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U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks during the Summit for Democracy in the South Court Auditorium at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Wednesday, March 29, 2023.
The Biden administration opened its second Summit for Democracy this week with a panel featuring India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. As the leaders of their countries, both have pursued similar forms of exclusionary nationalism.
Indeed, both Modi and Netanyahu were—as they spoke—facing political crises at home in response to their attempts to permanently sideline democratic opposition.
This was a seemingly discordant note with which to begin a democracy conference. Even so, it is very much in keeping with what the Biden administration means when it says that the United States is fighting a global battle for democracy against autocracy. Understanding the counterintuitive meaning of Biden’s slogan is important both to see why this framing is so powerful among American leaders and why it is so dangerous to the health of global democracy.
The administration’s interpretation is best captured in its 2022 National Security Strategy:
The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision [of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world] is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy. It is their behavior that poses a challenge to international peace and stability—especially waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order. Many non-democracies join the world’s democracies in forswearing these behaviors. Unfortunately, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) do not.
The salient division in the world, then, is not between democracies and autocracies but between countries that support the existing international order and the two autocracies—China and Russia—that are seeking to reshape it in illiberal ways.
But this raises some awkward questions:
One: Which side are autocratic U.S. allies on if, like Saudi Arabia and UAE, they wage wars of aggression, undermine the democratic political processes of other countries, and use technology for repression?
Two: Which side are democratic countries on if they support China’s efforts to reshape the international order? This is quite common, because many of the things that China does to “tilt the global playing field to its benefit” are things that poor countries—democratic or not—must do if they are to achieve economic development.
Three: Which side is the U.S. on? Because the U.S. violates the rules-based order and engages in coercion on a regular basis. Leaving aside a long list of examples under earlier presidents and looking only at the Biden administration, the U.S. is currently incapacitating the world trade dispute resolution system; supporting Russia’s argument that it can exempt itself from any economic agreement (in this case, throttling Ukraine’s trade) merely by invoking national security; building a comprehensive blockade on Chinese businesses’ access to certain advanced technologies; seeking to destroy China’s most successful private multinational company, Huawei; and maintaining an extraterritorial sanctions regime that has done terrible damage to Iran’s economy.
The United States welcomes as client states outright autocracies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and deteriorating democracies like India, Israel, and Italy in order to turn back the huge threat that administration officials think a powerful China poses to the principle of democracy itself.
So the particular list of allegations against Russia and China, which does not apply equally to both countries, also fails to clearly distinguish the “democracy” team from the “autocracy” team. But the Biden administration has a deeper rationale in mind. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Ultimately the United States welcomes as client states outright autocracies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and deteriorating democracies like India, Israel, and Italy in order to turn back the huge threat that administration officials think a powerful China poses to the principle of democracy itself.
What is the nature of that threat? Often the administration accuses China of exporting its authoritarian model in the form of surveillance technology—technology that companies in the U.S. and allied states also sell. Or they highlight China’s campaign to change “democratic norms” at the United Nations. For example, China has sought to elevate collective rights, such as the right to economic development, to the same level as individual rights.
Members of the Biden administration have argued that such a goal would dilute individual rights and empower autocratic states to speak in the name of their people. This perspective, however, is not shared by the overwhelming majority of democratic developing countries. They stand on this issue and many others alongside their authoritarian counterparts, against the opposition of the rich democratic countries. In U.S. political culture, the interests of wealthy countries are often represented as the interests of democratic countries.
Beijing also rejects the “universal values” that the U.S. champions and seeks respect for “the diversity of civilizations,” including those that do not recognize liberal democratic rights and freedoms. The Biden administration has a point here—China does seek to overturn the rhetorical dominance that liberal values have enjoyed in recent decades—but the presence of numerous autocrats and aspiring autocrats in U.S.-led coalitions is eloquent proof that liberal rhetoric does little to restrain authoritarians.
Finally, Biden has made the point that if Chinese authoritarianism is stable and prosperous while U.S. democracy is dysfunctional and stagnant, democracy will lose its appeal around the world. But it is hard to find examples of this happening in practice. China’s recent history of Party-state rule sets it apart from most other countries, making it unpersuasive as a model. And third countries are perfectly capable of valuing partnership with China without losing faith in democracy. In a 2022 survey of African leaders, China was preferred over the United States (46% to 9%) as a partner on infrastructure development; yet the U.S. was chosen over China (32% to 1%) when it comes to cooperation around governance and the rule of law.
The idea that a popularity contest between two powerful countries is what determines the choice of political regime in other countries is, in any case, both implausible and insulting.
Why, then, is the idea that China poses a potentially existential threat to democracy so widespread in Washington? Because over the last two decades, the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism (“free markets and free individuals”)—which underwrote the narrow concept of democracy that drove the Third Wave of democratization and supplied the intellectual foundations for the U.S. political elite in recent decades—has disintegrated at home and abroad.
This ideology’s loss of legitimacy is a global phenomenon, but in Washington it was experienced as the outcome of a series of increasingly disastrous setbacks for U.S. economic and military aspirations, starting with the dotcom crash and 9/11, ramifying through the failures of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Iraq War, and the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, and culminating in the 2008 global financial crisis and the Great Recession.
The sense of crisis only grew over the following decade as previously marginalized political currents represented by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suddenly posed a serious challenge to the political status quo in the United States.
For mainstream American political leaders, the three essential parts of the post-Cold War global system—U.S. military hegemony, free market globalization, and a specifically neoliberal vision of democracy and human rights—were inseparably interwoven
For mainstream American political leaders, the three essential parts of the post-Cold War global system—U.S. military hegemony, free market globalization, and a specifically neoliberal vision of democracy and human rights—were inseparably interwoven. Now referred to in Washington as the “rules-based international order,” a challenge to any part of the package is considered an attack on the whole, and American leaders are particularly sensitive to such challenges given the fragility of the whole system.
Today’s China, though a product of that very system, was also the most prominent country to reject liberal democracy and U.S. hegemony. And in the years since 2008, it has been a step or two ahead of other countries—in some ways constructive and in some horrifying—as every country moves beyond the system. So even though China has been little involved in the specific U.S. failures of the last two decades, it nonetheless stands in as a symbol of all the setbacks that U.S. power and ideology have faced.
Though China’s success within the “rules-based international order” has given it a major stake in sustaining and shoring up significant parts of the system, that success has also made China far more powerful than more antagonistic countries like Russia or North Korea. Because Washington sees China as both hostile and powerful, the image of a menacing China offers a shared focus for U.S. leaders that could overcome the debilitating partisan divisions afflicting the country’s governance—a point that Biden has made many times.
So it’s true that the Biden administration does not see the world as divided between democracies and autocracies. But it does see the world as divided between democracy in the abstract—understood to be the same as U.S. military and economic power and the alliances supporting it—and autocracy in the abstract, represented by the only peer competitor facing the United States, China.
This emerging consensus in Washington is driven by insecurity and defensiveness rather than a serious analysis of the real forces endangering democracy around the world. As such, U.S. leaders have neglected the single most important question: is international conflict and geopolitical bloc formation likely to nourish democracy—or will it strengthen in every country the most threatening authoritarian political currents, namely militarism, nationalism, and nativism?
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The Biden administration opened its second Summit for Democracy this week with a panel featuring India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. As the leaders of their countries, both have pursued similar forms of exclusionary nationalism.
Indeed, both Modi and Netanyahu were—as they spoke—facing political crises at home in response to their attempts to permanently sideline democratic opposition.
This was a seemingly discordant note with which to begin a democracy conference. Even so, it is very much in keeping with what the Biden administration means when it says that the United States is fighting a global battle for democracy against autocracy. Understanding the counterintuitive meaning of Biden’s slogan is important both to see why this framing is so powerful among American leaders and why it is so dangerous to the health of global democracy.
The administration’s interpretation is best captured in its 2022 National Security Strategy:
The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision [of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world] is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy. It is their behavior that poses a challenge to international peace and stability—especially waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order. Many non-democracies join the world’s democracies in forswearing these behaviors. Unfortunately, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) do not.
The salient division in the world, then, is not between democracies and autocracies but between countries that support the existing international order and the two autocracies—China and Russia—that are seeking to reshape it in illiberal ways.
But this raises some awkward questions:
One: Which side are autocratic U.S. allies on if, like Saudi Arabia and UAE, they wage wars of aggression, undermine the democratic political processes of other countries, and use technology for repression?
Two: Which side are democratic countries on if they support China’s efforts to reshape the international order? This is quite common, because many of the things that China does to “tilt the global playing field to its benefit” are things that poor countries—democratic or not—must do if they are to achieve economic development.
Three: Which side is the U.S. on? Because the U.S. violates the rules-based order and engages in coercion on a regular basis. Leaving aside a long list of examples under earlier presidents and looking only at the Biden administration, the U.S. is currently incapacitating the world trade dispute resolution system; supporting Russia’s argument that it can exempt itself from any economic agreement (in this case, throttling Ukraine’s trade) merely by invoking national security; building a comprehensive blockade on Chinese businesses’ access to certain advanced technologies; seeking to destroy China’s most successful private multinational company, Huawei; and maintaining an extraterritorial sanctions regime that has done terrible damage to Iran’s economy.
The United States welcomes as client states outright autocracies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and deteriorating democracies like India, Israel, and Italy in order to turn back the huge threat that administration officials think a powerful China poses to the principle of democracy itself.
So the particular list of allegations against Russia and China, which does not apply equally to both countries, also fails to clearly distinguish the “democracy” team from the “autocracy” team. But the Biden administration has a deeper rationale in mind. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Ultimately the United States welcomes as client states outright autocracies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and deteriorating democracies like India, Israel, and Italy in order to turn back the huge threat that administration officials think a powerful China poses to the principle of democracy itself.
What is the nature of that threat? Often the administration accuses China of exporting its authoritarian model in the form of surveillance technology—technology that companies in the U.S. and allied states also sell. Or they highlight China’s campaign to change “democratic norms” at the United Nations. For example, China has sought to elevate collective rights, such as the right to economic development, to the same level as individual rights.
Members of the Biden administration have argued that such a goal would dilute individual rights and empower autocratic states to speak in the name of their people. This perspective, however, is not shared by the overwhelming majority of democratic developing countries. They stand on this issue and many others alongside their authoritarian counterparts, against the opposition of the rich democratic countries. In U.S. political culture, the interests of wealthy countries are often represented as the interests of democratic countries.
Beijing also rejects the “universal values” that the U.S. champions and seeks respect for “the diversity of civilizations,” including those that do not recognize liberal democratic rights and freedoms. The Biden administration has a point here—China does seek to overturn the rhetorical dominance that liberal values have enjoyed in recent decades—but the presence of numerous autocrats and aspiring autocrats in U.S.-led coalitions is eloquent proof that liberal rhetoric does little to restrain authoritarians.
Finally, Biden has made the point that if Chinese authoritarianism is stable and prosperous while U.S. democracy is dysfunctional and stagnant, democracy will lose its appeal around the world. But it is hard to find examples of this happening in practice. China’s recent history of Party-state rule sets it apart from most other countries, making it unpersuasive as a model. And third countries are perfectly capable of valuing partnership with China without losing faith in democracy. In a 2022 survey of African leaders, China was preferred over the United States (46% to 9%) as a partner on infrastructure development; yet the U.S. was chosen over China (32% to 1%) when it comes to cooperation around governance and the rule of law.
The idea that a popularity contest between two powerful countries is what determines the choice of political regime in other countries is, in any case, both implausible and insulting.
Why, then, is the idea that China poses a potentially existential threat to democracy so widespread in Washington? Because over the last two decades, the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism (“free markets and free individuals”)—which underwrote the narrow concept of democracy that drove the Third Wave of democratization and supplied the intellectual foundations for the U.S. political elite in recent decades—has disintegrated at home and abroad.
This ideology’s loss of legitimacy is a global phenomenon, but in Washington it was experienced as the outcome of a series of increasingly disastrous setbacks for U.S. economic and military aspirations, starting with the dotcom crash and 9/11, ramifying through the failures of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Iraq War, and the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, and culminating in the 2008 global financial crisis and the Great Recession.
The sense of crisis only grew over the following decade as previously marginalized political currents represented by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suddenly posed a serious challenge to the political status quo in the United States.
For mainstream American political leaders, the three essential parts of the post-Cold War global system—U.S. military hegemony, free market globalization, and a specifically neoliberal vision of democracy and human rights—were inseparably interwoven
For mainstream American political leaders, the three essential parts of the post-Cold War global system—U.S. military hegemony, free market globalization, and a specifically neoliberal vision of democracy and human rights—were inseparably interwoven. Now referred to in Washington as the “rules-based international order,” a challenge to any part of the package is considered an attack on the whole, and American leaders are particularly sensitive to such challenges given the fragility of the whole system.
Today’s China, though a product of that very system, was also the most prominent country to reject liberal democracy and U.S. hegemony. And in the years since 2008, it has been a step or two ahead of other countries—in some ways constructive and in some horrifying—as every country moves beyond the system. So even though China has been little involved in the specific U.S. failures of the last two decades, it nonetheless stands in as a symbol of all the setbacks that U.S. power and ideology have faced.
Though China’s success within the “rules-based international order” has given it a major stake in sustaining and shoring up significant parts of the system, that success has also made China far more powerful than more antagonistic countries like Russia or North Korea. Because Washington sees China as both hostile and powerful, the image of a menacing China offers a shared focus for U.S. leaders that could overcome the debilitating partisan divisions afflicting the country’s governance—a point that Biden has made many times.
So it’s true that the Biden administration does not see the world as divided between democracies and autocracies. But it does see the world as divided between democracy in the abstract—understood to be the same as U.S. military and economic power and the alliances supporting it—and autocracy in the abstract, represented by the only peer competitor facing the United States, China.
This emerging consensus in Washington is driven by insecurity and defensiveness rather than a serious analysis of the real forces endangering democracy around the world. As such, U.S. leaders have neglected the single most important question: is international conflict and geopolitical bloc formation likely to nourish democracy—or will it strengthen in every country the most threatening authoritarian political currents, namely militarism, nationalism, and nativism?
The Biden administration opened its second Summit for Democracy this week with a panel featuring India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. As the leaders of their countries, both have pursued similar forms of exclusionary nationalism.
Indeed, both Modi and Netanyahu were—as they spoke—facing political crises at home in response to their attempts to permanently sideline democratic opposition.
This was a seemingly discordant note with which to begin a democracy conference. Even so, it is very much in keeping with what the Biden administration means when it says that the United States is fighting a global battle for democracy against autocracy. Understanding the counterintuitive meaning of Biden’s slogan is important both to see why this framing is so powerful among American leaders and why it is so dangerous to the health of global democracy.
The administration’s interpretation is best captured in its 2022 National Security Strategy:
The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision [of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world] is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy. It is their behavior that poses a challenge to international peace and stability—especially waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order. Many non-democracies join the world’s democracies in forswearing these behaviors. Unfortunately, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) do not.
The salient division in the world, then, is not between democracies and autocracies but between countries that support the existing international order and the two autocracies—China and Russia—that are seeking to reshape it in illiberal ways.
But this raises some awkward questions:
One: Which side are autocratic U.S. allies on if, like Saudi Arabia and UAE, they wage wars of aggression, undermine the democratic political processes of other countries, and use technology for repression?
Two: Which side are democratic countries on if they support China’s efforts to reshape the international order? This is quite common, because many of the things that China does to “tilt the global playing field to its benefit” are things that poor countries—democratic or not—must do if they are to achieve economic development.
Three: Which side is the U.S. on? Because the U.S. violates the rules-based order and engages in coercion on a regular basis. Leaving aside a long list of examples under earlier presidents and looking only at the Biden administration, the U.S. is currently incapacitating the world trade dispute resolution system; supporting Russia’s argument that it can exempt itself from any economic agreement (in this case, throttling Ukraine’s trade) merely by invoking national security; building a comprehensive blockade on Chinese businesses’ access to certain advanced technologies; seeking to destroy China’s most successful private multinational company, Huawei; and maintaining an extraterritorial sanctions regime that has done terrible damage to Iran’s economy.
The United States welcomes as client states outright autocracies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and deteriorating democracies like India, Israel, and Italy in order to turn back the huge threat that administration officials think a powerful China poses to the principle of democracy itself.
So the particular list of allegations against Russia and China, which does not apply equally to both countries, also fails to clearly distinguish the “democracy” team from the “autocracy” team. But the Biden administration has a deeper rationale in mind. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Ultimately the United States welcomes as client states outright autocracies like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and deteriorating democracies like India, Israel, and Italy in order to turn back the huge threat that administration officials think a powerful China poses to the principle of democracy itself.
What is the nature of that threat? Often the administration accuses China of exporting its authoritarian model in the form of surveillance technology—technology that companies in the U.S. and allied states also sell. Or they highlight China’s campaign to change “democratic norms” at the United Nations. For example, China has sought to elevate collective rights, such as the right to economic development, to the same level as individual rights.
Members of the Biden administration have argued that such a goal would dilute individual rights and empower autocratic states to speak in the name of their people. This perspective, however, is not shared by the overwhelming majority of democratic developing countries. They stand on this issue and many others alongside their authoritarian counterparts, against the opposition of the rich democratic countries. In U.S. political culture, the interests of wealthy countries are often represented as the interests of democratic countries.
Beijing also rejects the “universal values” that the U.S. champions and seeks respect for “the diversity of civilizations,” including those that do not recognize liberal democratic rights and freedoms. The Biden administration has a point here—China does seek to overturn the rhetorical dominance that liberal values have enjoyed in recent decades—but the presence of numerous autocrats and aspiring autocrats in U.S.-led coalitions is eloquent proof that liberal rhetoric does little to restrain authoritarians.
Finally, Biden has made the point that if Chinese authoritarianism is stable and prosperous while U.S. democracy is dysfunctional and stagnant, democracy will lose its appeal around the world. But it is hard to find examples of this happening in practice. China’s recent history of Party-state rule sets it apart from most other countries, making it unpersuasive as a model. And third countries are perfectly capable of valuing partnership with China without losing faith in democracy. In a 2022 survey of African leaders, China was preferred over the United States (46% to 9%) as a partner on infrastructure development; yet the U.S. was chosen over China (32% to 1%) when it comes to cooperation around governance and the rule of law.
The idea that a popularity contest between two powerful countries is what determines the choice of political regime in other countries is, in any case, both implausible and insulting.
Why, then, is the idea that China poses a potentially existential threat to democracy so widespread in Washington? Because over the last two decades, the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism (“free markets and free individuals”)—which underwrote the narrow concept of democracy that drove the Third Wave of democratization and supplied the intellectual foundations for the U.S. political elite in recent decades—has disintegrated at home and abroad.
This ideology’s loss of legitimacy is a global phenomenon, but in Washington it was experienced as the outcome of a series of increasingly disastrous setbacks for U.S. economic and military aspirations, starting with the dotcom crash and 9/11, ramifying through the failures of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Iraq War, and the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, and culminating in the 2008 global financial crisis and the Great Recession.
The sense of crisis only grew over the following decade as previously marginalized political currents represented by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suddenly posed a serious challenge to the political status quo in the United States.
For mainstream American political leaders, the three essential parts of the post-Cold War global system—U.S. military hegemony, free market globalization, and a specifically neoliberal vision of democracy and human rights—were inseparably interwoven
For mainstream American political leaders, the three essential parts of the post-Cold War global system—U.S. military hegemony, free market globalization, and a specifically neoliberal vision of democracy and human rights—were inseparably interwoven. Now referred to in Washington as the “rules-based international order,” a challenge to any part of the package is considered an attack on the whole, and American leaders are particularly sensitive to such challenges given the fragility of the whole system.
Today’s China, though a product of that very system, was also the most prominent country to reject liberal democracy and U.S. hegemony. And in the years since 2008, it has been a step or two ahead of other countries—in some ways constructive and in some horrifying—as every country moves beyond the system. So even though China has been little involved in the specific U.S. failures of the last two decades, it nonetheless stands in as a symbol of all the setbacks that U.S. power and ideology have faced.
Though China’s success within the “rules-based international order” has given it a major stake in sustaining and shoring up significant parts of the system, that success has also made China far more powerful than more antagonistic countries like Russia or North Korea. Because Washington sees China as both hostile and powerful, the image of a menacing China offers a shared focus for U.S. leaders that could overcome the debilitating partisan divisions afflicting the country’s governance—a point that Biden has made many times.
So it’s true that the Biden administration does not see the world as divided between democracies and autocracies. But it does see the world as divided between democracy in the abstract—understood to be the same as U.S. military and economic power and the alliances supporting it—and autocracy in the abstract, represented by the only peer competitor facing the United States, China.
This emerging consensus in Washington is driven by insecurity and defensiveness rather than a serious analysis of the real forces endangering democracy around the world. As such, U.S. leaders have neglected the single most important question: is international conflict and geopolitical bloc formation likely to nourish democracy—or will it strengthen in every country the most threatening authoritarian political currents, namely militarism, nationalism, and nativism?
Italian labor unions led a massive 24-hour general strike on Monday to protest Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, with estimates of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallying in dozens of cities across Italy.
Protesters took to squares, streets, transport hubs, ports, university campuses, and other spaces in more than 75 cities and towns, rallying under the call to "Block Everything." Places including schools, train stations, and retail stores were shut for the day.
"The strike is called in response to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, the blockade of humanitarian aid by the Israeli army, and the threats directed against the... Global Sumud Flotilla, which has on board Italian workers and trade unionists committed to bringing food and basic necessities to the Palestinian population," explained Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), a grassroots union confederation known for its militant stance on labor and political issues.
In Rome, tens of thousands of Palestine defenders rallied at the Termini rail station, Italy's largest, with many of the demonstrators occupying the building.
While protest activities snarled traffic in some parts of the Italian capital, many Roman motorists showed solidarity with the demonstrators by honking their horns and raising their fists into the air.
Watch: Pro-Gaza protesters who blocked a highway near Rome were met with visible solidarity from drivers. Regional news coverage of the paralyzed Central Station showed only people expressing support for the protest.Source: Paolo Mossetti on X (@paolomossetti)
[image or embed]
— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) September 22, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Milan saw an estimated 50,000 people turn out to locations including the central rail station, where some protesters damaged property and clashed with police, who said 10 people were arrested and 60 officers were injured.
“If we don’t block what Israel is doing, if we don’t block trade, the distribution of weapons and everything else with Israel, we will not ever achieve anything,” protester Walter Montagnoli, who is the Base Unitary Confederation's (CUB) national secretary, told The Associated Press at a march in Milan.
In Bologna—home to the world's oldest continuously operating university—students occupied lecture halls and thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, including the Tangenziale, the ring highway around the city, where police attacked them with water cannons and tear gas.
Dockworkers and other demonstrators marched and blocked ports in cities including Genoa, Trieste, and Livorno.
Thousands of protesters also blocked the main train station in Naples.
Source: Potere al Popolo via X (@potere_alpopolo)
[image or embed]
— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) September 22, 2025 at 11:06 AM
In the Adriatic seaside resort of Termoli, hundreds of student-led Palestine defenders rallied in St. Anthony's Square and, with Mayor Nicola Balice's permission, draped a Palestinian flag from the façade of City Hall.
"Faced with such an important subject, the genocide in Palestine, we students... said this would be a nonpartisan demonstration because in the face of what is happening in the Gaza Strip—hospitals bombed, children killed every day—there can be no political ideology," said one Termoli protester. "We must all be united.”
Some participants in Monday's general strike pointed the finger at their own government.
"In the face of what is happening in Gaza you have to decide where you are," Italian General Confederation of Labor leader Maurizio Landini told La Stampa. "If you don’t tell the Israeli government that you have to stop and don't send them more weapons, but instead you keep sending them... you actually become complicit in what’s happening.”
While European nations including Ireland, Norway, Spain, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, Luxembourg, and Denmark have formally recognized Palestine or announced their intent to do so since October 2023, Italy has given no indication that it will follow suit. More than 150 of 193 United Nations member states have recognized Palestine.
Although increasingly critical of Israel's 718-day genocidal assault—which has left at least 241,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza—right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been accused of complicity in genocide for actions including presiding over arms sales to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meloni has rejected the ICC warrants and said Netanyahu would not be arrested if he enters Italy.
"Meloni should listen to the voice of those who are peacefully protesting and asking her to act, rather than curling up to Washington to protect her friend, the war criminal Netanyahu," Giuseppe Conte, who leads the independent progressive Five Star Movement, said Monday on social media. "Meloni should take a stand with the facts against those who have slaughtered 20,000 children, rather than limiting herself to saying, 'I do not agree.' And she should stop running away from the debate in Parliament."
As US President Donald Trump faces mounting accusations of authoritarian conduct, the Supreme Court's right-wing majority on Monday empowered him to proceed with firing a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to review a 90-year-old precedent that restricts executive power over independent agencies such as the FTC.
Trump in March fired the FTC's two Democratic commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, without cause. Slaughter fought back, and US District Judge Loren AliKhan allowed her to return to work while the case continued. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld that decision, but it was halted Monday by the nation's top court.
Monday's decision was unsigned, though the three liberals collectively dissented, led by Justice Elena Kagan. In addition to letting Trump move forward with ousting Slaughter, the majority agreed to reconsider the precedent established with Humphrey's Executor v. United States, a 1935 case that centered on whether the Federal Trade Commission Act unconstitutionally interfered with the executive power of the president.
In Humphrey's Executor, the high court found that Congress' removal protections for FTC members did not violate the separation of powers. Along with revisiting the precedent established by that landmark decision in December, the justices plan to weigh whether a federal court may prevent a person's removal from public office.
The court's stay allowing Trump to fire Slaughter was granted as part of the court's emergency process, or shadow docket. In a short but scathing dissent, Kagan noted that it is part of a recent trend: "Earlier this year, the same majority, by the same mechanism, permitted the president to fire without cause members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merits Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission."
"I dissented from the majority's prior stay orders, and today do so again. Under existing law, what Congress said goes—as this court unanimously decided nearly a century ago," she wrote. In Humphrey's Executor, Kagan continued, "Congress, we held, may restrict the president's power to remove members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing 'quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial' functions, without violating the Constitution."
"So the president cannot, as he concededly did here, fire an FTC commissioner without any reason. To reach a different result requires reversing the rule stated in Humphrey's: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress' judgment about agency design," she argued. "The majority may be raring to take that action, as its grant of certiorari before judgment suggests. But until the deed is done, Humphrey's controls, and prevents the majority from giving the president the unlimited removal power Congress denied him."
More broadly, Kagan declared that "our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the president, and thus to reshape the nation's separation of powers."
Kagan, of course, is correct that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Humphrey's Executor and allow the president to fire leaders of any independent agency (other than the Fed—maybe?!). She's also right to bemoan the fact that SCOTUS effectively overruled Humphrey's on the shadow docket already.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the anti-monopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, slammed the court in a Monday statement.
"Today, in a one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court authorized President Trump's illegal firing of Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and his ongoing destruction of the independent, bipartisan Federal Trade Commission," Vaheesan said.
"As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent, Commissioner Slaughter was fired without cause and is clearly entitled to her position under the FTC Act and controlling Supreme Court precedent," he added. "The court could override Congress' decision to create an independent FTC on specious constitutional grounds but until it takes that step Commissioner Slaughter has a right to her job.”
While the justices agreed to take Slaughter's case, they turned away petitions from two ousted Democratic appointees referenced by Kagan: Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board. According to SCOTUSblog: "The court did not provide any explanation for its decision not to take up Harris' and Wilcox's cases at this time. They will continue to move forward in the lower courts."
The New York Times noted that "the justices are separately considering the Trump administration’s request to remove Lisa Cook as a Federal Reserve governor. The Supreme Court has yet to act, but has suggested that the central bank may be insulated from presidential meddling under the law."
However, as Law Dork's Chris Geidner highlighted on social media, the second question the justices will consider in the Slaughter case, regarding courts preventing removals from public office, "would have implications even for the 'Fed carveout' exception that the court suggested exists."
US Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling for an investigation into the Department of Housing and Urban Development after several whistleblowers reported that Trump appointees have gutted enforcement of the decades-old law banning housing discrimination.
A New York Times report published Monday, quotes "half a dozen current and former employees of HUD’s fair housing office" who "said that the Trump political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs" enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act "which involve investigating and prosecuting landlords, real estate agents, lenders and others who discriminate based on race, religion, gender, family status or disability."
In a video posted to social media, Warren (D-Mass.) explained that “if you’re a mom protecting her kids from living with an abusive father or if you’re getting denied a mortgage because of the color of your skin, you have civil rights protection under US law. But the Trump administration has been systematically destroying these federal protections for renters and homeowners.”
According to the Times, when President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk, launched its crusade to dismantle large parts of the federal government at the start of Trump's second term earlier this year, the Office of Fair Housing (OFH) had its staff cut by 65% through layoffs and reassignments, with the number of employees dropping from 31 to 11. Just six of the remaining staff now work on fair housing cases.
The number of discrimination charges pursued by the office has plummeted since Trump took office. In most years, it has 35. During Trump's second term, the office has pursued just four. Meanwhile, it's obtained just $200,000 total in legal settlements after previously obtaining anywhere from $4 million to $8 million per year.
Emails and memos obtained by the Times show a pattern of Trump appointees obstructing investigations:
In one email, a Trump appointee... described decades of housing discrimination cases as “artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary.”
In another, a career supervisor in the department’s [OFH] objected to lawyers being reassigned to other offices; the supervisor was fired six days later for insubordination.
In a third, the office’s director of enforcement warned that Trump appointees were using gag orders and intimidation to block discrimination cases from moving forward. The urgent message was sent to a US senator, who is referring it to the department’s acting inspector general for investigation.
Several lawyers said they have been restricted from using past cases in enforcement and communicating with certain clients without approval from Trump's appointees.
A memo also reportedly went out to employees informing them that documents “contrary to administration policy” would be thrown out, and that “tenuous theories of discrimination” would no longer be pursued.
Among those supposedly "tenuous" cases have been ones involving appraisal bias—the practice of undervaluing homes owned by Black families—zoning restrictions blocking housing for Black and Latino families, and cases related to discrimination against people over gender or gender expression.
The administration has also abandoned cases related to the racist practice of "redlining"—the decades-old practice of denying mortgages to minorities and others in minority neighborhoods—with memos from Trump appointees calling the concept "legally unsound."
The changes follow a sweeping set of executive orders from Trump during his first week in office, targeting "diversity equity, and inclusion" (DEI) programs. Employees at the Office of Fair Housing told the Times that Trump appointees had begun to describe much of the department's work as "an offshoot of DEI."
A HUD spokesperson, Kasey Lovett, told the Times that it was "patently false" to suggest that the administration was trying to weaken the Fair Housing Act. She pointed out that HUD was still handling approximately 4,100 cases this year, on par with the previous year. As the Times notes, "Lovett did not address, however, how many of the cases had been investigated or had resulted in legal action."
According to the Times:
Hundreds of pending fair housing cases were frozen, and some settlements revoked, even when accusations of discrimination had been substantiated, according to the interviews and the internal communications.
In one instance, a large homeowner’s association in Texas was found to have banned the use of housing vouchers by Black residents. That case had been referred to the Justice Department, but the referral was abruptly withdrawn by the new Trump appointees.
Four current staff members have provided the trove of documents to Warren, who announced Monday that she'd sent a request to Brian Harrison, HUD’s acting inspector general, to open an investigation into its handling of discrimination cases.
Warren said that the documents "show the extent of the Trump administration's attack on civil rights and show how the administration appears to be ignoring the law."
In a press release from the Democrats on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Warren, the ranking member, highlighted the particularly devastating impact staffing cuts have had on the enforcement of complaints under the Violence Against Women Act, which the Times says only two of the six lawyers remaining at HUD have experience with.
According to Warren, whistleblowers said the cuts were "placing survivors in greater danger of suffering additional trauma, physical violence, and even death."
Warren said that as a result of the hundreds of dropped cases, "Now people are asking, 'well, why would I file a case at all if nothing's going to happen?'"
Calling for an independent investigation, Warren said, "We wrote these laws to make this a fairer America, and now it's time to enforce those laws."