This essay argues that aspects of the political left and right have adopted a “morally bankrupt imagination”—meaning, they have neglected aspects of Lederach (2005)’s “moral imagination.” It explores experiences at the Chicago DNC protests in 2024, highlighting two failures in theory and practice: the U.S. Democratic Party’s failure to build and expand a coalition against corporate globalization and market fundamentalism since the 1990s, and the U.S. left activists’ acute and specific focus on Gaza in 2024 amidst Trump’s domestic campaign. We argue that Gaza was leveraged, both by left factions and their various political opponents, as a wedge to fracture left constituencies as seen clearly in the organizing of protests and the strategies of different groups there. As such, the essay draws on and reconstructs Lederach’s four features of moral imagination (relational mutuality, sustained curiosity, unwavering trust in creativity, and embracing risk) from a left/Marxian perspective to critique two ends of an international peace struggle: international displacement and state violence on one hand, and the failure to counter an internationalist U.S. nationalist populism on the other.