I have often remarked that if the Democratic Party were an animal, it would be a headless chicken that occasionally pauses its erratic death-spiral to lecture you on the ethical implications of its own decapitation. The latest installment of this long-running tragicomedy centers on the Middle East—a region that has served as a convenient stage for Western moral preening since long before the invention of the internal combustion engine. From the concrete canyons of New York to the post-industrial rust of Michigan, the 'blue wave' is currently less of a political movement and more of a tepid, stagnant puddle of internal resentment. The news that left-leaning challengers are taking on pro-Israel incumbents is not a sign of a healthy 'marketplace of ideas'; it is the sound of a party cannibalizing itself because it has run out of actual problems it can solve.

On one side of this intellectual wasteland, we have the 'progressives,' a collection of individuals whose primary political contribution is the aesthetic of being perpetually offended. They’ve decided that the best way to secure a midterm victory is to wage a primary war against anyone who doesn't view the agonizingly complex geopolitical tapestry of the Levant through the lens of a thirty-second Instagram reel. To them, foreign policy is merely a sub-genre of identity politics, a way to signal virtue to an audience of undergrads while the actual world burns with a refreshing indifference to their hashtags. They scream about the party’s 'abysmal job,' ignoring the reality that their own influence is largely confined to the echo chambers they’ve built from the scrap wood of abandoned ivory towers. They want a revolution, but they’d prefer if it happened between brunch and their scheduled therapy sessions.

On the other side of the aisle—well, the same aisle, which makes it even more pathetic—sit the pro-Israel incumbents. These are the fossilized remnants of a neoliberal era that refuses to die, individuals who treat political strategy as a series of checks from donors and boilerplate press releases written by consultants who haven't stepped outside their D.C. townhomes since the Clinton administration. Their 'unwavering support' is less about historical conviction and more about the path of least resistance. They are the human equivalent of a beige wall: uninspiring, structurally sound only through sheer inertia, and desperately afraid of any thought that requires more than three syllables. They watch the insurgent left with the panicked confusion of a dinosaur watching a particularly loud, neon-colored asteroid.

The real joke, of course, is the notion that these internal squabbles are 'threatening midterm plans.' As if there were a coherent plan to begin with. The Democratic 'plan' usually consists of hoping the other side is slightly more repulsive to the average voter—a strategy that relies entirely on the Republican Party’s seemingly infinite capacity for moronic cruelty. But when the Democrats decide to turn a foreign policy crisis into a domestic litmus test, they are essentially handing the keys of the kingdom to a GOP that thinks climate change is a Chinese myth and that healthcare is a luxury for the undeserving. It’s a race to the bottom, and the Democrats are currently winning by tripping over their own shoelaces while arguing about the structural integrity of the floor.

Let’s be brutally honest: neither side of this 'civil war' gives a damn about the people actually living in the Middle East. If they did, they might engage in something resembling nuanced diplomacy rather than performative shouting matches. This isn't about peace; it’s about branding. It’s about whether the party wants to be the party of corporate stability or the party of revolutionary cosplay. The party has indeed done an abysmal job, but not for the reasons the activists think. It’s abysmal because it is a Frankenstein’s monster of incompatible ideologies held together by the thin thread of hating Donald Trump. Once that thread frays, you’re left with what we see now: a cacophony of screeching voices, each convinced they are the savior of the world, while the voters look on with the vacant stare of someone who just realized they’re trapped on a plane where the pilots are fighting over who gets to wear the captain's hat while the engines are visibly on fire.

History will not look back at this as a pivotal moment of ideological shifting. It will look back at it as a footnote in the decline of a superpower that became so obsessed with its own internal definitions of 'justice' and 'loyalty' that it forgot how to govern a lemonade stand, let alone a nation. The 'tensions' mentioned in the headlines are just the latest symptoms of a terminal case of irrelevance. Enjoy the midterms; they promise to be a spectacular display of expensive, well-choreographed futility.