No Peace, No Democracy: A Reply to Waleed Shaheed’s Manifesto
Militarism abroad kills the working class at home. There is no prospect for carving out social democracy in America if it retains a primacist grand strategy.
is easily one of the smartest electoral strategists of my generation, and was key to the creation of the Justice Democrats, a political coalition I’ve written about before. Waleed is also one of the few political pundits with an honest, clear-eyed post-mortem on the Democrats’ electoral failings in 2024.
And so when he recently wrote “A Populist Manifesto for Democrats,” I was, as Master P used to say, ’bout it ’bout it.1
Without recapitulating his entire strategy manifesto here, many of the individual points he makes are hard to dispute:
The Democratic Party is run by a managerial class that still thinks of suburban and skilled workers—a shrinking population—as its demographic;
Democrats need to be the party of working people but aren’t;
Being the party of working people requires “confronting the power structures that define inequality”;
The working class is the base for a winning politics, and the working class is multiracial;
Policy, if it is discussed in politics, must be “stupidly simple”;
Democrats need “populist think tanks”;
Democrats must stop running candidates from the national security state and instead run candidates who are fighters for the working class;
Movements should be leading messaging fights to change public opinion, the party should be falling in behind them;
Democrats need to build up a base of independent, populist media (getting past the MSNBC/CNN/Pod Save Blob);
Democrats should support shifting to a proportional representation system (like New Zealand!).
All of this makes sense, and I’ve made some of these points over the past couple years too.2
But there was no geopolitics in it; no global context. And that’s concerning because the biggest blindspot in much domestically focused progressivism is internationalism. The terrain on which Waleed strategizes is electoral politics, yet it’s not in the context of a healthy, high-functioning democracy but rather in a country that is a functional oligarchy, bestriding the world in a sometimes predatory, always power-hoarding manner that some call global imperialism.
That makes foreign policy more than just wallpaper in the house of American electoralism; it’s the larger terrain of struggle that campaigns sit within. America would not be an oligarchy if not for its role in the capitalist world-system that its foreign policy defends. Put differently, strategizing about electoral politics requires accounting for the field of forces in which electoral politics occurs, and much of that field of forces concerns geopolitical and capitalist relations beyond American boundaries.
Bottom line: no peace, no democracy.
This might be especially hard to see for those of us who grew up in the unipolar moment, because we always took for granted an extreme imbalance of global power. But attempts to build a social democratic bloc are logically incompatible with the imperial mode of living that American politics sustains.
The lopsidedness of the unipolar moment depended on the fruits of globalization being very unevenly distributed, and by extension, America not being a social democracy. A foreign policy that seeks to preserve this highly unequal distribution of power abroad is not realistic, but it’s also not desirable because it necessarily forecloses on attempts from within the metropole to realize political and economic democracy within the metropole (which is how I’d characterize the project of domestic progressives).
Crucially, as the last several years of progressive strategizing has laid bare, even successful social democratic reforms (eg, BBB) will be hijacked by militarists and oligarchs so long as the larger framework for US politics remains American exceptionalism + military primacy abroad.3
Where Was the Counter-Strategy in 2024?
Winning means defeating your enemy’s strategy. And getting a win is evidence that you beat your enemy’s strategy, whether you were conscientious about doing so or not. It’s possible to overwhelm an enemy’s strategy without knowing what it is, but it obviously helps to have an accurate sense of it so that you know what you need to overcome. Often, pathologies and prejudices get in the way of a realistic assessment of your opponent, and so you end up only really knowing your enemy in hindsight.
In the context of the Democrats getting routed in 2024, what was Trump’s strategy? It was reducible to this: Do lots of podcasts, position his campaign as antiwar, and accuse the Democrats of being warmongers driving us to World War III.
Kamala—and many down-ballot Democrats—did not counter Trump’s strategy, they validated it. He made accusations, and they leaned into them. And to be honest, I’m not sure many Democrats even realized Trump’s strategy for what it was, because they were focused on canvassing, polling, and celebrity appearances amid Gaza denial. Who can forget this:
From a pure strategy perspective, the failure of counter-strategy was a failure of foreign policy.
The Democratic Party assumption that either “foreign policy doesn’t matter” or that Democrats benefit from being “the party of the national security state” contributed to the 2024 shellacking. Not primarily because the Uncommitted Movement was effective, or because Gaza was central to a vibe shift that worked against Kamala and down-ballot Dems. Rather, Dem assumptions about foreign policy mattered because it numbed Democratic strategists to the need to counter Trump’s strategy at all.
Is Economic Populism Possible Within Imperialism?
Economic populism is the minimally necessarily answer to the rise of fascism. It’s how to address—at the source—the toxic interplay of growing ethnonationalism and strengthening oligarchy under conditions of neoliberal globalization. That diagnosis-and-prescription combo has been prominent within the left since at least the Occupy Movement in 2011, and it remains essential to both Waleed’s manifesto and the Block-and-Build strategy that Convergence Magazine articulates.
But the left economic populism that has become a matter of growing urgency is not possible within, to put it crudely, imperialism. Consider this:
When Josh Hawley worked with Joe Manchin and others to reduce climate financing appropriations, it was to send money to defense R&D.
When Joe Manchin opposed Build Back Better in favor of the IRA, it was because the latter kept the investment provisions that supported US global primacy but gutted the provisions that funded the care economy.
The condition for signing the IRA into law was pivoting to relative austerity post-IRA…but that austerity applied only to social spending, not defense spending, which has seen year-on-year increases that now approach $1 trillion annually.
The ongoing bid to rebuild American manufacturing might help prepare for a catastrophic war with China that would inevitably sacrifice the working class, but it is definitely doing so at the opportunity cost of sectors of the economy with higher job-multiplier effects.
Defense spending is primarily paid for through deficit financing, and, according to the Costs of War Project, the interest alone on borrowed money for the War on Terror already exceeds $1 trillion, and could be $6.5 trillion by 2050 (and this is just debt servicing payments).
And because defense spending is financed through debt instruments held disproportionately by China and East Asian economies, surpluses of capital accrued by governments engaged in labor repression flow back to the US rather than get reinvested in their domestic economies, leading to imbalances in the form of asset bubbles that in turn produce financial crises that disproportionately harm the working class.4
These are all just contemporary examples of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s critique of Congress’s defunding of the War on Poverty in order to fund escalation of the Vietnam War.
And as even Waleed has acknowledged, AIPAC’s influence on the Democratic Party—which disproportionately funds election deniers and reactionaries in the Republican Party—biases the entire American electoral system in favor of not just militarism abroad, but also a foreign policy that works in favor of reactionary causes like supporting the Gaza genocide.
There’s also a dark history of the national security state being used to repress labor in the United States and being co-opted into militarism abroad. This happens in direct ways, but it also happens when the security state is used to surveil, harass, and restrict progressive formations like Black Lives Matter—movements that have been shown to cause increases in labor militancy and unionization.
A militarist foreign policy works favorably for ethnonationalists and oligarchs but comes at the expense of the working class.
Good Strategy Starts With a Diagnosis
To be clear, the issue is not that domestic progressives or electorally focused leftists have bad or ill-informed views on foreign policy. As I surveyed in Grand Strategies of the Left, leftist thought incubates plenty of good coherent perspectives on how to realize a more durable security, and most folks on the left take for granted that anything that looks like imperialism runs counter to democracy.
But where is that perspective in policy advice about the domestic economy or the strategizing for electoral campaigns? To take just one example, how much progressive effort went into promoting, defending, and celebrating the IRA and the CHIPS & Science Act, even though these pieces of legislation came at the expense of workers in the global South, heightened militarized confrontation with China, and bought off climate activists with tax credits for homeowners and corporations? A lot. How many champions of the IRA criticized America’s primacist foreign policy under Biden prior to October 7, 2023? Very few.
I am not arguing that foreign policy ought to be the primary issue in elections or that rhetoric about economic populism ought to be subordinated to rhetoric about ending endless war. I’m saying that the crucial ingredient of any good strategy is a realistic diagnosis, and we don’t have that if our economic and political analysis does not account for the role the national security state plays in perpetuating a system of mass harm on a global scale, which it sells us as being in our interests. It’s not an accident that the Democratic Party, the party of the technocratic class, is also the party of the national security state.
No campaign of left economic populism is going to meaningfully take root in America without addressing the global imperialistic architecture that US foreign policy perpetuates and prioritizes. The absence of something like a Sunrise Movement for peace—and against militarism—is the missing ingredient in a manifesto for left populism. Without it, any effort to realize anything resembling economic democracy in America will continue to be thwarted.
So my message is this: Progressives cannot afford to bifurcate reality. Militarist geopolitics are bound up with wealth-hoarding and the financialization of the economy. America will never have a party that stands for the working class if that party can’t also stand against war.
At the Defense Language Institute circa 2001, posing next to my talking Master P doll. When you squeeze his belly he moans, “Make ‘em say Ugh, Nah Nah Nah Nah.” It was a different time.
Here, for example, is me arguing that the Democratic Party is a managerial class. Here is me arguing for a progressive foreign policy think tank architecture. Here is me saying that the Democratic Party’s proper base is the working class. Here is me saying that progressives need independent media. And here is me saying that Democrats should not be running candidates whose main credential is their experience at the CIA and the Pentagon.
This is the meta argument we make in The Rivalry Peril.
Periods of military buildup in the US were followed by global financial crises because of the asset bubbles that resulted from slack capital in the global system being rerouted to and concentrated in the US. See especially Thomas Oatley’s A Political Economy of American Hegemony.