May 21, 2025

Empire With Decorum: the Complicity of Cory Booker and the Crisis of the Democratic Party

By Tim Hjersted / filmsforaction.org

During Cory Booker's 25-hour speech, which many mistook for an act of moral courage, he never once mentioned the atrocities committed by our so-called ally, Israel. No acknowledgment of the white phosphorus dropped on civilian neighborhoods, no mention of the starvation blockade, the bombings of refugee camps, or the systematic targeting of journalists and medics. Not a word about the policies of collective punishment that meet every definition of a war crime under international law*.

And then, as if to punctuate his silence, he turned around and voted to send more weapons—more bombs, missiles, and bomb guidance kits—to the very regime carrying out these crimes, totaling over $8 billion. That's $8 billion that's not going to schools, Medicaid, or anything that actually helps Americans here at home.

Specifically, he and 81 other Democratic and Republican Senators voted to send Israel:

-35,329 MK 84 2,000 lb. bombs
-4,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads
-2,800 500-pound bombs
-2,166 Small Diameter Bombs
-and tens of thousands of JDAM guidance kits

This doesn’t just violate international law; it violates U.S. law—specifically the Leahy Law and the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibit our government from providing military support to nations committing gross human rights violations. But of course, these laws, like so many others, are only enforced when convenient for the empire.

Cory Booker has never meaningfully stood up to the oligarchs who bankroll our elections, nor the war profiteers who shape our foreign policy. He's never challenged the architecture of permanent war, or the bipartisan consensus that keeps the military-industrial complex humming. His rhetoric may occasionally drift toward the moral register, but his actions are always in perfect alignment with the interests of capital, the Pentagon, and the surveillance state.

I'm sad to say it, but it’s time we stop giving politicians like Cory Booker a pass because they speak in full sentences or refrain from outright fascist theatrics. Empire with good manners is still empire. Empire in a blue tie is still empire. We don’t need better managers of decline or more polished caretakers of imperialism—we need people willing to dismantle it.

We should not be satisfied choosing between "empire with decorum" and "empire with the mask off."

That’s a false choice designed to keep us docile.

We must begin demanding something different entirely: a politics of conscience, rooted in international solidarity, human rights, and liberation - not domination dressed in progressive language, or fake populism dressed in nationalism.

For decades, the Republicans have been the party of war and the rich, and they are likely beyond redemption. Perhaps the Democrats are too - but if we don’t push them to be better now, after they’ve lost every branch of power to a band of Project 2025 extremists more brazenly serving oligarchy and empire than ever before, then our failure to hold them accountable will only ensure that extremism continues to rise.

Extremism doesn’t grow in a vacuum. It grows in the fertile soil of political failure—when people are suffering and see no one in power willing to fight for them, when both parties appear captured by the same donors, mouthing different slogans while serving the same underlying systems of profit and control. When the so-called opposition refuses to hold the powerful accountable, or even name the crimes unfolding before our eyes, they forfeit their legitimacy. And into that vacuum steps the strongman, the demagogue, the well-funded authoritarian who promises to burn it all down—backed by think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and blueprints like Project 2025.

We are witnessing the consequences of decades of cowardice, triangulation, and complicity from a Democratic Party that often seems more concerned with preserving institutional decorum than preventing institutional collapse. Their failure to act boldly, to speak honestly, and to name the systems of oppression that define our foreign and domestic policy has allowed the far right to define the terms of political debate. While Republicans energize their base by channeling discontent into nationalism and grievance politics, Democrats ask for donations and promise incrementalism.

This isn’t just political malpractice—it’s moral failure. And unless we confront it directly, unless we stop treating the next election as the only terrain of struggle and start building movements that demand a break from empire, oligarchy, and ecological collapse, the slide toward authoritarianism will continue. Not because the right is strong, but because those who claim to oppose them remain too afraid—or too comfortable—to boldly offer a genuine alternative.

The task ahead isn’t just to replace those in power, but to build movements strong enough to confront them—whoever they are, whatever party they belong to. This means organizing around principles, not personalities. It means building structures that outlast election cycles, that educate, agitate, and mobilize people at the local level, where real change begins. We need networks of solidarity rooted in mutual aid, labor organizing, independent media, and direct action—tools that don’t beg power for scraps, but demand transformation.

Only when politicians fear losing more than our votes will they begin to act differently. Until then, they will offer symbolic gestures while empire grinds on. Our job is not to wait for courage from above, but to cultivate it from below—by refusing to normalize injustice, and by refusing to participate in a system that asks us to stay silent out of fear the other half of the establishment is worse.

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Empire With Decorum: the Complicity of Cory Booker and the Crisis of the Democratic Party

1. Use of White Phosphorus on Civilian Neighborhoods

2. Starvation Blockade

3. Bombings of Refugee Camps

4. Systematic Targeting of Journalists and Medics

5. Policies of Collective Punishment