Friday, November 08, 2024

Portland: America's Last Bastion of Normalcy


In my congressional district, local media is now projecting that Janelle Bynum has ousted incumbent Republican Representative Lori Chavez-Deremer. As terrible as election day was on the whole, I am grateful that I'll be represented by a Democrat in Congress once again, and I'm glad my neighbors made the right choice in sending Bynum to Congress.

Meanwhile, across the river in Washington state, Democratic incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has won her rematch against Republican challenger Joe Kent. This was a result that thrills and honestly confuses me. Perez's 2022 victory over Kent was one of the night's bigger upsets, largely chalked up to Kent being basically a White supremacist. But clearly the lesson of 2024 is that that's no longer any object, and if you told me ahead of time that election night would see a broad-based "red shift" compared to 2020 I would have been dead certain that Perez was absolute toast. So why exactly did this nut crack? I don't have an answer to that,* and I acknowledge that Perez has annoyed Democratic leadership before. But she seems to have some ideas of how to present progressive priorities in a way that speaks outside of our current base (e.g., her championing of "right to repair" laws, or pairing student loan debt relief with "dollar-for-dollar ... investments in career [and] technical education"), and she is a voice worth paying attention to going forward.

Needless to say, both Bynum and Perez bucked a pretty terrible national trend. As most of the country embraced the chaos and the void, the single, solitary exception was the Pacific Northwest. Here, we rejected crude reflex and base instinct. And it's not just the local congressional races. In the Portland mayor's race, we didn't pick the woman who thinks the law doesn't apply to her just because she's "progressive", and we didn't pick the man who wants to execute the homeless because he promised "law and order"Our new mayor is going to be Keith Wilson, whose major appeal in the field, from my vantage point, is that he seemed like a normal, good guy making reasonable efforts to resolve the problems in front of our city. That shouldn't always be enough, but in the field we had it was better than all the alternatives.  In my city council district, I felt like we had a plethora of good candidates to choose from, and the three winners all were among my top six picks. Here too, I'm very happy with the choices offered and choices made, and none of them seem (yet, anyway) like kooks, cranks, or gadflies. I'm optimistic that they will be diligent and attentive public servants when they enter office, and again, that's not something I take for granted anymore.

It is, of course, quite off-brand for Portland to be America's avatar of normalcy. Locally, we're more used to embracing our "weird" identity, nationally, our reputation is something like that of a post-apocalyptic drag show. "Normal" is not historically our forte.

But for my part, I am so, so happy that this is the city my wife and I have chosen to build our life in and raise our child in. Portland is a great city. It is full of great people, great beauty, great resources, great activities, and great values. I'm under no illusions that anywhere, blue states included, will be "safe" in the coming years. But there are very few places I'd rather be than here, and if you're looking for a new place to call home, I'd encourage you to look our way.

* One thing I will say, and someone inundated with ads for the Perez/Kent race, is that Kent went 100% all-in on anti-trans fearmongering. The result was Perez likely expanding her margin of victory in an otherwise red wave year. Take from that what you will.

What Will Trump 2.0 Mean for the Jews?


Short answer: It will be terrible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comment Moderation is On


Just a quick note that I've turned on comment moderation. Some banned trolls who refuse to accept that they're no longer welcome here aren't taking the hint, and so I've had to temporarily switch to a default where comments must be approved before appearing. Since I'm not used to doing full-scale comment moderation, there may be a delay between when you post and when your comment shows up on the site.

Sorry for the inconvenience (save for those intentionally being inconvenienced).

Wednesday, November 06, 2024

We Failed


We failed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 05, 2024

Resilient Fascism


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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, November 04, 2024

Vote Joy


Tomorrow is election day. Voting isn't the only obligation of a democratic citizenry, but it is the most basic one. Voting isn't the guarantor of positive change, but it is an essential component of it.

If you haven't voted already, please make sure you get to the polls. And when you do, I encourage you to vote joy.

Sunday, November 03, 2024

Read an Iowa-Selzer and You'll Feel Better Fast!

A few days ago, the watchword of the pollster-watchers was "herding". Polls adjust based on underlying assumptions (models) of the electorate, and these assumptions can sharply shift the reported results. Many have hypothesized that the pollsters, feeling burned by underestimating Trump's support in 2016 and 2020, are now overcorrecting to show a tight race so they don't look foolish in the event that we have our third straight tight race.

To this possibility, a lot of responses online took the form of "report the data you cowards!" If the data was showing Harris with a larger than "expected" lead (say, because she's cleaning up amongst women still furious about the fall of Roe), then don't hide from your own conclusions -- report them!

And then, right as that call of "don't be a coward" was cresting, the extremely highly regarded Selzer poll in Iowa put Harris over Trump by three in a state virtually nobody had in play. And that, in turn, generated a wave of "now I'm not saying I expect Harris to win Iowa, but ...."

Turns out, we're all cowards too.

No pollster is perfect, but Selzer's reputation for accuracy is well-earned. As you can see, in the last seven statewide Iowa races, Selzer's biggest miss was 5 points (2018 Governor), and more often she nails it to within a point or two.

So I'll add my voice to the chorus, but basically to echo Scott Lemieux: I'm also not going to venture a prediction that Harris wins Iowa, but even Iowa being closer than expected (say, Trump +2 rather than his 8-9 point margin from the last two elections -- this would equate to Selzer's largest recent "miss") augurs very, very well for Democrats across the country (and in contested House races in Iowa, for that matter).

Friday, November 01, 2024

Two-Thirds Excited, One-Third Terrified


I've alluded to it a couple of times before, but I don't think I've come out expressly and said: we're having a baby!

(It's a boy, due in January)

When people ask me how I'm doing, I have a stock answer: "Two-thirds excited, one-third terrified." It's always good for a laugh. But it's more or less accurate.

There's so much I'm excited about. I'm excited to share my favorite books. I'm excited to get him into Calvin & Hobbes. I'm excited to take him to hockey games. I'm excited to tell him stories. I'm excited to see him sit up, crawl, and walk for the first time. I'm excited to learn his passions. I'm excited to find out who he's going to be. I'm excited to be a dad, and I'm excited to watch my wife become a mom. This is, of course, only a very partial list.

But I'm also, admittedly, a bit terrified. And I know that's normal -- everyone says the moment the hospital discharges you and just ... sends you home with a baby generates a feeling of incredulous disbelief ("Who, me? I'm in charge now? You're just letting this happen"). But I want to talk about the fear side in a bit more in depth.

One overall salutary development we've seen in society recently is that we've moved towards allowing women -- including women who very much want to have children -- to have a more complicated relationship with pregnancy and childrearing beyond "it's the greatest thing ever and if you have any misgivings you're a failure as a woman." There is at least some more space to acknowledge that pregnancy is uncomfortable, and labor painful, and parenting is exhausting. It doesn't mean you're a bad mother. It's an acknowledgment of reality, and it makes for stronger, not weaker, parents.

Meanwhile, for men, there's been a cultural push in the other direction, because the gendered social dynamics began in a different place. For men acculturated into thinking of children as either "seen not heard", or a sort of doomsday event ("baby trap"), the emphasis has been on accentuating both the positives of fatherhood but also the responsibilities of being a good partner. Parenting is equal parts our job. It's not okay to just leave it all to the missus. In fact, the missus almost certainly has it a lot harder than you (you're not the one gestating and then expelling a whole human being inside your body).

This, too, is a salutary development. But it has I think left a bit of a gap in men being able to talk earnestly about their legitimate fears -- in part precisely because those fears in some ways need to be subordinated to the more pressing needs of one's partner.

For example: one thing I'm really scared about is the process of labor. Leaving aside catastrophizing about medical complications, it's a terrible thing to see my person, whom I love more than anyone in the world, in pain. Under normal circumstances, that fear and fright solicits resources of care and concern -- probably from my wife, who is my main source of care and concern when I'm feeling fear or fright. But of course, in the context of labor, that resource is unavailable, and more broadly my need for care resources is obviously of lower priority than my wife's -- what kind of self-absorbed jerk would I be if I made the pain of childbirth about supporting me? My job in the delivery room is to support my wife however I can, not to horde care resources for myself. I don't want to reenact this scene from Brooklyn Nine Nine.

I've spoken about this before as an "empathy drought": circumstances where our care resources are overtaxed and so need to be triaged. And so again, I want to emphasize that the prioritization here is absolutely, 100% proper. There is no injustice here. And the lack of injustice is, in its way, the injustice -- or at least the loneliness: what is one supposed to do when one's genuine needs (because I don't think, in the abstract, that the pain of seeing a loved one in pain is not the sort of thing where one might need emotional support) are rightfully subordinated? It's hard, and it generates a lacuna.

Childbirth represents an especially clear case. But there is some carry over to fatherhood as well -- it's hard to talk about one's genuine fears and concerns without sounding like one wants to reach back into the not-so-misty past of overgrown man-babying where mom-wife just took care of everything. And again, it's a good thing that we're rearticulating manhood and fatherhood. But that doesn't change the fact that, just as a more complex relationship to childrearing for women that speaks to both the joys and the fears doesn't make one out as a bad mother, so too for fathers as well.

Because while I'm two-thirds excited, there is plenty that sits in that third of terror. I'm scared of not getting enough sleep. I'm scared of freezing up when my kid throws a tantrum. I'm scared of not knowing how to balance between transmitting my values and letting him be his own person. I'm scared of my two-person life suddenly adding a third. I'm scared of not having time for my own hobbies. I'm scared of raising a Jewish child in today's world. Hell, I'm scared of bringing any child in today's world. Again, only a partial list, and not one I claim is unique to men. But it's a real list, and I don't think it's one that is unreasonable in soliciting support. 

I'm not a parent yet, so I don't have some deep words of wisdom to offer on this. But I do believe, and I've always believed, that letting oneself be vulnerable and honest encourages others to be as well. Talking about these things openly lets others do so too. We don't have to work through these fears alone. We should not and need not present these fears as the number one priority of parenthood. But the more people who come out and speak, the more this burden can be shared, and the more room we all have to also turn our attention to the essential task of being great fathers and great partners. So this is me doing my part: being open, and being vulnerable, and trying to make everyone a little less alone -- because there's so much to be excited about.

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Which Nuts Crack?


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

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

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

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

It's (Not) All Greek To Her


I have an ambivalent relationship to "kids these days!" thinking.

On the one hand, I'm a professor, so I'm constantly exposed to the "kids". And overwhelmingly, they're alright! Great, even! I have very little patience for the notion that the young people of today are some sort of uniform blob of incuriosity, intolerance, and preachiness. It just isn't my experience.

That said, I've always been a bit of a crotchety old man at heart. And it being age-appropriate to shout "get off my lawn!" is one of the few things that excite me about growing older.

So for someone with my proclivities, this story is outright dangerous in how much it pushes some of my confirmatory bias pleasure buttons regarding youthful idiot "activists" being idiots.

A 23-year-old woman has been arrested after she posted on social media about having gotten away with ripping down Greek flags at a New Jersey restaurant that she believed were Israeli.

The incident at Efi’s Gyro in Montclair, New Jersey, occurred March 11, but it wasn’t until Amber Matthews posted the video to TikTok on Oct. 15 that police were able to identify her. She was arrested on Tuesday and charged with bias intimidation and harassment.

In the video, Matthews, who went by the name “Ambamelia” on her now-removed TikTok account, can be heard berating employees about the “genocide” in Gaza. She posted the video with the text “The time I mistakenly thought the flag for Greek was for Israel and took the restaurants flag down OMG.”

Both Greece and Israel have blue and white flags.

Just to sum the above up, this lady:

  1. Tore down flags at a random restaurant as a means of protesting "genocide" (which is bad enough on its own);
  2. Didn't realize the flag she tore down was that of Greece (excuse me, "Greek") rather than Israel; and
  3. Was only caught because she posted a TikTok video where she bragged about her idiotic crime burst.
It's too much.

Is it fair of me to tie this sort of stupidity to a particular generation? Of course not. After all, how many Boomer insurrectionists on January 6 got caught because they flaunted their treasonous jaunt on Facebook?

But when someone is this stupid, in this public of a fashion -- I'm sorry, I just can't help myself.

Going Darker



Jeff Bezos has published a defense of his last-minute decision to override the Washington Post's editorial board and decline to issue a presidential endorsement.

It is not persuasive.

Bezos' core theme is that the media has a trust problem. This problem is not about actual impropriety or bias -- Bezos firmly rejects the notion that the Post is and has been anything but professional in its coverage. Rather, the problem is the appearance of bias. Editorial endorsements, even if they do not actually evince bias on behalf of the paper's news coverage, make people believe that there is. And that's why presidential endorsements need to be axed.

There's much that can be said here, including the fact that this in no way explains why presidential endorsements, alone, have this problematic effect. But I want to focus on a different problem about the concentration on an "appearance" of bias, because this is an area where in many cases the cure will be worse than disease. Where the "appearance" is based on falsehoods or absurdities, as it is here, attempts to "correct" the appearance (a) will never work and (b) will simply make other stakeholders (rightly!) second-guess whether bias is present.

The "voter fraud" panic is a great example of this, because it is also an arena where courts have justified severe limits on voting rights to combat the "appearance" of fraud even in circumstances where there is concededly no evidence of actual fraud. The logic is that the state still has a valid interest in its elections being perceived as legitimate. The problem is that if people are inclined to believe "fraud" is a problem notwithstanding evidence that it essentially doesn't exist, there's no reason to believe that any interventions will disabuse them of their delusions. Why would it -- the whole premise is that the people in question believe things in contradiction to the objective evidence! Meanwhile, the "appearance" justification conveniently overlooks other stakeholders whose faith in free and fair elections starts to decay precisely because they're witnessing a slew of voter suppression measures justified on (admitted!) fantasies. Why doesn't their assessment of "appearances" matter? At least it's based on something that's really happening.

The same is true in the Post's situation. The notion that an opinion page publishing an opinion is reflective of impermissible bias is beyond parody. Nobody actually believes this (including Bezos, as evidenced by the fact that the paper will continue to endorse in every other election). So there's no reason to think that abandoning endorsements will have any effect on those who make irrational and frivolous accusations of bias. Even if you buy Bezos' "logic", the entire problem is by stipulation illogical. And even as this move tries-and-fails to appease the unappeasable, it generates a far more serious "appearance of bias" in its own right. It will appear to many that Bezos is trying to coddle up to Donald Trump. It will appear that the Post's editorial independence is being compromised by the arbitrary whims of its billionaire owner. It will appear that the Post no longer is capable of fearlessly speaking truth even where powerful interests find it awkward or inconvenient.

These appearances are why I and 200,000(!) other subscribers have hit the cancellation button. But of course, what Bezos' choices "appear" to represent to us doesn't matter, just as what spurious "anti-fraud" measures "appear" to represent to minority and marginalized voters doesn't matter. When it comes to avoid the "appearance" of impropriety, invented concoctions by the dominant caste will always trump objective failings endured by the less powerful.

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Don't Doom Before You Have To


After a good few months of heady optimism, the mood amongst Democrats has gotten considerably more dour. It's not because Harris is behind -- while there might have been some tightening of the race, if anything, polls still have her (narrowly) ahead. But I'm hearing more than a few liberals who are already preemptively resigning themselves to a Trump victory, glumly relaying an anecdote or a sentiment that it just "feels" like it's going to happen. And this is being paired with preemptive capitulations by major institutions, which is a very bad sign that some of the powers-that-be are already trying to get in good with a future dictator.

I'm inclined to agree with Paul Campos that the main instigator here is that we were dashed in our hopes of putting the election away by now. As he says, "it’s not much comfort to someone who thinks there’s a 50% chance that something absolutely catastrophic is about to happen to tell that person that hey be realistic, it’s probably only 45% or even 40% if you squint just right. For my part, the prospect of bringing a child into the sort of world that Trump would wreak in 2024 is outright terrifying. If in 2016 I suddenly grasped feeling safer in a blue state, looking out to a second Trump administration in 2025 I wouldn't feel safe anywhere. They'll be coming for us no matter where we hide. And if this is the end (as is alarmingly plausible) of America's global preeminence, well, historically speaking those sorts of falls rarely occur without destroying a lot of lives and livelihoods in the process.

I can't say that doom might not be coming. But there's no sense in dooming before one absolutely has to. Right now, there are still things we can do -- not just desperate rear-guard actions, but real, genuine moves that can push America in the right direction. If Trump wins, our best options will be somewhere in the field of "battlefield trauma surgeon trying to stop the patient from completely bleeding out." We're not there yet.

It's a little over a week until election day. Play to the whistle, and play to win. We can decide what comes after, after. For now, let's do this.

Friday, October 25, 2024

Going Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Do Republicans Care That Trump Admires Hitler?


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, October 20, 2024

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!

Thursday, October 17, 2024

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.