Racism is a Productive Ideology

The other day, Ezra Klein tweeted this:

The Trump bet is paying off for the GOP. They got tax cuts. They got SCOTUS picks. They got deregulation. It's been worth the norm violations, the weakening of alliances, the indecency, the global risk.

Trump's approval rating among Republicans is 90%.

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) June 28, 2018

He's right. And, though Ezra doesn't come out and say this, the reason the GOP got these victories is because of racism. And xenophobia and Islamophobia and misogyny and all of their other cousins.

That's important to remember. Not in a "these victories are tainted" sort of way, though that's true. It's important to remember because it emphasizes something important about racism. To wit:

Racism is a productive ideology.

It builds things. It makes things happen. It motivates voters, it lubricates alliances, it stirs up passions.  There are times where one can't do certain things one would very much like to do unless one is willing to harness a bit of racism.

That's why standing up to racism requires real moral fiber. Not just because racism is "wrong". But because standing up to racism, in practice, means not availing yourself of certain opportunities and benefits that one greatly desires and which are in your grasp if only you agree to play with some racism.

It's no great thing to oppose racism when it's hurting you. It's not even that difficult to oppose it when it's only hurting others. But it takes real strength to know for a fact that opposing racism will cost you -- will mean losing elections you might otherwise win, will mean that the other party might get a Supreme Court seat that you'd otherwise appoint, will mean that your cherished tax policy won't see the light of day in Congress -- and nonetheless say "no." It's so easy to console yourself with the fact that you "don't like it", that politics "is about making compromises", and that the ends justify the means. Racism flourishes in America because of what it can produce. For it to be rooted out, politicians and leaders must be willing to draw a line and decline its bounty.

That was the test facing the Republican Party over the past few years. Because it's true: had they fought -- really fought -- Donald Trump, they wouldn't be the ones picking this Supreme Court Justice. They wouldn't be in a position to finally overturn Roe. They wouldn't be steering ship on tax policy. They wouldn't be in charge of immigration regulations. They wouldn't be able to purge voters in Ohio or gerrymander to hell and back in Wisconsin. The racist tides Donald Trump tapped into are what put all these things in Republican hands.

It is a test, to turn away from those things. And it is one Republicans failed, abjectly and utterly. They decided that tax cuts and Supreme Court seats were more important. They could not resist the bounty racism could provide for them.

I have no doubt that liberals will face their own form of this test at one point or another. Racism is not just productive for conservatives, and we delude ourselves if we think it is partisan in that way.

But right now, the test was handed to Republicans. And their failure -- their near-complete abdication of responsibility, in fact -- is why they lack the moral character to lead our nation. All of them -- from Paul Ryan to John Roberts to Anthony Kennedy to Mitch McConnell to Marco Rubio to Susan Collins -- faced a moment of moral challenge and completely, utterly, entirely crumbled. They are weak. They are failures. They are profiles in moral cowardice.

That is how they should be remembered. History is faint vindication, but it is what we have. And at the end of the day, they have nobody but themselves to blame for their legacies.

The Media is Not Part of the Liberal Family

Max Weber has a quote (Yair Rosenberg just promoted it), regarding the proper role of a teacher:

"The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts--I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others."

It's a good quote, and it's good advice -- not only for teachers. What it suggests is that among our most difficult deliberative obligations -- with respect to facts and also to opinions -- is to consider alternatives and counters and problems with our position. It does no good to harp on what we already know and what confirms our ideological priors. We must stretch wide to think those thoughts which are hard for us and ours.

However. There's a certain strand of malign media behavior which I think is in some ways attributable to this quote and needs to be addressed. It stems from a distorted understanding by media figures of who the relevant "parties" are and what facts actually are "inconvenient". It seems to me that quite a few major stories -- about growing right-wing authoritarianism, racism, prejudice, and Islamophobia -- are going undercovered because, in the view of many journalists, they're not "inconvenient" stories. It's not that they don't recognize that this sort of behavior is wrong. It's that they think that their wrongfulness is so obvious that there's nothing interesting to talk about.

Consider the recent debates about "civility" in the public square. It's come up primarily with reference to the ethics of a private restaurant owner (quite politely, by all accounts) asking Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her establishment (oddly enough, that seemed to get more negative attention than protesters quite loudly haranguing Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant). And because it's come up in that context, liberals have been quite annoyed that it's come up in that context, as opposed to, say, the fact that Congress contains a man who was criminally convicted for body-slamming a reporter, or another man who's happily retweeting Nazis. Or, you know, everything the President of the United States ever says ever.

Under any objective metric, these are far more serious breaches of "civility" than Maxine Waters urging people to confront Trump administration officials in public settings. One can think -- quite abstractly -- that the question of whether restaurant owners should refuse to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders is ponderable while acknowledging the obvious truth that it doesn't rank in the top 200 highest priority moral questions that the media should be placing on the public agenda -- even confined to the "civility" subcategory. Given that fact, there's something facially outrageous about devoting any non-trivial amount of journalistic attention to Sarah Huckabee Sanders' dining options over and above other, obviously higher-priority stories.

To that point, though, I think many media members would issue the following retort: Yes, body-slamming a reporter or being a bit of Nazi fanboy is obviously wrong. But that's the point: it's obviously wrong. It's not interesting -- who even disagrees? By contrast, the reporters probably know a ton of people who laud Maxine Waters or the Red Hen. That issue, consequently, has stakes -- it's interesting in a way that talking about physically assaulting reporters isn't. A similar motivation probably explains the New York Times' infamous "Most Americans Want Legal Status for 'Dreamers.' These People Don't" profile. From the vantage of the journalist, sympathy for Dreamers is the obvious position -- it scarcely needs explanation. Wanting to see them deported? That's novel. That's interesting. That's a truly alternate point of view.

Hence, the reason these -- objectively low-priority -- liberal (alleged) breaches of civility (or what have you) get the media attention that they do is, in a sense, precisely because they aren't viewed as self-evidently terrible. By contrast, the argument goes, nobody needs to be told that Dana Loesch is a thug or that Mitch McConnell utterly lacks any sort of principles beyond partisan hackery.

And let's be clear: within the liberal "family", that sort of introspective consideration is valuable. We should be considering the thoughts that are hard or inconvenient for us, we should be forcing ourselves to contemplate arguments or positions that challenge our own (conservatives should do the same). And the journalists, whom (I strongly suspect) are generally left-of-center in their private commitments, think that's what they're doing. They're not going to waste time confirming what's already known -- that there are some psychopaths in the Republican caucus who are pretty much avowed White Supremacists, or that there is a growing right-wing endorsement of explicitly authoritarian language towards the media as "enemies of the American people", or that undocumented immigrants remain human beings and do not deserve to be caged up and torn from their families. That's easy. What's hard is the act of forcing other members of the "family" to deal with truly inconvenient, facts and perspectives, ones that don't come naturally.

But here's the thing: journalists are not part of the liberal family. Not professionally, anyway. In their professional capacity, their job isn't to uncover the facts and narratives that are inconvenient for themselves or their tribe. Or more aptly, their "tribe", so long as they're acting as journalists, is the entirety of the United States. Which means that, for much of their audience, it is quite "inconvenient" that Republican Congressman Steve King is a White Supremacist, and it's quite "inconvenient" that Republican Congressman Greg Gianforte physically assaulted a reporter, and it's quite "inconvenient" that the Trump administration's Muslim ban was explicitly based on racism and the Supreme Court has now decided that's okay. That these facts may seem too obvious, too much like conventional wisdom, to the journalist, or even to all the journalist's friends, is utterly immaterial. Because as it happens, they're apparently not obvious for large swaths of the country.

Ironically, conservative media critics are right about one thing: journalists need to stop thinking of themselves as part of the liberal family. It's that self-identification that creates a paradoxical problem of conservative media bias. It emerges when private liberal political beliefs conjoin with the professional understanding that it's the journalist's job to unsettle received wisdom and disturb pat answers. The result of that cocktail is that journalists persistently undercover the "obvious" conservative wrongdoings (what are they really "disturbing"?) and overreport on relatively trivial liberal ones (it may be small fries, but it least it's a challenge).

This same dynamic is also why the charge of a conservative bias is so baffling and easily dismissed by journalists. Of course, part of it is because they're private liberals themselves, so how could they be biased against liberals. But part of it is because the locus of the critique feels like a complaint about journalists doing their job right -- tackling the hard issues, forcing people to think the hard thoughts.

And the thing is, that is the right way to be a journalist -- they're not wrong about that. The problem is that they're not actually successful at forcing people to grapple with the inconvenient thoughts -- they only think that they are because their sense of what counts as a hard issue and a hard thought is distorted by the false belief that they're just liberals talking to other liberals.

They're not. They're journalists talking to the country. And for this country, right now, the things that seem so "obviously" wrong are deemed by many to be entirely right.

A good journalist should think about how to unsettle that wisdom.

What We Put There Ourselves

The Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Hawaii is a disgrace.

There are many things to be said on this disgrace -- what it means, where it takes us going forward. But for now I'll limit myself to one: the refrain one has been hearing a lot over the past two years, on issues ranging from the Muslim ban to the practice of caging immigrant children. "American doesn't do this." "This is not who we are."

I respect the instinct behind those sentiments. But I think they're wrong.

These are appeals to what exists "in the soul" of America. Much like the convicted criminal whose friends plead to the judge that he's "really" a good guy, much like the internet provocateur who tearfully insists that "in her heart she knows she's not racist", these are appeals to let an unseeable and intangible essence trump actual behavior and practice.

To that endeavor, the great philosopher Richard Rorty had a cutting retort: "There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves."

Does America countenance banning immigrants on basis of the faith? Do we allow for asylum-seeking children to be caged?

Yes, clearly. America does do this. We're doing it right now. If we don't like what that says about us, then it's up to us to change it. There is nothing deep down inside us except what we decide to put there. It got there through us, it can only be removed by us.

The problem with this appeal to what lies "deep down" is not that our essence is actually corrupt -- I don't believe America is "essentially" (unavoidably, irretrievably) racist any more than I believe that we're "essentially" non-racist. The problem is that when we believe that something "deep down" is in fundamental tension with these sorts of practices, it suggests that there is some sort of natural arc that will resist them for us -- absolving us from putting in the hard work of doing the resistance ourselves. Or worse: it seductively promises that these things can't be happening here because "that's not who we are." It becomes tautology that an act of the United States of America can't truly be racist precisely because "that's not who we are."

But it's wrong. It is who we are, right up until the moment that it isn't. There's nothing deep down inside us that prevents us from being a racist, bigoted, prejudiced nation. It is not destiny, or character, or essence that makes America what it is. It is our choices, our decisions, our behavior, our practices.

I predicted the Supreme Court would uphold the travel ban. And I made another prediction as well:

15 years after the ruling, it will stop being cited. 30 years after the ruling, it will become part of the anti-canon. 45 years after the ruling, it will be beyond obvious that it was an embarrassment, but fortunately, the sort of embarrassment we as a nation have thankfully outgrown. 

And 60 years after the ruling, we'll do it again -- or something very much like it.

Until we learn the lesson of Korematsu -- the actual lesson, not the limp pseudo-history Chief Justice Roberts offered in a lame attempt to act as if he was overruling the case as opposed to renaming it -- we'll keep on repeated the cycle.

There is nothing deep down inside of the American system or way of life that checks against a Korematsu -- or a Trump. There is no intrinsic resistance, no arc of the universe inexorably pressing the other way. There is simply us -- our choices regarding what America is, and what it isn't. That, and only that, is what exists inside of us. "Who we are" as a nation is no more and no less than what we choose to put there ourselves.

Quote of the Day: Justice Jackson in the Steel Seizure Case

No comment other than to note that Justice Jackson took time off from his duties as a Supreme Court Justice to be the lead prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials:

Executive power has the advantage of concentration in a single head in whose choice the whole Nation has a part, making him the focus of public hopes and expectations. In drama, magnitude and finality, his decisions so far overshadow any others that, almost alone, he fills the public eye and ear. No other personality in public life can begin to compete with him in access to the public mind through modern methods of communications. By his prestige as head of state and his influence upon public opinion, he exerts a leverage upon those who are supposed to check and balance his power which often cancels their effectiveness.

Moreover, rise of the party system has made a significant extraconstitutional supplement to real executive power. No appraisal of his necessities is realistic which overlooks that he heads a political system, as well as a legal system. Party loyalties and interests, sometimes more binding than law, extend his effective control into branches of government other than his own, and he often may win, as a political leader, what he cannot command under the Constitution. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson, commenting on the President as leader both of his party and of the Nation, observed, "If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible. . . . His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it."

I cannot be brought to believe that this country will suffer if the Court refuses further to aggrandize the presidential office, already so potent and so relatively immune from judicial review, at the expense of Congress.

But I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that "The tools belong to the man who can use them." We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers. 

The essence of our free Government is "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the law" -- to be governed by those impersonal forces which we call law. Our Government is fashioned to fulfill this concept so far as humanly possible. The Executive, except for recommendation and veto, has no legislative power. The executive action we have here originates in the individual will of the President, and represents an exercise of authority without law. No one, perhaps not even the President, knows the limits of the power he may seek to exert in this instance, and the parties affected cannot learn the limit of their rights. We do not know today what powers over labor or property would be claimed to flow from Government possession if we should legalize it, what rights to compensation would be claimed or recognized, or on what contingency it would end. With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations. 

Such institutions may be destined to pass away. But it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.

343 U.S. 579, 653-65 (1952).

Which Comes First, The Progressivism or the Democratic Vote?

I'm a bit late on this question, but this is a great explainer from Daily Kos Elections on why yes, Democrats should be targeting (among other places) affluent suburbs as part of the strategy to turn America blue. It is responding to an NYT editorial which suggested such targeting would cause the Democratic Party to abandon important progressive values, since affluent suburban (coded as White) voters are thought to be prime constituencies demanding policies harmful to poorer or brown citizens.

The DKE piece does a good job problematizing several assumptions in the NYT article (including the belief that these suburban districts are all uniformly or predominantly White), but I particularly like the way it pays attention to voter psychology. 

One might think that people come to beliefs on clusters of issues, and then vote for the Party that best matches their preferences. And sometimes that's true -- but usually only for a small band of exceptionally salient issues which the voter cares a lot about. On other issues -- the vast majority --the causality runs in the opposite direction, with people tending to follow their team. Hence, if people identify as "team Democrat" they'll likely shift their views towards consensus Democratic Party positions. This is one of the reasons why White Democrats have in fact shifted hard to the left on issues of racial justice in America over the past few years -- that position is now part of what it means to be on "team Democrat", and so self-identified Democrats adjust their views accordingly.

We see this all the time -- a recent prominent case is the surge in favorable Republican sentiment towards Vladimir Putin, almost certainly driven not by any considered judgment about the merits of Putin but rather by the sense that Russia and Putin are "on their team" and anti-Russia and anti-Putin sentiment are associated with Democrats. The almost complete absorption of southern Evangelical political ideology into that of the Republican Party is another case. On the other side, Muslims have become considerably more liberal on social issues since 9/11 -- not coincidentally, they've also moved from a Republican to a Democratic constituency at the same time stemming from the GOP's open embrace of Islamophobia. One suspects that a similar dynamic accounts for American Jewry's general across-the-board liberalism -- I'd love to attribute it to some intrinsic progressive characteristic of my people, but it's probably more a function of what segments of American society welcomed us onto their team and what segments pushed us away.

This account of how social groups develop political ideology is not the most popular secret in Political Science. It suggests that the route to political change isn't deep reflection on matters of truth and justice but simply relatively passive games of "follow the leader" and partisan feedback loops. But results are results. And in the case of progressive commitments on issues of racial justice, the more White suburban voters view themselves as consistent Democratic voters, the more likely they'll be to back progressive political commitments across the board.

Westworld Season 2 Thoughts

Another season of Westworld is in the books. And since I need to at least semi-regularly offer pop culture commentary as dessert for the political vegetables that are this blog's standard-fare, I figured I'd share my thoughts.

*Mild Westworld spoilers follow*

* Last season, my line on Westworld was that it was a very good show that was held back because it clearly thinks it's a great show. If anything, this season I revise that estimate downwards. To borrow from another reviewer, Westworld is a show that just adamantly refuses to step back and get out of the way of its own story. The interweaving timelines and flashbacks and fragmented memories and self-absorbed mystique is pretentious at the best of times and more often than that actively aggravating. You have a good story -- have the self-confidence to just tell the damn thing!

* Having just praised the story, I'm going to register another complaint here: The show's view of human (and, for that matter, robot) nature is so relentlessly negative that I have trouble relating to it. It also feels a little bit dated. Five or so years ago we were still obsessed with the "anti-hero", but since then there's been a flurry of shows -- mostly comedies, admittedly -- that are considerably more positive about the human condition (Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine Nine, The Good Place). So when Westworld's message is basically "everyone is awful, and if you try to be even slightly less awful you'll be exploited and then brutally murdered", it doesn't feel bold, it just gets tiresome (RIP Elsie).

* Speaking of, I felt like at the end they finally leaned into Doloros being an actual monster -- which was pretty evident pretty early on in my view -- but it sure took awhile. Her story is that of anti-colonial rebel who becomes every bit the murderous bloodletter and tyrant that she initially was reacting against. A decent arc actually, so long as the show recognized it was telling it, but it ended up lacking distinction because everybody on the show is the worst.

* All of this is why Maeve's plotline was the best of the season. For one, it was definitely the most linearly told -- see, you don't need ninety cross-cutting flashbacks to make for an interesting story. But Maeve's plot is one of the only ones that deals with the theme of strength and power in an interesting way. Maeve makes herself strong -- the show never valorizes weakness in any character -- but she's one of the few strong characters who uses her strength for a purpose beyond simply trying to redirect the orgy of violence elsewhere.

* Oh, the orgy of violence. "The violent delights," indeed. I'm not a huge fan of graphic violence, but I can handle it if it seems thematically necessary (I'm okay with Game of Thrones, for example). On Westworld, this season -- it felt gratuitous. Maybe just me.

* Actually, the real theme of Season 2 is that giving someone a gun and dressing them up in a fancy costume does not make them into a tough guy. I'm talking, of course, of Delos "security", who are almost comically useless with those machine guns. Question: if Delos security got into a battle with the stormtroopers from Star Wars, would anyone die?

* Teddy going to robot heaven and Doloros not being there is the most Teddy ending imaginable. Nothing truly good ever happens to Teddy.

IfNotNow 2, Establishment Jewish Organizations 0

Following Ramah's histrionic letter disavowing IfNotNow and saying they'd never allow "antisemitic" content in their Israel curriculum, Birthright trip leaders act like overzealous middle school field trip chaperones while trying to block their trip participants from chatting with INN activists at JFK airport.

Participants for the most part merely listened quietly to [INN activist Andy] Ratto and the other activists there. 

The trip leaders, however, repeatedly stepped in to tell the activists to stop talking with the participants. As the leaders became more agitated, tensions escalated. 

Ratto, attempting to contextualize the activists’ position, offered postcards to a few trip leaders with some introductory information about IfNotNow. 

A trip leader took a postcard and tore it apart in front of several participants.The cards also contained questions participants can ask during the trip, such as, “What is the occupation?” “Will I have the chance to meet with Palestinians on my trip?” 

“They’re coming in, trying to fill their minds with stuff,” the trip leader later said. He gave his name only as Tyler.

As the article indicates later on, several of the trip participants came away unimpressed by "Tyler's" decision to literally rip up informational packets in front of their eyes. Way to lead, Tyler!

And that makes twice in a month where, in a confrontation between establishment Jewish organization and IfNotNow, I've come away more annoyed at the former. For someone like me, who's very establishment-oriented and very wary of IfNotNow, that's actually kind of a big deal.

Loving the Children To Death

Right now, the Republican Party is trying to square a very nettlesome circle. On the one hand, they want to communicate that they care about the immigrant children the Trump administration is ripping away from their families. On the other hand, they want to do as little as possible to actually challenge Trump's policies or effectuate any meaningful change -- especially if it might mean (heaven forbid) some of these kids actually get to stay in the United States and build a safe and productive life here.

The latest bit of rhetoric emerging out of this impossible dynamic is the claim that it is for the children's own good that they are being ripped from their families and locked into cages. Moderate Republican(tm) Susan Collins kicked this off, wailing about how "dangerous" it is for parents try and cross the American border as cover for refusing to join Democratic efforts to end family separation.

More recently, that gambit has been extended to allege that the children in question are actually trafficking victims and that therefore efforts to prevent family separation are the real acts of child abuse. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for example, tweeted the following today:

Dems' Keep Families Together Act is better called the Child Trafficking Encouragement Act. Show up at border with a minor & call him your child, then you get released into the US! Children will be abducted & sold to drug cartels & slave-traders as a free ticket into US.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) June 19, 2018

Meanwhile, his Nebraska colleague Ben Sasse took a more circuitous route -- sprinkled with many rhetorical condemnations of the family separation policy -- to arrive mostly at the same place:

This bad new policy is a reaction against a bad old policy. The old policy was “catch-and-release.” Under catch-and-release, if someone made it to the border and claimed asylum (whether true or not, and most of the time it wasn’t true), they were released into the U.S. until a future hearing date....

Catch-and-release – combined with inefficient deportation and other ineffective policies – created a magnet whereby lots of people came to the border who were not actually asylum-seekers. This magnet not only attracted illegal immigrants generally, but also produced an uptick in human trafficking across our border.... 

Human trafficking organizations are not just evil; they’re also often smart. Many quickly learned the “magic words” they needed to say under catch-and-release to guarantee admission into the U.S. Because of this, some of the folks showing up at the border claiming to be families are not actually families. Some are a trafficker with one or more trafficked children. Sometimes border agents can identify this, but many times they aren’t sure. 

Any policy that incentivizes illegal immigration is terrible governance. But even more troubling is that catch-and-release rewarded traffickers, who knew they could easily get their victims to market in the U.S.

Incidentally, "Ben Sasse takes a more circuitous route to arrive at the same place as Tom Cotton" basically describes the Republican Party dynamic on every noteworthy case of Trump administration extremism.

Anyway, first thing to say about the trafficking talking point is that it's basically bogus: DHS statistics indicate that 0.61% of family apprehensions at the border are even alleged to be cases where smugglers have falsely presented a trafficking victim as a family member.

But let's take the tiny minority of trafficking cases at face value. Those kids whom Collins and Cotton and Sasse are so concerned about? They're the ones the Trump administration is putting in cages. One might forget that the immigrant children are supposedly the victims in the GOP story, given how every Republican solution centers around keeping them incarcerated until they can be sent back to their countries of origin (where, remember, they were by stipulation abducted and smuggled across international borders -- so not a great place for them). Much like Syrian children, immigrant children (whether victims of traffickers or not) are good enough for Republicans to imprison, but not good enough to rescue.

It's no accident that the more honest voices of the Trump movement -- the Ann Coulters of the world -- are perfectly explicit in stating that the children are just as much of the enemy as their supposed "traffickers". Nothing the Republican Party has done over the past several years has been remotely consistent with the idea that they actual view immigrant children as valuable human beings whom we have an obligation to treat with respect. The priority is ensuring -- at any cost -- that they do not have the opportunity to build a dignified life for themselves in America. If that means ripping them from their parent's arms, so be it. If they means permanently destroying families, so be it. If that means sending them back to countries where they'll be executed by paramilitary gangs, so be it.

Republicans care a lot about immigrant children. It's a shame that all that care and concern goes mostly into destroying their lives.

SPLC Apologizes to Maajid Nawaz

The Southern Policy Law Center has formally apologized to Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation for including them in a 2016 list of "anti-Muslim extremists" (they're also paying a multi-million dollar settlement, earmarked for fighting anti-Muslim bigotry as well as Islamist extremism).

I remember when that SPLC document came out -- I was at most dimly aware of Nawaz at that point, but as I wrote at the time "even solely going off what the SPLC says about him in this document the case for labeling him an 'anti-Muslim extremist' seems exceptionally thin. Placing him on a list that includes Pam Geller seems recklessly irresponsible at best, discrediting at worst." So it's good that the SPLC apologized, although I'm a bit surprised that they did -- it's been two years, and while Nawaz had threatened a defamation suit, the legal basis for such an action was exceptionally thin.

On that note, it is worth reiterating Ken White's cautionary note, which is that while -- again -- the SPLC almost certainly wronged Nawaz from a moral and ethical point of view, legally they should have been in the clear. Their description of Nawaz and Quilliam as anti-Muslim extremists, irresponsible and unwarranted as it was, still clearly falls in the realm of protected opinion. To the extent that the tool of anti-defamation law was used to extract this settlement, that has worrying First Amendment implications notwithstanding the fact that on-substance it was the right thing for the SPLC to do.

IfNotNo....?

My last post on IfNotNow's attempt to introduce Palestinian narratives into Jewish summer camp programming suggested that INN missed an opportunity to Brandi Maxxxx its putative adversaries. (The "Brandi Maxxxx" strategy is when a somewhat-marginal group or institution holds its position out as being of a kind with that of a centrist group -- in this case, e.g., emerging out of genuine love for Israel and a place of care and concern for Israel's future -- thereby forcing the centrist group to either implicitly accede to the connection or aggressively repudiate the principles).

The unnecessarily harsh and distancing statement of INN directed at Camp Ramah (one of the major Jewish camps INN had sought to work with) emphasized the gap between the two (and therefore, in effect, the non-mainstream nature of INN's position) and effectively let Ramah claim the "big tent" high ground. By contrast, if INN had suggested that they and Ramah were in agreement, in order for Ramah to disavow INN it would have to "register a much more specific disavowal of IfNotNow and discussion of the occupation in its camps, in which case -- IfNotNow has a much stronger basis for critique against Ramah and Jewish camps going forward."

But now Ramah has come out with a new statement that basically did that anyway. It is rather gratuitously nasty in tone and makes it pretty clear that it is the one taking its ball and going home, not INN. The result is that INN gains a lot more credence, in my book, when it asserts that organizations like Ramah are institutionally allergic to any serious reckoning with the reality of the occupation and Palestinian lives. It also reemphasizes something I've long railed against: that when it comes to Israel politics, the Jewish community places a border on its left flank but not its right. Ramah is rigorous and emphatic in policing how far to the left its willing to let its staff go on Israel -- but there's no indication that there's any standards they apply on the right.

(Interestingly, the commentary IfNotNow gave to this letter was I thought much better in tone than its prior response to Ramah's more moderate initial statement. It might just be a matter of comparison though -- it's easy to look reasonable and fair-minded when your interlocutor so nakedly decides to go overboard).

Second-Class Jews and the Future of the Jewish State

When I wrote my Forward article on how Israel doesn't care about American Jews, the most common response from Israeli readers was "that's right, we don't -- and fuck you for saying so."

The second-most common reply was to suggest that while American Jews certainly mattered to them, they'd never risk Israeli security in order to assuage American Jewish concerns.

If the former message was, in its pugnacious way, confirmatory, the latter response was revealing for what it overlooked. For while it's true that my article talked about issues related to "security" as one area where American Jews were routinely ignored, it quite consciously did not limit itself to that forum.

But it’s not just about questions of security. Israel has shown no interest in dislodging the Orthodox hammerlock on Israeli religious practice, despite the burdens it places on mostly non-Orthodox diaspora Jews. And the decision to renege on the egalitarian prayer agreement at the Western Wall, where we saw perhaps the single most concentrated explosion of American Jewish fury at Israeli government policy, made it abundantly clear that American Jews count for nothing in Israel’s political deliberations.

These issues do not plausibly relate to "security". And, if anything, they are doing more to drive splits between the American and Israeli Jewish community, as the American Jewish Committee recently stressed at a Jerusalem conference (the gap between how American Jews and Israeli Jews view these issues is staggering). Yet it was as if they weren't even being spoken of -- so loud was the mantra "security, security, security".

As the AJC pointed out in blunt terms, the Israeli government -- by capitulating over and over again to the ultra-Orthodox Rabbinate -- is basically telling the 85% of American Jews who are not Orthodox that they don't count as Jews. The failure to create an egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall means half the world's Jewish population is forbidden from praying at our religion's holiest site -- were it any other nation, the term for that would be antisemitism. Those of us with Jewish partners who did not grow up Jewish, those of us who were raised Jewish but lacked a Jewish parent, those of us in Jewish communities who are not acknowledged to be Jewish by the Rabbinate, we're realizing just how precarious our status as Jews is in the putative Jewish state.

And yet the Israeli government thinks that these Jews-they-don't-acknowledge-as-Jews will indefinitely go to bat for them in Congress, on college campuses, at the UN? Why? What hubris, what chutzpah, makes them believe this? How arrogant must they be to think there can be an ongoing asymmetrical relationship of heartfelt caring on one side and utter, abject contempt on the other?

American Jews are Republican and Anti-Zionist in Roughly Equal (Tiny) Numbers

The American Jewish Committee has released its 2018 survey of American Jewish opinion (along with Israeli Jewish opinion -- and they conveniently offer a side-by-side comparison here).

A lot of it is predictable: American Jews loathe Trump, support gun control, support DACA, and oppose greater immigration restrictions. Some of it doesn't surprise me but might surprise some: American Jews think Trump is doing a lousy job handling the U.S./Israel relationship, think Russia is the greatest threat to America (well ahead of Iran and North Korea, in a statistical dead heat for second), and think caring about Israel is important to our identities as Jews.

(One area I desperately wish the AJC had polled on is on Jewish attitudes towards BDS -- both "support/oppose" numbers as well as "a lot/somewhat/a little/not at all antisemitic" numbers).

But if one digs into the data a bit more, there are some fun observations to be had. For one, American Jews continue to overwhelmingly identify as Democrats (51% versus 16% Republicans). This tracks 2016 voting patterns, where 60% of respondents voted for Clinton versus 19% for Trump.

The survey doesn't ask about Zionist identity, but it does ask whether respondents believe Israel can be a Jewish and democratic state, and then asks those who say no whether it should be Jewish or democratic. If we use the "no, and it should be a democratic state" as a rough proxy for anti-Zionist -- well, that figure is 20%.

So basically, the proportion of American Jews who are anti-Zionist is about the same as the proportion of American Jews who are Republican -- and in both cases, it is less than the proportion of Idaho voters who backed Hillary Clinton. Which is to say, in the scheme of things, both are trivial. (Incidentally, the percentage of American Jews who oppose a two-state solution "in the current situation" sits at about 30% -- not quite as tiny, but still pretty small).

Of course, that a given topical minority is rather small doesn't mean that it shouldn't have a voice, and I'm agnostic as to exactly how much of a voice such a group should have in broader Jewish communal affairs. There's a fine line to be drawn between pluralism and representativeness.

But equally-sized groups should be treated equally. As much (or as little) attention as we pay and influence we accord to Jewish Republicans is precisely as much as should be meted out to Jewish anti-Zionists. Fair is fair, after all.

IfNotYes ...?

I have a relatively negative view of IfNotNow. It's certainly not from any pro-occupation place, but every time I see them in action they appear to have the political instincts of an arsonist. I once said of Simone Zimmerman "some people haven't met a forest fire they didn't ache to pour gasoline on," and I feel like that fits INN pretty well too. As someone who's never thought regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict "you know what this needs? More incendiary rhetoric and us-versus-them tribal organization!" IfNotNow was never going to be among my favorites.

In many ways, I view IfNotNow as the Jewish heirs to the "Occupy" movement -- both in their preference for disruptive politics (not my cup of tea, but not per se invalid) and their utter allergy to actually accomplishing anything concrete if it involves working through establishment channels (which drives me up the wall). Hence their signature move: hosting sit-ins with Jewish organizations they think are insufficiently anti-occupation, and then refuse to actually meet with said organizations when they agree to discuss their demands. The results are ... basically what we saw with Occupy: managing to harness a ton of progressive energy, and then have it completely dissipate with nothing to show for it save self-righteous declarations about how pure they are and how broken "the system is". They're all ethics of conviction, no ethics of responsibility.

Here's the latest: IfNotNow has been hosting training sessions for Jewish camp counselors (that is, counselors at Jewish camps, not counselors who happen to be Jewish) to help them teach about the Occupation. Cool, in concept. Following those reports, one of the camp bodies released a statement saying, in part:

We, the leadership of Ramah, are proud that Zionism is a central part of our core mission, as we nurture within our campers and staff members a deep and enduring love for Israel.

Unfortunately, some recent articles in the Jewish press have mischaracterized our educational mission, leading some to believe that our 70-year history of strong pro-Israel ideology has changed. It has not. 

[...]

Our older teens and staff members represent a range of opinions on many contemporary issues, and a wide variety of positions supporting Israel can be voiced and discussed. We do not, however, permit the sharing of anti-Israel educational messages at camp.

 Okay. Now, one could interpret this as a repudiation of IfNotNow, saying their training sessions are "anti-Israel" or do not come from a "deep and enduring love for Israel." But IfNotNow could also very easily nestle itself inside this message, affirming that its educational mission stems from a "deep and enduring love for Israel" and that its arguments exist with then the "wide variety of positions supporting Israel" that Ramah is open to facilitating.

Guess which side IfNotNow picked? Yep, the one that maximizes confrontation.

After our meeting with Mitch Cohen, Director of @NationalRamah in March of this year, we believed that they would keep their word and muster the moral courage to include Palestinian narratives and have the tough conversations that we know are necessary, especially this summer.

— IfNotNow🔥 (@IfNotNowOrg) June 8, 2018

However, as the leadership of @ramahwisconsin makes clear, they “have made no changes in our approaches to Israel education from previous summers.”

— IfNotNow🔥 (@IfNotNowOrg) June 8, 2018

Now, part of this may be a matter of honesty, of a sort. INN is internally diverse on questions of Zionism, and it is possible that some members would blanch at the idea that their anti-occupation curriculum even comes from a place of "deep and enduring love for Israel." But that's their problem, and at most I think it's only part of the story. The bigger issue is that IfNotNow really loves its lone wolf fetish, which depends on constructing the Jewish center as irredeemable opponents who must be wholly thrown off (one advantage of this is that it conveniently takes compromise -- and the threat compromise poses to moral purity -- off the table).

And there are other approaches available. I wrote years ago about what I called "the Brandi Maxxxx strategy" for Jewish liberals, which basically is a form of killing-by-agreement. Keep on insisting that mainline Jewish organizations actually agree with you -- that only a two-state solution is acceptable, that the occupation exacts terrible costs on Palestinians, and so on -- and force them either to very explicitly disavow those positions or accede to the linkage of the Jewish left and center in the public imagination. Consider the following hypothetical response by IfNotNow to Ramah's statement:

IfNotNow is pleased that Jewish campers will have the opportunity to learn about the reality of occupation at Camp Ramah. 

Our discussions with Mitch Cohen confirmed that this is an important arena of learning for young Jews, and we fully agree that such discussions are an integral part of the "variety of positions" Jewish should be exposed to and entirely consonant with "deep and enduring love for Israel" that the camp tries to facilitate.

That is entirely consistent with the Ramah statement -- it just very publicly and agreeably posits a harmony between the two organizations. But lest you think it's a case of IfNotNow rolling over, notice the position it puts Ramah in. They can specifically agree with INN's statement, in which case -- IfNotNow wins. They can not respond to it at all, in which case -- IfNotNow wins. Or they can register a much more specific disavowal of IfNotNow and discussion of the occupation in its camps, in which case -- IfNotNow has a much stronger basis for critique against Ramah and Jewish camps going forward (which is to say: IfNotNow wins).

I suspect that Door #2 would be the most likely outcome, and the upshot of that is that they've got an open door towards bringing in the sort of learning that they want. But my sense is that IfNotNow cares a lot less about getting the occupation taught at Jewish summer camp than they care about being able to loudly declare how radical and disruptive it'd be if the occupation were taught at Jewish summer camp. If getting the former requires them to use conciliatory rhetoric or suggest that the distance between themselves and mainline Jewish organizations isn't the gaping chasm they like to portray it as -- well, they can always go back to the ethics of conviction, can't they?

It's not quite an inability to take "yes" for an answer. But it's something very close.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XLV: Electing Trump (and Making Russia Pay For It)

I already did an entry in this series where people blamed the Jews for Trump's election (it ... did not take long). But this one is a little different. It's not a claim that Jews voted for Trump (spoiler alert: we didn't). It's a much more nested little argument from John Schindler, a former NSA intelligence analyst who thinks that all this talk about Russian interference in the election might just be a smokescreen distracting from the real culprits.

“What if the real secret of the Trump campaign isn’t that it’s a Kremlin operation, rather an Israeli operation masquerading as a Russian one?”

— John Schindler (@20committee) June 5, 2018

Oh, those sly dogs.

The hook here is an interview George Papadopoulos's new wife did with the Daily Caller, where she claimed that he only plead guilty to charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller "to avoid facing charges that he was an agent of the Israeli government."

Mueller hasn't corroborated the account. But Schindler sure took it up and started running ... hard:

[T]here are strange Israeli footprints all over the Trump-Russia story. Quite a few of the shady figures close to the president and his business affairs are American Jews of Soviet heritage who possess connections to Israel. Felix Sater and Michael Cohen are only the best-known of this dubious crew. Those men are also connected to Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island that is part of the worldwide Chabad movement—which just happens to possess close links to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin.

For the record, Cohen was born in Long Island to a Holocaust-survivor father -- I wonder if that's what "Soviet heritage" (is "Soviet" an ethnicity now?) means in this context? While he clearly has significant family ties to the Ukraine, I've actually been able to find little in his family history that suggests particularly "Soviet" leanings.

To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if Israeli intelligence had contacts with the Trump campaign during the election run-up -- he was such an inviting target that it's hard to imagine them passing up the chance. And to the extent the evidence leads in that direction, we should follow it fearlessly.

But the claim that the entire thing was an Israeli plot of whom they made Russia their patsies? That's on quite a different level.

Having Your (Masterpiece) Cake and Eating It Too

The Supreme Court  has issued its long-anticipated decision in the Masterpiece Cake case (where a Christian baker refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple). It ruled in favor of the baker by a 7-2 vote, but on exceedingly narrow grounds (I'll get to those in a moment) that provide virtually no guidance to resolving similar cases in the future. On the other hand, given the way oral argument went, I'd say we might have even dodged a bullet.

Basically, Justice Kennedy's majority opinion concluded that certain statements by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (which concluded that the baker had discriminated against the couple in violation of Colorado law) indicated that they held anti-religious bias. This bias tainted the proceedings in an unconstitutional manner, and hence the ruling had to be set aside.

On that point, there are two comments worth making. First, in the abstract I wholly agree that religious hostility provides a sufficient basis for invalidating a government action even in cases where -- absent said hostility -- the substantive decision might well be constitutional. If a commissioner in a case like this said "I'll be damned if I'm going to rule in favor of some towel-wearing heathen," that to me is an obvious constitutional violation on its own. So to the extent Masterpiece Cake clarifies that point of law, I have no quarrel.

Second, as applied to the facts of this case I think the evidence of anti-religious animus on the part of the Commission is pretty thin. Certainly, it is microscopic compared to the evidence of anti-religious animus in the travel ban case -- though who knows if that will matter. But if the upshot of this case is that governmental decision-makers need to step more lightly around grandstanding declarations when dealing with sensitive areas of discrimination and religious freedom, that's not the worst thing in the world.

In any event, because the Court's decision was based on a finding of religious animus in the administrative proceedings, Justice Kennedy specifically stated that the Court was making no proclamation on how a case with even identical facts (but absent the biased state-level decisionmaker) should be decided. Hence why we get no real guidance on how to handle similar disputes going forward. But the majority opinion actually contains a lot of dictum emphasizing that there are perfectly legitimate anti-discrimination considerations the state has here and can legitimately impose (in a neutral, generally-applicable fashion) onto religious objectors. So to some extent, the tea-leaf reading off this case is considerably better than one might think.

But while much of the attention has focused on the religious freedom aspects of the case, it's the compelled speech issue that I think will be more nettlesome going forward. The Court declined to wade into that issue in this case, both because it was resting on the narrow religious animus ground and because the relevant parts of the record in this case were surprisingly opaque (Justice Thomas made a game effort to argue that the issue was ripe in this case, but I'm unconvinced).

When does selling a cake become a form of (compelled) expression by the baker? On the one hand, simply selling an "off-the-rack" cake should not be viewed as compelled expression by the seller that they approve of the buyer or what the buyer plans to do with the cake (a half-century old Supreme Court case quite quickly dispensed with a claim that a barbeque vendor could circumvent anti-racism laws compelling him to serve Black customers because doing so would communicate the message that he believes in racial equality, in violation of his religious beliefs). On the far other side, consider cake orders with specific messages to be engraved like "Homosexuality is a detestable sin" (the Colorado Commission received complaints when several bakers refused to bake cakes with that message, and dismissed them). There, the compelled speech claim seems stronger. Presumably, that would have to hold in cases where the text was something like "God loves gay people same as straight" -- it's expression, and if someone genuinely doesn't want to express that message, I don't think the government can compel him to do it.

There are any number of cases in the middle. I don't think a custom-cake order necessarily becomes a case of expression (e.g., a cake with no text but where the purchaser wants a specific design) -- but what if it is specifically requested to have rainbow coloration? Or consider more anodyne messages like "Congratulations Jim and Steve". Such cases are going to reflect some difficult judgments, and we still have only dim contours on what the right legal guidelines are.

As for the other opinions: Justice Gorsuch's was predictably terrible. It rests primarily on the somewhat odd belief that there is a distinct product called a "same-sex wedding cake" that is different in-kind from a "wedding cake" (is it something in the food coloring?). Consequently, Justice Gorsuch can deny that there is any discrimination occurring against same-sex couples because the baker presumably would decline to sell both straight and gay customers a "same-sex wedding cake". This is the same logic through which gay marriage bans were not forms of anti-gay discrimination because gay and straight individuals could not perform a gay marriage, and it is eviscerated both in Justice Kagan's concurrence and Justice Ginsburg's dissent. As Justice Kagan aptly put it: "A vendor can choose the products he sells, but not the customers he serves—no matter the reason." A wedding cake is a wedding cake -- it doesn't magically become a different product because of the sexual orientation of the purchaser.

Indeed, one thing that this case made clear for me is that the category "gay marriage" may have outlived its usefulness. In American law, there are no longer "gay marriages" as a qualitatively distinct entity. There are "marriages", which are sometimes entered into by straight couples and sometimes by gay couples. Of course, people in private life are free to maintain the distinction, and sometimes those private views can carry weight (the obvious case being the right of a religious officiant not to solemnize a gay wedding). But these should be seen as areas where we're departing from the general neutrality of the law and accordingly need justification; the default understanding should be weddings are weddings are weddings.

First Rule of Jews Is ... Don't Talk About Jews

Carrie Rickey has a fabulous article in the Forward documenting Hollywood's history of casting non-Jews to play Jews (alongside the famous propensity of Jewish actors to change their name in a goyish direction -- paging Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz). I was a bit surprised it didn't mention the most recent example of this -- the non-Jewish Rachel Brosnahan cast as the lead in the exceptionally Jewish Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I did recall reading at least a few murmurs of discontent about this, though the general vibe among the Jews I know is that it's a great performance on a great show.

Anyway, the paradox Rickey identifies in her article is that many of the Hollywood moguls who resolutely refused to cast Jews in Jewish parts (and often tried to avoid Jewish themes altogether) were themselves Jewish. What gives? The answer is that these Jews were convinced "that movies about Jews would incite anti-Semitism" -- they wanted at all costs to avoid the sense that they were tribalistic, or insular, or that Hollywood was (as it was in the antisemitic imagination) a "Jewish" front. One upshot of this was that the people freest to produce movies about Jews were the non-Jews. Another, of course, was that non-Jews were considered less objectionable or dangerous choices to play what Jewish roles there were.

There's actually a parallel to the academic world here. Academia in the United States has certainly had a robust Jewish presence, but for many years these Jews almost never wrote on Jewish topics (see here for how this played out in Anthropology). Jews were in fact specifically counseled to avoid such matters, lest they be seen as provincial or tribal. And so for the most part, we wrote on other things. Even now, when there's been a flowering of "identity" research in academia (e.g., "ethnic studies"), Jewish Studies have lagged considerably behind -- again, a fact belied by the raw numbers of Jews in academia (on that score, we continue to be just fine). I can tell you I've been counseled on more than one occasion -- albeit with varying degrees of explicitness -- to downplay or cover the Jewish elements of my research agenda. So this is ongoing.

No Qualified Immunity? For Prison Officials? In the 8th Circuit? What Is Happening?

First of all, if you're not reading Short Circuit (hosted on the Volokh Conspiracy blog), you're missing out. It's a great compendium of interesting circuit (and state appellate) court decisions, issued every week.

For example, this week we got Williams v. York, a deliberate indifference to medical needs claim brought by an Arkansas state prisoner. And -- get this -- the prison officials didn't get qualified immunity! If that sentence means nothing to you, you're most people. But if you have any familiarity with qualified immunity jurisprudence or prison litigation -- especially in the Eighth Circuit -- then it's jaw-dropping.

Williams benefited from drawing perhaps the best possible panel (Kelly, Arnold, and Smith). And he "benefited" because the facts really were shocking -- he experienced facial disfiguration, pus oozing from his gums, and mouth boils, all of which persisted for months after he first alerted prison officials to his condition and were obviously apparent even to laymen with no medical or dental training. In fact, Williams pulled out two of his own teeth before getting to see a dentist. Gross -- but also, powerful evidence.

So his case actually gets to proceed to trial. Congrats, Williams!

Also worth flagging is Rodriguez v. County of Los Angeles, a Ninth Circuit case involving sadistic beatings by prison guards of non-resisting inmates (the guards chanted the ritualistic "stop resisting!" while administering the beatings). The most interesting part is the officer's argument that the suit was barred because the prisoners failed to "exhaust administrative remedies" -- by which they mean, they failed to submit a complaint through the prison's internal review process. Generally that suffices to knock out a suit, but the court let it slide -- probably because the last time one of the inmates tried to file such a grievance he was put in the yard with rival gang members who somehow got their hands on razors and kicked the shit out of him.

Finally, McGirr v. Rehme tells a fascinating tale of a now-disbarred trial attorney whose been systematically shuffling his assets around to try and avoid a $42 million judgment granted to his own clients after he helped defraud them out of their settlement money. But here I think Short Circuit buried the lede -- the attorney in question is the husband of a federal district court judge! And, if footnote 9 is to be believed, several of the attorney's more "curious" transactions have been filtered through said wife.

Everything Falls Apart

So a different syndication service I use -- NetworkedBlogs -- is shutting down. I'm not happy with dlvr.it (it's utterly inadequate for cross-posting tumblr), and I can't get IFTTT to work consistently.

Yes, this post is really primarily another test attempt.

I was at a wedding and a funeral this week (really -- all in the family, too), and one of my relatives encouragingly told me that I need to get my blog out to more readers. But at this rate, it's going to go out to no readers at all.

Any suggestions on other (free) replacement services would not go unappreciated.

Big Media David: Tamika Mallory's Israel Rehabilitation Tour Hits Haaretz

Haaretz has republished a version of my post from earlier this month: "Tamika Mallory's Israel Rehabilitation Tour."

Also, if you're trying to comment on my blog using OpenID, it doesn't work anymore. That's not based on anything I did (though I am still fiddling with my new syndication service) -- Google got rid of the feature. You'll need some sort of Google ID to comment now. Sorry.

New Website, New Syndicator

I've got a new personal website!

I finally bit the bullet and got myself professional(ish) homepage for my academic life. It felt like it was time, and I wanted to nail down the davidschraub.com URL.

The new site has links to my CV, most of my articles, and all my popular press publications, as well as a nifty "about me" section. Don't worry though -- the blog is staying right here (to the point where I actually went out of my way to delete the "blog" tab from the website template. Tempt me not, Satan!).

This post is also an opportunity to test-run the new syndication service I'm using: dlvr.it. For awhile now, IFTTT has been markedly unreliable, and this past week it seemed to stop working almost entirely. Hopefully, this will result in my feeds being cross-posted more reliably, but there still might be some kinks as I set up my account.