“Democracy or global supremacy.”

Democratic Party delegates must choose one come August.

In this brief note, the novelist Peter Dimock calls upon Americans to reject Joe Biden’s desperate bid for a second presidential term by prevailing on the four thousand-plus delegates to the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago next month to recognize what is fundamentally at issue as the November election draws near. Biden’s vulnerability presents the nation with an unexpected opportunity to break with an imperial tradition in favor of an altogether new politics that rejects  permanent war and the pursuit of global dominance. “Voting for American supremacy at the expense of democracy,” Dimock writes, “is a vote for absolute violence.”

This choice, Dimock clearly and persuasively argues, distinguishes this historically significant moment. In our view, he frames the question facing Americans precisely as it is.

We are pleased to have Peter Dimock once again in our pages.

—The Editors.   

Peter Dimock

11 JULY—As the presidential elections approach, Americans face an existential choice between upholding historically principled democratic commitments or voting to support a criminal president and administration already under formal legal indictment for complicity in the commission of genocide, war crimes, and failure to comply with international and humanitarian law. 

Over the past eighty years there has been a lockstep partnership of both mainstream American political parties to use the democratic forms of the American nation state as a vehicle for militarized economic and strategic “full-spectrum dominance.” This political consensus has produced a neoliberal transnational culture of permanent war within which prospects of an authentic international, universal, and democratic peace have been all but destroyed. Permanent war as a default policy to ensure “global order” through American state power does not constitute an international politics capable of fostering democratic well-being around the world. Economically and militarily imposed American supremacy destroys the possibility of any genuine democratic international politics.

This August the Democratic Party, by rejecting the candidacy of Joe Biden for a second presidential term, suddenly has an opportunity to break with America’s imperial political tradition which refuses to distinguish between, on the one hand, permanent war, domination, and militarized supremacy, and, on the other, “national security.” Without democratic practices that enact that radical, categorical distinction, the American state has no more legitimacy as a democracy than the state of Israel, whose government has committed itself illegally to genocide as a legitimate policy of governance and historical continuity.

Liberals, as Americans use this term, who affiliate with the Democratic Party can now act on this understanding (and self-recognition) from within the Democratic Party. They can use all means at their disposal to pressure Democratic National Committee delegates to vote against Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy. Such a vote surely will more accurately reflect the political will and social aspirations of the American people than the alternative—craven obedience to the DNC’s scripted logrolling.

I urge all citizens who identify as Democrats to do what they can to convince the delegates who will be voting at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August, who number more than four thousand, to refuse to endorse the leadership of President Biden and his administration for another four years. The Democratic Party needs a candidate who is authentically committed to American democracy and a politics of international peace rather than the state of permanent, unconstrained war in the name of American militarized global supremacy masquerading as “security.” 

There is no lack of documented and experiential evidence to prove that voting for American supremacy at the expense of democracy is a vote for absolute violence. 

A vote for the supposed right of the nation’s most powerful actors to wage permanent war implies a commitment to the notional utility of self-granted impunity. Self-granted impunity is exterminatory. 

In reply to all those who insist that everyone must support the Biden candidacy and then vote for him because Donald Trump “will be even worse,” I join Ali Abunimah of The Electronic Intifada, who rightly insists, “There is nothing worse than genocide.” Only acting on that recognition can now reform American democracy.