Portside

Recently, Waleed Shahid, a founder of Justice Democrats, posted an essay (“Primary Colors: On Progressive Electoral Strategy”) arguing the Left should not focus exclusively on ‘swing seats’, the perennial holy grail to regain a Democratic majority in the House.  Instead, he says, we should pay equal attention to the ‘safe seats” in deep-Blue cities, places like the 14th Congressional District in the Bronx and Queens, where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s taking down Joe Crowley in 2018 opened up new electoral possibilities across the country. 

Since then, district-by-district, emphatically Left activists have won election to the House—not just the original four members of the “Squad” (AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) but several dozen more. Together they have organized a new progressive bloc around the push to make the Democratic Party stop backing Israeli apartheid, the most urgent foreign policy issue of our time.  In tandem with the innovative “Battleground” projects--grassroots coalitions to take back swing districts in New York and California in 2024, and the new national Battleground Alliance PAC for 2026--this is the blueprint for a renewed party that actually stands for something and is able to win a majority. 

Here's some relevant (and relatively recent) history.

First, starting in the 1970s “movement conservatives” took over the GOP by challenging sitting members; the most painful example for New Yorkers would be Alphonse D’Amato defeating the consistently liberal Senator Jacob Javits in a 1992 primary (remember when there were “liberal Republicans?”).  By doing so, these New Rightists made their party ideologically coherent, moving it far to the right.  There’s a lesson for us!

Second, also beginning in the 1970s, Black challengers steadily replaced the white Democrats representing majority-Black districts. The result was an empowered Congressional Black Caucus acting as Congress’ social-democratic wing for decades.

Least-known, however, is the ascendance of an anti-interventionist/anti-militarist congressional bloc lasting from the late Vietnam years through the early 1990s. Year-in and year-out, these Members voted against all of the core Cold War policies: nuclear build-up, supporting dictatorships in the name of “containment,”, intervening overtly and covertly in other countries. For young Central American solidarity activists like me back then, it was a given that we had allies in Congress, and the point was to increase their numbers.

The 1984 Voting Record issued by the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, representing leading Protestant denominations, progressive Catholics, the major peace groups, some important unions and a lot more, provides a window. That document, one of several published by groups like SANE (today’s Peace Action), used thirteen votes to rate House Members:  six on Reagan’s wars in Central America; one each on military spending, chemical weapons, “Anti-Satellite Weapons,” the Cruise and Pershing missiles, and the Trident submarine; two on the MX missile. 99 Members, 23% of the House, received perfect or near-perfect scores (100 or 92), and in some years that number went up considerably, with an equivalent grouping in the Senate.

Where did this bloc come from?  The conventional wisdom was that their politics reflected the anti-Vietnam War movement seeping into Congress, but that’s insufficient. Some of them—like Madison, Wisconsin’s Robert Kastenmeier, in the House 1959-1991--challenged conventional Cold War policies long before U.S. ground troops arrived in Vietnam in 1965. A series of crises radicalized liberals:  the Johnson Administration’s threadbare justification for its 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic; opposition to the Brazilian military regime’s systematic use of torture in the late 1960s and Argentina and Chile’s death squad dictatorships in the 1970s, which resonated deeply with Catholics receiving anguished pleas from their co-religionists; rebellions against European rule in Africa, including Portugal’s colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, the white settler government in Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa, which catalyzed a deep solidarity in Black America.

Who were these congresspeople?  To a remarkable degree, they resemble the members that Shahid has identified as the basis for an expanded Left in Congress. In both cases, we find a multi-racial group drawn mostly from urban districts in the Midwest and Northeast and along the West Coast.   The informal “Ceasefire Caucus” and the current 47 co-sponsors for H.R.3565, the Block the Bombs Act, to bar transmission of the most lethal weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, demonstrates that continuity. Then as now, large groups represent Greater Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Chicago.  There are some meaningful differences, however.  Texas now produces almost as many House members (5) opposing arms to Israel as Illinois (6), and New York fields only three co-sponsors, presumably because of the influence of “Leader” Schumer and “Leader” Jeffries.  In the 1980s, New England was near-monolithic in its opposition to Reagan’s re-fighting Vietnam, but now only a handful of Yankees (5) are supporters of Palestinian rights.  Another distinction is the complete absence of Republicans.  For decades, you could count on enough of them to somewhat offset the rightwing Southern Democrats. Oregon’s Mark Hatfield was one of staunchest pro-peace figures in either party throughout his thirty years in the Senate (1967-1997), joined in the House by Iowa’s Jim Leach and the venerable Silvio Conte from western Massachusetts.

The Soviet Union’s collapse and the hollow triumph of the First Iraq War in 1990-91, combined with the advent of the first Democratic president since 1980, made foreign policy opposition seem obsolete. Bill Clinton’s many long-distance wars met little dissent in Congress or his own party. In the 1990s, one of the few Congress members firmly opposing Clinton’s constant bombing campaigns was the ultra-libertarian from Texas, Ron Paul. Even Bernie Sanders had little to say. The last hurrah for anti-interventionism was the Second Gulf War.  Sixty percent of the House Democratic Caucus opposed the October 2002 AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) against Saddam Hussein, and then replaced Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, who voted for it, with Nancy Pelosi, because of her antiwar stance.  Congressional and popular opposition to that dunder-headed disaster simmered for the next five years, helping bring about the Democrats’ sweeping rebound in the 2006 midterms. Barack Obama’s campaign for the 2008 nomination derived much of its energy from the perception that he was the antiwar candidate, but during his presidency, foreign policy dissent from the Left dwindled into obscurity, as he dialed down the temperature, and members of his party rallied around their president. But then came Trump, and the constant murderous cycle Israel of “mowing the lawn” in Gaza, then October 7, and now the daily face of slaughter.  It as if a dam has broken, provoking the largest wave of popular and congressional dissent since the 1980s.  And here Bernie has come forward with remarkable impact, somehow getting a majority of Senate Democrats to oppose at least some arms to Israel in back-to-back votes in late July.

There is one obvious difference between the post-Vietnam era and the present, however.  The Left opposition among Democrats now runs up against a deeply entrenched constituency in their own party: AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, which last year took out two stalwart members of the Ceasefire Caucus, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, and will keep repressing opposition to Israel’s genocide for some time to come. Nonetheless, despite its being the proverbial “third rail,” congressional support for Palestinian human rights has steadily increased since Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) drafted `Dear Colleague’ letters to Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to protect “the human rights of Palestinian children subjected to Israeli military detention” in 2015-2016, followed by formal bills in 2017-2018; the Upper Midwest, whether Madison or Minneapolis, has been more resolutely anti-intervention than any other part of the country for more than a century, with McCollum, Ilhan Omar, and Robert Kastenmeier’s successor, Mark Pocan, maintaining that tradition. 

Where to go from here? The Palestine solidarity movement and its allies need to make opposition to military aid for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza a litmus test.  Less than half of the members of the House’s Progressive Caucus have co-sponsored the Block the Bombs Act, and that must change. In the words of SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in 1966, it’s time to say “Move on over, or we’re going to move on over you,” which means primarying those Members who claim to be progressive but resist constituent pressure to do what is, in the most existential sense, the right thing.

What would it look like if the collective “we” implemented a fork-in-the-road strategy in advance of the 2026 elections?  If someone asked me how the Central America movement repeatedly barred aid to the Contra terrorists and the like, it’s pretty clear:  make a short list of those solidly Blue districts whose members are recreant, find groups in them, and hit those representatives hard and often—town halls, billboards, op-eds in local papers, respectable leaders (clergy, business, professionals, professors) lobbying inside their district offices while the less-respectable picket and then blockade them:  If Representative __ from their own state is co-sponsoring the Block the Bombs Act, why aren’t they?  Keep publicizing the list—and don’t leave Hakeem Jeffries and the rest of the leadership out, they need to feel the heat. This is not rocket science, and all of it is probably being strategized in national meetings right now. 

One more thing:  a signal strength of the Central America, anti-apartheid, and anti-nuclear movements of the late twentieth century was the absence of dogmatic blaming-and-shaming.  Unfortunately, that is not the case today, when some large part of DSA’s leadership is intent on censuring AOC (if not expelling her outright from the organization) because they find her position on Israel less than one hundred percent of what they demand. At a time when unity both on the Left, and with those more centrist forces willing to join us in opposing fascism, is the highest possible demand, this kind of sectarianism is radically counter-productive. We are at a turning point. The “third rail” over Palestine is losing its fatal power in Congress and the Democratic Party, and it’s time to shut it down permanently, as part of a long-term orientation towards blocking fascism while building the kind of new Left we need.

Van Gosse is Professor of History Emeritus, Franklin and Marshall College