Gaza became a symbol for the lack of substance among the Democrats and their manifest policy failures. The Democrats’ response to the horror their own constituents have expressed at what we are doing in Gaza produced a revulsion that alienated many voters.

Gaza was the most visible issue that created the frustration and disillusionment with the Democrats that suppressed turnout in support of Kamala Harris, but it was not the only one. Democrats’ draconian stance on immigration was another factor. The minimization of the struggles that people have making ends meet from month to month, where Democrats kept telling those people that they were too stupid to understand how good the economy really was and burying the reality that it was still very bad for the majority of Americans was likely the single biggest factor.

Gaza became the symbol for all of these failures. In no regard was Harris’s unwillingness to listen to her own constituents clearer. The 77% of Democrats who want a ceasefire also know the United States can get one by demanding it from Israel on pain of stopping the arms flow. Harris’s gaslighting on this issue, claiming that they were “working for a ceasefire” when it is quite clear they are unwilling to take any substantive action toward one, highlighted her shallowness on other issues.

Gaza, and the Palestinian cause in general, were like getting the sunglasses from “They Live” War nerds can tally up all the battle statistics we want, but Hamas’ campaign has completely upended the world order in Palestine’s favor and decisively against isntreal.

Palestine threw every other campaign signal in sharp relief, and especially highlighted the disconnect between voters and party officials. While I agree with the article that Palestine wasn’t singularly the cause of the Democratic rout, it underestimates the symbolic nature that unifies and stitches so many other disparate symbols. The symbolic nature of Palestine competed with the Democrat’s own manufactured symbology, and the depth of the Palestine symbol’s network exposed the shallowness of, and thus undermined, the Democratic symbology. It’s hard to imagine such a unifying force that runs counter to the manufactured symbology.

To put it concretely, the Democrats tried to pull a Baudrillard Disneyland. Democrats, as a Hyperreality, tried to make you believe they were Reality by comparing themselves to the Disneyland of Trumpism. But the Real of Palestine shattered this symbolic network (*sniff*) by precisely exposing both the Democrats’ Unreality and Equivalence with its supposed opposite in Trump (*sniff*)