Panic! At the ADL

Pictured: The ADL, piloting the right TIE fighter.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is running for DNC chair. The ADL has thoughts on this.

On November 22, Jonathan Greenblatt issued a very thoughtful, balanced statement:



There are concerns, but there's also much that's positive in Congressman Ellison's record. The concerns should be addressed, the positives should be acknowledged, and at all points the conversation should be open, fair, and free of race- or faith-based innuendos.

Not everyone likes thoughtful, balanced statements. ZOA had come out swinging against "Congressman Keith Ellison a/k/a Keith X. Ellison a/k/a Keith Hakim a/k/a Keith Ellison Muhammed."  They were not happy that the ADL refused to jump on the bandwagon, and weren't shy about claiming "double-standard" since the ADL had condemned Steve Bannon (my post on the matter explains why I think that's a bogus comparison). Three days later, feeling the pressure, Greenblatt backtracked a little.

Today, the Investigative Project on Terrorism released a short audio clip where Rep. Ellison says the following:

“The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people,” Ellison is heard saying. “A region of 350 million all turns on a country of 7 million. Does that make sense? Is that logic? Right? When the Americans who trace their roots back to those 350 million get involved, everything changes. Can I say that again?”

Now, we could say that the IPT -- last seen bringing us that ridiculous "Muslim no-go zones" bit on Fox -- might not be a source worth taking at face value. We could express skepticism of whether that bit provides the full context. Nonetheless, I think it is fair from that clip to express worries. These are, indeed, worrisome remarks. They are a reasonable addition to the inquiry that Jewish and pro-Israel groups might wish to make into Congressman Ellison's candidacy. He should be asked to address them, and address them seriously. And an unsatisfactory answer would be a cause for deep concern.

So the ADL issued another statement. It starts off fine. It recaps its previous analysis. It quotes the newly released material, which it says "raises serious concerns about whether Rep. Ellison faithfully could represent the Democratic Party’s traditional support for a strong and secure Israel." And then it says that

Rep. Ellison’s remarks are both deeply disturbing

Fine.

and disqualifying.

Oh for the love of....

See, this is what happens when mainline Jewish groups have become conditioned to flinch each time right-wing groups go "boo!" They trip over themselves to show they're not "soft", and end up getting trapped in ill-thought out, ill-advised, and uncompromising positions.

It would have been absolutely appropriate to raise these concerns, note that they raise serious questions, and then say "these comments demand a serious and thorough explanation from Congressman Ellison, which we will review very carefully" -- without flying straight into the "disqualifying" wall. Maybe Congressman Ellison would have a response that would assuage our justified concerns. Or maybe his response would be terrible, fully vindicating a conclusion that he cannot be supported in good conscience! Either way, notice how not locking oneself into a permanent position based on a brief audio-clip from six years ago leaked by a hatchet operation gives you a much nicer array of options.  Putting aside whether it was fair to Ellison or not, taking away your own leeway to respond to any further developments is the definition of amateur hour. To quote de Talleyrand: "It's worse than a crime, it's a blunder."

But no. The ADL panicked, and decided it was done without any consultation whatsoever. And now they're stuck. Fabulous work, guys -- this is why you're the professionals.

The really amazing thing is that Congressman Ellison's reply is far, far kinder than the ADL had any right to expect.


This would have been a great letter had the ADL not elected to do the bull-in-a-china-shop thing. That it was issued after the ADL did so is the sort of gift from God that I hope the ADL is privately thanking each and every lucky star for. If they're supremely lucky, they can restart this conversation the way it should have happened all along.

And yes, one element of that conversation should be to interrogate Congressman Ellison's statements. That's part of the tragedy here: the ADL's panic has deeply tainted the discussion we should have had. Ellison's comments were problematic. Perhaps context would mitigate their apparent meaning, perhaps not. Regardless, it would be worthwhile to explain, clearly and explicitly, why they were so troublesome, and see how he took that critique. I am not someone who will ever say that we should fail to call out anti-Semitism or troublesome tropes when we see them, and Keith Ellison is no exception to that rule.

But there's no rule that vigorous opposition to anti-Semitism requires that one be an idiot about it. Part of the job of combating anti-Semitism is getting people who have made problematic remarks to disavow them and return to the fold. Groups like ZOA make that harder, because they rather the Jewish state have enemies they hate than for it to have allies they detest, so their strongest efforts are to ensure that Israel and the Jewish community stays in a constant state of implacable warfare against anyone to the left of Naftali Bennett. It's bad for Israel, and it's bad for the Jews. Yet the institutional Jewish community has a reflexive instinct to coddle a tiny right flank whose volume is grotesquely out of proportion to its numbers. Until the ADL weans itself from this habit, it's going to keep making very basic mistakes that undermine its effectiveness as an organization and its credibility as a Jewish communal leader.

Fear and Trembling in American Jewish Institutions

Some Jewish organizations have been deafening in their silence on Steve Bannon and the clear links between the Trump administration and the alt-right. I have been ... rather public in my denunciations of their decision. I am in broad agreement that there is a building revolution in the American Jewish community, and those groups which purport to be communal representatives while refusing to actually represent our community will rapidly lose the authority to speak as Jewish voices.

But if a passable defense of at least the silent organizations (certainly not the ones, like ZOA, which have outright endorsed Bannon et al*) could be made, it is of the form taken by Shai Franklin in the Jerusalem Post.

Franklin's basic argument is that there is and should be a "distribution of labor" within the institutional Jewish community. Groups like the ADL, which take on the role as anti-bigotry watchdogs, can and should condemn Bannon. But groups like the JFNA, which are primarily policy lobbying organizations, need to play a more cautious hand. Responsible for securing millions of dollars in funding for critical aid programs -- those which feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and take care of the sick -- the JFNA cannot decide to simply cut ties with any administration, even one as repulsive as Trump's. It has to grit its teeth and work with him as best it can.

The bar for JFNA to condemn an action by the president – before he’s ever taken office, before he’s had the chance to issue a single executive order – must be very high. Condemning the president-elect’s choice for top policy official runs the risk of alienating him and his staff for the duration, squandering decades of cultivation and branding overnight.

One might think that appointing a man who has provided a massive platform for the most dangerous and influential American White nationalist movement of our generation would clear that bar. But put that aside, and note the more subtle assumption. Franklin's column takes the view that condemning Bannon is tantamount to "boycotting" the Trump administration outright, that it would entirely throw away any ability to have any influence over government policy whatsoever. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But note how it diverges from how Jewish institutions treat Democratic administrations. We don't fear that by criticizing this appointment or that policy from the Obama administration, we are permanently cutting ourselves out of the political loop. We trust that Democrats can tolerate dissent and disagreement, and so we can articulate our views openly and honestly, secure in an ongoing positive relationship.

With Republicans, that assumption flies out the window: if we even verbally object to the appointment of prominent alt-righter, we assume they'll be done with us forever. This was the core of the argument I made in my column:

Last year (writing on “pro-Israel” disputes, not anti-Semitism specifically), I noted the sharp disjuncture in how the Jewish community reacts to problematic left versus right behavior. The left is met “with the full sound and fury for every toe out of line,” while the right “must engage in the most flamboyant provocation to elicit even a murmur of discontent.” The left is “policed to the letter,” while the right is “treated with kid gloves.” The reason—I implied then and will state explicitly now—is fear of right-wing anti-Semitism. “[I]t stems from a belief that conservatives, but not liberals, will turn on [us] entirely if they are not constantly treated with obsequious fawning.”

Unlike the mainstream Democratic Party, where Jews are deeply enmeshed and so can have difficult conversations without blowing up the entire relationship, the connection between Jews and the American right has been—at best—tenuous, contingent, and precarious. And so we’ve become accustomed to letting mainstream right-wing anti-Semitism slide, satisfied with the rote recitation “I am a great supporter of Israel” (surely, the right-wing variant on the leftist’s “I have always opposed all forms of bigotry…”). We’ve allowed ourselves to pretend that our fear of antagonizing these “allies” is a sign of the strength of our relationship, rather than its weakness.

So, whatever the tactical merits of Franklin's position, it should at least make clear the monster we're dealing with. Groups which respect Jews, respect Jewish criticism. If the assumption is that Donald Trump cannot tolerate Jews telling him we're not okay with him hiring a hate-peddler, then the assumption is that Donald Trump is no friend of Jews.

* The other question raised by Franklin's piece is what to do with the groups that have failed in the labor that is assigned to them? He includes, for example, the AJC as among the "watchdogs" that should be calling out Bannon. But the AJC has been almost defiant in its refusal to issue a statement, issuing bland platitudes about the importance of letting the President "organize his own team". What flows from this abdication of duty? What punishment is Franklin willing to endorse? If we're serious about the "distribution of labor", then these questions cannot go unaddressed.

This, of course, goes double for groups (like ZOA) which have outright praised Steve Bannon. It's one thing to tolerate strategic silence of a few institutionally-oriented actors. It's another to accept the open endorsement of the sort of vicious hatred Steve Bannon represents. If Franklin is to be taken seriously, then he needs to have a plan for either roping groups like ZOA back into line, or initiating their very clear and very public disaffiliation from the communal Jewish tent.

And Now Your Troubles Begin

I feel bad for Trump-critical congressional Republicans. Really, I do. They thought that their efforts would be over after election day. In a Hillary Clinton administration, never Trump Republicans could go back to being regular Republicans. They could be a normal opposition party. To be sure, had they done this I think they'd have missed the lesson of their own experience -- Donald Trump was the fruit of "regular" Republican activity over the past eight years -- but it would have been understandable. Their labors would have been done.

Instead, they have four years of Donald Trump. Four years where "opposition" no longer is just tongue-clucking in the New York Times, but actually will involve taking concrete action on the House and Senate floor. That's a very different animal.

I'm not asking that Republicans suddenly become NARAL backers just because Trump is in office. But basic good governance regulations (such as reigning in Trump's conflicts of interest)? Those can't be allowed to slide. And, with Democrats in a state of rout, it is up to the Republicans in Congress. They can't fob it off on others..

Unfortunately, many congressional Republicans are indicating they have no interest in rising to the occasion. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has miraculously lost all interest in investigating the President after promising two straight years of investigation into Hillary Clinton had she won the Oval Office. Other Republicans literally run for the elevators when asked to discuss Trump's unprecedented ethical conflicts. It is an unacceptable abdication of duty. And it unfortunately betrays, yet again, the fundamental unwillingness of the modern conservative movement to take responsibility for itself.

[M]any other Republicans downplayed the ethical concerns, noting Trump was still some two months from Inauguration Day. Many said they had faith in Trump and his family to make the right moves, and they insisted any problems that emerge would come out in the normal course of Washington’s checks-and-balances.

“The republic’s been around 240 years. We didn’t say George Washington couldn’t have any interest in the affairs of Mount Vernon,” said Oklahoma GOP Rep. Tom Cole said. “These are real problems but there are lots of ethics rules and regulation. And there’s lots of scrutiny, more scrutiny with the presidency of the United States than any other position in the world, from the media to your friends to your enemies.”

“Let’s give the guy a chance to work through this and set up some sort of system,” he added. “We’ll see if it works or not. I hope it does. I trust it will. But if it didn’t, he’ll pay a horrific political price.”

"Hope" and "trust" are not part of the checks-and-balances schema. Our system of government is not based on "trusting" people in power to do right. It's based on the different branches of government taking it upon themselves to actively check one another, exercising their oversight powers fairly but aggressively. Seriously, read Federalist #51.

In any event, while Democrats can do little things to hold Donald Trump accountable, it's ultimately up to the Republican Party to keep him in check -- or not. It won't be easy for them. It will involve constantly and aggressively tackling the leader of their own Party -- never a fun endeavor. Those GOP members who recognize how dangerous Donald Trump is may have thought they'd have earned a reprieve on Election Day. But in reality, their troubles -- like ours -- have only just begun.

The Train Has No Brakes: Ryerson University Edition

One of the main bases for my objections to the BDS movement is that the "train has no brakes." It might start with something facially defensible -- a targeted divestment from a firm that directly supplies occupation-supporting infrastructure, a narrow sanction directly attached to the settlements -- but almost never stays there. It keeps rolling, until it reaches flat bans on collaborating with Jews (Sydney, Australia), or open calls for the expulsion of all Jews (Durban University of Technology).

Ryerson University, Toronto, has been a center of BDS activity in Canada. Earlier this week, their student council was scheduled to vote on a resolution commemorating Holocaust Education Week. The resolution did not mention Israel. It was also never voted on. A walkout led Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association deprived the meeting of a quorum, preventing the voted from occurring.

“What starts with BDS does not end with BDS,” said Amanda Hohmann, national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights. “More often than not, BDS is simply a gateway drug to more blatant forms of anti-Semitism.”

And let's be clear: The reaction against commemorating the Holocaust is not isolated to Ryerson. It is part of a larger pattern whereby some see "the Holocaust not as a source of trauma but as a source of privilege, and an unjust privilege at that." When it comes to Jewish access to progressive discourses around equality and non-discrimination, the Holocaust "is the last firewall left standing; the last citadel the forces of Gentile Supremacy have not yet been able to overrun."

The train has no brakes. It doesn't stop at BDS, and it won't stop at a "mere" walkout protesting Holocaust commemoration either. Board at your -- or more accurately, my -- peril.

Personal Responsibility and the Infantilization of the American Right

If there was a single day that characterized the conservative movement's relationship to the Obama administration, it was September 28, 2016. That day, Congress overrode President Obama's veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. Congress had passed the law earlier that month, ignoring the President's warnings that it opened up a massive foreign relations can of worms and placed American servicemembers and diplomats at risk of being haled into hostile foreign courts. President Obama followed through on his promised veto on September 23rd, and Congress promptly overrode the veto.

Both the initial vote and the override were bipartisan affairs (the Senate and the House votes on both were overwhelming). But in the aftermath, once the issues President Obama identified now were encoded in law and presented a real and immediate threat, congressional Republicans took a very distinctive stance. They recognized the law had grave problems. But it wasn't their fault for voting for it. It wasn't their responsibility in drafting it. If anyone was to blame, it was none other than President Obama, who, they told us, was not sufficiently emphatic in communicating the bill's problems.

It would have been astonishing if it wasn't so sad. A Republican Congress passes a bill over the President's warnings, then overrides his public veto of the same bill, and then has the chutzpah to blame the President for not doing enough to stop them.

In reality, it was part of a pattern. The American right is fundamentally incapable of taking personal responsibility for its own decisions. Everything is someone else's fault. Everything can be blamed on someone else, usually Democrats or Democrat-leaning constituencies. It's never on them.

Consider the ever-popular parlor game of "who's responsible for Trump's victory?" The left is indulging in its own form of this game, with the predictable factions deciding between "it's the fault of Bernie Bros and Jill Stein for undermining Hillary Clinton", "it's the fault of the neoliberal hacks at the DNC for rigging the game for Hillary Clinton," and "it's the fault of everyone who cares what non-White, non-male, and non-straight people think." To that debate, my contribution has been simple: the people responsible for the election of Donald Trump are the people who voted for him. Full stop.

On the right side of the spectrum, though, this debate has taken a different hue. Much of the conservative movement has spent the last two years slowly transitioning from "it's an outrageous slander to say that a racist cartoon character like Donald Trump represents the conservative movement" to "it's an outrageous slander to say that the American conservative movement is 'racist' or 'cartoonish' just because it adopted Donald Trump as its representative." In between, the conservative movement treated Donald Trump as if he was some sort of inexplicable act of God, a deus ex machina whose surge to dominance in the conservative political movement defied all logic or rationality. He's a cipher, he's a reaction to Obama's own extremism, he's ... [hiss] really a Democrat. Whatever Donald Trump was, he wasn't their fault.

And so when conservatives talk about why Trump won, they play the game quite differently. Why did Trump win? It's because of safe spaces and trigger warnings, Katherine Timpf declares in the National Review; Trump was "a long-awaiting contrast to the infantilization and absurd demands for 'safe spaces' sweeping our society." Nay, says George Will, it was academia as a whole -- their books are full of "pretentious jargon" like "interrogated" and "problematized" and their courses have silly titles like "Jews in American Entertainment." Jonah Goldberg attributes Trump's rise to the media "crying wolf" -- how could anyone have known that Trump really was that terrible, given how untrustworthy our newspapers have been? None of these persons, from what I can tell, is a Donald Trump fan, which makes their commentary all the more striking. They recognize what a terrible choice Donald Trump is, but whirl about seeking to blame everyone but those who chose him.

This is pathological. Even if every critique the right had about, for example, liberal academia was entirely on target, is it really the case that a middle-income suburbanite in Dubuque decided to vote Trump because of how Wesleyan students want their classroom syllabi structured? It's implausible that it is true, and it'd be deeply pathetic if it was true. And to the extent that -- abstracted out to a broader commentary on "kids these days" and coastal elitism -- it is even part of the explanation, it's more pathetic still. "Just because the media says Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to American civic values doesn't mean he is one; and I don't feel the need to figure that out myself when I could be sending a message to those snot-nosed Ivy League teenagers who think they're so much better than me!" Who is patronizing who here?

This is the politics of a temper tantrum. There's certainly no notion of personal responsibility, that conservatives have duties to cause and country that exist independently of what media figures say or liberal youths do. Instead, conservatives are treated as creatures of instincts; minor children who are scarcely capable of independent reason. They lashed out, and now blame liberals for being inadequate babysitters. Republican voters, we're told, are helpless in the face of the grave insults they face from ... 19-year old bloggers living across the country. Minorities in cities they never visit. Professors at schools they don't attend. Nobody who has any real power over the conditions of their lives, mind you. No matter: they just had to respond. The backlash was inevitable. Certainly, they can't be expected to have independently come to the conclusion that Donald Trump is a menace. In these circumstances, nobody can reasonably hold them accountable for the decision they made in the ballot box.

The ur-form of this must be the very favorite explanation for why Trump won: That White Americans were sick of being criticized for racism, for sexism, for xenophobia, for not being perfect little egalitarians. Liberals insisted on holding Americans to account for these sins, and Americans deeply resented them for it. Eric Holder called us a "nation of cowards" around the subject of race, and White people railed against him even in the course of proving him absolutely right. And so, under this story, Trump won because he offered an alternative where Americans didn't have to feel guilty about any of these things: They could mock minorities, swap stories about assaulting women, demand an American free of non-Christians, and they'd be okay, even justified, in doing so.

There is a very literal form of emotional regression at work here. I was a pretty well-behaved kid growing up, but like anyone else I sometimes misbehaved. Sometimes I was inconsiderate or hurtful, or mocked or insulted people. And when I did do those things, my parents made me own up to it and apologize. I didn't get a ton of "this is what it means to be a man" type parenting, but if ever I got it, this was the context. Part of being a man means manning up and taking responsibility when what you're doing hurts other people.

Of course, as anyone who's gone through this knows, it's not fun. It made me feel bad, and the actual act of apologizing felt even worse. As a kid, just learning these lessons, you're very susceptible to being in denial about the whole thing. It wasn't really your fault, the other guy had it coming, they deserved it, I was right, they were wrong, my friends got away with it -- anything to avoid owning up to the mistake. How easy it would be to fall in with a pied piper who endorsed that entire line? The reason we have to teach children to take responsibility for their actions is because the alternative is very, very tempting.

We expect adults to know better. To the extent our nation has and continues to commit wrongs along the axis of race, of gender, of religion, of disability -- and we have, and we continue to -- we should have the maturity to look it in the eye and take responsibility for it. That doesn't mean always accepting blame. It does mean fairly taking one's share of it and -- more importantly, in the case of complex political issues -- being open to the difficult conversation such issues provoke.

Donald Trump's appeal was precisely in offering the opportunity to circumvent all of that. He held out a choice that would be understandably appealing to spoiled children, but should have been beneath the dignity of a mature democracy. Turns out, it wasn't (or turns out, we weren't one). And it's hard not to think that part of the reason why is the legion of commentators who have been eager to explain why those persons who did choose to align themselves with Trump -- a notorious racist, a flagrant misogynist, a man whose only qualification to lead our nation was that he was openly in contempt of half it -- could be excused for it. It's not their fault. It's not their responsibility.

You want to talk about infantilization in American culture, this is the place to start. American conservatives have gleefully regressed to a state of childhood. They spent years acting out and then wonder why someone else didn't protect them from the consequences of their own actions. At some point, America cannot move forward unless we collectively grow up. Part of that will involve conservatives -- especially conservatives who have recognized the perils of the Trump movement -- accepting responsibility for the choices their faction has made, and holding their colleagues to account.

Is that day coming? Now, of course, conservatives control both houses of Congress and the President-elect. They hold the levers of American government. And -- just as we saw over the last two years -- there are right-wing voices who do recognize serious fissures in our democratic fabric. Noah Rothman in Commentary frets about "the normalization of intemperance or even fanaticism" we have recently begun to witness. So, now that their fruit has fully bloomed, will conservatives finally take responsibility for it? What does Rothman say?

Alas: "[D]on’t blame Donald Trump or his voters for this condition. Blame the left."

Old habits die hard.

Thanks on Thanksgiving

The Wednesday after election day, I woke up to an email announcing that an article I submitted -- my first ever political theory piece -- had gotten a "revise and resubmit" request.

It was that kind of year: Decent, except for the part where America seems on the brink of immolating itself. It was tough to even email my graduate advisors with the "good" news that day: "So, I know that we're all reeling from America electing a proto-fascist, but a paper I wrote three months ago was officially not-rejected (yet)!"

I'm thankful, nonetheless, for the parts of my year which were very good. On a professional level, my writing got more attention. I gave my first invited talk, and developed great new contacts with various elements of the institutional Jewish community. Both the key figures I wanted to serve on my dissertation committee agreed to do so.

On a personal level, I'm also thankful for having an incredible family (with whom I'm currently enjoying a "non-traditional" Las Vegas Thanksgiving), an amazing girlfriend who has stolen the show at both(!) of her two jobs, and great friends both in Berkeley and around the country.

Finally, I'm thankful because I'm well aware of how lucky I am. I'm financially secure. I'm ensconced at an incredible university. I'm no DC power broker, but I "know-people-who-know-people". While things aren't the best for people like me at Berkeley, they're by no means the worst. Knowing people -- brilliant scholars and great human beings -- who are, for example, undocumented keeps things in perspective. And -- keeping on the selfish theme -- my life is better because they're in my life. So I'm thankful for that too.

The next few years could go all manner of different ways. They could just be generically bad, in the same way that having a conservative President tends to be usually be pretty bad. They could be truly appalling, in the same way that the grotesque erosion of basic liberal and democratic norms -- far beyond the normal liberal/conservative divide -- we've witnessed over the past year tends to yield appalling results.

But I'm thankful that -- for the moment, at least -- I still have the wherewithal and the motivation to keep speaking out for what I believe in, and I deeply, deeply believe in both liberalism and democracy. I hope you still do too. And in seeking to keep that spark of liberty and self-governance alive, everybody does their part in their own way. Some march. Some write letters. Some organize. I write.

We all have our part to do. Whether we elect to do it or not is a choice we make every day. But I'll try to keep making a better choice today than I made yesterday, and I hope you will try to do so too. It's never too late to be a little kinder, a little more empathic, a little more responsible, a little more welcoming. And it's never too late to be a little less fearful, a little less close-minded, a little less parochial, a little less callous, a little less uncharitable. It's never too late for any of that.

But it's nice to do it with company.

Because while we all should, individually, try to make better choices today no matter what our fellows do; it will always be apparent that Americans are stronger together.

Can Keith Ellison Become America's Sadiq Khan?

In 2006, Keith Ellison was elected to the United States Congress, representing Minnesota's 5th Congressional District. In doing so, he became the first Muslim-American ever to serve in Congress. I was living in Minnesota at the time and so I had the opportunity to follow both his campaign and how it was covered and perceived in both the national press and the local Jewish community.

The first post I ever wrote on Keith Ellison, in October of 2006, I think nails down the story pretty well:

• Ellison had some past associations with the Nation of Islam and past anti-Semitic remarks which were genuinely problematic.
• But he put in the work to heavily court the Twin Cities Jewish community, persuading them that those days were behind him and gaining their trust and backing.
• His position on Israel well-recognized the significant security threats it faced and the culpability of groups like Hamas in the conflict. This view was not remotely in tension with his support for Palestinian rights.
• He pledged to visit Israel after his election (a pledge he followed through on).

The other major theme in early Ellison coverage was the tragically unsurprising bigoted backlash he faced from elements of the American (including, unfortunately, Jewish) right. The most prominent manifestation came when Dennis Prager (a Jewish writer notorious for being wholly enthralled by the Christian right) accused Ellison of "undermin[ing] American civilization" by swearing his congressional oath of office on Thomas Jefferson's copy of the Koran. 

Now Ellison is a front-runner to take over the Democratic National Committee  (he's already secured the endorsement of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer), causing him to again to return to the front pages of national media. Many conservatives -- desperate to draw attention away from the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism brought about by the Trump campaign and seeking to return to the "good old days" where the only anti-Semitism that mattered was on the left -- have sought to portray Ellison as a radical anti-Semite and anti-Israel extremist. I've read several of these dispatches (this one by Jeff Ballabon in Tablet is representative), and it inspired me to once again sort through my thoughts.

• Ellison's past associations with groups like the NOI were genuinely problematic, and I am convinced that Ellison consciously sought to downplay them. It is reasonable to interrogate them and insure that they no longer are reflective of Ellison's views. 
• That said, I am equally convinced that he's completely repudiated them.  These links are now well more than a decade old; since being elected to Congress he has completely followed through on his friendship to the Jewish community.
• On this score, his letter to the Minnesota JCRC on is simply excellent -- a clear, unambiguous admission of responsibility and a full and complete disavowal of the views he once held. In contrast to "apologies" which functionally deny wrongdoing and defiantly assert that it is wholly irrational to even consider one a racist or anti-Semite, Ellison's frank admission that his prior actions did give rise to concern and did demand a response that fully demonstrated an actual change in attitude is refreshing in its honesty. That letter should be distributed far and wide as a model of how one can successfully reengage with a community after committing genuine wrongdoing.
• It is clear that Keith Ellison cares about Palestinian rights. So do I. So does the majority of the American Jewish community. He has also been clear, time and again, that the full measure of responsibility does not fall on Israel's shoulders, and has always taken care to condemn Palestinian terrorism and incitement. A tweet noting that West Bank Palestinians are accusing Israel of practicing "apartheid" does not falsify this.
• There is no evidence of any sort I've seen indicating that Ellison supports BDS, and considerable evidence (from his own personal statements to his repeated trips to Israel) cuts the other way. The declaration in Tablet's headline that Ellison "Supports BDS" appears to be flatly inaccurate, and should be corrected (the article presents zero evidence in support of this proposition).
• The effort to act as if Ellison is the equivalent of -- or, more implausibly, is worse than -- Steve Bannon is both opportunistic and flatly ridiculous. The simple difference is that Ellison has put in the work to earn the support of his local Jewish community on a community-wide basis, and has a few partisan detractors. Bannon, by contrast, has alienated and infuriated the American Jewish community on a community-wide basis, and has a few partisan defenders. Ultimately, if the relevant question on anti-Semitism is "do you trust the instincts of the broad Jewish community," that suggests that Ellison is kosher, and Bannon is treyf.
• Finally, Shmuel Rosner's assessment back in 2006 that a Muslim congressman giving support to Israel is exceptionally valuable even if he doesn't get a 100% AIPAC scorecard remains absolutely true. A high-profile Muslim leader who does not take the "Israel is always wrong" route, who does not endorse BDS, is a gift for the Jewish community that we would be fools to pass up.

On that final note, the person Keith Ellison may be most likely to emulate is London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Like Ellison, Khan has been a trailblazer for Muslims in Western politics. Like Ellison, Khan had some genuinely troubling associations with Muslim extremists early in his career; and like Ellison, he has since repudiated them. Like Ellison, Khan put in the work to earn Jewish support (and unlike Ellison, Khan had to deal with a political climate where his left-of-center party -- Labour -- was in more-or-less open warfare with the UK Jewish community); like Ellison, he successfully persuaded them that he was a genuine Jewish ally. Since his election, Khan has upheld his promises -- being a steadfast critic of anti-Semitism (including in his own Party) and coming out against BDS.

I think there is a strong chance Keith Ellison could fill a similar role. If he becomes DNC chair, I am confident he will oppose BDS and anti-Semitism. I am confident that he will support Palestinian rights, perhaps more so than has been seen in the official DNC line; I am also confident he will do so in a way that is cognizant and respectful of Israel's genuine security needs.

Keith Ellison's greatest strength is not that he says he's an ally of the Jews. It is not that he publishes loud columns talking about how much he loves Netanyahu or hates the Palestinian Authority. Keith Ellison's strength is that he acknowledged past wrongs, committed to better choices, and has taken it on himself to earn the Jewish community's trust. He put in the work. And that makes him very, very different from certain other alleged anti-Semites who are now demanding Jewish respect as an entitlement.

UPDATE: JTA just put up a very good article on Rep. Ellison, including an explicit rejection by him of BDS.

How Steve Bannon Rallied the Jews

My Ha'aretz piece asked the question: How would the major players in the Jewish community react now that anti-Semitism was entering the right-wing mainstream? Underlying my post were two observations:

1. Jewish organizations had largely treated mainstream right-wing anti-Semitism (that is, that which emerged out of significant political figures rather than some crank in the woods) with kid gloves. This was because Jewish organizations suspected that the right would turn on them with a vengeance if they dared speak up.
2. Despite the significant liberal tilt of the American Jewish community, many Jewish organizations seemed to go out of their way to coddle our relatively small right-wing element. Among the center/left Jewish mainstream, the sense that the Jewish right got to play by different rules and has been allowed to claim the mantle of a (if not the) "Jewish perspective" on politics has led to increasing anger, anger that is now at the risk of boiling over.

And now we see the reaction to Steve Bannon. And it is something to behold.

As has now become clear, the case against Bannon is less that he has personally made utterances of the "I hate Jews" variety, and more that he has actively nurtured and promoted a worldview that provides a welcoming home for old-school anti-Semites of the White supremacist and neo-Nazi variety. And that case is, as far as I and most other Jews are concerned, a sufficient case. Steve Bannon is functionally identical the prototypical anti-Zionist mouthpieces who are very proud to "have Jewish friends", and usually remember to be sticklers about saying "Zionist" rather than "Jew", but have had no problem elevating a social movement that is deeply and notoriously toxic to Jewish equality in the American and international community. As David Hirsh accurately put it: "anti-Semitism is about politics, not personal moral failure." And so with respect to Bannon, we could fairly say that "Globalist" : Breitbart :: "Zionist" : Electronic Intifada.

And so then we move to a fantastic article in Tablet by Bari Weiss. She, too, echoes this powerful observation:

We will never know what’s in Steve Bannon’s heart. What we know is that he is proud to have provided the bullhorn for a movement that unabashedly promotes white nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the relentless identification of Jews as the champions of the country’s most nefarious forces, like “globalism” and “elitism,” that the alt-right seeks to destroy. It’s no coincidence that a publication that identifies as the “platform” for this movement thinks nothing of calling Bill Kristol “a renegade Jew” or smearing Anne Applebaum: “Hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.”

Last time I checked, we Jews come from a faith that judges not by intention but by deed.

Even John Podhoertz at Commentary recognized this: "the key moral problem with Steve Bannon," he wrote "is that as the CEO of Andrew Breitbart’s namesake organization, he is an aider and abetter of foul extremist views, including anti-Semitic ones." Podhoertz distinguishes this from Bannon, himself, being an anti-Semite -- but see Weiss and Hirsh above. In any event, the precise verbiage doesn't matter so much to me. What matters, as Hirsh observes, is the politics.

Alas, not everyone on the right has been as strong as Podhoertz. And Weiss has some sharp words for them as well:

Yet Jews on the center-right seem to be facing a particular challenge when it comes to Bannon and this administration. The anti-Semitism coming from the left is worse, they say. Let’s hold our fire. Maybe it’s not worth it to use our political capital on this guy. Maybe he’s not so bad.

Is it frustrating to watch left-wingers who remained mum about Jeremiah Wright now protesting in the streets about the president-elect’s appointment? Is it maddening to witness the sudden sensitivity to anti-Semitism of so many Jews who are willfully blind to it among their political ranks? Who have nothing to say about the BDS movement, the bullying of pro-Israel students on college campuses across this country, the bellicosity of Iran, and of a nuclear deal that so clearly emboldened the ayatollahs?

Yes.

Get over it. We don’t have the luxury of holding political grudges in an age where Steve Bannon is going to be the president’s right-hand man.

Hawkishness on Israel is not the litmus test of a person’s decency. To hold your tongue as the godfather of the alt-right is installed in the West Wing is deplorable.

Damn straight (and -- as someone on the left who has consistently called out left-wing anti-Semitism over and over and over again -- I'd add that it's equally frustrating to watch right-wingers who went absolutely wild over even the thinnest-reed of anti-Jewish sentiment from Barack Obama suddenly act like they don't know what a dogwhistle is, or that anti-Semitism only occurs in the form of someone openly declaring "I hate every Jew").

Steve Bannon is an outrage, not just to the protest-sorts currently marching in New York, not just to the institutional Zionist left -- groups like Ameinu, T'ruah, and the Jewish Labor Committee, but to center-line institutions -- the ADL, the Reform Jewish movement and the Conservative Jewish movement.

These groups are not going to be impressed by one's implacable support of settlements. If anything, they find it offensive that the label "pro-Israel" is being wielded as a Get-Out-Of-Bigotry-Free Card. That rhetorical move isn't the act of a genuine friend, it's the act of someone who holds Jews in deep, deep contempt and thinks we can be played. They're in for a rude surprise. The Jewish community, I think, has just woken up a bit and recognized that we don't have the friends we thought we did. We're mobilizing, we're vocal, and we're angry.

The ground is changing under Jewish organizations' feet. Groups like the AJC -- which stayed quiet on Bannon and whose post-election statement excused Trump's plethora of racist remarks as mere campaign "crowd pleasers" that could not fairly form the basis of "judgment" -- will find that this sort of coddling of the right will no longer be tolerated by the community for which it speaks. The Jewish community voted for Hillary Clinton by a 3:1 margin. It is not going to have indefinite patience for its communal representatives kowtowing to a tiny minority which will excuse any amount of illiberal hatred so long as its progenitors line up behind Bibi.

And as for groups like ZOA, who openly backed Bannon and invited him to its gala (in the height of irony, he no-showed)? They need to be reminded that they are a fringe minority, Jews who advocate for policies and persons most Jews find deeply abhorrent and threatening. They are the mirror image of the anti-Zionists groups they claim to abhor (they even agree on the one-state solution). As such, they should be given no more attention and no more credence than any other marginal Jewish clique.

The days when Jews were afraid to tackle right-wing anti-Semitism are over. And they days where we showed infinite patience with Jewish collaborators are likewise numbered. If you're on the left, you don't get to play the moral purity game and try to undermine mainstream Jewish institutions because they're "Zionist". And if you're in the right, you don't get the luxury of sniveling that Liberals Are Worse and crying about what Keith Ellison said 15 years ago. We're way past that, and it's time to accept a new reality of Jewish life in a world many of us thought had passed us by. The gloves are off. It's time to fight.

The Media Does Not Get To Blame Hillary Clinton for their Own Choices of Coverage

Last night, I tweeted out the following as an "unpopular opinion":

Unpopular opinion: Hillary Clinton in fact devoted plenty of time to promoting a positive agenda for America. Media just didn't give a shit.

— David Schraub (@schraubd) November 19, 2016

It turned out to be ... rather popular (for me at least).

Now here's the thing. There is an entirely valid post-mortem critique of the Clinton campaign vis-à-vis the media. It would go something like this:

In our current media climate, what matters is who can get the attention of the cameras. Donald Trump was a master at ginning up free publicity for himself by being outrageous and outlandish. Hillary Clinton -- too dry, too boring, too establishment, too wonky, too policy oriented -- was incapable of adequately countering this strategy. One can moan about how unfair that is, but politics is the art of winning, and Clinton didn't win. So in that essential respect, she, her team, and the Party that picked her failed.

If a member of the media wanted to level that critique, I'd respect that. I'd view it as a rather sad commentary on democracy, but I'd respect the sort of hard-headed realism of it. I'd even accept the claim that the "media climate" reflects nothing more than what the people want, and so the media can't be blamed for not indulging in the delusion that what the people want is neatly laid out agendas for American policy reform.

But for the media -- whose political coverage never left the pendulum swing of "look at this KEE-razy thing Trump said" and "EMAILZ!" -- to now turn around and say that the problem was that Clinton didn't forward a positive agenda for America ... that takes serious chutzpah. Yes, she ran plenty of negative ads. But I saw plenty of positive ads too. And listening to her at the debates or at her DNC speech, the vast majority of her statements were about explaining, calmly and seriously, her plan for how to keep America safe, how to improve the lives of working Americans, how to bring about justice for the full panoply of our diverse population, and so on. The problem was not that this analysis wasn't there. It was, if anything, the centerpiece of her campaign! To say that she tried to run a campaign on nothing more than "I'm not Trump" is ludicrous.

The problem was not that Hillary Clinton ran as "the one who isn't Trump." She didn't. It was the media who chose to treat her as "the boring one who's only relevant as the one who isn't Trump. And who had an email server." And again, if we're saying it's her responsibility to deal with the media we have and the electorate we actually have, not the one deliberative democrats fantasize we have, that's one thing. But it's another thing entirely to blame Hillary Clinton for not presenting a positive policy agenda that she tried desperately to frontload in the face of months of media apathy.

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux: The Media Refuses Accountability For Its Own Malpractice.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XXXI: Electing Donald Trump

In 2008, when Barack Obama won election with 78% of the Jewish vote. a Greek newspaper heralded the outcome as "the end of Jewish domination." So now in 2016, with Donald Trump surging to victory while only carrying 24% of the Jewish vote, who's the driving force behind his victory? Oh, you know who:

Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, has reportedly suggested that Donald Trump won the US election because of support from “the Jews.”

Zakharova made the comments over the weekend on a nationally televised talk show, saying that it was Jewish money that tipped the election for Trump, Radio Free Europe reported.

“If you want to know what will happen in America, who do you have to talk to? You have to talk to the Jews, naturally. But of course,” Zakharova said while on Sunday Evening, a show hosted by pro-Kremlin television personality Vladimir Solovyov, the report said.

Zakharova then reportedly adopted “a cartoonish Jewish accent” while impersonating her alleged interlocutor.

Honestly, the question was less "would people blame the Jews for this" and more "who would be the first to blame the Jews for this." Although, given that this is a Russian governmental official talking about Trump winning the presidency, we might more accurately title this one "Things People Credit the Jews For."

Mike Huckabee Doubles Down on Jewish "False Flag" Allegations

A few days ago, I encountered a story on some far right websites alleging that left-wing Jewish students at Northwestern had fabricated an incident of bigotry -- spray painting a church with swastikas and other hateful images, along with the word "Trump" -- in order to further the narrative of right-wing prejudice following Donald Trump's election (it's been scrubbed or "updated" from many of these websites, but this one at least gives you a sense of how they initially reported the story). Basically, they suggested that this (and by implication, other) alleged hate crimes that occurred after the election were really false flag operations to frame the right for sins they were not, in fact, committed. Among the proponents of the story was Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (it's gone from his Facebook page, but I checked a cached version and he absolutely endorsed the allegation that left-wing Jews -- and he specifically mentioned Jews -- were behind the vandalism incident).

The story was entirely false -- for starters, because the incident occurred this past March (not post-election day), but more importantly because there was no evidence that the perpetrators were (a) leftist, (b) Jewish, or (c) anything other than earnest (albeit probably drunk) in their hateful acts. And this matters, because the claim that Jews fabricate anti-Semitic incidents in order to generate public sympathy and discredit their supposed adversaries is among the most prominent forms of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing extant today. It was, for example, central to the anti-Semitic musings of just-fired Oberlin professor Joy Karega (she alleged that Israel secretly was behind the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and ISIS in order to discredit pro-Palestinian advocates).

I had seen that Huckabee had scrubbed the story from his Facebook page, and today I read in JTA that he had apologized for the initial post. The JTA article does not link to Huckabee's actual note of apology [UPDATE: The link is now in the story], and perhaps for good reason. Because in his "apology", it turns out that Huckabee is not apologizing at all. He very explicitly, and very openly, doubles down on the core allegation that the incident in question was a false flag operation done by left-wing and (potentially -- he hedges here) Jewish students to discredit conservatives. Here's the key segment:

[Critics] accused me of spreading false information and hatred, and demanded an apology. And they’re right, I do owe readers an apology. Due to a posting error, the story was actually from last March, but it appeared to be a new story. I didn’t remember the original story and assumed it was new. For that mistake, I sincerely apologize. But the facts of the story were otherwise accurate.

Read that passage again -- it's clear as day. Huckabee concedes only that the incident occurred in March, not this past week. Other than that, he maintains that "the facts of the story" -- in other words, the claim that the swastikas and vandalism was a hoax perpetrated by left-wing Jews to tar conservatives -- is "otherwise accurate."

Need more proof? Here's Huckabee's very next paragraph:

As for the rest of the paper’s attacks on me, which included a disputed report that the vandals were Jewish, that was part of the original story and was certainly not intended as any sort of slur on Jews. It was considered relevant only because the hateful graffiti included a swastika, obviously intended to make it falsely appear that the vandalism was committed by anti-Jewish Trump supporters.

Again, other than the slight hedging on whether the vandals were Jewish (and, to reiterate, there is precisely zero evidence that they were -- that was not part of the "original story" and was apparently made up out of whole cloth), Huckabee stands entirely behind the core narrative. The act of vandalism was a hoax. It was a false flag.

That is not an apology. That's a double-down. And it's very important that he be called to account for it, because the claim that Jews (or any minority group) engages in false flag attacks on its own community in order to discredit adversaries is incredibly serious, and flagrantly bigoted in its own right. It is not something minor, and it is not something that can be overlooked -- especially when he appears to be the front-runner for Ambassador to Israel.

In presenting Huckabee as apologizing for his false flag allegations, the JTA story is spectacularly misleading, and gives Huckabee a pass on an issue which frankly should end his career. It needs an update, and it needs an update stat.

The Last Temptation of Jewish Groups

The Jewish community is facing a difficult challenge when it comes to the Donald Trump administration: "Condemn or court?" It has come to a particular head given the appointment of Steve Bannon -- head of the far-right Breitbart News, the notorious clearinghouse for every brand of White nationalist hatred imaginable -- to a high-level advisory position. Some groups, like the ADL, have stood by their principles and condemned the appointment. Others have been more, shall we say, cowardly on the question of bigotry in the Trump campaign and in his appointments.

The American Jewish Committee just released its big post-election statement. Would they be brave, or would they cower in mealy-mouthed apologias? Alas:

Campaigns frequently generate rhetoric that sounds appealing to some voters, but, in reality, are little more than unexamined sound bites and crowd pleasers. History has shown that not all pledges made in the heat of a tight race turn into policy. This has been true of both Democratic and Republican winners. We need, therefore, to understand how a successful candidate plans to govern before making sweeping judgments based largely, or even exclusively, on the language of the primary and electoral periods.

Indeed, who among us cannot relate to -- in the heat of electoral passion -- calling Mexicans rapists or demanding that innocent Black people be executed?  Have we not all sometimes been tempted to insist on a ban on all Muslims entering the country? And surely all of us can understand how, at the end of a long electoral season, one might end up cutting a campaign ad that functionally reboots The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's quite the crowd-pleaser, after all.

I hope the AJC recognizes the peril they're putting themselves in with the community for which they claim to speak. I am not the only one has entirely lost patience with this craven approach of coddling bigotry, and I am not the only one taking note of which Jewish organizations are showing a backbone and which ones are falling over themselves to knuckle under. If the AJC wants to dishonor itself, that's its prerogative. But if it wants to claim to be a representative of the Jewish community, it needs to look at exactly where that community is, and what message we want to send. Because right now, it is a shanda.

Who's Afraid of Right-Wing Anti-Semitism?

I just published a column in Ha'aretz about how Jews have given mainstream right-wing anti-Semitism a free pass, and how it needs to stop. While I submitted it to them under the title "Who's Afraid of Right-Wing Anti-Semitism", they published it as "Who’ll Have the Guts to Stand Up to Trump’s Powerful anti-Semitic Predators?" But you can get a fair sense of the tenor of the piece by its original working title: "The Republican Jewish Coalition is chickenshit."

And that was before they (and the even-more risible ZOA) decided to defend Steve Bannon.

Ha'aretz, alas, has a paywall (and a notoriously cantankerous website). But if you're having trouble accessing the article, I've found that going through google and selecting the cached version usually works.

Who Benefits from a National Popular Vote?

Hillary Clinton will win the national popular vote.

This is a lot less relevant than it seems. Legally, of course, it's entirely irrelevant: we elect our President through the electoral college system, not the popular vote. And even as a talking point, its bark is worth more than its bite. Just because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote under  the system we have (where the popular vote isn't the prize) doesn't mean she would have won had a popular vote plurality been the deciding factor. Both candidates' strategy would have been very different had the popular vote been the deciding factor; perhaps if Trump had an incentive to focus on ginning up more votes in, say, Los Angeles, the numbers would work out differently. It's not implausible that Clinton would have won the popular vote anyway, but it's a hypothesis supported by moderate -- not overwhelming -- evidence.

Nonetheless, the fact that we've now had two elections in 16 years where the popular vote winner was the electoral college loser has put our status quo system under unprecedented scrutiny. My inclination is to support reform: it's hard to justify the electoral college (particularly since it is about to fail at one of its original justifications -- ensuring that a wave of populist demagoguery doesn't put a manifestly unqualified hack in the oval office).

Perhaps the only plausible contemporary justification for the electoral college I've seen is that it forces candidates to appeal to a wide range of Americans, instead of just concentrating on big cities. Who would spend time in rural states like Iowa or New Hampshire were it not for the electoral college incentive? The claim is that, if we only decided things by the popular vote, our presidential election campaigns would be fought out only in our biggest cities, leaving many Americans on the outside looking in.

I don't find this objection compelling for two reasons. First, the electoral college also very obviously causes large swaths of America to be overlooked. "Safe states" like California or Texas (or Delaware or Wyoming) are entirely ignored. And if certain regions have to be ignored in a democratic system, in a democracy it seems like "having fewer people" is a pretty decent metric for allocating our attention.

But second, I'm actually unconvinced that we'd see widespread neglect of rural America in a popular vote model. The way actual presidential campaigns operate in swing states is illustrative. In Wisconsin, for example, it's not like Democrats and Republicans spend all their time fighting for votes in Milwaukee and Madison, and ignore the rest of the state entirely. Rather, there is plenty of attention paid to the outlying regions -- particularly by Republicans, who try to drum up support from many smaller counties to counteract huge Democratic margins in the cities. This seems to be pretty standard across most contested states. So why wouldn't we see the same dynamic play out nationwide: Republicans rallying many small-population regions to try to overcome large Democratic margins in cities?

And this brings me to my final observation. I support a national popular vote model because it seems more democratic than our status quo. But I think people are being mislead in thinking that it necessarily benefits the Democratic Party. Many large urban centers are in blue states that are not currently contested. Many rural areas, by contrast, are in purple states which are absolutely contested. In other words, our political system right now has Democrats and Republicans nip-and-tuck in a situation where Democrats do try to appeal to rural and exurban voters, and Republicans basically don't try to appeal to urban voters. It seems like the GOP has a lot more room to grow if, as it'd have an incentive to do in a popular vote system, it starts making a serious play for city votes (it's also true that in doing so it may have an incentive to moderate itself by appealing to a more diverse constituency that it currently ignores).

Again, my small-d democratic preferences aren't based on what helps the large-D Democratic Party. But this is a note of caution about thinking that a popular vote model will necessarily be a boon for progressives. It may well help the GOP more (though it also might help the GOP break out of its increasingly radical shell).

The Independent Republican Conference

The Independent Democratic Conference is a group of six renegade Democrats who effectively let the GOP control the New York State Senate, despite its nominal Democratic majority.

I do not expect there to be an Independent Republican Conference in the U.S. Senate. It will be a 52-48 Republican majority (barring something truly shocking in Louisiana's runoff) -- a two-seat Democratic gain (pickups in Illinois and New Hampshire).

But what is plausible -- maybe -- is that a cohort of Senate Republicans might be willing to break from the past eight years policy of absolute, resolute, kneejerk party line voting and join with Democrats to insure there will be some actual oversight of the Trump administration.

Who are the likely candidates to take up that mantle?

The leader almost certainly would have to be Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE). He was one of the earliest, most consistent, and most outspoken critics of Trump from within the GOP (here's his column on Trump's victory, tealeaf it yourself). That's one -- not because it's guaranteed, but because if he doesn't take the lead I can't imagine any caucus forming. Who else?

The supposedly moderate Susan Collins (ME) is an obvious possibility, but she's never exactly been renowned for her backbone. It'd be a major change for her to start bucking her party on a regular basis. But if ever there was a time for her to grow an actual spine, it'd be now.

Lindsey Graham (SC) could be a possibility. He's likewise been pretty critical of Trump, and has some personal grudges against Trump's wing of the party. His colleague Tim Scott (SC), as the only Black Republican in the Senate, is a complete wild card on this -- I wouldn't normally slot him in unless Trump goes so avowedly White supremacist that he can't not say something.

John McCain (AZ) ... well, who knows what he's thinking these days. I don't have a lot of faith. Jeff Flake might actually be a more realistic shot from this rapidly purpling state.

Marco Rubio (FL) and Ted Cruz (TX)? Don't make me laugh. Both have raced to snuggle up to Trump after getting blown apart by him in the primaries.

Chuck Grassley (IA), Orrin Hatch (UT), and maybe Pat Roberts (KS) might be old enough to do the whole "elder statesmen" thing. None of them will suffer any repercussions if they don't, though.

Dean Heller (NV) might look at Joe Heck's defeat and feel the need to avoid a similar fate. Or he might think that Heck was undone by his late wince away from Trump.

The Democratic Party is in a routed state right now. It will recover, but it will take time. In the meantime, it'll be up to congressional Republicans to decide if they want to put brakes on Trump or let him run wild. Democrats are, for the short-term at least, out of the equation: the last eight years have shown that a unified Republican majority can completely, utterly, entirely shut out the Democratic minority if they want to.

The ball is in your court, Sasse.

Post-Election Roundup: The Bad Place or the Darkest Timeline?

Jill says we're in the darkest timeline. I say we're in The Bad Place. Either way, it ain't good, and my browser is clogging up.

* * *

If there's an award for Most Craven Jewish Organization of 2016, the Republican Jewish Coalition has to be the frontrunner.

Everyone's talking about how coastal elites are in a bubble. But many rural Americans -- who've scarcely met a Muslim or a Jew, or an African-American or an Asian -- are in a huge bubble of their own. And nobody seems all that concerned with urging them to break out, or to take seriously the views of other people unlike them.

Latino Trump voters explain their votes.

A meditation by Joan C. Williams (UC-Hastings Law) on what drives "White working class" (which actually generally means middle class) voters. Basically, they feel like their is a dignity-deficit in their lives, and they hate the professional/managerial (not the rich) class. An interesting read, though I have some reservations.

The anti-Semitization of racism. That's my term, but Phoebe Maltz Bovy explains how racism is beginning to resemble anti-Semitism in that it targets achievement by racial minorities and snarls about their supposed excess of power and influence.

And finally, a truly excellent letter from Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander, a Democrat who only narrowly lost his deep red state in a big GOP year. Well worth reading if you need a jolt.

The Humiliating Best-Case Trump Administration Scenario

I want to talk about what I take to be the best-case Trump administration scenario. Now let's be clear, along a lot of axes that scenario is still a pretty grim one. On many issues -- civil rights and liberties, voting rights, the environment, reproductive rights, to name a few -- it's hard to imagine a Trump administration being anything less than cataclysmic. I don't talk about those here, not because they don't matter, but because they aren't meaningfully different in the "best-case" scenario versus the median-case.

So what is our "best-case"? Well, Trump's victory speech focused on infrastructure, and I've joked with my friends that if Donald Trump wants to distract himself for four years by building trains I would be over-the-moon. And this is hardly implausible -- Trump has very little in the way of firm ideology (he's the consummate populist panderer), but he does like building things. He's already calling for a huge stimulus package, of the sort that Democrats have been begging for for years now but Republicans always derided as socialist. Well, "always" meaning "when Democrats propose it." If there's one thing we know about Republicans, it's that they're entirely fine with massive federal government spending so long as it isn't a Democratic idea. So it strikes me as eminently plausible that this could get through Congress.

Likewise on health care. The big news and the end of this week was that President-elect Trump may consider keeping major portions of the Affordable Care Act: specifically, the ban on preexisting condition discrimination and the allowance that young people can stay on their parents' insurance up until age 26. I've also heard that he might continue to support the Medicaid expansion, and I'm dubious Republicans state politicians will continue to resist taking that money now that it isn't an explicit middle finger to Obama. The ban on preexisting condition clauses, for its part, would make it virtually impossible to get rid of the mandate. I fully expect to see some law out of the Republican Congress that purports to "repeal Obamacare." But rather than "repeal and replace," it may well be in essence "repeal and keep." The "repeal" part would basically be an ego salve; or perhaps more accurately, an effort to appropriate Obama's legacy to themselves by taking what's properly termed a "fix" and pretending like it's a brand-new Republican idea.

So let's see: Infrastructure spending. Stimulus. A health care plan modeled on the ACA. All of these are Democratic ideas, that Republicans will now consider only because it won't be a party of Black people and women that's proposing them. This is actually not even that surprising when you look back at American history -- remember how the healthcare mandate was bog-standard Republican orthodoxy right up until it became Obama's policy, at which point it transformed into the greatest threat to human liberty in the past century? Much like Rock & Roll, they'll savage them right up until they can steal and take credit for them. Again, it's the best case scenario because it preserves or implements some genuinely good policies. But it'll be humiliating to see Republicans act as if they came up with these wonderful ideas all by themselves.

And of course, the real moral of the story would simply be "we can get Congress to invest in America again, but only if we wash it down with a gallon jug of White nationalism and misogyny while we're at it." This would not augur well for the future of American progressive politics.

Which Historical Leader Will Trump Most Emulate?

The opening odds:

Silvio Berlusconi ------- 2:1
Vladimir Putin ---------- 4:1
Richard Nixon ---------- 4:1
Hugo Chavez ----------- 5:1
Warren G. Harding ----- 6:1
Andrew Johnson -------- 6:1
Rodrigo Duterte -------- 8:1
Gamal Abdel Nasser --- 10:1
Benito Mussolini ------- 12:1
George W. Bush -------- 12:1
Teddy Roosevelt -------- 30:1
Adolph Hitler ------------ 30:1
Barack Obama ----------- 2000:1

Hebrew Letters in Berkeley, Part II

First, a bit of background.

On Wednesday, the Vice Chancellor sent out a message noting the concern and fear that many felt as a result of happenings this election, and providing a message of support from the Berkeley administration and a thoroughgoing commitment of the university to principles of equality, inclusion, diversity, and tolerance. Her note included a very lengthy list of groups that were "in particular" affected by the election, the rhetoric leading up to it, and its potential aftermath. Jews were conspicuously absent. I thought about writing on that omission, but ultimately elected not to (for reasons that my letter will explain).

On Thursday, the Vice Chancellor sent out an additional message which specifically assured that Berkeley's leaders "condemn bigotry and hatred in all forms, including the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the recent campaign season." Though not expressly mentioned, it was pretty clear that this message was sent due to expressions of concern regarding the omission of Jews from the first email.

What follows is the email I sent to the Vice Chancellor following this second message. I wrote it this afternoon; independently, Richard Jeffrey Newman also authored a thoughtful post about how many progressive groups are -- consciously or not -- omitting Jews from those groups which are seen as threatened by the Trump movement and what it represents. I endorse his post in full as well, and I highly encourage you to read it.

* * *

[Name,]

I wanted to write and thank you for the email you sent out today, acknowledging the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the campaign season and affirming Jewish inclusion in our campus community going forward. As a Jewish student (and faculty member) who is feeling renewed concern about his place in our community and country, it meant a lot to me that you transmitted this message.

I assume this particular email was sent as a follow-up to yesterday's, which did not include Jews among the lengthy list of communities in concern. I admit I had noticed the omission as well. Two things made the absence particularly stand out to me.

• First, all of us probably had a moment Tuesday evening which was particularly piercing for us. For me, it was a Jewish journalist who spent much of Tuesday retweeting message after message gleefully promising him a swift trip to the gas chambers. It drove home for me the real danger that had been unleashed, fanned, and validated this election cycle. Other people of all backgrounds undoubtedly experienced their own iterations of the same. It is a terrible commonality we shared in fear.
• Second, following the first, I considered on Wednesday morning wearing a Hebrew-language t-shirt and additional identifiably Jewish garb simply to send the message "I am not afraid." But ultimately, I did not do so. There were many reasons for this, but one was the fear that my gesture would not be recognized as a rallying point for solidarity; that for many in our community it would not even register that I was threatened by these developments too, in a very real and material way.

Because of those considerations, I had considered writing about the message that was sent when, in such a lengthy listing of groups expressly mentioned as experiencing fear and concern, mine was not among them. But I elected not to. In part, this was because this day and this message was not just about me, and I did not want to center myself as the focal point of the conversation when so many of my peers were hurting in their own way. And in part, it was because I continued to fear that even asking for this gesture of inclusion would be seen as some as an imposition, as illicit, even as a form of theft.

And this hurts. It hurts to feel like one has to beg for the scraps of communal solidarity. And it hurts to feel that, if one does so, it will be viewed by some as fundamentally dishonest -- even appropriative.

The failure to include Jews in lists like these at the outset, without prompting or prodding, matters. It is not because it would ever be possible to list off every single group, but because the lack of Jewish inclusion is read not as an oversight but rather as locating them as similarly situated to the groups that "won" with Trump (even though Jews voted Clinton 70/24). The failure to instinctively perceive Jews as among the communities threatened by waves of populist prejudice goes hand in hand with the presumption that Jews are not entitled to access these forms of solidarity; that when we do ask for support on equal terms, we are arrogating to ourselves something that is not ours, that we are stealing precious resources from the "real" marginalized communities and hoarding it to our perfectly-privileged selves. 

There is, in short, a particular instantiation of structural anti-Semitism in which Jews are viewed as anti-discrimination winners, the outgroup that's in. Jewish oppression very often goes hand in hand with the view that Jews are if anything hyperpowerful, surely not in need of more of the bounty they already possess. The particular way one shows solidarity for Jews in cases like these is to recognize that we count, that we are not artificially but naturally a part of the communities that this week need our help.

The hope of all of us is that each and every community one day will be able to count on that instinctive form of solidarity -- that if we're hurting or threatened or vulnerable, our fellows will be there to have our back not because they were pressured to do so, or persuaded to do so, but simply as a basic reflex. That's our hope not just in Berkeley, but nationwide. It is, perhaps, a particularly distant hope this week. But the first step is to try and cultivate those instincts right here in our own backyard. That is the hard, trying, difficult work that we are tasked with.

Of course, if everyone already perfectly possessed those instincts, we'd be having a very different conversation this week. So I will return to where I began: Thank you for sending the follow-up. It does matter, and it is appreciated. If, as Orlando Battista once said, "an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it," then I appreciate the attempt to correct the error and the commitment that next time, it will be right the first time.

Thanks again for all of your had work in this difficult time,

--

David Schraub

Lecturer in Law, UC-Berkeley

Senior Research Fellow, California Constitution Center, UC-Berkeley

PhD candidate, Department of Political Science

Democracy is a Choice We Make Everyday

Election day is an important day when we as Americans choose who we are as a nation. Today, Americans chose Donald Trump to be our standard-bearer, and he will be our next President.

I truly didn't think this would happen. I can say that with 100% honesty, as I actually put a bunch of money into the stock market this morning on the assumption I could turn a neat profit on the Clinton victory bounce. That didn't turn out great.

As it became more evident that Donald Trump would win tonight -- massively outperforming prior Republican tallies in White regions even as he lost Latinos by shocking margins -- I didn't quite have the reaction I thought I would. I wasn't quite as panicked as I thought I'd be. I wasn't quite as despondent as I thought I'd be.

This is not a softening on the Trump campaign one bit. I do not believe this election was about "economic anxiety", and I do not believe it was about generic anger at the "establishment". What drove the White majority in this nation was the realization that they didn't have to pretend to care about others' equality. And if they didn't have to do it, they had no interest in it. If ever a hypothesis was falsified, it was the conceit that contemporary American bigotry was subconscious rather than simply in hiding.

Peter Beinart's twitter feed today -- retweeting message after message gleefully promising to send him to the gas chambers -- was an entirely unnecessary confirmation of the hell Trump has unleashed for Jews in this country; a hell that parallels the terrors he promises for Muslims, immigrants, people of color, and women. Indeed, the most terrible lesson we've learned this day is the degree to which White people in this nation thirst to return to an overt position of supremacy -- advantaged not just implicitly but openly. What I was reminded of most was Bernard Henri-Levy's commentary on the resurgence of European anti-Semitism. It came out of a yearning

for people to feel once again the desire and, above all, the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large numbers of rabbis, to kill not just one but many Ilan Halimis....

They want to do it, and they want to feel good about wanting to do it. This election was about White people wanting to no longer feel guilty about wanting to stand atop and astride people of color, about Christian people wanting to no longer feel guilty about dreaming of an America that only includes Christians, about men wanting to no longer feel guilty about their fantasies of assaulting women.

Another lesson we learned was the absolute, complete irrelevancy of the "intellectual" wing of contemporary conservatism -- a faction which has always feared Trump. Let's be clear, if even a quarter of Republicans actually bought into #NeverTrump, this election is a blowout. The GOP establishment, its elites, its thinkers -- people who found Trump risible -- they are trivial. They are nothing. There has probably never been a larger gap between public profile and actual influence in the history of this nation.

So what caused my zen-state earlier this evening? Maybe it was numbness. Maybe it hasn't set in yet.

But Donald Trump is not interested in governing. I suppose thank goodness for that; heaven help us if he developed an interest. But if he's not interested in governing, then he won't be interested in following through on his more vicious policy proposals. They'll require work, after all, and since when does Donald Trump wish to work?

Take the Supreme Court. Trump clearly couldn't care less about it. Which means he'll almost certainly nominate bog-standard conservative justices from the standard conservative lists. Under normal circumstances, that would be awful. But the silver lining is those justices tend to come from that "intellectual" wing of the Party I just dismissed as trivial. They are precisely the sorts of conservatives who may well recoil at any overtly authoritarian tendencies by a Trump administration.

Or perhaps not. The Republican establishment has been thoroughly cowed by Donald Trump, and that has a tendency to prompt one to reconcile oneself (maybe that's what I -- optimistic, establishment-oriented-I -- am doing right now). And does anyone really trust Trump to abide by a hostile court decision? The fact that we're asking these questions is scary in its own right. And there are other issues -- global warming is perhaps the most striking -- where it seems we are probably just doomed.

But what this boils down to is this. As awful as Donald Trump is, I'm less scared of him than I am of the people who elected him. They formed a national plurality that talks of throwing political opponents into jail, that revels in hurting others unlike them, that has unleashed a torrent of racist and sexist abuse the likes of which haven't been seen in my lifetime. All that talk about how "you can't say" certain things about Muslims or Jews or Blacks or women? We've discovered you absolutely can say it -- and become President in the process! That genie won't get bottled up again easily, regardless of how Trump comports himself from this day forward. Trump was just an opportunistic vessel for that sentiment; I no longer think it needs his express or implied support for it to survive. That said, better men than him have tried to purely translate raw populist sentiment into concrete policy. It's no easy task even for skilled politicians.

So where do we find ourselves?

Election day is a day when we as American choose who we want to be as a nation. But that's only because we make that choice every single day. We make it tomorrow, when we agree to a peaceful transition of power. We make it this weekend, when we stop making stupid jokes about moving to Canada and start thinking about our next steps here. We make it over the next two years, when we dig in our heels and renew the fight. We make it each and every moment that we put forward a vision and a dream that the choice America makes for itself tomorrow will be better than the choice we made today.

Today's choice was a terrible choice. But it is not our last choice. It is not history that will vindicate us, or the arc of the universe that will bend our way. It is up to us, and our choices, to (if I can adopt a successful slogan) make America great again.