In all the thoughtful – and less thoughtful – analysis and understanding that follows USA election, I haven’t seen anyone consider what it might actually have meant to the country, its people, and their place in the world, if Kamala Harris’s powers of “joy” had somehow overcome Donald Trump’s powers of “darkness.”

Let’s stop, just for a minute, and consider the implications. Registering joy at a Harris win would have meant — what, exactly?

Regardless of the kind of mental, intellectual, emotional, or political acrobatics involved, at least some of that joy would also have involved explicit support for US participation in and enabling of Israeli genocide still being committed against Palestinian.

Would not such an outcome also have validated and presented, in a completely unadulterated way, the total rot at the core of American politics and so many of its institutions?

Wouldn’t that then have dug an even deeper hole from which an outgoing US empire must finally find ways to climb out of? And lamenting her loss, as so many now do, has exactly the same meaning. There can be no other logical possibility.

While the Democrats presented this election as a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, at no point did they allow democracy to function within their own party, opting instead for the old adage from America’s war in Vietnam to “destroy the village to save it” .

Starting with the undermining of their strongest candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, in 2016, the party elite continued its long-standing dominance of the electoral process.

In 2020, campaigning from the basement with tightly controlled media and public exposure, Biden’s weak campaign took off only after a relentless focus on racial politics and the endorsement of Senator Jim Clyburn of South Carolina.

Undefeated Democrats

To complete the circle, through an internal coup against Biden this year – after the party and the media shielded him from scrutiny of his mental decline for years – the same interchangeable party donors and “leaders” who left Sanders (all unelected, of course), chose Harris as the candidate, without a single citizen having voted for her.

Harris’ embrace of Republican politician Liz Cheney — though it made perfect sense in a world where the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations helped rehabilitate both her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and former President George W Bush, felons from a previous war – was just another nail in the coffin for her dying campaign.

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This is not even to mention the lip service of Palestinian speech at the Democratic National Convention and elsewhere, because, after all, Harris spoke.

Pundits and party leaders continually hounded voters to vote for Harris, primarily because of her identity and because she wasn’t Trump, rather than for her performance or her policies. Then they turned round in the most obscure manner and blamed everyone without themselves for results that were obvious to anyone outside their media and ideological bubble.

With little but enough time left in office, will the Biden administration dare to change course, if only slightly?

Almost immediately, the usual suspects have begun frantically and shamelessly raising funds to “secure” the very democracy they have been so busy destroying.

Pen America, after being convicted and boycotted by author for its failure to address genocide in Palestineis now concerned about “new threats to freedom of expression we know are coming”, and about “authoritarians” who are “persecuting journalists”.

With his signature clarity, journalist Jonathan Cooks last columnheadlined “A year late, The Guardian finally allows us to use the term ‘genocide'”, overrules the language police in “progressive” circles.

We can expect to see many more such cases of hypocrisy in action, of greater and greater consequence, as liberals and progressives all try to score points after the US election, returning us to the sick cycle of consensus – each hurling invective from their own side, with fewer and fewer standing on principle.

Apocalyptic cruelty

All of this, of course, has occurred against the backdrop of the truly hallucinatory and apocalyptic cruelty and violence that the current US administration continues to support, enable and fund with US taxpayers, while Israel continues to ramp up its total impunity – as if daring the world to not just weakly saying “enough”, without actually trying to stop its genocidal rampage.

With little but enough time left in office, will the Biden administration dare to change course, if only slightly?

As Israel continues decimating Gazaseparating men from women, executing people of all ages, murdering journalists and academics, and destroying what is left of health care while preventing food and medicine from entering, is there even a word of rebuke to the perpetrators – or a word of hope, sympathy or comfort to those being slaughtered, as if any of that would even matter at this point?

Israel’s genocidal intent is crystal clear. Even university students in Gaza, who are already attending or accepted in schools all over the world, cannot leave to resume or begin their studies. In this way, Israel, in addition to physically destroying Gaza’s education system and killing students, teachers and administrators, wants to prevent any possibility of a future for Palestine.

And what about Lebanon? When Hezbollah drives Israeli ground troops from southern LebanonIsrael continues its cowardly tactics of aerial bombing, destroying villages, decimating cities and infrastructure, targeting journalists and medical workers, and killing civilians.

But what is there to show for it? Has this strategy quelled the resistance, or prevented rockets from raining down on northern Israel? Has it allowed Israeli residents to return to their homes?

The way forward

While President-elect Trump may well have the political will to reach a negotiated settlement to end war in Ukrainehis first Cabinet appointments point to a fervent Israel-first, rather than America-first, agenda – cementing the immovable One Party’s bedrock policy of absolute Israeli impunity, no matter what it does.

Beyond the relentless and expected continuity of the US-enabled Israeli death machine, there is much that could happen between now and Inauguration Day.

War on Gaza: Trump’s cabinet is a recipe for a full-scale Middle East war

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In the background, the response of Western mainstream media and politicians to Progress of Israeli soccer players in Amsterdam – presented as a “pogrom” in which the perpetrators were portrayed as victims – points to a future of upcoming psy-ops and the production of “anti-Semitism” on an industrial scale, in an attempt to resurrect the idea of ​​Israel as a “sanctuary” for ” persecuted” Jews.

These maneuvers will be met on the ground with further media connivance and invention, as well as new laws equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism; new campaigns to ban various types of speech; and further violence directed at anyone who stands up in protest, not to mention new forms of military coercion and destruction, using techniques field-tested by Israeli occupation forces, that will go down in historical infamy.

The US is not even close to accommodating a multipolar world where the Israeli state in its current form – as French occupation of Algeriaor the apartheid regime in South Africa – dissolve into the dustbin of history.

But in the end, it is the people of the region, along with their supporters around the world, who will decide.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.