What Are You Going To Do?

You know, as soon as I started reading this Paul Campos post about "respectable" conservatives who, in the event that Trump does (as he has started suggesting) try to cancel the 2026 elections, will inevitably find some way to explain why it isn't so outrageous or unlawful or norm-busting or what have you, I immediately thought "Josh Blackman".

Now, that was before I got to the halfway mark and saw that Blackman's name was, indeed, dropped. And perhaps laying a marker down on Blackman here is akin to bragging about picking a one seed to make it to the Sweet Sixteen of March Madness.

But lay down my marker I shall. I can even hear the formulation he'll use: "I can't bring myself to be mad about ....", followed by a citation to some non-analogous alleged liberal sin that supposedly demonstrates that this is all just part of the game everyone plays, and Democrats are just play-acting at crying foul.

Again, I don't pretend I deserve any credit for a bold prediction here. But Blackman really is just the archetype for this particular brand of hackishness. 

And if it feels unfair to say someone like him would really support nullifying the 2026 elections, that's part of the pattern too -- the whole point is the repeated practice of conservatives rationalizing behavior that, a few months earlier when it seemed inconceivable, they would have treated as outrageous slander to assert conservatives would ever rationalize:

Suppose the Republicans move to cancel or annul the 2026 elections.  What will be the justification from the center-right (the same people who never would’ve dreamed of annexing Greenland but now say it’s kind of a reasonable idea, the same people who never would’ve dreamed of endorsing insurrection but now say . . . the same people who never would’ve dreamed of shooting survivors on a boat but now say . . .)?

 In fact, I'd say this is the ur-story of Trumpism, dating back to his first arrival onto the political scene. As I wrote back in 2016, shortly after his first election: "Much of the conservative movement has spent the last two years slowly transitioning from 'it's an outrageous slander to say that a racist cartoon character like Donald Trump represents the conservative movement' to 'it's an outrageous slander to say that the American conservative movement is "racist" or "cartoonish" just because it adopted Donald Trump as its representative.'" It was not, in the scheme of things, too long ago that "supporting Donald Trump" fell into the category of "something so outrageous of course I, the reasonable conservative, would never do it and only a crazed partisan would contemplate otherwise." Blackman, after all, was on the "Originalists Against Trump" letter, urging that we "deny the executive power of the United States to a man as unfit to wield it as Donald Trump." But once Trump's presidency went from impossibility to reality, well, some people will make their peace with Hitler himself if it keeps the inside the inner circle.

Two Queens

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump met today, and it went ... well? For all of Trump's prior bloviating about Mamdani being a communist, he seemed quite taken with Mamdani's charisma and was pretty much all praise during the meeting.

Obviously, there is an angle on this that goes "can you imagine if Hakeem Jeffries ....!?!" Trump is (as Mamdani described him on the campaign trail) a despot and an autocrat. If pretty much any other Democrat did an Oval Office meeting with Trump and made nice-y nice, the left would have gone ballistic.

For my part, I take the opposite lesson. One does, indeed, have to recognize that Trump is a despot and an autocrat. Yet even holding that recognition, that doesn't mean the right play is always the one that most performs "resistance". There is space for maneuvering, and we should recognize that savvy actors sometimes have maneuver. Of course, that does not mean that any "maneuver" is always savvy, and sometimes one does need to dig in one's heels. But it is a good thing to give good Democrats some latitude on this -- we don't truly know what the best strategy is going to be.

So no, one does not have to go full Ryan Grim and decide that actually Trump has now revealed himself as a champion of the working class. That remains as gullible as all get out.

But one also does not have to view Mamdani as some sort of traitor for taking this meeting. The true moral here is to not treat the mere fact of a meeting like this as sufficient evidence on its own that a Democratic politician is a traitor.

The 615th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Let Trump Define What it is To Be a Jew

Tradition holds that there were 613 Commandments given to the Jews at Sinai.

A more recent tradition, pioneered by Emil Fackenheim, identified a 614th Commandment: "Thou shalt not give Hitler a posthumous victory." There are several interpretations of what this means, but the basic gist is that Hitler tried to eradicate the Jewish people and failed, but we cannot let him win in death by allowing the Jewish people to disappear. Be religious, be secular, be in Israel, be in the diaspora, but don't stop being Jewish or transmitting your membership in the Jewish community forward.

As many have remarked, we seem now to be in the twilight of a Jewish "golden era" that began out of the ashes of World War II. Old hatreds that slumbered now are past stirring and roar awake, and new threats emerge on all sides. And a large part of that threat (though not all of it) emanates from Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

Of course, the connections between Trump and his lackeys and far-right antisemites of the worst sort are easy to document. But one of the more insidious features of their antisemitism is how they anoint themselves speakers for the Jews. It's more than just the old saw "a philosemite is an antisemite who likes Jews". Trump and his followers arrogate to themselves the right to define what being Jewish is in the public eye. Right now, most people in America only encounter the concept "Jew" in the context of various MAGA policies that pretend to be about fighting "antisemitism" -- the deportations, the funding cuts, the speech cancellations. Whether they support or oppose these initiatives, these events swamp any other context in which they might encounter something that is (or claims it is) Jewish. Through his efforts, many people understand "Jewishness", in its public persona, exclusively through the lens of Trumpism -- Jewishness is free speech crackdowns and mass deportations and destroying the academy and promising to turn Gaza into a beachside resort.

I wrote about a form of this in my "Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty" article under the moniker "the new supersessionism": "the ability of non-Jews to possess, as against actual Jews, a superior entitlement to declare what Jewishness is." Certainly (albeit regrettably) it's true that some Jews support some or all of the above things Trump is seeking to place under the umbrella of Jewishness. But the point is that Jewish endorsement or not is largely irrelevant to this popular perception -- it is a seizure of control of Jewishness from the Jews.

Against this, though, I feel like I'm witnessing an organic and largely inchoate emergence of a potential 615th Commandment: a compulsion to not let Trump define what it is to be a Jew. The various cries, against Trump's attempt to make us into fig leaves for his fascism, "not in my name!" is a version of this -- but I think it goes deeper than that. I'm seeing more and more liberal Jews making a point of being publicly Jewish not (or not just) in a political context, but simply out of desire to reclaim the public meaning of Jewishness. It's not cynical, and it's not opportunism. If anything, it's inspiring in its earnestness -- the category "Jewish" matters to us, and where we see that category being purloined out from under us, the best way to fight back is to claim it louder.

Every time a public-facing Jew talks about eating bread again after Passover, it resists this. Every time a Jew mentions their Bar or Bat Mitzvah, it resists this. Every time a Jew casually drops in the Yiddish slang they grew up with, it resists this. I'm not saying the "political" displays -- talking about what Jews actually think about reproductive freedom, or marching with the families of the hostages enraged that Netanyahu has kept this war going not to redeem the captives but to save his own skin at their peril -- doesn't matter. They matter a lot. But it is very important that it's not just that. It's not as-a-Jew-ing. It's not being indifferent to one's Jewish identity except as an occasional political cudgel. It is people for whom being Jewish matters to deeply, at every level, and who cannot countenance letting a sick antisemitic authoritarian steal that identity away from us and claim it for his own project.

Perhaps placing this in the realm of one of the Commandments is too august. But the instinct, I think, is one I'm not alone in feeling. Being Jewish is meaningful, and beautiful, and historic, and a privilege. It is our obligation, as Jews, not to let this intruder seize our very identity from his and redirect it to his perversions. To borrow a very non-Jewish concept, we have a duty to bear witness to our Jewishness every day, simply by being Jews others see, so that they have something that stands against the torrent of articles and news stories and press releases that relentlessly associate "Jewish" with ... that. In doing so, we resist. In doing so, we assert that it is Jews -- not Donald Trump or his minions, not right-wing media outlets, not conservative Christian "allies", but Jews -- who determine what it means to be a Jew.

Bill Kristol: Warrior for Light

One of my favorite subplots of what has been an overall awful political season has been the redemption arc of Bill Kristol.

For people of my generation or a bit older, it is genuinely hilarious to watch him sound not just like a NeverTrumper, but as a full-blast Resistance Lib.

At one level this didn't come completely out of nowhere. Back in 2016, I predicted the possibility that the neoconservatives might return to the Democratic fold. For those who know their history, neocons were liberals once (as I said then -- not to mix media properties -- this is much like Saruman describing the orcs: "they were elves, once"). They turned away from the progressive movement based on aversion to what they saw as reflexive anti-westernism and a deep, almost messianic, belief in America's ability to spread democracy and liberal values worldwide. 

The latter commitment in particular took them to some pretty dark places, and a lot of, shall we say, "compromises" occurred along the way. But as we reach a crisis point for democracy here at home, some of them -- Kristol being the most prominent -- reached back deep into themselves and remembered what nominally was motivating them as idealistic youngsters.

It's not, of course, like Kristol has some profound influence on the right these days (or the left, or the center). And it should be obvious that none of this requires one to view Kristol as some sort of heroic figure or forget his past "interventions" (forgive the pun).

But as a narrative arc, I can't help but enjoy watching it. And there's so little joy these days; please don't begrudge me for indulging in this one.

"I Decide Who Is a Jew", Redux

Leo Terrell just reposted a prominent White supremacist's claim, in reference to Donald Trump declaring that Chuck Schumer is not a Jew but a "Palestinian", that "Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card."

Who is Leo Terrell, you may ask? Why, he's Donald Trump's "antisemitism czar". Can't make this up.*

But in reality, the claimed entitlement by (non-Jewish) conservatives to decide who does and does not count as Jewish has been waxing for some time now. In my "Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty" article, I made an observation about the contemporary salience of Vienna Mayor Kari Lueger's famous declaration "I decide who is a Jew":

Lueger made this statement in response to criticisms that there was an inconsistency between his publicly professed antisemitism and his private friendships with certain Viennese Jews; a contradiction resolved by Lueger simply declaring that the Jews he liked were not actually Jews at all. In the spirit of the old saw “a philosemite is an antisemite who loves Jews,” the modern iteration—where the hated Jews are denied to be Jews and the few acceptable Jews deemed the only actual Jews—flips Lueger’s pattern but fundamentally replicates it.

In that article, I grouped this practice into what I termed the "new supersessionism": "the ability of non-Jews to possess, as against actual Jews, a superior entitlement to declare what Jewishness is." The original supersessionism was theological: Christianity simply declares itself to be the true and proper evolution of Judaism; the Jews themselves got Jewishness wrong. Today's supersessionism is more often political: Christians informing Jews that holding Jewish positions on issues like abortion or gay rights mean they are not real Jews at all. And having declared that these Jews -- which is to say, most Jews -- are not "real Jews", there of course can be no antisemitism in hating them. 

In this way, contemporary conservatives can square the otherwise impossible circle: their self-identity of loving (their self-constructed image of) "Jews", and their actual practice of hating (real-life, flesh-and-blood) Jews. It is the natural terminus of that mode of thinking that a nominal leader of a taskforce against antisemitism would promote antisemitism of the most despicable kind -- we are not the Jews he ever intended to protect, we are the Jews he seeks justification to hate.

* In fairness, we all know how committed today's conservatives are to originalism, and originally speaking a "czar" absolutely refers to someone who promotes antisemitism, not one who combats it. Let it never be said that Donald Trump isn't taking conservatism back to its roots.

Roberts to Trump: The Bottle is in the Warmer

It's taken less than two months for Donald Trump to start demanding impeachments of judges who issue rulings he doesn't like. This remarkably fast turnaround prompted Chief Justice Roberts to rebuke the president, stating that the proper mechanism for expressing disagreement with a lower court decision is an appeal, not an impeachment threat.

People are reading Roberts' statement as him recognizing Trump's increasingly lawless posturing and pushing back (albeit in a sort of "Dr. Frankenstein realizes his monster is a problem" sort of way). I must confess, I read it more like me trying to calm my screaming baby while his bottle is in the warmer: "If you could just wait five minutes I promise I'll give you what you want."

I guess we'll see who's right.

How To Handle Leopard Chow

Has there been a more resonant viral post in the past decade than "'I never thought leopards would eat my face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party"? It's so funny, and so evocative, and I can't believe we're going through it a second time.

But we are, and articles like this about axed federal workers ruing their votes are once again setting off a discussion about how the rest of us should relate to these remorseful Trump supporters. Basically the entire conversation is about being pulled between two entirely reasonable and understandable instincts.

1. Trump won the last election. If Democrats are going to win the next election, by definition they need to persuade some number of people who either voted for Trump or couldn't be bothered to vote against him to make a different choice. When at least some erstwhile Trump backers signal they're waking up and recognizing their mistakes, that's an unabashed good thing.
2. Trump voters made a choice that in all cases was some combination of bone-jarringly stupid and actively malicious. That they're now facing consequences for their actions is entirely their own fault and moral just deserts, and the idea that they're entitled to even a smidgeon of emotional care and support from the rest of us (many of whom are suffering too) is outrageous.

My basic belief is that if you are a professional political operative, you have to emphasize the first instinct over the second. That's not because the second is unreasonable or unfair! It's just that it's the job. If you don't think you can do it, if that thought makes your stomach turn, that doesn't make you a bad person, it just means you might not be cut out for this job. Politics as vocation is not a venue for people to simply pour out their personal emotional baggage, however genuine and heartfelt. Take a different job.

But most people, including most random Democrats who post on social media, are not professional political operatives, and our own frustration/schadenfreude should not be confused with some sort of official party line. It's one thing to say Democrats need to have message discipline, but that demand is an impossible one if it means preserving "discipline" over every BlueSky account with #resist in the bio.

As for me, perhaps the deepest root of my frustration is my sense that even for the leopard chow, these lessons will not be internalized. The WaPo article, for instance, notes at the outset that the protagonist's own family and loved ones are cheering the very governmental cuts that have destroyed her future. I'm sure they think her firing was a mistake, but it's prompting no broader reassessment. After all, how many times have we seen posts of the form of "I support the goal of eliminating government waste, but my job is important and I'm a hard worker, so I can't believe you would terminate me?" For every one of those posts, I guarantee that the guy you have mind as the example of "government waste" is drafting his own post explaining why his job matters while envisioning you as the right target to fire. The reality is that there just aren't, in the scheme of things, all that many government jobs that are useless or wasteful -- they're part of an important machine that makes society run. But as long as everyone thinks they're exceptional, they'll continue to miss the six-lane expressway starting from their contempt for their peers and ending at their own ruination.

Right after Trump was elected, I predicted this. The day after election day, I wrote of Trump's supporters that:

They will laugh as the leopard eats their neighbor's face, and then some number of them will be stunned, not just that the leopard turns on them, but that the people they were laughing with a moment earlier keep on laughing as it eats their face. There is no actual solidarity here, just an enjoyment of the cruelty and enjoyment of finding oneself on the right side of the cruelty, and there is perverse power in that -- your buddy next to you might get betrayed in an instant and it won't move the needle an inch. They will keep laughing even when their fellows are being hurt, so certainly they will keep laughing straight through our marches and protests and rage.

What are we do to do about this? Even if these people do recoil from the leopard gnawing on their face next election, they'll inevitably exhibit the memory of a goldfish the next a Democrat takes office and the price of eggs goes up 5 cents, or some Facebook meme convinces them that immigrants are going to eat their cat, or they just get bored with living in an era of unprecedented abundance and decide a little performative cruelty will fill their thirst for meaning. I just don't see a way of making the lesson stick with any scalability, and it's maddening.

Again, as a political message, none of this is useable. But that doesn't make the instincts unreasonable. Is it our job to try to win back half-eaten leopard chow, no matter how responsible they are for their own (and all of our) plights? Yes, it is. But nobody can judge us for judging them harshly, or having dim hopes that they'll actually clear the most bare-minimum bar of virtuous citizenship with any consistency going forward. They deserve the scorn they receive.

Betar Expulsion as Trump Impeachment

The other day, I wrote about the new(-ish) far-right organization operating in Jewish spaces, Betar. Betar has distinguished itself for its open endorsement of hate and violence directed both at Palestinians (its response to reports of Israel killing children in Gaza was to say "Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!") as well as Jews it views as insufficiently fundamentalist in our Zionism, which in their case means virtually all of us.

Since them, they've gotten into a spat with the ADL after the latter added them to its database of extremism. And then a competing slate in the World Zionist Congress elections, Kol Israel, moved to have Betar expelled from the American Zionist Movement, citing both electoral blackmail tactics and Betar's "abhorrent" calls "for genocide and the murder of Palestinian babies." Betar, through its coalition partner ZOA (there's a team-up everyone could see coming), has warned of filing retaliatory complaints against Kol Israel.

On the one hand, it's always good to see groups stand up to racist thugs like Betar. On the other hand, this feels eerily reminiscent of how the political establishment treated the rise of Donald Trump. 

After years of ignoring, excusing, coddling, and enabling him, January 6 happened and for an instant it seemed like folks woke up and sanity might be restored. But the reality was it was already too late -- the supposedly unthinkable extremism that Donald Trump represented had become normalized through those years of excuse and neglect. Even in the most incredible moment -- the immediate wake of an outright insurrection against the United States -- the effort to rein him in fizzled out, and he would soon reestablish himself as at the center of a conservative movement that at one point would have viewed as the most outrageous slander the charge that it would harbor the likes of Donald Trump. They failed to stop him when they could, and found themselves isolated and alone when they (briefly) roused themselves to try.

That pattern seems apt here. Efforts to kick out ZOA from the Conference went nowhere. A similar initiative at the Boston JCRC, one where it was admitted ZOA "elevated White supremacism", only ended up yielding the eventual departure of the left-wing group the Workers Circle (that group also left the Conference). In Isarel, years of enabling and nurturing the neo-Kahanists have made them into the dominant force in Bibi's coalition -- a cadre that is not just ("just") contained to secondary parties like Jewish Power but is running riot through Likud itself. In the diaspora, too, Kahanism is being ever-more normalized as something other than a violent mob of racist thugs. Everyone who thought this was just posturing, or political jockeying, or unsavory alliance-making, but who was sure that if and when the time came they could pump the brakes has been proven to be a fool. There are no brakes. As wrote in my first post on Betar:

[L]eaders of social groups that simultaneously play footsie with the sort of extreme rhetoric while assuaging themselves that of course their actual politics are humanitarian and egalitarian, they're just revving up a crowd or exaggerating for effect, will quickly learn that much of their base isn't in on the bit. They're in it for the hate, and when someone offers that hate better, they won't listen to your attempts to rein things back in.

So as happy as I am to see groups try to stand up to Betar and ZOA, I am dubious about their likelihood of success. The most likely outcome for Betar and ZOA is exactly what they've enjoyed for years by the mainstream Jewish institutions: averting their eyes, kicking the can down the road, hoping the problem solves itself -- and with each passing moment, what once was unthinkable becomes undislodgeable.

Maybe eventually, someone will learn a lesson. But I doubt it will be this day.

Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Believe Them

 

The above conversation captures two different accounts of why people voted for Trump. In one corner, there are those who voted for him because "he'll do what he says" (unlike, presumably, other more feckless politicians who make big promises but never keep them). In the opposite corner, there are those who voted for him because he won't do what he says -- it's all bluster and trolling and hyperbole to trigger oversensitive woke libs, but in reality he's just playing a transactional game and will be reasonable.

Emma Briant flags these two accounts with the observation that it's interesting how Trump has been able to effectively activate both camps even though they have seemingly opposite priors. I'll suggest, though, that paradoxically these two opinions about Trump are not as far apart as they seem, and can -- albeit with a very healthy dose of self-delusion -- coexist in the same voter.

Start with the premise that Trump "tells it like it is." Obviously, this seems absurd to anyone who spends a half minute listening to Trump -- he's a grade-A bullshitter whose open lies can be spotted a mile away. But for a certain type of observer -- the self-styled cynic who prides himself on knowing that every politician is some type of liar or fraud -- Trump's very brazenness loops back around into a form of trustworthiness. At least he isn't trying to pull the wool over our eyes. The lies are so obvious that they don't even count anymore. But they're deemed to be in service of some greater agenda, an agenda which the listener is confident Trump very much believes in.

Once one adopts that approach, one can absolutely simultaneously believe that Trump obviously won't do what he says he'll do and that he alone will do what he says he'll do. Simply put, if one doesn't like something he says or if some ramble taken "literally" is acknowledged to go too far, then it is one of those obvious lies that can be discounted -- the listener patting himself on the back for his sophistication in not taken the clearly absurd seriously. And everything one does like is slotted into that greater agenda that is presumed to represent a substrata of absolute, passionate commitment -- the core promises that the listener does want to believe in, desperately, and so is willing to project onto Trump with reckless abandon.

Others have categorized Trump as a classic scam artist, and we see that here too -- the trick is convincing his followers that they're in on the con, as opposed to the marks. Seeing the lies doesn't drive them away from Trump, it makes them feel like they're insiders. Believing they've spotted the ruse, they become more confident that the underlying play is whatever they're being sold.

I've said before and I'll say again: it's no accident that Arendt identified this sort of cynical outlook as a harbinger of totalitarianism, because it leads to worse than believing lies -- it leads to an indifference towards truth. There's no falsifying this outlook, since it can equally and happily accommodate belief and disbelief in equal measure.

What Will Go Wrong Hardest, Fastest?

It's hard to keep track of the firehose of sewage the Trump administration has already started pumping out in its first few days. From civil rights to cybersecurity, the administration has been taking a wrecking ball to the American governmental project, with consequences that will likely reverberate for years, if not decades.

But I don't want to wait that long. I'm curious: which of Trump's endeavors are likely to blow up hardest, fastest, in a way that is noticeable to the broader public?

For example, take the cancellation of scheduled funding meetings at the National Institute of Health. This is a terrible thing, that will needlessly obstruct critical medical research. But while it's certainly noticeable to the doctors and scientists on the inside, the public impact of it won't be felt for a long time. It's not like there's a cancer cure that was scheduled to come out tomorrow that now is being shelved.

Ditto Pete Hegseth likely getting confirmed as Secretary of Defense. It is very bad that an alcoholic sexual predator is overseeing America's military, but we're not going to lose Buffalo to a Canadian invasion in the short-term. The fallout -- in terms of military readiness, efficiency, professionalism, and so on -- will occur over a longer timescale.

By contrast, the myriad governmental hiring freezes Trump has announced do seem to be breaking out of containment, insofar as they are kneecapping many people who in many cases were all set to move long distances to start a new job, only to have it abruptly pulled out from under them. I'm already seeing a few "leopards ate my face" posts by Trump supporters who are sure that Trump couldn't possibly have meant to do exactly what he said he was going to do.

Tariffs are another good candidate for something that will immediately, dramatically, and noticeably impact American pocketbooks -- especially if they set off another bout of inflation.

But maybe there's something else that will explode harder, faster, and stronger than I anticipate. I would say I can't wait to find out, but I suspect my preferences will have little to say on the matter.

Does the ADL Care That Republicans Admire Hitler?

Shortly before the election, I posted about the alarming fact that (a) Trump seems to admire Hitler and (b) Republicans don't seem to care that Trump admires Hitler. In the course of that post, I asked rhetorically what the ADL's response to this news was going to be, observing that the actual answer appeared to be covering their eyes with a "lalala" see-no-evil approach. This was of a kind with the new direction Jonathan Greenblatt had taken the organization, which was steadfast and resolute in never, ever, giving offense or more than the most mealy-mouthed critique to the American right no matter how open their antisemitism became.

Fast forward a few months and some increasingly pathetic acts of ADL supplication, and we reach inauguration day, where Acting President Elon Musk appears to have given a Nazi stiff-arm salute (the Nazis sure think so). 

Is the ADL on the case? Only if dismissing the case counts!

On what possible basis is there to extend any sort of "grace" or "benefit of the doubt" to Elon Musk of all people? He's basically a modern-day Henry Ford (oops, bad comparison)! He's been one the leading figures injecting extreme-right antisemitism back into mainstream discourse! There are few people -- even including Donald Trump -- who have been more open than Elon Musk about wanting to resurrect the reputations and the political influence of the modern-day Nazi movement. Extending "grace" to Elon Musk should be like extending "grace" to, I don't know, the Alternative for Germany party.

But of course, none of that matters. The ADL has, over the past few months, made it abundantly clear that it views the American far-right as its friend, and so will extend infinite grace to them no matter how obvious their antisemitism becomes. It's disgusting. It's despicable. It is a grotesque abdication of the ADL's core mission. And the worst part it is, it's no longer even surprising.

I spent today taking care of my newborn, doing my best to keep him fed, warm, and safe. My only thought on the inauguration I wanted to have was that it was a shameful, shameful day. Which it was -- but it didn't occur to me that the ADL would add to that shame. 

Maybe it should have.

What a shameful, shameful display.

Another, (Mostly) Unrelated Way Life Sucks Now

A few days ago, I was chatting with my mom (who's retired down in Florida). After our usual pleasantries about the doomed world we live in, she told me about a weird thing that happened at her house while she was out (she has a Ring doorbell and so saw the recording).

Basically, two people, a woman and a man, came up and knocked on her door for awhile. Since nobody was home, obviously no one answered (though my mom said that if she was home alone, she'd be disinclined to talk to strangers banging on her door anyway). Eventually, the woman left a card and then they drove off. The card identified the woman as a U.S. Marshal, with a name, telephone, and email; on the back she wrote a note asking to please contact her ASAP about a "subpoena".

My mom thought, and I agreed, that this seemed pretty suspicious. My parents are law-abiding folk and aren't otherwise involved in any litigation; mom couldn't think of any reason that federal marshals would be delivering a subpoena. The note wasn't addressed to anyone in particular (it didn't have either of my parents' names, for instance). She was already on edge from the election, and living in DeSantis-land added to her fears that there might be some sort of political thuggery or intimidation at work. I googled the name on the card, which didn't reveal anything; on the other hand the phone number did match that of the local United States Courthouse. I asked my mom if she and dad had a lawyer and stressed that they should not let anyone pressure them into signing or paying or doing anything. Fortunately, my dad is a retired attorney and we know many people in the legal world, so they had plenty of resources to figure out if things were legitimate or not.

Anyway, the next day rolls around and it turns out that the card and the note and everything ... was entirely legitimate. An old case of my dad's from before he retired, that he thought had long fizzled out, had burbled back to life without warning (the reasons why this resulted in a federal subpoena are frankly too stupid to go into, but that's not my story to tell anyway). It'll be a quick bit of work for an old client in a few weeks, but everything was basically above board. No one was trying to steal their kidneys after all.

I told this story to a colleague of mine at work, and he relayed a similar situation he had been in a few months ago: he got a call from a man identifying himself as a police officer who claimed to have found a check under my colleague's name. The number from the call was a personal cell number; it was not that of the local police department. So my colleague called the department directly to ask if the man who called was really one of theirs, and the answer was ... yes. Apparently, some of his checks had been stolen out of the mail and recovered, and they really were calling to inform him of the situation. Again, everything was exactly as it was stated to be. No scam here.

In both cases, growing experience with spam and scams and hoaxes made people (quite reasonably) suspicious of genuine, legitimate interactions with authority figures. And hearing the outcome of these two stories, I thought back on something that happened to me a few weeks earlier, when I got a call from a man identifying himself as a county sheriff who asked me "why I missed my grand jury summons." I hadn't received any such summons and this is a scam I'm familiar with, so I told him something along the lines of "I'm pretty sure you're a scammer, otherwise contact my attorney" and hung up on him. Of course now, since the above two cases both turned out to be legitimate, I'm wondering if I just told an actual county sheriff to go fuck himself.

I haven't heard anything about this since, and again the "you missed your jury duty" bit is a common scam, so I'm pretty sure my instincts were right the first time. But again, it goes to a broader toxification in our informational ecosystem -- all these scams and hoaxes mean nobody knows who to trust at all: we risk falling for the fake, and we also risk ignoring what's real, and it's increasingly difficult to know how to ameliorate either of those risks. It is an exhausting and anxiety-laden way to live life, and it sucks.

And while I said this this particular suck is mostly unrelated to the main way life is terrible right now, there is a connection. Authoritarianism, Arendt teaches us, doesn't demand that people believe fictions. It flourishes best when people either do not care about, or lose confidence in their ability to distinguish, fact and fiction. 

One way this occurs is by a faux-worldly cynicism, where one congratulates oneself for recognizing that all politicians lie, are scoundrels, are in the bag for "the elites", etc., and so there are no differences worth sussing out. But another mechanism, that can afflict the more diligent and virtuous, is where institutions of authority and trust become so degraded or jumbled that it just becomes impossible to sort anything out. This is the risk of, for example, deep fakes -- one can entirely recognize that not everybody is lying while being helplessly unable to distinguish between an actual video of a political event and a manipulated or concocted one. 

Trusted institutions with reputations for vetting can help alleviate this problem. But as public confidence in those institutions fade -- or they simply become easier to spoof -- we're left with an endless sea of slop content, none of which can even in concept contain any markers of reliability or trustworthiness. And one thing we're seeing in 2024 is that this sort of toxified informational ecosystem is apocalyptically dangerous to a functioning democracy. It is not an accident that high on Trump's target list is leveraging government power to sabotage any effort -- public or private -- at combatting "misinformation". A world in which nobody can trust anything, where lies and truth become a single indistinguishable mass, is a world favorable to his brand of fascism.

One thing that I think "acab" sort of misses is that, even if it is correct to say things like "never trust the police", it is in fact bad to not be able to trust the police or other authority figures. Wondering if "the police" calling your house are really just Nigerian scammers, and wondering if "the police" calling your house are really just looking to harass you for lining up against the dominant governing faction, are two sides of the same coin. If I get subpoenaed, I want to know that without dialing up my entire legal network to figure out if it's a hoax! If I did accidentally miss a jury summons, I want someone to tell me so I can work things out!  More alarmingly, if an authority figure knocks on my door and says "there's a dangerous fugitive on the loose, have you seen anything," I want to be able to help out without wondering if the fugitive is a woman who had an abortion or an immigrant avoiding the deportation camps. When that trust fractures, it is a terrible way to live. The atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion that it cultivates, even -- maybe especially -- when it is well-warranted, is toxic to a free society. But in so many ways, this is the direction we're moving.

What Will Trump 2.0 Mean for the Jews?

Short answer: It will be terrible.

But of course, that's the short answer for a lot of people.

Nonetheless, I know more about the Jewish situation, so here's my best assessment of what the near-future will look like for Jews. I'll start with Israel (since, contrary to what some would have you believe, Israel contains many Jews and its future is relevant to discussions about Jews), and then shift over to the American Jewish community.

With Israel, the chalk pick has always been that Trump will allow Israel to do absolutely whatever it wants to Palestinians with gleeful abandon. And, to be sure, there are a lot of good reasons to lay money on that bet. But I think the range of plausible, if not necessarily probable, outcomes are wider than many people realize.

To begin, I think there is a good chance that upon Trump's inauguration Israel does end its war in Gaza (or at least transitions to something that it can say with a half-straight face constitutes ending the war). Trump wants it, and getting it might (fairly or not) instantly solidify the significant inroads Trump made amongst Muslim voters this election.

The real question is whether Bibi will give it to him. The answer to that question, as to literally every decision Israel has made for the past several years, depends entirely on Bibi's craven assessment of his personal self-interest. To that point though, I genuinely believe that Bibi does not care about Gaza. I mean that in the most bloodless way possible -- he does not care if Gaza rebuilds or is razed to the ground, he obviously does not care about Palestinian life, he does not care about some significant security posture, and he certainly does not care about the hostages. If Bibi wanted to, he could declare victory right now. He's not "doing" anything in Gaza anymore (other than killing and immiserating thousands upon thousands of people, of course), there's nothing he's trying to accomplish other than whatever he thinks will save his political skin.

So the question is whether he thinks giving Trump something to crow about will be in his interest. Obviously, I think Bibi benefits in many ways from sucking up to Trump. And because Bibi's supporters (in Israel and abroad) are hacks, dupes, or sycophants, they'll happily agree to any declaration of victory (whereas if something similar occurred under a Biden or Harris administration, they'd be raging about how Israel was "forced" to "surrender" before "the job was completed").

Beyond that, though, things get murkier. Again, the most likely scenario is that Trump lets Israel run riot for four years. But unlike some I never thought this was guaranteed. Trump is a mercurial sort; past alliances are no guarantee of future loyalty. He has certainly noticed that Jews have continued to oppose him despite what he's done for, er, "our country". And he also noticed the spike in support from prominent Arab and Muslim politicians -- there's a reason why Arabs and Muslims, and not Jews, got a positive shoutout in his victory speech. More broadly, the isolationist, nativist, and flat-out antisemitic branch of the Trumpist movement has always been present and continues to grow in influence. J.D. Vance tried to disaggregate abandoning Ukraine from abandoning Israel, but the underlying logic from an isolationist "America First" standpoint is the same. And while obviously there is an ideological affinity between the right-wing authoritarians running Israel and the right-wing authoritarians taking power here, when it comes down to brass tacks doesn't Trump have just as much in common with the murderous religious fanatics in Hamas, or the incompetent kleptocrats of Fatah?

All of which is to say, while I'm skeptical that Trump would go flat-out "pro-Palestine", it is not absolutely inconceivable that if the going ever gets tough he'll leave Israel to twist. It goes without saying, of course, that he'd make this decision for all of the worst reasons -- a mix of antisemitism, isolationism, xenophobia, and good-old-fashioned pettiness. Still, right-wing Jews who voted for Trump because he's "good for Israel" may well be wise to look out for leopards.

So that's my Israel story. What about American Jews? Unsurprisingly, it's going to be if anything even grimmer.

First and foremost, we will continue to see the rise of antisemitic harassment and targeting by a far-right that correctly sees Trump as an avatar and legitimator of their ideology. Antisemitic conspiracies -- regarding "globalists", "cultural Marxists", Soros money, and more -- will gain even more traction in the center of American public life. Bomb threats, vandalism, assaults, and more will remain facts of life for Jews nationwide. Christian dominionism will continue to crest and will continue to isolate and marginalize Jews in public spaces, and the nominal "religious liberty" turn of the Supreme Court will not deign to protect us or even recognize us as real Jews. Orthodox Jews, who have increasingly de facto seceded from the broader American Jewish community, will greet these developments with apathy at best and enthusiasm at worst -- they will happily sacrifice religious equality in the public schools most Jews (but not them) attend if it means more public money funneling into their private religious academies. More and more blatant public antisemitism will be tolerated, mainstreamed, and incorporated into centers of power. Indeed, "far-right antisemitism" will increasingly become an anachronistic term, because it won't be "far" from anything -- it will be near-and-dear to the epicenter of the Republican Party.

In terms of the left, at one level I think we will for better or worse see a partial ebbing of the centrality of anti-Israel protest as attentions shift and people's priorities turn inward. That said, I think we will still see significant targeting of Jews in "left" spaces -- such as college campuses -- for the simple reason that they are convenient and available targets. A lot of people are very angry, and the actors and institutions they really want to hurt are largely immune and out of reach. Jews are considerably more proximate and considerably more vulnerable, and punching a Jew (metaphorically or occasionally literally) is a lot more satisfying than punching your pillow. Indeed, while various campus protests and movements relating to Israel have had, let's say, a range of approaches towards how they oriented towards their mainline Jewish peers (i.e., those who are by no means Israel über alles but still have significant care and concern for Israel's future and believe in its legitimacy as a Jewish state), I expect over the next several years the center of gravity will shift further away from effective and nuanced organizing that at least conceptually could include mainstream but Israel-critical Jews, and more towards inchoate, exclusionary lashing out. This will be bad, and it will further isolate and alienate young Jews especially at a time when they desperately need solidarity and allyship.

Finally, there is the question of how the Jewish community is positioned to respond to all of this. Here I daresay Jews have never been weaker in our ability to effectively mobilize and defend ourselves in the public square. And on that point my story is one that can largely be told around the current status of the ADL.

In recent years, I've taken to analogizing the ADL to Hobbes' Leviathan: It is the giant, overbearing sovereign that we must nonetheless offer allegiance to because the anarchic alternative is too terrifying. 

Agree or disagree with the normative prescription, we may be about to test my prediction about what the alternative looks like. Because right now, the hegemon is crumbling.

In 2017, the ADL was able to position itself as a central pillar in the resistance to Trumpist predations, a focal point of mobilizing the political agency and priorities of Jews rightly terrified about what Trumpism meant for us and for our friends and neighbors. It certainly cannot do so now, not the least because it suffers from a terminal case of Washington Post syndrome. Jonathan Greenblatt has spent quite a bit of time cozying up to Trump and his cronies, and the effusive welcome he gave to Trump's victory (that saccharine congratulatory message was the last email I got from the ADL before I unsubscribed from their listserv) shows he is ready and eager to comply in advance. Even if it were welcome in the progressive organizing spaces that are going to try to rally against Trump, it's far from clear the ADL is even interested in participating this time. I can't imagine it's going to see a repeat of the donation wave it received after 2016.

Some have chalked up the ADL's position to the increasingly untenable position of the Jewish "center" (in quotes because "center" for Jews is still left-of-center for Americans). Certainly, increased polarization (inside and outside the Jewish world) has placed pressure on legacy mainline institutions. But I think this story gives the ADL too much credit -- it could have pivoted to stick with the Jewish center-of-gravity, it just decided not to. Nothing -- not campus protests, not BDS activism, not "drop the ADL" chants -- forced the ADL to call Elon Musk a modern-day Henry Ford (as a compliment!), and nothing forced them to just be okay with Donald Trump treating Hitler as a fount of inspiration. Its missteps and mistakes are choices, not compulsions.

But here's the thing: if the ADL no longer can serve as the focal point for Jewish self-advocacy, none of its competitors -- from J Street to JFREJ, IfNotNow to Ameinu, JVP to DMFI -- are anywhere close to being able to replace it.

For starters, none of them are comparably resourced. None have the penetration and influence at all levels of American political life that the ADL does (even after everything I said above, if my kid experienced antisemitism at a Portland school, I still have no idea who I'd reach out to other than the local ADL branch). When it comes to the security threats faced by synagogues contemplating another Colleyville, nobody out there can replace what the ADL offers -- and I'm sorry, but if you think the "safety through solidarity" chants are right now an adequate substitute you are divorced from reality.

And even if we could get past that, no other group can come close to claiming to be a comprehensive or umbrella representative of the American Jewish community writ large. An increasingly common critique of the ADL was that it is not truly "representative" of the entirety of the Jewish community because its staunch pro-Israel attitudes necessarily didn't include the anti-Zionist Jewish minority. I'm dubious that any group can truly be uniformly representative; I do think that for many years the ADL was sufficiently tied to the median American Jewish position that it could credibly claim the label. But however far that criticism applies to the ADL (now or throughout history), it applies tenfold to its leftward alternatives, all of which occupy even more partisan, provincial, and particularistic lanes of American Jewish life. That's not a criticism -- it's fine to have a point of view -- it's only to say that these groups necessarily cannot replace the ADL's role as a sufficiently unified voice of the Jewish community writ large. The ADL may or may not at any given point failed to satisfy its mandate of being a broad tent, but there's no disputing that essentially every alternative out there is self-consciously narrower, not broader, in who it purports to speak for.

So what we are looking at over the next several years is an American Jewish community that simultaneously is under unprecedented threat and is wracked by unprecedented internal division. What I expect to see, then, is that a depressingly large proportion of Jewish political action will take the form of fratricidal squabbling and internal jockeying for position. If the suzerain is falling, the border lord upstarts are going to race to annex as much territory as possible.

In fact, not only will Jewish organizations largely end up concentrating on fighting internal political battles, I also expect to see a crabs-in-a-bucket effect where different Jewish factions actively try to sabotage the ability of others to garner external influence. I noticed this a bit in the whirlwind attempt to kneecap Josh Shapiro as a Vice Presidential contender -- an anti-campaign that in its initial manifestation was largely pushed forward by other Jews. This endeavor was nominally justified by  Shapiro's Israel positions, but I don't think that really is the full explanation (in part because Shapiro's record on Israel is, if anything, arguably to the left of Tim Walz's). Rather, the problem was that if Shapiro became the VP nominee, he would immediately be positioned as perhaps the highest-profile emblem of what “Jews” (and Jewish liberals) are, and what they believe, in the public imagination. In a world of identity capitalism, where significant power flows from who is seen as "representing" a group, that possibility threatened the influence of competing factions of Jewish progressives whose views don’t align with Shapiro’s in a way that Walz could not replicate even if Walz’s substantive positions on Israel were materially indistinguishable from Shapiro’s. In short, while a VP candidate with Josh Shapiro's views on Israel would be acceptable to left-wing Jews (and indeed, more or less, that's what we got), a Jewish VP candidate with Josh Shapiro's would be a disaster because those Jews (correctly) understood that Shapiro's elevation would solidify the power of a rival faction internal to the Jewish community.

I expect to see this dynamic to be replicated and proliferated across all areas of Jewish political action. One faction's attempt to document campus antisemitism will be met with another's counter-letter decrying the initiative. Adopting one group's definition of antisemitism will lead to others' furious denouncements and demands to select an alternative. Even as external threats grow ever grimmer, Jews will relentless concentrate on our own internal power plays -- trying to grab space for ourselves and prevent the growth of our rivals.

Now again, maybe you think that the status quo hegemony of the ADL-type organizations was sufficiently awful that this transition is necessary and salutary, notwithstanding the growing pains. I won't argue the point here. But necessary or no, during the anarchic interregnum it's hard to imagine Jews being able to leverage much in the way of political influence. We are weak externally, and we are weak internally, and that is a very scary position to be in no matter how you slice it.

UPDATE: This post was already so long, I forgot one more point that's probably pretty obvious -- the Democratic Party is going to have a nasty fight over Israel in the near future. To some extent it will be about policy, but I think much of it will rhetorically take the form of debates over a tactical blame-game regarding who is responsible for losing the 2024 election. On one side there will be those who say that blind, lockstep support for Bibi's war on Gaza cost Democrats key voting blocs and possibly the election, and that we need to purge the party of people who thought defending genocide was a higher priority than keeping the presidency. On the other side will be those who believe that radical performative edgelording about refusing to commit to opposing an existential threat to American democracy was recklessly irresponsible, and that anybody who indulged in such antics should be shot into the sun as de facto Trumpist collaborators. I don't know who will (or should) win that fight, but it's going to be terrible too.

And precisely because the fight will focus on electoral tactics and not policy, it also is going to primarily end up being about securing factional gains rather than trying to recraft an Israel/Palestine policy that is sensible, broad-based, and genuinely attentive to and protective of the valid interests, fears, and aspirations of Jews/Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians alike. So even to the extent Democrats very much could use a genuine rethinking of our approach to Israel/Palestine -- one that recognizes that we're not going to snuggle Bibi into accepting Palestinian equality without swinging over into treating Jews and Israeli as inhuman invaders who need to be wiped off the map -- I think such efforts will be swamped by factional knife-fighting within the party.

We Failed

We failed.

Part of being in a democratic society is that we have a collective responsibility towards our fellows, and to the greater health of our democracy. "A republic, if you can keep it." And we failed. We encountered the most basic test of democracy imaginable since the Civil War -- how to respond to an outright insurrectionist force in the center of our political life -- and we failed.

The "we" is both broad and narrow -- it includes the American citizenry as a a whole, but also the more particular institutions that had more specified tasks centered around militating against and responding to the rise of fascism in this country. The media. The judiciary. The legal community. Law enforcement.  Some of these institutions I'm a part of, and so I include myself in all levels of the "we" who failed. But I'm not interested in assigning blame, I am just stating fact: We specifically failed, and then we, generally, failed.

There are so many who were failed yesterday, and I am wracked with guilt that we failed them. It's no good to say it is not my fault -- I know it mostly isn't -- but collective responsibility is the burden we share as members of a democratic polity, and that means that this failure lands on me as much as everyone. Part of the politics that won yesterday were that of "I got mine, so fuck you", and at the very least I refuse to indulge in that abandonment of responsibility. We should feel bad about those we've abandoned, left vulnerable, marginalized, and excluded. We did a bad thing.

Not that any of us should have any confidence as to which side of the line we'll find ourselves. The cruelties that are coming may not be distributed evenly, but they also won't track perfectly predictable patterns either. Certainly, I have little optimism that "Jewish professor who works on antisemitism" is going to be a fun social position to occupy for the next four years. Maybe I'll skate by unfazed, or maybe a hate campaign will drive me out of my job. Maybe my kid will enjoy his local preschool, or maybe my kid will get sick from avoidable illness because he wasn't allowed to get a vaccination. Who knows! Anything can happen, to any of us. And if it does, we can be absolutely assured that the Trump administration and the coalition that brought him to power will not care. They will not care if you thought yourself one of them, and they certainly won't care if you thought yourself one of us.

We will soon see (it's no doubt already starting) various stories and narratives explaining why exactly we failed, and who exactly is responsible for the failings. I mostly don't want to partake at this time (90% of them will be variations on "if only we did the things I was already urging us to do!"), but if I were to explain this outcome, it is the story reflected in this post: people were just tired of fighting against fascism, and decided to give in. They hope that if they just align themselves with the authoritarianism, they'll be left alone. They can live a boring, normal life under authoritarian rule. Even among the populations that seem most obviously targeted, there's a tendency to say "he ain't talkin' about me!" Why would he? I'm not a criminal, I'm not a threat, I'm just here living my life. The real risk is poking my head up, so better to keep it down and comply in advance.

That's part of the story, but I do want to echo the point made by others: that at root many, many Americans wanted this. They want the cruelty, they want the viciousness, they want the lawlessness, they want the insurrectionism. It may be (likely is) the product of a sort of naivete -- surely the leopards won't eat my face -- but we should take it seriously: the hurt and pain that is about to rain down on so many Americans (and so many others around the world) is desired. 

This is a self-imposed puzzle the media was never able to resolve: it insisted that we had to understand Trump voters, but then refused to actually understand them because doing so felt impolite, instead concocting a series of "respectable" stories about them ("economic anxiety") so as to avoid reckoning with what they actually want. The complaints of "media bias" against Trump voters is laughable: I'm never more sympathetic to Trumpers than when I'm reading about them in the New York Times, where all their grievances and hostility and hate are laundered through gentle cycles and explained as a rough-edged byproduct of the most understandable human needs and frailties. When that filter is removed and I encounter Trump backers directly, it is immediately obvious that this story of them somehow being coerced into hatred is nonsense. They want detention camps, they want to obliterate public health programs, they want schools to be ideological indoctrination centers, they want to be fed lurid conspiracies about the Jews and the Blacks and the Immigrants and the Communists, they want their charismatic leaders to break the law with impunity and they want their enemies to be harassed and thrown outside the protections of the constitutional order.  There isn't some alchemical process where "economic anxiety" explains and apologizes for this. This is what they want, and we should have enough respect for them and us to describe it honestly.

And it will be resilient -- far more resilient than I think even now we can comprehend.  They will laugh as the leopard eats their neighbor's face, and then some number of them will be stunned, not just that the leopard turns on them, but that the people they were laughing with a moment earlier keep on laughing as it eats their face. There is no actual solidarity here, just an enjoyment of the cruelty and enjoyment of finding oneself on the right side of the cruelty, and there is perverse power in that -- your buddy next to you might get betrayed in an instant and it won't move the needle an inch. They will keep laughing even when their fellows are being hurt, so certainly they will keep laughing straight through our marches and protests and rage. It is so, so hard to dislodge this cancer once it gets its claws into power, and it is so much worse when it obtains power the second time. From Hugo Chavez to Viktor Orban, "the second time is worse."

Because this time, there will be no guardrails. This time, the institutions are already in place to smash the dissidents. This time, losing is not an option. And this time, the Republican Party has already reeducated itself to comply utterly and without hesitation. I doubt Susan Collins will even bother to furrow her brow. There is not a single Republican at any elected office anywhere in America I trust to impose any check or limit on any Trump policy that does not personally affect them -- and I mean that with zero limitations. No matter how extreme, no matter how norm- or rule-breaking, no matter how cataclysmic, the Republican Party is poised to march in jack-booted lockstep. And again, in those rare moments where one single Republican does have a personal stake and a personal connection that prompts them to idiosyncratically step out, they will find themselves utterly and entirely alone. Nobody will join them, just as they will not join the next colleague down the row when that one finds their one issue they wish to speak out on. Every element of the governmental and political apparatus will have one and only one objective: to promote the interests of the authoritarian. That's what we are facing down.

It hurts to fail, when the price of failure is so steep. It hurts to have a vision of a better future, and witness it disintegrate with no clear plan of how to win it back. It hurts to care this deeply about the future of our democracy, and watch everything unravel. It hurts so much, I can almost sympathize with deciding ... not to care -- to keep one's head down, and just acquiesce to what is happening, in the hope of being left alone in contented apathy and ignorance.

But to be a responsible citizen means to resist that impulse. And on this day of catastrophic failure, that is one failure I will not accept from myself.

Resilient Fascism

I still haven't decided if I'm going to do my traditional liveblog of the election. It may just be too stressful. Plus, I have to teach an early-morning class tomorrow, and it would be bad if I stayed up all night tracking election returns (lol, like I have a choice).

While we're waiting for results to come in, I want to briefly comment on news abroad -- namely, that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has fired his Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. It is yet another incident of capricious chaos meant to appease Netanyahu's furthest-right base, and is being greeted with yet another round of mass protests throughout Israel. And I can't help but think it is a premonition of what America will be like if Trump wins another term.

When I look at what's happening over there, what stands out to me is the resilience of the Israeli government -- and not in a good way. What's been striking about the current Israeli government is not just the blundering into crisis after crisis that has typified its time in office, but how it has managed to survive and endure them while barely budging. It has survived near-constant protests, brutally sagging popularity, a seemingly endless (now two-front!) war, complete abandonment of hostages, regular evidence of widespread corruption, and increasing international isolation, and has through all of it only deepened its commitment to the furthest-right fringes of its governing coalition. 

It's not that it's been able to accomplish all its heart's desires (the judicial coup continues to tread water), but it has hunkered itself down and proven nearly impossible to dislodge. Why isn't widespread public rage and scandal enough to bring down the government? Simple: because the people in government know that the minute they dismount the tiger they've been riding, they'll get devoured. So they bound about from desperate move to desperate move, breaking this rule, smashing that norm, all in complete defiance of the popular will, hoping to find a magic bullet that will forestall the inevitable day of reckoning. Chaos, dysfunction, unpopularity, public rage -- even in extreme doses none of it has proven enough to dislodge the authoritarian nightmare once it took root.

This isn't an Israel-only story -- I saw someone else making a similar observation about India -- but it is a grim harbinger of what will happen if Trump re-enters office. It was hard enough getting him out of office the first time. The second time around, he'll be even worse. It is beyond obvious he will take extreme, authoritarian measures to protect himself and to hurt his enemies, ones that will prove ruinously unpopular and will prompt widespread public protest. And it won't matter -- even leaving aside the myriad ways our "democratic" institutions do not reflect the democratic will, every incentive of Trump's ruling coalition will be to not respond to popular outrage, to not give an inch, to double-down at every moment. And the evidence from Israel suggests that this is a workable strategy -- when the fascists take power, their power is alarmingly resilient to public fury and terrifyingly immune to public outrage.

The first results should start appearing momentarily. I've spent all day on a "doom and bloom" cycle, but at this point we can only watch. I'm praying that America makes the right call, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Which Nuts Crack?

I like to keep a half eye on Senate, House, and gubernatorial polling trends at The Downballot (formerly Daily Kos Elections). There are quite a few swing state races that are certainly close, but seem to have mild Democratic advantages -- these include the Michigan and Pennsylvania Senate races, for instance. But there are also some swing state races where Democrats are running away with it -- Ruben Gallego looks set to smoke Kari Lake in Arizona, for instance; same with Josh Stein over Mark Robinson in the race for North Carolina Governor.

All of these races are occurring in tightly contested swing states. If anything, Arizona and North Carolina are more red leaning than are Michigan and Pennsylvania. So why are Lake and Robinson doing so poorly?

Obviously, the most straightforward answer is "they're both certified nutjobs." But the same statewide polls that have Lake and Robinson down by double-digits have Trump either tied or ahead. And I truly, honestly, cannot figure out what sort of person recognizes the nuttiness of a Kari Lake or a Mark Robinson but doesn't see it in Trump. What's the difference? What makes Trump's lunacy different from Lake's or Robinson's? What characterizes the voter who sees Lake or Robinson as different-in-kind from Trump?

Going Dark

The Washington Post has announced it will not be issuing an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race, overruling a decision by the editorial board planning to endorse Vice President Harris. This follows a similar decision by the LA Times, both justified under the auspices of maintaining "neutrality", both actually made at the behest of billionaire owners who have significant financial stakes in staying in the good graces of the once- and potential-future president.

For the Post, it is a stunning abdication of duty and role by an outlet that operated under the mantra "democracy dies in darkness."

(The LA Times case has a slight wrinkle, in that the billionaire owner's daughter suggested in her own tweets that the non-endorsement was actually a commentary on the "genocide" in Gaza. While I suspect the owner's more pecuniary motives were driving the show, I'll just say that it should surprise no one that these "different" politics lead to the exact same place, and are profound exercises in cowardice in the exact same ways).

I remember the week Trump was elected, I was in a pedagogy class where new collegiate instructors were discussing how we should respond to the shocking news in our classroom. On this point, our professor was quite decisive: we had a job to do, and we should respond by doing our jobs. Since we were in a political scientist department, this didn't mean we necessarily ignored the events in the outside world -- politics were part of our ambit, after all. But we were not to pout, or cancel class, or anything of the sort. We had jobs to do, and we should do them.

The Post's choice today is the climax of a broader failure in our mainline news media to simply do its job in the face of shocking news. When Trump initially rose to power, the media's job was to report on him accurately. It instead viewed him as a fun little joke that could spike some ratings and inject some entertainment into the staid and boring world of politics. They saw their job as goosing readership, not informing the public. As the 2016 election approached, they chose to develop a truly unhealthy obsession with the absolute non-scandal of EMAILZ, to the exclusion of virtually every other issue. They saw their job as getting out in front of the candidate who "of course" was going to win, or of carrying out their own personal vendettas against Hillary Clinton.

This time around, we're going through the same thing. It is the media's job to accurately report on the frightening descent of Trump into a mix of babbling incoherence and unapologetic fascism. Instead, we get sanewashing -- express efforts to misreport what Trump actually says and does because rendering the copy accurately would make him look, well, look exactly as he is.

And that brings us to the non-endorsement developments. The media -- or the business "leaders" who own the relevant papers -- no longer sees Trump as a joke. They are scared of him. They know full well that his next term in office will be replete with recrimination against all he deems his enemies, and they do not want to fall on the wrong side of the naughty/nice list. I agree with those who say that the Post's decision is anticipatory compliance, but more than that I agree that it is a terrifying sign of the Putinization of American politics -- a billionaire class that knows the security of its position is entirely at the whim of dictator, and makes sure to cozy up to him lest their portfolios (or other things) start plummeting from great height.

All of this is no more complicated than a simple refusal by the media to do its job, in the most basic form imaginable. Some institutions are, as a matter of role, forbidden from wading into political controversies, but newspaper editorial pages are not one of them. The contention that a newspaper violates some precept of neutrality by having its editorial board issue an endorsement is beneath contempt; editorials are opinions by definition, they necessarily take a point of a view. When the media, in its professional judgment as observers of the political scene, decide that candidate A is a better pick for the position than candidate B, communicating that choice is doing one's job. Where the evidence shows that candidate B would be a disaster for democracy, rule of law, and the very continuation of the American project, all the more so.

Not every newspaper is failing in its job. But some are. The Washington Post was my hometown paper, it is the one I grew up with. It is bitterly disappointing to see it stoop to such a pathetic low.

Pictured: The entirety of the presidential endorsement by the Willamette Week

Do Republicans Care That Trump Admires Hitler?

The Atlantic's bombshell story this week was that Donald Trump expressed an admiration for Hitler, saying "I need the kind of generals Hitler had." This had been reported before, but the confirmation by former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly gave an extra boost of confirmation from Trump's inner-most circle.

How are Republicans responding to the news? In a variety of ways. Door #1, from the Trump campaign itself, is just to declare it all a lie:

Trump’s campaign categorically denied The Atlantic’s reporting and blamed Harris for encouraging Trump’s assassination. Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said Harris “continues to peddle outright lies and falsehoods that are easily disproven. The fact is that Kamala’s dangerous rhetoric is directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump and she continues to stoke the flames of violence all in the name of politics.”

I actually respect this response the most, since it at least concedes the premise that Trump being pro-Hitler is a bad development that should be shunned. 

Not every Republican agrees. Behind Door #2 is New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who said that Trump supporting Hitler is "baked-in to the vote at this point." In other words, Republicans already had figured Trump was a Hitler supporter and were fine with it. No surprises here.

And then finally, there's Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, who's response was to say "actually, Trump was making a good point!"

On Fox News, anchor Brian Kilmeade said Trump was justifiably frustrated by aides who refused to carry out orders they deemed illegal.

Kilmeade said, “I can absolutely see him go, ‘It’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever.”

"...or whatever," indeed. What sort of president wouldn't want generals who blindly follow executive orders to commit the most horrific atrocities humanity has ever witnessed? (Answer: the sort of president who isn't interested in replicating the most horrific atrocities humanity has ever witnessed).

Meanwhile, yesterday on Bluesky I snarked that I couldn't wait for the inevitable "Jonathan Greenblatt response that contains three paragraphs of effusive praise for Trump’s allyship towards the Jewish community sandwiching a vague gesture that 'this sort of rhetoric isn’t helpful.'" That drew off of this post which observed how Greenblatt's recent treatment of Trump has been defined by a fundamental trust in Trump as a true "ally of the Jews," the commitment to which he regrettably occasionally falls short of realizing.

So was my prediction on Greenblatt's response correct? Answer: We don't know, because as far as I can tell the ADL hasn't issued a statement on this news at all! What a sterling performance by America's preeminent antisemitism watchdog.