The Making of a Murder-Cheerer

Last week, I spent some time at the eye doctor to address periodic swelling, irritation, and pain in my left eye. This happens periodically, but it got especially bad during my trip to Florida (to the point where airline attendants asked if I needed paramedics to meet me once we landed). The doctor was quite nice but suggested that incidents like this are a symptom of my keratoconus worsening and there probably wasn't much to be done at this point other than hope it doesn't happen too often and ride it out when it does.

I say "at this point" because at an earlier point there was something to be done -- a surgical proceeding called corneal cross-linking. Cross-linking surgery doesn't "fix" keratoconus, it just stops further deterioration, but since keratoconus is a degenerative condition that's no small thing. I was slated to get cross-linking surgery while at Berkeley, but at the last moment my insurer denied coverage as not medically necessary since I could still see with contact lenses. Again, remember that what cross-linking does is stop degeneration -- that is, the surgery would preserve the status quo where I could see with contact lenses -- so the fact that I currently could see with contact lenses is exactly why the surgery was being recommended to me. Nonetheless, even though the surgery had been scheduled for months, the insurer issued its denial just a day or two before, giving me essentially no time to appeal or gather additional medical information to support why the surgery was, in fact, necessary.

Several years later (now in Portland), I was able to get the surgery -- but only in my right eye. My left eye had, in the intervening years, deteriorated to the point where it was no longer a candidate for the procedure. And that deterioration is likely permanent, and (given the periodic swelling etc.) possibly still ongoing. My doctor said that if things continue to get worse in that eye, the only real treatment option available is a full-blown corneal transplant -- quite a bit more intense (and expensive) than cross-linking would have been, and not something I'm especially excited to pursue. There's not even the karmic satisfaction of the insurer having to pay more, because I'm on different insurance now compared to when the surgery was initially denied!

My experience is, of course, not uncommon. We've all been swapping stories on this subject prompted by the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. My case is not to the degree of being denied life-saving care, but permanent vision loss in an eye is not exactly frivolous either. Like many Americans, I have persistent ambient anxiety about what would happen if I faced a major medical crisis, and that anxiety is less about the crisis itself and more wondering in what ways will my insurer try to screw me over in my most vulnerable moment in order to financially ruin me.

There are very, very good reasons for Americans to loathe their health insurance companies. But even still, it is alarming how many people are outright thrilled to have witnessed a street murder. The cause of this excitement is, no doubt, in significant part justifiable fury at the injustices health insurers wreak on regular people. But that more systemic explanation I think has to be cut with acknowledgment that a significant portion of people seem to be excited at the prospect of being justified in cheering a murder. They are luxuriating in this feeling of justified schadenfreude, and are encouraging others to feel similarly, and are hoping to feel it again and again.

No matter how one identifies the cause, such a situation is not a sign of a healthy society. For me, there were eerie echoes of the days after October 7, where we also saw too many people be not just thrilled at seeing Israelis murdered, but thrilled at their mutual, collectively reinforcing justifications at why they were right to be thrilled. Certainly, Thompson was far more directly complicit in injustice than a group of teenaged concertgoers, whose "complicity" was basically being Israelis full stop. But to the celebrators, this is a difference of degree and not kind -- they labored hard to establish why being Israeli was a form of culpable complicity for which the proper punishment was death and the proper affect was a hearty cheer. And that effort to stretch so one can properly enjoy the murder is powerful evidence that the desire to enjoy murders is the actual driving motivation, with the political or strategic apologias just epiphenomenal window dressing. How far down the pecking order at UHC is it warranted to be excited at extermination? To the adjusters? To the HR professionals? To the janitors? We all know the Tumblr accounts who would rush to point out we should cheer not just the death of the Himmlers but every German Nazi, top to bottom -- so why not apply that logic to UHC? Or to Israel? Or to any other institution complicit in systemic injustice -- a category which can include without too much in the way of struggle every institution? (This was one of the lessons of The Good Place -- while everyone has an obligation to try to do the right thing, overindulgence in "complicity" arguments makes everyone guilty and places everyone in hell).

The terrible realization many of us had, and are having again, is that for many the orientation towards Israel/Palestine or the American healthcare system isn't "let's create a just political structure for all" but rather "I want to see the right people be hurt," and the thirst for the latter is what drives the nominal political commitments rather than vice versa. Even where one can sympathize with the causes, this sort of outlook never leads anywhere good; more often than not, it's just people coming up with stories for why they should be permitted to revel in the misery of others. As a species, we should know well that our problem is not that we are too skittish about justifying brutality and violence, and so we should be hesitant about any political momentum which takes the form of accentuating and accelerating a popular desire to enjoy murder.

It is no answer to point out the many, many more people whose lives have been ruined by unjust insurance denials (UHC has the highest denial rate in the country, denying a full third of all filed claims). For one, anyone who reads a story about one of these denials and lets out a whoop and high fives would be a bad person too. More fundamentally, I also return to one of the most outstanding articles I've ever read, Robin West's "Sex, Law, and Consent," which does a superb job explaining how direct interpersonal injustices are qualitatively different than "systemic" ones even when the latter cause greater tangible loss than the former. We experience being robbed or burgled differently from being on the receiving end of wage theft, even if the latter might actually take more dollars from our pocket; West extends this analysis to how we think of rape vis-a-vis the broader suite of patriarchal norms which regularly generate "consent" to sexual activities that are not truly or enthusiastically desired. Again, this doesn't mean that UHC's conduct in the healthcare system isn't an example of serious injustice -- it is, just like wage theft is and just like structural sexism is -- but the point is that we're not simply delusional in viewing street murder as qualitatively different notwithstanding the fact that it is but one dead body.

I say all this because there is not, or should not be, a tension between "the murder of Brian Thompson is bad" and "we are obligated to create a more just and humane healthcare system that is not liable to the exploitations and predations of entities like UnitedHealthCare." Anxiety about insurer-driven financial ruin notwithstanding, and direct experience with insurer manipulation causing permanent medical injury notwithstanding, I never wanted Brian Thompson to die, and I cannot relate to thousands of internet strangers who did want him to die. What I want is for our health care system to work for us and to take care of us. That's all. My first response to Thompson's murder was to write:

The murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO is outrageous. We as a society must do everything in our power to ensure that a tragedy like this never occurs again. If that means implementing national universal healthcare so that anger over a failing private system isn't displaced onto violence, so be it.

And while yes, that was intentionally snarky, I also meant it with total earnestness. We should hate murder. And we should commit ourselves to creating a just healthcare system that doesn't generate justified seething hatred amongst ordinary Americans.

Yet here we see another element of our despairing time, which is that the proof is in the pudding in terms of what drives social change. Just like it may be sadly true that manipulative echo chambers are a more effective political strategy that earnest and honest engagement with people of diverse political views, it may be sadly true that violence and social disruption are able to drive necessary political change where persuasion and law fail. It is a bad precedent when we let terroristic violence drive even salutary social change, and the lesson to draw from that is to make salutary social changes without being prompted to do so by terroristic violence. And if we can't learn that lesson, then I'm at a loss except to say that it inherently puts us in a very grim place, and nobody should be excited to live there.

I have no answers here. But I again cannot help but feel that it is fundamentally unhealthy when people feel, and our encouraged to feel, excitement over murder. For too many people, the murder of Brian Thompson isn't about murder or even about generating justice in the healthcare space. It rather is an opportunity to enjoy the spectacle of a murder, and feel righteous in doing so. That instinct is one we should be very wary about letting flower unchecked, in ourselves or in others.

We Who Are About To Die

The Romans loved their gladiator games.

I actually have no idea if that's true. Most of what I know about gladiators comes from how they're portrayed in Ridley Scott movies. For all I know, Romans did not actually enjoy seeing innocent people torn apart in the arena by wild animals or what have you.

But, to quote Philip J. Fry, "it's a widely-believed fact!", so we'll run with it.

It seems clear that a huge part of the second Trump administration will be vindictive political prosecution of his "enemies". This was a recurrent campaign theme of his, from proposing "military tribunals" for the likes of Liz Cheney to alleging "COVID crimes" by Anthony Fauci. Willingness -- implicit or explicit -- to engage in such thuggery has been a theme of his early announced appointees, from Kash Patel to Brendan Carr to Pete Hegseth. Concern over such tactics was expressly raised by Joe Biden in his pardon announcement for his son, Hunter. How deep down the list will he go? Unclear, though normalcy will not save you. The hammerfist coming to smash American rule of law is something unprecedented in my lifetime.

These prosecutions will be lawless along every possible dimension. The people driving them won't care about the law. The venues will be selected based on political convenience (I bet one will be amazed at how many of the "crimes" in question will center on the Western District of Texas). The "crimes" themselves either will be frivolous or nakedly selective. It will be undisguised authoritarian thuggery: the apparatus of law enforcement entirely perverted to immunize the president's allies while harassing his enemies (the almost-assured pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists is also part of this story).

I won't here venture a prediction as to how the judiciary will respond to these endeavors. It's possible they'll hold the line, as they largely did in 2020. But it's also the case that in 2024 the conservative legal movement has embraced and assimilated into full-blown MAGAism to a far greater degree than in 2020; even if they don't actively embrace the conspiracism (which they might), one can very easily imagine them hiding behind rules of deference to enable Trump to run wild.

The open question I want to consider, though, is how the public will respond to all of this. Of course, Trump's base will love it -- they've been baying for blood since 2016. And equally obviously, people like me will hate it. But I have a bad feeling -- maybe doom-mongering, maybe not -- that these spectacles of prosecution will go over better than one would think with low-information independents.

The reason isn't because they necessarily have strong opinions that Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci or various military general actually are criminals. Rather, it is a more inchoate desire to see "the powerful" get their comeuppance. It almost doesn't matter whether they're guilty or not; the mere practice of seeing people one is accustomed to thinking of as "above you" laid low, ripped apart by the animals in the arena, is desired in of itself.

Consider what is for me one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump's victory: that he will not be held accountable for his many, many blatant crimes. No sentencing for the New York felony convictions, no consequences for the attempted 2020 insurrection, no pursuit of the document theft case, no nothing. It is maddening, to see such naked abuses of power result in nothing simply because Trump is powerful enough to evade responsibility for anything. If you take that indignant sensation and shear it from any substantive political knowledge, you're just left with the boiling resentment that a vague "they" keep "getting away with it". And the mere performance of going after a "they" can appeal to those resentments -- a fascist essence where the struggle is valuable in of itself, to show oneself to be the tribune of the people.

This suggests that Democrats could have leveraged this same atavistic desire to get at a powerful "them" by, for example, a fast Garland or prosecuting big bankers for the financial crisis or going after Elon Musk. And much like with echo chambers, I'm of two minds on this: torn between thinking that (for better or for worse) this is the strategy that works, versus thinking that it is a bad thing to encourage this sort of political climate (to be clear: I have no quarrel with "going after" big bankers or whoever when they commit crimes, but performatively going after an "enemy" class -- no matter who it is -- untethered by normal rule of law constraints strikes me as bad both morally and also conducive to a political environment that ultimately helps the right).

So once again, I'm at a bit of a loss here. But if we're relying on a natural popular revulsion to politicized sham prosecutions by the Trump administration, I'm not sure we're going to get it. We are going to be entering a very, very dark time.

Did Bluesky Win or Did X Lose?

"She only won because I lost. That's not a winner."

"Network effects" refer to situations where a product becomes more valuable to individual users the more total users there are. It's commonly applied to social media platforms -- one wants to be on, for example, Facebook because that's where the people are; a Facebook that had a small user base wouldn't be a lot of fun even if its features and product functionality were vastly superior. On a darker level, network effects are often cited as a reason why it's so difficult to leave even bad or malfunctioning social media platforms -- we're "stuck" there, even if there's widespread agreement that another platform would be better, because of the collective action problem of coordinating a mass decamping to an alternative.

For a long time, Twitter was held out as the epitome of a network effect in action -- because everyone was there, everyone had to be there; leaving Twitter for a competing platform was the equivalent of leaving a bustling party and deciding to shout into a boundless void. This sense of Twitter as a de facto monopoly gave at least some measure of credence at efforts to regulate it as a "common carrier" or "public square" -- the idea being that if Twitter "censored" (banned, throttled, or deprioritized) certain people or views, it was tantamount to blocking them from the premier domain of public conversation.

Now, of course, we are seeing Bluesky ascend as a truly viable alternative to Twitter X. For my part, I've been exclusively on Bluesky for several months (I joined in July 2023, but like many for a long time I straddled both platforms). By now, I'm close to my peak follower account on Twitter, and my engagement on Bluesky is at least as robust (if not better) than it was on Twitter. And while Bluesky isn't wholly immune to some of the worst elements of "old" Twitter, it is generally in my experience a nicer and more humane place (arguably compared to the Twitter of yore, certainly compared to the cesspool its devolved into as of late).

From my vantage point, seeing Bluesky challenge and, in certain domains, topple Twitter is unprecedented territory. The closest analogue I can think of is Facebook dislodging Myspace, but I don't know (genuinely, I don't) if Myspace was as ubiquitous and dominant in its domain as Twitter was. Outside of that, it's hard to think of a titan that's fallen as far, from as high, as Twitter did. How did this happen? How did Bluesky overcome the network effect hurdle to emerge as a viable alternative? 

I have two stories, and I'm genuinely unsure which is more persuasive.

Story #1 is that Bluesky's emergence shows that the network effect, while certainly real, isn't as big of a hurdle to change as people thought. We're not actually stuck with incumbent social media providers come hell or high water. There's inertia militating against change, but it's not insurmountable. Bluesky is winning because it is fundamentally better than X is right now, as well as better than the other X competitors (Threads, Mastodon, Post) that emerged over the last few years. It's making better choices about the use (or not) of algorithms, it's making better choices about doing content moderation, it made better choices about growing responsibly, and it's reaping the fruits of making those better choices that appeal to more people.

Overall, the moral of this story is that the concerns about Twitter as a functional monopoly that could singlehandedly manipulate the public square without any possibility of public recourse or accountability have been falsified. And that, of course, has implications for the rest of the social media space -- many of our worries about undislodgeable tech monopolies maybe seem overblown. What a relief!

Story #2, which is probably less hopeful but might generate more primal glee inside of me, is that the basic narrative of network effects creating entrenched monopolies is still true, but Elon Musk so epically and catastrophically mismanaged Twitter that he managed to destroy it anyway. Keeping in mind that Musk didn't actually want to buy Twitter in the first place (he made his offer as a troll, only to be forced into a sale when Twitter's leadership realized this was their best chance to cashout at inflated prices), every choice he's made since assuming ownership has been a disaster borne out of his own infinite depth of arrogance and boundless need for public affirmation. 

He had a company with universal brand recognition; he renamed it for no reason. He complained about Twitter allegedly censoring speech to put its thumb on the political scales; he converted X into an explicit megaphone for Donald Trump and far-right MAGA politics. He whined about bots taking over the platform; bots are even more ubiquitous than they were before. Ad sales are down because advertisers don't like their brands being associated with neo-Nazis, to the point where Musk is suing on the theory that it's illegal for people not to give him money. Neutering the utility of the block function served mostly to make harassment and brigading easier. Changing "verified" accounts into paid promotional material nuked the ability of Twitter to serve as a trusted outlet for anyone. 

It's been an utter, unmitigated, arguably unparalleled trainwreck -- and that's why Bluesky was able to overcome the network effect headwinds and establish itself as a competitor. It's not so much "popular discontent can overcome anything," and more "even the biggest ship can sink if its drunken captain insists on ramming it into an iceberg". I don't want to say that's never going to be replicable, but we won't always be so "lucky" as to have someone this incompetent at the helm of our big tech outfits. To take one example, there is plenty of negative things to be said on how Mark Zuckerberg has run Facebook as of late, but as bad as his choices have been and as aggravating as Facebook often is as a platform, nothing Facebook has done has come anywhere close to the abyss of incompetence that characterized how Elon Musk ran Twitter into the ground -- and for that reason, we haven't seen a true competitor emerge to Facebook in a manner akin to Bluesky.

So which story is right? I don't know (and of course, it's more of a spectrum than a binary). I do think Bluesky made some smart choices that it deserves credit for -- there's a reason it is the main competitor (and not Threads or Mastodon). But there's little doubt it got a huge assist from the dizzying array of unfathomably boneheaded choices Elon Musk has made at the helm of X -- a unicorn event that to my eyes stands out even amongst a sea of overconfident, underperforming tech bros.

Fictional Character Ideological Turing Test

If you're a Democrat, which fictional television character do you think most "embodies" contemporary Republicans? And if you're a Republican, which television character do you think Democrats would pick to answer the above question?

(Then do it vice versa -- what character do Republicans think embodies Democrats, and what character do Democrats think Republicans would pick to embody Democrats?).

I'm weirdly obsessed with thinking about this thought exercise. Unfortunately, I think it isn't really doable, if for no other reason than it presupposes a shared media culture that doesn't really exist, and in particular in my head it involves everyone sharing my particular Peak TV cast of potential characters, which definitely doesn't exist.

But nonetheless, the concept is interesting to me. Under conditions of negative polarization, I think we can assume that the selected character would be one who embodies the perceived vices of the "other side". And so one thing we'd be measuring is to what degree people have a handle on what the "other side" perceives as their most salient and emblematic vice.

For example, I've written that for me the character that most embodies the contemporary MAGA right is Jerry from Rick & Morty. But I doubt that most Republicans would guess that Jerry would be my pick. I'd guess that they'd guess I'd choose someone like Homer Simpson ("they think we're oafish idiots"), or Boss Hogg ("they think we're racists"). I don't think they think that I think (boy, that's a mouthful) that their emblematic vice is whiny entitlement and crippling beta male insecurity, which is crystallized into the character of Jerry Smith.

Who do I think Republicans would choose to embody Democrats? I'm thinking one of the characters from Lena Dunham's "Girls" (again, bracketing the fact that most Republicans have never seen that show -- and in fact, I haven't seen it either -- the point is to identify an archetype). I think they think of us as self-obsessed and self-absorbed, performatively "woke" (but massively hypocritical about it), and generally unproductive leeches who wouldn't know a "real job" if it chafed our uncalloused, manicured hands. But maybe I'm wrong, and their emblematic Democrat is epitomized by a completely different set of vices! And again, it would be interesting to learn the mismatch.

Anyway, as I said, it's an exercise that -- even just as a thought experiment -- I've always found fun to ponder. And I'm curious at people's thought processes here -- so feel free to play in the comments (i.e., if you're a Democrat say which character most embodies Republicans, and also give guesses as to which character you think Republicans would choose to embody Democrats as well as which character you imagine Republicans would guess Democrats think embodies Republicans)!

What If Echo Chambers Work?

A few days after the election, I remember seeing a Washington Post column that said something like "You can't win an election if you're going to shun or denigrate half the electorate." And I remember wishing I could ask the author, in all earnestness: Why not?

After all, hadn't we just seen someone win an election while shunning and denigrating half the electorate? Clearly it's possible! The Post's hypothesis had been decisively falsified less than a week before!

This came up again today with the ongoing "echo chamber" discourse about BlueSky, paired against the fact that Republicans did in fact manage to win an election while generating an almost entirely cloistered epistemic bubble for themselves. The belief that echo chambers are antipathic to good electoral strategy is a comforting belief for people of a certain political persuasion (myself included!), but it just seems not to be true.

So the real question, and I think harder question, for Democrats is -- what if echo chambers work? What if one can win an election by constructing an epistemic fortress and just mainlining as many conspiracy theories and wild accusations about the other sides as humanly (or AI-ing-ly) possible?

It's a harder question because, at least for someone like me, this would be a very sad reality to come to grips with. I very fervently don't think democracy should be about scratching your way to the thinnest possible plurality and then steamrolling the other side. If you asked me what I would hope to happen to MAGA Republicans in rural Idaho or whatever after a Kamala Harris win, I'd have answered "I hope they get good healthcare, decent jobs, and well-funded schools." I have no desire to unleash recriminations upon "enemies", and I hate the idea of politics as a lawless bloodsport where all is fair if it wins you an election.

But maybe people like me are naive, and the lesson that has to be learned from 2024 (and 2016) is that brutal, no quarter, snarling attacks are an electorally winning play, and that for Democrats to win they need to harness their inner demonization machine and find some people to vilify. Of course, one could respond to this by saying that even if such a strategy is electorally superior at the margins, it's just plain wrong. That's always a valid response, and one might notice that it's the same response given to arguments that Democrats need to throw trans persons under the bus for electoral wins. There, of course, the retort is "well, enjoy feeling morally pure as you lose the Senate for the next decade" -- it's of course fascinating that the Post would never apply a similar retort to those who demand foreswearing scorched-earth electoral tactics against the GOP ("have fun patting yourselves on the back for your moral purity!"). It goes to show which moral commitments are truly seen as sacrosanct by the mainstream media, and which aren't.

But if we leave the moral objection aside, there remains one circle I cannot quite square. I've never been one to think, contra some narratives, that Democrats have just preemptively surrendered at every turn (e.g., as far as I know I'm the only person who thinks Chuck Schumer has done a pretty good job keeping a very thin majority dependent on some very unreliable actors relatively unified over the course of his tenure). Nonetheless, I am, with great reluctance, coming to believe that Democrats cannot win elections solely by taking the high road and demonstrating sober commitment to good governance and rule of law, when pitted against the emotional fever-dream populist pitch that characterizes the modern GOP. Again -- this is not a conclusion I'm happy to accede to. There probably are some people whose every instinct is to destroy the opposition at all costs and have to be persuaded to stay within the lines; but as noted above that's not me. My sensibilities are extremely wedded towards sober technocracy and good governance, and I reflexively recoil at the sort of hardball, "crush the enemy" tactics we're talking about here.

But here's my problem: if over the short term I think Democrats need to compete with the GOP on the level of back-alley brawl politics, over the long term I think that a politics that takes that form is inherently slanted towards the right. We will never be able to out-hate the GOP. We'll never be better than them at conjuring up some shadowy enemy to put people into a frenzy. There are absolutely ways to pitch distrust towards established institutions and a belief that "They" are out to get "Us" in a left-ish manner, but ultimately those narratives are going to benefit the right more (and we're already seeing how that pipeline flows from left-to-right in the form of folks like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard). So even if I may believe that my fighting faith of good governance liberalism just isn't winning elections, I'm also very concerned that the punchier left-wing populist alternatives will generate a political environment that is even more systematically slanted towards the right. Conspiratorial populism is home turf advantage for the right -- if that's the field we're playing on, we're always going to be starting from behind.

As I said, I don't have a way to square this circle. I'm not a political strategist, and I'm trying to avoid the temptation of "just agree with me and of course we'll win elections." But it's something I'm feeling very glum about.

The Media is (Really!) Not Part of the Liberal Family

When I think of what I, as a liberal, want the media to do, it's really quite simple: just tell me what's happening -- without varnish, horserace hypothesizing, or "sanewashing". I don't need them to lie to me. I don't need them to confirm my priors. I don't need to have "bad" news hidden from me. I don't need or want a liberal version of Fox News. Just tell me what's going on! 

For example, immediately after the election and Trump's victory, the stock market went way up. It seems the market was happy with Trump's victory (alongside, I'm guessing, general happiness that the outcome was decisive). As a Democrat, that's not pleasant to see -- but still, I didn't need anyone to hide that fact. I didn't need to construct some Potemkin coverage where it didn't happen. I didn't even need some side-eye slant about how it turns out "the elites" seem rather elated at Trump's triumph (I can make that inference on my own). Just tell me the truth. It will suffice.

Now, I fully admit that this "simple" request isn't so simple. Nonetheless, even accounting for its easier-said-than-done character, there's little doubt that the media has been abjectly terrible at this. And while the reasons behind it are myriad, one answer I keep returning to is an argument I made back in 2018: namely, that the media thinks of itself as part of the liberal "family".

It may be counterintuitive why that leads to conservative media bias. But the idea is that, to the extent journalists fundamentally see themselves as liberals talking to liberals, then there isn't much need to report on various dangers and predations of conservatives. "We" already know that. There's nothing new here. If anything, the job of a journalist is to disturb "our" preexisting narratives. And since the "we" and the "our" are all imagined to be liberals, we get an endless stream of apologetics, explainers, and sanewashing of conservative extremism.oooo

But I said in 2018 and I'll say it now: regardless of the personal politics of any particular editor or journalist, the media is not part of the liberal family. They should not presume their only audience is liberals, they should not assume that their job is to give liberals "the other side of the story", because they should view conservatives (or liberals) as "the other side" to begin with. This is related to something Jamelle Bouie wrote recently: the political media has a bad habit of thinking its job is to play amateur political strategist for Democrats, instead of just trying to accurately report on what's happening in the world. When we're talking about Biden's alleged mental decline or Trump's rambling political speeches, we don't need hypothesizing about how this is playing out in swing states. Just -- tell us what's happening. Report Trump's speech. Report Biden's speech. The audience can decide for itself whether this reality is "good news" or not for Democrats or Republicans.

I admit, there is a small part of me that harbors hope that the surrenderist policy taken by many journalistic "elites" towards Trump -- exemplified by the owners of the Washington Post and LA Times craven non-endorsement decisions -- might disabuse some other members of the legacy journalist community of the naive notion that "everyone" (who counts) already knows how dangerous Trump and his cronies are. The increasingly evident truth that this assessment is not universally-held (obviously it's not!) should, in an ideal world, dissipate the notion that straightforward, accurate recounting of what's going on in Trumpland is in some way preaching to the choir or superfluous repetition of obvious truths. And likewise, it should be obvious right now that the main "bias" the media needs to combat within itself is not a propensity to overtell liberal narratives, it's an instinct to self-censor truths inconvenient to conservatives because it's viewed as gilding the lily.

On this score, the early returns are not good -- the media is already racing to sanewash RFK Jr.'s anti-vaxx positions on the apparent premise that "we all" know why vaccines are healthful, and need to understand the argument for why they're dangerous. The reality, though, is that we don't all know that vaccines are healthful, and lots of people need to be educated on why avoiding or tamping down on vaccines is what's dangerous.

This, ultimately, is what it actually means to speak to an audience of conservatives and liberals alike. It's not about being evermore coddling and accommodating of conservative conspiracism -- that's never going to work. Ultimately, it means remembering that not "everyone" knows and accepts truths inconvenient for contemporary conservatism, and when reality poses facts troublesome to a conservative reader, it is the media's job to report those facts without varnish or sugarcoating. To borrow from Harry Truman: you're not giving your conservative readers hell -- you just telling them the truth, and they're calling it hell.

Will Matt Gaetz Finally Cause the Senate GOP To Stand Up To Trump? My Money's On No!

I really thought I'd laid the bar on the floor, but somehow Donald Trump has already burrowed under it by announcing (former*) Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as his pick for attorney general. I had the pleasure of sharing this news with several of my law school colleagues, where it literally provoked a laugh-out-loud howl of incredulity.

It wasn't just my people though. Senate Republicans also seem rather blindsided by the pick:

The selection of Mr. Gaetz blindsided many of Mr. Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill. The announcement was met with immediate and unvarnished skepticism by Republicans in the Senate who will vote on his nomination. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she was “shocked” by the pick — and predicted a difficult confirmation process.

[....]

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, when asked about Mr. Gaetz’s selection, said, “I don’t know the man other than his public persona.”

Mr. Cornyn said he could not comment on the chances that Mr. Gaetz, or Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, would be confirmed: “I don’t know — we’ll find out.”

“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said as other senators dodged questions from reporters.

Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, told reporters that many members of the G.O.P. conference were shocked at the choice of Mr. Gaetz for attorney general, but mostly thrilled at the prospect that he might no longer be a member of the chamber.

The House, Mr. Miller added, would be a more functional place without Mr. Gaetz.

He predicted a bruising confirmation fight, adding that if the process revealed evidence to corroborate the allegations of sex trafficking against Mr. Gaetz, he would not be surprised if the House moved to expel him, as it did with Representative George Santos. Mr. Santos lost his seat after the Ethics Committee documented violations of the chamber’s rules and evidence of extensive campaign fraud.  

But things aren't all bad. You'll never guessed who raced ahead of the pack to greet Trump's failson pick with open arms:

One of the few lawmakers to offer a positive assessment was a staunch Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who called Mr. Gaetz “smart” and “clever” but predicted tough confirmation hearings.

So, how long will it take for the Senate GOP caucus to fall in line? I'm guessing it'll happen before the first confirmation hearing. (That is, if we have confirmation hearings).

Oh, and speaking of organizations that have put their dignity in a lockbox, we did finally learn what bridge is too far for the ADL, which blistered the Gaetz selection because of his "long history of trafficking in antisemitism," including "defending the Great Replacement Theory." How he's distinguished from the ADL's glowingly-praised Elise Stefanik, who also promoted Great Replacement Theory, was left unsaid.

* Gaetz hastily resigned his seat following the announcement, also getting ahead of a planned House Ethics Committee report that was set to issue findings on Gaetz's myriad, er, "controversies" -- including allegations of sex trafficking minors. Score one for QAnon!

The Shrapnel Marked "Occupant"

There's an old saying passed around by soldiers, that goes something like: "Don't worry about the bullet with your name on it. Worry about the piece of shrapnel marked 'occupant'."

The point of the story is to impress the fundamental impersonality of war. Who lives, who dies -- there's nothing special about it. The bullet or bomb or rocket doesn't care about you; the person firing it doesn't care about you either. In 99.9% of cases, it has nothing to do with you in any meaningful sense. We have for ourselves a thick understanding of our own choices and values and importance, but none of that really plays any role in who gets hurt. The bullet that comes for us almost certainly will not have our "name on it".

At one level, this outlook is a corrective to main character syndrome, where we all imagine ourselves to be very special indeed, and so the reasons good or bad things happen to us relate to our specialness and our special choices. The bullet is inscribed with my name because I made distinctive choices which made someone take notice of me and decide to specifically take me out. 

But at another level, this saying is also about undermining a sense of security based around our own ordinariness. In many respects, most of us I think don't imagine ourselves as "special". We don't stand out, we don't see ourselves as making some sort of radical or impactful choice that would cause someone else to go to the trouble of crafting a bullet specially for us. I'm just a regular guy, doing ordinary things. There's nothing special about me, so why would anyone bother to target me, of all the people in the world? And the answer is that maybe they wouldn't -- but the shrapnel marked "occupant" is distinguished precisely because it doesn't bother to target at all. Your mundanity will not save you.

I've been thinking about all of this in relation to my own coping mechanisms as I envision what the future might hold over the next four years. One mode of "reassurance" is to tell oneself that Trump and Trumpists aren't really going to go after me; they are targeting other, more distinctive communities (such an immigrants, or trans individuals). Of course, this cope might not even be right on its own terms (it's entirely plausible he will target, e.g., Jewish college professors). And to the extent it is right, even thinking this way wracks me with guilt -- "I feel better knowing it's others who will be hurt".

But there's a more fundamental problem at work here. Finding reassurance in terms of who is likely to be "targeted" tries to find security in normalcy and ordinariness. It's that notion of "I'm just a regular guy, I'm doing nothing special or out of the ordinary -- why would anyone bother to come after me?" And again, I think that self-conception is incredibly common. Some of you might have seen interviews with undocumented immigrants who claimed that, if they could vote, they would have backed Trump. This feels inconceivable -- how could they do that, when Trump says he wants to enforce their deportation en masse? The answer they give is basically: "he's not talking about me." Why would he be? I'm just trying to work hard and build a better life for my family. He must be talking about the criminals and the rapists and the predators. I'm just a normal guy, doing normal things. There's no reason why someone would go through so much trouble just to hurt me.

This in-depth story from a few months ago, about a trans girl in Florida who was on her middle school's volleyball team. The reassurance her mother tried to draw on was entirely centered around her daughter's ordinary mundaneness -- she's just a regular tween, going through normal adolescent experiences, who wants to play a sport. She's not even an especially good volleyball player! Who could be bothered to care about something so fundamentally normal?

Of course, it doesn't work. Her normalcy doesn't save her. Now certainly, in the Florida case one could say that this kid absolutely was personally targeted (the article suggests there were only two trans female athletes in the entire state at the time). The school board, the police, and so on -- they very much went after her when they found out she was trans and participating in public school athletics. But in a truer sense, I don't think it's accurate to say that what happened had anything to do with "her" at all. She is better described as the victim of the GOP's saturation bombing directed at the trans community, broadly; a campaign that self-consciously does not care about any of its victims as individuals. It's not about her. She's simply the occupant.

If one wants to catastrophize further, I sometimes think about what would happen if our newly-elected overlords got us into a global hot war (Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense is a Fox News personality who openly promoted the idea of a first strike attack on North Korea). It feels, and some sense is, cosmically unfair that such a war would effect me. What do I have to do with anything? I didn't vote for this! I think this whole thing is stupid! But what's true for soldiers is even more true for civilians caught in war zones -- we're all just regular people, and our regularity simply does not matter (this insight applies to other civilians who are actually, and not just hypothetically, stuck in actual war zones right now). If the rockets start raining down on Portland, it will do me no good to call out to them and say "I had nothing to do with us -- go over there!" They in no way will have my name on them, and they will  nonetheless be implacably indifferent to me.

Perhaps the moral of the story, then, is to not be afraid to stand up. Your normalcy, your ordinariness won't save you. Maybe it should, but it won't. It may or may not surprise you to know that this conclusion is very hard for me to grasp onto. I actually don't have any desire to stand out, I'm not looking to present a visage one cannot look away from. I'm fine doing "ordinary" politics and writing and participation, but I have no desire to be special beyond that. My fondest wish is that the world leave me alone and I leave it alone in turn.

But that probably isn't going to be an option. Someone like me may or may not be directly targeted for abuse and oppression -- as a Jew, as an academic, or as a Democrat. But targeted or no, there's always the chance that some shrapnel will find me as an "occupant". I don't think of myself as particularly special or distinct, I have no illusions that I represent some critical node in the Resistance to Trumpist oppression. I'm just a regular, normal guy. But normalcy will not keep me safe.

Yet More Trumpist Humiliation of the ADL

I really don't intend for my post-election coverage to be so ADL-centric. But I can't help but be struck at the degree to which Trump's Jewish and Israel-related decision-making might as well be solely based on how to personally humiliate the ADL, and prompt them into embarrassing and degrading acts of submission and hypocrisy, to the greatest extent possible.

For example, Trump's announced pick for UN Ambassador is New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik. One of my basic rules of 2024 political observation was that "one does not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Elise Stefanik," who defined the term bad-faith grandstanding when it came to her supposed objections to campus antisemitism even as she was directly promoting dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theories on her own. 

But alas, the ADL eagerly jumped in with praise for the selection, allowing us to juxtapose this:

next to this:

Like I said -- just abject, humiliating supplication. It couldn't be more pathetic.

Or consider the position of United States Ambassador to Israel. If ever past was prologue, this is it. The first time Donald Trump was elected, he appointed an ambassador to Israel who referred to liberal Jews as "kapos". The ADL maintained a studious silence, a choice which I maintained "sold out" a substantial swath of the Jewish community that it purportedly was tasked to protect.

This time around, the nominee is going to be former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has an even more illustrative history with the ADL. You see, back in 2011, the following sequence occurred:

1. Huckabee made spurious and offensive analogies to the Holocaust (comparing it to, of all things, the national debt).
2. The ADL publicly took exception.
3. Huckabee threatened the ADL.
4. The ADL scampered backwards and issued a groveling apology.

So here, at least, the ADL already got ahead of schedule, and I look forward to some embarrassingly effusive praise directed towards Huckabee to emerge forthwith.

What we saw in 2016, is only going to be worse in 2024. That's true on many levels, but for the ADL in particular it is evidently apparent -- they will sell us out. They will take vulnerable American Jews, who are rightfully terrified about emergent Christian nationalism and White supremacy and violent extremism and, yes, left-wing campus antisemitism too*, and they will leave us to twist. They will do it regularly, and repeatedly, and without hesitation, and for an embarrassingly cheap payoff.

* I include this because, by cuddling up to the far-right powers that be, the ADL will necessarily kneecap any ability to effectively fight campus antisemitism, though they certainly will retain the capacity to yell about it. The sorts of tactics which actually might tamp down on and respond to campus antisemitism, versus the sorts of tactics which yield good Fox News ragebait and can justify blowing up the Department of Education, are not compatible with one another, and the ADL is going to lash itself to the latter at the expense of the former. While there still may be utility in what the ADL can do for someone like me on the local level, in terms of a cohesive, national strategy I do not have any more confidence in the ADL's ability to effectively protect me from campus antisemitism than I have confidence in its ability to protect me from conservative antisemitism.

Another, (Mostly) Unrelated Way Life Sucks Now

A few days ago, I was chatting with my mom (who's retired down in Florida). After our usual pleasantries about the doomed world we live in, she told me about a weird thing that happened at her house while she was out (she has a Ring doorbell and so saw the recording).

Basically, two people, a woman and a man came up and knocked on her door for awhile. Since nobody was home, obviously no one answered (though my mom said that if she was home alone, she'd be disinclined to talk to strangers banging on her door anyway). Eventually, the woman left a card and then they drove off. The card identified the woman as a U.S. Marshal, with a name, telephone, and email; on the back she wrote a note asking to please contact her ASAP about a "subpoena".

My mom thought, and I agreed, that this seemed pretty suspicious. My parents are law-abiding folk and aren't otherwise involved in any litigation; mom couldn't think of any reason that federal marshals would be delivering a subpoena. The note wasn't addressed to anyone in particular (it didn't have either of my parents' names, for instance). She was already on edge from the election, and living in DeSantis-land added to her fears that there might be some sort of political thuggery or intimidation at work. I googled the name on the card, which didn't reveal anything; on the other hand the phone number did match that of the local United States Courthouse. I asked my mom if she and dad had a lawyer and stressed that they should not let anyone pressure them into signing or paying or doing anything. Fortunately, my dad is a retired attorney and we know many people in the legal world, so they had plenty of resources to figure out if things were legitimate or not.

Anyway, the next day rolls around and it turns out that the card and the note and everything ... was entirely legitimate. An old case of my dad's from before he retired, that he thought had long fizzled out, had burbled back to life without warning (the reasons why this resulted in a federal subpoena are frankly too stupid to go into, but that's not my story to tell anyway). It'll be a quick bit of work for an old client in a few weeks, but everything was basically above board. No one was trying to steal their kidneys after all.

I told this story to a colleague of mine at work, and he relayed a similar situation he had been in a few months ago: he got a call from a man identifying himself as a police officer who claimed to have found a check under my colleague's name. The number from the call was a personal cell number; it was not that of the local police department. So my colleague called the department directly to ask if the man who called was really one of theirs, and the answer was ... yes. Apparently, some of his checks had been stolen out of the mail and recovered, and they really were calling to inform him of the situation. Again, everything was exactly as it was stated to be. No scam here.

In both cases, growing experience with spam and scams and hoaxes made people (quite reasonably) suspicious of genuine, legitimate interactions with authority figures. And hearing the outcome of these two stories, I thought back on something that happened to me a few weeks earlier, when I got a call from a man identifying himself as a county sheriff who asked me "why I missed my grand jury summons." I hadn't received any such summons and this is a scam I'm familiar with, so I told him something along the lines of "I'm pretty sure you're a scammer, otherwise contact my attorney" and hung up on him. Of course now, since the above two cases both turned out to be legitimate, I'm wondering if I just told an actual county sheriff to go fuck himself.

I haven't heard anything about this since, and again the "you missed your jury duty" bit is a common scam, so I'm pretty sure my instincts were right the first time. But again, it goes to a broader toxification in our informational ecosystem -- all these scams and hoaxes mean nobody knows who to trust at all: we risk falling for the fake, and we also risk ignoring what's real, and it's increasingly difficult to know how to ameliorate either of those risks. It is an exhausting and anxiety-laden way to live life, and it sucks.

And while I said this this particular suck is mostly unrelated to the main way life is terrible right now, there is a connection. Authoritarianism, Arendt teaches us, doesn't demand that people believe fictions. It flourishes best when people either do not care about, or lose confidence in their ability to distinguish, fact and fiction. 

One way this occurs is by a faux-worldly cynicism, where one congratulates oneself for recognizing that all politicians lie, are scoundrels, are in the bag for "the elites", etc., and so there are no differences worth sussing out. But another mechanism, that can afflict the more diligent and virtuous, is where institutions of authority and trust become so degraded or jumbled that it just becomes impossible to sort anything out. This is the risk of, for example, deep fakes -- one can entirely recognize that not everybody is lying while being helplessly unable to distinguish between an actual video of a political event and a manipulated or concocted one. 

Trusted institutions with reputations for vetting can help alleviate this problem. But as public confidence in those institutions fade -- or they simply become easier to spoof -- we're left with an endless sea of slop content, none of which can even in concept contain any markers of reliability or trustworthiness. And one thing we're seeing in 2024 is that this sort of toxified informational ecosystem is apocalyptically dangerous to a functioning democracy. It is not an accident that high on Trump's target list is leveraging government power to sabotage any effort -- public or private -- at combatting "misinformation". A world in which nobody can trust anything, where lies and truth become a single indistinguishable mass, is a world favorable to his brand of fascism.

One thing that I think "acab" sort of misses is that, even if it is correct to say things like "never trust the police", it is in fact bad to not be able to trust the police or other authority figures. Wondering if "the police" calling your house are really just Nigerian scammers, and wondering if "the police" calling your house are really just looking to harass you for lining up against the dominant governing faction, are two sides of the same coin. If I get subpoenaed, I want to know that without dialing up my entire legal network to figure out if it's a hoax! If I did accidentally miss a jury summons, I want someone to tell me so I can work things out!  More alarmingly, if an authority figure knocks on my door and says "there's a dangerous fugitive on the loose, have you seen anything," I want to be able to help out without wondering if the fugitive is a woman who had an abortion or an immigrant avoiding the deportation camps. When that trust fractures, it is a terrible way to live. The atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion that it cultivates, even -- maybe especially -- when it is well-warranted, is toxic to a free society. But in so many ways, this is the direction we're moving.

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).

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.