Until, that is, 2018 and then again in 2020, when I decided the insurgent candidates now known as “The Squad” were worth supporting. Now – as punishment for my sins, I suppose – I get calls, texts, and emails almost every day from candidates all over the country, running for a variety of offices but mostly the House, who describe themselves as progressives. I dutifully check out their campaign websites, and some turn out to sound like just mainstream Democrats, in whom I don’t have much interest (even if I’d rather see them in office than a Republican). But I’ve been heartened to discover dozens of aspirants to the House who mostly live up to their progressive branding: they speak out strongly in favor of a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, voting rights, immigration reform, racial justice, reproductive rights, criminal justice reform, affordable housing, and so on. Many are a stronger on slogans than on specifics, but by the standards of American politics in the 2020s, they sound remarkably right-on.

Except for one glaring problem: many of the candidates’ platforms I looked at made no mention of a complex of issues that used to be – and to me still should be – central to what it means to be a progressive: U.S. foreign and military policy. And even among those who in some way addressed such issues, some offered only pieties about eliminating waste and preferring diplomacy to war. Distressingly few and far between were references to specific issues like the obscene $768 billion Congress just gave the military for 2022, the continuing drone wars around the world, the 800+ offshore U.S. military bases, the ongoing unraveling of the never-complete international arms-control regime and the wasteful and dangerous (Obama-initiated) effort to “modernize” our enormous nuclear stockpile, the evident lust on the part of so much of the DC establishment for a new cold war or two (if not hot ones!) with Russia and China, or the backing our government gives to repressive regimes worldwide as long as they are “on our side,” including billions in foreign military assistance and arms sales to documented violators of human rights, starting with Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

Concerned that the sites I was looking at were somehow unrepresentative on this score, I decided to undertake a systematic survey of all the non-incumbent progressive House candidates I could identify. That’s not to say the records of incumbents who call themselves progressives don’t also deserve scrutiny, but they are better known, and I was particularly curious about the possibility of an expanded Congressional left, so I concentrated on non-incumbents – some challenging incumbent corporate Democrats, others seeking the Democratic nomination to run for open seats or against incumbent Republicans.

Besides the candidates who had contacted me, and a few more I came across on my own, I got most of my survey subjects by looking at the endorsements of three progressive advocacy groups: the Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, and Brand New Congress. A few more came from the endorsements of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Our Revolution.

In all, I ended up with a sample of 39 House candidates. They are definitely an appealing lot: nearly all are women and/or people of color; most are young and photogenic; they all have impressive records as activists, non-profit officials, or in some cases state or local officeholders; and their platforms check all the boxes that dominate today’s progressive discourse. Unfortunately, though, my expanded research confirmed my initial impression: more than 3/5 of these progressive candidates – 24 out of the 39 – make no mention whatsoever on their campaign sites of issues of war and peace.

And it seems that none of the many advocacy groups that endorse progressive candidates condition their support on candidates taking a position on these issues. Consider, for example, Justice Democrats. I’ve supported them in the past, they played a major role in promoting the campaigns of the current “Squad,” and their own organizational platform includes a pretty good call for a “Progressive Foreign Policy”. Yet of the six new House candidates they’re supporting this year, only one – Rana Abdelhamid, a child of working-class Egyptian immigrants who is taking on establishment incumbent Carolyn Maloney in NY-12 (parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens) – addresses military and foreign-policy matters, and even she devotes only a couple of sentences to them.

The next stop in my research was the Working Families Party (WFP), and the results there were even more depressing from anti-militarist perspective: Of the 10 House candidates they’ve endorsed, again only one – Nida Allam, the daughter of Indian and Pakistani immigrants who is running in NC-06 (Durham, Chapel Hill, and surrounding rural areas) – addresses issues of foreign and military policy. Allam’s position, like Abdelhamid’s, is not as detailed as I’d like, but at least it includes pledges to support reducing the military budget, to seek repeal of the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMF), and to seek an end to aid and weapons sales to regimes committing human rights abuses.

Brand New Congress, a group I’d previously been only dimly aware of, turned out to have the most candidates with the clarity and courage to speak out against U.S. foreign and military policy among its list of endorsees: of the 16 hopefuls it’s endorsing for the House, fully half have some kind of statement about military spending and imperial bullying on their websites.