Paul Croce – Democrats in Power to Protesters in Streets: Mutual Prods to Peace

Dear Joe Biden-Kamala Harris Administration,

Many of your own supporters, Mr. Biden, were wavering in their support, and not just for the age issue. Your administration wears the burdens of liberalism. As a centrist outlook, it can seem wishy-washy. With your own run for the White House, Ms. Harris, and in your association with the current administration, this reputation now becomes your burden. Below, I outline some of the problems you have faced and offer advice drawn from the words and actions of those who have faced similar intellectual, moral, and political puzzles. Together, they suggest a tough centrism that you can seize.

The administration’s stance on the Gaza War is a case in point. Yet with some bold steps, the burdens of centrism can become an opportunity.

While Israel assaults Palestinians in retribution for the Hamas attack last October, your administration is being squeezed between Republicans’ tough declarations for more aggressive action and, within your own ranks, fierce insistence to bring peace. I get it: you are looking for a sweet spot down the middle.

The administration’s recent actions are not helping your reputation: open impatience with current Israeli policies, suspending shipments of big bombs, then issuing a report that this US ally likely violated international humanitarian law. After all that, approval of over a billion dollars in arms shipments anyway. This all looks weak and indecisive—even your supporters don’t warm to this mix of steps.

As with many liberals, you are not pacifists, but as centrists, you seek reduction of wartime cruelties. There’s a history of fellow travelers on paths like yours. The Geneva Conventions, starting in 1864, were written by those against war who took bold action to reduce its horrors. William James, a self-proclaimed “pacifist,” wrote “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910) to divert those frequent warrior impulses in decisive but less destructive directions. Harry Truman seemed doomed to defeat in the 1948 presidential election until he used the adamant ideologies around him to campaign with “give ‘em hell” fierceness as a centrist alternative.

Centrism does not have to be middling. You can speak about the tough task of balancing Israeli aggressions in response to Hamas terror and progressive calls for peace now. But the toughness of that talk can only become persuasive if you act with toughness too.

Difficult balancing act? Well, yeah, but that’s the liberal challenge—and the liberal opportunity, if you can seize it.

The big student protests have presented that challenge with just such an opportunity. Students outraged by the Gaza War demand peace. They are the tip of the spear of changing American sentiments. After generations of bipartisan support for Israel resulting in ready funding of its military and widespread association of Palestinians with terrorism, many Americans are doubting this portrait of the tensions. According to a recent Gallup poll, the number of Americans approving Israel’s military actions has dropped from half to a little over a third since last November. That’s a big change, and Democrats can ride this wave.

Students’ sharp speech expresses changing views that many Americans feel more quietly. While many political and educational leaders have been portraying the students as violent or hateful toward Israel or toward Jews, most protesters direct their verbal spears against policies supporting widespread death and destruction.

To the Democrats in power: How are you going to respond? If you endorse the protesters, you lose votes from supporters of Israel. If you criticize the protesters, you alienate the progressive wing of your party. The centrist squeeze is on.

At a time when Americans are saying they want change—70% in a recent poll—Democrats cannot rely on their reputation as calm centrist caretakers. Bold action on the spiraling Middle East war would give you a chance to a be change agents. And you can do it in your own liberal-leaning way. In a phrase attributed to John Kennedy, those who make moderate change more difficult will make radical change more likely. That’s your opening to push the combatants to make moderate changes for pulling the pins out from under the forces for convulsive tragedies.

President Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the presidential race actually adds support to these possibilities for forceful centrism. As with most Vice Presidents, Ms. Harris, you have been a loyal Veep. As your advisors have reported, “there [has been] no disagreement between her and Biden.” However, the tone of your March speech on Gaza suggests potential for breaking with the current administration’s constraints. And delivery of your remarks at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of a big 1965 turning point in growing public sympathy for the Civil Rights Movement, reinforces potential also to encourage the changing public sentiments about Israel-Palestine. Your tough talk there for Israel “to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses,” and for Hamas to “agree to … an immediate ceasefire,” has primed Americans to expect that you can step away from “Biden’s war,” the administration’s enabling of continued massive violence in Gaza. Your comments after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 25 reinforce expectations that your empathetic tone for the suffering of both Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages could lead to more forceful steps toward peace.

Kamala Harris, you can transform your administration’s centrist dilemma into a tough centrism…. Imagine now, at the top of the ticket, delivering this speech, using the tone of your recent talk as a bridge to the more striking statements of the students:

Dear Protesters,

Like you, I want peace. For you, it’s a statement, a hope. For me, it’s a process, a big challenge, and an aspiration. I am not ready to stride immediately into peace without preparation. That would produce a backlash in the Middle East and invite Republican victory in November. That would turn Peace Now into a ticket for more aggression. Neither of us want that.

Peace with preparation means a combination of my moves toward more aggressive steps to wean the combatants off of war and your actions to build a coalition for peace to support those steps. If you work smart for peace, your actions can enable me to make more substantial policies for peace. Drop the smarts for peace and you stifle it. What’s it going to be, dear potential collaborators?

You may think of me as an unlikely ally, but we can do teamwork.

Your work for peace can include keeping your protests peaceful, making clear your opposition to terrorism by Hamas or by any group, and avoiding any hint of anti-Semitism. Slips from these goals provide gifts to those who are ready to tar our paths to peace.

My work for peace can include plans to condition aid to Israel for defense but not for offensive weapons and taking action against attacks on Hamas that slip into civilian destruction. I can insist that Israel allow humanitarian aid through land routes, which would be even more effective for bringing supplies to suffering Gazans than the floating piers President Biden had built.

Your calls for peace can generate political room for my work for peace. And you can do more. You can build coalitions with the citizens that are ebbing away from unquestioning support for Israel because of its aggressions—that’s worrying more and more Americans, and these are the very things that worry both of us. Students: move beyond college walls! Think of the young people in 1968 supporting Eugene McCarthy who campaigned against the US war in Vietnam. They went “clean for Gene” to talk with citizens just beginning to raise questions, and you too could translate your impulses for peace into a growing voting bloc.

That emerging united front, across landscapes and across generations, will give me political power to support policies that will address the irritants that have been prodding this region into repeated violence. With more support, I could make stronger political and economic moves to endorse less violent factions among the Palestinians, and I could block funding to prevent Israeli settlements on Palestinian territories and insist on equal treatment.

I can’t move toward any of these aggressively centrist policies without political support. But I can do more of these if your bold spear for peace remains unconnected to hatred and violence and gets more deeply connected to mainstream American voters.

Those voters have already been moving in your direction, dear protesters. Maybe they are not fully awake to your demands, but they are waking. I can gain their support with your help. Protesters! Seize with Martin Luther King, Jr., the “sword that heals” through forceful but nonviolent actions that will help me make political actions for peace.

In 1968, the Democrats did not nominate for president peace advocate McCarthy but centrist liberal Hubert Humphrey. As sitting Vice President, he was dogged by his affiliation with Lyndon Johnson who was orchestrating the war in Vietnam. In September, Humphrey declared he would “stop the bombing” and “move toward de-Americanization of the war.” These reflected growing sentiments in the public and the vocal sentiments of peace advocates. When he then spoke on college campuses, student activists held out signs for that beleaguered liberal, saying if you mean it, we’re with you.

In our time, this liberal candidate for president with pressures from all sides now asks you: are you with me? Will you help push me toward political paths for peace?

If your groups and I remain at odds, that will help the advocates for war, constantly ready to solve differences through violent conflict. But together, we can transform peace from idealistic talk to political action.

That’s my challenge to you and my challenge to me. In a violent and politically fraught world, that’s the goal of working toward peace that we can accomplish together.

For peace in the making,

Vice President Kamala Harris

Madame Vice President, your teamwork with the protesters using tough centrism will open a lane for you to turn your current problems into opportunities. Your campaigners might call it building political momentum. The world will call it steps toward peace.

Paul J. Croce, Senior Professor of History and American Studies at Stetson University and past president of the William James Society.

Author of Science and Religion in the Era of William James (University of North Carolina Press, June 1995); and Young William James Thinking (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); author interview.

Presenter on Learning from People Who Disagree, The 2020 History of Psychology Wallace A. Russell Memorial Lecture, American Psychological Association.

Creator of the Public Classroom: essays with brief accounts of scholarly insights, presentations on learning across differences, and podcasts on healing our cultural wounds.

Contributor to the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the philosophy blog Civil American, the public interest platform Public Seminar, history pages including History News Network, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and US Intellectual History Blog, in town, the West Volusia Beacon West Volusia Beacon, and with a lighter touch, the satire, “New University Logo: NO TESTS.”