The Swarthmore Anti-Semitism Experiment

After swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti appeared at Swarthmore College, William Meyer penned an excellent column that lucidly lays out the difficulties many Jews have in getting anti-Semitism taken seriously. I don't have much commentary (beyond my now-cliched pointer to my "Playing with Cards" article), but I did want to promote it. And the following line, in particular, deserves excerpting:

The greatest barrier to confronting anti-Semitism in 2016 seems to be proving that it exists.

Truth.

Alabama's Pro-Muslim Bias

Eugene Volokh has the scoop on a fascinating lawsuit filed by the ACLU in Alabama, alleging state religious discrimination ... against Christians and in favor of Muslims. Here are the alleged facts:

Plaintiff Yvonne Allen is a devout Christian woman who covers her hair with a headscarf as part of her religious practice. In December 2015, Ms. Allen sought to renew her driver license at the Lee County driver license office, where officials demanded that she remove her head covering to be photographed. When Ms. Allen explained her religious beliefs, the County officials responded with a remarkable claim: They admitted that there was a religious accommodation available for head coverings, but contended that it applied only to Muslims.

Assuming these claims are accurate, there is no question in my mind that the practice constitutes religious discrimination.

Yet it seems implausible, to say the least, that local governmental officials in Alabama are systematically biased in favor of Muslims and against Christians. So what gives?

One possibility is that we're seeing a weird confluence of dutiful bureaucratic obedience with a genuine belief in Fox-inspired "Muslims get special rights!" nonsense. That is, the relevant civil servants assume that in our decaying politically correct world Muslims get special rights that everyone else doesn't, and being faithful public officials they are simply following (what they take to be) the law.

But another way of thinking about this reflects something I've long wondered about religious and cultural accommodations (I could have sworn I've written a post on this, but I can't find it) -- what if the accommodation itself is motivated by some sort of degrading or stigmatizing belief about the accommodated party? Let's say one thought of a particular religious outgroup as being especially backwards and primitive. So one offers an "accommodation" to that faith that makes it easier for them to pass their GEDs. That accommodation could itself be a form of discrimination against the religious group -- a public message that they, as a collective, are the sort of people too dumb to pass high school on their own. And so here, an accommodation for Muslims-only could make sense to the extent that it marks them as other/deviant, whereas a Christian seeking the same accommodation threatens the communal sense of Christians as normal, Western, and integrated.

This type of wrong is by no means especially "conservative" in nature. It is more or less the same instinct motivating the left-wing Jewish college professor who fell over herself to be friendly to the her head-scarf wearing bus-mate when she assumed she was Muslim, but went ice-cold upon finding out that she was in fact an observant Jew. There are slight differences in valence, but in either case the "accommodation" is really a way of demarcating otherness or strangeness.

In any event, to think of Alabama as favoring its Muslim residents over its Christians is amusing enough on its own to be worth flagging. Again, the case itself seems pretty straightforward, at least on the facts alleged.

Not a Conversion, But a Unification

The Hebrew Israelite community -- an umbrella term encompassing a variety of Black Jewish organizations and movements -- has just selected Chicago Rabbi Capers C. Funnye as its official Chief Rabbi. The Forward has a good overview of this historic event and the current status of Hebrew Israelites in the United States.

Rabbi Funnye is a well-known figure in both the Hebrew Israelite and American (Ashkenazi-dominated) Jewish establishment (I was well aware of his congregation when I lived in Chicago during law school). He is also relatively unique in the Hebrew Israelite community for having undergone a "formal" (Conservative-overseen) conversion to Judaism. Many members of the Hebrew Israelite community do not do this, primarily because they already see themselves as Jews and they bristle at the suggestion that their Jewish pedigree needs validation or ratification from other (predominantly White) Jewish institutions. A similar controversy often exists in African Jewish communities, who frequently see conversion requirements as disrespecting their own historical identification as Jews.

Yet there is no doubt that Rabbi Funnye's conversion has assisted him greatly in building bridges between his Jewish community and the "mainstream" one populated by people like me. Which got me thinking. There are not that many Jews, and there are not that many people seeking to identify as Jewish. Our default stance should be to embrace diverse populations which want to join our community, and at one level a "conversion" is a great formal ritual to make clear on all sides that regardless of what you look like or where you come from, we are all equal as Jews. Yet I am sympathetic to the notion that there is something askance about forcing a predominantly Black Jewish community, that has been practicing Judaism for multiple generations and fully identifies as Jewish, to submit itself to Jewish approval by predominantly non-Black institutions. What gives us the right to form that hierarchy? And what does "conversion" say about their prior status as Jews?

So it seems to me that it should be a Jewish priority to come up with an alternative. Not a conversion, but a unification -- a ritual or practice whereby persons from Jewish communities that have historically been on the margins of normative Judaism, who perhaps have not always been recognized as Jewish by normative Judaism, can have the opportunity to declare themselves and be declared part of the broader Jewish family. Of course, this is not an open-door proposal -- unification requires, if not agreement by all parties on all aspects of what Jewishness means, then at least consent by both parties that they mutually understand the other to be Jewish in a sufficiently robust way so as to be part of a single community.

Were I a Rabbi -- and lord knows I'm not -- this is what I would be spending my time developing. I think along the same lines regarding the children of interfaith couples where the mother is not Halakhically Jewish but the child has been raised Jewish and fully identifies as a Jew. For that child, it seems to me that the Bar or Bat Mitzvah could just as easily serve the role of a "conversion" as well: it is, after all, the moment where a young person assumes the responsibilities as a Jewish adult, and so a young person who was not born a Halakhic Jew but who is willing to assume those same responsibilities can, in my view, reasonably be said to have been accepted into the community as a Jewish adult.

Judaism is strengthened by our multiculturalism -- the vast montage of human diversity and experience which is enveloped under the Jewish umbrella. We should be proud that we are a faith which for thousands of years (and through no small adversity) continues to exercise a pull on persons of widely divergent histories. I have no desire for Judaism to become a proselytizing faith. But in a world where different faiths and ethnicities interact and intersect like never before in human history, it is time for Judaism to adjust in how it embraces persons who -- diverse though their heritages may be -- are united in their identification as Jews.

Warning Against Warning Against Trigger Warnings

A recent letter sent by the University of Chicago to its incoming students has generated quite a bit of attention for its verbiage on that ever-present collegiate bugaboo, "trigger warnings":

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called "trigger warnings," we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual "safe spaces" where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

One point of contention has been whether this statement, fairly read, means that the U of C now bans its professors from issuing trigger warnings. I'm inclined to doubt this is the case, but if it is so it most certainly is an intrusion on the academic freedom of Chicago professors to manage their own classrooms. Hopefully, we can all agree that the issue of trigger warnings is one best left to the sound academic discretion of individual professors -- it should not be mandated or forbidden by academic administrators.

But leave that aside, and turn to the advisability of "trigger warnings" as a pedagogical tool. Ilya Somin offers his "Warning against Trigger Warnings" that he delivers at the start of his Constitutional Law course.

I don’t believe in trigger warnings. But if I did, I would have to include one for virtually every day of this course. We are going to cover subjects like slavery, segregation, sexism, suicide, the death penalty, and abortion. There is no way to teach this course without discussing these issues. And there is no good way to cover them without also considering a wide range of views about these subjects and their relationship to the Constitution.

This is, to reiterate, framed as a statement against trigger warnings. But it seems to me that it functions ... basically as a trigger warning. It tells students, accurately, about some of the content they'll be reading, and notes that much of it deals with issues of deep injustice and controversy. It explains why that material is there, and why it needs to be addressed forthrightly. We see things like this a lot. Jerry Coyne argued in The New Republic that while perhaps it is appropriate of professors to prospectively inform students of triggering content, there most certainly should not be a trigger warning -- heaven forbid! What they do in disclaiming trigger warnings is for the most part not far different from what many, though not all, trigger warning advocates are asking for.

What, exactly, is going on here? In part, many people seem to ascribe to "trigger warnings" a function they are manifestly not designed for -- to avoid teaching sensitive topics. But that's silly -- if you don't want to teach a sensitive topic, you don't put it on your syllabus. The very fact of including a trigger warning indicates that this material is present on the syllabus and being taught.

What else? Well, clearly what many people have in mind when they think of "trigger warnings" are not the mild cases outlined above, but more extreme versions where every ticky-tack element of the syllabus is meticulously sorted through and warned over to appease the most sensitive theoretical student. Perhaps cases like that do exist -- I'm sure one can find some obscure sociology professor at Southwest Oregon State Technical College who's hard at work making a 12 page list of potential triggers on his syllabus -- but certainly they don't represent the main. And in any event, that's a difference of degree, not kind.

So we can certainly say that certain extreme manifestations of trigger warnings are ridiculous, pedagogically and otherwise. But this argument cuts both ways -- it seems to me that there are cases where something like a "trigger warning" would be universally agreed to be not just prudent but the only pedagogically responsible course of action.

I was talking with a colleague at another law school who teaches First Amendment law. As part of the course they discuss various anti-pornography ordinances, and as part of that unit she shows a clip in class of graphic rape pornography of the sort targeted by the ordinance. And the class before that class, she tells her students that this clip will be shown and asks them to prepare to discuss and react to it. In short -- though she doesn't use the term -- she provides a trigger warning.

We can of course debate whether it is wise to show such a clip in class at all. But given that she does so, I imagine all of us think it is wise that her pedagogical tack is not "surprise! Rape porn!" Of course you give students advance notice that it's coming. Anything else would be recklessly irresponsible. Does anyone disagree on that score?

The other argument against "trigger warnings" that might apply even in a case like this is the appeal to the "real world". In the real world, this argument goes, people are exposed to disturbing or hostile events without warning. It will happen, and it is important that young adults learn to cope with it. The proponents of this view sometimes recognize that people really do have deep-seated aversion and anxiety to certain topics, but, they suggest, the way to resolve it is through some version of "exposure therapy." We expose people to their fears under safe and controlled conditions so they learn to cope.

This argument really just does not grasp the professional and pedagogical role of a university professor. To begin, I am not my students' therapist. I am not professionally trained in getting students to overcome their anxieties. If I were forced into that role, however, my instinct would be that exposure therapy would exist alongside "trigger warnings" and even some of the more controversial forms of university "mollycoddling" that conservatives like to condemn. As my friend Kate Manne observed, we do not cure arachnophobes by randomly tossing spiders at them. If we do exposure therapy, it is in controlled environments, with advance warning and significant support to help the subject recover when they're (understandably) rattled.

But there's a deeper misunderstanding here. Just as my job as an academic is not to be a therapist, likewise it is not to be a generic life coach offering exposure to the various hard knocks my students will inevitably encounter as they walk through life. Yes, it's true that my students will "in the real world" encounter disturbing or distressing material without warning. It's also true that my students will "in the real world" most likely have a supervisor who is a jerk. Does that mean I should be a jerk to my students? They'll have to get used to it to survive in the real world! No, of course not. My job is not to offer a buffet table of life's prospective misfortunes for my students. My job is to teach the material I offer in the most effective manner possible. The advisability of a trigger warning, as far as I'm concerned, depends wholly on how it meets that criteria: will it aid or impede my students in the learning process? That will be a matter of individual judgment on individual cases, and it strikes me as fairly ridiculous to try to sweep more broadly than that.

SHOCKED To Find Out There Was Gambling!

A Sheldon Adelson backed anti-BDS group has distanced itself from one of its grantees after it launched a poster campaign identifying pro-Palestinian student activists as "Jew-haters." 

The Maccabee Task Force issued its disavowal of the poster campaign Monday after the Los Angeles Times reported the link between it and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which launched the campaign in February. 

The David Horowitz Freedom Center is a conservative foundation based in Los Angeles. 

“The Maccabee Task Force did approve a modest grant to the David Horowitz Freedom Center to focus on the true nature of pro-BDS organizations, but we did not ask for or approve the poster campaign that targeted student activists, and were not aware that our money had been used to support it. It should not have been,” Maccabee Task Force Executive Director David Brog said in a statement issued Monday.

“The Maccabee Task Force does not believe that focusing on student activists who conduct themselves civilly is an appropriate or effective way to combat the BDS movement on campus. Focusing on the true nature of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups like SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine), however, remains a core component of our approach and we will continue to fund efforts that expose those organizations and their leadership,” Brog also said.

Holy shit, you're saying that giving money to David Horowitz might not result in an advocacy campaign that scrupulously adheres to principles of civility and political justice? Who could have known!

In any event, this statement by Brog is worth nothing unless it is followed by (a) the Task Force cutting off Horowitz from any further grants and (b) the Task Force taking cues from those Jewish organizations which managed to fight BDS on campus and condemn vicious political stunts like this at the same time.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XXX: Sadiq Khan Endorsing Owen Smith

Sadiq Khan is the Mayor of London, the first Muslim to be elected mayor of a major Western city. Khan is also a member of the UK's Labour Party, which at the moment is embroiled in a major anti-Semitism problem many lay at the feet of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn is unpopular with the general public, but his numbers among Jews are especially abysmal -- approaching Trump-among-Latinos depths. But Khan is relatively well liked by his Jewish constituents (London is a major center of the UK Jewish community). His campaign for mayor was characterized by an impressive level of outreach to the Jewish community, and following his election he has walked the walk. Khan is proof that Jews are perfectly happy to vote Labour if Labour offers a choice that incorporates them as part of Britain's multicultural tapestry and offers them respect and solidarity. The problem with Labour is that Corbyn-style Labour is not making that offering.

In any event, Corbyn is currently being challenged for his post as head of Labour by another MP, Owen Smith. And Khan has just come out hard for Smith, though his focus was not on the issue of anti-Semitism but on Corbyn's general lack of leadership, particularly on the "Brexit" vote. All of that information is background for this:

Took about 5 minutes from Khan tweeting his Guardian article backing Smith for him to get a tweet like this... pic.twitter.com/YDuvYcg24X

— Rupert Sutton (@StubbsMaloy) August 20, 2016

Five minutes. That didn't take long at all (the photo, incidentally, is genuine -- Khan really did eat Matzah at a Passover event during his campaign).

Post-Contemporary Roundup

Yesterday, I had my first Ph.D subfield exam (in contemporary political theory). It was a delightful smorgasbord of Rawls, Walzer, Rorty, Anderson, and Landesmore; thus (hopefully) proving I am a smart young man who knows things about contemporary political theory.

As one can imagine, this has been taking up much of my time (well beyond the six hours I spent taking the actual test). But now it's over, and I can enjoy my ... one week before the Fall Term begins! Anyway, here are some links that have been cluttering my browser over the past few days.

* * *

Glenn Beck has some surprisingly thoughtful and introspective remarks on Black Lives Matter. Good for him.

MEMRI says there has been a recent streak of articles in the Saudi press urging its readers to renounce and reject anti-Semitism. Sea change, or drop in the bucket? Who knows.

"For Israel, It’s No Jew Left Behind — Unless You’re Ethiopian".

Jeremy Corbyn must find it baffling how his friends mysterious keep on saying things to Jews like "F**k him, they should cut his throat."

Department of Justice to phase out the use of private prisons. Good news, though my suspicion (possibly unfounded) is that most private prison contracts are with the states, not the federal government.

Complicated Problems are Still Problems

When I teach a unit on controversial topics, I sometimes begin by making an observation about "hard" and "easy" problems. Many of us have a tendency to convert hard problems into easy ones. This can be a great skill at times, particularly for lawyers -- distilling a complex and multifaceted mess of a fact pattern into a simple set of issues that straight-forwardly demand victory for one's clients. As thinkers, though, it is a more problematic instinct. For example, I've argued that there is a peculiar left-right convergence -- some of the time -- regarding how they talk about issues of racism. Some persons on the left think racism is a simple matter, in the sense that once we've identified something as racist that's all we need to know on the matter. And some persons on the right will agree with that sentiment, but proceed to argue that since such-and-such case is not simple but rather quite complex and complicated, it therefore can't be racist (since racism is, by stipulation, something that is straight-forwardly wrong). These two views converge to box out what seems to me the far more plausible reality: racism being often a matter of great complexity and moral difficulty, an appraisal which in no way diminishes the seriousness or gravity of racism as a wrong. Complicated problems are still problems.

Having told this parable, I continue to tell my students that the instinct to make hard cases easy ones is troublesome for at least two reasons. The first one is perhaps obvious: when we do it, we almost always act to exclude morally relevant considerations that should be factoring into our analysis; nuances and wrinkles that make the case a hard case and so are written out. But there's a more subtle problem as well: When we make hard cases easy, we condition ourselves to think that only easy cases are solvable cases -- that hardness is a synonym for "intractable" or (worse) "apolitical". Sometimes this leads to a sort of quiescence around hardness (as in the case of the conservative who thinks observing the complexity of racial injustice is a sufficient response to claims of racism). Other times it leads to a suspicion of hardness (as in the leftist who thinks observing the complexity of racial injustice represents a failure to take it seriously). Either way, it is a path that leads nowhere, and so I conclude by telling my students to "lean into the hardness." 

All of this came to mind when reading the penultimate paragraph of Daniel May's contribution to the MBL/Jewish flare-up, which discusses the issue of "complexity" and credibility. May offers up a list of some of the more egregious instances of Israeli injustices and then derides those who claim "that such realities must be understood in 'context,' as 'complicated,' or a tragic consequence of 'ha'matzav' (“the situation,” as Israelis call it)." 

May is articulating a real wrong here -- the conservative voice in my parable who thinks he has responded to an allegation of injustice by asserting "it's complicated." Yet there is the question of how we frame our retort. The shortfall of the conservative reply is not that the problem isn't a complicated one. The shortfall is that complicated problems are still problems. It is absolutely true that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is bound up in all sorts of immensely difficult nets and traps which defy simple solutions or easy finger points. None of that removes the fundamental injustices that exist where an entire population is deprived of the basic democratic entitlements to vote for the sovereign authority controlling their lives, where racist incitement against Palestinians continues to surge, where "price tag" attacks by Jewish terrorists occur with near-impunity, where a military occupation persists indefinitely while insulated from any accountability to the people in its cross-hairs. And those fundamental injustices, in turn, don't flatten or dissipate the complexity of "the situation" that produces them. We deal with hard problems by tackling them in all their difficulty and complexity.

There's a reason why I think the most powerful sentence in Stacey Aviva Flint's superb reflection on the Movement for Black Lives platform is also its shortest: "I choose discomfort". The issues posed by police violence targeting people of color, or Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, or the dispossession of ancient Jewish communities in the Christian and Muslim worlds, or continued vulnerability of Arab and Muslim communities to state-sponsored and individual acts of violence, or systematic racism, or ongoing global anti-Semitism, are not easy, comfortable issues. They are not morality plays and we are not blessed with simple and straightforward choices. Crafting a just social sphere is hard, complicated, complex business. That observation is part of the work; it's not an excuse to refrain from it.

It Is Not The Job of Democrats To Babysit Republicans

Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for President. This has caused a giant crisis of confidence among Republicans who are committed to denying that Trump represents the Party which voted, by overwhelming margins, for him to be their standard-bearer (as Scott Lemieux observes, the best part of this narrative is when it claims that folks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham are "leading Republicans", as opposed to, say, Donald Trump). And that has created a small cottage industry of figuring out how to blame Democrats for Trump's rise. They cried wolf, Jonah Goldberg wails! Indeed they did, says David Graham. How could Republicans take the charge that Trump was a sui generis threat to American's democratic character, when Democrats always are calling Republican politicians terrible, horrible, no good very bad candidates for higher office?

If this complaint strikes you as pathetic, that's because it is. Obviously, Democrats are generally not going to like Republican nominees for higher office (if we did, either we'd be Republicans or they'd be Democrats). Republicans are responsible for their own nominee, if their nominee reflects poorly upon them, that says nothing more than that they are who we thought they were.

But the real question is why Republicans are supposedly entitled to rely on Democrats to keep them in check? We are not their keeper, after all. Why didn't their own self-generated political principles put the breaks on Trump? The answer seems to be that Republicans at this point, by their own admission, lack any self-generated political principles. As one commentator astutely put it at the end of Obama's first term: "[T]oday’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily." The entire conservative movement today is one large exercise in ressentiment against urban coastal multicultural liberal elites, entirely reactive, creating nothing of its own. Of course it relied on Democrats to behave in such a way as to not "create a Trump"; Democrats -- indirectly -- create everything the contemporary Republican Party "stands" for.

Theirs is, as Nietzsche would put it, a Party beset by sickness. And while it's not the case that only a Party that sick could produce a Trump, it is the case that only a Party that sick could blame its opposition for forcing them into it.

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.