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WHEN THE LEFT EXERTED POWER IN CONGRESS—AND HOW IT CAN AGAIN  
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Van Gosse
September 18, 2025
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_ The “third rail” over Palestine is losing its fatal power in
Congress and the Democratic Party, and it’s time to shut it down
permanently, as part of a long-term orientation towards blocking
fascism while building the kind of new Left that we need _

Families and supporters of the Movement of Victims of the Regime
(MOVIR) in El Salvador call on the international community to denounce
the country’s human rights violations.,

 

Recently, Waleed Shahid, a founder of Justice Democrats, posted an
essay (“Primary Colors: On Progressive Electoral Strategy
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arguing the Left should not focus exclusively on ‘swing seats’,
the perennial holy grail to regain a Democratic majority in the
House.  Instead, he says, we should pay equal attention to the
‘safe seats” in deep-Blue cities, places like the 14th
Congressional District in the Bronx and Queens, where Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s taking down Joe Crowley in 2018 opened up new
electoral possibilities across the country. 

Since then, district-by-district, emphatically Left activists have won
election to the House—not just the original four members of the
“Squad” (AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) but
several dozen more. Together they have organized a new progressive
bloc around the push to make the Democratic Party stop backing Israeli
apartheid, the most urgent foreign policy issue of our time.  In
tandem with the innovative “Battleground” projects--grassroots
coalitions to take back swing districts in New York
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national Battleground Alliance PAC
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2026--this is the blueprint for a renewed party that actually stands
for something and is able to win a majority. 

Here's some relevant (and relatively recent) history.

First, starting in the 1970s “movement conservatives” took over
the GOP by challenging sitting members; the most painful example for
New Yorkers would be Alphonse D’Amato defeating the consistently
liberal Senator Jacob Javits in a 1992 primary (remember when there
were “liberal Republicans?”).  By doing so, these New Rightists
made their party ideologically coherent, moving it far to the
right.  There’s a lesson for us!

Second, also beginning in the 1970s, Black challengers steadily
replaced the white Democrats representing majority-Black districts.
The result was an empowered Congressional Black Caucus acting as
Congress’ social-democratic wing for decades.

Least-known, however, is the ascendance of an
anti-interventionist/anti-militarist congressional bloc lasting from
the late Vietnam years through the early 1990s. Year-in and year-out,
these Members voted against all of the core Cold War policies: nuclear
build-up, supporting dictatorships in the name of “containment,”,
intervening overtly and covertly in other countries. For young Central
American solidarity activists like me back then, it was a given that
we had allies in Congress, and the point was to increase their
numbers.

The 1984 _Voting Record _issued by the Coalition for a New Foreign
and Military Policy, representing leading Protestant denominations,
progressive Catholics, the major peace groups, some important unions
and a lot more, provides a window. That document, one of several
published by groups like SANE (today’s Peace Action), used thirteen
votes to rate House Members:  six on Reagan’s wars in Central
America; one each on military spending, chemical weapons,
“Anti-Satellite Weapons,” the Cruise and Pershing missiles, and
the Trident submarine; two on the MX missile. _99 Members, 23% of the
House, received perfect or near-perfect scores (100 or 92), and in
some years that number went up considerably, with an equivalent
grouping in the Senate._

Where did this bloc come from?  The conventional wisdom was that
their politics reflected the anti-Vietnam War movement seeping into
Congress, but that’s insufficient. Some of them—like Madison,
Wisconsin’s Robert Kastenmeier, in the House 1959-1991--challenged
conventional Cold War policies long before U.S. ground troops arrived
in Vietnam in 1965. A series of crises radicalized liberals:  the
Johnson Administration’s threadbare justification for its 1965
invasion of the Dominican Republic; opposition to the Brazilian
military regime’s systematic use of torture in the late 1960s and
Argentina and Chile’s death squad dictatorships in the 1970s, which
resonated deeply with Catholics receiving anguished pleas from their
co-religionists; rebellions against European rule in Africa, including
Portugal’s colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, the
white settler government in Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa,
which catalyzed a deep solidarity in Black America.

Who were these congresspeople?  To a remarkable degree, they
resemble the members that Shahid has identified as the basis for an
expanded Left in Congress. In both cases, we find a multi-racial group
drawn mostly from urban districts in the Midwest and Northeast and
along the West Coast.   The informal “Ceasefire Caucus” and the
current 47 co-sponsors for H.R.3565, the _Block the Bombs Act_
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TO BAR TRANSMISSION OF THE MOST LETHAL WEAPONS TO THE ISRAEL DEFENSE
FORCES, DEMONSTRATES THAT CONTINUITY. THEN AS NOW, LARGE GROUPS
REPRESENT GREATER LOS ANGELES, THE BAY AREA, AND CHICAGO.  There are
some meaningful differences, however.  Texas now produces almost as
many House members (5) opposing arms to Israel as Illinois (6), and
New York fields only three co-sponsors, presumably because of the
influence of “Leader” Schumer and “Leader” Jeffries.  In the
1980s, New England was near-monolithic in its opposition to Reagan’s
re-fighting Vietnam, but now only a handful of Yankees (5) are
supporters of Palestinian rights.  Another distinction is the
complete absence of Republicans.  For decades, you could count on
enough of them to somewhat offset the rightwing Southern Democrats.
Oregon’s Mark Hatfield was one of staunchest pro-peace figures in
either party throughout his thirty years in the Senate (1967-1997),
joined in the House by Iowa’s Jim Leach and the venerable Silvio
Conte from western Massachusetts.

The Soviet Union’s collapse and the hollow triumph of the First Iraq
War in 1990-91, combined with the advent of the first Democratic
president since 1980, made foreign policy opposition seem obsolete.
Bill Clinton’s many long-distance wars met little dissent in
Congress or his own party. In the 1990s, one of the few Congress
members firmly opposing Clinton’s constant bombing campaigns was the
ultra-libertarian from Texas, Ron Paul. Even Bernie Sanders had little
to say. The last hurrah for anti-interventionism was the Second Gulf
War.  Sixty percent of the House Democratic Caucus opposed the
October 2002 AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) against Saddam
Hussein, and then replaced Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, who voted
for it, with Nancy Pelosi, because of her antiwar
stance.  Congressional and popular opposition to that dunder-headed
disaster simmered for the next five years, helping bring about the
Democrats’ sweeping rebound in the 2006 midterms. Barack Obama’s
campaign for the 2008 nomination derived much of its energy from the
perception that he was the antiwar candidate, but during his
presidency, foreign policy dissent from the Left dwindled into
obscurity, as he dialed down the temperature, and members of his party
rallied around their president. But then came Trump, and the constant
murderous cycle Israel of “mowing the lawn” in Gaza, then October
7, and now the daily face of slaughter.  It as if a dam has broken,
provoking the largest wave of popular and congressional dissent since
the 1980s.  And here Bernie has come forward with remarkable impact,
somehow getting a majority of Senate Democrats
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oppose at least some arms to Israel in back-to-back votes in late
July.

There is one obvious difference between the post-Vietnam era and the
present, however.  The Left opposition among Democrats now runs up
against a deeply entrenched constituency in their own party: AIPAC and
the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, which last year took out two
stalwart members of the Ceasefire Caucus, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman,
and will keep repressing opposition to Israel’s genocide for some
time to come. Nonetheless, despite its being the proverbial “third
rail,” congressional support for Palestinian human rights has
steadily increased since Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) drafted
`Dear Colleague’ letters to Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry
to protect “the human rights of Palestinian children subjected to
Israeli military detention”
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followed by formal bills in 2017-2018; the Upper Midwest, whether
Madison or Minneapolis, has been more resolutely anti-intervention
than any other part of the country for more than a century, with
McCollum, Ilhan Omar, and Robert Kastenmeier’s successor, Mark
Pocan, maintaining that tradition. 

Where to go from here? The Palestine solidarity movement and its
allies need to make opposition to military aid for Israel’s
slaughter in Gaza a litmus test.  Less than half of the members of
the House’s Progressive Caucus
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Block the Bombs Act, and that must change. In the words of SNCC’s
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) in 1966, it’s time to say “Move on
over, or we’re going to move on over you,” which means primarying
those Members who claim to be progressive but resist constituent
pressure to do what is, in the most existential sense, the right
thing.

What would it look like if the collective “we” implemented a
fork-in-the-road strategy in advance of the 2026 elections?  If
someone asked me how the Central America movement repeatedly barred
aid to the Contra terrorists and the like, it’s pretty
clear:  make a short list of those solidly Blue districts whose
members are recreant, find groups in them, and hit those
representatives hard and often—town halls, billboards, op-eds in
local papers, respectable leaders (clergy, business, professionals,
professors) lobbying inside their district offices while the
less-respectable picket and then blockade them:  _If Representative
__ from their own state is co-sponsoring the Block the Bombs Act, why
aren’t they?_  Keep publicizing the list—and don’t leave
Hakeem Jeffries and the rest of the leadership out, they need to feel
the heat. This is not rocket science, and all of it is probably being
strategized in national meetings right now. 

One more thing:  a signal strength of the Central America,
anti-apartheid, and anti-nuclear movements of the late twentieth
century was the absence of dogmatic
blaming-and-shaming.  Unfortunately, that is not the case today,
when some large part of DSA’s leadership is intent on censuring AOC
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not expelling her outright from the organization) because they find
her position on Israel less than one hundred percent of what they
demand. At a time when unity both _on_ the Left, and _with_ those
more centrist forces willing to join us in opposing fascism, is the
highest possible demand, this kind of sectarianism is radically
counter-productive. We are at a turning point. The “third rail”
over Palestine is losing its fatal power in Congress and the
Democratic Party, and it’s time to shut it down permanently, as part
of a long-term orientation towards blocking fascism while building the
kind of new Left we need.

_Van Gosse is Professor of History Emeritus, Franklin and Marshall
College_

* political strategy
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* international solidarity
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* El Salvador
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* Palestine
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* Democratic Party
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* Left Politics
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