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The Pain of Repeating 'We Told You So'
On issues ranging from the Vietnam War and the War on Terror to the genocide in Gaza and Trump's authoritarianism, progressives have a history of being prematurely, fruitlessly right.
Aug 19, 2025
I spent the summer of 1965 arguing about the Vietnam War. I was 13, and my interlocutor was my 18-year-old camp counselor in Vermont. She was headed for UC Berkeley in the fall, where she would, as she later described it, “major in history and minor in rioting.” Meanwhile, I was headed back to junior high school. I was already convinced that our government was lying about why we were fighting in Vietnam (supposedly to protect our sworn ally, the South Vietnamese government, in response to a trumped-up “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin). I was also convinced that the war was unjustified and wrong. She seemed less certain about the war but was similarly convinced that expending energy opposing it would distract activists from supporting the civil rights movement.
As it turned out, we were both right.
Our summer camp subscribed to the Boston Globe, which I read daily, probably when I was supposed to be doing something more physically edifying like playing tennis. I remember the day the Globe ran a story quoting an informal adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson—it might have been Dean Acheson—suggesting that, even if the South Vietnamese government were to ask the United States to withdraw its forces, it wouldn’t do so. I cut the article out (property damage is not violence!) and ran to show her. “See? I was right. They’re lying about the war.”
It’s been 60 years since that summer, and she and I are still arguing about politics, now as life partners of more than four decades. (Don’t worry: it took me another 14 years to convince her I was a grown-up and therefore a legitimate object of romantic affection.)
The Vietnam War Was Wrong and Some of Us Knew It
Although she and I are indeed still arguing about politics, like millions of people in this country and around the world, we were right then about Vietnam. We may not have foreseen it all—the assassinations, carpet bombings, tiger cages, and the Phoenix Program (the Central Intelligence Agency’s first mass torture scheme)—but we were hardly surprised when it all finally came out. Today, there’s a consensus in this country that the Vietnam War was more than a mistake; it was a decade-long exercise in overreach and overkill.
That war would eventually result in the deaths of 58,000 members of the American military and millions of Vietnamese, both soldiers and civilians. We’d see a generation of Vietnam veterans come home with visible (and invisible) injuries: amputations; cancers born of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Air Force to defoliate jungle terrain; heroin habits; the illness we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD; and moral injuries caused by following orders to murder civilians. It tells you something about that war that Vietnam vets would prove more likely to become homeless than the veterans of previous or later wars. They would also suffer contempt from many of their fellow Americans for having been drafted into a vicious and ultimately pointless conflict.
I sometimes think it’s the fate of many progressives for once in our lives to be right—over and over.
Many who actively opposed the war also suffered. I knew young men who went to jail for resisting the draft. Others took on false identities—it was easier in those pre-internet days—or moved to Canada to avoid being drafted. My college boyfriend never registered for the draft (also easier before networked computers permeated the country and when you had to apply for a Social Security number rather than being assigned one at birth). Since many employers demanded to see your draft exemption or, after the war ended, your discharge papers, he worked for his housepainter father until President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 amnesty for draft evaders.
A friend I came to know during the 1980s had spent nine months in the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, for pouring blood on draft board records. Thousands were beaten bloody during the police riots outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, where activists had gone to protest the nomination of pro-war presidential candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey. And on May 4, 1970, four students were shot and killed by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University during antiwar protests. They were all right about the war, but too few Americans believed them—until decades later, when just about everyone did.
For Once in Our Lives
My father had a few sayings he thought were pretty funny. On meeting a child for the first time he’d ask, “How old are you? 10? When I was your age,” he’d continue, “I was 21!” A favorite of his was: “For once in my life, I’m right again.” He’d make that joke whenever he’d been proven right about anything. I sometimes think it’s the fate of many progressives for once in our lives to be right—over and over. This isn’t because we’re particularly good people, although some of my heroes are indeed good people. It’s at least in part because we are people with good luck. It’s been our good luck that, at some time in our lives, somebody offered us a place to stand, a viewpoint, an ethical way of grasping the world.
I think for example of Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan just days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. On the House floor, she got up and responded to the almost universal calls for revenge with these words: “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”
As I wrote about her courage at the start of the Biden years:
The legislation she opposed then, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), has indeed allowed “this”to spiral out of control. It has been used to justify an ever-metastasizing series of wars, spreading from Afghanistan in central Asia throughout the Middle East, south to Yemen, leaping to Africa—Libya, Djibouti, Somalia, and who knows where else. Despite multiple attempts to repeal it, that AUMF remains in effect today, ready for the next president with aspirations to military adventures.
And four years later, it’s still in effect, providing legal cover for a once-isolationist Donald Trump to drop bombs on Iran and threaten Russia with US nuclear submarines.
Back in 2001, Lee was excoriated for her vote against that war. The Wall Street Journal called her a “clueless liberal” and the Washington Times claimed that she was “a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies.”
Twenty years later, the Washington Post celebrated her courage, noting that no one in Congress—not even Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders—had shared her prescience at the time.
…We’re Right Again
The best response to the horror of September 11 was never a military one. The attacks were a criminal act best prosecuted as such, both in this country and in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. It was clear to anyone who remembered Vietnam that the Afghan war would become a murderous quagmire, and some of us said so at the time.
We were similarly right that the Iraq War that followed would never be the “cakewalk” Bush administration officials promised. We knew that Bush speechwriter David Frum, who invented the phrase “axis of evil” for Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, was deluded when he said, “The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.” We were convinced at the time that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were lying about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction. We knew, in part at least, because Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in Iraq, had told the UN Security Council so on February 14, 2003, writing in part, “So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons [of mass destruction], only a small number of empty chemical munitions…”
Twenty years later, and remembering the US response to the 9/11 attacks, some of us had an inkling of what October 7, 2023, portended for Gaza. On October 25, 2023, just a few weeks into the now almost-complete destruction of that tiny strip of land, journalist Omar El Akkad tweeted this sentence: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” (He has since published a memoir of his reporting life, covering everything from the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the war on Black people in Ferguson, Missouri.)
In June 2024, I wrote that both the Democrats and Republicans were offering uncritical support for the demolition of Gaza. Here’s what I said then:
Right now, it’s not too hard to foresee the approaching catastrophe in Gaza. Indeed, at my own university and across the country and the world, even in Israel, students are desperately trying to prevent a genocide already in progress. While the “grown-ups” debate the legal definition of genocide, those young people continue to point to the murderous reality still unfolding in Gaza and demand that it be stopped before it’s too late.
Now that it is too late, it’s no longer forbidden to use the word “genocide” in polite company. Now, as Gazans starve, as they are shot by soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces while seeking food aid at sites run by the farcically-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the world has decided it is, after all, “against this.” Only recently, in fact, two Israeli human rights organizations used the word “genocide” for the first time to describe their own government’s attempts to rid Gaza of Palestinian life.
France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have all called for the recognition of a Palestinian state, again many years too late. No contiguous land remains where such a state could be constructed. The world looked passively on for decades as Israel fulfilled Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s dream of turning the occupied West Bank into a “pastrami sandwich.” Back in the 1970s, he explained the plan to Winston Churchill’s grandson. “We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements,” he said, “in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” Over 20 years ago, The Nation magazine reported that Sharon’s mission had already essentially been accomplished. And now? This past May, the Israeli parliament the Knesset approved another 22 settlements there, a move that, as the country’s defense minister explained, “prevents establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”
Recent weeks have seen increased attacks on Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but on the West Bank. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded 757 such settler attacks by mid-July. As the newspaper Al-Jazeera reports, “The violence also includes the demolitions of hundreds of homes and forced mass displacement of Palestinians as well as annexations of more land in violation of international law.”
Premature Antifascists?
During the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, a group of Americans formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to help defend the Spanish Republic against the forces of fascist General Francisco Franco (aided by Adolf Hitler’s military forces). Almost a quarter of the Brigade died, the Spanish partisans lost the war, and Franco’s dictatorship lasted until he died in 1975. I knew a few of those Lincoln Brigade members in their later years, including Commander Milt Wolff, who was also a staunch member of the movement in solidarity with the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution.
In the 1950s, when this country was gripped by an anti-communist fervor, the Lincoln Brigade members and others who had opposed Franco came to be known as “premature antifascists.” Unlike the good (and timely?) antifascists who fought the Axis powers in World War II, they had recognized the dangers of fascism too early—before, that is, the United States had decided to enter the war on the side of France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Those Americans who’d jumped too early for the Allies were derided as communists (as indeed, many of them were) rather than being congratulated for seeing the danger ahead of everyone else.
The 2024 election cycle contained what some might call a resurgence of premature antifascism: those of us who warned that electing Donald Trump (and by proxy, his coterie of anti-democratic monarchists) would bring a dictator into the White House and fascism to the nation. During the first Trump administration, of course, many people could already discern his despotic trajectory. And yet, in August 2017, the New York Times ran an op-ed headlined, “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” Its authors ridiculed the (presumably premature) opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism as “tyrannophobia,” which they defined as “the belief that the overwhelmingly important political issue is the threat to our liberal freedoms and institutions.”
Well, yes, some of us did see that threat as an, if not the, overwhelmingly important political issue. There’s no joy in saying, “We told you so.” Sadly, the first six months of Trump’s second term have proved us—disastrously—right again.
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To Beat Back Trump's GOP in 2026, Progressive Leader Says 'Corporate' Dems Must Go
"Voters have made their feelings clear," said the leader of Justice Democrats. "The majority do not see themselves in this party and do not believe in its leaders or many of its representatives."
Aug 14, 2025
A top progressive leader has given her prescription for how the Democratic Party can begin to retake power from US President Donald Trump: Ousting "corporate-funded" candidates.
Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas wrote Thursday in The Guardian that, "If the Democratic Party wants to win back power in 2028," its members need to begin to redefine themselves in the 2026 midterms.
"Voters have made their feelings clear, a majority do not see themselves in this party and do not believe in its leaders or many of its representatives," Rojas said. "They need a new generation of leaders with fresh faces and bold ideas, unbought by corporate super [political action committees] and billionaire donors, to give them a new path and vision to believe in."
Despite Trump's increasing unpopularity, a Gallup poll from July 31 found that the Democratic Party still has record-low approval across the country.
Rojas called for "working-class, progressive primary challenges to the overwhelming number of corporate Democratic incumbents who have rightfully been dubbed as do-nothing electeds."
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in June, nearly two-thirds of self-identified Democrats said they desired new leadership, with many believing that the party did not share top priorities, like universal healthcare, affordable childcare, and higher taxes on the rich.
Young voters were especially dissatisfied with the current state of the party and were much less likely to believe the party shared their priorities.
Democrats have made some moves to address their "gerontocracy" problem—switching out the moribund then-President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race and swapping out longtime House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) for the younger Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.).
But Rojas says a face-lift for the party is not enough. They also need fresh ideas.
"Voters are also not simply seeking to replace their aging corporate shill representatives with younger corporate shills," she said. "More of the same from a younger generation is still more of the same."
Outside of a "small handful of outspoken progressives," she said the party has often been too eager to kowtow to Trump and tow the line of billionaire donors.
"Too many Democratic groups, and even some that call themselves progressive, are encouraging candidates' silence in the face of lobbies like [the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee] (AIPAC) and crypto's multimillion-dollar threats," she said.
A Public Citizen report found that in 2024, Democratic candidates and aligned PACs received millions of dollars from crypto firms like Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreesen Horowitz.
According to OpenSecrets, 58% of the 212 Democrats elected to the House in 2024—135 of them—received money from AIPAC, with an average contribution of $117,334. In the Senate, 17 Democrats who won their elections received donations—$195,015 on average.
The two top Democrats in Congress—Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—both have long histories of support from AIPAC, and embraced crypto with open arms after the industry flooded the 2024 campaign with cash.
"Too often, we hear from candidates and members who claim they are with us on the policy, but can't speak out on it because AIPAC or crypto will spend against them," Rojas said. "Silence is cowardice, and cowardice inspires no one."
Rojas noted Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who was elected in 2022 despite an onslaught of attacks from AIPAC and who has since gone on to introduce legislation to ban super PACs from federal elections, as an example of this model's success.
"The path to more Democratic victories," Rojas said, "is not around, behind, and under these lobbies, but it's right through them, taking them head-on and ridding them from our politics once and for all."
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Trump Is Vulnerable to Progressive Populism
Now is the time for progressive Democrats to break from the party and, allying with politically independent progressives and others on the political left, put forth an agenda that forges an alternative vision of a healthy America.
Aug 14, 2025
Democrats are politically flummoxed by the flurry of regressive proposals and policies daily manufactured by the Trump administration. Party leadership has been reduced to a reactionary political presence, simply responding to US President Donald Trump's initiatives. Weakened and disoriented, the party seems incapable of effectively challenging Trump's disingenuous populism. It does not forcefully attack his many vulnerabilities. Democratic Party leaders, moreover, refuse to embrace a comprehensive program of fundamental social, economic, and environmental projects and guarantees that are both popular and a genuine alternative vision of America.
The beleaguered Social Security Administration (SSA) offers an enormous opportunity to weaken Trump's political strength. Ostensibly driven by budget deficits, Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has eliminated 7,000 employees at the SSA. That will certainly reduce services since now one employee manages 1,480 beneficiaries, which is three times the beneficiary load in 1967. Already telephone calls to the agency have gone unanswered. Close to 90% of Americans, moreover, want Social Security to remain a strict priority of the government, "No matter the state of budget deficits." Here the Trump administration has left itself wide open to a progressive political challenge that would guarantee funding of Social Security in the coming decades, definitively reject any privatization plans, and highlight how Trump's cuts threaten the integrity of a service so vital to all Americans.
Trump is also vulnerable in many other of his administration's initiatives. The elimination of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), for example, immediately terminated the annual purchase of as much as a million metric tons of U.S. crops, depriving American farmers of a $510 million market. As a direct consequence, farmers are burning crops due to low prices, rising input costs, and labor shortages compounded by the government's immigration policies. Tragically, 1.5 million starving children in Afghanistan and Pakistan depend on USAID's food assistance. By 2030, according to researchers, an estimated 14 million people, including 4.5 million children under age 5, will die without the relief USAID's programs provide.
Exposure of Trump's cuts and plans for the Federal Emergency Management Agency again opens opportunity to reveal the callousness and shallow, short-term thinking that is typical of the administration. From 2008 to 2024 FEMA provided $170 billion to assist with environmental disasters. FEMA assistance is based on the cost of per capita impact (PCI). Trump has proposed raising the qualifying PCI from $l.89 to $7.56. This policy change is designed to shift the cost of disaster relief onto the states, thereby reducing federal spending and, among other specious cost-reduction efforts, diminishing the federal deficit to fund tax cuts that disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans. And contrary to Trump's assertions, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the tax cuts will spike the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the coming decade.
To turn back a government takeover by the wealthy corporate class, progressives must seize this political moment.
Trump's healthcare plan is yet another area of his vulnerability. A national universal health insurance program is long overdue and such a proposal would stand in stark, constructive contrast to the administration's plan to cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which would leave 10.9 million more Americans without healthcare, especially targeting those with low incomes and individuals in poor health. The elimination of the ACA funding mechanism, moreover, will increase the federal deficit by $41 billion. In addition, planned Medicaid cuts threaten rural hospitals that depend on it for a significant percentage of their revenues. And massive cuts to science and medicine in the recently approved "Big Beautiful Bill" will hamper and even end much research into lifesaving medicines and reduce the nation's preparation for future epidemics and pandemics.
The disappearance and detention of thousands of immigrants are a direct attack on the U.S. Constitution. Capturing and transporting law-abiding individuals to distant detention facilities without due process are practices common to police and military states. More than 60,000 immigrants are detained in facilities across the nation. Judges who rule against Trump's immigration policies and practices are pilloried and threatened by the president himself. Families are broken up and children are arrested. This is yet another example of outrageous and often tragic violations of law and human rights.
Trump's virtual abandonment of Ukraine and his unwavering support of Israel are also very profound moral issues, positions that must be adamantly opposed. The US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies must swiftly counter and arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin's military onslaught. With regard to Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza, Trump's continued support for the Netanyahu government—his approval of $12 billion in military assistance in less than two months in office—makes the Trump government an unquestioned accessory to massive crimes against humanity. Trump swiftly bypassed Congress to supply these military weapons to Israel. To date more than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, at least 18,000 of them children.
The list of assailable proposals and program issues is interminable. Flagrant flouting of the law and congressional authority. Threats to and removal of dissenting judges. Weaponizing the Department of Justice. Deploying military troops in streets. The attack on the media to eliminate fact-based critique and dissent. The assault on academic freedom and free speech at universities, blocking the entrance of foreign students and undermining basic scientific research, imperiling U.S. global leadership in science and technology. Elimination of federal support of public education. The pursuit of tariffs that are actually paid by American importers who will raise prices of these goods, inducing inflation. Downgrading the NATO alliance. Violation of the emoluments clause. Usurping congressional authority and eroding separation of powers among the three branches of government. Pardoning insurrections. Appointing unqualified and compromised nominees to sensitive government positions. Undermining the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health. Weakened regulations at the Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency. A complete retreat from renewable energy and other green practices and emphatic reliance on fossil fuels. Absolute ignorance of climate change. Aggressive vote suppression and rigging elections. Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And on and on, ad infinitum...
The Democratic leadership is incapable of moving from soft, centrist politics to a progressive social and environmental agenda. In 2016 Democrats' electoral scheme of superdelegates undermined the democratic socialist insurgency and its millions of youthful followers. Wedded to identity politics and fixated on quixotic undecided voters and presumably fence-post Republicans, the establishment wing of the Democrats runs away from thoroughgoing reform. Eschewing progressive populism—fearful of being branded leftist, socialist, and communist—the party has pursued an electoral platform of abstract ideas such as appeals to saving democracy and nearly politically meaningless allusions to joy and decency. Without a genuine populist agenda the Democratic leadership drifts toward the political center, an increasingly conservative position as the center moves to the political right.
Now is the time for progressive Democrats to break from the party and, allying with politically independent progressives and others on the political left, put forth an agenda that forges an alternative vision of a healthy America, one that supports ordinary families through authentic social welfare and sound environmental policy. To turn back a government takeover by the wealthy corporate class, progressives must seize this political moment. Their voice must be forceful, optimistic and youthful. They must aggressively challenge Trump, preying on his numerous points of vulnerability.
By staging powerful televised weekly press conferences, engineering appearances on televised and digital "talk shows," generating a compelling social media presence, and organizing public rallies and marches, progressives could present timely critiques of Trump's ongoing misrepresentations and regressive proposals and, even more importantly, put forth a platform of populist programs that will really benefit average Americans.
Such a campaign and strategy will energize and focus opponents of Trump, elevating the political discourse and conferring enormous credibility on progressive alternatives. It will give anti-Trump forces a platform of specific programs and goals to confront his dictatorial intentions and methods. If progressives fail to lead at this critical juncture in the nation's history, they cede the immediate and long-term future to a self-serving dictator supported by a party of sycophants and opposed mainly by weak-kneed, unimaginative politicians.
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