"Militant democracy as a political culture that can win"

Speech to Green Renaissance and Green Liberty

Emanuel Pastreich

"Militant democracy as a political culture that can win."

June 27, 2025

Address to Green Renaissance and Green Liberty

Much has changed in America since I wrote the article “A Green Party that will win” in September, 2023 during my campaign for the presidential nomination in the Green Party.

Of course, the United States was then, and is now, a military dictatorship in drag, reporting through a covert chain of command to Wall Street while posing as an open society that embraces democracy. But the decay of institutions dating back to the 9.11 incident and the destabilization of the politics, from ideology to systems of governance, from values to symbols of legitimacy and authority, has completely destabilized the system; amplitude in political discourse has increased, leading to a complete breakdown failure that is just months from low-level warfare.

So, we are not looking for simply a way to make the Green Party into a political party that can win at this point. We are trying to use the foundations of the Green Party, in spite of all of its corruption and ineffectiveness under the rule of Ben and Jerry’s progressive-minded businessmen and Homeland Security anti-disinformation agents who run it now, as the base for a mass movement that goes far beyond a political party, offering a full alternative to not only the corrupt political parties like the Republicans and Democrats, Greens and Libertarians, but also an alternative to a bankrupt civil society, an alternative to a government captured by billionaires, and an alternative to an economy run for the profit of a handful of the super-rich.

This means real organization, real action and a willingness not only to risk one’s wealth and one’s life, but a willingness to share with those who fight with us without condition. We must be as well organized as any army, and as willing to take risks and to sacrifice ourselves, if we wish to make progress against the highly organized teams in the military and intelligence, in Homeland Security and ICE with whom we fight—even if our actions are peaceful. That means that we must take seriously counterintelligence operations against infiltration and enforce strict discipline internally.

Two historical events took place recently that have created an entirely new political environment, one that asks of us, will we take this opportunity, or cast it aside out of sloth and inflexibility.

The first event was the criminal bombing of Iran by Israel and the United States, an effort intended to establish military rule at home and world war abroad as a means of enriching the few.

The other event was the victory of Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), in the Democratic Party primary for mayor of New York City, beating out the billionaire-funded insider Andrew Cuomo who did everything right in the corporate media and who embraced all the fictions of the Democratic Party.

The bombing of Iran by Israel, and more significantly by the United States, even though it was to some degree political theatre, was the final stage of decay of American institutions that leaves America without any moral legitimacy and opens up the real possibility of massive collapse like the fall of the Soviet Union, or of the Roman Empire after Nero and Caligula. It also creates a dynamic flux pushing for world war on multiple fronts.

The US military, whose top generals were dismissed over the last three months in an unconstitutional military coup by Trump’s boys, attacked Iran without warning, without any justification in international law or diplomacy, without consultation with international bodies, or even with allies, without any expert input, without consultation with the Congress in accord with the Constitution, and over the opposition of the vast majority of the military itself.

Although, so far, a third world war has not ensued, and kabuki theatre tricks have been used to try to claw back towards normalcy, we are looking as something akin to the phoney war (1939- 1940) after the German invasion of Poland when the start of hostilities oddly did not to jell into total war for eight months. But war did come, did it ever!

We must not deceive ourselves, the attack on Iran has completely destabilized geopolitics and it would be easy, in light of the push in NATO to massively increase defense spending, for a total war at multiple levels to break out at any moment. Moreover, when it comes to information warfare and psychological warfare, the use of biological and nano weapons, total war is already underway everywhere under the radar.

So, when we consider how to create a movement that will win, that will take institutional and political control, we need to first accept that the Democratic Party will never be a credible opposition force. Just look at the response of the Democratic Party to Trump’s attack on Iran.

When the Texas Democrat Al Green introduced a resolution to impeach Trump, fully supported by the law and the Constitution, and based largely on Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional attack on Iran, the majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives, serving faithfully their corporate masters, stepped in to block even that weak resolution.

Green’s resolution stated clearly that “President Trump’s unilateral, unprovoked use of force without congressional authorization or notice constitutes an abuse of power when there was no imminent threat to the United States, which facilitates the devolution of American democracy into authoritarianism. Opposition to this statement is not based on values or interpretations, but rather a complete contempt for law and accountability.”

The majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives joined the unanimous Republicans to block the resolution; every Democrat in a position of authority, from Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and former Majority Whip James Clyburn voted to stop consideration of the resolution.

Democrats were not concerned with the illegality and immorality of Trump’s attack on Iran but rather only with the possibility that it would fail militarily and that he launched the attack without congressional authorization.

Trump should be impeached by the book, according to the law, for his crimes. It is not a matter of politics or political parties. But the truth is that the Democratic Party itself is up to its elbows in blood from the Covid reign of terror and its support for massive repression at home and abroad; it is incapable of serving as an opposition. Most of the members of the Democratic Party are active collaborators in state crimes and should be impeached themselves. The sickness has gone to the marrow of our very civilization and requires radical surgery.

Thus, now that it is so obvious that the Democratic Party cannot play the most basic role as opposition in any form other than as entertainment, we are tasked with creating a real opposition; we must go beyond propping up a weak and corrupt political party like the Green Party so that it gets 10% of the vote rather than 3%.

The other critical development was the victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City of Zohran Mamdani, a man who called out Gaza a genocide at a time when people were being arrested by ICE and placed in concentration camps for such statements, who embraced explicitly socialist policies and who focused on class issues to a degree that has not been seen in mainstream politics in the last 60 years.

Mamdani’s win demonstrated that the anger shown in the No Kings protest is starting to take political shape and can be channeled as a revolution that cannot be contained by sheep dogs and agents like Bernie Sanders.

Mamdani demonstrated that young people were willing to work day and night to support him as part of a larger political movement and that they were not intimidated by the fascist takeover of the court system, or the creation of a secret police in the form of ICE.

Yet, although there is real support for revolution in America, and a movement in opposition to plutocracy is just waiting to be born, it is extremely doubtful that Mamdani’s victory will transform the Democratic Party. Already

former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers denounced Mamdani for not disavowing “working to globalize the intifada” and promoting “Trotskyite economic policies.” The Republicans are threatening to deport him.

As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it, we are in an “age of monsters” because “The old order is dying, but the new order still is struggling to be born.”

That is the challenge for our movement.

I want to address a critical issue here that John Spritzler and I have brought up, but that many others hesitate to consider, even at this late date as we careen forward towards catastrophe, and that is the topic of “militant democracy.”

“Militant democracy” is the concept that there is a practical and strategic need for a radical defense of democracy and the rule of law when it is under assault by fascistic forces who employ the assets of democracy such as freedom of speech, free elections, and transparent systems of deliberative government as tools to advance totalitarian government and destroy democracy itself.

The locus classicus for “militant democracy” is an article by the German constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein entitled “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights” that appeared in The American Political Science Review in 1937, the height of the takeover of governments across Europe by fascist political parties. The similarity between the bleak political reality that Loewenstein described, and what we see today as the heads of NATO countries commit to raising defense spending to 5% of GDP and embrace a radically militarized and repressive political system, goes without saying.

Karl Loewenstein fled Germany in 1933 when he and other defenders of constitutional governance were subject to personal threats by the Nazi Party after it took power. He ended up teaching at Yale and then Amherst College.

Loewenstein studied different forms of democratic governance over decades and developed a new field of comparative constitutional law. That is to say that Loewenstein was keenly aware of the specifics of how a militarized fascist movements took over countries step by step and why they could not be defeated at home through attempts to debate laws, or to contest actions in courts (as the foolish leaders in the Democratic Party are doing now) because fascism depends on emotionalism, not rational thought or logic, and it treats the systems of democratic deliberation as mere soft targets to be taken over by brutal means.

Loewenstein saw remarkable uniformity in fascist movements and he recognized, accurately, that fascism was not an ideology or political philosophy at all, but a technique for the hostile takeover of a government.

Fascism, he noted, is similar in its “hatred towards communism, Marxism, and socialism, antisemitism, hostility to freemasons, pacifists, and similar international organizations; the ‘leadership principle’ and abolition of liberal democracy and its institutions; a hazy sort of corporativism; general house-cleaning under the slogans of ‘regeneration’ and ‘renovation;’ rampant nationalism.”

Little has changed 90 years later.

Loewenstein was unambiguous in his postmortem for Germany and other states overrun by fascism,

“Democracy and democratic tolerance have been used for their own destruction. Under cover of fundamental rights and the rule of law, the anti-democratic machine could be built up and set in motion legally. Calculating adroitly that democracy could not, without self-abnegation, deny to anybody of public opinion the full use of the free institutions of speech, press, assembly, and parliamentary participation, fascist exponents systematically discredit the democratic order and make it unworkable by paralyzing its functions until chaos reigns. They exploit the tolerant confidence of democratic ideology that in the long run truth is stronger than falsehood.”

He suggested that those defending democracy must form a common front and that democratic movements across the world must cooperate with each other as closely as the fascistic movements do. Most importantly, he held, based on his experience in Germany, that democratic forces cannot imitate the emotionalism used by the fascists, but that they must adopt a militant democracy that is organized and that denies democratic rights of expression and political action to those who use those rights to carry out political warfare for the purpose of domination.

That perspective, based on his experiences in Germany up through 1933, led Loewenstein to make the following statement which may be beyond what most in the Green Party, or the progressive and left, are willing to accept even at this late date, but that I think must be taken seriously in light of the moves by the Trump administration, with full cooperation of the Democratic Party, to militarize the entire state against its own citizens, and to promulgate laws in the “Beautiful Big Bill” that make it impossible for states, or courts, to contest the empowerment of multinational IT corporations to use AI for social and economic control.

Loewenstein says,

“Few seriously objected to the temporary suspension of constitutional principles for the sake of national self-defense. ‘During war,’ observes Leon Blum, ‘legality takes a vacation.’ Once more, democracy is at war, although an underground war on the inner front. Constitutional scruples can no longer restrain from restrictions on democratic fundamentals, for the sake of ultimately preserving these very fundamentals.”

Leon Blum, the socialist leader in France of the 1930s who inspired me in my own political battles, was entirely correct in recognizing that full legality cannot be preserved when one is under attack. I hope that you will also consider the reality that we must become militant, and that being militant will ultimately mean forming not only a Green Party that will win, but a provisional government that will contest the authority of the criminal organizations posing as government in Washington while overseeing massive state crimes.

Loewenstein concludes his article thus,

“Constitutions are dynamic to the extent that they allow for peaceful change by regular methods, but they have to be stiffened and hardened when confronted by movements intent upon their destruction. Where fundamental rights are institutionalized, their temporary suspension is justified. When the ordinary channels of legislation are blocked by obstruction and sabotage, the democratic state uses the emergency powers of enabling legislation which implicitly, if not explicitly, are involved in the very notion of government.”

Let me close by touching on the main points in my article “A Green Party that will win.”

The Green Party is large and it has the infrastructure and the people necessary to serve as the foundations for a national movement against the rule by multinational corporations. But it will win elections when it puts all of its focus on the movement and leaves the actual elections to the masses of mobilized citizens fighting fascism. To put all efforts into trying to elect a few politicians here and there by begging rich people with progressive pretentions is a recipe for catastrophe and if the Green Party follows this foolish path, it will most likely be made illegal and its leadership imprisoned in the years ahead. Time for us to start thinking clearly.

The party must be run like a democracy, but with protections in place to stop the powerful forces mobilized by the super-rich from infiltrating the party with operatives using Homeland Security anti-disinformation budgets to attack every effort to create a viable political movement. That means that the party must engage in active and effective counterintelligence work against Homeland Security, ICE or other agents sent by billionaires to degrade our effectiveness.

The Green Party must become a national and international movement that embraces truth politics, that not only demands that state crimes like the Kennedy assassination, the 9.11 incident, the Federal Reserve counterfeiting operation, numerous false flag attacks on citizens, and the Covid 19 reign of terror be made entirely public (everything declassified) but also that the rich who ordered these attacks have their assets confiscated for these crimes. Sweeping reforms of the military, intelligence, police, and government that end the criminal privatization of government and restores accountability must be demanded without fear or compromise.

A Green Party that will win must offer concrete benefits to working people who make contributions, or who volunteer. If a billionaire gives a hundred million to a Democratic or Republican PAC, he or she will get billions and billions of dollars in benefits. If a worker gives 50 dollars to the Green Party, all he or she will get is a vague sense that something might get better in the future, maybe.

Workers will give hundreds of dollars to the Green Party when they think that they get thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars back in value not only from advocacy, but from access to cheap and nutritious food, opportunities for work, housing, cheap or free medical treatment, and substantial education opportunities.

The Green Party must become the government that does not exist anymore after the Trump gutting of social services, education, medical assistance and welfare.

Elections are not all that important. The people will be loyal to the Green Party because it helps them organize the food programs that help them survive, supports their community movements, sets up barter systems and shared resources (like lawn mowers, automobiles, tools, and furniture), and supports true independent journalism. The Green Party can create local banks run as cooperatives, set up local renewable energy systems using wind and solar that allows neighbors to sell power to each other without a middle man. When that happens, the Green Party will not have to lift a finger to get elected. Working people will go out on their own to fight for the Green Party.

That new role for the Green Party means that it must value all of its members. The Green Party must make it clear that a homeless person who is willing to work many hours as a volunteer for the movement to bring down the plutocrats is more valuable than a lawyer who gives 10,000 dollars so as to ease his conscience.

Finally, the Green Party must adopt a revolutionary position, and take a brave stand to fundamentally change how government works, and how society is structured. We must demand that everything changes right now, and do so without hesitation or compromise. That demand itself, as a word act, like pronouncing a couple “husband and wife” is just words, but by its nature, it will fundamentally alter everything.