Leader Cannot Fail, He Can Only Be Betrayed

Almost as soon as America began its latest round of military strikes on Iran a sizable number of GOP officials have sought to frame Trump's decision as coming at the behest of Israel. From the outset, it seemed obvious to me why the GOP was taking this approach -- "it gives them a ready-made escape hatch if things go south".* It is impossible for Republicans concede that Trump did wrong. But it is possible to argue that he's been misled or betrayed. And so it struck me as inevitable that "[w]hen, in however many months/years, the GOP tries to run from this calamity, the line they will take about where they went astray will 100% be 'we were dragged into this by the Jews.'"

One should obviously read the Joe Kent resignation letter -- which contends that the Iran War (and the Iraq War, and America's intervention in Syria) all occurred at the behest of "Israel and its powerful American lobby" -- in this light. It gives Kent far too much credit to treat him as an isolationist naif who foolishly believed the "Donald the Dove" talk. Kent has no history of non-interventionism (he has a well-known history of bigotry and neo-Nazi associations). But as petroleum prices skyrocket, global trade routes are snarled, and the war labors under massive domestic unpopularity, the number of conservatives looking for a parachute is rapidly rising even as conspiratorial antisemitism is rapidly becoming the dominant force in conservative politics. Kent's resignation is not principle, it is opportunism -- he's looking for how best to flee his sinking ship.

But how can one do that, without committing the one absolutely unforgivable sin in conservative politics? Well, if one reads the letter, it is very careful not to blame Donald Trump. He is still wonderful. He is still a great man. Alas, he has been coaxed against his better judgment into this disaster by (((them))). They lie, they deceive, and Trump was caught in the middle. This framing was inevitable; it's the only way to metabolize viewing the war as a disaster while retaining the MAGA cult of personality. After all, if Trump is a God-like figure, who could possibly sway him off the righteous path other than those practiced in deicide?

And of course, what goes for his lackeys goes infinite for Trump. He will never admit error and misjudgment. There always must be someone else to blame. And Israel, for a host of reasons, makes for a very attractive "someone". We're already seeing a marked shift in Trump's tone on Israel, criticizing the latter's strike on the South Pars Gas Field in Iran. To my ears, that's laying groundwork. The worse things get, or the more this war gets blamed as an anchor on the economy or GOP polling numbers, the more we can expect to see Israel become the prime villain in a stabbed-in-the-back narrative. Anyone who thinks Trump is incapable of or even reluctant to turn on his erstwhile friend and ally isn't paying attention. As always, the notion that Israel would come out ahead in a world where liberal democratic values were supplanted by ethno-nationalist authoritarianism was fanciful.

None of this, to be clear, means that Israel shouldn't be accountable for its own choices. It also made a choice to go to war with Iran, and it can't hide from responsibility for the ensuing fallout. Israel is responsible for Israel's choices, and America is responsible for America's choices. But of course, the defining feature of MAGA-era conservativism is a complete and absolute refusal to take responsibility for anything. It must be someone else's fault. And when the time comes to stop claiming credit and start assigning blame, you can be very sure that Israel and those associated with it (i.e., Jews) will be top of the list. It can't go any other way.

* As I also observed, it is less clear -- by which I mean it is entirely clear -- why certain Democrats also acceded to this framing, as if the prospect that Donald Trump might make reckless warmongering decisions was some sort of bizarre anomaly only explicable via external intervention.

Grieving Alone (But Not Entirely Alone) After Michigan

You might recall my post after the attempted synagogue massacre in Michigan, where I wrote that I had basically become numb to such attacks. Even though my baby attends a preschool program very similar to the one that was in session at Temple Israel, I realized that I had mentally "priced in" the possibility of such an assault. It didn't shock me; it barely affected me. I already knew things like that might happen.

There is a common line one hears from more humanitarian-inclined anti-Zionists, condemning attacks like we saw in Michigan on the grounds that they make the Zionist's point (that Jews will never be safe in the diaspora, that our only hope for security lies in an armed fortress of our own). Antisemitism hurts the Palestinian cause. I've always hated this line. For starters, I'm dubious of its truth as an empirical matter. The antisemites, after all, posit that antisemitic terrorism will not harden Jewish resolve, it will cow Jews into submission. Are they wrong? That's an empirical question, not an article of faith. More broadly, antisemitism is one of the most powerful tools of social mobilization the world has ever seen. It is not only not implausible that antisemitism might help those social movements which can successfully harness it, it would be weird if it didn't. The real question is whether anti-Zionists will oppose antisemitism even where it helps their cause. The jury is still out there.

But the more I think about it, the more I think this entire framing -- that antisemitic attacks in the diaspora are what push diaspora Jews to cleave to Zionism -- is slightly off-kilter. For me at least, it is not the attack itself that causes that sort of recoil. It's the response of the public to the attack.

Like a 10/7 in miniature, most people responded to the Michigan assault exactly appropriately -- with horror, grief, and condemnation. Good, and it's good not to overlook the fact that the humane majority was humane. 

But there was a small but vocal slice of individuals, often self-styled pro-Palestinian "progressives", who were insistent that the synagogue was a fair and justified target. And then there was another small but somewhat larger slice of individuals who bent over to explain why the first slice could not be called antisemitic -- uncouth, emotional, un-PC, anything but antisemitic -- and were in fact the primary victims of a smear machine which had the temerity to use the dread slur "antisemitic".

Far more than the attack itself, that's the response that makes me despair. I can accept (maybe I shouldn't accept, but I do) that bad things might happen to me as a Jew. But it is a horribly alienating sensation to feel certain that, if something bad did happen to me, a large chunk of political energy will dedicated to explaining why I had it coming, to poring over my social media feeds to find "evidence" that I'm one of the bad ones, and to being aghast and appalled that anyone would be so gauche as to find any of this antisemitic.

The anti-Zionist counterproposal to policing and militarism and wall-building as a response to antisemitism is "safety through solidarity". Yet it is ironic that in spite of this rhetorical commitment, solidarity is the last thing they extend. Josh Yunis had a provocative post the other day, where he observed the following:

Antizionists (including antizionist Jews) like to observe – with a feigned helplessness, as if observing a passing cloud – the “inevitable” correlation between increased antisemitism in the diaspora and the actions of the state of Israel. But if we lived in a world in which antizionists were successfully making the case for their worldview, anti-Jewish hatred would decrease or remain steady in spite of Israel’s actions abroad. Antizionists would be springing into action, forming protective rings around synagogues and organizing multi-faith solidarity rallies after each new anti-Jewish atrocity, in which they proclaim that “in spite of our strong, even visceral disagreement on Israel, we want Jews of all kinds, regardless of their views on Israel and Palestine, to know that they are welcome in our communities.” (Surely by now, they’ve had enough time to internalize this lesson and organize such efforts.)

And yet: when was the last time you saw a self-identified antizionist show up at a vandalized kosher restaurant to help clean up its windows, broken in the name of a Free Palestine? Or clean the swastika graffiti off the wall of a synagogue? What we get instead from this camp is the usual dissembling, in which defenders of anti-Jewish harassment rifle through the dumpster for some kind of receipt that indicts this Jew and that Jew for having failed to sufficiently distance themselves from Israeli crimes.

The most compelling antizionist argument imaginable would be to point at the news and tell Jews, “see, even when Israel does horrific things, you are safe here.” But of course, the reverse has happened. It’s one thing for the movement to be doing the valiant work of trying to keep Jews safe, albeit unsuccessfully; it’s another entirely to not even try. Each new retreat to the same old talking point about the regrettable, but inevitable correlation between Israeli policy and antisemitism is itself evidence of a movement that isn’t really interested in trying. On the contrary, each new instance of anti-Jewish violence is trotted out not as a pained expression of their movement’s failures, of the need to do better – of asking “where did we go wrong?” (such hand-wringing questions are de rigueur for leftist Jews when it comes to Zionism) – but as a barely-veiled threat: here’s what happens when you don’t distance yourself from Israel – and you can expect a lot more of where that came from.

That possibility Yunis alludes to, of unconditional love and support, stands out because it is simultaneously so obvious and so fanciful. Of course one could do that. And of course it's actually the opposite happening. The energy here isn't actually around promoting solidarity, it's around justifying abandonment -- here's why you should shun synagogues, here's why you must expel Jewish organizations, here's why the Israeli food truck must be kicked out, here's why the Jewish lesbians can't march with us. The fact that I cannot even imagine any of these people "showing up at a vandalized kosher restaurant to help clean up its windows" -- that is what feeds the sense that the diaspora will never be there for us.

One of the first bad October 7 takes I responded to -- less than a week after the attack -- was a truly wretched essay by Gabriel Winant urging progressives not to grieve the Jews slaughtered by Hamas. Winant's argument was not exactly "these were settlers and colonizers and so had it coming." It was rather that grief over dead Israeli Jews is the fuel for Israel's genocidal machine, so we must resist our humanist impulses lest we feed the beast. My basic critique of the argument was that it was terrible causal inference -- the Israeli response to October 7 would not materially change by whether the broader world grieved or didn't grieve, so one might as well do the humanist thing and grieve. But I also wrote:

If there is even the slightest truth in Winant's framework, it is not that Israel transmutes grief into power. It's that Israel transmutes grieving alone into power. The impetus behind Zionism -- I've been in enough of these conversations to speak confidently here -- is not (just) that bad, dreadful things happen to Jews. It's that bad, dreadful things happen to Jews and Jews are the only ones who will ever care. The only people who will grieve dead Jews are Jews; the only people who will rally to the defense of threatened Jews are Jews; the only people who will feel empathy (or anything at all, really) towards frightened or traumatized Jews are Jews; the only people who will erect fortresses to protect Jews are Jews; and so ultimately the only people who can be entrusted to protect and ensure the lives of Jews are Jews. It is not grief alone, but grief alone, that fuels these instincts.

Taken from that vantage point, the scenes of collective global grief over dead Jews represent what might be the closest thing Israelis can get to a non-violent catharsis for their trauma -- the knowledge that Jews aren't actually alone, that others do care when we are pricked and bleed. If you want something that might actually sap the machine of violence and vengeance of some of its forward momentum, that's by far your best bet -- not enforced loneliness, but unconditional embrace and empathy in the moments where it is needed most.

As I said, the contretemps following Michigan felt like a miniature version of what we saw post-10/7. Thankfully, the Michigan attack was largely thwarted and had no casualties other than the attacker, but that also made the alienation from the aftermath come into sharper relief.  Once again, we're confronted with the fact that in our moments of intense pain and fear the response from a non-trivial segment of our peers will be to explain why we deserve it, and the response from another segment will be to bend over backwards to explain why the true victims are their friends in the first segment who are oh-so-unfairly being maligned. With regard to Winant, I argued that even if he personally wasn't quite saying "the Jews got what was coming to them," the appetite for his argument came largely from those who "desperately don't want to accede to the overwhelming power of 'Who can begrudge tears for those lost to violence?' [and who want] an excuse, an apologia they can wield to begrudge, begrudge, begrudge." The sheer amount of energy and enthusiasm dedicated to propping up that horrible point is itself proof of the problem.

Again, I don't want to exaggerate the prevalence of these sorts of responses -- they are and remain a distinct minority compared to most people responding with basic human empathy. But if one is looking for a causal chain that ends in "and here's why diaspora Jews still believe in Zionism", I think these responses are more germane than the attack itself.

I'll close with one more thought. When New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned antisemitic remarks from prominent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa in the wake of the Michigan attack, he took some serious heat from the more irredentist wing of the pro-Palestinian movement who, of course, presented him as a traitor even as they mocked the idea that Mamdani's words would put him in the good graces of the "Zionists" (the possibility that Mamdani might not be doing this for credit, but because he actually believes it, is apparently beyond consideration). There were some Jewish voices that sought to poo-poo Mamdani's words since condemning Abulhawa's obvious antisemitism -- among other things, she's been promoting neo-Nazi "noticer" accounts and said no Israeli or Jew (she specifically clarified she didn't care if the two were conflated) should "feel safe anywhere in the world" -- was "the bare minimum". Arguable, but that's not the point. 

The point was that, although Mayor Mamdani clearly has substantial, deep-felt disagreements with many (if not most) Jews on a matter of deep personal importance to him, he was saying that those disagreements do not matter in the context of a larger threat to Jewish safety and equal standing. He was committing himself to the protective ring, he was saying that no matter what Israel does over there he won't compromise on keeping Jews safe here. That's laudable. That's meaningful. I disagree with Mamdani on some important things, he disagrees with me on some important things. But the reality is he's performing the actual hard work of solidarity -- extending even to those who aren't in his political camp, even to those who represent a very hostile audience -- and that really does stand out as deserving considerable credit.

The 1001 Faces of the Permacold

Nathaniel is in daycare, and I have a cold.

This is a sentence that is true today, was true the first week we sent Nathaniel to daycare, and has been true virtually every day in between.

I had heard about that permacold -- that as a parent you just spend the first X number of years of your child's life sick as he brings every single mildly transferable virus home with him. I had heard about it, but didn't quite believe it. Nathaniel stayed home with us for his first year, so he wasn't really affected, and so neither were we. It was all rumor and legend. And just as we miraculously missed the travails of having a baby who wouldn't stay asleep, maybe we'd miss this too. Maybe all the terribles of raising a little one are rumors and exaggeration!

Nope. This one hit. And the interesting bit about the permacold is that it makes you vividly aware of all the different types of colds one can have (because one is essentially speed-running them in a rapid and never-ending cycle). Sometimes you have a dry cough, and sometimes it's a productive cough. Sometimes you're congested beyond belief, and sometimes your nose won't stop running. Sometimes your throat is scratchy, and sometimes it's swollen. Sometimes your teeth hurt, and sometimes you snore just from breathing. It's not that any of these symptoms are novel or unfamiliar, exactly. It's just that normally they're spaced out weeks or months apart. To oscillate between all of them in 24 hour shifts is very disorienting.

And the bonus irony is that Nathaniel is basically unaffected by any of the diseases he vectors into the house. He coughs and sneezes and has a runny nose, but it never really bothers him all that much. It's mom and dad who are shambling around the house like the night of the living dead. Even when he gets sent home from daycare for something more serious, like pink eye or hand-foot-mouth disease, we're the ones who really end up suffering while his behavior barely changes at all. Objectively, I know that's far better than the alternative. Subjectively, it's tough not to feel a twinge resentful.

Jill was out tonight to see a play, so I got to put Nathaniel to bed (Jill and I share the nighttime routine, but the very last part of it is Jill's time). He hadn't gotten the best nap in (and the nap was late -- from 4:15 - 5:15), so I was a bit nervous. But I did my best solo version of the nighttime winddown process, and Nathaniel was very obliging. I gave him his kisses and told him how much I loved him, and he snuggled up against me and rested his head on my chest. I put him down to sleep, and he went right down, and all is right in the world -- no matter how much I cough.

Pricing In Synagogue Attacks

I first heard of the attack on the Temple Israel Michigan synagogue from one of my students after my morning class. The attack has been variously described as a "shooting" or a "car-ramming" attack; from what I can tell the terrorist had a ton of explosives in his car that he was hoping to set off via crashing his vehicle into the synagogue building. He was shot dead by security, and thankfully he seems to be the only fatality.

It's been reported that the synagogue also runs a preschool that was in session at the time of the attack. I, of course, am also the parent of a baby who currently attends preschool/daycare at his synagogue, under a set up that is very similar to that of Temple Israel. We also have security posted outside the building on a daily basis; we also have a gate set up one needs to "swipe" into (twice!) in order to access the interior of the building. 

It is very, very easy to imagine that our synagogue and our preschool could have been the target of this attack. In fact, the other day I was idly imagining (in the way parents do) just such an attack on my synagogue, in circumstances where Nathaniel was present. And what was striking to me about my thought process -- both in the imaginative space, yesterday, and in responding to the very real attack in Michigan, today -- was how numb I felt to it. It should feel terrifying. I should be terrified. But my reaction was alarmingly muted, as if I've just "priced in" the possibility of attacks like this. This is what it means to live as a Jew.

I don't know. I can't say I mourn not feeling overwhelmed by crippling anxiety and fear. But also, what does it say about me that I'm past feeling anxious and fearful? And this isn't, to be clear, a sound assessment of actuarial risk -- that would give me too much credit. It's something more quiescent -- an atrophication of any sense that security and safety is something I could ever expect to have for me and my family. That feeling -- or lack thereof -- well, I don't think it's a good thing.

David's First Math Problem

Last night, I had a math problem.

Sort of. Not really. I'm not saying it's a hard math problem, or an interesting math problem. It may be a profoundly weird way to look at a math problem, and the way I solved it may be a really silly and convoluted solution to the math problem. But it stuck with me until I just had to tackle it -- and I haven't done any real math in about twenty years.

Okay, let's get to it.

At an auction, the amount an item sells for is known as the "hammer price". But it is not necessarily the case that either the buyer pays, or the seller receives, the hammer price. Rather, there is both a buyer's premium (BP) and a seller's premium (SP) that is calculated as a percentage of the hammer. The buyer pays the hammer plus the BP; the seller receives the hammer minus the SP. In other words:

• Final buyer's price = Hammer + (Hammer x BP)
• Final seller's final return = Hammer - (Hammer x SP)

Imagine two different auction premium models. In the first, the buyer pays no premium (BP = 0), and the seller pays a premium of 50% (SP = .5). In the second, the buyer pays a premium of 30% (BP = .3) and the seller plays a premium of 20% (SP = .2). Assuming the final buyer's price remains constant, which model is better for the seller?*

The answer is obviously the second -- but not by as much as might appear at first glance. Since the buyer pays no premium in the first model, they'll pay a higher hammer price than in the second, which partially offsets the first model's higher seller's premium. It's just not enough. To give an example, for a buyer willing to pay $130 for an item:

• In model one, the item would hammer for $130 (130 + (130 x 0)). The seller would get half of that, or $65 (130 - (130 x .5).
• In model two, the item would hammer for $100 to yield the same final buyer's price of $130 (100 + (100 x .3)). The seller would get 80% of the $100 hammer, or $80 (100 - (.2 x 100)).

So model two is better than model one for the seller by a ratio of 16/13 (80/65 = 160/130 = 16/13).

That was not the math problem.

I looked at that number: 16/13. And I thought, that's an ugly number. It expresses out to 1.23076923077 -- yuck!** Moreover, it's an ugly number that, at first glance, has relatively little to do with the relatively nice numbers we saw in the inputs -- .3, .2, .5. Where on earth did 16/13 come from?

16/13, I knew, was not just the ratio that applied to the particular example buyer's price I chose ($130). It was the ratio for any buyer's final price fed into these two premium models. The seller's return would always be 16/13 times higher in model two compared to model one.

What I wanted was (and this was the math problem) was to write some sort of equation or proof that would spit out that ugly 16/13 number, not just for one particular buyer's price but generally.

Now all of this thinking occurred last night, in bed, right around when the daylight's savings time switch happened. It was pretty unproductive.

But this afternoon, I decided to actually take out a pen and paper and really see if I could do this. Here were my steps.

Fb = Final Buyer's Price

Fs = Final Seller's return

H = Hammer.

(1) Fb1 = H + (H x 0) = H

(2) Fs1 = H - (H x .5) = Fb1 - (Fb1 x .5) = .5Fb1

Since The Final Buyer's Price in the first model is just the hammer, we can substitute it in for the hammer in calculating the first model's Final Seller's Return. The Seller pays a 50% premium, so they receive half the Final Buyer's Return aka half the hammer price.

(3) Fb2 = H + (H x .3) = 1.3H

(4) 10Fb2 = 13H, divide both by 13 --> (10/13)Fb2 = H

Not as neat as the first model, but that also lets us express H as a function of Fb2.

(5) Fs2 = H - (H x .2) = .8H

(6) Fs2 = .8((10/13)Fb2 = (8/13)Fb2

(7) Fs2 = (8/13)Fb2 and Fs1 = (1/2)Fb1.

But by stipulation, Fb1 and Fb2 are the same (the buyer is paying the same final price in each model). Meaning:

(8) The ratio of Fs2/Fs1 = (8/13)/(1/2), multiply those by 2 and you get (16/13)/1, or just 16/13.

Tada!

And listen: maybe you're good at math. Maybe you do math all the time. I'm not and I don't. I did not enjoy math in school, and I have generally avoided math as an adult. Indeed, I've written about my complex relationship with my own math educational trajectory, which while not exactly a tragedy was not exactly a triumphant tale either. So I felt very good about being able to work this out, and to stretch some muscles that had lain dormant for quite some time -- even though to be honest I'm still not entirely sure why this particular hypothetical sunk its claws into me so.

Yay me!

* If you're wondering where these two "models" came from, model two represents the rough premiums charged by a standard commercial auction house, and model one represents a charity auction where returns are split 50/50 between the consigner and the charity beneficiary. My initial inquiry was to ask just how much the consigner is losing by doing the charity auction (with the answer being "they are losing, but not as much as they might think upon seeing that steep 50% seller's premium").

** In hindsight, while writing this post, I realized that just by flipping the ratio -- 13/16 -- it would be at least a little less ugly (13/16 = .8125).

The Shock Has Passed, the Awe is Gone

One of the Trump administration's earliest and most vicious power abuses was its attempt to sabotage law firms who it viewed as tied to Trump's adversaries, targeting the firms with outrageous and draconian restrictions on everything from their ability to meet with federal agencies to their license to enter federal buildings. It was an existential threat to these firms' businesses if allowed to go through, and some firms, famously, caved in. 

But others fought, and won injunctions against the administration's unlawful retaliation. And today, the report is that the Trump administration is quietly dropping its appeal of those rulings. It is a victory for rule of law, and for the law firms that understood the actual demands of the moment beyond the most transient instinct for self-preservation.

The timeline of events here is instructive, offering hope and, I'd argue, a lesson. From their first week back in power, the Trump administration came out storming with a cavalcade of some of the most radical attacks on the American constitutional order that have been seen in my lifetime. It was shocking, and people and institutions were shocked. They'd never witnessed anything like this. Many were still reeling from an election they weren't expecting to lose. They didn't know how to respond. And the Trump administration exploited that shock and that awe to spend months just running over the institutional guardrails that should have existed to keep them in check. The law firm submissions were part of that story, but it was much larger than that. Media companies, universities, even the Democratic leadership was left floundering at best, trying to negotiate a panicked surrender at worst.

But now the tide is turning. Once again, the dropped initiative against the law firms is just one part of a larger story. The initial blitzkrieg is grinding to a halt. A dazed opposition has regained its footing. Resistance is mounting. Even the Supreme Court maybe is starting to recognize, just a little bit, that its constitutional role is not to act as the highest rubber stamp in the land. The shock has passed, the awe is gone. People are fighting back, and they are winning. And while nobody should expect the Trump administration to just slink away quietly (even if that's what they did do in this appeal), at the very least it's no longer a romp. They're in for a fight now, and it's a fight we can and will win.

This is not an exculpation of those who turned tail and ran. It is a praise of those who remained steadfast -- a few law firms, sure, but far more importantly ordinary American citizens in places like Minneapolis and Chicago and Portland who planted their feet and said no. Their continued faith and grit is what allowed others to rally and reestablish themselves. They are heroes. May their names ever be sung in our victory speeches.

That's the hope. Here's the lesson. The Trump administration's goals are evil. But the strategy -- of coming out the gates storming, front-loading as much aggressive policy content as possible, as fast as possible -- was a sound one. It worked. Yes, it bred backlash -- eventually. But much of the damage "accomplishments" they wrought is already well-entrenched. The lesson here is Machiavelli's, and I flagged it when the Supreme Court did something similar in loading up its most extreme right-wing agenda all at once in 2022.

[I]f you feel compelled to take certain actions that you know are unpopular, or will engender backlash -- do them all, do them early, and do them all at once.

Do not try to spread them out. Do not feel the need to pull back on some to balance the others. Do not hem and haw with baby steps. Do everything you want to do early, and immediately. The backlash will come, but the backlash won't be materially different between one outrageous thing and ten outrageous things. Spreading them out just creates new moments of fresh anger. Purported sops won't make people forgive in the moment.... Get them all out of the way in one fell swoop.

This was a lesson I argued Democrats should internalize, though it was already too late for them in 2022.

Democrats needed to do big things. Those things would be controversial. Talking them out indefinitely in a bid for a compromise that would never occur only would bleed resources (ask Barack Obama how that went with the ACA). Better to slam them through at the start. Voting rights, anti-gerrymandering, DC statehood, BBB, protecting abortion rights. Yeah, these things would be controversial. They wouldn't be any less controversial if they're spread out in drips and drabs. Do them all, do them together, weather the storm, and then spend the rest of your time consolidating your position. 

That would still be my basic advice if Democrats retake the Oval Office in 2028. By the end of the first week, I'd want to a complete pro-democracy package (including DC statehood) on the president's desk. I want to see prominent Republicans and ICE leaders who've committed crimes frog-marched in handcuffs. I want the corporate executives who approved "settlements" for Trump's frivolous lawsuits indicted for bribery. I want to see public resources and opportunities expressly redirected away from companies and firms who caved to Trump, and towards those who showed backbone, to show that there are penalties to being a quisling. I want the DOJ to announce an anti-corruption task force geared at identifying all the money stolen from the American taxpayer by the Trump family and clawing back as much of it as possible, and I want them to name and shame the Supreme Court as among the primary obstacles to providing accountability for their crimes. I want to uncover the corrupt insiders who bet on the lives of American servicemembers and have their identities blasted across every newspaper in America in advance of their trials. Do it all, do it fast, weather the storm, then consolidate your position.

Does the backlash to Trumpism discredit this strategy? I don't think so. For starters, a Democrat administration hopefully would not have the same proportion of incompetent and corrupt lickspittles undermining its progress at every turn -- it's not clear to me that the same level of backlash would emerge. Indeed, I suspect Trump's hyper-aggression was initially popular in a political climate where many people just have an inchoate desire to see some inchoate powerful "them" receive comeuppance. That instinct can be harnessed by Democrats, but, you know, without resort to random street kidnappings.

But even if there is a real backlash, again -- the brute truth is that Trump "accomplished" a lot in his shock and awe period. Those accomplishments are vicious and evil and destructive, but they're going to prove more terribly durable than they have any right to be. Democrats, too, should try to entrench big victories, even if it does generate adverse political winds. Those winds will come regardless -- that's how politics work. You might as well try to accomplish what you can -- and there's a lot that needs accomplishing.

UPDATE: Now Trump's lawyers are trying to undo their motion to dismiss. This does not undermine my assessment that the Trump war machine is sputtering to a halt.

The Totenkopf is Part of Platner's Appeal

A new poll out of the University of New Hampshire has Graham Platner opening up a giant lead over Gov. Janet Mills (64/25) in the Democratic primary to challenge Maine Senator Susan Collins. Platner also leads Collins by a greater margin than does Mills.

It's a startling show of resiliency from a man whose campaign seemed DOA once it was revealed he had gotten a big ol' Nazi tattoo on his chest. And lest we think that was some sort of one-off, just today Platner boosted the message of a prominent neo-Nazi radio host when the latter identified war with Iran as "the only thing Republicans and Democrats have both given a standing ovation for" (Platner added "As always, there’s one thing that brings Republican and Democratic politicians together: sending other people’s children to die in stupid wars in the Middle East.").

As the possibility of a Platner victory, post-Totenkopf, is sinking in, we're starting to see more folks from what we might call the intelligentsia of the "insurgent" wing of the Democratic Party trying to raise the alarm on him. The line I'm hearing most often is that Platner will become "another Fetterman" -- a politician initially promoted by the populist wing of the party, whose appeal traded significantly on coding as a manly-man to Democrats desperate to shed their elitist, East Coast, alternative, intellectual, left-wing (...) image, who became one of the Democrats most likely to cross party lines and back conservative initiatives. 

It's an ironic charge, given that one of Fetterman's chief sins to this clique is that he is among the few diehard Bibi-or-bust Democrats remaining, and Platner is a loud and harsh critic of Israel. To the extent the allegation is that Platner will turn out to be an AIPAC darling, I'm dubious. But if the claim is more broadly that Platner is highly liable to align with conservative populists at the expense of Democratic priorities, it's quite plausible -- and, it must be said, quite compatible with retaining his loud and harsh anti-Israel politics. His fate is not to become Irving Kristol, but to become Tucker Carlson.

As this last-ditch rally against Platner develops, though, I've been thinking about the old "the party decides" line that people thought until too far late in the day would stop Trump from being nominated in 2016. In this case, though, "the party" I have in mind is not the organizational Democratic Party, but rather the aforementioned insurgent intelligentsia that's trying to claw back support for Platner from what is largely their own rank-and-file. They've relentlessly promoted a vision of Democratic politics that is almost entirely front-loaded into a particular aesthetic of being a "fighter", and now they've found it's spiraled out of their control. And in particular, one thing I think they still haven't wrapped their heads around is the real possibility that Platner's antisemitic associations are a selling point for him. They're not something he's had to overcome, they're part of why -- in the context of this particular "I'm a fighter, I'm tackling the powerful, I'm beholden to nobody" aesthetic -- Platner is as popular as he is.

Amanda Marcotte, for instance, uses the fact of Platner's success-notwithstanding-Nazi-ties to complain not about the Democratic branches backing Platner, but of the Democratic establishment that has aligned with Mills. "It really says a lot about how the Democratic establishment is failing to meet the moment that Platner is a contender.... Running Mills was political malpractice." The implication, here, is that Platner is only succeeding because Democrats thirsting for a true "fighter" didn't have another option other than a geriatric old biddy; they're so desperate that they'll even back the Nazi-adjacent dude if the alternatives are so poor. 

Problem #1 with this argument is that Platner was not the only alternative to Mills in the race; Marcotte's account doesn't explain why Platner specifically became the popular alternative. Problem #2 is that while Mills is certainly old, there's no evidence that she doesn't take the positions or adversarial attitude towards Republicans that we supposedly want -- her only actual sin is her age, the other problems are just imputed to her by virtue of her date of birth. Platner's ascendence is directly related to this conflation, where a "vibe" of being "fighter-ly" matters more than one's actual record, beliefs, or policies. Can we really be surprised when Platner's support is not dinged by complaints relating to his record, beliefs, and or policies? Folks are reaping what they've sown here.

Much like with conservatives and Trumpism circa 2016, it's clear that there is a substantial cadre of political professionals who thought -- quite sincerely -- that they could play with currents of populist rage but also keep them under control, in part because they assumed that of course people didn't really want overt nativism or White supremacy or antisemitism or what have you. And the problem is, it turns out that a lot of people wanted exactly that. The "party" tried to hit the brakes, and nothing happened. It was a complete misjudgment of where the center of gravity was, alongside a complete misjudgment of how intolerable pure rancid bigotry would be.

We have gone through a long, long period of certain people ranting about the DNC rigging primaries and all incumbents are bought and paid for by special interests and every Democratic leader is a spineless weasel shrinking violet ... etc., etc., onward to infinity. A lot of the "smarter" people who indulged in that rhetoric didn't mean it literally. It was a tool to harness popular rage, which they would deploy with scalpel-like precision to knock out the sclerotic old guard to be replaced by better (but still savvy) operators like themselves. The problem is that when that rhetoric sinks in far enough, it never gets deployed with scalpel-like precision. It can't. It metastasizes quickly and uncontrollably, and any effort to restrain it flops as it is perceived as yet another instance of the Big Bad "Them" trying to assert control over and squelch the true voice of the people.

And at the risk of spiking the football, of course antisemitism would be at the center of this. A central component of antisemitism is how it places Jews, in the public imagination, as the paradigm-case of the small elite class of riggers and cheaters who pull puppet-strings behind the scenes. In this light, Platner being perceived as antisemitic Jewish accentuates, rather than undermines, his appeal as someone who will fearlessly take on ... the elitist class of riggers and cheaters pulling puppet-strings behind the scenes. Couple that with the other central feature of epistemic antisemitism -- this simmering fury that there's so much that "they" won't let you say, that you're Not Allowed To Say, that we all know are true and are secretly thinking but Your Life Will Be Over if you say it -- and there is a frankly orgasmic pleasure in letting that cauldron boil over and pour out all the thoughts they've been suppressing for years that they now feel license to say. That's what we're seeing now, more than anything: an outright ecstasy amongst people who finally, finally, feel free to not care what Jews think when they think about Jews. Maybe that's why we seem to have gone from zero to ninety so fast. Once again, cf. Trump: the reason why Trump's overt bigotry didn't seem to hurt him the polls is that a lot of people wanted more than anything else to be able to say all of those horrible things, things that they'd been told and believed would destroy their lives and careers and marriages and future if they ever said out loud, and for it to be okay. When Trump said it and it didn't spike his political career, the freedom he promised -- the freedom not to care what "they" think -- was absolutely intoxicating.

Again, I absolutely believe that many of the "smart" people who promoted this sort of approach didn't mean for this to happen, and thought quite earnestly that of course they (they personally and they-the-voters) would not conflate "elitist class of cheaters" with "Jews". Nonetheless: that's exactly what happened. They misjudged the center of gravity dramatically. They underestimated the appeal of antisemitism, which they were sure was good and well-buried, and only being dredged up now as a tired refrain of a baiters and hustlers who had no other refrain to offer. They were wrong. The "hustlers" were right. And the "smart" people, once again, found they can't stop the train.

That's why I'm very pessimistic about arresting the currently accelerating antisemitic trends, particularly in a context where progressive politics are moving towards an aesthetic populism questing for whoever can provide an outlet for our seething, incandescent rage. It's not even that the rage isn't understandable -- of course it is -- but when it swallows up every other political instinct it necessarily leads to bad places (a downward spiral I'm familiar with in part because of how I've seen it afflict elements of the Jewish community dealing with Jewish anger). 

It's very clear, as Adam Serwer wrote today, that too many people (including left-identified people) are looking for an excuse "to indulge in the transgressive pleasure of public bigotry as a little treat." Platner's Nazi affiliations are exactly that sort of transgressive treat, and until we understand that they are part of his appeal for regular voters -- not Tiki-torch neo-Nazis, but ordinary Americans -- we're not going to wrap our heads around the scope of the actual problem.