Above photo: President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., after announcing Holder’s resignation, Sept. 25, 2014. White House / Public Domain.
The author’s break with the Democrats began when Obama’s administration sought revenge on him for blowing the whistle on C.I.A. torture.
Now he has many more reasons.
In the movie Network, newsman Howard Beale famously shouted (and made a living from it) “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” That’s how I feel today.
I hate the ugly, angry, and divisive politics of 2025. And I hate the two major parties that have been thrust upon us as the only choices we have.
They’re two sides of the same coin, even if they pretend to be polar political opposites. We seem to hear constantly about the “radical left” and the “fascist right.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
As background, I was raised in a solid, middle-of-the-road, pro-labor Democratic family. My paternal grandfather kept a framed photo of Franklin Roosevelt on top of the TV until the day he died.
Both of my parents were George McGovern for President volunteers in 1972, and I even remember them arguing about whether Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) or Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) would be the better president in 1976. When I was in college at George Washington University, I was vice president of the College Democrats.
The affinity that I felt for Democrats began to wane when Bill Clinton moved the party to the right and embraced Wall Street in 1992. Still, I just accepted it at the time as a reflection of the world we were in.
But my complete and utter break with the Democratic Party came in 2012 when the Obama Justice Department arrested me and charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, for blowing the whistle on the C.I.A.’s illegal and immoral torture program.
That’s a story in and of itself that I’ve covered elsewhere. It was certainly one of the reasons why I left the Democratic Party, but it wasn’t the only reason. And it wasn’t even the most important reason. There were a lot.
Rigged Nomination Process
First, Democratic voters don’t really choose the Democratic presidential nominee. See, the Democrats have a system of “superdelegates” at their conventions. Every major Democratic elected official in the party is automatically made a delegate to the presidential nominating convention. The party thus stacks the convention so that the party’s preferred candidate always becomes the nominee.
This began relatively recently, in 1976. The reason was that in 1972, Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), an outsider, anti-Vietnam War liberal won the Democratic presidential nomination over others that the party apparatus preferred.
The party honchos in those proverbial smoke-filled back rooms would have much preferred Sen. Ed Muskie (D-ME), Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), or former Vice President Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) to the solidly progressive McGovern. McGovern won the nomination by appealing to anti-war Democrats, but he went on to lose 49 of the 50 states to Richard Nixon.
The Democrats, seeking to ensure that no other outsider ever won the nomination, then created the position of superdelegate. Democracy be damned.
The caucus system, versus the more democratic primary system, also has ensured that the party bosses’ favorite candidates win the nomination.
In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton began the race with 523 superdelegates to only 39 for Bernie Sanders. In the 2016 Wyoming Caucus, Sanders beat Clinton 59-40 in the popular vote, but Clinton won 11 delegates to four for Sanders. That’s just one example. The same thing happened across the country.
The unfairness of the Democratic presidential nominating process is just one reason why I don’t trust the Democrats or want to be associated with them. The more important reasons are policy-focused.
Donald Trump won all seven so-called battleground states —Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona — for a reason. Or for several reasons.
Human Rights and War
First, the Democrats have, for the most part, walked away from human rights as a tenet of their platform.
They at least appear to not care one whit anymore about Palestinian human rights, and they gladly attach themselves to Benjamin Netanyahu, the notorious right-wing Muslim-hater who rules Israel.
It’s not an accident that so many Muslim-Americans and Arab- Americans stayed home on election day last year rather than to choose between an anti-Arab Democrat and an anti-Arab Republican.
It was also no surprise that Donald Trump won Pennsylvania and Michigan when the Democratic Party promotes free trade on the backs of the American union worker, rather than to try to protect those workers from unfair foreign trade practices.
I actually found myself cheering Donald Trump’s speech in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, a week ago when he announced a deal between U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel that included a promise to not close a single steel mill for at least 10 years, and promises of higher wages and better benefits for American steelworkers. Why didn’t the Democrats do that?
A woman’s right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy is also an issue that has always been important to me. The Democrats had literally decades to enshrine abortion rights into law. But they didn’t. Why? Because they knew that they could use the issue to frighten voters into donating millions of dollars. “Vote Democrat! The Republicans will take away your right to choose.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Literally everybody in America knew that the Republicans would seek to stack the Supreme Court and to overturn Roe v. Wade. That’s what they did. And the Democrats just stood there and watched it happen. And lest you forget, Democrats had a filibuster-proof 60-40 majority in the Senate from 2009-2010. They could have protected reproductive freedom, but they elected not to.
Issues of war and peace, and the way the Democratic Party handles them are also of great importance. When did the Democrats become the party of war?
Wasn’t it Democrats in the streets in the 1960s and early 1970s demanding that the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam? Now it’s that same Democratic Party that demands blank checks for Israel and Ukraine. It’s the same Democratic Party that votes for defense budgets of over $1 trillion — more money than the Pentagon itself even asks for!
Our political system is such that we are supposed to just accept the duopoly. We’re supposed to just accept the fact that there are only two viable political parties. Just choose the lesser of two evils, they tell us. But the lesser of two evils is still evil, and I won’t do it.
The Republican and Democratic Parties are copies of each other, with minor differences around the edges. I want a party that respects human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties, not just at home, but abroad, too. That’s why I left the Democratic Party. I won’t go back.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.