Tell Me Who To Vote For (Portland Edition 2024)

Election day is coming up, and while my choices are very easy on a national level (every Democrat gets my enthusiastic, excited, and unqualified endorsement), there are a bunch of local races where I'm feeling considerably less informed. So I'm going to lay out my tentative preferences for Portland Mayor, City Council (District 4), and Multnomah County Commissioner (District 1), as well as some ballot initiatives -- but I very much invite you to chime in with your own thoughts if you have information I do not.

Mayor

We have ranked choice voting now, so it's not just a matter of choosing a favorite -- you have to have an order of preference (at least amongst viable candidates). As far as I can tell, there are four candidates who seem to have a plausible shot: Rene Gonzalez, Carmen Rubio, Keith Wilson, and Mingus Mapps.

1. Keith Wilson. Wilson is the "outsider" candidate -- he's never held political office before -- and for me that's actually a significant strike against him. I think politics is a job, and one people get better at with experience. That said, the entire field of candidates seems profoundly unimpressive this year, and Wilson -- who at the very least seems to be thoughtful and dedicated to public service. Most people agree that homelessness is the critical issue in Portland, and Wilson has made that his signature issue -- not just as a matter of rhetoric, but actually putting in the work to really study best practices around the country to try and figure out what will work for Portland. I admit that I still don't fully have a bead on the nitty-gritty here, but it seems like Wilson is landing in a place in between the twin poles of "snuggle the problem until it goes away" and "send in the shock troopers", and that appeals to my progressive pragmatist sensibilities.

2. Mingus Mapps. Great name, first of all. The bead on Mapps seems to be that he's a good and thoughtful guy, but has not been especially effective in his tenure on the Portland City Commission. That's turned off several would-be supporters who were big boosters of his when he first ran for elective office. For me, good instincts and blandly inoffensive isn't a rousing endorsement, but it still pushes him into second place given his contenders.

3. Carmen Rubio. If this election was held three months ago, Rubio probably would've been my pick. Policywise, she seems like a good progressive Democrat but not a blinkered fundamentalist, and I'm all for that cocktail. But Rubio has been buffeted by a pretty big scandal recently that has really soured me on her -- specifically, an incredibly long rap sheet of hundreds parking and traffic offenses, many of which she simply refused to pay, leading to having her license suspending six times.

Look, I know I'm not voting for city driving instructor. But everything about this scandal has made me think that Rubio is the sort of person who can't be entrusted with power. A few traffic violations here and there, whatever. Over a hundred, and we have someone who just clearly thinks of herself as above the petty rules that govern society. And it just kept getting worse. Four days after the Oregonian broke the story, Rubio dinged yet another car in a parking lot. Then she didn't leave a note. Then, when the car owner tracked her down, she accused him of trying to blackmail her. Then she claimed that sexism was to blame for why people viewed any of this as a problem at all. The mix of brazen disregard for the law and the quick cries of persecution is -- I hate to say it -- a bit Trumpist in character, and I cannot abide that. Maybe there are ways she can actually restore public trust and return to public service. But right now, she needs to actually face some accountability.

4. Rene Gonzalez. Everyone in Portland runs as a Democrat, but Gonzalez definitely is occupying the "law and order" lane, where "law and order" seems to mean "cracking homeless skulls until they find housing." As noted above, I don't think homelessness is a problem we can just snuggle our way to a solution of, but neither do I think it's something that can be resolved by hyperaggressive policing. Gonzalez seems less concerned with "solving homelessness" than he is interested in "solving people having to see the homeless," and this issue deserves better. And while Gonzalez doesn't have quite the length of Rubio's scandal sheet, he has some worrying signals of his own regarding abuse of power (including calling the cops on a constituent who brushed past him on the subway), and definitely has ranked poorly on the "plays well with others" metric during his time on the city commission.

City Council (District 4)

There are approximately six trillion people running for three seats here, but from what I can tell there is a bit of a coalescing among the establishment-types behind Olivia Clarke, Eric Zimmerman, and Eli Arnold, with progressives backing the trio of Mitch Green, Chad Lykins, and Sarah Silkie. But while the top three don't overlap, my first thought was to see whether there were any candidates who seemed reasonably well-liked by both factions. The progressive groups I looked at still had nice things to say about Clarke, the former legislative director for Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber, so she seems like a good fit. And likewise, the establishment venues had praise for Silkie and Green. For Silkie, that's also probably good enough to put her towards the top of my list. As for Green, he's apparently my neighbor in West Portland Park, which is a point in his favor. But he's carrying a DSA endorsement, which admittedly makes me nervous these days. Are there strong reasons to pick Lykins, Zimmerman, or Arnold above him? I don't know! Still, unlike the mayor's race, it seems that in District 4 we have an abundance of solid choices, which is nice to see. Definitely can be swayed in various directions here.

Multnomah County Commission (District 1)

Meghan Moyer versus Vadim Mozyrsky. Both seem like strong candidates. I voted for Mozyrsky once before, but he lost to Rene Gonzalez -- still think I made the right call there. Moyer's seemingly got the better endorsements this time around. Honestly, I'll probably be happy with either.

Ballot Measures

The two significantly contested measures, both statewide, are 117, which provides for ranked choice voting in most state and federal elections, and 118, which is basically a huge tax increase on businesses to fund a $1,600 universal basic income. I lean towards yes on 117 -- I'm not an evangelist for ranked choice voting, but I don't object to it either.

118, by contrast, seems like a very classic "if the issue is important enough, it shouldn't matter how incompetently we execute it!" initiative. I find UBI an appealing prospect. And to be honest, I do not care that "Phil Knight will get $1,600 too!" There are three billionaires in Oregon; including them in the program will cost the state $4,800. Creating extra layers of bureaucratic red tape to distinguish between worthy and unworthy recipients will cost more and will make the program less streamlined for regular folks. But the way this program is structured, it stands a strong chance of starving the state budget of funds for essentially any other public service -- and that will be a catastrophe.

So -- am I wrong about anything? Is there something I'm overlooking? Pleaes, let me know in the comments!

The Nebraska Cornwhisker Scenario (U.S. Senate Edition)

As polling for incumbent Montana Senator Jon Tester (D) looks increasingly grim, it becomes increasingly hard to see how Democrats maintain control of the Senate this election. But because the universe's sadistic screenwriters love a good out-of-nowhere twist, there may be one last shot at reprieve from the most unlikeliest of places: Nebraska.

Something really interesting is happening in Nebraska, where Dan Osborn, who is running as an independent, is leading incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in a couple of new polls. (Fischer is being hurt by among other things her decision to ignore her previous commitment not to run for a third term. Her explanation is that she just hadn’t realized that seniority is a thing in the US Senate.)

Osborn, a former union leader, is pro-choice and anti-billionaire, which are two unacceptable positions in the contemporary GOP caucus, but still the best that can be hoped is that he would be more or less the Nebraska version of Joe Manchin.

He’s promising not to caucus with either party, but that’s not realistic, given that caucusing is how committee assignments are handed out. If the Senate ends up 50 GOP 49 Dem and Osborn, and Harris wins, Osborn will be in a position to essentially hand control of the Senate to the Democrats, which of course will given him enormous negotiating leverage. Assuming Tester loses and the Dems hold all the other genuinely competitive seats, that will in fact be the split, so this is definitely a race to watch closely.

While both campaigns are issuing dueling internal polls showing them ahead, Fischer hasn't led in an independent poll since August; the last independent poll of the race (at the end of September) had Osborn up five.

If Osborn wins, I do think it is most likely he will end up caucusing with Democrats (after extracting some monster concessions) -- partially because it'd be weird to run against a Republican in the general and then caucus as a Republican, partially because that's what all the other recent "Independent" Senators have done. But I do wonder at the possibility that he tries to create some sort of centrist junta to run the show,  like we've seen in some state legislatures (Alaska, New York). It'd probably be Murkowski and Collins on the Republican side, Angus King on the Dem/Independent side -- maybe someone like Bob Casey joins them from the Democrats too? Hard to know the exact personnel.

Obviously, from a Democratic vantage point such a setup would be (a) better than GOP control of the Senate and (b) worse than Democratic control of the Senate. But I'm inclined to think that such a setup would be closer to better for Democrats (though I may be unduly influenced by just how catastrophic full GOP control of the Senate would be). It would probably mean that more ambitious Democratic priorities (including things like DC statehood) would be DOA. But I do think it would mean that a President Harris could get (most of) her cabinet and other major appointees through, which is not something we can take for granted under Republican rule. At the very least, it would enable a semi-functioning government, which is a lot more than we can say if Republicans control the Senate and decide to filibuster absolutely everything.

"... But They're Doing Great" at UW

The University of Washington has just released a joint task force report on antisemitism and Islamophobia on its campus. I haven't read it cover-to-cover, but I have looked it over, and it seems to be an excellent and thoughtful report on an obviously touchy subject, for which the authors deserve kudos.*

There's a lot of interesting data to sift through, but there was one chart in particular that stood out to me, and not in a good way.

For those who can't read the chart, it asks a set of affected campus constituencies (e.g., Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims) how they assess the campus climate for themselves and all the other groups. The results were basically that each group said "things are awful for us and ours, but they're doing great!" So, for instance, when Israelis were asked this question, they overwhelmingly reported a hostile campus climate for Israelis and Jews, but generally reported that the campus was comfortable for Arabs, MENA people, Muslims, and Palestinians. Palestinian respondents reported the opposite -- they thought the campus climate was swell for Israelis and Jews, and terrible for Arabs, MENA people, Muslims and Palestinians.

I'll leave aside the first half of the equation ("things are awful for us") for now, though it's bad enough. One could I guess try to contest it if one wanted to, but I see little reason to doubt that the relevant communities are accurately reporting their own experiences in what has almost universally been characterized as a very rough year. But for the latter half of the finding ("... they're doing great") the polarization in responses is especially disturbing. 

The best case explanation I can think of is a failure of empathic imagination. Over many years, I've observed variations of this phenomenon where one's own lived experience of hurt and marginalization is paired with a decided conviction that everybody else is getting life fed to them on a silver platter. This certainly is part of my story around "Us Too-ism" -- everybody else supposedly can get a hostile speaker canceled at the first sign of discomfort, so why not us too? -- but it long predates it. Eight years ago I was writing about circumstances at Oberlin where both Jewish and Black students contrasted tepid community responses to discrimination targeting them with what they saw as "hypervigilant" reactions enjoyed by the other. That post in turn referenced a post almost ten years before that about the "pane of glass" which is obvious to someone standing in one position and invisible to their neighbor looking from a different vantage. We're all able to see the pane of glass standing as an obstacle in front of us, while blind to the pane of glass similarly blocking our neighbor.

And so, perhaps, at UW. The Jewish and Israeli students feel lonely and isolated. They look over at the encampments and the teach-ins and the flag-wavings and think "how lucky they have it -- clearly, the community has their backs when they cry out." The Muslim and Arab and Palestinians students, meanwhile, feel hyperscrutinized and overpoliced. They observe the congressional hearings and the discipline meted out to protesters and think "how lucky they have it -- look how responsive the powers-that-be are to them when they claim injury!" Both groups feel as if they're walking on eggshells, both feel that the tremendous stress and strain they are under is being ignored. In concept, this shared vulnerability could be a vector for solidarity and compassion -- these feelings are commonalities, not distinctions. But the problem is this shared vulnerability isn't perceived as shared at all, but rather unique, and that further entrenches the feeling of loneliness.

And this, as I said, is what I'd consider the best case scenario. Another explanation for the polarized responses is that we're seeing, not a failure of imagination, but a motivated refusal to acknowledge the vulnerability of the "other side", in favor of a constructed image where their power can be contrasted with our weakness. I would not be the first to observe that there is a strand of contemporary politics that aggressively valorizes weakness and vulnerability as its own justification for political solidarity. Though sometimes identified with the identity politics left, there's actually no intrinsic political cadence to this -- the right makes this move all the time. Who can forget when Breitbart, playing off investigations into "Big Oil" or "Big Pharma", created an entire subsection of his website dedicated to resisting the overawing power of "Big Peace"(!)? And of course, the contemporary right contains no shortage of claims that it stands against the elites, the powerful, the globalist cabal -- all attempts to claim the mantle of weakness against the evils of strength.

The true cynic would point to this politics to explain why each group is so emphatic about its own vulnerability -- it wants to stay on the right side of the empathy line. As I said, I don't think one needs to go that far -- I think it is more than likely that each group is accurately recounting its own experiences about itself. The point is, though, that where vulnerability (or at least the perception thereof) is a political resource, it can become a strategic imperative to deny it to one's competitors. Acknowledging that a given community -- Jews and Israelis, or Palestinians and Muslims -- are in a vulnerable state means acknowledging them as valid subjects of empathic concern and legitimating some flow of solidaristic political resources in that direction. Denying that acknowledgment can obstruct that flow, and better maintain an asymmetry in who is worthy of care and concern. Even in circumstances where antagonism isn't that overt, where resources of care and concern are assumed to be scarce, there still will be the temptation to withhold that acknowledgment and try to direct the flow to oneself.

The reason why this is worse that the first explanation is that it isn't something that can be resolved just by expanded imaginative capacities. Again, it speaks to a motivated refusal to recognize the aforementioned joint vulnerability. It's not just ignorance, there are reasons behind it. The work of overcoming this refusal to extend empathy means, in a very real sense, insisting on sharing a political resource that feels very much in short supply with a group that may in important respects feel like a rival. That is not an easy task, least of all in present climates.

Which is the true explanation? To be honest, I suspect there's a little of column A and a little of column B. That does give me a little hope, because I still believe -- justifiably or not -- that there are enough people who won't run away from their expanded empathic imagination such that, once they're peeled away from their more fundamentalist fellows, a new core of solidarity can emerge. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. But I don't see much of an alternative.

* I also read a critique of the report issued by a small group of Jewish UW stakeholders (I actually read the critique before the original document). I'm not a member of the UW community myself, and so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. But to be perfectly honest I found the critique to be churlish, even petty, clearly partisan in its motivation, and ultimately not at all compelling. 

The overall theme of the critique was a contention that the report was intentionally suppressive of anti-Zionist/pro-Palestinian Jewish viewpoints and so generated skewed conclusions. That contention was extremely weakly supported -- it seemed to me that the critics came in spoiling for a fight and made a series of tendentious or stretched inferences to justify picking one. For example, a single passing mention of the IHRA antisemitism definition (which the report said it "took into consideration along with other definitions", and then never mentioned again) inspired a veritable temper tantrum by the critics and a demand that the university instead adopt the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism as its preferred definition (ironic, since JDA at its inception insisted that it should not be used as a definition of antisemitism in official proceedings!). It also lambastes the report for "attacks" on DEI work, but there is no such attack -- the report actually recommends incorporating antisemitism education and training into existing DEI structures. One can contest the mechanisms through which that incorporation would occur, but this is not an "attack" in any sense -- so where on earth is this defensiveness coming from other than preloaded beliefs that reports such as this are presumptively part of an anti-DEI crusade?

Perhaps the most serious allegation contained in the critique is its speculation that the report authors skewed their focus groups toward pro-Israel identifying students. This is a very grave charge, but the critics give absolutely no concrete evidence to support it. Literally their only basis for making this claim was that "one focus group was held at UW Hillel (an organization with standards of partnership that explicitly disallow affiliation with Jews critical of the state of Israel)." That and that alone was sufficient for the critics to assert with confidence that "We know" (we know!) "that whatever steps were taken were not sufficient" to ensure proper representational diversity.

This is absurd on a multitude of levels. First, the critic's position apparently is that an attempt to connect with the UW Jewish community should have a blanket policy of refusal to work with Hillel (again, their complaint is that one focus group was held there), which is an absolutely wild claim to make and utterly incompatible with actually trying to get a deep cross-section of the UW Jewish community. Second, it's simply false to say Hillel's partnership standards "explicitly disallow affiliation with Jews critical of the state of Israel." The partnership standards aren't directed at students qua students to begin with, and they are a fair flight more specific than targeting those who are merely "critical of the state of Israel" -- an especially important distinction because the UW report is actually very good about recognizing the heterogeneity of Jewish views on Israel and expressly disaggregating those who are "critical of Israel" from those who are outright "anti-Israel" (in the sense of wanting Israel to cease its existence). At most, only the latter would find Hillel an exclusionary space, but the numbers suggest that this cadre is a small (though not non-existent) minority amongst Jewish students. 

Finally, and most damningly, the report clearly did speak to and incorporate the views of the anti-Israel minority. How do we know? Because the report (to its credit!) specifically delved into and devoted an entire section to experiences of marginalization by anti-Zionist Jews -- something one does not see every time one of these reports emerges but is absolutely appropriate given the subject matter. The report even says it included comments from "self-identified anti Zionist/anti-Israel Jews in proportion to their representation in the random sample of quotes provided to the task force co-chairs (18%)" -- that 18% figure is either equal to or if anything higher than (the report was fuzzy on this) the proportion of anti-Israel Jews in the UW Jewish community. Despite all of this effort, none of it is given any mention whatsoever in the critics' document. Perhaps they missed it. But it I think decisively belies the unsupported assertion that the report deliberately ignored the diversity of Jewish views on Israel at UW.

Ultimately, as someone who periodically does consulting work with university leaders on issues of antisemitism, I found this critique tremendously disheartening and frustrating. The report seemed unusually attentive to the diversity of views amongst Jews on matters relating to Israel, and seemed like a good faith attempt to accurately communicate the sentiments of the Jewish community as a whole. That even an effort like this was met with a response like that -- the near-reflexive at this point fuming about Zionist hegemony and suppression of dissident voices etc. etc. is, to be honest, a substantial deterrent in continuing that work forward. There's just no pleasing some people.

Draw the Lines

Slowly but steadily, there are increasing sanctions on Israeli actors responsible for implementing human rights violations in occupied Palestinian territories. The UK just announced new sanctions against West Bank outposts. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned Israel that if it doesn't increase the flow of aid into the Gaza Strip, military aid might be cut off. And in one of the more symbolically (if probably not tangibly) impactful moves, Canada revoked the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund* due in part to its activities in the occupied West Bank.

Given the ubiquity in the diaspora Jewish imagination of JNF's little blue boxes, the Canadian decision was a bombshell, and the Canadian Jewish community is reportedly aghast, and claiming that it is being unfairly targeted by a biased organization. I'm not a Canadian lawyer, and so I won't comment on the underlying legal issues. Speaking broadly though, JNF's historical importance does not and should not give it any immunity to violate Canadian non-profit laws or to funnel "charitable" donations to projects that violate Canadian policy, which absolutely can include projects that retrench Israel's occupation of the West Bank and which stymie the project of Palestinian statehood. Blue box or no, there is no right to leverage Canada's tax code to flout Canada's foreign policy priorities regarding Israel and Palestine.

The one thing that does give me pause is the claim that the Canadian tax authorities have refused to tell JNF exactly which activities are out of compliance or how to get back into compliance. That seems troublesome. JNF absolutely should be given clear guidance about what it the tax authorities deem to be compliant and non-compliant activities, at which point JNF can decide whether it wants to come into compliance or not (and the public can decide whether the rules are or are not reasonable). Draw the lines clearly about what is and is not permissible, and let the chips fall where they may -- but secret rules smack of punitive targeting. Other than that, though, my general view is that it is up to Jewish charities to stay in compliance with the law, and it is entirely reasonable for the law to declare that aiding the occupation is not a charitable endeavor.

* The article on this story did give me one blast from the past moment. It extensively quoted Corey Balsam, head of Independent Jewish Voices, praising the decision to revoke JNF's charitable status. That name rang a bell -- Corey Balsam was who I cited in my White Jews: An Intersectional Approach paper arguing that even non-White Jews were functionally "whitened" by virtue of being Jewish. He made that argument in a graduate school thesis paper, so seeing his name pop up again was a fun "where are they now" moment.

Kyrsten Sinema: The Origin Story

Here are some quotes from a politician currently stumping in Michigan, rallying voters around the 2024 presidential race:

• "[W]e do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan."

• "[The goal is] fighting to defeat Harris, not just symbolically but in reality. This is ground zero to punish Kamala Harris and defeat her."

• "Ultimately, Harris is a more reliable and consistently controllable tool for billionaire interests."

• "The Democrats were the party of slavery, and of slave owners — that’s in their history."

Now here is my question for you, dear reader: Based on these quotes, do you think this politician is (a) an utterly unremarkable, bog-standard conservative promoting the MAGA right, or (b) a self-described "leftist" campaigning on behalf of Jill Stein?

Guesses in? Answer: It's a trick question! Self-described "leftists" campaigning on behalf of Jill Stein are utterly unremarkable, bog-standard conservatives promoting the MAGA right!

Anyone who was baffled by Kyrsten Sinema's "journey" from the Green Party to obnoxious contrarian "independent" doesn't pay attention to what the Green Party is all about. Though in fairness, even at her worst Kyrsten Sinema never came out and actively campaigned on behalf of Donald Trump.

(The politician in question is former Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant, who was elected under the banner of the Trotskyist-Socialist "Socialist Alternative" party but, in true splitter fashion, has broken away to form two new organizations -- "Workers Strike Back" and the "Revolutionary Workers" party).

How Awful They Must Be, To Compel Us To Do Such Dreadful Things

I'm writing this post today, because all indicators suggest that tomorrow will be a terrible day.

It is a hazard of being Jewish that the commemorations of our worst moments are, for too many, an opportunity to victimize us further. The flurry of October 7 events that seek to reframe the day away from Hamas' massacre and onto the claim of an Israeli genocide are a case in point -- they are rhetorical salvos against the right of Jews to even grieve, against anything that might suggest that they, too, are inside the communities of concern. Those who say "the genocide didn't begin on October 7" prove too much: if the genocide didn't begin on October 7, then October 7 is not a distinctive date for commemorating the genocide save for those who argue -- with varying degrees of explicitness -- that "the genocide" makes October 7 justifiable or even praiseworthy.

I make that point wholly cognizant of the fact that for others, it is the Palestinian people who cannot be allowed to count as people, whose grief can only be understood as so much performance and manipulation. It is the same basic moral disease, only goring a different ox, and nobody should confuse recognizing the reality of what's happening tomorrow with some sort of tout court denialism of Palestinians right to grieve. Yet one catastrophe amongst many over the past year has been the choice of too many to view acknowledgment of legitimate grief as a zero-sum phenomenon -- we can only truly be in solidarity with these folks if we commit to truly hating those folks.

As terrible as that conclusion is, in a sense it does not surprise me. Many Jews were shocked at how rapidly October 7 seemed to accelerate a sense of hatred against Jews and Israelis. How was it that many people, it seemed, appeared to hate Jews and Israelis more, and more passionately, and more vocally, in the aftermath of October 7 than they did before? But I was not that surprised. Indeed, I understood this response as quite rational -- at least, from a given point of view. If one is truly committed to a pure politics of solidarity, of uncritical defense and apologia of anything and everything occurring under your banner, then the only way to metabolize an atrocity like October 7 is to flee into a deeper cavern of hatred and dehumanization. "How awful they must be, to compel us to do such dreadful things." The more dreadful the thing, the more awful they must be; for surely we and ours would never do engage in such murderous barbarism unless it was against the truly monstrous.

Lest anyone get too smug, this is the same basic impulse behind that sermon I heard last week in synagogue. The theme there, too, was to redirect the congregation's presumed aversion and revulsion towards the scenes of devastation in Gaza and in Lebanon, and explain why they actually showed the depths of our enemies' depravity -- they must be monsters indeed, to force those as righteous as us into such terrible acts. How awful they are, that they force us into such dreadful things. Or take that famous Golda Meir quote, "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children." 

It's the same theme, repeated ad nauseum. Recall what Montesquieu said about the Spanish atrocities against the indigenous population of the Americas:

Once the Spainards had begun their cruelties, it became especially important to say that "it is impossible to suppose these creatures [the indigenous population] to be men, because allowing them to be men a suspicion might arise that we were not Christian." 

And so too here. An earlier generation predicted that "The Germans Will Never Forgive the Jews for Auschwitz." Now it seems that Palestine solidarity advocates will never forgive the Israelis for 10/7, and the pro-Israel community will never forgive the Palestinians for the war in Gaza. Over and over again, the last atrocity is used to justify the next atrocity, and everyone it seems must play along as a means of expressing "solidarity".

So I expect tomorrow to be a terrible day, and not wholly or even primarily because it commemorates another terrible day. It will be terrible because it be an exclamation mark upon a year's worth of usage of atrocity as its own justification, a terrible cycle of self-generating and self-affirming hatred. Somehow worse than "they did this horror to us, so we must do that horror unto them" (and that's bad enough!), it will be "we did this horror unto them, so we must construct an even more vile image of who they are in order to justify it."

All I will say -- in acknowledged futility -- is that these are choices. It does not have to be this way. We can choose a different path. We can allow for Jews to grieve without complication for those lives destroyed October 7. We can allow for Palestinians to grieve without complication for those lives destroyed in the war on Gaza. We can choose to use tomorrow, and any other day, as an opportunity to deepen empathy and encourage different choices.

If that feels futile, maybe it is. I can't fathom any way to make Bibi Netanyahu choose differently, or Yahya Sinwar, or Columbia's CUAD students, or criminal UCLA "counter-protesters", or Tom "bounce the rubble" Cotton", or Ali Khamenei, or MAGA-hat extremists or professors with paraglider pictures pinned to their profile pics. Their choice to pursue politics of antagonism and hatred and dehumanization may be forever beyond me. Or forget them -- there are all too many people in my immediate circles, friends and loved ones, who I already know I will never be able to make choose differently, and that impotent thought hurts me immeasurably.

But I can choose differently. You can choose differently. Each of us can be a little better than what's going on around us. And who knows? Maybe a lot of people being a little better will make a bigger difference than one might think.

So as hard as it is, try to avoid the awful things that will pervade tomorrow -- the many, many, many voices that will try to persuade you to turn towards hatred and antagonism and extremism. And equally importantly, resist the inclination to flee so far in the other direction that you just develop a polar opposite hatred, antagonism, and extremism. Commit, tomorrow, to a different choice. I'll try my best too. We won't be perfect. But it's the best way I can think of to truly commemorate such a terrible day.

The Sermon Every Jew But Me Heard Every Week

One supposedly ubiquitous aspect of millennial Jewish upbringing that I do not at all relate to is the storyline where their Jewish education was a completely uncritical and unsophisticated "Israel right-or-wrong" drumbeat, one which eventually shattered upon the reality of going to college or meeting Palestinian friends or visiting Israel and the occupied territories. This story is omnipresent amongst Jews of my generation, and it just never resonated with me. I never felt like my Israel education was so inflexible, and so I never had the experience of it crashing into the real world.

The synagogue I grew up in was, admittedly, in many ways atypical. It wasn't especially liberal (no more so than is normal for a Jewish congregation, anyway), but its location in the DC suburbs meant it did have quite a few genuine experts on Israel and the Middle East (well beyond the armchair experts I imagine one can find in any synagogue pew). Their views were by no mean unchallengeable and the environment was certainly unabashedly "pro-Israel", but it did mean we perhaps avoided some of the more nakedly crude manifestations of pro-Israel politics.

This apparent idiosyncrasy in my upbringing has really jumbled my ability to connect with the zeitgeist. On the one hand, I hear the aforementioned tales of Rabbis giving these near-comical caricatures of the "true" contours of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and I can't help but be skeptical -- that's certainly not how I remember it. On the other hand, you hear it often enough and you have to think that maybe I'm just the weird one. While I certainly wouldn't characterize myself as detached from the organized Jewish community, it is the case that my connection to a synagogue has been sporadic in my adult life (if only because I moved around so much) -- so I have little in the way of comparison to juxtapose against the synagogue I grew up with.

But the imminent arrival of a little one in our family has finally prompted us to begin synagogue shopping in earnest, and over the high holidays we've been surveying various congregation's services. One congregation in particular checks a lot of our boxes -- a vibrant community, lots of young families, excellent early childhood resources, and we were excited to try out their services for the first time.

At the same time, I was seeing a flurry of posts and resources talking about how anti-Zionist or Israel-critical Jews were struggling to find welcoming Jewish communal spaces -- where could they go to high holiday services where they wouldn't be bombarded with hasbara defenses of the war in Gaza? And I will admit -- I was feeling skeptical. "Bombarded"? Come on. My own experiences made me exceptionally dubious that there would be much beyond the anodyne and unobjectionable. There'd probably be an Israeli flag on the bimah, and a prayer for the state of Israel, and statements of concern for the hostages and spiking antisemitism on college campuses. If that's what passes for an unwelcoming atmosphere, I'd say deal with it.

And so I attended services, which were quite lovely, and then the Rabbi stood to give his sermon. And it didn't take long for me to realize "oh, so this is the sermon that every Jew of my generation but me is talking about."

My first thought -- since I was synagogue-shopping and so had recently seen exactly how much it costs to join a synagogue -- was "I could just subscribe to Commentary and save a lot of money!" The second thought was to remember all the wonderful programs and suddenly understand why people join megachurches ("I may not agree with the pastor's politics, but my goodness what a preschool!"). I asked my wife her thoughts, and she said "honestly, I just tuned him out" (probably another regular facet of Jewish experience that I don't relate to -- the Rabbi at my childhood synagogue may well be the single most compelling orator I've ever met in my life).

In terms of the sermon itself, I'm not going to go to deep into the substantive details. The nicest thing I could say about the speech was that it was, at best, a good twenty-plus years out of date in speaking of an Israeli government that of course wants nothing more than peace, but alas must deal with the reality that the Palestinians will settle for nothing less than maximal and total victory. This does not, to say the least, aptly characterize the current Israeli government; much of the ideology the Rabbi imputed to Hamas and Hezbollah resonated just as strongly with Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, or yes, Netanyahu -- all of whom have proven entirely willing to sabotage prospects of peace for a chance at complete and utter dominion between the river and the sea.

At root, the sermon read as an attempt to rally a wavering audience to continue to back a war without end whose suffering has been immeasurable, because the belief that a peaceful solution can be achieved is just so much Western naivete. And it was made worse because the sermon did contain the periodic rhetorical gestures in a liberal direction -- a concession that the occupation is a problem here, a willingness to admit Bibi hasn't been perfect there. Hearing such sentiments expressed as brief asides amidst a sea of "we are fighting a culture of death" jeremiads made me understand why so many of my peers view such positions as meaningless smokescreens -- they were not actual concessions; they were balms meant to reassure the audience of its own virtue. And more broadly, if this was the Israel-outlook that I was exposed to as a teenager, then I absolutely would've gotten clobbered when reality hit in adulthood.

Again, I was not prepared for this. In fact, I had a different blog post ready to roll that was all about there being a spectrum of Jewish opinion out there and the broad tent had room for a variety of voices. The week before I had just been invited to give a talk at the Eastside Jewish Commons, and nobody had any qualms about my own harsh critiques of the Israeli government (and indeed on the bulletin board in the space I saw a posting for the Center for Jewish Non-Violence, advertising its work of "co-resistance and solidarity against Israeli occupation and apartheid." I was planning to buttress that experience by reference to my High Holiday experience, which (I was already drafting in my mind) was a High Holiday experience, not a Bibi Netanyahu appreciation tour.

Now, to be sure, I'm still not convinced my initial instincts regarding communal pluralism were fully off-base. Leaving aside the wrongness of making judgments off of an n of 1, even at this very synagogue, the other Rabbi had just written a column about the importance of choosing peace even as her colleague was delivering an ode to the virtues of war. So one might say that Jews engaging in aggressive pro-war politicking is just as much part of a pluralism as Jews organizing to demand a ceasefire is. And again, as much as people say that any "whiff" of dissent results in an insta-purge from mainline Jewish spaces, I feel like I have dissented more than a whiff and I remain unpurged. So what am I doing that's so special? 

But nonetheless, I had a prediction of how I expected the High Holidays to go, and it was falsified. I could have just kept that to myself, of course -- none of you would have been the wiser. But it felt more honest to relay the experience.

We Don't Know What a Fast Garland World Would've Looked Like

It is almost certain that Donald Trump is going to run out the clock on facing real legal consequences for his myriad 2020 election related crimes before the 2024 election occurs. Consequently, many are blaming Attorney General Merrick Garland for being too slow and cautious in his prosecution of Trump. By taking so much time before bringing his case, Garland enabled Trump's various delaying tactics -- aided, of course, by loyalist judges at both the trial level and Supreme Court -- to stretch the cases out until after election day. Had he moved faster and more aggressively, things would have been different.

Maybe. But the thing about alternate futures is that we can't live there; and if we did live there, we wouldn't know here. Suppose that Garland did move fast and aggressive on Trump right at the outset of Biden's term. And suppose that right-wing judges such as the current Supreme Court majority, or Judge Cannon, issued the same rulings that they did in our timeline -- providing broad immunity to Trump designed to shield him from legal accountability. I suspect that, in that timeline, there would be a lot blame cast at Garland for moving too quickly -- he rushed things, he let political expediency get in the way of methodically building a case, and so he gave the courts an excuse to slow things down or even to cast his investigation as a witch-hunt rather than a genuinely legalistic inquiry. Had he been more temperate, things would've gone differently

Now, since we live in our timeline, we know that a more temperate and methodical approach would not have led to a success story. But the point is not just that it's always easy to speak with the benefit of hindsight. It is that we actually don't know what alternative paths-not-taken would look like, and if we did know we wouldn't know what was happening in our path. This is a ubiquitous problem, and while it is entirely reasonable given what we know now to say that Garland made the wrong judgment, it is not hard to imagine a very plausible timeline where Garland made the judgment we (in the prime timeline) say is clearly "right" and it is widely viewed (in the alternate timeline) as a terrible and eminently avoidable miscalculation.

Teshuva in Springfield

When I first saw a story about the Rabbi of Springfield, Ohio giving his views on the Trump campaign's racist invective targeting Haitian migrants, I was heartened at what I assumed would be a clarion call to stand by the stranger in our midst. Then I read the actual story, where the Rabbi instead echoes the hostility in the worst way -- contending that Haitians lack "Western civilized values", stating that "white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant" residents were being "disenfranchised", and contrasting today's immigrants from Jews whom, he said, "wanted to assimilate, they wanted to be good Americans" -- and I felt embarrassed and sad. As much as Ohio and national Jewish organizations might speak otherwise, this would be -- both locally and nationally -- seen as the paradigmatic "Jewish" take.

There has, however, been a modest update to this story, which I found a bit more heartening. The actual Jews in Springfield (it's a small community; this Rabbi commutes from Columbus) made clear that they did not endorse or accept these sentiments. They pushed their Rabbi to do better -- to issue an apology, to acknowledge his lack of knowledge of the actual circumstances of both the community and of their new Haitian neighbors, and to meet with representatives of the Haitian community,

“I was not well-informed on the situation with the Haitian immigrants,” [Rabbi Cary] Kozberg said. “Since the interview, I have learned much more about the immigration situation in Springfield. My opinions have definitely been modified.”

Kozberg made his statement alongside Temple Sholom’s president, Laurie Leventhal, who told the Observer that her rabbi made a “mistake” and would be pursuing teshuvah, or the Jewish process of repentance.

“We are not giving him a pass,” Leventhal said. “He has asked lots of questions and learned lots of stuff about what’s going on in Springfield, and he has changed his views. And that is how human beings grow. And that is what we are about. And I hope that you will not go on a witch-hunt and take a situation in a city that is so hurting and make it worse.”

This was coupled by additional moves by area Jewish organizations to express support for the Haitian community:

Viles Dorsainvil, a local Haitian community leader in Springfield and the executive director of the Haitian Community Health and Support Center, told JTA on Monday he hadn’t been aware of Kozberg’s comments and hasn’t received any communication from the rabbi. But he said he had been glad to receive a letter of support from the Dayton Jewish Federation, which the federation had sent to him on the same day JTA published Kozberg’s interview.

In their letter, the federation heads introduced themselves as “your Jewish neighbors to the west” and added, “It is a core tenet of our faith to ‘welcome the stranger.’ We, along with so many others of different faiths and cultures, whose ancestors made this journey before you over the decades, support your quest, and welcome you. We are sending all our virtual thoughts of goodwill your way, including our prayers for your safety.”

The letter was touching, Dorsainvil said. “We’re so happy that the Jewish community in Dayton reached out to us,” he said, adding that he, too, saw similarities between what Jewish immigrants to the United States experienced in the past and what Haitian migrants are currently experiencing. 

I'm not asking anyone to give Kozberg a prize here. For one, he hasn't really done anything yet. I'd also suggest that "Most people don’t know me as a racist" doesn't quite communicate the sentiment that Kozberg I think is trying to get across. And even amongst his congregants, there is a split between those who think his apology is "genuine", and those who more circumspectly "hope" that it is. The local Jewish news coverage indicates that Kozberg maybe has a bit more of a self-pitying streak than might otherwise be let on, quoting him repeatedly suggesting that the initial interview he did was a "politicized" and "taken out of context." I'd also note the congregation, even as they recoil against his "racist" statements, is standing by him as their Rabbi -- noting that they have a thirty-year history they're looking across whereas all the rest of us are only accounting for this past week. It is a fair note, and one that I hope we can remember with regard to other potential instances where someone imbricated in a particular small community spikes to prominence for acts of (real, genuine) bigotry and is not immediately met with exile.

But on the whole, what I'm really flagging and really heartened by is not Kozberg but the Springfield Jewish community. When someone they loved and who they were close to and who was their leader stepped out, they stepped up. They demanded accountability. They used their own voices to try and set things right. It's never fully possible to make these wounds whole. But I've seen far, far worse attempts than this, and I hope the project of Teshuva and repair continues to make amends and build new bonds in Springfield.

Jonathan Greenblatt Trusts Donald Trump

Yesterday, I flagged one of the scarier entries in my "Things People Blame the Jews For" series when Donald Trump baldly asserted that if he lost, it would be the Jews' fault. It was a clear foundation for a "stabbed in the back" narrative that puts Jews at tremendous risk in an environment where far-right antisemitism increasingly isn't all that "far", but has penetrated every nook and cranny of the modern conservative movement.

Unsurprisingly, these comments were met with outrage by many Jewish institutions and leaders. That's appropriate and well-earned. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he leads is a menace to the American Jewish community, and Jews have never hesitated to identify it as exactly what it is. But in that context, I have to flag the particular statement by ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt, which stood out for its unimaginable fecklessness, particularly from the putative leading voice against antisemitic hate. Here's what Greenblatt wrote:

Here we go again.

I appreciate that former President Trump called out antisemitism and recognized its historic surge. 

He's right on that. 

But the effect is undermined by then employing numerous antisemitic tropes and anti-Jewish stereotypes — including rampant accusations of dual loyalty.

Preemptively blaming American Jews for your potential election loss does zero to help American Jews. It increases their sense of alienation in a moment of vulnerability when right-wing extremists and left-wing antizionists continually demonize and slander Jews. This is happening on college campuses, in public places, everywhere. There are threats on all sides, period.

Let’s be clear, this speech likely will spark more hostility and further inflame an already bad situation. Calling out hate is important, but I can’t overstate how the message is diluted and damaged when you employ hate to make your point.

What is striking about this is how it bends over backwards to assume Trump is actually an ally of the Jews. He's a good guy! He's our friend! It opens, incredibly enough, by lauding Trump for having "called out antisemitism", and closes by praising him for "calling out hate". The framing is entirely centered around a premise that Trump is trying his level best to help the Jews, but is sadly undercutting his own best efforts by ill-chosen rhetoric or misplaced blame.

This is the theme. His efforts against antisemitism are "undermined" by his antisemitic tropes -- not that his antisemitic tropes are promoting exactly the sort of antisemitism he intends to promote. His setting up Jews to take the blame "does zero to help American Jews" -- again, assuming the goal is to help American Jews and he's failing, not that he's trying to threaten American Jews and succeeding. There's the de rigueur (for Greenblatt) pivot to taking a shot at left-wing antizionists who, whatever their sins, have nothing to do with this conversation. And finally, he concludes by saying that Trump's efforts are "diluted" and "damaged" by his forays into hate -- again, a framing that takes as a given that Trump is intending to be a friend of the Jews but is inexplicably hurting his own cause.

This is a framing I've seen regularly in how Greenblatt talks about Trump's antisemitism (and Elon Musk, for that matter). And it stands in obvious contrast to how he speaks of perceived antisemitism on the left -- say, from campus pro-Palestine encampments -- whom, it should be said, also frame their actions as in pursuit of a broader paradigm of opposing bigotry and inequality, antisemitism included. Needless to say, antizionist protesters accused of antisemitism are not given Trump's courtesy treatment of a compliment sandwich. One cannot imagine Greenblatt opening his remarks about antisemitic invective in collegiate encampments by frontloading his appreciation that they "called out antisemitism." One can scarcely fathom him framing his criticisms of antisemitic tropes or actions in terms of the protesters "undermining" their attempts at showing solidarity with Jews, or "doing zero to help" the Jews on campus, or "diluting" their anti-racist message, or anything else that suggests that the protesters' antisemitism is some sort of accidental stumble at odds with their true intention of being allies of the Jews.

Now one could say that the reason Greenblatt doesn't speak of the campus protesters in those terms is that he does not see any basis to credit their self-avowed bona fides as opponents of antisemitism. They have not earned such trust in the face of their actions. Leave aside whether that's a fair dismissal; leave aside whether he's right in what he adjudges antisemitic at all. The point is that if the defense of Greenblatt not giving the anti-Zionist left praise and gratitude before criticizing their usage of antisemitic tropes is that he does not believe they have earned Jews' trust, then it follows the reason he's so gentle with Donald Trump is that Greenblatt believes Trump is fundamentally trustworthy. I can think of no more damning indictment of his judgment, as a putative leader in the fight against antisemitism, than that. And that colossal failure of judgment is ultimately why Greenblatt has proven himself utterly incapable of effectively rallying against the rapidly rising tide of antisemitism overtaking the American right. 

As an organization, the ADL, I have to reemphasize, has many people doing absolutely invaluable work on antisemitism. They have some incredible staff who are doing amazing things. I still do not see any other group in the American Jewish space capable of replacing what the ADL does for us.

But as the ADL's head, Greenblatt has proven, time and time again, that when it comes to Donald Trump and mainstream conservative antisemitism he cannot rise to the demands of the moment. Ultimately, despite all the evidence, despite all the history, despite all the hatred, Jonathan Greenblatt fundamentally trusts Donald Trump to be a friend of the Jews. So long as he cleaves to that nightmarish delusion, he will never oppose Trump's bigotry with the moral clarity and decisiveness the Jewish people need.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXXI: Trump Losing

Back in 2020, I suggested that Jews needed -- in the event that Trump lost his re-election bid -- to prepare for a "stabbed in the back" narrative. The fact that Jews consistently vote Democratic, I observed, would assuredly not make Republicans reconsider their arrogant assumption that they're the best friends of the Jews. The fact that Jews consistently vote Democratic would instead make Republicans fly into paroxysms of rage at the fact that the ungrateful Jews don't recognize what wonderful friends Republicans are.

Well, it took a little longer, but come 2024 Donald Trump is expressly laying this gauntlet down:

Speaking at antisemitism event on Thursday, Donald Trump doubled down on attacks on American Jews — those who do not vote for him.

He suggested that Jews would be to blame if he loses in November. He also said American Jews who vote for Democrats harm American interests, in an escalation of his standard rhetoric.

[....]

“I will put it to you very simply and gently. I really haven’t been treated right, but you haven’t been treated right, because you’re putting yourself in great danger, and the United States hasn’t been treated right,” he said. “The Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss if I’m at 40%. I mean, think of it, that means 60% voting for Kamala.”

Obviously, this sort of "the Jews betrayed us" narrative is extraordinarily dangerous, -- the stabbed-in-the-back narrative was central to how the Nazis whipped up an antisemitic frenzy that ultimately led to the Holocaust. And it's particularly scary given a MAGA base that's already primed towards White supremacism and extreme right-wing nationalism, and has been increasingly open in accepting and promoting antisemites of all stripes (oh hi, NC GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson, I didn't see you I totally did see you there, because the revelation that you called yourself a "Black Nazi" was only the latest iteration of an antisemitic record that was already widely known when you were nominated!).

The comments came at an event titled "Fighting Antisemitism". This might seem ironic, but I believe observers were missing the point: It's "Fighting Antisemitism" like "Fighting Irish" -- the promise of a more pugnacious, in-your-face style of antisemitism. Not limp-wristed Genteel Antisemitism or bookish and wordy Academic Antisemitism, but Fighting Antisemitism. That's the MAGA way.

Going Fishing

The wave of terror Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have unleashed upon the Haitian community in Ohio continues to crest. I am by no means the first to observe the similarities between how they are talking about Haitians and how Nazis spoke of Jews at the outset of their rise to power. That's strong language, and yet it is terrifyingly warranted. We are seeing something that is, in fact, not at all unprecedented.

But there is a particular aspect of the racism we're seeing here that particularly resonated with me as a Jew -- the frenetic scouring to find anything and everything that "proves" the conspiracies right, or at least justified. In the Ohio case, this reached a comical (if anything about this could be comical) apex when Christopher Rufo offered a bounty to prove the "Haitians in Springfield are eating cats" conspiracy correct and then started crowing over a video of not-Haitians in Toledo Dayton grilling chicken. But other examples abound (although at least J.D. Vance had the "decency" to admit he was simply making things up). Far, far too many Republicans response to blatant acts of hatred is to cast far and wide for something that makes the hatred feel palatable.

As a reasonably public-facing Jewish professor, I frequently idly wonder if I'll be targeted by some sort of antisemitic attack. Mostly, it doesn't happen. Occasionally, it does; though in my case never in such a fashion that would explode into the public view. But if an "incident" did happen -- someone graffitied my office door, for instance -- I am absolutely sure that a certain cadre of online folk would immediately begin pouring over my collection of writings to find anything they possibly could to explain why I'm a legitimate target. That knowledge -- less that something could happen, and more that if it did I'd be the one scrutinized to hell and back, with the most gimlet eye and uncharitable gaze -- is perhaps what stresses me the most. I do not think I am alone amongst Jews in feeling this way; hyperpoliced at every turn to justify ex post facto a judgment that has been handed down in advance.

By all objective accounts, the Haitian community in Springfield has been a boon to an erstwhile struggling city. But they are not universal saints, any more than anyone else is -- if one places them under a powerful enough lens, one will of course be able to find something or someone butting up against the social compact (though not, I'd wager, stealing and eating pets). No group can maintain a perfect record under that sort of scrutiny. And the knowledge that one is under that microscope is just exhausting. It's exhausting right alongside the more direct anxiety and misery of being directly subjected to acts of hate and bigotry.

The people responsible for this have no shame, so I won't bother to say they should be ashamed. But no good person should feel anything other than contempt for this latest dose of bigotry.

Couch Fucking is not the Same as Cat Eating

Try explaining that headline in 2019!

Despite it featuring in Donald Trump's disastrous debate performance on Tuesday, Republicans appear to be committing to "immigrants are eating your pets!" as a central part of their campaign message. What a wild time to live in.

One thing I've heard in response to this is that "cat eating" is just the GOP version of the "J.D. Vance fucks couches" meme that bounced around the liberal blogosphere a few weeks ago. In either case, the argument went, it was a "humorous" falsehood that speaks to an overall decay in our informational climate, and so if you're uncomfortable with the one, you have no grounds to justify the other.

This comparison seems too cute. For starters, as others have noted, one extremely important difference between the two memes is that nobody is worried about extremists deciding to go out and terrorize Ikea shoppers based on misinformation about sofa sex acts occurring therein. That alone is enough to work as a distinction.

But also, the more fundamental difference is that nobody -- left, right, or center -- ever purported to believe J.D. Vance actually had sex with couches. It was self-conscious absurdism from the get-go. If there was a progressive out there who earnestly, genuinely believed J.D. Vance copulated with a couch, that person would be viewed with contempt by everyone else sharing the meme -- it was not meant to be believed, and there was no effort to make it something that would be believed.

By contrast, conservatives can't quite decide whether they believe the "cat eating" stories are real or not. The neo-Nazis who initially promulgated the claim certainly hoped and expected people would believe it. And Vance himself described the potential truth of the claim in deliberately waffling fashion "It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false" -- a formulation which indicates a comparably strong possibility that these "rumors" are in fact true. Comparing the two "stories" is like saying an Onion article and 2024 election trutherism are both examples of "misinformation".

What we're seeing from the right here isn't self-conscious absurdism but rather a sort of empirical edgelording -- dancing around the edge of "do I believe it/am I joking" to try and get the best of all worlds. If the listener is shocked, then they're just messing around; if the listener buys in, well, then they're being totally serious. People often cite Sartre's remarks on the way Nazis like to "play" with words, but the comparison that immediately jumped to my mind is Nelly suggesting to a female friend that he has a "pole in the basement". The shocked "what?" from said friend is met with "I'm just kiddin' ... Unless you're gon' do it." It's not a serious statement, except for those who take it seriously. 

The irony, though, is that precisely because Republicans can't fully commit to "cat eating" being obviously made up, it can't serve the function they want from it -- which is to be the counter to the "Republicans are weird" narrative Democrats have been so effectively impressing upon them (and of which couch fucking was a satirical encapsulation of). They're hoping for "you think we're weird -- well you eat cats!" The problem, though, is that the sort of person who actually thinks (or even is unsure) whether gangs of immigrants are abducting and devouring household pets in Ohio is ... a weird person! That is a weird thing to think, and it comes off as a weird thing to think. When Donald Trump publicly promotes cat-eating conspiracies in a debate, the response isn't "ooh, what a great zinger", it's "what on earth is he babbling about?" If you're not already in the fever swamp, it's a line that just reinforces that Trump is profoundly abnormal. He actually seems to believe too many things that regular Americans, at a gut-level, view as ridiculous.

Today's Republicans may be alarmingly good at stoking hate and fear and xenophobia. But they are very bad at avoiding being weird. Their commitment to spreading absurd nonsense about immigrants eating pets, more than anything else, just accentuates that weirdness.

There But For the Grace of God

Over at the bad place, Batya Ungar-Sargon is mainlining copium to explain Donald Trump's debate performance.

My take on the debate is that Harris did well because she's a factory settings Democratic apparatchik, and the main skill for doing that well is one she's good at: acting, pretending the neoliberal (or now neoconservative!) agenda of the Democratic elite is your own,…

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) September 11, 2024

Ah yes, that explains it. Donald Trump is just too pure authentic for this world. His raw untamable independent streak just couldn't be corralled to please "the elites" ("on either side"!). Harris gets "if anything, she was too prepared" version 2.0. It's amazing how hard one has to work to avoid the Occam's Razor explanation* that Trump sounded like a madman because he is one; that Trump's inability to articulate a concept of a plan for America beyond crude xenophobic nativism is because he lacks one.

Batya's descent into utter madness brain worms territory (which has been ongoing for years, including being a key player making Newsweek the house journal for the alt-right and antisemitic White supremacists and parroting the crudest Putinist propaganda about how funding of "Zelensky's War" is why Americans don't have manufacturing jobs) legitimately frightens me, because I don't know what zombie bit her and so I don't know how to ensure it doesn't bite me too. My main inference right now is "don't become opinion editor for a Jewish media outlet", because it was her experience at the Forward that seemed to drive her into the arms of madness, but I'm terrified that if exposed to the wrong trauma I too might go from being a reasonable intelligent and thoughtful commentator to a true believer in every fever swamp inanity imaginable.

I'm not really exposed to Batya these days, since she's not on BlueSky. There's a line on BlueSky that it's an echo chamber, and that's something I worry about too -- isn't it important that I be exposed to more views like Batya's, to ensure that I'm not cocooning myself in an epistemic bubble? The problem, though, is that while when I expose myself to the Batya's of the world I may pat myself on the back for being a good, virtuous epistemic citizen willing to challenge myself with views-not-my-own, in reality exposing myself to the likes of Batya feels less challenging than it is confirmatory. Reading her takes only makes me feel incredibly relieved that I don't have her takes. She is anti-persuasive. 

If the point of reading diverse views is to have that "huh, I never thought of it that way" moment, reading these people makes me go "huh, turns out that the caricatured mental model I have of brain-rotted right-wingers isn't a caricature at all." They're saying exactly what I expect them to say; there are no surprises. I'm unconvinced that confirming that instinct is actually healthier, even along the axis of remaining open-minded to divergent opinions.

* Of course, this circle also struggles mightily to understand what an "Occam's Razor" explanation is.

UPDATE: Matt Taibbi got bit as well.

UPDATE 2x: The Taibbi piece, in particular, reminded me of an exchange I had with an old high school buddy of mine who sadly has also gone off the deep end. He posted a collage of various media outlets all reporting on the travails of Twitter/X under Elon Musk -- that it had cratered in value and become a haven for bigots and extremists. He decided that the fact that similar reporting was appearing across many different media outlets could only mean one thing: a conspiracy by the legacy media to collude in order to slander Elon Musk's reputation. I sarcastically wondered if he saw a similar conspiracy in the fact that every Atlas will tell you the capital of Norway is Oslo, or every science textbook will inform you that the Earth rotates around the Sun. 

He said "I bet you think you're so smart." I assured him that I never dreamed that my observation required any intelligence whatsoever.

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.