The Hawks have Won. What Now?
The Democratic Party is the last thing standing in the way of total carnage. They should act like it.
There was a voice in my head on the day I cast my ballot. It told me that this was a moment of extraordinary danger. A moment where our world stood at the knife’s edge of war, and that maybe, extraordinary moments necessitated extraordinary action. That action, for me, would be to vote for the man that promised to prevent a third world war. A man who told young men like me he would not send us to a shallow grave in Taiwan or Kyiv. A man who promised that America would, finally, look within.
I could not bring myself to, in the end, vote for President Trump. I took some solace, though, in the peace I thought his Presidency would bring. I thought, naively, that the President understood the stakes of this current moment—that whether by ego or empathy he would use the awesome power of America with restraint and respect. I was wrong. President Trump has pushed our world into a new age of lawlessness and lethality by overthrowing Nicolás Maduro. He has set the rules for an era he will not live to see, and by doing so has handed so many young men across this world the shovel for those shallow graves. This era will be one of chaos and carnage—one that will make the imperfect morality of the rules-based international order look like the pinnacle of civilization. We must all be ready for what this means.
Donald Trump is not going to stop at Venezuela. The President is serious about Greenland. He is serious about Cuba. He is serious about Iran. He is serious about Mexico. The Democratic Party must, then, be as steadfast as he is serious. We must once again be a party that believes America, in the words of Joe Biden, should lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. A party that, in the words of Lyndon Johnson, believes we must either love each other, or we must die. A party that thinks peace does not require a preamble—whose leaders do not couch their criticism with soliloquies on how Maduro, or any other dictator, had it coming.
To be frank, I don’t care how bad of a man Nicolás Maduro was. I don’t care how poorly he ran his country. I don’t care if he went to bed every night a happy dictator. I care about America. I care about the fact that out of every five dollars spent in America, one is spent on healthcare. I care about the fact that the average young American is coming out of college with forty thousand dollars in debt. I care about the fact that our cities have become infested with drugs and overrun with homelessness. So, you will have to excuse my lack of interest in making sure that oil refineries in Caracas are operating at the efficiency they need to be.
Why is it so hard for those in our party to admit this? Why must it be that only the far-right and the far-left get to be agents of change while those near the center wallow away? It does not have to be this way. We must realize the rage that so many in this country feel and respond with the responsibility it requires. A responsibility that rests, most of all, on action. Action that makes our streets safer, our children healthier, and our lives less expensive. These are the issues of our time—and they are issues that will not be forgotten no matter how many dictators we destroy or capitals we capitulate.
When two elements are at odds and irreducible, the only solution is strength. There has never been any other solution in history, and there never will be. When the Democratic Party refuses to be strong in pushing for peace, the people of this country will look right. When the Republican Party refuses to be strong by focusing on America, this country will not know where to look. It is this moment where we find ourselves now, a nation without a leader and a country without a purpose. The strongest country in the history of the planet has been turned into its most expensive bounty hunter.
The danger of this cannot be overstated. For all the talk the Democratic Party has made about democracy, we still cannot seem to comprehend that democracy for democracy’s sake is not enough. It is supposed to be a means to an end, an end to ensure that the state would not be pilfered by the privileged. If our current delineation of democracy is an ideology fully realized, then it is an ideology that is ripe to be swept away in the turning tides of our current moment. We should all work to ensure this is not the case.
There has not been a war fought by this country since there was a Kingdom of Yugoslavia that has not been looked back on with terrible regret, and its supporters with horrible anger. This is why, even with knowledge that everything I write today can and will be used against me tomorrow, I say this truth with complete confidence. I am against war. When I cast my ballot in November of 2024, I hoped Donald Trump was too. How wrong I was.