Omar El Akkad: 'One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This'
Omar El Akkad is on tour in the UK and will be appearing in London on 11 February, Edinburgh on 12 February and Dublin on 13 February. More information can be found here.
Among the more troubling trends of 21st-century American politics is the normalization of every election as the existential one, the one upon whose results rests the very survival of American democracy. In one way or another, there is some truth to this claim.
Almost without fail, whatever deranged position sat on the periphery of the Republican Party a decade ago now resides in the center. Does anyone truly believe the same party, in another decade’s time, will be more moderate and reasonable? When will any Democratic candidate not be able to say: Elect me or they will dismantle everything, will wreak unimaginable havoc, unbelievable cruelty.
However true it may be, there’s also an aggrandizing quality to this kind of framing. It appeals to the liberal version of the Red Dawn reflex. In a perfect world, politics is boring, informed by debate but assured of a mutual understanding that the civic good matters. It’s tree-cutting permits and public transport levies and people who go to school for years and years to learn how to best pass a thoroughfare through a residential area. Republicanism, in its current form, proposes the exact opposite - treason trials for political opponents, the stripping away of any societal covenant, a war on expertise. In the right-wing vision of America, every societal interaction is an organ harvest, something vital snatched from the civic body, sold for one kind of profit or another. It’s a vision that produces an almost unmatched clarity in the base, an unmatched loyalty: Which side of this operation do you want to be on?
In mid-January 2024, with Gaza’s health system essentially collapsed and no one left to count the dead, The New York Times publishes an article detailing a drop in the number of Palestinian casualties - marking a change in Israel’s approach, it is said. This will happen again and again in the coming months: very serious reporting about perceived slowdowns in the rate of killing, the “war” entering a different “phase”.
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Every such story seems to prompt another round of argument about the folly of abandoning the Democratic Party now, when so much is at stake. A writer friend of mine describes it as cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s a hackneyed phrase for a writer to rely on, but I can’t stop thinking about it, the privilege implicit in its assumptions: ownership of body, agency over mutilation.
It is a source of great confusion first, then growing rage, among establishment Democrats that there might exist a sizable group of people in this country who quite simply cannot condone a real, ongoing genocide, no matter how much worse an alternative ruling party may be or do. This stance boggles a particular kind of liberal mind because such a conception of political affairs, applied with any regularity, forces the establishment to stand for something. It suddenly becomes insufficient to say: Elect us or else they will abolish abortion rights; elect us or they will put more migrants in concentration camps; elect us or they will make your lives so much worse. What is the use, once elected, of doing anything of substance when what was necessary, the negation of some other hypothetical outcome, has by definition already been achieved?
We know it could be worse. We have been made to know. The parents whose children were stolen from them at the border under the direction of the Trump administration were not hypothetical (though such policies didn’t begin with Trump, and didn’t end after). The Muslims who had to watch loved ones die from afar because they could not leave or enter the country on account of a plainly racist law were not hypothetical. But neither were those kids a drone mistook for terrorists. Neither were those people killed by bad cops and left to drown by border agents and told - but, thank God, by a more liberal administration this time - those new oil-drilling leases are the best thing for their children’s future. And neither are the tens of thousands of people being shot and bombed and left to die cold and hungry when a single directive from the White House could end it.
'Four more years'
It is an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside, that with enough respectful prodding the establishment can be made to bend, like that famous arc, toward justice. But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?
A few months into the genocide, protesters are regularly interrupting Democratic Party events. Dozens of major universities across the country come to a standstill as students build encampments to protest the killing. It harkens most clearly to the anti-apartheid movement of the eighties and the antiwar and civil rights protests of the sixties - all of them, too, led overwhelmingly by young people and derided as naive and inconsequential until they weren’t, until they became central facets of the story the United States tells itself about how, inevitably, justice prevails.
But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?
Once again, the party’s supporters react to these demonstrations by chanting “Four more years, four more years,” which by now can no longer be described as simply ghoulish. There is instead a kind of mechanical fear laced in it, a sense among these people, as there has been a sense among all people at all times on whom the judgment of future historians has started to dawn, that they have stepped too far into complicity with something evil.
Look up photographs of what we now consider this country’s - any country’s - most morally diseased moments. The dogs being let loose on men and women asking for basic dignity, the marching of undesirables through the streets, the wrath, the bloodlust. Ignore, for a moment, the people engaged most directly in the violence. Look instead at the faces of those who watch from the sidelines. Often, what you’ll find is not an expression of proud support or the shock and horror all these people will claim to have felt much later, after the verdict is in. Rather, you’ll see a childish little smirk. It’s the smirk of someone who has come to realize the ugliness of the enterprise they have passively aligned with but cannot muster the courage to abandon now. The soul, what’s left of it, buckles under the weight of contradiction, and all one can do is hide behind that pained little smirk, the half-stance of the spineless, the chanting, with not quite enough conviction, of four more years, four more years, as the bodies pile up outside one’s door.
It’s difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be. From this outcome, everything is reverse-engineered. Being seen as someone who believes in justice - not the messy, fraught work of achieving it - is the starting point of any conversation on justice. Saying the right slogans supersedes whatever it is those slogans are supposed to oblige. It makes sense - when there are no real personal stakes, when the missiles are landing on someone far away, being seen as good is good enough.
But there were always going to be consequences. The fascists whose ranks exert such outsize influence on Republican politics have come to understand that the veneer of liberalism is a deeply vulnerable thing. Its perfunctory concern with rhetorical evenhandedness gives even the most obviously bad-faith allegation influence. The result is an endless stream of distractions, fantastical claims, and charges on which, in the name of fairness, countless ink is spilled, debates had. Again, what matters is not the damage done when such nonsense is given oxygen, but the idea of being a person who gives all ideas a fair shake.
Beyond the stream of distractions, there is a much more existential vulnerability. Whatever derangement currently occupies conservative American politics is, at least, something of very real consequence: the minority groups they want to legislate out of every facet of society, the books they want to ban, the mechanisms of democracy they want to subvert - none of it is hypothetical. But if inoffensive centrism is seen to be concerned with these things only in as far as it reflects on the centrist’s self-image, if the Hillary Clintons of the world can muster great outrage at the fortunes of the Barbie movie at the Oscars but nothing at population-wide military murder sprees, then every Republican will always be able to say, truthfully: At least there’s no contradiction between what I am, what I claim concerns me, and what I plan to do.
This is the crux of it, the unavoidable reckoning. Every morning countless well-paid, well-educated foot soldiers in the employ of the Democratic Party wake up and decide on the day’s talking points. Every morning a small army of spokespeople step to the lecterns and deliver statements about how much the president cares for innocent lives, or the immense effort the United States makes to minimize unnecessary suffering, or whatever it is that needs to be said that day so as to launder the evil done between the last press conference and this one. A growing number of people ask a different question; the world asks a different question. The world, full of people who factor not one iota in the calculus of those morning meetings, looks upon this and asks, simply: Beyond self-interest, what do you believe in? And every morning the answer, dressed up in anesthetic euphemism and dependent on our collective capacity for resignation to the lesser of two evils, is: Nothing.
On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice rules that Israel must stand trial for genocide. Not long after, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and six other nations decide to cut off all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, one of the few organizations providing any aid to Palestinians. The decision is supposedly based on allegations that about a dozen of the UNRWA’s 30,000 or so workers were involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks. The allegation is enough. Hundreds of millions of dollars are withheld. More people will starve to death because of this decision, taken in the halls of power far away from where the starvation will happen, taken by people who will never be held responsible for any of it, who will live out the rest of their lives in total comfort. And should some activist interrupt their night out at a restaurant to show them pictures of the children they’ve helped kill, they will be deeply offended. Civilized people shouldn’t behave so rudely.
'It must take great courage, to dissociate so fully'
I went to a Trump rally once, in Eugene. People sold pins and shirts and other paraphernalia in the parking lot, most of it stamped with stuff like, lock the bitch up. A mostly naked young woman protested at the intersection closest to the venue; a few college kids living nearby put up signs on their lawns saying, fuck trump. Not a single unexpected thing happened.
Except later, midway through Trump’s speech. He showed up late, meandered as usual, seemed fully lost at times, or not lost but bored, bored with these people who had nothing to give him but the very temporary sugar rush of adoration. He tried various bits on for size, about murderous immigrants and about murderous immigrants and how America isn’t winning anymore. Eventually, even the most enthusiastic in the crowd sensed their leader’s heart wasn’t really in it, that he bristled at having to play this no-name open mic when what he really wanted was Madison Square Garden. And then, quietly, a few walked out. The die-hards stayed but a smattering of people who’d until then stood there, smirks on their faces, began to leave.
A few days after the ICJ decision, Nancy Pelosi floats the theory that some of the people who are calling for a ceasefire have Russian ties. Later she’ll add China to the mix - the real source of this phantom treason of not much concern, in the grand scheme of things. The carefree quality of the accusation, the ease with which it can be lobbed, is as powerful as the accusation itself. Anyone who came to the West from the places where such charges are commonplace recognizes it immediately. In the country of my birth, where, as of this writing, inflation rages somewhere around 130 percent and a substantial portion of the population doesn’t have enough to eat, everything is the fault of an insidious plot hatched by Israelis and Americans, by the West, by some outsider jealous of Egypt’s potential or intent on its destruction. It’s a prized tool in almost every failed regime’s workshop. It’s a source of great disillusionment, to see it so casually repurposed by a democratically elected Western politician.
Does Nancy Pelosi truly believe that the countless state and county offices of her own party that have called for a ceasefire are aligned with the Russians? Unions representing millions of American workers? The city council of Chicago? All of them agents of hostile foreign powers who have chosen this particular issue to unleash their Manchurian candidates? She doesn’t. Just as when she calls for the FBI to investigate activists protesting for a ceasefire, the message’s primary audience isn’t the FBI or the activists, it’s the base. It is to say, to the centrist who simply cannot understand why a good upstanding student at Columbia would risk their job prospects to protest some distant unpleasantness: These people making trouble are not like you. If they get their way, things will change and it will not be to your benefit.
One struggles to determine the more frightening reality: that this message is a lie, or that it’s true.
I watch an interview with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. “I think, right now what is happening in Gaza, I can’t, I just, I can’t go on every single day seeing this,” she says. “I don’t associate myself with what’s happening.”
I wonder what it must feel like. It must take great courage, to dissociate so fully, and under such difficult circumstances.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad will be published by Canongate on 13 February.
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