The Moral And Strategic Idiocy Of The DNC

At its meeting this week, the DNC opposed a ban on U.S. provision of offensive weapons to Israel.

By Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

We’ve been here before: widespread Democratic opposition to an outrageous war, particularly among the young, while a good chunk of the party’s establishment remains unwilling to halt U.S. involvement in that conflict. In the ’60s, that was Vietnam. Today, it’s Gaza.

Echoes of that rift were loud and clear at this week’s meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Minneapolis. There, on Tuesday, the party’s Resolutions Committee voted against bringing to the floor a motion to put the Democrats on record as opposing the continuing provision of arms to Israel to wage its war of extirpation. It did vote for a resolution essentially restating the Biden administration’s position on the war: calling for a two-state solution, for the release of hostages, for an end to the conflict. That resolution said nothing, however, about America’s ongoing provision of the arms with which the Netanyahu government is waging its war.

The resolution that was adopted was authored by DNC Chair Ken Martin. The one that was squelched was authored by Allison Minnerly, a 26-year-old DNC member from Florida who’s a voter mobilization organizer. Her resolution was backed by most of the DNC’s young members, including the leaders of the College Democrats of America and the High School Democrats of America.

During the committee’s Tuesday meeting, proponents of Minnerly’s resolution offered amendments that would have made it more acceptable to a majority of DNC members, in particular one that specified the weapons ban would apply only to offensive weapons (and not, therefore, to defensive weapons like Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile deployments). That effectively would have conformed her resolution to the one that Bernie Sanders brought to the floor of the Senate last month, which failed in the face of unanimous Republican opposition, but which did win the support of a majority of Senate Democrats, who voted for it by a 27-to-17 margin.

Yet supporters of Martin’s resolution also voted against that amendment, fearing that so amended, the Minnerly resolution then might prevail if it reached the floor in Wednesday’s general meeting. That the resolution’s supporters on the committee voted for the amendment showed their eagerness to amend their initial position, if by so doing they could bring the party establishment around to the position of the party base: A Gallup poll from late July showed just 8 percent of Democrats backed Israel’s war on Gaza, while a Quinnipiac poll released just yesterday showed that Democrats opposed, by a 75 percent to 18 percent margin, the U.S. sending more military aid to Israel for its war.

Martin apparently understood he was hurling the party into an abyss if he then brought his own resolution to the floor. Instead, he withdrew it, and had a five-minute impromptu meeting with Minnerly, in which he agreed to form a commission to devise a party stance that presumably reflects more of a consensus. Minnerly welcomed his proposal, hoping, as she told me, that the commission would come up with something more reflective of the view of the “everyday people” who fill the party’s ranks.