The Democratic Party Exists To Make Sure Good People Do Nothing

Caitlin Johnstone
5 min readAug 23, 2024

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The reason I criticize the Democrats so much can be explained in the aphorism “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The Democratic Party exists to ensure that good people will do nothing.

Gaza is such a perfect example of this. When Instagram progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promulgates the blatant lie that Kamala Harris is “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,” the result is that people who trust AOC will relax and stop pushing for an end to the genocide. They’ve been told by the congresswoman who’s been marketed as standing as far to the left as anyone can reasonably be that the current administration can be trusted to take care of this thing, so all they need to do to save Gaza is vote for the vice president in November.

It isn’t necessary to impose such manipulations upon Republicans, who simply support Israel’s atrocities in Gaza because they believe Muslims should be exterminated and because Israel is going to fulfill a biblical prophecy that will bring back Jesus and send all the heathens to burn in hell. Such manipulations are only necessary to politically nullify the kinds of people who would otherwise see what’s happening in Gaza and move mountains to end this mass atrocity.

So, so many of the world’s problems wouldn’t exist if the Democratic Party simply was what it pretends to be. If it really did stand against the sickest impulses of the Republican Party, if it really did stand for peace and justice and equality and ordinary working people, things would be unrecognizably different — not just for the United States, but for the entire world. Because good people would be doing something instead of nothing, evil would not triumph.

The Democratic Party exists to prevent this from happening. Instead of a good faction standing against an evil faction, the world’s most powerful and influential government instead has two evil factions working together toward the advancement of evil agendas. But what makes it so destructive is that it’s not just two openly evil factions: it’s one openly evil faction, and another faction which pretends to stand with good people against the evil faction.

If it was two openly evil factions, good people would immediately recognize that their goals are not being represented by either party, and a real revolutionary movement would emerge. What makes the Democratic Party such an effective psyop is that it stops good people from recognizing that everyone with power and influence in their country is their enemy. And it stops them from responding accordingly.

For ten and a half months American progressives have been mollified into a state of paralysis with empty words about a ceasefire and a two-state solution by a political party that has never had any real intention of bringing about either of these things. The Biden administration has been just as guilty in Israel’s genocidal atrocities as the Netanyahu regime itself, but by paying lip service to humanitarian concerns and pretending to be working toward peace while regularly leaking stories to the press about how angry and stern Biden is with Netanyahu, they’ve been able to wash their hands of their guilt in the eyes of many.

That has been the single defining feature of this presidential race. Not electing the first female president. Not stopping Trump. Not saving American democracy (whatever that means). The single defining feature of this presidential race has been one of America’s two mainstream factions claiming to want peace and justice for the Palestinians while supporting an administration that has been butchering them in a horrifying genocide.

That’s the effect of the Democratic Party, and it’s been doing this since long before October 7. Obama made a whole political legacy out of weaving tapestries of flowery prose expressing deep compassion and a love of peace and justice, while spending eight years continuing and expanding all the most depraved and murderous policies of his predecessor. Biden gave liberals throughout the western world a sigh of relief when he took office, because at long last “the adults are back in the room,” and now he’s waging a steadily escalating proxy war against a nuclear superpower while backing an actual genocide.

An empire whose existence depends on endless violence, oppression and exploitation at home and abroad cannot afford to have a major political party which stands against those things — so it doesn’t. And because it doesn’t while pretending that it does, it is able to relegate objections to this tyranny to the fringes of political discourse.

So I criticize the Democrats more than the Republicans because they require more criticism. That Republicans are evil is obvious at a glance to anyone with a conscience; that Democrats are evil is much less obvious, and usually requires quite a bit more consciousness and commentary to understand.

The empire has weaponized the insight that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing, so spreading awareness of the reality that the Democrats are not good people and are not doing good things helps take away that weapon.

Evil will continue to triumph as long as good people continue to do nothing, and good people will continue to do nothing as long as they believe their values and desires are represented by a political party whose sole purpose is to ensure the triumph of evil. Shattering that belief is an absolutely essential step toward a healthy world. This should be a major goal of good people everywhere.

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