The Left Left the Mizrahim to the Right

A characteristically thoughtful piece by Gershom Gorenberg has an important passage on recent efforts by the Israeli government to further include the lives and stories of Mizrahi Jews in its educational curricula.

In June, the Education Ministry published the Biton Report, named for the head of the committee that produced it, prominent Algerian-born poet Erez Biton. It's a set of recommendations for reforming the country's Ashkenazi-centered schooling. Ashkenazi Jews have their roots in Germany and Eastern Europe. The report aims at including the history and culture of Mizrahi Jews—those from Muslim countries—and of Sephardim, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain. 

Reform is long overdue. It's a failure of the Israeli left that the issue was left for a right-wing government to champion.

The emphasis is my own,  because it is worthy of emphasis. The degree to which the Israeli left (to say nothing of the broader Jewish left, to say nothing of the broader international left) has left matters of Mizrahi equality and inclusion is a failure we must be held accountable for. That the right picked up the baton we dropped is likewise to their credit. It is our fault, our responsibility, that we did not tackle this issue on our own. We cannot therefore be indignant when a community we did not, for the most part, protect today mistrusts our politics (to say nothing of our egalitarian slogans).

The way you rectify that is by jumping back into the fray. I found this post on +972 searching for ways to reinvigorate efforts to promote restitution for Mizrahi refugees heartening (though, it must be said, my friends at JIMENA were less enthused). It's not quid pro quo, we're not "owed" anything for our (belated) backing. You do it because it's right, and hope that leads someplace better.

If You Like the Greens, You'll LOVE Donald Trump

The Forward manages to not only find the rare Jewish Trump voter, but, well, I'll let his justification speak for itself:

Let me be clear: I am to the left of President Obama on healthcare. I believe Bernie represents the best instincts of public service, though I find some of his views and certainly some of his supporters an anathema. I have spent most of my professional career in not for profit work around the country. 

I am Jewish, and this election will be no different than past elections. A very high percentage of my fellow Jews with whom I have identified, lived and worked among for my entire life overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic candidate. 

Yet, I will continue what has become a 21st century electoral activity for me: proudly voting for the Republican at the top of the ticket during presidential years. At the same time, you should know, I continue my equally stubborn sense of independence down ballot, and I have voted for at least one local Green Party candidate for Congress, though again I found certain of his views utterly distasteful. Ethics matter to me, especially when you have a very long track record. 

Donald Trump is a wild man and a populist. I believe both judgments are exactly what America needs. If anything, I hope he can fob off the corporate Republicans more worried about planning their taxes. I think he can; I know Hillary can’t shake off the yoke of Wall Street.

With leftist credentials like that, what's left to argue about? Trump is the only realistic choice for Green Party leftists concerned about health care, ethics, and reining in Wall Street. The good news is that those four paragraphs pretty much sum up all you need to know about both Trump supporters and Green Party voters.

DOJ Report: The Baltimore Police Rules Without Law

Rule of law is more than just a slogan. It represents the core of the government's contract with the people -- government does rule over us, but it does so bounded and restricted by law. Constitutional guarantees of things like probable cause and due process are not bonus objectives, to be pursued once we've got the fundamentals down. They are guarantees for a reason.

Radley Balko's summary of the DOJ's report on the Baltimore Police is simply stunning. It depicts a department that is, simply put, out of control -- or, even more worrisome, has built lawlessness into its practices and procedures in a very controlled and determined manner. I, too, had my jaw hit the floor when I saw this passage:

During a ride-along with Justice Department officials, a BPD sergeant instructed a patrol officer to stop a group of young African-American males on a street corner, question them, and order them to disperse. When the patrol officer protested that he had no valid reason to stop the group, the sergeant replied “Then make something up.”

During a ride-along! That is simply breath-taking. But it appears to reflect a system of policies which don't even pretend to play in the ambiguities of the law. Searches conducted without any probable cause. Arrests made without any legal violation. Complaints dismissed without any substantive inquiry. And it happens over and over again.

These wrongs are not evenly distributed, even in Baltimore. They are targeted like a laser at a Black community which is not served so much as it is overseen by those entrusted with the public trust. Balko writes words that are worth reflecting on for those of us for whom what is documented in this report is not in our experience:

I can’t imagine what it must be like to get stopped by the police 20 or more times every year — to be arrested and jailed for nothing at all, to be stripped nude and searched in public for a traffic offense, or to be told it’s basically illegal for me to merely exist in public. I can’t imagine trying to have a life under those conditions, to raise kids, to just function as a human being — much less rise above my surroundings.

These issues matter. They reflect a rot that runs deep. It won't be fixed overnight, but neither will it be fixed by ignoring the problem. You are not obligated to complete the work, the sages tell us, but neither are you free to desist from it.

"Genocide", Black Lives Matter, and the Persuasive Definition

Words have meanings. But those meanings are liable to change. One motivator for seeking a change in a word's meaning -- to have it encompass something that currently falls outside of its ambit -- is to harness the emotive punch associated with that word. "Democracy", for example, is a word with many positive associations, and so people very frequently argue that various concepts or norms not currently associated with "democracy" should, in fact, be considered democratic and thereby fall under the beneficent aura of "democracy". So too with negatively-connoted words -- racism, rape, fascism. We push things we don't like into those categories (or, more accurately, stretch those categories to encompass things we don't like) so as to capture their negative power; to tie them together with the harsh vitriolic impact of those terms. This practice is what philosopher Charles L. Stevenson called the "persuasive definition."

The persuasive definition has a somewhat shady reputation. It is seen as blurring previously sharp meanings. It can be viewed as illicitly seizing moral force rather than gaining it organically. Frequently, it is practiced as a sort of sleight-of-hand -- staying deliberately ambiguous about whether one really means to evoke the "original" meaning of the term or not. Yet at some level I think the persuasive definition is responsible for virtually all attempts to push the boundaries of language. The whole reason we bother to argue that a given concept should be identified as "freedom," as opposed to coming up with some new name for it ("beebom"), is because "freedom" carries with it a cluster of emotive meanings holding real political purchase, while "beebom" does not. The connotive impacts of language are sites of power; obviously they will be contested. It's far from clear that such contestation is wrong, or even avoidable.

Much of the Jewish reaction to the Israel section of the Movement for Black Lives (MBL) platform has focused on its contention that Israel is engaging in a "genocide" of Palestinians. I haven't written on this directly yet; by and large I endorse the measured and principled response of organizations like T'ruah, J Street, and the ADL -- each of whom recognizes the critical importance of the issues Black Lives Matter organizes around, each of whom recognizes the essential insights of many elements of the MBL platform, and each of whom leveled sincere and valid objections to the way it conceives of and speaks about the world's sole Jewish-majority state. I also recoil at the efforts by some on the fringes of the Jewish community to demand Jewish silence when the MBL turns it gaze to Jewish issues, and bristle when they act as if objecting to particular language in a particular platform is akin to closing off all critical discussion of Israel whatsoever. When If Not Now activists claim to "recognize the links between black liberation, Palestinian liberation and Jewish liberation", but demand that Jewish organizations simply accept without question what MBL says about the most prominent manifestation of modern Jewish liberation, they render Jews second-class members of our own struggle. That sort of behavior is incompatible with Jewish equality; it is reflective of a situation where Jewish marginalization is not seen as resting on equal turf with that of other groups.

But that issue is, for the most part, best left for another time. I want now to return to the "genocide" language and the matter of the "persuasive definition". Two of the authors of this section, Ben Ndugga-Kabuye and Rachel Gilmer, have talked to Jewish media about how this language came about, and I think it is evident that the persuasive definition element is very much in play here. They and others asserted that "genocide" need not refer to offenses identical to the Nazi Holocaust, or even ones which involve systematic extermination and mass murder. The point of using the term "genocide" was to evoke the gravity associated with that term, to hammer home the severity of the injustice experienced -- even if that injustice is, in the words of Robin Kelley, more of a "cultural genocide -- losing a culture, losing a language, losing your land." From their vantage, the orthodox definition of "genocide" monopolizes emotive and organizing power in the hands of a particular class of wrongs; preventing them from being harnessed to combat other injustices that are pressing in their own right. When they claim genocide, they are acting against framings that view the wrongs in question as "mere" violence (who doesn't experience violence some of the time?) or discrimination (who hasn't been maltreated on occasion?). Genocide helps evoke the injustice as the sort of wrong which threatens, in a real way, to make ordinary practices of living as a cohesive social group impossible.

This, I think, presents the case for the reasonability of "genocide" in a fair light. Yet nonetheless there are, I think, Jewish objections to the deployment of "genocide" language here that I think have very strong force and demand serious consideration. The most obvious is the suspicion that the meaning being evoked here is not being deployed in an impartial manner; it writes a check Jews are not entitled to cash. If "genocide" can include "cultural genocide" (things like "losing a culture, losing a language, losing your land") there would seem to be a very strong case that what happened to North African and Middle Eastern Jews over the course of the mid-20th century was a "genocide" -- and a genocide orchestrated under the banner of anti-Zionism to boot. Those communities were virtually obliterated; communities of thousands of years wiped out within the space of a few decades, albeit mostly by "ordinary" expropriation, discrimination, and violence rather than any generalized politics of extermination. Yet it seems unlikely that MBL would agree to such a labeling. It identifies with anti-Zionist movements in the Middle East; it would object strenuously to being deemed complicit in a genocidal project. Their reticence, in turn, calls  into question whether they seriously believe in the new definition they're forwarding -- will they apply it to friend as well as foe? I was talking the other day to the executive director of a prominent Middle Eastern Jewish organization who spitting mad about the MBL platform and (especially) the demands by groups like JVP that all Jews endorse it without reservation (On JVP: "They completely ignored us for over a decade and now they want to speak on our behalf?"). It's not that her group wants to call what happened to Jews like her a "genocide" (though they have used "ethnic cleansing"); but she is well aware that this discursive reframing is not done on her behalf and is not being made available to her. 

We could push the argument further -- groups like Hamas call for a genocide of Jews in a very "traditional" sense, but even some of the purportedly progressive organizations operating in MBL's circle who would abhor such exterminationist desires nonetheless campaign for a recreation of a Middle Eastern universe where there is no longer a sovereign and independent space of Jewish life capable of self-creation and self-determination. Is that project properly termed "genocidal"? Are they willing to cop to the legitimacy of that label? Discriminatory application of the new persuasive definition is an identifiable wrong, and one that is worth calling out. It suggests that the term is not being used as part of a genuine egalitarian political program, but as a "ticket good for this ride only".

But there is a deeper problem here worth interrogating. The term genocide, as many of the MBL platform defenders do recognize, has a special significance and sensitivity to the Jewish community. Its significance to the Jewish community, in turn, has been the subject of considerable frustration to those who frequently find themselves adverse to the mainstream Jewish community. Often, they treat the Holocaust as a sort of unearned advantage for Jews -- a chip or a card that Jews can use to tilt the discursive game in our favor, as when Naomi Klein accused Jews of thinking "we get one get-away-with-genocide-free-card." The contemporary Jew, they seem to think, is downright lucky that his or her relatives perished in the camps -- look at the bounty it's gotten us! How fortunate we are, to have this talisman of the Shoah that we can wave around to ward off all criticism going forward! They treat the Holocaust not as a source of trauma but as a source of privilege, and an unjust privilege at that. Sometimes this occurs in a very explicit manner, as in Holocaust denial or contentions that it was actually part of the Zionist plan all along. More often it is implicit, with the vaguely acknowledged Jewish suffering in the Holocaust placed on equal footing with the illegitimate benefits Jews seized in its wake ("Germany," Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, "is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians."). Accordingly, their approach to genocide and the Holocaust is focused on neutering this illicit advantage, of depriving Jews and Jewish groups of their capacity to rely on it for staking claims and demanding hearings. If Jews fall on both sides of the "genocide" ledger, then the Holocaust variable is canceled out and the Jews return to our starting position.

The simplest way of expressing this problem, then, is to return to the issue of the persuasive definition as a sleight-of-hand. Even if in private MBL organizers might agree that the "genocide" they see occurring in Israel and Palestine is meaningfully distinct from the Nazi Holocaust, adopting the label purposefully elides the distinction. The point of using the term is precisely to appropriate the emotive power that largely emerged from the crematorium smokestack, and the point is also to posit an equality between what the Jews had done to them then and what the Jews are doing to others now, all the while denying that they really are saying Gaza is like Auschwitz, or really saying occupation is like gas chambers. That gambit comes off as disingenuous, and reasonably so. From the Jewish vantage point, what is happening is that cultural capital derived in part from the ashes of burnt Jews is stripped from those bodies and turned on their descendants. It is nothing less than the leveraging of Jewish oppression against Jews, and that is always in my view anti-Semitic.

Yet there is something important to be said about this issue of the role "genocide" plays in discourse by and about Jews. I agree that the Holocaust, to some extent, has provided a foundation for Jewish claims staked against non-Jews, in the same way that I think that slavery and Jim Crow have provided a foundation for Black claims against Whites -- though in both cases that foundation is honored less frequently than often assumed. But what underwrites this foundation? Frequently, critics suggest that Jews, as Edward Goldstein put it, think "that the Holocaust confers permanent, unassailable virtue on Israel and Jews." But this is nonsense -- oppression doesn't confer virtue on its victims, and nobody sensible believes otherwise. Rather, the Holocaust's relevance was not showing the perfection of the Jews, but the imperfection of the Gentiles. Used to being the measure of all things, the Holocaust (as I wrote in response to Goldstein):

destabilizes the hegemonic presence of non-Jewish voices and thus creates space for Jewish voices to be heard. To the casual observer that looks like a claim that Jews are "perfect", but that's only because Jews are claiming the right to speak on equal terms with a non-Jewish presence that had previously arrogated to itself a label of universal transcendence.

For thousands of years, for much of the world, part of the cultural patrimony enjoyed by all non-Jews -- spiritual and secular, Church and Mosque, enlightenment and romantic, European and Middle Eastern -- was the unquestionable right to stand superior over Jews. It was that right which the Holocaust took away, or at least called into question; the unthinking faith of knowing you were the more enlightened one, the spiritually purer one, the more rational one, the dispenser of morality rather than the object of it. To be sure, some people were better positioned to enjoy this right than others. And some people arrived onto the scene late in the game, only to discover that part of the bounty they were promised may no longer be on the table. Of course they're aggrieved! The European immigrant who never owned a slave but was at least promised racial superiority is quite resentful when the wages of Whiteness stop being what they once were. Similarly, persons who lived far from the centers of Christian or Muslim power where Jewish subordination was forged are nonetheless well aware of what was supposed to be included in modernity's gift basket. They recognize what they've "lost" as acutely as anyone else.

"The Germans," the old saying goes, "will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz." And not just the Germans. Many people deeply resent the Jews for what Auschwitz took away from them -- the easy knowledge that their vantage point was elevated over and superior to that of the Jews, the entitlement to be able to talk about Jews without having to listen to Jews. The desire to neuter the Holocaust is a desire to return to that old state of affairs. And so it shouldn't surprise anyone that Jews exhibit a special ferocity over the meaning of "genocide". As noted above, the controversy of this MBL language has in large part played out in terms of whether it is even proper for Jews to register an objection. Are we valid contributors to the conversation? Are we equal players in this struggle? This is no coincidence. When people charge the Jewish state with genocide, part of what they are doing -- with varying degrees of explicitness -- is telling Jews "this concept which obliged us to listen to you no longer can underwrite that duty." And in that brave old world, they can return to baseline that had existed for thousands of years -- where it was unthinkable, outrageous, blasphemous, for a Jew to have the temerity to contest a non-Jewish articulation of Jewish experience.

The debate over the meaning of genocide runs hot because for an important sector of progressive discourse, "genocide" is the only concept that grants Jews access to campaigns for equality as among their primary subjects. What else is left? Generic human equality? Even if Jews ever had it, such universalism is passe anyway. Anti-racism? We're not people of color, no matter what the White Supremacists say and even when we're talking about a Jewish state where over half the population is not of European descent. Non-discrimination? Everyone knows Jews are anti-discrimination winners, even when Jews make up over half the victims of religious-based hate crimes in the United States and are targeted for a welter of discriminatory campaigns to drive us out of cultural, political, and academic exchange. Genocide is the last firewall left standing; the last citadel the forces of Gentile Supremacy have not yet been able to overrun. Once that flag is taken, the non-Jew can finally break free, soar beyond the fallen Jew, and reassume her rightful place of looking down on us from up on high.

None of this entails abandoning the struggle for racial justice -- including, it should be said, justice for Jews of color in and out of Israel -- that is embodied in the Black Lives Matter message. We pursue that goal because it is right and because it is just, and that is reason enough. Nor do I necessarily think Jews should disassociate from the broader Black Lives Matter campaign. It is notable that both the hard right and the far-left have united in preaching a message of silence to the Jewish mainstream vis-a-vis Black Lives Matter -- the former the silence of shunning, the latter that of acquiescence. Yet it is only engagement -- open, honest, vulnerable engagement that takes neither endemic racial injustice nor ingrained anti-Semitism off the table -- that offers a way forward. No relationship is free of missteps, wounds, hurts, and wrongs. Relationships are built from what we do after the hurt is identified, in the bravery to return to the fray, announce the wound, and hope for growth. If we think anti-Semitism is a ubiquitous problem, the corollary is that anti-Semitism will be found in organizations that nonetheless demand our engagement, that cannot and should not be written off. Jonathan Zasloff is right to say that one of the morals of the MBL platform story is that the Jewish community as a whole -- not just a non-representative few -- needs to be in the room. We continue to speak, not because it will work, but because it could. And sometimes, that's enough.

A modified version of this post was published in Tablet Magazine.

Quote of the Evening: Sander Gilman on the Most Assimilated Jews

Writing on the intersection of Jews and "race" at the turn of the 20th century, Sander Gilman writes something very interesting:

But the more Jews in Germany and Austria at the fin de siecle looked like their non-Jewish contemporaries, the more they sensed themselves as different and were so considered. As the Anglo-Jewish social scientist Joseph Jacobs noted, "it is some quality which stamps their features as distinctly Jewish. This is confirmed by the interesting fact that Jews who mix much with the outer world seem to lose their Jewish quality. This was the case with Karl Marx . . ." And yet, as we know, it was precisely those Jews who were most assimilated, who were passing, who feared that their visibility as Jews could come to the fore. It was they who most feared being seen as bearing that disease, Jewishness, which Heinrich Heine said the Jews brought from Egypt.

Sander L. Gilman, “Are Jews White? Or, the History of the Nose Job”, in Les Back & John Solomos, eds. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (London: Routledge 2000), p. 234.

There are, in short, elements at both ends here. On the one hand, there is significant historical evidence that Jewish assimilation has gone hand in hand with Jewish stress of our particularities. The more we are viewed as "like" our contemporaries, the more some of us wish to emphasize that which makes us distinct. Yet, as the latter half of the paragraph emphasizes, there are also those Jews who fear this reemergence. For them, their own Jewishness lurks in the background and threatens their status as unmarked (or -- perhaps more aptly -- marked in the ways they would like). Such persons, one would suspect, would rush to disassociate themselves from the markers of Jewishness -- to make very clear that they do not bear "that disease, Jewishness."

Other-Promotion Tuesday!

It's been a busy time as the end of summer approaches -- and I've made my situation worse by pitching a "big media" piece this week -- so instead of writing something myself, I'm going to promote some other voices that I've come across in the past few days that are well worth your attention:

Joseph Timan, an Iraqi Jew currently studying philosophy at University of Birmingham. Follow him on twitter @josephtiman

Stacey Aviva Flint, an African-American Jew from Chicago who is writing on the historical connections between Black Nationalism and Zionism. No twitter feed, but I hope to see some of her stuff soon on bigger Jewish media platforms.

Third Narrative is an organization I've long been a fan of, and recently joined up with in a formal capacity. It brings together progressive scholars and academics who are willing to fight for Israel, for Palestine, for peace -- and against the racism, anti-Semitism, and academic boycotts that are a disservice to that project. If you fall in that category, please do consider joining us as well.

Feel free to other- or self-promote in the comments!

Letting Anti-Semitism Fly

The most radical thing about this Jordana Horn article in the Kveller may be its title: "It's Time We Stopped Letting Anti-Semitism Fly."

Why?

Because for too long, the narrative most certainly has not been that Jews are too reticent to step in and call out anti-Semitism. Much the opposite: it is taken as an article of faith that Jews do nothing but call out anti-Semitism -- consistently, persistently, often over-sensitively. The idea that Jews need to be told to confront anti-Semitism more aggressively would have been laughable. Even our own institutions take it as a given that Jews "cry anti-Semitism" at the drop of a hat.

I don't think that's true. It hasn't been my experience. There are, to be sure, a variety of responses one can take to perceived anti-Semitism -- and sometimes, depending on the context, letting it slide is a valid choice. But the point is we should trust Jewish evaluations of the situation we're in. If you're Jewish, and a pattern of discourse or conduct worries or threatens you as a Jew, you shouldn't feel uncomfortable speaking out about it. Our testimony may not (and perhaps should not) represent the end of the discussion; but it should be seen as a valid -- indispensable, even -- contribution to it.

Busy with Everything But Roundup

Ever had one major thing on your agenda, which causes you to become superproductive regarding all the minor things on your agenda? That's been me this week.

* * *

Daniel Oppenheimer's meditation on being a "conservative leftist" really spoke to me. I've often described myself as "conservative in temperament but liberal in politics", and this is what I meant. It's also what I mean when I characterize myself as a very, very idealistic pragmatist.

Bibi Netanyahu tells GOP Senators he's still pro-two-states. For all the talk from the RJC about how Democrats are "anti-Israel", it's Republicans who have deviated most dramatically from core elements of the pro-Israel consensus. And it's high time that the pro-Israel establishment take them to task for it.

A really, really fascinating article by Eylon Aslan-Levy on early Israeli diplomatic policy regarding Jewish refugees from Arab countries (early meaning circa 1948-1956). It filled in some significant gaps in my knowledge about this important and nettlesome issue.

T'ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, issues a nuanced, thoughtful, and principled statement on the Black Lives Matter platform.

The Khan Family and Volunteering to Sacrifice

The speech given by the family of Captain Humayun Khan, Muslim, son of immigrants, who died serving in the American army in Iraq, was one of the most powerful moments of this campaign. The response of Donald Trump and his campaign has been one of the darkest. Smearing a Gold Star family, insinuating that the mother of the fallen hero wasn't "allowed" to speak -- it was truly grotesque. Several Trump supporters have, regrettably, followed suit -- this column has been making the rounds on Twitter for example. An old friend of mine posted another one on Facebook by a man named Chris Mark arguing that since Khan volunteered to serve in the American army, he -- not his parents -- is the only one who could be said to have sacrificed. Mark was clearly frustrated that the Khans were supporting a political party that he viewed as insufficiently supportive of the troops, and contended that "[t]o conflate the need to prevent potential terrorists from entering our country with the belief that ‘all Muslims’ should be banned is simply wrong and disingenuous."

I'm reposting, with minor edits, my response to the friend. Before I do so, though, I should observe that my friend is himself a person of color, of South Asian descent, who is currently serving in the American armed forces. I make that notation because it is always worth noting the perspective from which someone is coming from, particularly when it might diverge from popular expectations regarding what someone from that background would think. In any event, here is what I wrote in reply:

The question of whether a Gold Star family has itself "sacrificed" something strikes me as semantic at best; I've never before heard anyone chiding the family of a fallen soldier that they cannot speak of sacrifice. I'm doubtful one wants to plant one's flag on those grounds.

That said, the spirit of voluntarism does matter. All those who serve choose to put themselves in harm's way; that choice demands respect and admiration. But Trump's proposal for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" (it is Mark who is "simply wrong and disingenuous" to characterize this as "the need to prevent potential terrorists from entering our country". There is nobody who does not seek to prevent the latter; Trump was unambiguous in calling precisely for a blanket ban on all Muslim arrivals, as the link in Mark's own letter attests to) disrespects that voluntarism. The ethic of service, of voluntary sacrifice, is but a manifestation of the larger American ethos that we are who we choose to be, not what society or government assumes us to be. Khan chose to be a soldier and chose to risk the ultimate sacrifice. But were it up to Trump, Capt. Khan would have never had the opportunity to make the choice to serve in the first place, because Trump would not have let his family arrive in the United States at all. Trump's policy treats the Khan family as a threat solely due to their faith. That judgment crashes against the reality that they produced a hero.

There's a more basic point at work here, though. I can understand the frustration from someone who sees a military family carrying water for a party that he feels doesn't support the troops. As the respective conventions make evident, there are many other families of servicemembers or other public servants that feel the same way about the GOP. And it will thus inevitably be the case that some persons who have or whose loved ones have sacrificed themselves for our nation will be the authors of pained charges against those political figures they view as having failed them and their families. And those charges may not be right or accurate or even fair. The GOP has put up some Benghazi families in similar roles to that taken up by Khan's parents; no doubt Secretary Clinton views their charges as deeply wrongful.

But if you're a decent public servant dealing with a grieving family -- even one saying bad things about you, even one giving a speech attacking you -- you take the hit. You don't issue a snarky press release, you don't suggest the family forbids women from talking. Cindy Sheehan said plenty of things about President Bush that I (no fan of 43) found pretty ridiculous. But Bush, to his credit, didn't degrade or demean her. He took the hit, because sometimes taking the hit is part of the job. And that basic decency, unfortunately, is something Donald Trump proved he is just not capable of doing.

Has Trump finally gone too far? I doubt it. If "too far" hasn't happened yet, I don't know why this would change anything. But who knows. It would be poetic justice if the straw that finally broke this bigoted camel's back was that Donald Trump could not help himself in attacking the family of a Muslim, first-generation, American war hero.

God is in the Details

Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, and I couldn't be happier. Her speech was quite good, even though it is tough for her to compete with legendary orators like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. On that note, my sentiments were summed up perfectly by one of my law firm friends:

Look, Hillary does do the service part better than the public part.... But that's part of why I love her. Too many of our politicians do the reverse.

Where it matters, Hillary Clinton gets it done.

The fact is, politics isn't about the sweeping arc or the soaring speech. It is often "a victory of a hundred thousand inches"; the strong and sole boring through hard boards. It isn't always sexy, or high-profile, or headline-worthy. It isn't always even lovable. But each one of those inches matters to someone, and we should never sell short the commitment it takes to keep on shouldering that ball a little forward, day in and day out.

So if I was to pick the line in Clinton's speech that stuck with me -- the reason I'll pull the lever for Hillary Clinton not as the best of bad options, not because she's what we're stuck with, but with pride, optimism, and enthusiasm -- it's

Because it's not just a detail if it's your kid.

Jill Stein: The Ultimate Ideological Compromise

Last week, I explored the issue of whether leftists "should" vote for Jill Stein. Many people on the left frame the choice as being between ideological purity -- the candidate whose positions are closer to their ideal candidate -- and realism about who can get elected. My argument was that (a) part of the preference calculation for picking one candidate over another should include the realistic effects of that choice (here, making it more likely Trump comes into office), and (b) while one can decide that said effects are less important than avoiding the moral compromise of voting Clinton, that decision is substantively awful and is condemnation-worthy in itself.

But while I still agree with that analysis, I also think it gives Stein way too much credit, in that it accepts the basic suggestion that Stein is a non-compromised, purely progressive choice hampered only by the fact that she stands no chance of victory.* In reality, many of Stein's positions range from the objectively terrible to the merely incoherent. The "realism" argument isn't just about political realism but policy realism -- Jill Stein swaps out actual progressive reforms in favor of vague fulminations about how the "system" is all that stands between us and our hearts' desires. It's the revenge of the Green Lantern Theory of Politics. To the extent that progressives have an ideological commitment to, say, basic precepts of science, it is not an uncompromised position to punch the ballot for a candidate who plays footsie with anti-Vaxxers and rejects the scientific consensus on GMOs.

To take one example near to my heart, Jill Stein's energy platform calls for moving completely to clean power sources by 2030. That sounds great; I'm all for aggressive efforts to promote clean power. But in this call she excludes nuclear power and (if we take the Green Party platform seriously) hydroelectric as well, without which the move to clean power is essentially impossible (unlike, say, wind or solar, nuclear power and hydroelectric power are "dispatchable" sources of power -- they can run at any time as needed, as opposed to only when the sun shines or the wind blows. This attribute is absolutely essential for grid stability, which is why we couldn't just build a lot more solar plants to replace our fossil fuel generators). This isn't a more ideologically pure energy package that suffers from being a political non-starter; it's an ideologically blinkered energy package that suffers from being utterly unmoored from any understanding of how the electricity grid works, much less how to leverage it in favor of our environmental goals.

To put it another way, the choice isn't between a flawed progressive who can get elected and a great progressive who can't. It's between a flawed progressive who can get elected and an even more flawed progressive who can't. Voting for Jill Stein is a massive ideological compromise for anyone who thinks of themselves progressive. And one gets the sense that it only feels like a "pure" choice because Stein stands no chance of being elected; the vote isn't even "for Stein" as much as it is "against the system."

And that logic hammers home another reality: The basis of Jill Stein's appeal is more or less the same as that which pulls people to Donald Trump. Both are seeking to harness an inchoate anti-establishmentarian rage that need not (and in many ways prefers not) tie itself to the world of facts and data. Everything from workable policy agendas to a basic consonance with the factual world can be dismissed as a sort of establishment-gotcha. It is to the great credit of the American left that Stein looks like she'll only muster support from the left-most 2% of the electorate or so, while Trump will capture the votes of at least the right-most 46%.

I doubt that most left-wingers are going to end up voting for Jill Stein. And it strikes me as equally unlikely that they will be the ones to tilt the election over to Donald Trump (though the spectre of Nader continues to linger). But regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins come November, if you're a Jill Stein supporter you don't get the consolation prize of knowing you kept your ideological purity intact. You compromised your integrity just as much as anyone else did.

* Some might object and argue that Stein, while not perfect, is on net a better progressive than Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure I'd even cede that, but I'll also stand my ground on the argument as presented. If voting Jill Stein is conceded to be an ideological compromise, it isn't clear how the argument against voting for Hillary Clinton on the grounds that one is tired of "compromising" sustains itself. At most it could be an argument of degree -- I'll concede up to Jill Stein, but not further -- but that's rarely how it is presented and lacks quite a bit of the self-righteous purity that normally drives the claim.

Why Must All the Candidates Be So Fucking Neoliberal?

[To the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”]

Oh….

Clinton voted for the war

And Timothy Kaine is such a bore.

Cory Booker loves Wall Street

And VP Warren spells defeat.

None of them’s acceptable

For my precious vote electoral

Why must all the candidates be so fucking neoliberal?

I think we’ve had enough of the White House

being a Whitehouse

And Tom Perez as Labor’s top

Didn’t restore the union shop

Tom Vilsack is in the sack for

Big Agricultural

Why must all the candidates be so fucking neoliberal?

O’Malley’s a coastal technocrat

Another pawn of the fat cats

Schumer opposed the Iran Deal.

Castro’s young—is he for real?

Of Biden I’ve had my fill

Since he wrote the ’94 Crime Bill

Why must all the candidates be so fucking neoliberal?

           

Cummings seemed to think

Black Lives Mattered more than TPP

And Becarra didn’t swear

I’d go to Yale tuition-free.

As Congressmen I think they’re swell

But if they’re picked it’s “betrayal!”

Why must all the candidates be so fucking neoliberal?

I was for Bernie until I learned he’d

Endorsed the dreaded Hillary

Now I see that he’s sold out

Of that there is no doubt.

Could the problem be with me?

My vain demands of purity?

Nah.

Why must all the candidates be so fucking neoliberal!

Who We Thought They Were

The post convention bump has pushed Donald Trump into the lead in the presidential race. While it's worth taking that news with a grain of salt -- polls bounce around tremendously around convention time, before settling back into place -- it is also a fair moment to think a bit about what a Trump victory would tell us about America.

The Republican primary caused several GOP loyalists to admit that Trump's victory essentially "proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true." Democrats had long alleged that the core of the Republican Party's base was built on simmering white resentment, bigotry, xenophobia, intolerance, and a thirst to get at a diverse range of "thems" who didn't count as real Americans (gays, religious minorities, people of color, women ... the list goes on). Republican elites had viewed this charge as basically a political smear, right up until the monster that they had created through baiting the Tea Party and playing birther-curious broke free of their constraints and ran away the nomination.

But a primary is just a primary. What happens if Trump wins the whole thing? Well, in that case it may well "prove every bad thing leftists have ever said about America is basically true." The left narrative about America, after all, is precisely that the organizing feature of American politics is racism and white supremacy, and that we're deluding ourselves if we think that it did anything but go into a minor hibernation for the last fifty years or so. What does it say about our national trajectory if we can easily turn back George Wallace in 1968 but can't keep Donald Trump out of office in 2016? What retort would we have to the simple statement that racism and xenophobia, as electoral rallying cries, really are what gets folks to "stomp the floor"?

Yet we wouldn't only be learning something about the right, or even America as a whole. If Trump -- a historically bad candidate, with historically low approvals, open in his bigotry and contempt for large swaths of the American public -- wins the election, it would also "prove every bad thing centrists have ever said about the left is basically true." What's been the core of the center's charge? That the left isn't politically serious, that it prefers its own sanctimony to the much scarier work of getting things done, that it is more seduced by the thought of rebellion than the staid and square work of slowly mining in the hard rock. If the left -- too besot with its own "purity" or inchoate resentment against "the establishment" -- can't coalesce to beat back this candidate, it would verify once again its complete and utter impotence as a meaningful force for improving the nation or the world. We have, after all, gone through this dance time and again: Walking away from universal health care in the Nixon administration because it wasn't single-payer and then waiting 40 years to claw our way back to the same basic deal; letting the Freedom of Choice Act fall to interleft squabbling in the 1990s and never getting it near passage since; watching the Occupy movement put economic justice on the political agenda for the first time in a generation and then seeing it promptly collapses in on itself because of an ingrained aversion to sullying itself with actual making a political demand (and let's not even get started on Ralph Nader in 2000). And now we're set to go through it all again.

Finally, we can also draw one lesson if Clinton wins. It would "prove" (not that we'd need proof) "every good thing that the center and left has said about minority groups in America". For it is almost assured that, win or lose, Trump will gain a majority of the white vote. And at that point, it might be worth dusting off William J. Wilson's 1860 essay What Shall We Do With the White People?, asking "are they fit for self-government?" If democracy "is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard," straight white Christian men want Trump; with all the implications that entails for their commitment to (what we've told ourselves are) the basic tenets of the American creed. If Clinton wins, it will be due to passion and commitment of non-white voters going to bat for her in the general election. Given the stakes of this election, it'd be no exaggeration to say that it will have been the American Others -- African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Jews, Muslims, and more -- who will have ultimately saved the American experiment.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XXIX: Plummeting Caviar Stocks

Rich people, as a rule, love caviar. And Jews, as any good anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist knows, are all rich. But the really woke anti-Semites know that Jews don't eat caviar (it's not kosher). And with caviar-producing sturgeon facing threats from invasive species -- well, it's not hard to put the pieces together (particularly if every puzzle has the same answer):

“Introduced species can disturb the ecosystem of an area,” Seyyed Jafar Mousavi[], the Deputy Head of Intelligence and Operation Department at the Biological Headquarters of Civil Defence Organization, said in an interview with Mehr News Agency, as translated by IFP. 

Some species can do more harm than good to an ecosystem, he noted. 

He noted that Caspian seal, Kilka and Sevruga fish belong to the Caspian Sea; however, comb jellies are alien species that have come from the Atlantic Ocean. 

“We firmly believe that the Zionist regime [Israel] is behind the conspiracy of nuisance species as they had sworn to do so,” Mousavi added.

Good catch (get it? "Catch"? Because fish)! The goyim will fall to their knees if the Zionist cabal can deprive their leaders of their precious caviar!

At Least Get Your Stupid Slavery Analogies Right

Scott Walker's newest appointee to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Daniel Kelly, had the following to say about affirmative action:

"Affirmative action and slavery differ, obviously, in significant ways," Kelly wrote. "But it's more a question of degree than principle, for they both spring from the same taproot. Neither can exist without the foundational principle that it is acceptable to force someone into an unwanted economic relationship. Morally, and as a matter of law, they are the same."

First, let's clarify that this passage wasn't something Kelly wrote as a drunk sophomore in his university's "alternative" political magazine. He wrote it in 2014, and he included it in his Supreme Court application packet. This is an argument he is proud of.

And that aggravates me. For the obvious reasons, sure, but more because this isn't even the right way of making an idiotic analogy between affirmative action and slavery. The right way of doing that is something to the effect of "both involve the distribution of social benefits and burdens on the basis of skin color." That wouldn't make the conclusion that "Morally, and as a matter of law, they are the same" any less appalling, but at least it would have an internal consistency to it.

But Kelly can't even get that right. Affirmative action very rarely "force[s] someone into an unwanted economic relationship." Much the opposite -- typically affirmative action programs are voluntarily adopted by given institutions (e.g., the University of Wisconsin), and then challenged by external actors who want them instead to use a colorblind admissions/hiring process -- or, to put it another way, want the judiciary to force them into an economic transaction that differs from the one that the university or business would want to enter into if left to its own devices.

This is why I find it so baffling when libertarians say they oppose affirmative action. It takes either a private or quasi-private (where a governmental actor is behaving as a "market-participant") decision, and strips it from the normal decisionmaker in favor of a blanket command-and-control rule imposed by governmental fiat. Libertarians should hate that!

Actually, it seems evident that Kelly simply got his issues confused. The argument he's making has been applied to cherished elements of the civil rights project before -- but it's the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that's been the target (Rand Paul made precisely the argument that this law, by prohibiting racial discrimination in various economic transactions, "force[s] someone into an unwanted economic relationship."). So really Kelly should be arguing that its the Civil Rights Act that is "[m]orally, and as a matter of law" the same as slavery.

In conclusion, Kelly probably won't choke anybody, so he'll still likely be a net boon on the Wisconsin Supreme Court compared to the guy he's replacing.

Sweeping Constitutional Text Aside, Virginia Supreme Court Invalidates Voting Rights Restoration

Earlier this year, Virginia Governor Terry McAullife used his executive powers to restore the voting rights to thousands of ex-felons who had finished their prison term, parole, and/or probation. Today, in a 4-3 decision, the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the measure -- re-disenfranchising thousands of Virginians. This, simply put, is legally outrageous.

The relevant constitutional clause seems straight-forward enough: Article II, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution informs us that "No person who has been convicted of a felony shall be qualified to vote unless his civil rights have been restored by the Governor or other appropriate authority." Governor McAullife issued an order which restored voting rights to all persons convicted of a felony who had completed all portions of their sentence (including any parole or probation periods). One would think that would be that -- the constitutional text is clear, and so there is no further work to be done.

But no, says the Court. The structure of this provision indicates that felon re-enfranchisement is meant to be an exception to the rule. The Governor's blanket restoration of voting rights turns the rule into the exception -- effectively becoming a suspension of the constitutional mandate that felons normally experience a lifetime bar on voting.

This, to put it mildly, is jaw-dropping in its reach. It's not just that it is obviously extra-textual -- although it is. It's that it is obviously extra-textual without being bounded by anything that purports to be a judicially enforceable rule or standard for when the governor can exercise his re-enfranchisement power. We're told he can't do it in a "blanket" proceeding -- everybody, all at once. It is presumably evident, though, that the Governor maintains his authority to exercise his enfranchisement authority individually -- or even in groups. So we're left with a "how many grains make a heap" problem that is not conducive to any non-arbitrary answer. Reportedly, 11,000 persons have already registered to vote under Gov. McAullife's order (out of over 200,000 became eligible) and now will have their registration's purged. It seems to me that Governor McAullife's next move should be just be to restore voting rights to those 11,000 (if the Court is as concerned as it claims to be regarding the fact that McAullife didn't include their individual names, I'm sure judicious use of the ol' autopen could resolve that). Would that act convert the rule into the exception? Who knows -- this opinion certainly provides no guidance on the matter. The very fact that we could get caught in this sort of infinite ping-pong match between executive and judiciary without any hints as to where the Governor's authority ends is proof positive of the radically unprincipled nature of the Court's decision.

This, alone, would make for a good reason to defer to a member of one of those democratic branches the Court recognizes ought to be the default site for these sorts of political disputes. Yet the Court shows an astonishing lack of deference to its democratically-accountable fellow. Why? Well, the Court says, apparently no other Governor has used its enfranchisement authority in this sort of sweeping, broad manner; it infers that if such a power did exist, some other Virginia Governor would have exercised it by now. It seems evident that an equally-plausible alternative explanation exists, which is that no governor until now felt particularly interested in blanket reenfranchisement. This, after all, is a decision fraught with political risk, and therefore is perfectly guarded by regular political checks. If Virginia voters find blanket voting restorations intolerable, they are welcome to make their voices known in the next gubernatorial election. This is not the sort of decision that is either benefited by nor amenable to being taken out of the political arena shunted into the judiciary.

Indeed, it strikes me that this case represents the essence of the so-called "political questions" that Courts would be better off leaving aside for the democratic branches (here, the governor's office) to handle. In Baker v. Carr, the Supreme Court outlined the factors which point towards a controversy being nonjusticiable as a poltical question. The first two (and in my view the most important two) are

1. A textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department; and
2. A lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it.

The Virginia Constitution textually delegates the issue of felon reenfranchisement to the Governor's office, and there is no (and the Court does not even purport to provide) judicially manageable standard for administering the rule/exception doctrine the Court purports to lay out. The Court picking apart whether the Governor's "exceptions" are "exceptional" enough is precisely the sort of judicial micromanaging of an executive function that (to draw again from Baker) "express[es] lack of the respect due [to] coordinate branches of government." Basic recognition of the limits of the judicial role, if nothing else, should have convinced the Court to keep out of this thicket. Now, it is likely stuck in a morass of its own devise. I hope that Governor McAullife uses the power that he does have -- whatever that might be, since lord knows this decision blurs things up nicely -- to at least get those persons who already tried to register back on the rolls.

UPDATE: Looks like McAuliffe is going to try to restore voting rights one-by-one, if necessary. Bold move.

Taking Clients Seriously

A criminal defendant facing charges after a gun and drugs were found in his dorm room tells his attorney he was framed. The attorney was dubious -- sure you were -- but has the resources to check out his client's story. Turns out, the client was almost certainly right. After relaying this tale (taken from his own professional experience), Ken White writes the following:

Being an effective and responsible criminal defense attorney doesn't require believing everything a client says, exactly. The policy could be better described as "trust, but verify." The key isn't to build a defense on the premise that everything the client says is perfectly accurate. The key is to take what the client says seriously and follow up on it, rather than dismissing them out of hand. If you don't, you're not defending the client — you're defending your stereotype of the client.

I find it interesting that White's advice here parallels almost exactly my own advice vis-a-vis how we should respond to persons making discrimination claims.  And I don't think it is accidental that the claimants in either scenario -- minorities and marginalized persons, persons accused of crimes (these categories, of course, often intersect) -- are typically persons who tend to be given less credibility as a default; whom society tells it is okay to assume are not worth taking seriously.

"Consent" Isn't Consent If You Have To Consent To Everything

Radley Balko provides a worrisome story regarding the advice the Waterbury, Connecticut police chief gave to a largely black audience regarding how to interact with police:

If an officer stops your car, if they ask to search your person or vehicle, if they demand entry into your home, comply and then complain later to the department’s internal affairs office and police chief’s office if you feel your rights have been violated, [Chief Vernon] Riddick said.

Balko gives a host of reasons why this is an outrageous piece of advice to give. But I'll focus on one: If you consent to a search of your person or vehicle or home, that search is now legal. If the police ask to search you and you agree to it -- even if there's no probable cause, even if there's no warrant -- that search is entirely valid and admissible. There wouldn't be anything to complain to IA about -- at least with respect to the search.

There is plenty of scholarship which suggests that this entire notion of "consent" is more than a little fictitious. If a police officer is talking with you on the sidewalk and asks if he can take a look inside your bag, reflect on how likely you are to say "sorry, no" and walk away. Now think of how much that instinct is compounded if your city's chief of police has just publicly announced that the way to have a safe and healthy relationship with the officers under his command is to "consent" to everything they ask and then complain about it later. Is it realistic to say that any "consensual" searches in that context actually evince "consent" in any meaningful capacity?

This advice is entirely unbecoming of person tasked with enforcing the law in a nation where the Constitution is the most important law of all. There are plenty of lawful commands the police have the right to issue which you should obey; including some of which the right move is to obey and then challenge later. But when it comes to a search request in a scenario where there's no warrant and no exigent circumstances, consenting to the search permanently obliterates your right to challenge it.

The Trump Movement's Dark Reflective Equilibrium

All of us have certain broad principles of justice we claim to adhere to. All of us, equally, have a variety of individualized judgments we make on the particular moral cases and controversies we might consider on a daily basis. Needless to say, sometimes our broad principles and our particular judgments don't precisely line up. In such cases, we can either modify the principle to account for the particular judgment or modify our case-specific judgments so they match the principle. Neither move is inherently more or less legitimate than the other -- sometimes reference back to a broad principle can tell us that our assessment of an individual case is mistaken, other times the exigencies of a concrete scenario can illuminate a flaw or inadequacies in our principles. The process of moving back in forth between the general and the specific, trying to bring the two into alignment, is known as "reflective equilibrium".

The rise of Donald Trump -- openly racist, avowedly xenophobic, deeply misogynistic, contemptuous of the very idea of rule of law -- has made me rethink some very basic assumptions I had about the American polity. Most notably, it raised the question about whether racism really had just gone to ground -- people's views not so much changing from the 1960s as being covered up until the moment was right. Yet it remained difficult for me to accept the idea that nothing changed, that this was simply the people getting what they always wanted. Was it really the case that a good 45% or so of Americans had always been secretly thirsting for far-right autocracy, awaiting only the right standard-bearer? Did bedrock American values regarding rule of law, regarding basic temperament for office, regarding human rights and liberties, really have so little purchase?

As I've been thinking about it, I've wondered if we are witnessing folks go through the reflective equilibrium, darkly. Many Americans, it is clear, held some pretty brutal case-specific views regarding social outgroups -- including mass deportations of immigrants and religious tests on public office. And Trump stood before them and endorsed those views loud and clear, but also was unyielding in identifying the principles that such particularistic views were and were not compatible with. Even the time-worn platitudes about colorblindness wouldn't do. And people, as reflective equilibrium would predict, adjusted their principles accordingly. And in doing so, well, that made certain other, still more radical specific proposals seem a little less out-of-bounds. Maybe we should endorse violence against protesters. Maybe it's okay to lob Holocaust imagery at Jewish journalists. And back-and-forth we go, the boat rocking ever-steadily towards fascism.

When I fret about a Donald Trump presidency, the first thing that springs to my mind is not a particular policy -- as abhorrent as I'm sure I'd find most of them. It's a question of more fundamental principle: the very idea of "rule of law". If a court tells Donald Trump he can't do something, can anyone say with confidence he'll listen? Does he believe, in any meaningful sense, in limited authority when he's the authority? Does he believe he's constrained by the rules, orders, statutes, cases, precedents? This charge -- thrown with such reckless abandon at Hillary Clinton ("there’s no politician who has been at the center of so many scandals that have turned out to be worth so little") -- is a very real concern when it comes to Trump. This is not someone who will work the system in a way I'd cluck my tongue at. This is a guy who may well destroy the system if it doesn't bend to his every whim.

The scariest thing about the Trump movement, then, is not that its adherents don't see how their man flouts the conventions that keep America's constitutional system afloat. The scariest thing is the prospect that they do see it, and they're simply okay with it -- those values and principles aren't what guides them anymore. To support Trump and his specific policies would require tossing out significant swaths of what makes America recognizable as a constitutional democracy. And so, on reflection, they reached a new equilibrium.

"Should" Leftists Vote for Jill Stein?

A question that pops up periodically on my social media account is whether folks on the lefter-side of the left-spectrum "should" vote for Jill Stein come November. Persons answering no typically accuse their Jill-curious fellows of being selfish or of not actually caring about progressive outcomes (on the theory that their decision risks throwing the election to Trump). Persons answering yes sometimes make the trivial -- and uncontested -- point that everyone has the right to vote for whomever they want. But more often they make more serious arguments, such as the contention that politicians are not owed anyone's vote but have to earn them, or that given their political positions Clinton and Trump are not meaningfully distinct from one another.

My instinct, on reading these innumerable back-and-forths, has always been to dismiss the inclination to vote Stein as one only possessed by political imbeciles. But recently, it struck me that perhaps part of the problem with the discourse here was the conflation of more than one type of question. To illustrate this, consider a different voter asking if he should support Donald Trump. To simplify, let's say this voter's political views are as follows:

1. By far, the thing he cares about most is insuring the absolute minimum amount of federal regulation on big business. He thinks Wall Street should be able to do effectively whatever it wants.
2. If it were up to him, he would not be building an immigration wall or engaging in mass deportations of Muslims, but the issue is of comparatively little importance when weighed against his views on business deregulation.

"Should" this person vote for Trump? On the one hand, we could say "obviously yes" -- Donald Trump matches his policy preferences far better than Hillary Clinton does, and voting for Trump is the best way to bring his political desires into reality. On the other hand, we could as easily say "obviously no," for the simple reason that his policy views are substantively terrible. His preferences are bad and he should feel bad for having them.

The discourse regarding left-wingers voting for Stein likewise blurs these understandings of "should". To be sure, sometimes there is just pure confusion at play -- someone's positions are perfectly compatible with Clinton's but for whatever reason they're in denial about it. That said, there absolutely are sets of preferences where it makes more sense to cast a ballot for Jill Stein than Hillary Clinton. However, given the realities of American electoral politics (at least for voters in battleground states), these preferences would have to include general apathy regarding whatever chaos Trump would wreak upon America and the world -- including another generation of GOP dominance on the Supreme Court, massive rollbacks of labor and environmental regulations, evisceration of reproductive rights, probable crackdowns on racial and religious outgroups (the list goes on) -- at least as compared to the "message" voting Green would send.

Someone who is okay with that calculus -- that is, who finds the possibility of all the terrible things a Trump presidency would bring about less significant than whatever expressive joy or moral satisfaction they get from casting their Stein vote -- can reasonably say they "should" vote for Stein in the sense that she better maps onto their actual preferences, just as a right-wing corporate hack who doesn't even care about the lipservice they give to "colorblindness" "should" vote for Trump. But they "shouldn't" vote for her in the sense that this view is normatively appalling and is worthy of significant scorn, as is that held by our hypothetical Trump voter.

Part of the confusion, of course, stems from the fact that many in Camp Stein fervently contend that they do care a lot about the aforementioned litany of horribles, even as their actual behavior shows that they care about it less than "sending a message" or "rejecting the two-party system" or whatever. They sometimes try to square this circle by suggesting that Trump and Clinton are not meaningfully distinct from one another in the America their presidencies will produce. Once again, sometimes this is just confusion of the normal kind -- not having any clear sense of the actual havoc a Trump presidency could wreak (see "Meh, the Supreme Court will block anything too terrible" -- how adorable). But sometimes it can reflect a cohesive position. If you actually think, as Cornel West apparently does, the "neoliberal" and "neofascist" are morally indistinguishable from one another, then it may well be that the gaps between a Clinton and Trump presidency will likewise not strike you as morally relevant. But once again, while someone who thinks that way may in some sense be perfectly justified in casting a Stein ballot, the real problem with is that the analytical steps that lead to that conclusion are substantively awful.