force surveillance flights over Gaza.
Political analyst Bushra Shaikh accused Starmer of "political grandstanding" and "speaking from both sides of his mouth."
Starmer's announcement followed a Monday meeting in Turnberry, Scotland with U.S. President Donald Trump, who signaled that he would not object to U.K. recognition of Palestine.
However, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce called Starmer's announcement "a slap in the face for the victims of October 7," a reference to the Hamas-led attack of 2023.
While the United States remains Israel's staunchest supporter and enabler—providing billions of dollars in annual armed aid and diplomatic cover—Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have all expressed concerns over mounting starvation deaths in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the U.N.-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned that a "worst-case" famine scenario is developing in Gaza, where health officials say at least 147 Palestinians, including at least 88 children, have died from malnutrition since Israel launched its obliteration and siege of the enclave following the October 2023 attack.
Israel—which imposed a "complete siege" on Gaza following that attack—has severely limited the amount of humanitarian aid that can enter the strip. According to U.N. officials, Israel Defense Forces troops have killed more than 1,000 aid-seeking civilians at distribution points run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. IDF troops have said they were ordered to shoot live bullets and artillery shells at aid seekers.
Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and weaponized starvation—responded to the U.K. prime minister's ultimatum in a social media post stating, "Starmer rewards Hamas' monstrous terrorism and punishes its victims."
"A jihadist state on Israel's border TODAY will threaten Britain TOMORROW," Netanyahu said. "Appeasement towards jihadist terrorists always fails. It will fail you too. It will not happen."
The U.K. played a critical role in the foundation of the modern state of Israel, allowing Jewish colonization of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine under condition that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," who made up more than 90% of the population.
Seeing that Jewish immigrants returning to their ancestral homeland were usurping the indigenous Arabs of Palestine, the British subsequently prohibited further Zionist colonization. This sparked a nearly decadelong wave of terrorism and other attacks against the British occupiers that ultimately resulted in the U.K. abandoning Palestine and the establishment of Israel under the authority of the United Nations—an outcome achieved by the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs.
On the topic of annexing the West Bank, earlier this month, all 15 Israeli government ministers representing Netanyahu's Likud party recommended the move, citing support from Trump. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found last year that Israel's occupation of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, is an illegal form of apartheid.
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country would announce its formal recognition of Palestinian statehood during September's U.N. General Assembly in New York. France is set to become the first Group of Seven nation to recognize Palestine, which is currently officially acknowledged by approximately 150 of the 193 U.N. member states.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz subsequently threatened "severe consequences" for nations that recognize Palestine.
Starmer's announcement came on the same day that the Gaza Health Ministry said that the death toll from Israel's 662-day assault and siege on Gaza—which is the subject of a South Africa-led genocide case at the ICJ—topped 60,000. However, multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet have concluded that Gaza officials' casualty tallies are likely significant undercounts.