Last night, I attended a retirement party for Jesse Choper, the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC-Berkeley. Jesse has been an active teacher for a remarkable 54 years, starting at the University of Minnesota in 1961. He moved to Berkeley in 1965 and has been here ever since (including a stint as Dean from 1982 - 1992). So while Jesse is known around the country as one of America's preeminent constitutional law scholars, it is no surprise that here in the Bay Area he is known more simply as "Mr. Boalt".
Of the literally hundreds of people who came out for Jesse's retirement party, it is probable that each of us could have given a meaningful personal toast. Of course, in that group of luminaries I rank pretty low in the pecking order. But here on the internet I can give my own toast, which while probably just a drop in the bucket of accolades Jesse has received throughout his career, is nonetheless the very least I can do.
Of all of Jesse's colleagues, I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I am the latest. I arrived a Boalt last year as the inaugural Darling Foundation Fellow in Public Law, and I had the tremendous privilege of being the coordinator for Jesse's final class -- a workshop in Public Law that focused on the Roberts Court. I got to know Jesse throughout the term as we selected the list of invitees and later attended the weekly talks, and so was able to experience first hand many of his noteworthy quirks. Not only does he drink white wine on the rocks, but he does so with such regularity that -- upon arriving at Saul's (our local Jewish deli) -- he need not say a word before a glass has already reached his table. I can also verify that he is a singularly happy figure -- on his daily strolls to the faculty lounge for coffee, I do not believe I've ever seen him without a smile on his face.
Since this was to be Jesse's last class, and since I had known him all of a few months, it would have been easy and understandable if I had faded into the woodwork of the thousands of students, staffers, and colleagues Jesse has worked with over his career. But that did not happen. Jesse took an immediate interest in my work and my career, offering to read and comment on drafts and put in calls whenever one of us spotted an open position. Perhaps more meaningful, he also asked me to read and comment on his work. Admittedly, this was quite intimidating, given that I was not even on the tenure-track and Jesse has literally 50x my experience in constitutional law. But it was also quite important to me. Many senior faculty members are aware of and cheerfully fulfill their obligation to comment on their junior colleague's work, but it doesn't always occur to them to run their own ideas past the juniors. Yet an important part of growing into this role and no longer seeing yourself as an impostor whose law school grades and mastery of big words duped a few people into giving you a faculty office is getting the sense that others value your opinion too. That Jesse Choper -- author of Constitutional Law: Cases, Comments & Questions and Judicial Review and the National Political Process -- wanted my opinion on his work was possibly the most important thing he could have done to make me feel like a true colleague.
Even having been here for barely over a year, it is difficult to imagine Berkeley without Mr. Boalt. There is a part of me that is very skeptical that we'll see much of a drop in Jesse's frequent strolls to the faculty lounge. But regardless of whether he's in the building or not, it is evident that his spirit has penetrated the law school deeply. I was privileged to have worked with him, I am privileged to know him, and I look forward to continuing as his colleague and friend well into the future.
Sunday, November 08, 2015
Thursday, October 29, 2015
The Signal and the Noise in the "Zionist" Boycott Case
Steven Levitsky and E. Glen Weyl have a much-talked about piece wherein they explain why they, self-described progressive Zionist Jews, are boycotting Israel. Like Michael Koplow, who already wrote a very thoughtful critique at the Israel Policy Forum, I have no interests in ad hominem. I will take their premises -- that they are proud Jews, that they are Zionists, that they are doing this because they love Israel, that they oppose the broader BDS movement (the feeling is apparently mutual, a fact which they trumpet) -- as given. These are not the problem here. The argument fails on its own terms, and fails in rather dramatic fashion.
Basically, Levitsky and Weyl's case runs as follows:
The first part of the argument I accept. The second is contestable but certainly plausible (I have no significant faith in Bibi's commitments here, though I'm not wildly optimistic about Abbas either). I'll mainly focus on the third and fourth elements and the riders. And, since providing personal biographical disclaimers is apparently a prerequisite to these sorts of posts, I'll say that I too am a progressive Zionist Jew who deplores Bibi, finds the occupation morally intolerable, thinks Israel should withdraw from settlements immediately (indeed, supports a general unilateral withdrawal), and whose views on Israel are most closely approximated by Ameinu's Third Narrative project.
To begin, Levitsky and Weyl are clearly making a consequentialist argument for the boycott -- supporting it because they believe it will lead to a more just state of the world. This is in contrast to another reason one might support a boycott of a state: that it is proportionate and just punishment for particular wrongs. Levitsky and Weyl implicitly disclaim this when rejecting a "mere" settlement boycott; their rationale is purely of the "will it work" sort (#3). Such considerations also come into play in their response to the "double-standard" objection (#5), they concede the critique but argue that it is acceptable in their case because their motivation is to make Israel specifically a better place (as opposed to reasoning from some general conception of "justice" and "punishment" across all states). So basically, we can appraise their argument based on whether they're right that the likely impact of a boycott movement is to create a better state of the world -- a situation wherein both Jewish and Palestinian rights are respected. The likely consequences of a boycott is an issue I discussed a half-dozen years ago in my "boycott outcomes" post, and I won't rehash those points here. I am curious, however, as to the extent to which they did seriously consider other options for improving the state of progressive politics in Israel and Palestine (e.g., supporting OneVoice or other like grassroots initiatives). I can't speak to the authors personally, but in my experience the people who say they see no alternative but boycotts have rarely invested significant time thinking about alternatives.
Before moving forward, I want to pause and note the oddity latent in their "double-standard" discussion: if the reason the double-standard is okay is because they (Levitsky and Weyl) "love Israel", the implication is that persons who don't love Israel can't boycott (as for them it really would be nothing but raw discrimination). That's a perplexing conclusion, and one I doubt that the authors really are willing to adhere to. Koplow does a good job exploring this problem, so I'll just say here that it emphasizes one of the key arguments I'm going to make below: that irrespective of whether they have shared motives or not, Levitsky and Weyl's argument relies on making common cause with persons whose desires are not to create a better state of the world (as understood by the two of them) and who are in all likelihood far better positioned to actually dictate the expressive meaning of a boycott effort.
In any event, the sequence of events Levitsky and Weyl hope to see happen is that a bunch of people boycott Israel in order to exert pressure that will change the status quo vis-a-vis the Palestinians; Israeli policymakers feel the pinch and adopt policies desired by Levitsky and Weyl; and then the conflict is resolved and the boycott dissolved. That middle step has a big problem, which is that the authors fail to explain why Israeli policymakers will be responsive to the expressed desires of Levitsky and Weyl specifically as against other boycotters who -- by their own admission -- are seeking to send a very different message and have very different objectives. One of the central consequentialist arguments against the boycott movement is the contention that it will make Israel more reactionary -- more distrustful of outsiders, more prone to viewing itself as under siege, more convinced that the wider world is intent on its destruction and that it can only rely on itself and its own instincts. The response to a boycott depends on the message a boycott expresses, and Israel's reaction will no doubt be very different if the message it hears is not "we want the best for you, but we'll boycott until you negotiate in good faith to create a Palestinian state" but "we'll boycott in order to weaken Israel and ultimately eliminate Israel," much less "we'll boycott as a first step in eventually sending the Jews back to Auschwitz where they belong." It is amazing that the authors seem to take as a given that it is their preferred message that will come through, when they admit that other boycotters are saying very different things that would provoke a very different reaction.
And this is where the claims that the authors are not signing up for the BDS movement fall apart -- not because they secretly share the same motivations, but because their entire program depends on leveraging the BDS movement proper to make their own boycott sufficiently expansive so as to compel an Israeli response. The whole reason why Levitsky and Weyl don't see themselves as two cranks yelling at clouds, but actually engaged in a potentially consequential political project, is that it is not just them but all these other people boycotting Israel too. But it is "all these other people", not Levitsky and Weyl, who will dictate the message sent by the boycott campaign. The only function of Levitsky and Weyl will be to boost the signal of the BDS movement as a whole; their idiosyncratic expressive desires won't come across and won't dictate Israel's response. Robert Farley's remarks on the precarious nature of "sending a message" in foreign policy (a critique he's thoughtfully applied to Israeli military action) apply here too: signals aren't always unambiguous, signals aren't always interpreted as they are meant to be, the meaning and impact of signals are dependent on many factors other than the raw intention of individual signalers -- and all of this is exacerbated when one is but one faction (and a relatively small faction at that) of a larger social movement.
And on the ambiguity of signals, consider a very important one: what Israel must do in order to end the boycott. The language is very fuzzy as to whether Israel must simply "seriously engage[] with a peace process" that is geared toward ending of Palestinian disenfranchisement (in either one- or two-state form) or that the boycott shall persist until an actual agreement is reached and implemented. The latter, of course, is not entirely in Israel's hands -- it creates a serious moral hazard problem for Palestinian leaderships who themselves would be given an incentive to negotiate in bad faith (or not at all) in order to further weaken Israel's international standings and extract more and more extreme concessions. This is particularly problematic if one thinks (as I do) that one of the most frustrating aspects of this conflict is how Israelis and Palestinians seem to alternate negotiating in bad faith -- when one party is willing to come to the table, the other dances around; then a few years later they switch roles. Certainly, one Israeli complaint I think has resonance is that Palestinian actors don't really want a negotiated settlement because they think time is one their side. Levitsky and Weyl purport to agree -- they think that demographic and political trends are steadily weakening Israel's position -- but their solution seems to exacerbate the problem.
But at various points the authors suggest that it's the former they have in mind (Weyl observes that he didn't boycott Olmert, for instance, implying that if an Olmert-type came to power he'd end his boycott, and he agrees that a just solution is not entirely in Israel's hands). The problem there is that "good faith" is very subjective. Years ago (discussing proposed boycotts of Arizona), Amanda Marcotte identified one key element of a successful boycott as having specific rather than vague goals. "Ending the segregation of Montgomery buses" is a specific goal. "Negotiate in good faith" isn't. It strikes me as very implausible that there might be a circumstance where Israel tries to negotiate, it doesn't succeed, but Levitsky and Weyl (much less their cohorts) agree that they made a "good faith" effort and agree to end their boycott. For example, what of Bibi's settlement moratorium, which was not met with serious Palestinian efforts to hammer out a deal? At that historical moment, would Levitsky and Weyl flip sides and boycott Palestinian institutions as punishment for Abbas' bad faith? Or was that not enough of a step by Bibi (how on earth is this measured, and at what level granularity?). At the very least, though, they should be explicit about which position they're taking -- for accountability reasons if nothing else.
From a social movement perspective (which is what I study), Levitsky and Weyl's position rankles because it is really reminiscent of a type of political advocacy (probably found among all sorts but which I personally associate with conservative libertarians) wherein people join hands with a bad campaign but disclaim any responsibility for the consequences because they personally prefer an entirely marginal and politically-irrelevant third option. These are the people who draft paper after paper urging the abolition of the minimum wage and then when asked whether they care at all about the poor say they actually support a guaranteed minimum income. The latter being a complete non-starter, the effect of their advocacy is to foster a world with no minimum wage and no guaranteed minimum income -- which they must know (even if they are being entirely above-board in describing their personal policy preferences). Ditto those who fought tooth-and-nail against a right to gay marriage and then said "actually, I think the government should get out of marriage altogether". The effect of their advocacy is entirely to support the mainstream anti-gay marriage position and does nothing to move us closer to a "government-out-of-marriage" world. Again, one need not think they're lying; their personal motivations are irrelevant. And so here, the author's support of a "Zionist" boycott of Israel is so far removed from any politically-viable position that their claim of separation from the general BDS campaign rings hollow -- the only thing it conceivably could do is bolster the effectiveness of that movement, one which (as they acknowledge) has no kindly desires regarding the future of Israel or the self-determination rights of the Jewish people. It's a sort of arrogance that enables one to engage in social movement politics while ignoring the "social"; of course the Israeli government will interpret a massive, wide-spanning boycott as embodying the precise cluster of idiosyncratic meanings that we intend it to.
While not directly on point, Eugene Volokh's superb Harvard Law Review article "The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope" is essential reading on the in-practice dynamics of social reform and how in many circumstances seemingly intermediate positions can glide forward into more extreme ones that the promoters of the initial reform would have found repugnant. In particularly, his discussion of attitude-altering slippery slopes (especially the extreme-aversion variety) provides important insight into understanding why promoting boycotts of this sort will likely have the primary effect of amplifying the nastier and more destructive iteration of the boycott campaign the authors claim to deplore. One thing that's become very clear about boycotts of Israel is that the train has no brakes: targeted boycotts of settlements leads to general boycotts of firms, to academic boycotts of universities, to personal boycotts against individual artists or scholars, to (as in South Africa) unadorned discrimination against Jews qua Jews. At every point some people no doubt would like to disembark -- but many others get onboard, having come to realize that such practices are now inside the bounds of ordinary political action.
That's the basic consequential case against Levitsky and Weyl's position: The message they want to send won't come across, the message that will come across won't have the impact they desire, and their signing on to the general idea of a boycott will provide aid and sustenance to a very bad movement while doing nothing to realistically promote the viability of their extraordinarily idiosyncratic "Zionist boycott" position. Yet there is a non-consequentialist observation that needs to be made as well. Levitsky and Weyl base their entire argument on the belief that a boycott will cause Israel to change its policies in ways that will create a new state of the world ideologically amenable to Levitsky and Weyl. As argued above, this is a tenuous assumption -- there's no reason to think their idiosyncratic preferences will be heard, much less dictate action, compared to the very different preferences expressed by the median boycotter. But let's think about this argument on its own terms. Levitsky and Weyl use soft language -- boycotts will "shape" Israeli strategy, they will "induce" it to think differently. But what they mean, or they hope to mean, is that it will force change. Theirs is a proposal of coercion -- as they put it, "The Israeli government could not sustain its foolish course without massive U.S. aid, investment, commerce, and moral and diplomatic support." And let's not mince words: the implied "or else" here is that "or else they'll collapse and their Jewish population will run a significant risk of being subordinated, expelled, or worse." It's that veiled threat that is will compel (or "shape" or "induce") the desired change, (On this score the authors engage in one of my favorite sleights of hand: dismissing Israel's security concerns by noting its significant military advantage while simultaneously urging that all military assistance be cut off and an arms embargo be imposed).
I've written before about how I suspect much of the antipathy non-Jews have towards Israel relates to its status as Jewish institution which -- sometimes -- does not have to listen to non-Jewish demands. Throughout most of history, when non-Jews had an objection to Jewish behavior, Jews pretty much had to assent immediately. Israel, being an extraordinarily anomalous instantiation of Jewish sovereignty, doesn't have to, and this is infuriating to persons who view power over Jews as part of their cultural patrimony. Interaction between moral equals generally implies that disagreement will be overcome by reason or suasion, not diktat; if I don't like how you're behaving, I try to persuade you to act differently. But then, Jews were never seen as a moral equals in this sense. The boycott movement is a particularly brute effort to reestablish the historical status quo wherein Jewish behavior wasn't a matter of Jewish choice, but of Jewish subordination. If they won't alter their behavior voluntarily, well, since when did Jews ever have a right to volition?
Now here Levitsky and Weyl certainly will object that by talking about non-Jews exercising coercive authority over a Jewish institution in the context of critiquing their column, I'm acting as if they are not Jewish (that they're the non-Jews seeking dominion over Jewish lives). But that misses the point. Levitsky and Weyl are absolutely Jewish -- but once again, they're not the ones who will be holding the leverage in the event their boycott movement succeeds. It will be a non-Jewish institution that is in a position to make demands, whether that be the United States, or the EU, or the UN, or Israel's Arab neighbors, or the PA, or PACBI, or someone else. It may be the case that a boycott will successfully force Israel to listen, but there is no plausible universe where a boycott will force Israel to listen to progressive Jews. The best progressive Jews could hope for is that whatever non-Jewish third party which ends up holding the cards will exhibit policy preferences mirroring those of progressive Jews. History suggests that this is a dim hope.
Levitsky and Weyl have indicated that they've had many persons lob personal attacks that often challenge their honesty or even their authenticity as Jews. So I want to stress again that none of the arguments I make in any way deny the sincerity of the position Levitsky and Weyl promote, much less their standing as Jews. Indeed, a key argument in my scholarly work is that there must be space "to interrogate potential injustices lurking within positions honestly taken and passionately felt." I think their position is fundamentally unjust towards Jews, but that doesn't deny that they are Jewish-- any more than Charles Jacobs ceases to be Jewish when he makes unjust comments about how the liberal character of the vast majority of Jews proves that we suffer from a "cognitive infirmity". And so the problem with Levitsky and Weyl's case has nothing to do with hidden motives or Jewish identity or anything like that. The problem isn't one of bad moral character, it's one of bad moral reasoning and bad social prognosticating. Their view doesn't take seriously Jewish subordination, doesn't take seriously the realities of expressive social action, doesn't take seriously the signaling effect of a boycott of Israel, and in practice reinscribes the historical norm of anti-Semitic domination. Those are failings enough on their own.
Basically, Levitsky and Weyl's case runs as follows:
(1) The status quo of Israel occupying the West Bank is morally untenable. Only a solution -- one-state or two-state -- where Jewish and Palestinian self-determination rights are respected is morally acceptable.There are also two elements of their argument which might be thought of as riders:
(2) Israel, at least under Netanyahu, is not credibly committed to changing this status quo.
(3) The only feasible way to change Israel's mind and cause it to (try to?) change the status quo is through a full-scale economic boycott and the removal of all governmental aid to Israel. A boycott solely of settlement products would be insufficiently coercive so as to force Israel to change its positions.
(4) Therefore, they support "refusing to travel to Israel, boycotting products produced there and calling on our universities to divest and our elected representatives to withdraw aid to Israel [u]ntil Israel seriously engages with a peace process that either establishes a sovereign Palestinian state or grants full democratic citizenship to Palestinians living in a single state."
(5) They concede that the boycott does impose a double-standard on Israel vis-a-vis other nations with worse human rights records, but contend that this discrimination is reasonable in their case because they care more about Israel's future than that of other countries.
(6) They concede that many other boycott proponents do not care about Israel and in fact may actively wish it and/or Jews generally harm; they do not join or endorse those people.
The first part of the argument I accept. The second is contestable but certainly plausible (I have no significant faith in Bibi's commitments here, though I'm not wildly optimistic about Abbas either). I'll mainly focus on the third and fourth elements and the riders. And, since providing personal biographical disclaimers is apparently a prerequisite to these sorts of posts, I'll say that I too am a progressive Zionist Jew who deplores Bibi, finds the occupation morally intolerable, thinks Israel should withdraw from settlements immediately (indeed, supports a general unilateral withdrawal), and whose views on Israel are most closely approximated by Ameinu's Third Narrative project.
To begin, Levitsky and Weyl are clearly making a consequentialist argument for the boycott -- supporting it because they believe it will lead to a more just state of the world. This is in contrast to another reason one might support a boycott of a state: that it is proportionate and just punishment for particular wrongs. Levitsky and Weyl implicitly disclaim this when rejecting a "mere" settlement boycott; their rationale is purely of the "will it work" sort (#3). Such considerations also come into play in their response to the "double-standard" objection (#5), they concede the critique but argue that it is acceptable in their case because their motivation is to make Israel specifically a better place (as opposed to reasoning from some general conception of "justice" and "punishment" across all states). So basically, we can appraise their argument based on whether they're right that the likely impact of a boycott movement is to create a better state of the world -- a situation wherein both Jewish and Palestinian rights are respected. The likely consequences of a boycott is an issue I discussed a half-dozen years ago in my "boycott outcomes" post, and I won't rehash those points here. I am curious, however, as to the extent to which they did seriously consider other options for improving the state of progressive politics in Israel and Palestine (e.g., supporting OneVoice or other like grassroots initiatives). I can't speak to the authors personally, but in my experience the people who say they see no alternative but boycotts have rarely invested significant time thinking about alternatives.
Before moving forward, I want to pause and note the oddity latent in their "double-standard" discussion: if the reason the double-standard is okay is because they (Levitsky and Weyl) "love Israel", the implication is that persons who don't love Israel can't boycott (as for them it really would be nothing but raw discrimination). That's a perplexing conclusion, and one I doubt that the authors really are willing to adhere to. Koplow does a good job exploring this problem, so I'll just say here that it emphasizes one of the key arguments I'm going to make below: that irrespective of whether they have shared motives or not, Levitsky and Weyl's argument relies on making common cause with persons whose desires are not to create a better state of the world (as understood by the two of them) and who are in all likelihood far better positioned to actually dictate the expressive meaning of a boycott effort.
In any event, the sequence of events Levitsky and Weyl hope to see happen is that a bunch of people boycott Israel in order to exert pressure that will change the status quo vis-a-vis the Palestinians; Israeli policymakers feel the pinch and adopt policies desired by Levitsky and Weyl; and then the conflict is resolved and the boycott dissolved. That middle step has a big problem, which is that the authors fail to explain why Israeli policymakers will be responsive to the expressed desires of Levitsky and Weyl specifically as against other boycotters who -- by their own admission -- are seeking to send a very different message and have very different objectives. One of the central consequentialist arguments against the boycott movement is the contention that it will make Israel more reactionary -- more distrustful of outsiders, more prone to viewing itself as under siege, more convinced that the wider world is intent on its destruction and that it can only rely on itself and its own instincts. The response to a boycott depends on the message a boycott expresses, and Israel's reaction will no doubt be very different if the message it hears is not "we want the best for you, but we'll boycott until you negotiate in good faith to create a Palestinian state" but "we'll boycott in order to weaken Israel and ultimately eliminate Israel," much less "we'll boycott as a first step in eventually sending the Jews back to Auschwitz where they belong." It is amazing that the authors seem to take as a given that it is their preferred message that will come through, when they admit that other boycotters are saying very different things that would provoke a very different reaction.
And this is where the claims that the authors are not signing up for the BDS movement fall apart -- not because they secretly share the same motivations, but because their entire program depends on leveraging the BDS movement proper to make their own boycott sufficiently expansive so as to compel an Israeli response. The whole reason why Levitsky and Weyl don't see themselves as two cranks yelling at clouds, but actually engaged in a potentially consequential political project, is that it is not just them but all these other people boycotting Israel too. But it is "all these other people", not Levitsky and Weyl, who will dictate the message sent by the boycott campaign. The only function of Levitsky and Weyl will be to boost the signal of the BDS movement as a whole; their idiosyncratic expressive desires won't come across and won't dictate Israel's response. Robert Farley's remarks on the precarious nature of "sending a message" in foreign policy (a critique he's thoughtfully applied to Israeli military action) apply here too: signals aren't always unambiguous, signals aren't always interpreted as they are meant to be, the meaning and impact of signals are dependent on many factors other than the raw intention of individual signalers -- and all of this is exacerbated when one is but one faction (and a relatively small faction at that) of a larger social movement.
And on the ambiguity of signals, consider a very important one: what Israel must do in order to end the boycott. The language is very fuzzy as to whether Israel must simply "seriously engage[] with a peace process" that is geared toward ending of Palestinian disenfranchisement (in either one- or two-state form) or that the boycott shall persist until an actual agreement is reached and implemented. The latter, of course, is not entirely in Israel's hands -- it creates a serious moral hazard problem for Palestinian leaderships who themselves would be given an incentive to negotiate in bad faith (or not at all) in order to further weaken Israel's international standings and extract more and more extreme concessions. This is particularly problematic if one thinks (as I do) that one of the most frustrating aspects of this conflict is how Israelis and Palestinians seem to alternate negotiating in bad faith -- when one party is willing to come to the table, the other dances around; then a few years later they switch roles. Certainly, one Israeli complaint I think has resonance is that Palestinian actors don't really want a negotiated settlement because they think time is one their side. Levitsky and Weyl purport to agree -- they think that demographic and political trends are steadily weakening Israel's position -- but their solution seems to exacerbate the problem.
But at various points the authors suggest that it's the former they have in mind (Weyl observes that he didn't boycott Olmert, for instance, implying that if an Olmert-type came to power he'd end his boycott, and he agrees that a just solution is not entirely in Israel's hands). The problem there is that "good faith" is very subjective. Years ago (discussing proposed boycotts of Arizona), Amanda Marcotte identified one key element of a successful boycott as having specific rather than vague goals. "Ending the segregation of Montgomery buses" is a specific goal. "Negotiate in good faith" isn't. It strikes me as very implausible that there might be a circumstance where Israel tries to negotiate, it doesn't succeed, but Levitsky and Weyl (much less their cohorts) agree that they made a "good faith" effort and agree to end their boycott. For example, what of Bibi's settlement moratorium, which was not met with serious Palestinian efforts to hammer out a deal? At that historical moment, would Levitsky and Weyl flip sides and boycott Palestinian institutions as punishment for Abbas' bad faith? Or was that not enough of a step by Bibi (how on earth is this measured, and at what level granularity?). At the very least, though, they should be explicit about which position they're taking -- for accountability reasons if nothing else.
From a social movement perspective (which is what I study), Levitsky and Weyl's position rankles because it is really reminiscent of a type of political advocacy (probably found among all sorts but which I personally associate with conservative libertarians) wherein people join hands with a bad campaign but disclaim any responsibility for the consequences because they personally prefer an entirely marginal and politically-irrelevant third option. These are the people who draft paper after paper urging the abolition of the minimum wage and then when asked whether they care at all about the poor say they actually support a guaranteed minimum income. The latter being a complete non-starter, the effect of their advocacy is to foster a world with no minimum wage and no guaranteed minimum income -- which they must know (even if they are being entirely above-board in describing their personal policy preferences). Ditto those who fought tooth-and-nail against a right to gay marriage and then said "actually, I think the government should get out of marriage altogether". The effect of their advocacy is entirely to support the mainstream anti-gay marriage position and does nothing to move us closer to a "government-out-of-marriage" world. Again, one need not think they're lying; their personal motivations are irrelevant. And so here, the author's support of a "Zionist" boycott of Israel is so far removed from any politically-viable position that their claim of separation from the general BDS campaign rings hollow -- the only thing it conceivably could do is bolster the effectiveness of that movement, one which (as they acknowledge) has no kindly desires regarding the future of Israel or the self-determination rights of the Jewish people. It's a sort of arrogance that enables one to engage in social movement politics while ignoring the "social"; of course the Israeli government will interpret a massive, wide-spanning boycott as embodying the precise cluster of idiosyncratic meanings that we intend it to.
While not directly on point, Eugene Volokh's superb Harvard Law Review article "The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope" is essential reading on the in-practice dynamics of social reform and how in many circumstances seemingly intermediate positions can glide forward into more extreme ones that the promoters of the initial reform would have found repugnant. In particularly, his discussion of attitude-altering slippery slopes (especially the extreme-aversion variety) provides important insight into understanding why promoting boycotts of this sort will likely have the primary effect of amplifying the nastier and more destructive iteration of the boycott campaign the authors claim to deplore. One thing that's become very clear about boycotts of Israel is that the train has no brakes: targeted boycotts of settlements leads to general boycotts of firms, to academic boycotts of universities, to personal boycotts against individual artists or scholars, to (as in South Africa) unadorned discrimination against Jews qua Jews. At every point some people no doubt would like to disembark -- but many others get onboard, having come to realize that such practices are now inside the bounds of ordinary political action.
That's the basic consequential case against Levitsky and Weyl's position: The message they want to send won't come across, the message that will come across won't have the impact they desire, and their signing on to the general idea of a boycott will provide aid and sustenance to a very bad movement while doing nothing to realistically promote the viability of their extraordinarily idiosyncratic "Zionist boycott" position. Yet there is a non-consequentialist observation that needs to be made as well. Levitsky and Weyl base their entire argument on the belief that a boycott will cause Israel to change its policies in ways that will create a new state of the world ideologically amenable to Levitsky and Weyl. As argued above, this is a tenuous assumption -- there's no reason to think their idiosyncratic preferences will be heard, much less dictate action, compared to the very different preferences expressed by the median boycotter. But let's think about this argument on its own terms. Levitsky and Weyl use soft language -- boycotts will "shape" Israeli strategy, they will "induce" it to think differently. But what they mean, or they hope to mean, is that it will force change. Theirs is a proposal of coercion -- as they put it, "The Israeli government could not sustain its foolish course without massive U.S. aid, investment, commerce, and moral and diplomatic support." And let's not mince words: the implied "or else" here is that "or else they'll collapse and their Jewish population will run a significant risk of being subordinated, expelled, or worse." It's that veiled threat that is will compel (or "shape" or "induce") the desired change, (On this score the authors engage in one of my favorite sleights of hand: dismissing Israel's security concerns by noting its significant military advantage while simultaneously urging that all military assistance be cut off and an arms embargo be imposed).
I've written before about how I suspect much of the antipathy non-Jews have towards Israel relates to its status as Jewish institution which -- sometimes -- does not have to listen to non-Jewish demands. Throughout most of history, when non-Jews had an objection to Jewish behavior, Jews pretty much had to assent immediately. Israel, being an extraordinarily anomalous instantiation of Jewish sovereignty, doesn't have to, and this is infuriating to persons who view power over Jews as part of their cultural patrimony. Interaction between moral equals generally implies that disagreement will be overcome by reason or suasion, not diktat; if I don't like how you're behaving, I try to persuade you to act differently. But then, Jews were never seen as a moral equals in this sense. The boycott movement is a particularly brute effort to reestablish the historical status quo wherein Jewish behavior wasn't a matter of Jewish choice, but of Jewish subordination. If they won't alter their behavior voluntarily, well, since when did Jews ever have a right to volition?
Now here Levitsky and Weyl certainly will object that by talking about non-Jews exercising coercive authority over a Jewish institution in the context of critiquing their column, I'm acting as if they are not Jewish (that they're the non-Jews seeking dominion over Jewish lives). But that misses the point. Levitsky and Weyl are absolutely Jewish -- but once again, they're not the ones who will be holding the leverage in the event their boycott movement succeeds. It will be a non-Jewish institution that is in a position to make demands, whether that be the United States, or the EU, or the UN, or Israel's Arab neighbors, or the PA, or PACBI, or someone else. It may be the case that a boycott will successfully force Israel to listen, but there is no plausible universe where a boycott will force Israel to listen to progressive Jews. The best progressive Jews could hope for is that whatever non-Jewish third party which ends up holding the cards will exhibit policy preferences mirroring those of progressive Jews. History suggests that this is a dim hope.
Levitsky and Weyl have indicated that they've had many persons lob personal attacks that often challenge their honesty or even their authenticity as Jews. So I want to stress again that none of the arguments I make in any way deny the sincerity of the position Levitsky and Weyl promote, much less their standing as Jews. Indeed, a key argument in my scholarly work is that there must be space "to interrogate potential injustices lurking within positions honestly taken and passionately felt." I think their position is fundamentally unjust towards Jews, but that doesn't deny that they are Jewish-- any more than Charles Jacobs ceases to be Jewish when he makes unjust comments about how the liberal character of the vast majority of Jews proves that we suffer from a "cognitive infirmity". And so the problem with Levitsky and Weyl's case has nothing to do with hidden motives or Jewish identity or anything like that. The problem isn't one of bad moral character, it's one of bad moral reasoning and bad social prognosticating. Their view doesn't take seriously Jewish subordination, doesn't take seriously the realities of expressive social action, doesn't take seriously the signaling effect of a boycott of Israel, and in practice reinscribes the historical norm of anti-Semitic domination. Those are failings enough on their own.
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Gerald Kaufman's Superstanding
I've talked before about the idea of "superstanding", a term borrowed from Derrick Bell. Superstanding refers to the idea that while, in general, outgroups are taken to be untrustworthy exponents of their own experiences (they lack the "standing" to demand redress of their claims), in cases where an outgroup member speaks against his or her own, that person is given enhanced credibility and is seen as especially authoritative.
Gerald Kaufman is a British Labor MP, as well as a Jew. His opinions on other Jews in government are not exactly salutary. But look at how he phrases it:
The related concept, of course, is the asajew, whom you've met if you've ever heard someone portentously begin a paragraph with "As a Jew ..." before proceeding to blast their fellow Jews as evildoers. It's a better replacement for the term "self-hating Jew", which is needlessly inflammatory and in any event usually inaccurate. The problem with someone like Kaufman isn't that he hates himself -- clearly he likes himself just fine. It's all the other Jews he has a problem with. And how fortunate for him, and all those who eagerly lap up his words, that he is blessed to be a Jew and thus perfectly positioned to point out the malignant nature of his coreligionists.
Gerald Kaufman is a British Labor MP, as well as a Jew. His opinions on other Jews in government are not exactly salutary. But look at how he phrases it:
"I’ll tell you (why) [the British government is allegedly becoming more pro-Israel] because I can tell you in a way which perhaps nobody else in this room can tell you. It’s Jewish money, Jewish donations, to the conservative party as in the general election in May, support from the Jewish Chronicle, all of those things, bias the conservatives,"The emphasis is my own. This was a speech a Palestinian solidarity event, and so it's hardly the case that Kaufman's claims would be met with shock and surprise by the audience ("It had never occurred to me that it was the Jews' fault!"). Kaufman's entire point, though, is that he can say those words that the audience desperately wants to hear, because he's Jewish, and therefore is especially entitled to warn of a massive Jewish conspiracy responsible for setting British governmental policy. See also this post on a pair of anthropologists writing under a Jewish pseudonym to urge Israeli anthropologists be boycotted.
The related concept, of course, is the asajew, whom you've met if you've ever heard someone portentously begin a paragraph with "As a Jew ..." before proceeding to blast their fellow Jews as evildoers. It's a better replacement for the term "self-hating Jew", which is needlessly inflammatory and in any event usually inaccurate. The problem with someone like Kaufman isn't that he hates himself -- clearly he likes himself just fine. It's all the other Jews he has a problem with. And how fortunate for him, and all those who eagerly lap up his words, that he is blessed to be a Jew and thus perfectly positioned to point out the malignant nature of his coreligionists.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
La Foule, C'est Moi
The Washington Post has a fun article about how members of the far-right Freedom Caucus who have agreed to back Rep. Paul Ryan's speakership bid are now in the unfamiliar position of being assailed as "RINOs" and "traitors" by their own constituents. You know, the ones they spent the last few years whipping into a frenzy about how the vast majority of Republicans are "RINOs" and "traitors"? Anyway, the whole piece is good, but my favorite part is definitely is the concluding question asked of Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO):
Asked Thursday if he expects pitchforks back home, Buck said he did not: “I’m the guy with the pitchfork.”"Am I worried about the blindly enraged, braying mob? Hell, I'm part of the blindly enraged, braying mob!"
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Academic Freedom vs. Academic Legitimacy: Williams College Edition
Williams College has a group called "Uncomfortable Learning", which "aims to encourage students to understand and engage with often provocative and uncomfortable viewpoints that oppose perceived popular opinions at the College." They invited a Suzanne Venker, a prominent critic of feminism and feminists, to deliver a lecture entitled "One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back: Why Feminism Fails". Many students protested the decision, and the organizers canceled the lecture.
I read the article, and was actually very impressed, because what I saw was students living out the distinction I drew in my Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy article (previously blogged about in reference to Steven Salaita, the University of North Carolina, and the Anti-Vaccination Movement). Take a look at what the student protesters said:
Now, of course, we can argue about whether Venker's arguments really are academically illegitimate or not. The organizers argued that her views are popular ones amongst many segments of the population and that it is therefore worthwhile to engage with them. This has some purchase for me, though it's not a knockout argument (a not-insignificant number of Americans oppose interracial marriage, but it seems like a waste of time to bring in a speaker urging that Loving v. Virginia be overturned). Obviously, the contours of academic legitimacy are open to debate same as anything else; maybe it's wrong to place someone like Venker outside of them (not being familiar with her work, I'm in no position to judge). But so long as that debate occurs as a debate -- free from using the coercive power of the state or college administration to enforce one side's views upon the other -- then academic freedom isn't breached. Say what you will about their substantive evaluations, but as a procedural matter the Williams College protesters did everything exactly as they should, and that's worth commending.
I read the article, and was actually very impressed, because what I saw was students living out the distinction I drew in my Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy article (previously blogged about in reference to Steven Salaita, the University of North Carolina, and the Anti-Vaccination Movement). Take a look at what the student protesters said:
Emily O’Brien ’18 created another Facebook event, “One Step Forward and We Keep Going,” on the same day in order to organize protests to the talk.The students all make it abundantly evident that they respect the right of Uncomfortable Learning to invite Venker, and were not demanding that the college "ban" her (Williams administrators confirmed that there had been no such request). There were no misguided quotes about "free speech not including hate speech" or anything of that sort. Rather, their criticism was of the idea that Venker represented the sort of speaker whose ideas were intellectually sophisticated enough to be legitimate entries into an intellectual discussion. Presumably this idea is entirely uncontroversial in the abstract: if a student group invited a young earth creationist to lecture on geology, or a Klansman to speak on racial justice, most people would I hope hold the group's decision in contempt (even while not challenging their "right" to do it). As I observe in my article, the decision to invite a speaker to campus signifies something less than "I agree with the speaker" and something more than "the speaker is capable of forming words into grammatically intelligible sentences." The concept of academic legitimacy reflects an appraisal of the boundaries of reasonable scholarly discourse, and it is perfectly fair game to criticize a group for (allegedly) straying beyond those boundaries so long as this criticism does not demand bans or sanctions as a remedy for the breach.
O’Brien emphasized that the goal of the protests was not to have the event shut down, but rather to express dissent from Venker’s ideas. According to her, many protestors had planned to attend the event and to engage with Venker during the question-and-answer session.
“The point of the event was not to censor her beliefs,” said O’Brien. “It was our rightful emotional and political reaction to something that has been harmful to many groups of people.”
Sam Alterman ’18 helped organize the protest and participated in discussions on both Facebook event pages. He said that the protestors were not seeking to censor Venker but rather disagreeing with the decision to provide her with a platform.
“No one has asked for her writing to be blocked on Purple Air [campus internet],” he said. “We were dissenting from the idea that she is someone we should elevate to a level where we feel that her point of view is relevant enough and intellectually rigorous enough to bring to campus, associate [the College’s] name with her, and give her money.”
[...]
Gerardo Garcia ’16, another student who was vocal in protests against Venker, said “While I do not agree with the decision for Suzanne Venker’s visit to Williams, I also acknowledge that people are within their right to request for such a speaker. But I also believe we should be able to freely criticize the reasoning for this decision when we invite someone who only spews hate in her talks and in her writing, while providing no concrete evidence to defend her claims. Venker tells women to become subservient to men, while completely ignoring the issues of domestic violence, equality, and much, much more … Personally, I have no patience to learn about a perspective that has no evidence, attacks women and demonizes the queer community.”
Now, of course, we can argue about whether Venker's arguments really are academically illegitimate or not. The organizers argued that her views are popular ones amongst many segments of the population and that it is therefore worthwhile to engage with them. This has some purchase for me, though it's not a knockout argument (a not-insignificant number of Americans oppose interracial marriage, but it seems like a waste of time to bring in a speaker urging that Loving v. Virginia be overturned). Obviously, the contours of academic legitimacy are open to debate same as anything else; maybe it's wrong to place someone like Venker outside of them (not being familiar with her work, I'm in no position to judge). But so long as that debate occurs as a debate -- free from using the coercive power of the state or college administration to enforce one side's views upon the other -- then academic freedom isn't breached. Say what you will about their substantive evaluations, but as a procedural matter the Williams College protesters did everything exactly as they should, and that's worth commending.
Thank Heaven for Small Victories
So UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural agency, passes a one-side resolution blaming Israel alone for "“aggression and illegal measures taken against the freedom of worship and access of Muslims to Al-Aqsa Mosque and Israel’s attempts to break the status quo since 1967.” It also labels two Jewish holy sites -- Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs -- as solely Muslim holy sites. But since the resolution dropped prior language that also would have denied Jewish connection to a third holy site (the Western Wall), it's being portrayed as a moderate position. Because, you know, UN.
Incidentally, the "status quo" on the Temple Mount being referred to is one where Jews aren't allowed to pray there. On that point, I observed the following last week:
In moderate counterpoint, Rabbi Avi Shafran, the Director of Public Affairs for Agudath Israel in American (an Orthodox Jewish umbrella group), has an excellent column on the issue of incitement and worship surrounding the Temple Mount. One thing he observes is that, under traditional Jewish law, Jews really shouldn't be praying at the Temple Mount (and the Orthodox establishment in Israel has accordingly come down hard against it). It is a nationalist move to do so, not a religious move to do so; and Rabbi Shafran says we should have no sympathy for nationalistic provocations (to forestall "one sided leftist!" comments, the bulk of his column focuses on the inexcusability of Muslim terror attacks purportedly "caused" by Jewish incitement).
It's not that I disagree with Rabbi Shafran. I don't have any desire to pray on the Temple Mount, in large part because I don't have a gratuitous desire to inflame tensions. That said, it is up to Jews to decide how to express their religion, and I don't accept that Jewish religious ritual (even that which is not Orthodox-approved) should in a just world be a per se inflammation of Muslim religious sensibilities.
The sad thing (well, one of many sad things) is that the fact that Jews and Muslims share so many holy sites could, in a different world, be a locus point for unity and solidarity. It is, after all, the sign of a common cultural heritage. Instead, we get comments from Mahmoud Abbas saying that Jews "desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet"; because instead of finding joy in shared history, he finds Jews disgusting and their presence contaminating. This is the incitement driving the current wave of violence: the view of Jews as dangerous contagions.
This is hardly the only driver behind the press to erase Jewish connections their own religious holy sites, of course. The ancient character of these sites is also an embarrassment to those who view Jewish presence as purely colonial in character -- as if Israel came to be when a bunch of Germans with "Stein" in their name threw darts to pick a pleasant-seeming summer home. That there are identifiably Jewish sites predating the 20th century belies this narrative; it presents a different one of a common homeland to which Jews and Palestinians alike have a valid claim of patrimony towards. There are various ways to elide this, none of which are anything but historical travesties, but the end result ultimately is flat erasure -- when Jews claim that they find the Cave of the Patriarch's holy, they're just lying. As they do.
In any event, that UNESCO only considers Rachel's Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarch's part of the lie, and not the Western Wall as well, is apparently a big concession from them. Thank heaven for small victories.
Incidentally, the "status quo" on the Temple Mount being referred to is one where Jews aren't allowed to pray there. On that point, I observed the following last week:
The fact that Israel prohibits Jews from praying at the Temple Mount, & the fact that this isn't even seen as religious freedom violation...
— David Schraub (@schraubd) October 16, 2015...really emphasizes how Jewish subordination is seen as a natural global baseline. I can accept the ban's security rationale as valid...
— David Schraub (@schraubd) October 16, 2015... but I can't accept that the prejudices which require it, and which deny Jewish religious heritage, are anything other than bigotry
— David Schraub (@schraubd) October 16, 2015In moderate counterpoint, Rabbi Avi Shafran, the Director of Public Affairs for Agudath Israel in American (an Orthodox Jewish umbrella group), has an excellent column on the issue of incitement and worship surrounding the Temple Mount. One thing he observes is that, under traditional Jewish law, Jews really shouldn't be praying at the Temple Mount (and the Orthodox establishment in Israel has accordingly come down hard against it). It is a nationalist move to do so, not a religious move to do so; and Rabbi Shafran says we should have no sympathy for nationalistic provocations (to forestall "one sided leftist!" comments, the bulk of his column focuses on the inexcusability of Muslim terror attacks purportedly "caused" by Jewish incitement).
It's not that I disagree with Rabbi Shafran. I don't have any desire to pray on the Temple Mount, in large part because I don't have a gratuitous desire to inflame tensions. That said, it is up to Jews to decide how to express their religion, and I don't accept that Jewish religious ritual (even that which is not Orthodox-approved) should in a just world be a per se inflammation of Muslim religious sensibilities.
The sad thing (well, one of many sad things) is that the fact that Jews and Muslims share so many holy sites could, in a different world, be a locus point for unity and solidarity. It is, after all, the sign of a common cultural heritage. Instead, we get comments from Mahmoud Abbas saying that Jews "desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet"; because instead of finding joy in shared history, he finds Jews disgusting and their presence contaminating. This is the incitement driving the current wave of violence: the view of Jews as dangerous contagions.
This is hardly the only driver behind the press to erase Jewish connections their own religious holy sites, of course. The ancient character of these sites is also an embarrassment to those who view Jewish presence as purely colonial in character -- as if Israel came to be when a bunch of Germans with "Stein" in their name threw darts to pick a pleasant-seeming summer home. That there are identifiably Jewish sites predating the 20th century belies this narrative; it presents a different one of a common homeland to which Jews and Palestinians alike have a valid claim of patrimony towards. There are various ways to elide this, none of which are anything but historical travesties, but the end result ultimately is flat erasure -- when Jews claim that they find the Cave of the Patriarch's holy, they're just lying. As they do.
In any event, that UNESCO only considers Rachel's Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarch's part of the lie, and not the Western Wall as well, is apparently a big concession from them. Thank heaven for small victories.
Monday, October 19, 2015
Quote of the Day: Rawls on the Human Good of Instrumental Value
I've been reading A Theory of Justice. Turns out this Rawls guy is pretty smart. I'm glad he didn't die in the Pacific Theater in WWII:
This would have fit in great inside my Racism as Subjectification article, which concerns how people "want to be wanted" and consequently how they are damaged when social structures deny them instrumental, objective value -- value in terms of their usefulness to the projects of others. That article is forthcoming in the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy, and should be coming out ... well, it should have come out months ago, actually. I'm not sure what the hold up is. Maybe I could still slip it in yet.
[I]f some places were not open on a basis fair to all, those kept out would be right in feeling unjustly treated even though they benefited from the greater efforts of those who were allowed to hold them. They would be justified in their complaint not only because they were excluded from certain external rewards of office such as wealth and privilege, but because they were debarred from experiencing the realization of self which comes from a skillful and devoted exercise of social duties. They would be deprived of one of the main forms of human good.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1971) (2005), p. 84.
This would have fit in great inside my Racism as Subjectification article, which concerns how people "want to be wanted" and consequently how they are damaged when social structures deny them instrumental, objective value -- value in terms of their usefulness to the projects of others. That article is forthcoming in the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy, and should be coming out ... well, it should have come out months ago, actually. I'm not sure what the hold up is. Maybe I could still slip it in yet.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Two Types of Microaggressions and a Comment on Epistemic Injustice
My friend Regina Rini has penned an excellent column on microaggressions in the L.A. Times. I highly encourage you to read it. Inspired by her work, I wanted to write about two different kinds of microaggression which -- though not wholly separate -- are worth teasing apart. Consider two examples in the gender context:
A skeptic of microaggressions, responding the former scenario, might concede that there is a gendered aspect to the comments but argue that any "offense" was probably unintended and in any event is marginal. "If this is the worst you're experiencing in terms of sexism," the argument goes, "count yourself lucky." This generally overlooks the pervasiveness of the statements. Pretty much everyone agrees that any singular instance of an activity termed a "microaggression" is not itself all that harmful. The problem is in the pattern: as Prof. Rini puts it "over time a pattern of microaggression can cause macro harm by continuously reminding members of marginalized groups of their precarious position." If someone made a weird joke about how my being left-handed marked me as the devil's servant, maybe I'd find it funny or maybe I wouldn't (depends on how good the joke was), but seeing as it would be the only time in the past decade someone had made reference to by leftiness in that way I'd probably shrug it off either way. If I lived in a different society where such "jokes" were routine and there were other broader barriers to lefty-equality and social sentiments promoting discrimination or exclusion of lefties, I'd feel different.
In any event, what matters in this case is that the cards are generally on the table. The operative question is how commonplace the slights are, and that is something the woman in question has directly experienced. I don't want to say there is no room for self-doubt -- we can still ask ourselves "is X number of gender-demeaning statements sufficient such that I am warranted to feel aggrieved" (contrary to popular belief, most women are not like Venus Fly Traps eagerly awaiting a stray call of "honey" to cross their path so they can experience the joy of crying victim). But most of the critical facts are pretty straightforward; indeed, I think it is fair to say that the microaggression critic here is in many cases simply unaware of the raw numbers and wrongfully views each microaggression in isolation.
Now consider the second scenario. Here the skeptic's response would be quite different, asking how we know that the professor's conduct relates to the student's gender? Maybe he's just a general asshole (hardly out of the question). Or maybe the student really isn't that bright (it happens, sometimes). Or maybe there is an other non-gendered factor causing his disdain. Moreover, it's not like male students don't also sometimes feel like their advisers don't respect them or speak to them as equals. Who's to say this instance is gendered?
Note that the problem here is in some ways the opposite of what is going on in the first case. Most people would agree that being derided and degraded by one's adviser (at least without good cause) is itself a pretty miserable experience -- even as a one-off. The dispute is over whether this wrong can be attributed to gender. By contrast, in the first set of microaggressions, the gendered component isn't really disputed, the argument is about whether the actions are pervasive enough so that one can characterize them as a wrong (or at least, a wrong not so trivial so as not to be worth talking about).
In a laboratory, answering the "how do we know" question also would generally be a matter of aggregation: when trying to unpack the roots of hostile conduct that could have both identity- and non-identity related causes, one thing we look for is the variance in how diverse groups are treated. If 75% of women in graduate programs are patronized but only 35% of men are, the evidence of sexism lies in the gap.
But people are not laboratories. Everybody knows, of course, that everybody sometimes receives bad treatment from their superiors. The woman in question may suspect, based on her experience, that it happens to her or her female peers more often than it does to men -- but this is a much more indirect and tenuous observation than would be the number of times she is called "sweetheart". Moreover, even under ideal laboratory settings the fact of the variance is evidence of discriminatory treatment existing, but it provides no hint as to which particular cases are and are not gendered (indeed, it strongly implies that some are not gendered). A woman trying to discern whether her particular experience derives from sexism or her own inadequacies or her adviser being a general jerk or something else will no doubt have to rely on much more subjective elements of her own judgment in making her evaluation.
This would all be tough enough if we respected the judgment of women when making these calls. But we don't, and this is where I think an epistemic injustice comes into play, and, more broadly, why I think the second class of microaggressions poses a particular peril. Epistemic injustice is probably the only reason why the first type of microaggression receives the doubt that it does ("Oh come on, you couldn't be cat-called that often. You're exaggerating!"), but it really rears its head with a vengeance in the latter case. The opinions of women or other marginalized groups -- in general but especially in this context -- are routinely dismissed as unreliable, self-centered, narcissistic, over-sensitive, or just plain nuts. In that world, a type of microaggression which can only be identified at the case-level by reference to subjective judgment is going to slam into the broader social belief that these judgments can't be relied upon. There isn't going to be a smoking gun in these cases, and the general rule is that without said gun marginalized persons are going to be ignored. And this message, trumpeted loud and clear, can knock one's own confidence in one's own appraisals of the surrounding world -- "am I just an over-sensitive whiner complaining about the same slings and arrows every person faces regardless of gender?" (Kate Abramson has a stellar paper exploring this topic through the lens of "gaslighting").
All of this leads to one more oddity I want to raise. Sometimes, I'll be engaging with a person or group that seems to me to be anti-Semitic, but hasn't said or done anything explicit yet -- my instincts are based on suspicions of differential treatment or lack of respect, but I can't outright falsify the possibility that Jewishness really has nothing to do with their positions. And then sometimes the person or group will say something that seems to tear the mask off -- positively quoting from Nazi propaganda or urging schools to expel Jews -- making the anti-Semitism clear and unambiguous. And even though this is a move to a more serious wrong on their part -- it converts a microaggression into a macro- one -- there is a part of me that often breathes a sigh of relief. There -- now that I have that smoking gun, people will believe me (I alluded to this issue in my Innocent until Proven Nazi post). And there is an even smaller part of me that breathes a sigh of relief and says See, you're not crazy after all. Even someone like me, who writes and talks constantly about the injustice of the default assumption that Jews and other minority groups either lie or are deluded when commenting on their own oppression, still has partially internalized the omnipresent social drumbeat that my instincts on anti-Semitism are systematically unreliable.
In short, there is a significant class of microaggressions which are genuinely ambiguous at the case-level. But the problem is not overzealous women, or Jews, or people of color, who seek to trample all over this ambiguity in a race to claim victimhood. What happens more often is that these people will perceive a problem, but be aware of the ambiguity, and know that they can't muster incontestable evidence to prove the problem, and are well aware that their subjective judgment on the matter won't be valued, and so are completely boxed off from any socially-sanctioned mechanism for talking about the perceived wrong or even fortifying their own epistemic self-regard. They are left in a limbo state, trapped with the nagging belief that maybe what everybody says about them is right, maybe they really are just making it all up. And that danger -- compounded by the fact that we lack socially-sanctioned mechanisms for talking about perceived wrongs in cases where there isn't smoking gun evidence -- is a real one and I think in many ways the most serious problem microaggressions pose.
(1) A female graduate student is constantly addressed by her male adviser through terms like "honey" or "sweetheart".The first one is gendered on face, the second is not. This matters.
(2) A female graduate student feels constantly belittled and patronized by her male adviser. He always seems to talk down to her and does not view her as a worthy member of the intellectual community.
A skeptic of microaggressions, responding the former scenario, might concede that there is a gendered aspect to the comments but argue that any "offense" was probably unintended and in any event is marginal. "If this is the worst you're experiencing in terms of sexism," the argument goes, "count yourself lucky." This generally overlooks the pervasiveness of the statements. Pretty much everyone agrees that any singular instance of an activity termed a "microaggression" is not itself all that harmful. The problem is in the pattern: as Prof. Rini puts it "over time a pattern of microaggression can cause macro harm by continuously reminding members of marginalized groups of their precarious position." If someone made a weird joke about how my being left-handed marked me as the devil's servant, maybe I'd find it funny or maybe I wouldn't (depends on how good the joke was), but seeing as it would be the only time in the past decade someone had made reference to by leftiness in that way I'd probably shrug it off either way. If I lived in a different society where such "jokes" were routine and there were other broader barriers to lefty-equality and social sentiments promoting discrimination or exclusion of lefties, I'd feel different.
In any event, what matters in this case is that the cards are generally on the table. The operative question is how commonplace the slights are, and that is something the woman in question has directly experienced. I don't want to say there is no room for self-doubt -- we can still ask ourselves "is X number of gender-demeaning statements sufficient such that I am warranted to feel aggrieved" (contrary to popular belief, most women are not like Venus Fly Traps eagerly awaiting a stray call of "honey" to cross their path so they can experience the joy of crying victim). But most of the critical facts are pretty straightforward; indeed, I think it is fair to say that the microaggression critic here is in many cases simply unaware of the raw numbers and wrongfully views each microaggression in isolation.
Now consider the second scenario. Here the skeptic's response would be quite different, asking how we know that the professor's conduct relates to the student's gender? Maybe he's just a general asshole (hardly out of the question). Or maybe the student really isn't that bright (it happens, sometimes). Or maybe there is an other non-gendered factor causing his disdain. Moreover, it's not like male students don't also sometimes feel like their advisers don't respect them or speak to them as equals. Who's to say this instance is gendered?
Note that the problem here is in some ways the opposite of what is going on in the first case. Most people would agree that being derided and degraded by one's adviser (at least without good cause) is itself a pretty miserable experience -- even as a one-off. The dispute is over whether this wrong can be attributed to gender. By contrast, in the first set of microaggressions, the gendered component isn't really disputed, the argument is about whether the actions are pervasive enough so that one can characterize them as a wrong (or at least, a wrong not so trivial so as not to be worth talking about).
In a laboratory, answering the "how do we know" question also would generally be a matter of aggregation: when trying to unpack the roots of hostile conduct that could have both identity- and non-identity related causes, one thing we look for is the variance in how diverse groups are treated. If 75% of women in graduate programs are patronized but only 35% of men are, the evidence of sexism lies in the gap.
But people are not laboratories. Everybody knows, of course, that everybody sometimes receives bad treatment from their superiors. The woman in question may suspect, based on her experience, that it happens to her or her female peers more often than it does to men -- but this is a much more indirect and tenuous observation than would be the number of times she is called "sweetheart". Moreover, even under ideal laboratory settings the fact of the variance is evidence of discriminatory treatment existing, but it provides no hint as to which particular cases are and are not gendered (indeed, it strongly implies that some are not gendered). A woman trying to discern whether her particular experience derives from sexism or her own inadequacies or her adviser being a general jerk or something else will no doubt have to rely on much more subjective elements of her own judgment in making her evaluation.
This would all be tough enough if we respected the judgment of women when making these calls. But we don't, and this is where I think an epistemic injustice comes into play, and, more broadly, why I think the second class of microaggressions poses a particular peril. Epistemic injustice is probably the only reason why the first type of microaggression receives the doubt that it does ("Oh come on, you couldn't be cat-called that often. You're exaggerating!"), but it really rears its head with a vengeance in the latter case. The opinions of women or other marginalized groups -- in general but especially in this context -- are routinely dismissed as unreliable, self-centered, narcissistic, over-sensitive, or just plain nuts. In that world, a type of microaggression which can only be identified at the case-level by reference to subjective judgment is going to slam into the broader social belief that these judgments can't be relied upon. There isn't going to be a smoking gun in these cases, and the general rule is that without said gun marginalized persons are going to be ignored. And this message, trumpeted loud and clear, can knock one's own confidence in one's own appraisals of the surrounding world -- "am I just an over-sensitive whiner complaining about the same slings and arrows every person faces regardless of gender?" (Kate Abramson has a stellar paper exploring this topic through the lens of "gaslighting").
All of this leads to one more oddity I want to raise. Sometimes, I'll be engaging with a person or group that seems to me to be anti-Semitic, but hasn't said or done anything explicit yet -- my instincts are based on suspicions of differential treatment or lack of respect, but I can't outright falsify the possibility that Jewishness really has nothing to do with their positions. And then sometimes the person or group will say something that seems to tear the mask off -- positively quoting from Nazi propaganda or urging schools to expel Jews -- making the anti-Semitism clear and unambiguous. And even though this is a move to a more serious wrong on their part -- it converts a microaggression into a macro- one -- there is a part of me that often breathes a sigh of relief. There -- now that I have that smoking gun, people will believe me (I alluded to this issue in my Innocent until Proven Nazi post). And there is an even smaller part of me that breathes a sigh of relief and says See, you're not crazy after all. Even someone like me, who writes and talks constantly about the injustice of the default assumption that Jews and other minority groups either lie or are deluded when commenting on their own oppression, still has partially internalized the omnipresent social drumbeat that my instincts on anti-Semitism are systematically unreliable.
In short, there is a significant class of microaggressions which are genuinely ambiguous at the case-level. But the problem is not overzealous women, or Jews, or people of color, who seek to trample all over this ambiguity in a race to claim victimhood. What happens more often is that these people will perceive a problem, but be aware of the ambiguity, and know that they can't muster incontestable evidence to prove the problem, and are well aware that their subjective judgment on the matter won't be valued, and so are completely boxed off from any socially-sanctioned mechanism for talking about the perceived wrong or even fortifying their own epistemic self-regard. They are left in a limbo state, trapped with the nagging belief that maybe what everybody says about them is right, maybe they really are just making it all up. And that danger -- compounded by the fact that we lack socially-sanctioned mechanisms for talking about perceived wrongs in cases where there isn't smoking gun evidence -- is a real one and I think in many ways the most serious problem microaggressions pose.
Friday, October 09, 2015
Unilateral Withdrawal: Something Everyone Can Agree On
Unilateral withdrawal is not a popular idea in Israel right now. The dominant narrative is that Israel tried that in Gaza (and Lebanon), and was met with rockets and terrorism from Hamas (and Hezbollah). I'm in what I take to be a pretty distinct minority in thinking that unilateral withdrawal was a success, albeit not a rousing one. Did it lead to peace? No. But it wasn't like there was peace when Israel still maintained an occupying presence. And my general sense is that both Israelis and Palestinians would be better served if their conflict could be reformulated into a standard, not-particularly-remarkable dispute between two sovereign nations; rather than the current ghastly hybrid of independence war cum counter-insurgency cum war of survival cum border dispute cum everything else that we have now. So while I'd be of course very happy if unilateral withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state provided permanent peace and happiness to Israelis and Palestinians alike, the point is that even if it doesn't it's still no worse under that dimension than the status quo, and comes with significant other benefits besides.
Liel Liebovitz has an article in Tablet today that makes a conservative case for unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank along roughly the same lines as I outlined above. It begins with a lot of tendentious hyperbole purporting to show that the sole cause of any Israeli/Palestinian animosity is irrendentist Palestinian maximalism and/or Jew-hatred, and that anybody who thinks that the ongoing occupation or lack of a Palestinian state might also play a role is a dupe. This is nonsense of the same degree and caliber as the idea that the conflict persists solely because of Israeli aggression and oppression as against saintly Palestinian suffers. The truth is, of course, that there is plenty of blame to go around and plenty of bad actors and bad acts on both sides of the equation that play their part in preserving the delightful status quo.
But the point is that, for purposes of this argument, none of that matters. As Liel observes, it is a silly mistake to premise unilateral withdrawal on the idea that it will create a perfectly just, tolerant, and peaceful state of affairs between Israel and Palestine (and within each nation) such that we'll all wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place. I mean, maybe that will be the result -- in which case, huzzah! -- but it's not a requirement for success. If a viable, functioning Palestinian state is created and its first move is to lob rockets at Israeli border towns, well, that's no different than what we have now, except for the fact that it would be definite expression of Palestinian sovereignty and the resulting conflict would be no different from any other armed conflict between sovereigns. Liel's view of the likely outcome of unilateral withdrawal is probably the most cynical one possible, and he still concludes it is better than the status quo of enduring occupation. I'm more optimistic -- I think it might tamp down on violence, though it won't eliminate it, and might redirect anti-Semitic and extremist anti-Israeli tendencies, thought without abolishing them -- so for me it's an even an easier call.
What is impossible to support is the idea that maintaining the occupation, and maintaining Israeli sovereignty over those lands which all agree will eventually be part of a Palestinian state, has any significant positive utility. One can think the Palestinian public sphere is made up primarily of monsters (as Liel seems to), or unblemished martyrs (as his mirrored-equivalents on the left seem to), or the usual in-between mix of saints and schmucks and regular folk (as I do); one can hold any similar range of views about Israelis. In any and all permutations, the case for Israeli clinging onto the West Bank falls apart.
Liel Liebovitz has an article in Tablet today that makes a conservative case for unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank along roughly the same lines as I outlined above. It begins with a lot of tendentious hyperbole purporting to show that the sole cause of any Israeli/Palestinian animosity is irrendentist Palestinian maximalism and/or Jew-hatred, and that anybody who thinks that the ongoing occupation or lack of a Palestinian state might also play a role is a dupe. This is nonsense of the same degree and caliber as the idea that the conflict persists solely because of Israeli aggression and oppression as against saintly Palestinian suffers. The truth is, of course, that there is plenty of blame to go around and plenty of bad actors and bad acts on both sides of the equation that play their part in preserving the delightful status quo.
But the point is that, for purposes of this argument, none of that matters. As Liel observes, it is a silly mistake to premise unilateral withdrawal on the idea that it will create a perfectly just, tolerant, and peaceful state of affairs between Israel and Palestine (and within each nation) such that we'll all wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place. I mean, maybe that will be the result -- in which case, huzzah! -- but it's not a requirement for success. If a viable, functioning Palestinian state is created and its first move is to lob rockets at Israeli border towns, well, that's no different than what we have now, except for the fact that it would be definite expression of Palestinian sovereignty and the resulting conflict would be no different from any other armed conflict between sovereigns. Liel's view of the likely outcome of unilateral withdrawal is probably the most cynical one possible, and he still concludes it is better than the status quo of enduring occupation. I'm more optimistic -- I think it might tamp down on violence, though it won't eliminate it, and might redirect anti-Semitic and extremist anti-Israeli tendencies, thought without abolishing them -- so for me it's an even an easier call.
What is impossible to support is the idea that maintaining the occupation, and maintaining Israeli sovereignty over those lands which all agree will eventually be part of a Palestinian state, has any significant positive utility. One can think the Palestinian public sphere is made up primarily of monsters (as Liel seems to), or unblemished martyrs (as his mirrored-equivalents on the left seem to), or the usual in-between mix of saints and schmucks and regular folk (as I do); one can hold any similar range of views about Israelis. In any and all permutations, the case for Israeli clinging onto the West Bank falls apart.
Wednesday, October 07, 2015
Welcoming Zionish To the Blogosphere
A bunch of UK students have launched Zionish, a liberal Zionist site (more of an online magazine than a blog by the looks of it). A quick browse demonstrates that it is has a lot of potential. So welcome to the internet, Zionish! With precisely zero irony or sarcasm intended whatsoever, I find your thoughts intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Tuesday, October 06, 2015
Islands of Non-Democracy
The United States is a democracy ... for the most part. If we define, as a basic element of democracy, that all persons permanently under the jurisdiction of the sovereign have equal democratic voting rights, then the United States has some islands of non-democracy: residents of D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and various other American overseas territories do not have a voting member of Congress or (except for D.C.) a vote for the President.
This got me thinking: How many other places are in a similar situation? How many non-democratic islands within democracies are there? One obvious potential example is Israel with regard to the Palestinian residents of the West Bank -- the idea of a perpetual occupation threatens Israeli democracy precisely because it seems to promise a permanent state of affairs wherein a chunk of persons under the jurisdiction of the Israeli sovereign lacks equal democratic participation rights. Of course, that raises the question of why this state of affairs is deemed more threatening to Israel's democratic character than the disenfranchisement of Puerto Rico, et al, is to America's democratic character. But I'm poorly positioned to investigate that argument since I think the American case absolutely poses a significant threat to America's democratic character.
But I digress. As I said, what I'm curious about is the prevalence of this state of affairs. I don't know the status of Bermuda vis-a-vis the U.K., or Aruba and the Netherlands, or French Guinea and France. Are they fully represented in the political structures of their sovereigns the same as someone from Manchester or Rotterdam or Nantes? This of course doesn't even get into non-democratic states where nobody has significant voting rights of any kind, but for the moment I'm just interested in the democratic world. Is this normal? Do most democratic states in fact have a few non-democratic pockets? And what are the implications if the answer is "yes"?
This got me thinking: How many other places are in a similar situation? How many non-democratic islands within democracies are there? One obvious potential example is Israel with regard to the Palestinian residents of the West Bank -- the idea of a perpetual occupation threatens Israeli democracy precisely because it seems to promise a permanent state of affairs wherein a chunk of persons under the jurisdiction of the Israeli sovereign lacks equal democratic participation rights. Of course, that raises the question of why this state of affairs is deemed more threatening to Israel's democratic character than the disenfranchisement of Puerto Rico, et al, is to America's democratic character. But I'm poorly positioned to investigate that argument since I think the American case absolutely poses a significant threat to America's democratic character.
But I digress. As I said, what I'm curious about is the prevalence of this state of affairs. I don't know the status of Bermuda vis-a-vis the U.K., or Aruba and the Netherlands, or French Guinea and France. Are they fully represented in the political structures of their sovereigns the same as someone from Manchester or Rotterdam or Nantes? This of course doesn't even get into non-democratic states where nobody has significant voting rights of any kind, but for the moment I'm just interested in the democratic world. Is this normal? Do most democratic states in fact have a few non-democratic pockets? And what are the implications if the answer is "yes"?
Saturday, October 03, 2015
Quote of the Day: Hobbes on Reason
"As oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against reason."
-- Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (J.C.A. Gaskin, ed., Oxford: Oxford UP 1994) (1650), p. 19.
I need to keep writing on motivated cognition so i can use this as an opening epigraph.
-- Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (J.C.A. Gaskin, ed., Oxford: Oxford UP 1994) (1650), p. 19.
I need to keep writing on motivated cognition so i can use this as an opening epigraph.
Kuwait Airways' Refusal To Board Israeli Passenger Violates Anti-Discrimination Law
In an administrative decision, the Department of Transportation has decided that Kuwait Airways violated federal anti-discrimination laws when it refused to board an Israeli passenger traveling from New York to London. The airline was following policy set in accordance with the Arab League's boycott of Israel, which in Kuwait prohibits doing business with an Israeli national. The punishment for violating this law can include hard labor as well as a fine.
This strikes me as an important ruling (and the letter is well-reasoned). Airlines have a "common carrier" duty which generally obliges them to serve all comers, absent good reason for a refusal (I should note that this narrows the decision considerably, since most private entities are not common carriers and thus the presumption is not that they have to do business with any and all comers absent justification to the contrary). The Department, quite properly in my view, did not consider the airline's desire to adhere to Kuwaiti law as a valid ground for the discrimination because the law itself was "part of a discriminatory statutory scheme." It would defeat the purpose of the general aviation non-discrimination requirement if it could be circumvented by a foreign nation simply making the discrimination mandatory. This alone would probably have sufficed for to justify the DOT decision, but it also notes that this Kuwaiti law in particular -- part of its boycott of Israel -- is specifically contrary to U.S. policy, with several statutes and regulations passed which prohibit giving succor to the boycott in the American context.
Though it does not say directly what type of "discrimination" occurred (the relevant statute, 49 U.S.C. § 41310, prohibits "unreasonable discrimination" generally rather than breaking out specific protected categories), the letter strongly implies that refusal to serve an Israeli-qua-Israeli should be understood as a form of national origin discrimination (the Court explicitly analogized it to racial discrimination, long since outlawed on American carriers). That strikes me as obviously right (as I observed when the case was filed), and we're starting to see boycott moves analyzed under this framework.
While I am generally a fan of this move, I don't want to pretend it provides a clear answer to every case. After all, not every hostile action directed at an Israeli entity could properly be viewed as national origin discrimination anymore than someone boycotting (say) McDonalds for its labor practices could be said to be discriminating against "Americans". Moving forward, I suspect two factors will become essential to judicial analysis appraising the legitimacy of boycott efforts, with a third wild card. The first is their breadth. The Kuwait Airways case is an easy one because it banned Israelis tout court -- even if we can infer that Kuwait's reason for enacting its policy was in some way targeted at the Israeli state (for its policies? For existing? No matter.), by instantiating those objections in such an indiscriminate manner to target every single Israeli national it crosses over from targeted critique to unlawful bias. The second factor, which will be much more difficult to figure out in practice, goes to motive. Motive is the heart of contemporary discrimination analysis, and so in this context the question would be "are you boycotting X actor because it is Israeli, or for some other reason [e.g., because it allegedly violates human rights]." Many Jews suspect that the boycott movement really is motivated by anti-Israel (or often anti-Semitic) beliefs rather than a genuine and universal commitment to the supposed human rights practices publicly given as a justification. Hence, for example, the popularity of the "why don't you boycott so-and-so" response, where so-and-so is an entity in a different company that seems to be implicated in a similar network of abuses. This sort of "comparator" analysis is a valid way of establishing discriminatory motive, but in general motive is going to be difficult to prove. Were I to advise would-be boycotters (and that's a weird thing for me to write), I would suggest that (a) the boycotts must be narrowly tailored to particular alleged abusers, rather than sweeping up Israelis generally (so a campaign against Ahava is more likely to succeed than a general boycott of Israeli academics), and (b) to ensure that one does not only boycott Israeli entities but also maintains a diverse portfolio of boycotts so as to demonstrate that Israeli nationality is not the driving force behind the move.
The wild card is the applicability of America's anti-boycott statutes, which seek to prohibit American entities (including American offices of foreign actors) from boycotting certain foreign nationals at the behest of a boycotting state. This law was specifically passed in response to the Arab League boycott of Israel, although it has been enforced only sporadically. To the extent it is held to apply to the BDS movement generally (which presumably goes to the degree to which the movement is considered to be acting at the behest of a foreign state), all bets are off.
This strikes me as an important ruling (and the letter is well-reasoned). Airlines have a "common carrier" duty which generally obliges them to serve all comers, absent good reason for a refusal (I should note that this narrows the decision considerably, since most private entities are not common carriers and thus the presumption is not that they have to do business with any and all comers absent justification to the contrary). The Department, quite properly in my view, did not consider the airline's desire to adhere to Kuwaiti law as a valid ground for the discrimination because the law itself was "part of a discriminatory statutory scheme." It would defeat the purpose of the general aviation non-discrimination requirement if it could be circumvented by a foreign nation simply making the discrimination mandatory. This alone would probably have sufficed for to justify the DOT decision, but it also notes that this Kuwaiti law in particular -- part of its boycott of Israel -- is specifically contrary to U.S. policy, with several statutes and regulations passed which prohibit giving succor to the boycott in the American context.
Though it does not say directly what type of "discrimination" occurred (the relevant statute, 49 U.S.C. § 41310, prohibits "unreasonable discrimination" generally rather than breaking out specific protected categories), the letter strongly implies that refusal to serve an Israeli-qua-Israeli should be understood as a form of national origin discrimination (the Court explicitly analogized it to racial discrimination, long since outlawed on American carriers). That strikes me as obviously right (as I observed when the case was filed), and we're starting to see boycott moves analyzed under this framework.
While I am generally a fan of this move, I don't want to pretend it provides a clear answer to every case. After all, not every hostile action directed at an Israeli entity could properly be viewed as national origin discrimination anymore than someone boycotting (say) McDonalds for its labor practices could be said to be discriminating against "Americans". Moving forward, I suspect two factors will become essential to judicial analysis appraising the legitimacy of boycott efforts, with a third wild card. The first is their breadth. The Kuwait Airways case is an easy one because it banned Israelis tout court -- even if we can infer that Kuwait's reason for enacting its policy was in some way targeted at the Israeli state (for its policies? For existing? No matter.), by instantiating those objections in such an indiscriminate manner to target every single Israeli national it crosses over from targeted critique to unlawful bias. The second factor, which will be much more difficult to figure out in practice, goes to motive. Motive is the heart of contemporary discrimination analysis, and so in this context the question would be "are you boycotting X actor because it is Israeli, or for some other reason [e.g., because it allegedly violates human rights]." Many Jews suspect that the boycott movement really is motivated by anti-Israel (or often anti-Semitic) beliefs rather than a genuine and universal commitment to the supposed human rights practices publicly given as a justification. Hence, for example, the popularity of the "why don't you boycott so-and-so" response, where so-and-so is an entity in a different company that seems to be implicated in a similar network of abuses. This sort of "comparator" analysis is a valid way of establishing discriminatory motive, but in general motive is going to be difficult to prove. Were I to advise would-be boycotters (and that's a weird thing for me to write), I would suggest that (a) the boycotts must be narrowly tailored to particular alleged abusers, rather than sweeping up Israelis generally (so a campaign against Ahava is more likely to succeed than a general boycott of Israeli academics), and (b) to ensure that one does not only boycott Israeli entities but also maintains a diverse portfolio of boycotts so as to demonstrate that Israeli nationality is not the driving force behind the move.
The wild card is the applicability of America's anti-boycott statutes, which seek to prohibit American entities (including American offices of foreign actors) from boycotting certain foreign nationals at the behest of a boycotting state. This law was specifically passed in response to the Arab League boycott of Israel, although it has been enforced only sporadically. To the extent it is held to apply to the BDS movement generally (which presumably goes to the degree to which the movement is considered to be acting at the behest of a foreign state), all bets are off.
Thursday, October 01, 2015
Learning What Should Be Quiet and What Should Be Loud
House Republicans are not pleased with their Speaker-apparent, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (CA), who went on Hannity the other day and bragged about how the Benghazi investigation had "succeeded" by tarnishing the reputation of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Since, for obvious reasons, Republicans do not like publicly admitting the partisan nature of the record-setting Benghazi investigation, this was a major faux-pas. Which raises the question: How could an experienced operator like Rep. McCarthy make such an obvious blunder?
Some folks are chalking it up to inexperience at being under the microscope of the Speakership (or near-Speakership). But I doubt that -- while it is true that the scrutiny level has been turned up, McCarthy is not some obscure back-bencher unused to political realities. Rather, I think this was a failed attempt to positively signal the Tea Party sorts who were Boehner's bane. McCarthy, like Boehner, is more of an establishment sort of GOPer, and he's had a front row seat as the hard right savaged his boss straight into an early retirement. And what does the Tea Party like to do? It likes to attack! It doesn't cower before the lamestream media or pretend that politics is beanbag or seek to reason with the current socialist regime. They hated Boehner because they saw him as seeking to appease the Democrats rather than fight for conservative values. And so note how McCarthy's statement about Hillary's Benghazi-inspired poll drop concludes: "No one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought."
Poor McCarthy. He thought he was saying something the right had yearned to hear out loud for once, but it turned out that even the Tea Party knows to keep overt partisan political investigations on the quiet side of the ledger. Well, this is a learning process for all of us.
Some folks are chalking it up to inexperience at being under the microscope of the Speakership (or near-Speakership). But I doubt that -- while it is true that the scrutiny level has been turned up, McCarthy is not some obscure back-bencher unused to political realities. Rather, I think this was a failed attempt to positively signal the Tea Party sorts who were Boehner's bane. McCarthy, like Boehner, is more of an establishment sort of GOPer, and he's had a front row seat as the hard right savaged his boss straight into an early retirement. And what does the Tea Party like to do? It likes to attack! It doesn't cower before the lamestream media or pretend that politics is beanbag or seek to reason with the current socialist regime. They hated Boehner because they saw him as seeking to appease the Democrats rather than fight for conservative values. And so note how McCarthy's statement about Hillary's Benghazi-inspired poll drop concludes: "No one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought."
Poor McCarthy. He thought he was saying something the right had yearned to hear out loud for once, but it turned out that even the Tea Party knows to keep overt partisan political investigations on the quiet side of the ledger. Well, this is a learning process for all of us.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Quote of the Day: Adorno on the Limits of "We're All Just People"
Today's quote comes from Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia:
I should say that this quote applies, I think, with equal force in the race context. We can assert until we're blue in the face the biological truth that "race is a construct". That notwithstanding, the racists are fully aware whom they do and do not intend to oppress.
The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang.... [P]roofs that the Jews are not a race will . . . scarcely alter the fact that totalitarians know full well whom they do and whom they do not intend to murder. (102)Adorno has recently been rising up my list of "theorists whose work I am relatively unfamiliar with, but know I should become more familiar with."
I should say that this quote applies, I think, with equal force in the race context. We can assert until we're blue in the face the biological truth that "race is a construct". That notwithstanding, the racists are fully aware whom they do and do not intend to oppress.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Kim Davis Will Forever Be The Face of Democratic Homophobia
Earlier this month, I remarked about the inevitable historical procession of the Kim Davis drama:
Today, Kim Davis has announced she is switching parties to the GOP, explaining that "the Democratic Party left us a long time ago."
I'd say that this might complicate the above story, but then, why would it? Certainly, the mass shift of southern Jim Crow supporters over to supporting the national GOP has done nothing to deter hack conservative historians ignoring that migration completely. In 30 years, I expect to see the exact same thing happen again -- party shift and all.
When does the Kim Davis story become "the bigoted Democrat clerk, & the bold Republican judge who stood for equality & the rule of law"?
— David Schraub (@schraubd) September 6, 2015Today, Kim Davis has announced she is switching parties to the GOP, explaining that "the Democratic Party left us a long time ago."
I'd say that this might complicate the above story, but then, why would it? Certainly, the mass shift of southern Jim Crow supporters over to supporting the national GOP has done nothing to deter hack conservative historians ignoring that migration completely. In 30 years, I expect to see the exact same thing happen again -- party shift and all.
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
For The Sins Anyone Has Committed....
It is Yom Kippur today, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Today the Jewish community collectively fasts and repents for the sins we have committed. Indeed, one of the most famous prayers on Yom Kippur, Al Chet, is a litany in which each line beings with "For the Sins We Have Committed...." (e.g., for the sins we have committed under duress or willing, for the sins we have committed by hard-heartedness, for the sins we have committed inadvertently, and so on). This is a time of taking responsibility for ourselves, and resolving to do better.
Peter Beinart thinks the Jewish community has sinned in how we are responding to the problem of anti-Muslim bigotry in American politics. But his column says, I think, more about him and his blind spots than it does about its putative subject. This is a lazy column, and in many ways an ironic column, and even at times a worrying column. The one thing it is not is an insightful column.
Beinart's piece is roughly divided into two parts. In the first, he takes note of the prejudiced and bigoted comments made by several Republican candidates for President (Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz). Pulling out how Muslims have been treated on the campaign trail, he asks he we Jews would feel if we were being treated the same way -- if people challenged our eligibility for the presidency, or shunned our synagogues, or claimed that our faith was incompatible with the Constitution, or nodded along at someone who urged "getting rid of us." And the answer is obvious -- it'd feel pretty terrible! It's a terrible thing to go through that, and that Muslims are experiencing that this campaign season is testament to the power and persistence of anti-Islamic bigotry in America.
Now, it's not immediately clear why any of this needs to be framed in terms of Jewish experience; and especially in Beinart's tone of "look how lucky you ingrates have it" (he even alludes at several points to Jewish "privilege", which, ugh). Beinart's point seems to be that Jews, being anti-discrimination winners, are not just lucky to live in a country where we're treated relatively well. He seems to think that we are beneficiaries of an injustice because we're treated relatively well in comparison to Muslims tout court. But this is obviously too pat. Certainly, I absolutely believe that on the campaign trail in America it is better to be Jewish than Muslim. But that's hardly the only axis we can look -- along the dimension of hate crimes in America Jews are considerably more likely to be victims than Muslims. Does that show how "privileged" American Muslims are vis-a-vis Jews? Not really. It does show that this mode of analysis is pretty silly. Different forms of oppression manifest differently -- a point I'll return to in a moment.
The second half of Beinart's essay attacks Jews for not adequately "confronting" the anti-Muslim sentiments of Carson et al. Faced with the uncomfortable fact that groups like the ADL do, in fact, do this (the ADL condemned Carson's statements, for example), Beinart acknowledges that actually this does occur "sometimes" but then remarks on the ADL's opposition to the Park 51 Mosque in 2010. I think it is fair to say that I was appropriately apoplectic when the ADL made that announcement, which was a true and abject disgrace. But surely even Peter Beinart has to acknowledge the strangeness of an argument which runs "Jewish groups don't condemn Muslim bigotry. Well, yes, they do, now, but five years ago one of them did something that was itself bigoted." Beyond the Park 51 fiasco, Beinart cites a variety of right-wing Jewish organizations who have, unsurprisingly, said bigoted and nasty things about Muslims. Most of these groups (ZOA, the RJC) you'll be unsurprised I find repulsive. But again, for someone so interesting in comparing Jews and Muslims against each other, how much does this echo a very common form of Islamophobia (and racism, for that matter)? "If any member of your ethnic group says or does something wrong, all members are presumed to endorse it unless each and every one loudly condemns the relevant action to the extent and volume deemed satisfactory by the majority. Oh, and if you yourself ever made a misstep, you're permanently tainted no matter what is done in the future."
This sort of requirement, of course, is something that Jews and Muslims share. But I will submit it operates differently for Jews than it does for other groups. The initial targets of Beinart's column, the sinners Jews were supposed to call out, were Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz. None of those three, you might note, is Jewish. Together they currently draw support from less than 14% of Jews combined. Republicans as a whole garnered a little over 37% of Jewish support -- a figure which would be a high-water mark for the GOP in recent years. To put that in perspective, Barack Obama got 38% of the vote in Alabama in 2012. Looking at Jews when Ted Cruz says something idiotic is like taking the latest Alabama abortion policy and turning to Obama with a "what the hell, man?" look.
But this idea, that Jews are collectively responsible not just for the sins we have committed but for the sins anyone has committed, runs deep. I've sometimes joked that what makes Jews different from other groups is how we're blamed for anything and everything. Other groups have this in a limited sense where a wrong by one will be imputed to all -- e.g., Muslim terrorists attacked us on 9/11, therefore, all Muslims are terrorists. And Jews experience this too (Bernie Madoff swindled people out of millions, therefore, all Jews are swindlers). But it stretches beyond that to encompass events that have no connection to Jews at all. Muslim terrorists attacked us on 9/11? Jews were responsible for 9/11. Vladimir Putin invades the Ukraine? Jews ordered Vladimir Putin to invade the Ukraine. Massive tsunami hits Japan? Who gave the Jews a tsunami machine?!?
And this doesn't seem to happen to other groups, Muslims included. Both Jewish and Muslim organizations regularly, of course, face demands to condemn this or that bad act by one of their compatriots. But I've never seen a case where someone -- even the usual hardcore anti-Muslim bigots -- has demanded that Muslim groups condemn anti-Semitism or violence or whatever propagated by non-Muslims. When Ann Coulter railed about the "fucking Jews" in the last debate, or when an NPR reporter contended that Bernie Sanders was a dual-citizen of the US and Israel, we didn't scramble over to see if CAIR had put up a condemnation. The thought of that is baffling. Yet as applied to Jews, it apparently makes perfect sense to take a member of another faith, who belongs to a political faction whose Jewish support hovers between "small" and "trivial", and be outraged that only some Jewish organizations immediately took the lead in condemning his bigotry. Along this dimension, we might ask "what if we talked about other groups the way Peter Beinart is talking about Jews"? Different forms of oppression manifest differently, and here is a case where Jews seem to be comparatively worse off than others.
Now I should say that I actually like that Jewish organizations do step beyond our own parochial concerns and take the time to oppose bigotry promoted by others, against others. I want us to be a "light unto nations", and I think this is part of that. But I don't view it as some sort of special unique obligation (of Jews or of anyone else), and I don't think of it as some sort of unique moral failing when Jews don't do it to the extent Peter Beinart finds satisfactory. This campaign season, Muslims in America are facing some horrific prejudice the sort of which it's difficult to imagine being foisted against other American religious groups. But Peter Beinart's column, in terms of its criticisms and of its demands, is of the sort that is difficult to imagine being written towards any other group in America but the Jews.
Peter Beinart thinks the Jewish community has sinned in how we are responding to the problem of anti-Muslim bigotry in American politics. But his column says, I think, more about him and his blind spots than it does about its putative subject. This is a lazy column, and in many ways an ironic column, and even at times a worrying column. The one thing it is not is an insightful column.
Beinart's piece is roughly divided into two parts. In the first, he takes note of the prejudiced and bigoted comments made by several Republican candidates for President (Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz). Pulling out how Muslims have been treated on the campaign trail, he asks he we Jews would feel if we were being treated the same way -- if people challenged our eligibility for the presidency, or shunned our synagogues, or claimed that our faith was incompatible with the Constitution, or nodded along at someone who urged "getting rid of us." And the answer is obvious -- it'd feel pretty terrible! It's a terrible thing to go through that, and that Muslims are experiencing that this campaign season is testament to the power and persistence of anti-Islamic bigotry in America.
Now, it's not immediately clear why any of this needs to be framed in terms of Jewish experience; and especially in Beinart's tone of "look how lucky you ingrates have it" (he even alludes at several points to Jewish "privilege", which, ugh). Beinart's point seems to be that Jews, being anti-discrimination winners, are not just lucky to live in a country where we're treated relatively well. He seems to think that we are beneficiaries of an injustice because we're treated relatively well in comparison to Muslims tout court. But this is obviously too pat. Certainly, I absolutely believe that on the campaign trail in America it is better to be Jewish than Muslim. But that's hardly the only axis we can look -- along the dimension of hate crimes in America Jews are considerably more likely to be victims than Muslims. Does that show how "privileged" American Muslims are vis-a-vis Jews? Not really. It does show that this mode of analysis is pretty silly. Different forms of oppression manifest differently -- a point I'll return to in a moment.
The second half of Beinart's essay attacks Jews for not adequately "confronting" the anti-Muslim sentiments of Carson et al. Faced with the uncomfortable fact that groups like the ADL do, in fact, do this (the ADL condemned Carson's statements, for example), Beinart acknowledges that actually this does occur "sometimes" but then remarks on the ADL's opposition to the Park 51 Mosque in 2010. I think it is fair to say that I was appropriately apoplectic when the ADL made that announcement, which was a true and abject disgrace. But surely even Peter Beinart has to acknowledge the strangeness of an argument which runs "Jewish groups don't condemn Muslim bigotry. Well, yes, they do, now, but five years ago one of them did something that was itself bigoted." Beyond the Park 51 fiasco, Beinart cites a variety of right-wing Jewish organizations who have, unsurprisingly, said bigoted and nasty things about Muslims. Most of these groups (ZOA, the RJC) you'll be unsurprised I find repulsive. But again, for someone so interesting in comparing Jews and Muslims against each other, how much does this echo a very common form of Islamophobia (and racism, for that matter)? "If any member of your ethnic group says or does something wrong, all members are presumed to endorse it unless each and every one loudly condemns the relevant action to the extent and volume deemed satisfactory by the majority. Oh, and if you yourself ever made a misstep, you're permanently tainted no matter what is done in the future."
This sort of requirement, of course, is something that Jews and Muslims share. But I will submit it operates differently for Jews than it does for other groups. The initial targets of Beinart's column, the sinners Jews were supposed to call out, were Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz. None of those three, you might note, is Jewish. Together they currently draw support from less than 14% of Jews combined. Republicans as a whole garnered a little over 37% of Jewish support -- a figure which would be a high-water mark for the GOP in recent years. To put that in perspective, Barack Obama got 38% of the vote in Alabama in 2012. Looking at Jews when Ted Cruz says something idiotic is like taking the latest Alabama abortion policy and turning to Obama with a "what the hell, man?" look.
But this idea, that Jews are collectively responsible not just for the sins we have committed but for the sins anyone has committed, runs deep. I've sometimes joked that what makes Jews different from other groups is how we're blamed for anything and everything. Other groups have this in a limited sense where a wrong by one will be imputed to all -- e.g., Muslim terrorists attacked us on 9/11, therefore, all Muslims are terrorists. And Jews experience this too (Bernie Madoff swindled people out of millions, therefore, all Jews are swindlers). But it stretches beyond that to encompass events that have no connection to Jews at all. Muslim terrorists attacked us on 9/11? Jews were responsible for 9/11. Vladimir Putin invades the Ukraine? Jews ordered Vladimir Putin to invade the Ukraine. Massive tsunami hits Japan? Who gave the Jews a tsunami machine?!?
And this doesn't seem to happen to other groups, Muslims included. Both Jewish and Muslim organizations regularly, of course, face demands to condemn this or that bad act by one of their compatriots. But I've never seen a case where someone -- even the usual hardcore anti-Muslim bigots -- has demanded that Muslim groups condemn anti-Semitism or violence or whatever propagated by non-Muslims. When Ann Coulter railed about the "fucking Jews" in the last debate, or when an NPR reporter contended that Bernie Sanders was a dual-citizen of the US and Israel, we didn't scramble over to see if CAIR had put up a condemnation. The thought of that is baffling. Yet as applied to Jews, it apparently makes perfect sense to take a member of another faith, who belongs to a political faction whose Jewish support hovers between "small" and "trivial", and be outraged that only some Jewish organizations immediately took the lead in condemning his bigotry. Along this dimension, we might ask "what if we talked about other groups the way Peter Beinart is talking about Jews"? Different forms of oppression manifest differently, and here is a case where Jews seem to be comparatively worse off than others.
Now I should say that I actually like that Jewish organizations do step beyond our own parochial concerns and take the time to oppose bigotry promoted by others, against others. I want us to be a "light unto nations", and I think this is part of that. But I don't view it as some sort of special unique obligation (of Jews or of anyone else), and I don't think of it as some sort of unique moral failing when Jews don't do it to the extent Peter Beinart finds satisfactory. This campaign season, Muslims in America are facing some horrific prejudice the sort of which it's difficult to imagine being foisted against other American religious groups. But Peter Beinart's column, in terms of its criticisms and of its demands, is of the sort that is difficult to imagine being written towards any other group in America but the Jews.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Once a Year
The motivating question behind Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is why Europeans came and conquered America, Africa, etc., rather than the other way around. And one can make a similar observation with respect to religion: Why did Christianity flourish and become the largest faith in the world, while Judaism remains comparatively tiny?
Today, I think I hit upon the answer. And it relies on "once-a-year" faith adherents.
Suppose you're a once-a-year Christian. What is that one day of the year like? It's pretty good! Presents, and bright lights, and beautiful conifers, and carols that remind you of the happy innocence of childhood. It's a great celebration had by all.
And if you're Jewish? Well, your one day a year involves fasting the entire time while thinking about how bad a person you are. It also involves no songs that remind you of your childhood, because the High Holidays are when we give Cantors a free pass to simply make up tunes that are never remotely familiar but are always 64x longer than their every day equivalents.
What I'm saying is, have an easy fast and a contemplative Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur.
Today, I think I hit upon the answer. And it relies on "once-a-year" faith adherents.
Suppose you're a once-a-year Christian. What is that one day of the year like? It's pretty good! Presents, and bright lights, and beautiful conifers, and carols that remind you of the happy innocence of childhood. It's a great celebration had by all.
And if you're Jewish? Well, your one day a year involves fasting the entire time while thinking about how bad a person you are. It also involves no songs that remind you of your childhood, because the High Holidays are when we give Cantors a free pass to simply make up tunes that are never remotely familiar but are always 64x longer than their every day equivalents.
What I'm saying is, have an easy fast and a contemplative Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Maybe He Just Likes a Challenge
Whatever one can say about his policy preferences (and I have nothing good to say about them), it's hard to argue that Bibi Netanyahu's foreign policy instincts are anything short of disastrous. Put aside entirely his catastrophic handling of the Iran nuclear deal debate (where he watched an international consensus against a nuclear Iran emerge and promptly enraged every single member of it). Let's just take the latest report out of South America, where Brazil is less than thrilled about who Bibi selected as their new Ambassador:
It's almost as if, with Avigdor Lieberman no longer in charge of the foreign ministry Bibi decided that someone had to jump in the role of completely unaware self-sabatoeur.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has expressed discomfort with the appointment of a former settler leader as Israel’s ambassador to her country.What on earth was he thinking? "Hey, South America is an important area of engagement for Israel as it seeks to solidify its international standing. But it's clear that South American countries are sharply anti-occupation -- Brazil, for example, recognized Palestine in 2010. Who is best suited to manage this critical yet delicate situation? I know -- a high-profile leader of a settlement enterprise loathed by the people he's reaching out to!"
Rousseff sent a backchannel message to Israel with her concerns that accepting Dani Dayan will signal “support for the settlement enterprise,” the Hebrew-language news website Ynet reported Sunday.
An official Brazilian refusal to accept the appointment could spark a diplomatic crisis between the two countries, according to Ynet. The rejection of an ambassador is rare.
It's almost as if, with Avigdor Lieberman no longer in charge of the foreign ministry Bibi decided that someone had to jump in the role of completely unaware self-sabatoeur.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Covert vs. Implicit Bias and the Persistent Appeal of Donald Trump
Since the 1950s, there has been a tremendous drop in self-reported prejudices by White people in America. There are three (arguably, more like 2.5) main explanations for this drop:
The reason that the face-value "racist self-identification has fallen because racism is diminishing" argument can't be accepted uncritically is that there is ample evidence that some form of racially biased behavior is still rampant in our society. So alternatives two and three explain that behavior by either saying "White people are doing what they've always done and thinking what they've always thought, they've just gotten craftier in hiding the ball" (explanation #2) or "there's been an actual change in White attitudes, but the continued presence of racially biased patterns of behavior can be explained by the operation of subconscious biases" (explanation #3). We can characterize this split as between covert biases (known and internally acknowledged by the holder, but hidden) and implicit biases (unknown and internally rejected by the holder, but nonetheless still operating subconsciously).
One way of distinguishing between the covert versus implicit bias explanations is that they have different predictions about when prejudice will reveal itself. Covert bias suggests that people conceal their biases because it is socially unacceptable to reveal them; hence, such biases will emerge in social contexts where it is considered okay to express prejudiced views. Implicit bias, by contrast, suggests that people are trying to harmonize conscious egalitarian commitments with their subconscious prejudices; hence, bias operates in cases where the discriminatory behavior can plausibly be justified as being consistent with an egalitarian ethos (for example, one could favor a white job applicant against a black competitor in situations where they were roughly equally qualified by relying on "intangible" differences that are hard to measure; but one couldn't reject a black candidate with obviously superior qualifications because that would be self-evidently discriminatory).
Most of the work I've done in the discrimination context has essentially assumed we mostly live in the implicit bias box. I believe that in general people today honestly and sincerely buy into egalitarianism, but that this commitment coexists with subconscious prejudice. There's some evidence to support this hypothesis (Gaertner and Dovidio's "aversive racism" work being the most influential on me), and as a historical matter it can be derived from Gunnar Myrdal's description of the "American Dilemma". But there was always evidence that supported the covert bias hypothesis: for example, "bogus pipeline" studies (roughly, ones where researchers informed subjects that "we'll know if you're lying because we're scientists with fancy machines") have erased much of the drop in self-reported prejudices. That supports the covert bias hypothesis over the implicit bias one, because in general on the former the bias is known to the test subject (who then tells the truth because "the jig is up"), whereas someone with implicit biases may not even be aware he holds them and thus would be unaffected.
So which is it? Are there really significant portions of Americans who quietly harbor nakedly, unabashedly prejudiced views -- only keeping them quiet because they know that's what society demands?
Enter Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's continued appeal even after a string of outrageous comments -- ranging from Obama birtherism to Megyn Kelly "blood flowing from her wherever" to Mexican immigrants all being rapists to most recently nodding along to a supporter who wants to "get rid of" the Muslims -- has perplexed legal commentators who expect Republican primary voters to eventually recoil against such obvious forms of prejudice. That expectation is very much consistent with the implicit bias hypothesis: as it becomes increasingly difficult to square Trump's statements with egalitarianism, people should start to reject it.
But things are different from the covert bias position. When Donald Trump implies Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, when he suggests that Latinos are all violent criminals, when he legitimizes mass expulsion (or worse) of American Muslims -- maybe he's saying out loud what many people secretly believe but felt constrained in saying. Isn't this the root of the "anti-PC" backlash? "I used to be able to openly degrade women for having a menstrual cycle, but thanks to liberal elites and Feminazis I can't say that anymore! What happened to freedom in America?" The complaint of the anti-PC crowd is precisely that they have to keep quiet that which they'd rather broadcast (and once could broadcast, before we had to actually start listening to the desires of pesky minorities).
Most people can't say such things anymore, or at least they're constrained in their ability to do so. There are members of traditional outgroups in their workforce (maybe even their boss), or as powerful constituents, or major donors, or simply well-connected citizens. Saying such things comes with real costs, sometimes prohibitive costs. It can lose you your job, or your friends, or your reputation, or your candidacy. And some people resent that deeply even as they quietly stew and keep their true beliefs private.
But Donald Trump is different. He can say these things. He can't destroy his reputation -- he's his own brand. He can't be driven out of the race by outraged donors -- he doesn't need them. He can't lose his job -- he runs his own company. He doesn't have to defer to outraged outgroups -- what can they do to him? For someone with implicit biases, this may not matter -- he's so obviously over-the-top that his positions can't be reconciled with any sort of egalitarian commitment. But for the covertly-biased, he offers up a tantalizing vision where one can say all of those open, overt, explicitly biased things they genuinely believe and it's okay. They don't have to cover it up anymore. After all, someone with covert biases only keeps them covert because of social conventions which demand it. And social conventions can change -- most obviously, if the President of the United States, or even a mainstream presidential campaign with significant support and staying power, busts the taboo.
Bernard-Henri Levy once referred to the reemergence of anti-Semitism in terms of people who "feel once again the desire and, above all, the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large numbers of rabbis, to kill not just one but many Ilan Halimis...." This is what the Holocaust took away from the world, especially the European world: the ability to hate Jews and feel justified and righteous in doing so. And under this view, anti-Semitism never went away, it just was forced underground, and what people thirst for is for something to return what they see as their God-given (often literally) right to openly hate Jews without losing social status (many consider the flourishing of anti-Zionist ideology to be related exactly to this desire). And likewise we can say that the civil rights movement, the laying bare of Jim Crow and American apartheid, and the rise in the power and influence of former outgroups have all taken away the previously-enjoyed rights of straight White male Christian Americans to feel and express their superiority.
The incredulity over Donald Trump's continued appeal relies on the assumption that his supporters can't really buy into his extreme statements or his openly bigoted views. It follows, then, that if his following does continue to stay true, then maybe its not a case of people overlooking, or minimizing, or downplaying those views. Donald Trump is popular because of, not in spite of, his decision and ability to be avowedly prejudiced and not be drummed out of the mainstream.
1) Self-reported prejudices have dropped because the level of prejudice has diminished. Straight-forward enough.
2) Self-reported prejudices have dropped because White people have learned to lie about their prejudices. They know racism has become unacceptable so they don't admit to it, but actual underlying attitudes haven't changed that much.
3) Self-reported prejudices have dropped because conscious prejudice has diminished, but it has been replaced or overtaken by subconscious or implicit biases which now exist in tension with conscious (and sincerely-held) egalitarian beliefs.(I say this might be 2.5 explanations because #1 and #3 are consistent with each other).
The reason that the face-value "racist self-identification has fallen because racism is diminishing" argument can't be accepted uncritically is that there is ample evidence that some form of racially biased behavior is still rampant in our society. So alternatives two and three explain that behavior by either saying "White people are doing what they've always done and thinking what they've always thought, they've just gotten craftier in hiding the ball" (explanation #2) or "there's been an actual change in White attitudes, but the continued presence of racially biased patterns of behavior can be explained by the operation of subconscious biases" (explanation #3). We can characterize this split as between covert biases (known and internally acknowledged by the holder, but hidden) and implicit biases (unknown and internally rejected by the holder, but nonetheless still operating subconsciously).
One way of distinguishing between the covert versus implicit bias explanations is that they have different predictions about when prejudice will reveal itself. Covert bias suggests that people conceal their biases because it is socially unacceptable to reveal them; hence, such biases will emerge in social contexts where it is considered okay to express prejudiced views. Implicit bias, by contrast, suggests that people are trying to harmonize conscious egalitarian commitments with their subconscious prejudices; hence, bias operates in cases where the discriminatory behavior can plausibly be justified as being consistent with an egalitarian ethos (for example, one could favor a white job applicant against a black competitor in situations where they were roughly equally qualified by relying on "intangible" differences that are hard to measure; but one couldn't reject a black candidate with obviously superior qualifications because that would be self-evidently discriminatory).
Most of the work I've done in the discrimination context has essentially assumed we mostly live in the implicit bias box. I believe that in general people today honestly and sincerely buy into egalitarianism, but that this commitment coexists with subconscious prejudice. There's some evidence to support this hypothesis (Gaertner and Dovidio's "aversive racism" work being the most influential on me), and as a historical matter it can be derived from Gunnar Myrdal's description of the "American Dilemma". But there was always evidence that supported the covert bias hypothesis: for example, "bogus pipeline" studies (roughly, ones where researchers informed subjects that "we'll know if you're lying because we're scientists with fancy machines") have erased much of the drop in self-reported prejudices. That supports the covert bias hypothesis over the implicit bias one, because in general on the former the bias is known to the test subject (who then tells the truth because "the jig is up"), whereas someone with implicit biases may not even be aware he holds them and thus would be unaffected.
So which is it? Are there really significant portions of Americans who quietly harbor nakedly, unabashedly prejudiced views -- only keeping them quiet because they know that's what society demands?
Enter Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's continued appeal even after a string of outrageous comments -- ranging from Obama birtherism to Megyn Kelly "blood flowing from her wherever" to Mexican immigrants all being rapists to most recently nodding along to a supporter who wants to "get rid of" the Muslims -- has perplexed legal commentators who expect Republican primary voters to eventually recoil against such obvious forms of prejudice. That expectation is very much consistent with the implicit bias hypothesis: as it becomes increasingly difficult to square Trump's statements with egalitarianism, people should start to reject it.
But things are different from the covert bias position. When Donald Trump implies Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, when he suggests that Latinos are all violent criminals, when he legitimizes mass expulsion (or worse) of American Muslims -- maybe he's saying out loud what many people secretly believe but felt constrained in saying. Isn't this the root of the "anti-PC" backlash? "I used to be able to openly degrade women for having a menstrual cycle, but thanks to liberal elites and Feminazis I can't say that anymore! What happened to freedom in America?" The complaint of the anti-PC crowd is precisely that they have to keep quiet that which they'd rather broadcast (and once could broadcast, before we had to actually start listening to the desires of pesky minorities).
Most people can't say such things anymore, or at least they're constrained in their ability to do so. There are members of traditional outgroups in their workforce (maybe even their boss), or as powerful constituents, or major donors, or simply well-connected citizens. Saying such things comes with real costs, sometimes prohibitive costs. It can lose you your job, or your friends, or your reputation, or your candidacy. And some people resent that deeply even as they quietly stew and keep their true beliefs private.
But Donald Trump is different. He can say these things. He can't destroy his reputation -- he's his own brand. He can't be driven out of the race by outraged donors -- he doesn't need them. He can't lose his job -- he runs his own company. He doesn't have to defer to outraged outgroups -- what can they do to him? For someone with implicit biases, this may not matter -- he's so obviously over-the-top that his positions can't be reconciled with any sort of egalitarian commitment. But for the covertly-biased, he offers up a tantalizing vision where one can say all of those open, overt, explicitly biased things they genuinely believe and it's okay. They don't have to cover it up anymore. After all, someone with covert biases only keeps them covert because of social conventions which demand it. And social conventions can change -- most obviously, if the President of the United States, or even a mainstream presidential campaign with significant support and staying power, busts the taboo.
Bernard-Henri Levy once referred to the reemergence of anti-Semitism in terms of people who "feel once again the desire and, above all, the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large numbers of rabbis, to kill not just one but many Ilan Halimis...." This is what the Holocaust took away from the world, especially the European world: the ability to hate Jews and feel justified and righteous in doing so. And under this view, anti-Semitism never went away, it just was forced underground, and what people thirst for is for something to return what they see as their God-given (often literally) right to openly hate Jews without losing social status (many consider the flourishing of anti-Zionist ideology to be related exactly to this desire). And likewise we can say that the civil rights movement, the laying bare of Jim Crow and American apartheid, and the rise in the power and influence of former outgroups have all taken away the previously-enjoyed rights of straight White male Christian Americans to feel and express their superiority.
The incredulity over Donald Trump's continued appeal relies on the assumption that his supporters can't really buy into his extreme statements or his openly bigoted views. It follows, then, that if his following does continue to stay true, then maybe its not a case of people overlooking, or minimizing, or downplaying those views. Donald Trump is popular because of, not in spite of, his decision and ability to be avowedly prejudiced and not be drummed out of the mainstream.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
How To Turn #IStandWithAhmed Into an Anti-Obama Attack
The big viral story of the day is a Muslim teenager, Ahmed Mohamed, who built a homemade clock, took it to school to show his teachers his engineering prowess, and was promptly arrested for bringing a "bomb". The case smacks of racial profiling and Ahmed's heartbreaking statement vowing "never to take an invention to school again" has really hit home the emotional and practical depths of his treatment. The President has joined the chorus of condemnations and invited Ahmed to the White House., and Kevin Drum wonders if this might be something so obviously outrageous that even Republicans have to follow suit.
But honestly, that's still only scratching the surface. The real opportunity comes from that invitation for Ahmed and his clock to come to the White House. Because when he arrives, obviously the Secret Service is going to check his bag, because that's what they do. And then somebody -- my prediction is Breitbart -- will crow about the naked hypocrisy of Obama condemning a local school district from taking the same precautions that his own security detail demands.
That's how you go pro in anti-Obama hackery.
UPDATE: BOOM! I called it:
Even conservatives can't really defend what happened here. On the other hand, they can hardly agree with Obama, can they? What to do?Please. This is easy. First of all, the statement of Irving's mayor (previously most-well-known for engaging in hysterical Islamophobia in an attempt to ban religious mediation), or that of the school district, is the perfect conservative response: no direct attacks on Ahmed, but stressing the importance of public safety and reporting suspicious threats, and congratulating authorities on being "vigilant" towards any "threats". It's basically how Republicans react to cases of police brutality when they can't gin up a decades-old theft conviction or an embarrassing Facebook photo mugging for the camera: vague indication that it sucks for the victim, overridden by the importance of trusting and deferring to the authorities.
But honestly, that's still only scratching the surface. The real opportunity comes from that invitation for Ahmed and his clock to come to the White House. Because when he arrives, obviously the Secret Service is going to check his bag, because that's what they do. And then somebody -- my prediction is Breitbart -- will crow about the naked hypocrisy of Obama condemning a local school district from taking the same precautions that his own security detail demands.
That's how you go pro in anti-Obama hackery.
UPDATE: BOOM! I called it:
#IStandWithAhmed
Didn't s.o. mail battery-powered socks to VP Gore once?
Secret Service saw a bomb and attempted a controlled demolition.
— Richard5832 (@richard5832) September 16, 2015Friday, September 11, 2015
The Best of the 2015 AJC Poll of the Jews
The AJC has released its 2015 poll of Jewish political attitudes. There's a lot to unpack here.
Some of it is very topical and gotten a lot of coverage, like the fact that a narrow plurality of Jews support the Iran Deal.
Some of it is very unremarkable, such as the finding that -- as is always the case -- the most important political issue for Jews is the economy (41.7%), not U.S.-Israel Relations (7.2%).
Some of it reflects the positions I hold, like that anti-Semitism is "somewhat of a problem" in the United States (64.2%).
Some of it does not reflect the positions I hold, like that more people approve of how Netanyahu is handling the US/Israel relationship (55.4%) than of how Obama is handling it (48.9%).
Some of it is reassuring, like that 58.9% of American Jews would support dismantling some or all West Bank settlements as "part of a permanent settlement with the Palestinians".
Some of it is deeply alarming, like that 39.2% of American Jews would not support dismantling any settlements as part of a permanent agreement.
But by far the most important finding comes in the "temperature" question that rates countries on a 0-100 scale of "cold" versus "warm" sentiment. As it turns out, while America receives a stellar 84.64 rating, it is not the country American Jews feel most warmly towards. Beating it out with a 84.73 -- less than .1 degrees! -- is, of course, Canada.
Frankly, I think we all knew that even the most patriotic-seeming American Jew secretly bleeds maple syrup. Is it any wonder that Ottawa effectively pulls all the strings in Washington?
Some of it is very topical and gotten a lot of coverage, like the fact that a narrow plurality of Jews support the Iran Deal.
Some of it is very unremarkable, such as the finding that -- as is always the case -- the most important political issue for Jews is the economy (41.7%), not U.S.-Israel Relations (7.2%).
Some of it reflects the positions I hold, like that anti-Semitism is "somewhat of a problem" in the United States (64.2%).
Some of it does not reflect the positions I hold, like that more people approve of how Netanyahu is handling the US/Israel relationship (55.4%) than of how Obama is handling it (48.9%).
Some of it is reassuring, like that 58.9% of American Jews would support dismantling some or all West Bank settlements as "part of a permanent settlement with the Palestinians".
Some of it is deeply alarming, like that 39.2% of American Jews would not support dismantling any settlements as part of a permanent agreement.
But by far the most important finding comes in the "temperature" question that rates countries on a 0-100 scale of "cold" versus "warm" sentiment. As it turns out, while America receives a stellar 84.64 rating, it is not the country American Jews feel most warmly towards. Beating it out with a 84.73 -- less than .1 degrees! -- is, of course, Canada.
Frankly, I think we all knew that even the most patriotic-seeming American Jew secretly bleeds maple syrup. Is it any wonder that Ottawa effectively pulls all the strings in Washington?
The Inevitability of the Jewish Lobby
Walter Russell Mead argues that the passage of the Iran Deal (indeed, the failure of opponents to even overcome a Senate filibuster) should signal the ned of the myth of the omnipotent and univocal "Israel Lobby". It won't, of course, because the myth is predicated on a series of anti-Semitic assumptions that ignore pluralism within the Jewish community, misattribute which positions are dominant, which are contestted, and which are marginal within the community, and ultimately lead to the "78% of Jews are very confused" problem.
Yet it was always obvious to me that the outcome of the Iran Deal debate would have precisely no impact on popular understandings of the Israel Lobby and/or Jewish power. For any issue which has a side coded in the public imagination as being supported by the "Israel Lobby", there are one of two possible outcomes:
Yet it was always obvious to me that the outcome of the Iran Deal debate would have precisely no impact on popular understandings of the Israel Lobby and/or Jewish power. For any issue which has a side coded in the public imagination as being supported by the "Israel Lobby", there are one of two possible outcomes:
(1) That side wins, thus demonstrating the impossibility of everyday Americans to overcome the overwhelming power of the Israel Lobby; orIn the case of the Iran Deal, I ultimately came down in support of the agreement -- a position which puts me at odds with much (though not all) of the Jewish establishment but in line with a narrow majority of Jews overall. And it should be the case that Jews -- whether in our individual or institutional capacity -- should be able to advocate for their preferred positions without it being viewed as a form of domination.
(2) That side loses, thus demonstrating that the position is so obviously righteous that not even the overwhelming power of the Israel Lobby can stop it.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Turkey Inches Towards Entering the Adult World
Like a spoiled teenager who refuses to admit they can do anything wrong (or a southern bro who insists that the Civil War was a "states' rights" affair), Turkey is rather notorious for throwing a temper tantrum whenever someone tries to acknowledge basic historical facts about its WWI-era Armenian genocide. But perhaps we're seeing a baby step in the right direction, as Ali Haydar Konca, Turkey's minister to the EU, has taken a big step towards actual acknowledgment of the atrocity.
So perhaps not a seismic shift. But maybe a tiny, tiny breakthrough in the long process of becoming a mature democracy that honestly reckons with its past.
"The fact that massacres happened is explicit and clear and everybody accepts that. Right now, the issue is what it should be called. We will make a decision in our party about that,” Konca told the press, becoming the the Turkish official to admit that, in fact, a Genocide had occurred.Now before we get too excited, Konca never actually used the term "genocide". That omission is noted later in the piece, although its belied by the last sentence of the block quote (and the title of the article: "Turkey’s New EU Minister Admits to Armenian Genocide"). And the article also has the usual array of charming quotes from other Turkish leaders, including the President's declaration that any EU statement on the subject will "go in one ear and out from the other because it is not possible for Turkey to accept such a sin or crime."
So perhaps not a seismic shift. But maybe a tiny, tiny breakthrough in the long process of becoming a mature democracy that honestly reckons with its past.
Monday, September 07, 2015
Everybody's Terrible ... But Maybe Not THAT Terrible
The Huffington Post has a new story up on how altering who is said to support a given policy changes how persons of different partisan persuasions register their opinions. So saying that "universal health care" is a Donald Trump-approved position makes Democrats less likely to support it and Republicans more so; attributing it to Barack Obama has the opposite effect.
For someone like me who is interested in how cultural affinities construct political beliefs, this is an important topic. That notwithstanding, I think the HuffPo article is potentially misleading in at least two respects. The first is the title -- "Republicans Like Obama's Ideas Better When They Think They're Donald Trump's" -- which implies this is a Republican problem when in reality (as the article makes clear) it is true of partisans of either party.
The second problem, though, challenges just how far we can take the implications of these findings. The issue is that while saying someone supports "universal health care" or "affirmative action" does tell us something, it doesn't tell us all that much. There are, after all, many different ways one might operationalize support for universal health care or affirmative action. And it is reasonable for a conservative to believe they are more likely to favor a Donald Trump-style instantiation, and are less likely to find Obama's version amenable (and vice versa). So for that reason, it is not entirely odd, or purely a matter of partisan hackery, that party identity affects how one responds to a question like "Do you agree or disagree with [Obama/Trump] about universal health care?"
None of this is to discount the point that cultural identity (here taking the form of party allegiance) plays a substantial role all its own. The literature supporting such an inference is robust, and this fits nicely into that puzzle. But it is worth taking this particular article with a grain of salt -- two grains, since its conclusions line up with those I generally share.
For someone like me who is interested in how cultural affinities construct political beliefs, this is an important topic. That notwithstanding, I think the HuffPo article is potentially misleading in at least two respects. The first is the title -- "Republicans Like Obama's Ideas Better When They Think They're Donald Trump's" -- which implies this is a Republican problem when in reality (as the article makes clear) it is true of partisans of either party.
The second problem, though, challenges just how far we can take the implications of these findings. The issue is that while saying someone supports "universal health care" or "affirmative action" does tell us something, it doesn't tell us all that much. There are, after all, many different ways one might operationalize support for universal health care or affirmative action. And it is reasonable for a conservative to believe they are more likely to favor a Donald Trump-style instantiation, and are less likely to find Obama's version amenable (and vice versa). So for that reason, it is not entirely odd, or purely a matter of partisan hackery, that party identity affects how one responds to a question like "Do you agree or disagree with [Obama/Trump] about universal health care?"
None of this is to discount the point that cultural identity (here taking the form of party allegiance) plays a substantial role all its own. The literature supporting such an inference is robust, and this fits nicely into that puzzle. But it is worth taking this particular article with a grain of salt -- two grains, since its conclusions line up with those I generally share.
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