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Opinion
How Lack of Political Imagination Resulted in Trump Threatening to End a Civilization
We must be willing to say out loud that the Democratic Party as currently led is a huge part of the problem. The people running it have failed. They have names. Saying so isn’t radical. It’s honest.
Apr 09, 2026
I’ve been hearing from a lot of candidates and campaigns lately. This one is for them.
In 2015, I sold my food trucks to volunteer for Bernie Sanders. That turned into co-founding Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, then helping elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the US House of Representatives. I worked as her strategist and communications director for a few years after that. I’ve spent the better part of a decade pretty close to the center of the progressive movement. The following is what I learned.
Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton said Bernie Sanders’ policies were “fairy dust and rainbows.” The point wasn’t just that big things were hard. The point was that big things weren’t needed. The system was basically working. America was great. If you thought otherwise you weren’t serious, or you weren’t paying attention, or you were the kind of person who gets dismissed at Brookings as insufficiently realistic.
That was the consensus. Serious people. Credentialed people. New York Times columnists and think tank fellows and television regulars, all reading from the same hymnal. Don’t rock the boat. Take what the system offers. Be grateful.
That consensus didn’t protect us from Donald Trump. It elected him. Twice.
Because when someone came along and said the system is rigged and I’ll burn it down, 80 million people said, "Finally." They were wrong about the messenger. They were completely right about the problem. The “things are actually pretty good” position was the most destabilizing thing anyone could have said. That realism was actually radicalism. And we’re living in the results.
Progressive politics has the same capacity problem that the rest of the country does. We don’t have enough aligned people in power, and we can’t fix that one seat at a time any more than we can fix the housing crisis one subsidy at a time.
The market doesn’t work for the things people actually need to live. Not anymore. Maybe it once did. It doesn’t now and the evidence is everywhere.
We spend $6 trillion a year on healthcare. More than any country on earth, by a lot, and we rank last among wealthy nations in outcomes. Last. Tens of millions of people are one diagnosis away from financial ruin. Rural hospitals are closing. The market has had decades to fix this. It hasn’t fixed it. It has extracted wealth from it while delivering less.
Or consider the mRNA vaccines. The federal government funded the foundational research for 35 years. When COVID hit, the government paid Moderna and Pfizer billions more to finish the job and purchase the doses. Moderna and Pfizer then walked away with over $100 billion in combined revenue. The public got the bill twice, once as taxpayers funding the research, once as patients paying the prices, and the companies kept the patents.
The same pattern shows up in housing. We have been short on housing for decades. The market hasn’t built our way out of it. Cities that people actually want to live in are unaffordable. But so are the rural areas. I live in Lenoir City, Tennessee. Population about 11,000. Here a studio apartment runs you a thousand dollars a month.
And what did our nominee offer? Kamala Harris proposed a $25,000 grant for first-time home buyers. I understand the instinct. But the issue is supply. You pump $25,000 into a market that isn’t building enough homes then prices go up. The money flows straight through the buyer and into the seller or the landlord and the developer, and nothing new gets built. It’s the same story as healthcare. We keep pouring money into broken systems I assume because it seems like a logical solution. But it only makes the problem worse.
Too many people think of American problems as spending problems. But if I walked into my local grocery store and wanted 15,000 pounds of beef, it wouldn’t matter how much money I had. You can’t buy what doesn’t exist. We don’t have enough housing. We don’t have enough doctors. We don’t have enough childcare slots. Pumping money into markets that aren’t producing those things doesn’t produce them. It inflates the price of whatever scraps are left. You fix a capacity problem by building and training, not injecting more cash.
We built our way out of the Depression not just by writing checks but by doing it ourselves. The government built water and irrigation infrastructure that turned the Central Valley into the food supply for half the country. It strung electrical wire to farms and small towns across the rural South and Midwest that private utilities had written off as unprofitable. We built the industrial capacity that became the Arsenal of Democracy. That was public investment. That was us deciding some things are too important to leave to the market.
We don’t believe that anymore. Or rather, our leaders don’t. Those few that do get stopped before they can do anything about it.
AOC won. She scared people badly enough that they spent millions trying to destroy her. She had the right diagnosis. She had the right policies. She had the courage. The things she ran on didn’t happen. Not because she wasn’t good enough. Because she walked in alone. A seat won in isolation gets absorbed. The machinery of this system is designed to absorb individual attacks.
Progressive politics has the same capacity problem that the rest of the country does. We don’t have enough aligned people in power, and we can’t fix that one seat at a time any more than we can fix the housing crisis one subsidy at a time.
Which brings me to where we are. An American president is suggesting on a Tuesday night that Iran should cease to exist. Not metaphorically. And the people who are supposed to be the opposition are writing letters. That is where we end up when the people in charge have no affirmative vision, no plan to build anything, and no team capable of fighting for it even if they did.
So when people ask me about candidates, I’m not asking whether they have the right positions. Most of the good ones do. I’m asking whether they understand what those positions are actually up against. Whether they’re ready to fight it.
I’m looking for bold, specific, public policy positions. Not values. Policies. Medicare for All. Public ownership of AI infrastructure. A housing program that builds and owns, not just subsidizes. Drug pricing reform that takes back the patents on publicly-funded research so the public owns what the public paid for. You would be amazed how many candidates won’t put this out publicly.
We must be willing to say out loud that the Democratic Party as currently led is the problem. The people running it have failed. They have names. Saying so isn’t radical. It’s honest.
An understanding that our institutions have been captured. The FEC. The FDA. The SEC. The DOJ. The Supreme Court. Not neutral referees. A coordinated fifty-year project to make progressive governance legally impossible. A candidate who won’t say that isn’t ready for what’s coming.
I’m looking for bold, specific, public policy positions. Not values. Policies.
A willingness to take risks inside the party. Not fighting Republicans on television, which costs nothing. Backing primary challengers against Democratic incumbents who are blocking the agenda. Making it more dangerous to oppose you than to support you. Almost nobody will do this.
All of those are necessary. None of them are enough.
A commitment to building a team before they win. Not after. Campaigning alongside candidates in other states and districts. Endorsing across geographies. Treating their race as part of something bigger than their district. This has never been done at scale on our side. It’s the thing that would change everything.
People resist this one the most, so let me explain why it matters.
A candidate’s victory, whether it’s a House seat or a Senate seat, can only accomplish things within the framework of how big and powerful their team is, how aligned that team is, and whether they built it before they walked into the building. It has to happen before, not after, for two reasons. First, because building it before is what proves you’re willing to put skin in the game and take real risks. Anyone can talk about solidarity after they’ve won. Doing it before, when it costs you something, is what makes it mean anything. Second, because you cannot change who’s sitting at the table from inside the table. You have to build the power to change it from outside. That means committing to each other before any of you have a seat, when the only thing binding you together is the mission itself.
And it matters to voters. Candidates running on these ideas as individuals are just putting policies on a page. They’re giving speeches. When they show up with a team, when they’ve committed to each other before they’ve won anything, they’re showing voters they understand what’s standing in their way and they have a plan for taking it head on.
Nobody is coming to do this for us. It takes a team. People who said all of this out loud before they won.
Underneath all of it, public ownership as the mechanism. Not regulation. Not subsidy. Ownership. We did it before. We can do it again. When a technology has the power to transform society, it’s unwise to leave it in the hands of a tiny group of self-absorbed billionaires whose only goal is to maximize profit, who consistently show contempt for the rights and interests of their fellow Americans, and who aren’t accountable to anyone, especially with a federal government this weak. We don’t let private companies build nuclear weapons. We don’t let them decide when or how to use them. We don’t let them raise armies. We understand some things are too powerful to leave in private hands. AI is one of those things. It’s built off of thousands of years of human data and thought. It’s built off of major public investment. It’s built by us. It should be working for us. The only thing that’s got a single chance of ensuring that is if we own it. Just like Alaska gets dividends from its oil reserves, the American people should be getting dividends from their data and their investments.
Nobody is coming to do this for us. It takes a team. People who said all of this out loud before they won. Who committed to each other before they walked into Washington. Who understand that their victory only matters if the person running three states over wins too.
That team is what I’m building with A Fight Worth Having. Not candidates with good vibes. Candidates who’ve passed this filter. Who know what they’re up against. Who are ready to fight the right people, including the ones in their own party.
If you’ve been reading this and asking what do we do, this is what we do.
Go to AFightWorthHaving.com
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Ending Israel’s War on Peace
To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognized borders of June 4, 1967.
Apr 09, 2026
A two-week ceasefire has partially halted the Israel-US war on Iran. The war accomplished precisely nothing that a competent diplomat could not have achieved in an afternoon. The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and it is open again now, but with more Iranian control.
Meanwhile, the chaos continues. Israel is intent on blowing up the ceasefire, as this was Israel’s war from the start. Israel dazzled Trump with the prospect of a one-day decapitation strike that would put Trump in charge of Iran’s oil. Israel, in turn, was out for bigger prey: to bring down the Iranian regime and thereby become the regional hegemon of Western Asia.
The foundation of the ceasefire is Iran's 10-point plan, which Trump (perhaps unwittingly) called a "workable basis on which to negotiate." The plan makes sense, but it is a major climbdown for the US, and probably a redline for Israel. Among other points, the plan calls for an end to the wars raging in the Middle East, almost all of which have Israel at their root cause. The plan would also resolve the nuclear issue, essentially by going back to the JCPOA that Trump ripped up in 2018.
The Iran War, and the other wars raging across the Middle East, trace back to one core Israeli idea, that Israel will permanently and steadfastly oppose a sovereign Palestinian state and will topple any government in the Middle East that supports armed struggle for national sovereignty. It is crucial to note that the UN General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions, such as Resolution 37/43 (1982), affirming that political self-determination is so vital, that armed struggle in the quest for self-determination is legitimate. The UN was born, in part, out of the determination to end the centuries of European imperial domination over Africa and Asia. Of course, there would be no cause for armed struggle if Israel would accept a political solution, notably the two-state solution that has overwhelming support throughout the world.
The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it.
Netanyahu’s core goal may be summarized as Greater Israel. This means no Palestinian sovereignty, and no clear boundaries for Israel even beyond the boundary of historical Palestine under British rule after WWI. Zionist extremists like Netanyahu’s political allies, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich favor Israeli control over parts of Lebanon and Syria, as well as permanent control over all of what was British Palestine. America’s Christian Zionists, exemplified by the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and a strong voter base of Trump, speak of God’s promise to Israel of the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates. Crazy stuff, but these are real beliefs, nonetheless, and they are conveyed in the White House.
Israel’s strategy is therefore regime change in every country that resists Greater Israel, a plan already foreshadowed in the famous political document "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written by US Zionist neocons as a platform for Netanyahu’s new government in 1996. We’ve had constant wars in the Middle East since then to implement the Clean Break vision. This has included the war in Libya to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi, the wars in Lebanon, the war to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the war to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and now the war to topple the Iranian regime.
This is not to say that the US lacks its own grandiose ideas. Israel wants regional hegemony, this is not a secret. Netanyahu confirmed these ambitions in his recent remarks about Israel becoming “a regional power, and in certain fields a global power.” On the other hand, American officials dream of global hegemony. And Trump dreams of money. He craves the Iranian oil and repeatedly said so.
In any event, it’s clear that this war was Netanyahu’s creation. He and the Mossad chief came to Washington to sell Trump a bill of goods. It’s not hard. Trump was suckered, while everybody else had their doubts about Netanyahu’s claims of an easy one-day decapitation strike—essentially a replay of the US operation in Venezuela.
It’s pathetic to “listen in” on the White House discussion, as revealed by the New York Times. Netanyahu, a con man, presented rosy scenarios of regime change that US intelligence contradicted, yet Trump foolishly accepted. Trump and Netanyahu were cheered on by Christian Zionists (Hegseth), Jewish Zionists and real-estate developers (Kushner and Witkoff), a faith healer (Franklin Graham), and high-level sycophants (Rubio and Ratcliffe).
While Trump was telling the world that Iran was begging for a ceasefire, it was Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire.
Until Tuesday evening, it looked like Trump might lead the world blindly to World War III. The vulgarity and brutality of his public rhetoric was unmatched in US presidential history. Now we know that he was desperately seeking an off-ramp and using Pakistan for that purpose. While Trump was telling the world that Iran was begging for a ceasefire, it was Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire. The Pakistani leader delivered it.
The ceasefire is good, and the 10-point plan is good, even if perhaps Trump didn’t know what was in it when he said that it was a good basis for negotiation. Israel will, in any event, work overtime to break it, and has already started to do so, with carpet bombing of Beirut that is killing hundreds of civilians, and with other strikes. A permanent US-Iran agreement is the last thing that Netanyahu wants. That would end his dream of Greater Israel.
Yet there is a way to peace and that is for the US to face reality. Israel is the real “terror state,” waging perpetual war throughout the Middle East for a wholly indefensible reason—to have unchecked freedom to terrorize and rule over the Palestinian people and to expand its borders as Israel’s zealots see fit. To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognized borders of June 4, 1967. Iran’s 10-point plan can be the basis of a comprehensive regional peace—if the US accepts the reality of a state of Palestine. In that case, Iran would likely agree to stop funding non-state belligerents, and Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the entire region could live in mutual security and peace. That outcome should be the basis of a negotiated agreement of the US and Iran in the next two weeks.
Israel is the real “terror state,” waging perpetual war throughout the Middle East for a wholly indefensible reason...
The American people have made their views clear. A 2025 Pew survey finds most Jewish Americans lack confidence in Netanyahu and back the two-state solution. Most Americans now view Israel unfavorably, the highest unfavourability in history. Sympathy for Israel has hit a 25-year low. Now the political class must catch up with the public.
The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it. Iran's proposal is serious and the ceasefire is a fragile opening for a comprehensive settlement. The question is whether the US will, once again, allow Israel to destroy the peace, or rather this time stand up for America’s interests and the world’s interests in a lasting peace.
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In Bombing Lebanon, Netanyahu Asserts That War and Peace Are His Decision Alone
Failure, for Netanyahu, is never an endpoint. It is a trigger. With no victory to claim and no strategic gains to present, he turned—once again—to Lebanon.
Apr 09, 2026
The moment a two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran was announced—brokered through Pakistani mediation on April 7—Iran declared that Lebanon was included in the arrangement. It was a clear message: The war could not be compartmentalized, and the fronts were linked.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to deny it. But the denial exposed more than it concealed. Lebanon and other resistance fronts were already embedded within Iran’s broader 10-point proposal—a framework the Trump administration had accepted as a workable basis for negotiations set to begin Friday.
Netanyahu was left politically and strategically exposed.
Iran was never just another battlefield. It was the culmination of a long campaign of perpetual war that Netanyahu has sustained for years—beginning with the genocide in Gaza, expanding into Lebanon, and stretching across multiple fronts whenever his political survival demanded escalation.
He seeks to reimpose fear across the Middle East—at a moment when millions are celebrating what they see as a decisive Iranian victory against the combined power of the US, Israel, and their allies.
Each war served a purpose: to silence dissent within his coalition, to distract from collapsing approval ratings, to evade accountability in corruption trials. War became governance.
But the Iran gambit failed. And failure, for Netanyahu, is never an endpoint. It is a trigger. With no victory to claim and no strategic gains to present, he turned—once again—to Lebanon.
Dahiya Doctrine Revisited
On Wednesday, Israeli warplanes unleashed one of the most extensive bombardments of Lebanon in recent memory.
Beirut. Southern Lebanon. The Bekaa Valley. Mount Lebanon. And more. Within just two hours, approximately 150 airstrikes were carried out, according to Lebanese media.
The death toll continues to rise. Entire families buried under rubble. Rescue workers targeted. Funerals struck. Civilian infrastructure pulverized. This is not warfare. It is punishment.
But these attacks are not random. They follow a doctrine—one that Israel has refined and reapplied whenever it seeks to compensate for military failure.
Netanyahu is reinstating the Dahiya Doctrine—a strategy first articulated after the 2006 war against Lebanon.
The doctrine is simple and brutal: Use overwhelming, disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure to collectively punish populations believed to support resistance movements.
Entire neighborhoods are treated as military targets. The goal is not precision—it is devastation. The logic is coercion through destruction.
Today, Lebanon is once again its laboratory.
Seven Messages
This escalation is not chaos. It is communication.
First, Netanyahu is asserting that war and peace are his decisions alone. Not Iran’s. Not Washington’s. Not the region’s. The message is clear: No agreement binds him.
Second, he seeks to reimpose fear across the Middle East—at a moment when millions are celebrating what they see as a decisive Iranian victory against the combined power of the US, Israel, and their allies.
Every time Netanyahu escalates in an attempt to regain the initiative, his adversaries respond in kind—and often with greater strategic effect.
Third, he is attempting to fracture the resistance front by suggesting that Iran has abandoned its allies. The goal is to manufacture distrust where unity has just been strengthened.
Fourth, he is providing ammunition to his political allies in Lebanon—and to compliant Arab regimes—who argue that Hezbollah has dragged Lebanon into catastrophe. This narrative is designed to intensify pressure for disarmament.
Fifth, he is distracting from his own failure. Both supporters and critics inside Israel are questioning the outcome of the war with Iran. Thus, Lebanon becomes the diversion.
Sixth, he is masking a military reality: Israel has failed to neutralize Hezbollah’s capabilities. Despite repeated claims, Hezbollah remains operational, resilient, and capable of disrupting Israeli plans along the border. The targeting of civilians is not a strength—it is an admission of limits.
Seventh, Netanyahu is raising the cost ahead of an inevitable settlement. He knows that he cannot defeat Hezbollah outright. By inflicting maximum damage now, he hopes to reshape the political terrain before negotiations he cannot avoid.
The Fragile Ceasefire
Yes, ending the war on Lebanon was embedded in Iran’s conditions for talks. But there are cracks.
Washington can—and likely will—argue that its agreement applies only to US actions, not to Israel, which it portrays as acting independently.
At the same time, Iran’s proposal was the basis for a temporary ceasefire—not a finalized framework for a permanent settlement.
This ambiguity is not accidental. It is the space in which Israel now operates.
Will Israel’s massacres be enough for Iran to declare that the US-Israeli camp has violated the ceasefire?
Or will negotiations proceed, despite the bloodshed in Lebanon?
The answer will shape the next phase of the war. But one lesson is already clear.
Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, a pattern has emerged: Every time Netanyahu escalates in an attempt to regain the initiative, his adversaries respond in kind—and often with greater strategic effect.
Therefore, his escalation has not delivered victory. Instead, it has deepened Israel’s entanglement.
Lebanon may be burning today, but the war is far from decided. Netanyahu may believe that he is reshaping the battlefield.
History suggests otherwise, because the other side still holds its cards—and this time, at least for now, Washington is not stepping in to tilt the balance.
For they, too, have been forced to step back. And that, more than anything, is what makes this moment so dangerous.
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To Stop US Wars, Saying No Is Not Enough
The US left needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.
Apr 09, 2026
The US-Israeli attack on Iran put an exclamation point on the Gaza genocide. It sent a message to the world from the regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv: We will do anything that our military strength allows us to do. There are no rules or international laws we are bound to respect.
Most European governments, many regimes elsewhere, and major sections of the Democratic Party leadership offer only a few “process objections” to this level of ruthlessness but go with the flow.
This is a road to global catastrophe. Despite the fragile (and welcome) ceasefire, It is accelerating a process that was already underway where every government in the world is deciding that their overriding priority must be increasing their military strength. And that security requires cracking down on opposition movements within their own countries as well.
An Interconnected World
To halt and reverse this course, it is essential but not sufficient to build mass opposition to the war on Iran and all the other evils perpetrated by Washington, The US left also needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.
In today’s world, there will be security for no one unless there is security for all.
That vision starts with the reality of an interconnected world where humanity’s very survival is in doubt. Viruses and the fallout from nuclear explosions know no borders. An interruption of supply chains in the Middle East threatens food security across the globe. Destruction in the Amazon Basin wreaks havoc on the climate worldwide.
In today’s world, there will be security for no one unless there is security for all. Weaving the fight for human survival together with peoples’ struggles for self-determination and against all forms of oppression, and with the fight for working class power, workers fighting for their rights, is a complex task. Yet in a world where diplomacy and inter-state cooperation predominate, movements for democracy and social justice have more favorable conditions to achieve their goals.
Without softening our critique of the US-dominated world order that is passing away, developing a forward-looking platform entails assessing the heightened dangers faced under Trump 2.0. It means breaking down the largely artificial division between domestic and foreign policies. When militarism, racism, and misogyny is practiced abroad, these pathologies inevitably come home.
Competing Visions as the Old Order Collapses
Today this quote from Antonio Gramsci is popular throughout the Left: “The old order is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born.” The different factions of the oligarchy are rushing into this “interregnum” to shape what comes next.
MAGA-Trump 2.0 argues that considering values like democracy or human rights when formulating policy is naïve if not treasonous, and that multilateral institutions are simply shackles on US power. It sees staying No. 1 in global “lethality” as the road to safety and prosperity for the “heritage Americans” who will dominate the country after removing or subordinating the various “others” who now live here.
The anti-MAGA wing of the US elite insists that the “rules-based” world order of the last 80 years produced a great American way of life. A few “mistakes” (Vietnam, Iraq) just need to be corrected to get back on the right track. Their program is to preserve NATO and other Cold War-era alliances; keep China at bay; and use “soft power,” sanctions, and “smart wars” to remain the world’s dominant power.
The left has trenchant critiques of the racism and exploitation inherent in both variants of Washington’s imperial project. But we won’t win popular support if we don’t go beyond critique to offer a positive vision of what the world can look like if we are shaping US policy.
Global Cooperation vs. American Exceptionalism
That vision has to address the hopes, fears, and pressing needs of the majority of US people. It has to be compelling enough to counter the American exceptionalist ideology that permeates US culture. Resting on the longstanding position of the US as the hegemonic global power and promoted unceasingly by the political class and mainstream media, the idea that the US is an inherently virtuous nation which always acts as the world’s “good guy” has long defined US “common sense.”
Anti-war and solidarity movements targeting Washington’s role in Vietnam, South Africa, Central America, Iraq, and Palestine have spotlighted the destructive role the US has played in each case. At times, energetic social movements have built mass support for arms control agreements and aggressive steps to fight climate change. But we have yet to win a durable majority to a structural critique of imperial behavior and support for an alternative world order where all countries are on equal footing, conflicts are resolved via diplomacy, and a transition away from fossil fuels is a worldwide priority.
The left has always stressed the common interest of the global majority in fighting imperial exploitation. But in a period when the most dangerous threats to human life—climate change, nuclear war, global pandemics, obscene degrees of inequality—can only be addressed by joint action by all countries, the arguments against American exceptionalism and the way it makes US national sovereignty absolute become stronger and more urgent.
This is a framework that draws on the insight of Albert Einstein at the beginning of the nuclear age (“Everything has changed except our thinking”). It embraces the outlook of the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which expressed the most advanced thinking in the coalition that defeated fascism in World War II.
Amid a continuing genocide in Gaza and seeing the disaster of the war on Iran, the numbers of people saying “stop” to the guardians of empire is growing by the day. Fanning those flames of opposition and offering these millions a vision to fight for is the combination needed to accumulate the political power to transform the US role in the world.
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