The Ethic of Responsibility and Working on Antisemitism

A few days ago, I wrapped up work with several Nexus-affiliated colleagues on a white paper seeking to provide guidance to college administrators about how various Israel-related buzzwords (think "apartheid", "settler-colonialism", "anti-Zionism") do and do not intersect with antisemitism. It was a group effort, and while I was a contributor, I was not the lead author. But my name will be on the finished product.

The paper is good. It is not perfect. Now, typically when people write that, they're damning with faint praise. I'm being literal. It is the work of a committee, and that means it is inherently going to be imperfect by the lights of any individual member. As in any group project, there are choices I would have made that were not acceded to be others; no doubt there were choices I made that other group members would not have incorporated had they had their lights.

In many ways, though, a project like this is out of character for me -- and it has given me newfound respect for anyone who engages in institutional political work (legislators, bureaucrats, etc.).

I've written before about how I'm an "institutionalist non-joiner" -- that is, I believe deeply in established institutions, but I also have little interest in directly participating in them. The reason for my reluctance stems from a strong desire to be in control of my own message, paired with the knowledge that any large institution will necessarily not perfectly reflect my own sentiments. It's the same reason why I rarely sign petitions -- unless I wrote the petition, it probably isn't going to say precisely what I want to say. And I don't like being a position where my name is on something that I wasn't wholly in control of. What do you do when someone say "well what about X clause", and you're like "well, I don't agree with X, but the totality was good enough"? My general answer is to avoid the problem -- I have a job and a life where I'm privileged to mostly be able to speak entirely in my own voice, and that's great.

Which makes this Nexus project, honestly, somewhat unnerving -- more so because it cuts to the heart of my own expertise. When this white paper is released, any critic can seize upon any portion of it they find suspect and say "Oh ho! How do you defend endorsing this!" And it will read as a limp reply to say "well, I didn't necessarily like that part" or "I would have phrased it differently." My name is on the document; it is natural to hold me responsible for what I signed onto. And so some part of my public reputation on my main area of scholarly specialization falls partially out of my control. Outside critics, not bound by the strictures of operating within a group, can snipe from the high ground.

Why did I agree to participate in drafting this document anyway? Well, I thought the issue was important, and I thought my contribution would make the resulting product better. I could have let others write the paper and then upon completion write a solo "here's what it should have said" rejoinder -- preserving my own unblemished voice at the expense of allowing a worse product to go through. But for whatever reason (and against all of my natural instincts), I decided to make the trade: I would participate in the collective endeavor to improve the document, and in exchange I would sacrifice some of my ability to control my own message.

The aforementioned inherent imperfection of group work applies to any political document -- and the more people involved and the higher the stakes are, the worse the problem gets. Our white paper involved less than a dozen people and has no tangible import other than whatever suasive authority we can muster. If one imagines a piece of legislation voted on by hundreds, or an administrative rule crafted by staff across countless government agencies, the problem multiplies. That work is simultaneously far more important than what I do, and also necessarily far more the product of innumerable compromises. For them, too, the realities of getting collective support and sign-off undoubtedly result in edits and alterations that they'd struggle to defend "on the merits". For them, too, the outside critic has a huge advantage in pot-shotting the most vulnerable elements and asking "how could you"?

But if there is to be political change, people have to be willing to take that fall. The extreme version of this is the government official in the Trump administration who knew the administration was evil, who knew that history would view them as a collaborator, but genuinely felt that if they stepped out they'd be replaced by someone who would do yet worse. But my thesis is that this core problem is not extreme at all, it is in fact ordinary and ubiquitous. Legislators have to be willing to vote for bills they know are imperfect, agency experts have to sign off on regulations they know are compromised. This is why Max Weber says that a pure "Ethic of Conviction" is incompatible with actual governance. Every academic who spends time in government leaves a record which a critic can peck away at as incompatible with their professed convictions, and they'll be right -- but not because the academic is a hypocrite. It is because political action is an inherently compromised endeavor, that needs to occur anyway.

For the most part, I don't have the stomach for it -- hence why this Nexus project is really an exception for me. But having gotten a tiny taste, I have more respect for those that are willing to engage, in good-faith, in the compromised and imperfect practice of governance -- knowing that at every point along the way they'll be forced to take hits to their reputation that in many ways they will not be able to truly defend.

UPDATE: The document in question is out. 

Blame To Share

Just the other day, I was rejoicing at the news that one of the hostages -- Qaid Farhan Al-Qaid -- had been redeemed from Hamas captivity.

Today, I mourned the news that at least six more hostages, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were found dead -- reportedly executed by Hamas moments before their rescue.

First and foremost, responsibility for these deaths falls on the heads of those who kidnapped and murdered them. Hamas has agency, and this is how it has chosen to exercise it.

But past that, there is plenty of blame to share.

Blame falls in part on Bibi Netanyahu and his blood-soaked government, who have displayed reckless disregard for the lives of Israeli hostages in order to prolong their ruinous bombardment of Gaza and potentially stave off their political reckoning for a little while longer.

Blame falls in part on those who've cheer-led a never-ending Israeli assault on Gaza, taking the mantra of "Bring Them Home" -- in Israel, a plea to concentrate on securing the well-being of the hostages -- and converting it into a chant for a war of indefinite duration with no plan of exit.

Blame falls in part on those who pronounced themselves "exhilarated" by the "great victory" of October 7 and have made clear their desire to see it happen again, and again, and again, at every chance and opportunity, regardless of the costs it exacts on Israeli and Palestinian innocents alike.

There's blame enough to go around, and one would be tempted to say that those who share the blame deserve one another.

But more often than not, it is not they who reap the consequences of their reckless bloodlust. It is innocents, countless innocents, Israeli and Palestinian alike, of whom Goldberg-Polin is only the most recent.

May his, and their, memory be a blessing.

Does the NYT Know What a "Progressive" Is?

The NYT reports on the integration of Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. into the Trump campaign. This is news, though its essentially news that "conservative cranks support the supreme conservative crank." But instead, the NYT frames it this way:

Donald J. Trump plans to name his former rival, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, a onetime Democrat, as honorary co-chairs of a presidential transition team that will help him select the policies and personnel of any second Trump administration, according to a campaign senior adviser.

Mr. Kennedy ended his independent campaign for president and endorsed Mr. Trump on Friday. Both he and Ms. Gabbard spent most of their public life as progressive Democrats, and Mr. Kennedy had started his presidential run as a Democrat, before renouncing his party and running as an independent instead. Ms. Gabbard left the Democratic Party after her 2020 presidential run and has rebranded herself as a celebrity among Trump’s base of support.

Excuse me?

Until recently, RFK Jr. was known for two things (aside from his name). First, water-related environmental causes; second, being an anti-vaxx nut. The former I'll agree is a progressive issue. The latter ... well, I guess there was a time when anti-vaxxers were partially associated with the crunchy granola left (you know, before it stopped being funny and started being a Serious Issue of Principle We All Must Respect). But this isn't exactly the profile of a progressive champion.

Yet Gabbard is even worse -- she's been widely recognized as a conservative for years! Anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, a friend of dictators and authoritarians the world over ... what, exactly, is supposed to be her "progressive" rep? The answer is that there continues to be a small number of "progressives" (and, I guess, NYT writers) who are absurdly easy to dupe by anyone who makes some vague "anti-establishment" (especially "anti-war") rumblings. But aside from that, nobody actually ever thought that Tulsi Gabbard was any kind of progressive -- she has always been in a class of her own.

And the thing is -- Democratic voters have made this conclusion very obvious, by emphatically rejecting both Gabbard and RFK Jr. every time they tried to hop onto the national stage. Their defeats were not situations where the "progressive" faction of the party happened to get outvoted by more moderate or establishment cadres (compare, say, Bernie Sanders). RFK and Gabbard both failed to get any discernable support from any substantial wing of the Democratic electorate -- left, right, or center. Progressive Democrats didn't see either as progressive choices, they saw them for what they were -- conspiratorial right-wing cranks. And now they've found their natural home alongside Trump. No news there.

The Shut It Down Strategy at the University of Michigan

This is a really interesting article about goings-on at the University of Michigan, where a "Shut It Down" party won effective control of the campus student government in elections last spring (they have the presidency and vice presidency, and 22 of 45 student council seats). They ran on a platform of refusing to distribute student activity money unless and until the university administration acts on their demands for divestment. The funds not being dispersed include everything from subsidies for the airport shuttle to money for the Ballroom Dance team to rent rehearsal space. As many of the effected groups have noted, these consequences tend to fall on the most vulnerable and marginal students (who are dependent on subsidies and support to access the full panoply of campus offerings).

As far as "protests" go, it's hard to argue that this one is out-of-bounds. The students who ran on the shut it down platform made no secret about what they planned to do, and they were able to convince enough of their peers to vote for them (I don't know if 20% turnout is low or not for a student government election, where turnout often is thin even by America's comparatively low bar). "Democracy," as the saying goes, "is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard." We know well that political movements predicated on anti-"establishment" backlash and throwing sand in the gears of the "system" can generate genuine appeal -- at least temporarily -- and so too here. Whether that enthusiasm is sustainable once the machine actually starts sputtering to a halt is another question.

Practically speaking, the most obvious strategic analogue for what the students are doing is the recent choices of House Republicans, who have also regularly threatened to shut down government unless their political rivals cede to their demands. It is not clear, to say the least, that this strategy has worked out for the GOP -- either materially or politically -- and there are some reasons to think it will be even less successful in this context.

For one, House Republicans had the "advantage" of genuinely not caring about all the suffering their chaos play was going to cause. That sociopathic lack of empathy may or may not characterize the student political leadership at Michigan; it is quite plausible to me that they will feel more pressure to back down if and when the consequences of their defunding start to actually land on their fellow students. And I should be clear that when I say this sort of strategy isn't "out-of-bounds", I mean that it doesn't break any formal rules. Obviously, one can still criticize it for how it hurts vulnerable student in order to (perhaps not even effectively!) make a predominantly symbolic statement about a war occurring thousands of miles away.

For two, I don't see where the actual leverage over the university administration comes from. The tangible pain the Shut It Down caucus is proliferating falls almost entirely on the heads of students -- it doesn't (arguably in contrast to some of the protest activities) make the administration's life significantly more difficult. Faced with student frustration over, say, airport shuttles that have doubled in price, they can pretty easily lean back and say "we hear you, and the student council can release those funds any time it wants." Fairly or not, the comparative lack of democratic accountability for the administration compared to the student council means that any student frustration will probably be channeled towards the student council, since they're the ones who can be most easily ousted and they're the ones who are most obviously holding up distribution of the funds.

Indeed, the article suggests that there's already been some kind of side deal where the central campus will fund the frozen student activities, with the promise that the student government will pay them back later. On the one hand, this insulates the Shut It Down caucus from the consequences of their demands, perhaps making their protest more sustainable over the long-term. On the other hand, it also obviates the theoretical leverage they're trying to exploit (i.e., immiserating the campus), returning the "protest" to the level of the near-totally symbolic (for what it's worth, the Shut It Down leaders appear to be opposed to this deal -- they do not want the pain to be symbolic).

So on the whole, I'm skeptical that this strategy will work, and I think there is a solid chance -- particularly if the funding freezes actually are allowed to play out -- that there will be a substantial backlash against the Shut It Down caucus whenever the next elections are. But as "protests" go, this one is clearly one that is playing inside the rules of the game. In contrast to "shout downs" or violent disruptions or indefinite occupations of campus buildings, there is absolutely no question that students are permitted to run for and win elections in their student government and then decide to freeze their own budgets. I'm very interested to see how this plays out.

The Joy of Being a Democrat

 

One of the things I'm enjoying most about the Harris/Walz campaign, and the current Democratic mood more broadly, is how joyful it is. A common critique of progressives has always been that we're joyless, and while that attack has never been entirely fair, it doesn't come wholly from nowhere either. There's a generalized version of the old Futurama joke ("I'm sorry, but if it's fun in any way, it's not environmentalism!") -- if you're not trudging along in grimdark misery, then you don't understand the stakes/don't care about the oppressed/aren't a true believer in the revolution. It's exhausting to live out, and it isn't a lifestyle anyone really wants to join.

But that isn't us right now! It's the right that is wallowing in its own self-induced machine of rage and fear and misery. The Olympics were a great example -- conservatives spent their time searching for their calipers and reliving their frustration that Simone Biles didn't snap her neck in 2021; meanwhile liberals just enjoyed watching some of the greatest athletes on Earth do incredible things under the American banner. Who would you rather be? 

And this divide is present all over the 2024 race. The complete inability of conservatives to make anything stick on Tim Walz stems from their complete bafflement that a basic cishet white guy can just be happy in 2024. Doesn't he know that trans-CRT-illegal-abortionists are coming for his daughter?!? The RNC was a miserable slog of one apparatchik after another warning us that we're all going to die unless the God-king Trump is restored; the DNC was a dance party featuring your favorite tunes from middle school. Hell, one of the primary attack lines Republicans have been trying against Kamala Harris is her laugh! Democrats now are literally the party of laughing (and football, and Bud Light)!

It's really nice. And for what it's worth, I do understand the stakes, and I do understand that many people are hurting, and I do understand there's a lot of work to be done. But joy counts for something. And it feels really good to be part of a joyful Democratic coalition.

Israel's Forever War

As the war between Israel and Hamas grinds on in Gaza, we've seen various moments where both Israel and Hamas have been deemed the barrier to a ceasefire. At the moment, the pendulum appears to be swinging Israel's way, as reports grow from multiple parties accusing Israel -- and Netanyahu in particular -- of sabotaging peace talks.

Ultimately, Israel's problem is this: once the war ends, it's put up or shut up about the day after plan. And Bibi's conundrum is that he doesn't have a plan for the day after that would result in an equilibrium anyone either in Palestine or in the international community would accept, and he knows it. This is why we get bombastic but vague bleatings about "total victory". Even assuming, for sake of argument, that it would be possible to completely destroy Hamas -- what then? An independent Palestinian state? We know the answer for Bibi is no. Some sort of inferior dependency status? That's a non-starter. Occupation forever? That's just another way of saying the war continues.

But those are the choices, and ending the war means making a choice that Israel -- or at least, this government of Israel -- simply does not want to make.  Whenever one questions the possibility of destroying Hamas, one gets dismissive snorts about how we managed to destroy Nazism in Germany, and didn't stop until we achieved "total victory" there. But the end of World War II didn't coincide with ending Germany as a country -- it was always taken for granted that Germany would, within the confines of the new world order, remain a sovereign state (indeed, we dedicated unprecedented resources to rebuilding Germany post bellum in the form of the Marshall Plan -- a commitment that proponents of this analogy seem strangely uninterested in extending). If the Allies' approach towards the Axis powers was that they just never get to exercise sovereign powers again, but remain under perpetual occupation and subjugation ever-outward in time, that's not an end to the war at all -- that's maintaining the war indefinitely.

So long as the war continues, the legal, political, and diplomatic framework allows Israel considerably greater freedom of action vis-a-vis Palestine than would be available under any peacetime scenario. When you're at war, you can occupy, you can raid, you can detain, you can violate normal rules of sovereignty. That's what war is, and ending the war means either giving those opportunities up or explicitly endorsing the logic of conquest and/or apartheid. Remaining at war punts the decision down the road, remaining at war indefinitely punts the decision down the road indefinitely. This, I think, is a large part of what motivated the ICJ's decision regarding the unlawfulness of the occupation -- its conclusion being that the occupation had become a delaying mechanism, an attempt to retain the prerogatives of belligerency indefinitely. Bibi's interest in prolonging the war in Gaza now is a concentrated version of the choice Israel has made off-and-on since 1967: a forever war to avoid an undesirable peace.

This isn't to pretend that Palestinian factions have been eager partners for peace, stymied only by Israel's intransigence. But it is to say that Israel's interest in blocking Palestinian statehood is fundamentally incompatible with securing a lasting peace, because any durable peace cannot avoid the question of Palestinian independence. Bibi is probably more ideologically opposed to Palestinian statehood and equality than any modern Israel leader, so even if he didn't have a partisan interest in prolonging the war to delay his own electoral reckoning, it should not surprise anyone that his orientation towards the war in Gaza is to keep it going as long as possible. He simply cannot answer the questions posed by its end.

I Say This Book is Going To Burn -- First Here, Then in Hell

Utah is banning books (via). That, sadly, is barely even news anymore. But Utah's law has two unique properties to it. 

First, Utah's rule is that any book that is banned in at least three districts must also be banned statewide. Utah has over 600,000 students enrolled in its public schools, but its three smallest districts contain less than 700 children. So the entire state is at the mercy of its three most conservative districts, which may enroll a tiny percentage of the overall school-aged population.

Second, once a book is banned Utah wants to be very clear. It is not to be stored. It is not to be donated. It is not to be sold. It is not to be distributed. It is to be "disposed" of. There's no compromise where maybe the books can be given to people who would enjoy or appreciate them. No -- quoth one board member: "I don’t care if it’s shredded, burned, it has to be destroyed one way or another."

So a uniquely grotesque and censorial law, even by red state standards. I only appreciate that it lets me reference a great Parks & Rec episode.

8th Circuit Reaffirms Constitutionality of Bans on Felons Bearing Arms

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has reaffirmed its earlier decision in United States v. Jackson, concluding that it is constitutional to prohibit felons from possessing firearms even if the felony they were convicted of was non-violent (the case was on remand following Rahimi). The court observed that there was ample evidence of historical precedent permitting disarmament of non-law abiding individuals even in absence of evidence they were "violent", as well as pointing to the Supreme Court's repeated insistence that its Heller/McDonald/Bruen line of cases repeatedly emphasized it was not disturbing longstanding prohibitions on felon disarmament laws.

It also reiterated a point it made in its initial ruling: that while it may be the case that prohibiting gun ownership by non-violent offenders would fail the more traditional "means/ends" scrutiny that prevailed pre-Bruen (and in most other areas of constitutional law), Bruen flatly forecloses such "policy" analysis. Bruen does not care about a law's fairness any more than it cares about your due process rights.

May I Have This Walz?

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been selected as Kamala Harris' running mate.

I thought all of the major names floating for VP would have been fine picks. But now that Walz has gotten the official nod, I can say that I'm really enthusiastic about him joining the ticket. 

What do I like about him? To begin, he's got the support of the base while not doesn't seeming to have any particular clique or bloc of voters with a beef against him. In terms of immediate reaction and instinctual enthusiasm, he's all upside. He's already proven himself an effective messenger against Trump and Vance, which is really a VP candidate's number one job. His presentation is a best-of-all-worlds: moderate affect, but progressive results. What's not to like?

As a member of congress representing a swing district, he had a relatively moderate voting record. But his moderation never took the form of hippie-punching for its own sake. In contrast to a Sinema or Manchin type, he wasn't randomly looking to sabotage progressive priorities just so he could grandstand about how he's constraining the left. He just wasn't interested in putting on a show of being a bold maverick bucking the party.

That approach really has come through in his tenure as Minnesota Governor, where he's delivered a long list of progressive priorities that have made Minnesota a model for other states to follow. Some people were surprised at Walz's leadership, again taking cues from his moderate reputation. But Walz's progressivism is really a lot like his moderation -- it wasn't part of some big performance about taking on The Democratic Establishment or being leftier-than-thou, it was just the honest, grinding work of making progress when you can. And it turns out that when you have that orientation, you really can accomplish a lot that makes a lot of people's lives better.

In short, Walz is a pragmatist in the best possible sense: someone who concentrates on getting things done. And I've realized that I lot of what I like about Walz is what I like about Joe Biden. Sure, there's the folksy demeanor and the "moderate" reputation, and the underlying warmth and human decency. But fundamentally, Walz seems like someone who is in politics to actually make things happen -- not to talk about them, not to ride the talk show circuit and get a big book contract, and not to impotently fulminate about how the system makes any real change impossible. And when he's put in a position to make positive change, he's taken it. Just as Joe Biden surprised a lot of people with the muscularity of his domestic agenda (coming from a "moderate"), so too did Tim Walz as Governor of Minnesota. In both cases, the surprise was a product of mistaking an affect and a pragmatic orientation for antipathy to progressivism. And in both cases, the results speak for themselves. I have absolutely zero qualms about carrying that tradition forward.

So I'm delighted to have this Walz on the Democratic ticket. To victory in November!