We Chose This

I was in middle school when Columbine happened.

At the time, it felt like a national watershed. In hindsight, I actually don't know the degree to which Columbine stood out from other school shootings, versus whether it just happened to be "the" big shooting that occurred in the formative part of my life where I began paying attention to such things. Maybe for people born a few years earlier or a few years later, a different school shooting was "the" shooting. Lord knows we don't lack for choices.

Nonetheless, I remember thinking then that obviously Columbine was going to prompt us to do something about gun violence. There was no chance that our collective response to that tragedy would be to do nothing. As a kid, you believe adults are interested in protecting you. Perhaps as an adult, without strong evidence to the contrary, you also believe other adults will take the steps necessary to ensure children aren't being gunned down in schools or in streets.

But, more than 20 years later, our response to school shootings has indeed been: essentially nothing. We can't say we're still "working on it", or that we're still processing. At this point, it is fair to say America has made a conscious choice as a polity that we find school shootings to be an acceptable price to pay in exchange for allowing guns everywhere.

Twenty years after Columbine, nobody can pretend as if we don't know the consequences of our choices. We chose to let Oxford happen. We'll no doubt choose to let the next one happen too. There is nothing surprising or shocking or even unexpected happening anymore. Each of these deaths is attributable not just to the loathsome gunmen who pull the triggers, but to choices we've made collectively as a community. We are committed to an open highway of free, unfettered access to guns, and these bodies are the change the NRA throws into the tollbooth on the way.

The Sovereign's Grace, Kosher Food, and BDS at UofT

A BDS resolution passed by students at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus is in the news, primarily because of one interesting wrinkle: it specifically addresses the matter of Kosher food sources. In particular, while the resolution sweepingly targets goods, services, and events which it deems implicated in Israeli apartheid, it offers a narrow carve-out for Kosher food products if "no alternatives are available." The specific policy language is this:

Efforts should be made to source kosher food from organizations that do not normalize Israeli apartheid. However, recognizing the limited availability of this necessity, then exceptions can be made if no alternatives are available.

The resolution was, for what it's worth, sharply criticized by the President of the University.

I do want to focus on this Kosher food issue, though, because it raises some interesting issues. The specter of the student government policing how Jewish students gain access to Jewish food -- seeking to ensure that Jews obeying the dictates of their faith do so in a way that satisfies a political litmus test set by the student union -- understandably rankles many Jews on campus (not the least because one suspects there are sharply different opinions between the student government and the median Jewish student about what it means for a food organization to "normalize Israeli apartheid"). Yet, at one level, this language was almost certainly meant as a conciliatory gesture -- an accommodation meant to alleviate burdens placed on Jewish students by the resolution by treating Kosher food options more leniently and opening the possibility of exemption. There is history here: a few years ago the UofT graduate student union made headlines for refusing to support Kosher food access on campus, on the grounds that the campaign was allegedly incompatible with BDS commitments. This was highly embarrassing for the union, which was forced to issue an apology. I strongly suspect that this provision of the new resolution was meant to avoid, or at least, ameliorate, the prospect of a repeat. I can even imagine the student union being surprised and hurt that their kind-hearted, magnanimous gesture is being thrown back in their face with such revulsion.

And yet. Often times, supporters of BDS lean so hard on the trite truism "Israel and Judaism are not synonymous" that they begin to act almost as if any connections between the two are wholly  idiosyncratic and coincidental. It can end up verging on the comical: "Israel is related to Judaism? Why, I had no idea -- in any event, that interesting factual tidbit, which never occurred to me until just now, certainly has nothing to do with anything I'm doing." But increasingly, it is becoming impossible to overlook the obvious fact that BDS commitments, interpreted expansively, necessitate significant regulation of Jewish political, social, cultural, and religious life, including aggressive and systematic policing of which Jews are okay to talk to or work with. The SunriseDC fiasco was one manifestation of this, the AMP position paper seeking to establish rules regarding when it is okay to collaborate with Jews is another. The myth that "BDS" will or perhaps even could be pursued in such a way that only incidentally and idiosyncratically affected Jews qua Jews (as opposed to "Zionists" or "settlers" or "occupiers") is collapsing.

Even if in the minds of the resolution drafters they were resolutely thinking about Zionists, Zionists, Zionists, and not Jews, Jews, Jews; there was no avoiding the reality that in practice the brunt of the impact would be felt far more in the latter capacity than in the former. Indeed, while virtually none of the entities which support BDS are in a position to impose regulatory burdens on the Israeli state, they absolutely can regulate their local Jews, and so it is the local Jewish community that in practice will predictably be the main venue through which these campaigns actually regulate conduct (I am hardly the first to note that BDS does far more to injure diaspora Jews than it does to harm Israel in any concrete way, let alone motivate Israel to alter its conduct). Who is most likely to have a speaker, or a food product, or a program, that potentially runs afoul of the guidelines (and who is most likely to have their speakers/foods/programs checked and rechecked and placed under the finest microscope to ensure they satisfy the relevant political litmus tests)? It's the local Jewish groups (and not just on matters that directly relate to Israel, either). The effect of these mandates is to place Jewish groups under constant, humiliating surveillance and interrogation to ensure they're not stepping out of line ("Wanna support the miners--what's your position on Zionism?" Or for a campus example, just ask Rachel Beyda). 

Critics sometimes argue that if the Jewish community in North America is that tied up with the Jewish community in Israel, that's an "us" problem. But it is simply not reasonable or feasible to expect the Jewish community writ large to wholly disentangle itself from a place where nearly half the world's Jewish population (and well more than half of the non-European Jewish population) lives and which is central to Jewish religious worship, history, and culture -- particularly given the depth of the "disentanglement" demanded (whereby nearly any connection whatsoever is sufficient to be deemed "complicit" or "implicated"). And again, that sort of insistence on a sweeping and dare I say revolutionary reorganization of Jewish public life is necessarily one that represents a "significant regulation of Jewish political, social, cultural, and religious" affairs. Even if one supports that revolution, and even one supports it so fervently that one is fine with it taking place via external non-Jewish compulsion, at the very least those making this demand cannot plausibly hold to the comforting myth that "we're not talking about Jews". They are, inescapably, and Jews are not doing anything unfair or unreasonable in calling it what it is (a few proponents of the revolution -- some Jewish, some not -- are open in saying "yes, we are targeting the Jews for compulsion because the Jews need and deserve to be compelled", and at the very least I appreciate the honesty).

History provides many examples of edicts placed upon the public whose effects would be to make Jewish public life difficult or potentially impossible. And sometimes, the sovereign in his grace would agree to the possibility of dispensation or exemption for Jews, or at least worthy Jews or sufficiently well-connected Jews, or for the Jews who impressed him and garnered his favor. Much of Jewish political history has been the project of begging for the establishment of these exemptions, begging for them to actually be effectuated, and then begging for them not to be removed or retired when the sovereign's mood changed. And on the one hand, the prospect of these exemptions existing is better than them not being available at all. On the other hand, their presence really hammered home the degree to which the Jews were at the mercy of the sovereign's whim; it illustrated in stark tones who was the law-maker and who was the supplicant subject.

The UofT clause on Kosher food is heir to this tradition. The broad sweep of the resolution risks making Jewish qua Jewish life on campus intolerable (there is a reason why the Nexus definition of antisemitism specifically includes as a species of antisemitism "conditions that discriminate against Jews and impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life."). The law-makers in their beneficence thus offer the possibility of an exemption, if those seeking it come with the right amount of supplication and prove their worthiness by demonstrating to the student union's satisfaction that there is absolutely no "alternative". How gracious! But in its grace, it actually lays bare something previously obscured. In so many words, what the student union is doing is developing an official bureaucratic apparatus whose job specifically is to regulate and oversee Jewish religious life -- with no question regarding who ultimately holds the power and who comes in as a mere petitioner.

Ironically, when there was no exemption at all it would be perhaps easier to cling longer to the myth that the impact on Jews qua Jews is mere idiosyncratic coincidence. The drafters surely would concede that there might be some people who might happen to be inconvenienced by the resolution and it just so may happen that some number of them (who can really say how many) might be Jewish -- but such is life! These things happen! Here, by contrast, the prior history of the Kosher food issue meant that the student union here finally had to admit to itself "yes, thinking about Israel and Zionism means also thinking about Jews" (lack of definitional identity notwithstanding). And in doing so, and in actually being somewhat responsive to that thought, it made visible the actual power dynamics in play that perhaps previously could be denied.

Journalistic Defectors

One of the more dangerous players in contemporary discourse -- or at least one of the types that makes me the most nervous, anyway -- are people who are trained as journalists, who know the forms of the genre, but now are working consciously and intentionally as advocates.

Adam Kredo -- he of Kamala Harris' pot-gate -- is one example. Before joining the Washington Free Beacon, he was a relatively well-respected "neutral" journalist working for the Washington Jewish Week. Now, nobody confuses what he does for the Beacon as dispassionate journalism (except maybe Kredo, who claimed -- apparently with a straight face -- that at the Beacon he remains a straight news reporter who is "not in the opinion biz"). Nonetheless, there's little question that Kredo is more effective as a purveyor of partisan hit pieces precisely because he knows how to write an article in a way that follows journalistic conventions. Get quotes from alternative sources, ask subjects for comments (that they're damned if they do and damned if they don't is a bonus), do much of the heavy narrative lifting not by direct accusation but in terms of presuppositions and framing -- it works in a way that more direct propaganda doesn't. I suspect the "news-ier" side of Fox News (not Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, but the parts that present themselves as straight coverage) fits this mold too.

On the other side of the street, one can see similar characteristics at Jewish Currents. Again, many of the people writing for Currents have clear talent as journalists, and their stories track journalistic conventions. They aren't obvious agitprop. But they're great examples of how, if you know what you're doing as a journalist, you know how to push every convention to the limits of its tolerance band in a way that gets you to something pretty close to agitprop while still looking on face like a regular investigation. If every choice of framing is meant to accentuate one side's story, if every presupposition of the relevant political climate or social atmosphere reaffirms a particular point of view, if every inference or interpretation is just a little credulous to the right people and cynical to the wrong ones, the result is an article in which all the constituent elements are defensible as fair but the net result is intentionally one-sided (their piece on Ritchie Torres I think works as a decent example of what I mean).

I've sometimes said that the "evil" version of me would make a good press secretary, because I think I'd be very good at spinning effectively. This is a version of that -- if you're a journalist, you know how the narrative machine works, and knowing how it works you also know how to break the machine. And as parts of a political toolkit this is very effective; arguably even necessary, even as it is also intentionally manipulative and kind of hackish. The reason "evil" me is a Press Secretary rather than actual me is that in real life I don't have the stomach for that sort of work. Which is not the same thing as saying that either I or the people I admire are perfectly virtuous or fair-minded in how we relate to our own interlocutors. We have times our biases shine through too. But there is, I submit, a difference between unknowingly being swayed by one's personal biases, or even a temporary lapse acknowledged as a wrong, and knowingly and self-consciously trying to align one's work product with one's biases to the maximum extent possible.

In any event, I suspect the people who do this are in fact decently self-conscious about what they're doing -- they don't (contra Kredo) actually think they're not engaged in opinion; they're relatively open about their agenda. Press them, and they might say something like "all news coverage has a political agenda behind it; the difference is that we are self-conscious about it, whereas the people who think they're doing straight news are more likely to be unconsciously parroting orthodox Pablum without recognizing that's a view too." And I have some sympathy for that critique, actually. We all could stand to be more reflective on what our biases and presuppositions are. But I also think there is a difference between actually trying to understand issues on their own terms and be fair to subjects one is covering, versus just going through the motions of it because "hey, everyone has an agenda right?" Such is the curse of many liberal values (objectivity, neutrality, even-handedness, etc.): they're simultaneously impossible to achieve, and yet things are so much worse when people stop even trying to achieve them.

Demystifying the very much non-neutral "mainstream" coverage norms need not necessarily take the form of "replicating those norms, but intentionally and in service of a different political program." But in practice, it often does, and the result is I think work product that is very slick, very effective for its chosen audience, and very dangerous for the project of fair-minded discourse.

AMP Presents: Chicken Soup for the Zionist Infiltrator Soul

Some of you are familiar with the name David Miller, a British academic widely denounced for antisemitic conspiracy mongering from his erstwhile perch at the University of Bristol. Perhaps the most notorious, if also darkly hilarious, entry into his antisemitism portfolio was when he denounced Jews and Muslims making chicken soup together as a "Trojan horse for normalizing Zionism."

Of course Israel have sent people in to target that, to deal with that. Particularly through interfaith work … pretending Jews and Muslims working together will be an apolitical way of countering racism. No, it’s a Trojan horse for normalising Zionism in the Muslim community. We saw it in East London Mosque for example, where East London Mosque unknowingly held this project of making chicken soup with Jewish and Muslim communities coming together. This is an Israel-backed project for normalising Zionism in the Muslim communities.

More than perhaps anything else, this subjected Miller to well-deserved mockery and scorn -- the poster child for "anti-Zionist" antisemitism taken to its fanatical extreme.

Now, the organization American Muslims for Palestine put out a position paper on when it is appropriate for Muslims to collaborate with Jews that pretty much crystallizes the Miller view into a policy document.

The title of the paper is "AMP's Report on Working with Zionist Organizations", but they are otherwise quite clear that this is actually a series of litmus tests for Jewish groups, specifically -- the opening line of the document is "This memo is intended to provide the American-Muslim community with a set of criteria by which to determine whether or not to work with various Jewish organizations." 

On that question, of whether Muslims should or should not work with Jewish organizations, the answer AMP gives can be summarized as "virtually never, with virtually none of them". It concludes with a literal good Jew/bad Jew list where the former includes JVP, IfNotNow, and a couple of organizations whose memberships effectively overlap entirely with JVP/IfNotNow, and the latter includes ... well, basically everyone else -- including the ADL, AJC, Hillel, local JCRCs, and local Jewish Federations. Also sitting in the "bad" category are most local synagogues, which the report characterizes as sitting in a "gray area" -- the vast majority should probably be avoided or at most handled with a Hazmat suit, but AMP does do the favor of linking to a helpful list of JVP-approved acceptable synagogues which are "safe" to collaborate with. The list numbers about two dozen. In total. In the entire United States. Thanks, guys.

Much could be written about this document, along many dimensions. I did have to smile when I saw that they intentionally were modeling their call for exclusion on Hillel's "standards of partnership" -- well-played (and yes, this position paper does serve if nothing else as an indictment of the more fundamentalist interpretations of those guidelines). Less amusing was the insinuation -- echoing Miller -- that the "American Jewish establishment" is actually comprised of "front groups" run out of the Israeli foreign affairs ministry, an especially egregious form of antisemitism that even the JDA denounces (B.7). Finally, it was noteworthy to see AMP expressly characterize these "standards of partnership" as emanating out of and required by the BDS movement -- no longer limited to Israel itself, or members of Israeli society, now BDS guidelines surrounding "complicity" in Israeli wrongdoing serve to demand extirpation of Jewish groups in America too. Again, it was always obvious that the train has no brakes -- this was always the final destination of that particular ride.

But perhaps the most interesting part was when AMP tries to answer the question of "if these organizations are so sinister, why is it that they reach out to the Muslim community in the first place?" Here AMP really channels its internal David Miller:

There are a few reasons for [Jewish organizations'] continued attempt at collaboration--all of which involve using the Muslim community to further their own political agendas. [emphasis added]

One of the core reasons that Zionist organizations continue to engage the Muslim community is that it provides these organizations with cover for their bigotry. When accused of Islamophobia for example, they can point to previous work with the Muslim community as evidence against those claims....

In addition to providing themselves with cover, Zionist organizations use these opportunities to infiltrate the Muslim community. Doing so serves several purposes. Firstly, it allows them to pursue a policy of “containment through other means.” By having to engage with these organizations, the Muslim community’s time and resources are deployed away from more serious efforts and from the real issues, in turn preventing the community from achieving its real priorities. Additionally, by generating a conversation around topics such as Israel’s right to exist or terrorism, they’re generating a conversation that was otherwise not present and infusing the community with an agenda item that was not there in the first place--further dividing and redistributing precious resources and muddling the narrative.

[Finally], infiltration of the Muslim community gives bad actors the opportunity to work towards defusing American Muslim commitment to Palestine....

It is notable that AMP explicitly commits to the notion that these efforts at engagement are always taken to be in bad faith, done for sinister agendas and ulterior motives masked by an insincere desire for dialogue or community-building. There are no good faith initiatives that falter in the face of an allegedly incommensurable value conflict; rather, it's you know the Jews -- they're only after that one thing. It is one thing, after all, to accurately observe that persons or groups accused of bigotry will often point to prior good acts they've done vis-à-vis the harmed group as apologia or mitigation. It is quite another to suggest that Jews cynically try to stockpile a resume of good deeds as a preemptive strike to justify future wrongdoing, and that warding function is the actual motivation.

If AMP really had the courage of its convictions here, they could accommodate the prospect that many if not most of these Jewish organizations have perfectly sincere desires to develop relationships; to listen, teach, and learn from one another. The argument would be that, while these motives are themselves noble and salutary, the importance of this issue is such that redlines have to be drawn even if the result is ostracizing people who really do seem nice enough -- an unfortunate consequence of an essential political program. But AMP cannot resist the temptation to speak in terms of monsters and ogres -- a crusade against evil that establishes by definition that anyone skewered must be an evildoer, and now we do return fully to Miller's "Zionist chicken soup" outlook on life -- shrieking to anyone who will listen that the most innocent of things masks terrible, nefarious purposes. One has to think here they might have self-sabotaged: the sort of person who is inclined to believe this histrionic accounting of what the Jews are after probably wasn't racing to collaborate with Jewish organizations to begin with; the presumed target audience (of Muslims who have been working with, or are considering working with, Jewish organizations) may be less likely to find this ghoulish description resonant. 

Of course, one ambition of a paper like this is to head off the sorts of intercommunal engagements that would conclusively demonstrate the presuppositions of this paper are absurd. It is easier to justify "don't talk to the Jews" if one believes the Jews only talk to infiltrate and manipulate, and it's easier to believe Jews only talk to infiltrate and manipulate if one doesn't talk to the Jews. Conveniently self-insulating, that. In fairness, it may be that certain sorts of positions (on Israel or Palestine or Jews or whomever) may become more difficult to hold after engagement. But my view has always been that, while there is no obligation to simply agree with members of outgroups on any given issue, a position that is so fragile that it cannot even survive an encounter with Palestinians or Israelis, or Jews or Muslims, is probably not a position worth defending to begin with.

It seems clear that one thing AMP is trying to do here is mirror (what it takes to be) the Jewish model on policing Israel discourse inside the community -- closing ranks around a unified voice that is tightly bordered around anti-Zionist norms, with dissidents tarred as threats to communal unity at best, sellouts at worst. Again, the reference to Hillel's standards of partnership is not just a rhetorical gotcha. That said, the paper stands out for its extreme, uncompromising approach to relations with the Jewish community -- one shot through with antisemitic stereotyping and ultimately, if it were successfully enforced, incompatible with just and equitable relationships between our communities. If AMP is replicating anyone here, it is not even Hillel, it's ZOA.

But we should ask: is AMP's attempt to freeze out coordination and cooperation between Muslims and (nearly all) Jews is a reflection of newfound power, or is a reflection of newfound weakness? That is, is the AMP paper the result of an emboldened pro-Palestine movement that now sees the realistic opportunity to go for broke and establish new rules and norms entrenching its influence and locking out opposition? Or is it reflective of anxiety over a corroding position, a rear-guard initiative to try and hold the line on norms of belief and conduct that they see collapsing?

I can see the case for either story. The "emboldened" story would hold that the positions on Israel and Palestine AMP wants to hold are, if not predominant, then are at least now mainstream enough such that one can present and defend them in unadulterated, uncompromising form. Elements of pro-Palestinian activism which for years were simply complete non-starters -- things like BDS, advocating dissolution of Israel outright, presenting all Israelis are illegitimate colonizers -- now are slowly transitioning out of the activist hardcore and into "regular" journals, political debates, and campaigns. Whereas in years past the groups like AMP were not strong enough to be able to credibly threaten dissidents and defectors with punishment (What would the threat be? Ostracism from a fringe organization with no significant political sway?), now there is both sufficient internal unity and sufficient external influence to be able to extract actual costs, and the AMP position paper is a formal attempt at declaring that these penalties will be paid. AMP's paper is, under this view, a sign of a movement coming into its own and transitioning from fringe to at least semi-mainstream, with a new ability and desire to flex its muscles (and, perhaps, a desire to turnabout what it sees as its own unjust exclusion and marginalization for many years at the hands of the American Jewish community).

The "anxiety" story, by contrast, suggests that AMP is responding to a perceived decay in norms of unity and uniformity around revanchist anti-Zionism that they are trying to shore up. Developments like the Abraham Accords are fostering increased curiosity amongst Muslims to engage and interact with Israel on a basis that, while certainly not uncritical, is perhaps less overtly antagonistic than AMP would like. A Muslim woman was the national head of J Street U; the Muslim Leadership Initiative continues apace. Even the Lara Alqasem case, while mostly presented (correctly) as an example of attempted Israeli state repression, was also a case where the former head of a campus SJP chapter decided to enroll in a graduate program at an Israeli university (BDS supporters, while not passing up the opportunity the denounce Israeli malfeasance, also were clear in their dismay at Alqasam's flouting of BDS mandates). Much of the rhetoric in the AMP paper -- appeals to unity, concerns about losing a united front, fretting of being distracted or taken into infighting -- is the language of a group which feels like it is losing rather than gaining ground. Under these circumstances, AMP's position can be seen as a response to threat -- an attempt to retrench weakening norms which no longer were deterring "bad behavior" (much in the same way Hillel's partnership guidelines were themselves responsive to a perceived deterioration in what was previously seen as uniform Jewish student support for Zionism). 

Although these two stories seem competitive with one another, there is a sense in which they both carry some truth. Attempts to impose ideological uniformity and crackdown on dissident voices are most common in periods of transition, as old orders and understandings fizzle but new ones have not yet been fully developed. While it is true that some mechanisms for squelching dissent requires some amount of power, it also is the case that groups on the fringe can often afford to maintain ideological conformity precisely because there are no opportunity costs to doing so. One cannot give up opportunities for power or influence that weren't available to begin with, and one cannot fracture a movement that is too small to develop significant cleavages. Any small group that starts to rise in influence experiences these growing pains; there is a freedom in being tiny and insignificant which contracts rapidly once true pluralism emerges (and you can play for true stakes on the table).

Social movements, I've long argued, "moderate as they mainstream". This is a tendency that immensely frustrates the original hard core of the movement which views this moderation as a form of selling out. It is simultaneously the case that the success of the pro-Palestine movement is why we'll see more folks like Jamaal Bowman in Congress sharply criticizing Israeli policy and floating conditioning foreign aid to Israel, and the case that, when people with Jamaal Bowman's views enter in Congress, they're more likely to do things like visit Israel or vote for Iron Dome right alongside sharply criticizing policy and floating conditioning aid. As we're seeing right now with Rep. Bowman, trying to resist the pairing of the former with the latter is why one sees such aggressive efforts to slam the door and draw the redline. But again, this dynamic trades on both increased power and increased weakness: power in that one's views matter (politically speaking) to mainstream actors in a way that they didn't in years past; weakness in that playing in the mainstream pool means that one is subjected to influences and pressures and relationships that previously were purely hypothetical.

I do not know enough about AMP to venture whether it is even capable of successfully promulgating norms of engagement within the American Muslim community that are akin to the (real or imagined) norms that have long existed within the American Jewish community. But the broad strokes of the move here are familiar. This sort of uncompromising call for ideological conformity is neither wholly coming from a position of strength nor of weakness. It is in a very real sense more extreme than what one would publicly see articulated in years past, but partially that stems from a panic that this sort of extremism is unsustainable -- it is a myth, a "happy" fantasy, to think that the relationship of American Jews to American Muslims can be redirected so it flows only through JVP. Ultimately, just as Hillel was never going to be able to successfully clamp down on Jews thinking more critically on Israel and on Palestine (no matter what its high-level machers might want), I suspect that AMP also will not actually be able to stem the tide of Jews and Muslims working together, learning together, dialoguing together, and, perhaps, coming to a new and jointly resonant vision of justice about Israel and Palestine together.

Dying, and Mourning, Politically

One of my greatest nightmares is that a loved one of mine will die "politically". What I mean by that is that their death will occur as part of something political or politicized. A terrorist attack would be a prime example; dying during a protest would be another. When a loved one dies, all one wants to do is grieve; and be surrounded by those who join and support you in your grief. But unlike dying in, say, a car accident, a political death doesn't allow that.  One cannot, truly, be left alone to grieve. One is forcibly kept in the center of an ongoing political maelstrom at the precise moment when one most deserves respite.

The most obvious horror is that some people might minimize or even justify your loved one's death, and they might do it to your face. Even if they don't directly target you, in a political death there will inevitably be people on the "other side", and they aren't going to just pack it in and call it quits because your loved one died (the thing about dying politically is that typically yours is not the first death attached to that politics). And then there are the people who are on your side, or who present themselves as such; they might try to recruit you as a symbol for a particular cause or banner. Suddenly, your tragedy is their debating point. If one does "want" to enlist in a given political project, the effort one must expend to make sure one does it right is mental energy one simply doesn't have -- which won't stop others from judging you; which wouldn't stop me from judging myself.  Or maybe one actually rejects the politics of those claiming to speak on your behalf; the act of repudiating those who are supposedly standing in solidarity with you would be delicate under the best of circumstances -- try to imagine balancing it in the absolute worst of circumstances.

It's a horrifying thought. And the worst part is that these terrible things the mourner is subjected to aren't, for the most part, even wrong. Political deaths are political, and the politics of political deaths don't pause because your loved one dies. While there are certain cruelties -- taunting, mocking, crowing -- that could be justly labeled beyond the pale (not that this labeling does much to deter anyone), it is not realistic for the world to stop thinking about the political issue your circle has just unwillingly punctuated. The world continues when a loved one dies a normal death too, but at least it typically has the decency to ignore you for awhile. In a political death, the world continues its path straight through you. I don't know how people handle it. It strikes me as one of the worst things I can possibly imagine.

Radicalizing on Guns

If you were to ask me the one issue I think I've "radicalized" on over the past few years, it'd probably be the issue of guns. A few years ago, my view on guns would be sort of a standard soft-liberal answer: I have no issue with guns per se, but we need common-sense regulation (assault weapons ban, background checks, and so on), and while I'd vote for any of these reforms if I were a member of Congress, it isn't an issue that would exercise me that much. Now, I find myself returning over and over to "guns are one of the central problems" holding up a host of important and salutary social reforms, such that if we don't tackle the scourge of widespread gun possession, we'll never get anywhere. So in that sense, I've radicalized on guns more so than on maybe any other issue. 

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think of guns as being a common "the issue" where people are being radicalized right now. Certainly, plenty of people have held very strong views on guns and gun control for a long time. But when I think of the issues where you see people talk about a really sharp swing in their views over the past few years from a starting position of "not really something I have strong feelings on", I think of things like "abolition" or "Israel/Palestine" or "anti-wokeism" or "anti-capitalism". Guns, for lack of a better way of putting it, seems to be socially speaking in a similar position to where it was several years ago -- or if there is movement, it's the typical jockeying for position around the margins.

How did I get here? I grew up in the era where school shootings were a major part of the public discourse (I was in middle school when Columbine happened), and that "discourse" was probably the main point of intersection between myself and guns as a kid. I did not grow up in an area where gun ownership was common (I don't think I knew of anyone who owned a gun), nor in an area where gun violence was a regular feature of life (though the "beltway sniper" rampage occurred while I was in high school); my personal experience with guns consisted entirely of firing one once while at sleepaway camp. As I recall my earliest views on guns, they were much as described above -- supportive of common-sense limits, but coupled with some amount of nervousness about meddling with part of the Bill of Rights.

Fast forward into adulthood, and for the most part guns remained marginal to my thinking. I read some books about the importance of armed self-defense to the civil rights movement, which I found interesting and modulated my thinking on the issue somewhat. I also came across the "Top Shot" reality TV competition series, which I viewed as a useful peek into what I took to be the healthy version of American gun culture. I still identified with a vague liberal gun control outlook, and indeed, as a lawyer, my pro bono practice actually centered around work for the Brady Campaign. I even applied for a job with the Brady Campaign -- but I withdrew after the interview, precisely because I felt that if you worked at Brady you should be a "true believer", and I didn't consider myself to be one on the matter of guns.

What changed? First, it was thinking through how to reduce the footprint of potentially-violent police interactions in our lives. For example, noticing how often violent police encounters occur in the aftermath of traffic stops, one might ask "why does the guy who gives tickets for turning right on red need to be armed and dangerous"? Recognizing that some officers may need to be armed for their jobs, could we not disarm our traffic cops?

Of course, part of the reason why traffic cops are armed as if they're infiltrating a violent drug cartel is because we've enlisted traffic policing into a convenient workaround to negate the Fourth Amendment -- it's not about traffic laws, it's about finding some ticky-tack rolled through a stop sign excuse to pull someone over so one can search them for drugs. But in part (and these are not unrelated), it's because we know there is a solid chance that the driver of the car is armed, and potentially the sort of armed man who thinks that turning-right-on-red is his God-given right as an American so don't tread on me, and police officers never want to be a situation where they are outgunned by a civilian. The proliferation of guns in the civilian population means that there needs to be a counter-proliferation in the police population.

And the knowledge that anyone one encounters could be armed with death-dealing firearms also predictably impacts how police officers treat ordinary policing encounters. Reading a steady drumbeat of qualified immunity decisions involving police violence, often (though not always) against unarmed victims, it becomes very clear how much both constitutional doctrine and policing policy operate under the shadow of a view where everyone around the police is a potential threat. This is the "warrior cop" mentality: A nervous twitch or a furtive glance has to be viewed as a potential precursor to drawing a gun, because, well, there are a lot of guns out there, and officers are only human. "What would you have them do?" But if that's the question, it's a question that presupposes a rider "What would you have them do in a country where guns are everywhere and anyone could be packing?" To the extent that rider is what generates the hapless and helpless inability to respond to the problem of "police keep killing people in situations where it was eminently avoidable", then the rider reflects the problem. The judicial system and much of our political reaction has not-altogether-unreasonable sympathy for the position well-meaning officers are placed in, even as that sympathy itself is demonstrative of a broader systemic failing.

This extends beyond policing. As Charles Pierce put it, the proliferation of firearms throughout the populace "transforms any mass event into a potential firefight." Guns being everywhere means any public outing now is potentially life-or-death -- all the more so ones that have controversy or heated passions. When Ta-Nehisi Coates said that he'd "rather die by shooting than live armed",  he was getting at the notion that in order to have a gun on you during an active shooting, you'd need to live armed. The gun doesn't just teleport into your hand in the moment of need, it needs to be on your person as you live your life -- including when you're playing with your baby, including when you're drunk, including when you're depressed, including when you're furious, including when you've just had an emotional argument with your ex. To have a gun on you during a shooting is to have a gun on you in those moments too. But when guns are everywhere, we all to some extent have to live that life -- or least, live on the far side of it. All of us now, when encountering the belligerent drunk at the bar or the depressed just-laid-off coworker or the furious protester or the incensed ex-boyfriend, now have to wonder -- on top of everything else -- "are they armed"? The mere act of living in public becomes a sort of haunted house -- we're all forced to eye each other warily and wonder if they're going to get us (which, for some of us, then becomes "so I better get them first").

And every time I look for a solution to this, I run into the brick wall of "it won't work unless we tackle the gun epidemic". Focus on those who actually engage in gun violence? Doesn't resolve the prospective anxiety of not knowing who is a potential threat, and doesn't have anything to do with the problem of extra-twitchy officers shooting at unarmed individuals. Disarming (non-specialized) police? It'll never happen in circumstances where police officers can reasonably say that they are liable to encounter armed individuals not just in specialized raids on violent cartels but in their ordinary beat work. Get rid of qualified immunity? As much as courts overuse rhetoric like cops being forced into "split-second decisions", some of this is a matter of symptom rather than cause; we know from too many experiences that juries have sympathy for officers who are reacting in the face of uncertainty in a world we know is awash in dangerous firearms. Criminal liability? Same problem: the panicked uncertainty of "anyone could be a danger" doesn't mesh well with guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; once the gun is in hand, it's too easy to imagine "wouldn't I panic in a similar fashion?" And maybe if there gun wasn't in hand, the panic would be the same, but the result wouldn't be.

The ultimate tragedy is that the sort of response that recognizable, non-monstrous humans make when feeling threatened -- not barbarians, not sociopaths, but people we can see ourselves in -- is one that, when one has a gun, often will result in people being maimed or killed. And the more guns there are, the tighter hair-trigger we'll all be on vis-à-vis feeling threatened. Guns -- both their actual presence, and the pervasive knowledge that they could always be present -- raise the stakes of confrontation to intolerable levels. It's a one-way ratchet, and there's no way down from it save by clearing guns off the street.

Hence my new radicalism. I don't need to believe that everyone who owns a gun is a secret militia member or yahoo or has some toxic masculinity fetish going on. And while it is abundantly clear that the humanizing sympathy towards persons who respond violently to feeling threatened is very much mediated by race, the core problem would persist even if it could be somehow deracialized (which, of course, it can't). The problem with guns is not that gun owners are not "law-abiding", and so it cannot be resolved by more stringently enforcing laws about guns. The problem is that, particularly in highly pluralized and polarized society, there is no way to preserve a functioning public square when everyone knows everyone else is capable of dealing death at a moment's notice; when every fight and every protest and every confrontation and every moment of negative emotion has immediate life-and-death stakes. That's not civilization, that's Hobbes' state of nature. Remember the old saw about "God made Man, Sam Colt made 'em equal?" Hobbes' state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short because it presents a state of affairs where all people are fundamentally equal in their ability to kill one another. Entering civilization was supposed to remove us from that hell. Instead, we've recreated it.

The Interesting Prospective Aftermath of Jamaal Bowman and the DSA

While I don't actually harbor ill-will towards Rep. Jamaal Bowman, I admit to feeling just a bit of schadenfreude when I heard he was facing expulsion from the DSA for the mortal sin of ... voting for Iron Dome and visiting Israel and Palestine. "I never thought the insignificant gnats would nip at my face ....!" indeed. Anyway, the DSA's national political committee is now saying that addressing Bowman's misconduct is its "highest priority" (a revealing choice of prioritization, to be sure), but it will seek to meet with Bowman's office before deciding on any sanctions.

I do admit to being intrigued at how this will play out. First thing's first: Bowman does not need (if he ever did) the DSA. He's safe in his district without them, they don't do much for him politically (indeed, I suspect that of all squad members, Bowman is the one whose base is least DSA-tied, with the possible exception of Ayanna Pressley). So the extent to which he decides to placate them is not going to be significantly dictated by political calculations -- it will be fairly thought of as reflective of his own beliefs, residual loyalty, affinity, and so on. In other words, while that doesn't mean that any response to DSA other than "f--- off" is inappropriate, if he decides to placate the DSA, it's not because he's been backed into a political corner.

In any event, there are broadly speaking three types of responses Bowman could give to DSA's demands here (albeit these are more a spectrum than hard-and-fast divides). He could fully give in, admitting error and committing to holding the DSA's hard line in the future, choosing the DSA and effectively jettisoning any relationship he'd have with the bulk of Jewish constituents and national Jewish organizations. He could try to walk some middle line -- throwing some placating bones towards DSA while not committing to shifting tangible positions on Israel in the future -- in an attempt to straddle both sides. Or he could stand his ground, defending his position and holding his own line about what the right progressive stance towards Israel and Palestine is, without much regard to making DSA happy.

The first move would be the most straightforward: the DSA would claim victory, Jewish organizations would be infuriated. It'd definitely be news, and it'd show the DSA has the ability to flex, but I'm not sure there'd be much interesting to say about this other than that it would communicate to any future politician who is DSA-curious that they will not be permitted to take anything but the most uncompromising position on Israel if they want to stay in the tent. Again, that'd be a serious development, but not one I have much to say about. I think it is fair to say that taking this step would permanently sabotage Bowman's relationship with the bulk of mainstream Jewish organizations, so there isn't a lot of use of gaming out potential responses here. The response would be "you're dead to us."

The second move is always the politician's temptation, but I doubt it would work here. Trying to stand in the middle will most likely satisfy neither side; he'd just make everyone angry at him. It's possible that DSA is looking for a face-saving way of keeping Bowman in the tent, but more likely than not any resolution that'd be seen as acceptable to them would be viewed as betrayal by the mainstream Jewish community, and vice versa.

So to some extent, I merge the second and third move together, insofar as I expect both would result in Bowman taking serious fire from the DSA (up to and including expulsion). Maybe he can form a support group with Liz Cheney. Again, I don't think Bowman needs the DSA to be politically successful, so this is not going to threaten his career in any way. But what I'm most interested in is how the rest of the "squad" would respond if the DSA turns its guns on Bowman. Do they stand up for him? Do they take public steps to affirm him as a valuable comrade? Or do they let him twist? It's never been fully clear the degree to which Squad members' relationship with the uncompromising left vanguard embodied by the contemporary DSA is one of true believers; this would give us an interesting glimpse into their headspace. Defending Bowman would suggest that they find DSA's antics to be obnoxious purity politics that is less ideologically helpful than it is a thorn in their side (it would also demonstrate loyalty to a friend); it wouldn't necessarily entail breaking with the DSA but it might prompt the DSA to take that step itself (or back down). If they stay silent, it would suggest they either are tacitly okay with this sort of hardball play from the left, and/or that they fear the backlash they'd endure from their far-left base for whom anti-Israel politics are ride-or-die issues.

It is often asserted that those inside these sorts of highly-regimented, orthodox political movements secretly hate the sense of compulsion -- the knowledge that if they step a toe out of line the penalty is ostracism and expulsion -- but they tolerate it out of fear that if they criticize, well, they'll be targeted for ostracism and expulsion. Sometimes that's true, though there are plenty of people who are probably fine with the constant hunt for heretics (at least until the gnats come for their face). In any event, right now the Squad is independently powerful enough that it could survive -- and survive without too much trouble -- attempts by the DSA to enforce this sort of iron-fisted discipline around Israel. The big question is whether they want to -- and that aftermath is one I'm interested in watching play out.

Antisemitism is a GOP Growth Opportunity in Minority Communities

When Marjorie Taylor Greene found herself approvingly quoting Nation of Islam conspiracy theories and noting the "common ground" between the GOP and the NoI, many laughed. Others pointed out that the synergy should not surprise: there really is a lot of common ground between the two. Conspiratorial antisemites should flock together. It is hardly a surprise that Louis Farrakhan has had his share of praise for Donald Trump; nor should it shock that one of Trump's most prominent Black advisors, Omarosa Manigault, tried to do outreach connected the Trump administration to Farrakhan. When one looks at the younger generation of "Blexit" style Black conservative leaders who are exciting the contemporary Republican Party, antisemitism is often part and parcel of their appeal. Omarosa was one example. Candace Owens -- she of the infamous apologia for Hitler -- is another. Mark Robinson, the new Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina and a rising star in the state GOP, has the Jewish community in a near-panic after a bevy of antisemitic (and otherwise bigoted remarks) which he has not retracted -- the most blatant being the claim that the movie Black Panther was the project of an "agnostic Jew" whose sole agenda was "to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets." Similar trends have been observed among Latinos in Miami -- a crucial "battleground" community whose unexpectedly shift back to the right in 2016 and 2020 has kept that state in the Republican column.

An underappreciated reality is this: antisemitism is one of the most obvious avenues for the GOP to make inroads in communities of color. To be sure, this is all relative -- we're talking about how to move from 10% of the Black vote to 15% of the vote; the vast majority of Black Americans are not antisemitic and are not going to be swayed over to the GOP side of the ledger by antisemitic appeals. Still, the Hirsh/Royden paper measuring antisemitic attitudes in the American population specifically found a massive spike among young conservatives, and specifically young conservatives of color (Latinos and African-American). I've joked that this finding has "something for everyone" partaking in the debates over where antisemitism is most threatening (the left is happy it can blame the right, and the right is happy it can blame Black people). But their finding really does have significant implications for where the "low hanging fruit" is for Republicans trying to bolster their vote share in minority communities, and it is very likely the GOP will start explicitly chasing that vote sooner rather than later.  

The obvious truth about someone like Louis Farrakhan is that he is a conservative figure and his ideology is far more harmonious with the right than the left. The same is true for others in the Black community who share Farrakhan's broader outlook. This obvious truth has been obscured, partially by the idiosyncratic reasons that Farrakhan and his NoI have connections to some on the progressive left, partially because the brand of conservatism he represents (deep mistrust of public institutions, xenophobic fear of contamination by "outsiders", conspiratorial ravings about the true powers governing society), when racialized through a Black perspective, often present White people and America as the "institutions" or "outsiders" or "powers" that are indicted. But on the latter, particularly, as the GOP has gotten increasingly comfortable with overt and often violent anti-government rhetoric, there are more and more opportunities for overlap here. Railing against "the CIA" or "the FBI" or "the banks" or the "globalists" -- those words will sound very similar coming out of either camp, and will likewise resonate similarly no matter who is speaking them. Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing nothing more than recognizing what was already before her eyes. And to the extent that attacks on "Whites" seems to be an insurmountable hurdle, well, redirecting those attacks onto the Jews is a prime opportunity for "compromise" that can satisfy both parties (Eric Ward's seminal "skin in the game" article expressly identified this in exploring how he, as a Black man, could enter far-right spaces -- the presumed common ground and foundation for alliance that could unify Black Americans and the far-right was explicitly that of antisemitism).

Again, Farrakhan is not representative here -- this post is not about how the GOP will win majorities of the Black community. I'm just saying that, however large this sector is in the Black community, it is a sector that is ripe for  As the GOP gets more explicitly captured by folks like Marjorie Taylor Green, these commonalities are going to become more apparent and become more tempting to leverage. And anyone who thinks that genuine concern or fair-feeling for Jews is going to stop Republican strategists from pushing that button is out to lunch. It is, simply put, too tempting a target. The overlap is already present, the votes are there to be had, and the Republican Party has no scruples to speak of when it comes to converting hateful rabble-rousing into electoral success.

The "Rigorous" Case Against Teaching More Students More Math

California is in the process of updating its statewide framework for Mathematics education, and unsurprisingly there is controversy -- controversy that will strike many observers as having striking similarities to the recent flare-ups about "ethnic studies" in the state. Monica Osborne in Newsweek has a concise summary of the position of opponents (largely summarizing the objections made in this open letter). There are the de rigueur drive-bys against the curriculum becoming too "political" and non-"neutral", to the point at which it is allegedly not even "mathematics" anymore -- I actually addressed some of those objections in a prior post. But the main objection is claiming that the new math framework abolishes (or at least sharply discourages) "accelerated" or "advanced" math classes, doing disservice to students who genuinely are "gifted" in a misguided nod towards "equity".

One thing I will say is that the open letter (perhaps learning from the Ethnic Studies debacle, where a refusal to do basic citation led to outright fabrications being bandied about by curriculum opponents) does everyone the helpful service of citing its sources so one can see where, exactly, the Mathematics Framework allegedly does say the things its critics contend it is saying. It isn't perfect -- for example, the letter claims that the Framework "[e]ncourages keeping all students together in the same math program until the 11th grade and argues that offering differentiated programs causes student 'fragility' and racial animosity (Ch. 1, p. 15)"; but I wasn't able to find either the "keeping all students together" claim or the "racial animosity" claim on that page (as for the "fragility" point, which was mentioned, it is interesting to note that -- perhaps contrary to one's intuition reading that word out of context -- the claimed "fragility" is that of the gifted students who come to "fear times of struggle in case they lose the label"). Nonetheless, it is tremendously helpful in assessing these claims that they are consciously linked to particular portions of the draft framework. Kudos for that!

Having said that, what do we make of how the new framework addresses issues like "tracking" and "giftedness" and other like practices? To some extent, there seems to be the usual "talking past one another" that one finds in controversies such as this; the State Board explicitly denies that the new framework removes programming to serve "gifted" students, or eliminates "accelerated" classes. But clearly they are attempting to make some alterations that are designed -- I think it is fair to say -- to de-emphasize the degree to which math education is sharply divided between the naturally-gifted "haves" and the hapless "have-nots". Are those modifications salutary? Do they underserve brilliant minds? Or are they increasing access to rigorous mathematical education for all students?

I want to digress for a moment to talk about my own journey through mathematics education. I am not, to be clear, a math teacher (though I am a teacher, and so to that extent have practitioner-level experience with pedagogy in general). I also never considered myself, and to this day do not consider myself, "good at math" (a label which to some extent makes this debate more interesting to me). This is so even though under any objective metric I was actually very good at math -- I got a 720 on my math SAT and a 4 on my AP Calculus exam. That's quite good, especially for someone who always considered himself "bad at math"!

My recollection of how math education occurred at my (high-performing, suburban public) school is that between sixth and seventh grade students made a single, fateful choice. They could enroll in advanced math -- that would put them on track to take advanced calculus (multi-variable calculus) by twelfth grade. They could enroll in honors math -- that would put them on track to take regular calculus in twelfth grade. Or they could enroll in some form of "basic" or "remedial" math, in which case they would not be on track to take calculus at all.

Notice that this single choice at age 12 basically laid out the entirety of one's mathematical education for the next six years. There was essentially no moving up the ladder once one made the choice (there was theoretically the possibility of falling down the ladder, although that was a terrifying prospect that kept many a "gifted" student awake cramming at night). For my part, I chose the middle ("honors") route -- I didn't think of myself as "good at math", so the top path wasn't for me, but I was a conscientious student, so I wasn't going to go the bottom route either. And from that point forward, my path was set; and to a large extent so was my self-identity vis-a-vis math. Despite the fact that I objectively was perfectly capable of doing well at math (again, check those SAT and AP scores), I always viewed myself as not a math guy -- the people who were taking the advanced classes; they were the ones good at math. As someone who tends to think very verbally, I never connected with math, never fully saw its usefulness to someone like me and with my interests.

This persisted even after I graduated high school. Carleton had a math/science distribution requirement, which I skirted as best I could with classes like "Science and Society" or "Conservation Biology" (which basically was a semester of taking pleasant hikes through nature). The political science department did require one to take a statistical methods sequence, which I satisfied by taking (1) the lowest level stats class the school offered and then (2) a "methods" class where I resolutely avoided doing any of the hard statistical analysis by deliberately choosing a research question where I found no correlation between my variables (so no need for robustness checks). When I got to graduate school, there was no way in hell I was going to touch the methods classes (which were not required for political theorists) -- that was way to advanced for little ol' anti-math me. I can't quite say I "regret" not taking them -- even now, the thought of it fills me with dread -- but I can say that lacking the ability to conduct independent empirical research is probably the biggest gap in my scholarly toolset dividing the sorts of scholarship I'm interested in doing from that which I'm capable of doing, and I do regret that.

Thinking back on it, it is simply insane that this entire mathematical-education arc was more or less set in stone via a single decision made when I was twelve. That's nuts! All the more nuts since it ended up becoming quite obvious that I was perfectly capable of learning advanced math; the choice made then did not map onto any "natural" capacity I did or did not have. I can fully accept that some other students at twelve might have had more fire in the belly for math than I did at the time, and that in turn could suggest different styles of teaching math to them than would have been appropriate for me. But to lock either of us into a particular rigid track at that age, telling us "you will go exactly this high, and no further" (and "you can go lower, but only if you cop to being a disgraceful failure") seems absolutely absurd.

It was remembering that personal trajectory that informed my read on what California is proposing. The core of their argument is, more or less, "all or nearly all students are capable of learning high-level math, and so making decisions in middle school that lock students in or out of taking high-level math classes at the end of high school is both unnecessary and foolish". Instead, we should restructure math education so that there are many different pathways that offer the opportunity for more students to end up enrolled in high-level math courses -- the choice you make at twelve shouldn't be your destiny. And likewise, we should recognize that "calculus" is not the only example of "high-level" math -- it is one, but not the only one. The current system is defined by the "race to calculus", where success is defined solely by whether and how fast one gets to the calculus class of the math sequence. This was certainly my experience -- the advanced students got there in 11th grade (then took an extra class of advanced calculus senior year), the middle group I was in get there in 12th grade, and the bottom group doesn't get there at all and is thus looked down upon. We actually had an AP Statistics class offered as well, but I honestly do not recall who even took it -- it was definitely seen as the "lesser" math class, even though in retrospect a strong knowledge of statistics would have been far more useful to me than the calculus class I did take. But it did not lie on the rigid trajectory of the math sequence, which meant it was implicitly downgraded as the off-ramp for the failures.

Math education, even more so than other disciplines, is addicted to the "cult of the genius", where we can identify relatively early on certain students as naturally gifted and others as hapless drones, and sort them into appropriate tracks based on those assessments. The California Framework suggests that this cult, like many cults, is not backed by empirical evidence -- one needn't be a gifted genius to learn high-level math, and working on the assumption that one does need to be such a genius means providing decidedly suboptimal math education to the median California student. We could be successfully teaching more students more math, but we don't because we somehow decided that we can sort the geniuses from the worker bees at the tweenage years and after that we just let nature take its course. It is unsurprising that these gut-check instincts about who is a "genius" track the usual lines of social hierarchy and stereotyping, but that is just the tip of the problematic iceberg.

The reformulation proposed by the California framework is not to prohibit strong, enthusiastic math students from being able to pursue their interests. For those students, it suggests that optimal math education is not defined by racing them to calculus as soon as possible, but may entail giving them more opportunities to explore more elements of math in greater depth or rigor. Moreover, by broadening the pathway that leads to high-level math, we reduce the sometimes overwhelming pressure that falls upon these student where if they struggle anywhere they are a failure and have sacrificed their future. It stands to reason that there will be plenty of "gifted" students for whom algebra clicks easily and for whom geometry is a nightmare. The status quo assumes that anyone who happens to be good at that type of math that is prevalent in grade seven will likewise sail through all the other math concepts at a similar pace. It would be better if we recognized that all students likely will have some parts of math they find easy or which naturally connects (or which they just enjoy more), and other areas they find difficult and need more time on (or just find profoundly uninteresting), and that acknowledging the latter does not come at the cost of giving up one's chance to take upper level courses. The rigidity of the current framework doesn't serve "advanced" students even on its own terms. It locks them into a rat race with only one destination and exceptionally high stakes for failure. It is not a good thing that strong math students at my high school essentially could not take AP Statistics even if that interested them more than AP Calculus.

But the bigger reform being pitched is that, for the average California student, the math sequence being offered isn't rigorous enough. It knocks too many students off the path of taking advanced math classes at far too early a point. Pluralizing the sequence of math classes and making it so that many students -- not just those identified as "stars" as tweens -- are in position to take advanced coursework in the field is a step towards stronger math education. It is step towards teaching more students more math at a higher level -- an unambiguously good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

In this, Osborne's reference to the opportunities wealthier families have to place their children in bespoke math "enrichment" programs actually proves the opposite of her point. It is unlikely, after all, that all or even most of the students who enroll in such programs are "geniuses". But that's the point -- they don't have to be: give them access to advanced programming, and they're perfectly capable of learning the material, because this education is not the province of geniuses but of ordinary students. The lesson California draws from those programs is that most of their students, "genius"-labeled or no, can and should have access to strong, rigorous mathematical education. So they should reorient their math education away from rigid, imprecise sorting at young ages, and instead think in terms of providing a plurality of pathways to get as many students as possible to advanced classes. Rich parents get this already; they can provide their kids with advanced instruction regardless of how they're labeled as tweens. This is powerful evidence that the rest of the public school system should follow suit.

What may be true is that California is trying to at least diminish the obvious hierarchy within math, where we can say the students who took multi-variable calculus their senior year are better than the those who only took AB calculus are better than those who didn't take calculus at all (recall my high school, where taking AP Statistics was a sure mark of being a lesser student). Reorienting the math curriculum so that many different end points (calculus, statistics, formal modeling, and so on) are all rigorous and robust means consciously trying to blur hierarchical lines that say one of these ends is "higher" than the others. If the most important part of math education is providing for status-differentiation -- being crystal clear about who are the elite students and who are the normies -- then this is a loss. It is, we should be clear, a very different loss from depriving "gifted" students of the opportunity to learn advanced math -- they're still learning it, they if anything have more choices on exactly what arena of advanced math they want to concentrate on, but they are not simply by virtue of staying on the top rung of the ladder they climbed at age twelve automatically viewed as superior math students to their peers. There is good ground to believe that it is that loss --the status loss, not the educational loss -- which is what's motivating much of the anger at the reform (how can I guarantee I'll get into Stanford unless everyone knows I'm better than my classmates who weren't imprecisely identified as math geniuses as a tween?). 

But California is making a conscious decision to trade having clear ordinal hierarchical ranking for giving more students more rigorous math instruction than they have now. That, to me, sounds like a good trade. And to the extent it isn't -- the problem isn't that the new curriculum lacks rigor or ambition, or tries to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. It is because it is sincerely committed to doing more for more students that the framework is generating this animosity.

Omari Hardy is the Future of BDS in the Democratic Party

In the sprawling field vying to replace deceased Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings, there were no less than five current elected officials running in the Democratic primary that occurred this week. One of these five was State Rep. Omari Hardy.

Initially, all of these candidates avowed positions on Israel that fell roughly in the mainstream of contemporary Democratic politics. About a month before election day, however, Hardy abruptly changed his position on Israel -- announcing his support for the BDS movement (he had only several weeks earlier claimed to be opposed) as well as opposition to the U.S. funding Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. Upon announcing this change, I suddenly started seeing him a lot more on my Twitter feed, loudly proclaiming about how he wouldn't be intimidated into changing his position and basking in the adoration of a certain wing of commentators who lauded his rare courage and bold commitment to principle, and who presented him as a harbinger of change in Democratic politics. This was not something Hardy did quietly -- his switch to becoming overtly anti-Israel and pro-BDS was a critical part of his closing argument to try and win the race and become the next Democratic Representative from Florida.

On election day, in a sprawling field that contained five current elected officials, Omari Hardy ended up placing sixth. He received less than 6% of the vote -- behind all of his fellow politicos, as well as a wealthy self-funding businesswoman named Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (the ultimate winner has not yet been called; Cherfilus-McCormick and Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness are currently separated by a whopping twelve votes).

Sixth place finishing, 6% winning Omari Hardy is the future of BDS in the Democratic Party.

If that sounds a bit snarky, I don't -- well, okay, I do mean it to be a little snarky. But believe it or not, the snark is not actually my main thesis.

Omari Hardy was competing in a sprawling, wide open field for an open congressional seat. If you're going to stand out from the pack, you need to do something that clearly marks you as different from the pack. Adopting a generic pro-Israel position in the same vein as all the other candidates wouldn't give anyone a reason to vote for him. Or against him, to be sure. But in politics, the saying "second place is first loser" is especially apt. Announcing support for BDS and pivoting towards intense pronounced hostility to Israel was a calculated risk; it at least offered him a chance to win, even if the more likely result was that he'd just lose by a wider margin (before he announced his pro-BDS turn, Hardy was polling at 10%, so if anything he slipped in performance).

It is a myth that the only route to political power is to take broadly popular positions, even within your own party. That's probably necessary if you want to become the national leader -- as Bernie Sanders found out, if you want to become the Democratic nominee for President, you have to be supported by most Democrats. But becoming the leader is not what everyone wants. You can amass a great deal of power by becoming the standard-bearer for a smaller but intensely passionate faction of the party. And the nice thing about these smaller factions is that they are smaller, and so it's easier to become their "the guy" than it is to become the national "the guy". In particular, in a sprawling primary that's wide open and conducted under first past the post rules, consolidating the small but intense faction is an at least plausible path to victory. It's no accident that Sanders performed best against a divided Democratic field -- a high floor, low ceiling candidate is well-positioned in wide-open, sharply fractured races.

Omari Hardy represents the future of BDS not (just) because he shows that BDS remains whatever the opposite of a selling point is for most Democrats. That is certainly an important lesson to learn. But just as importantly, he's the future because he perceived -- and I think not incorrectly -- that endorsing BDS is a way of standing out from other Democrats and potentially consolidating the backing of a small but intense wing of the progressive movement, some of whom border on being single-issue (anti-)Israel voters (the seething hatred many on the left have for Ritchie Torres, who is on the left edge of the party on virtually every issue but Israel, is one manifestation of this. The comical attempt by some lefty activists to expel Jamaal Bowman from the Democratic Socialist of America because he didn't vote against Iron Dome is another). 

A sprawling primary where a small cadre of passionate supporters can plausibly carry a candidate to victory is a good place to try and leverage becoming the consensus choice of a small wing of Democrats who feel very intensely about one issue. An even better place to run this play may be after one has already won the primary to hold a safe seat and one can feel confident in one's ability to hold onto it indefinitely (Ilhan Omar, too, flipped on BDS only after she had secured a victory in a Democratic primary), when a politician's eye can drift away from local challengers and towards the national spotlight. To be clear, this path is not the route to become President, it's not even the route to become leader of the Democratic congressional caucus (neither one of these is in Ilhan Omar's future). But it is a route to securing a not-insubstantial amount of power. And that's going to be very tempting to a certain type of ambitious politico.

I'm not accusing Hardy of being purely opportunistic in his sudden embrace of BDS. I don't think he's lying; I believe he believes BDS is a reasonable and non-pernicious campaign. But I also don't think it's wrong to look a little archly at his rapid about-face, just a month before election day -- one that was loudly trumpeted and promoted by his campaign, one that he quickly tried to make a centerpiece of his campaign and his boundless courage -- and think that political calculations were playing a rather sizeable role here. Most likely, I suspect that Hardy didn't really care that much about BDS or Israel at the start of this race, and doesn't care too much about it now. He took the anti-BDS position at the start of the race not because he had strong feelings against it but because it was the easiest, default option and didn't seem patently offensive, and he swapped positions at the end of the race not because he developed strong feelings for it but because it was a plausible Hail Mary play that also didn't patently offend him. And if this sounds very cynical, I suspect this is how most politicians deal with most issues that are not especially central to their identity -- it's not that they don't believe what they're saying, but for the 90% of issues that aren't "their" issues, there's plenty of room for beliefs to accommodate a more bloodless calculation of political interest. Hardy is no different from any other politico save for the particular lane his bloodless calculation of political interest ended up placing him in.

And so, despite the fact that the result for Hardy was finishing in sixth place with less than 6% of the vote, plays like Hardy's are something I think we'll be seeing a lot more of. Most Democrats will continue to oppose BDS, and oppose extreme anti-Israel policies (while -- hopefully -- become more open to practical and sorely needed policy shifts designed to actually promote Palestinian rights, such as backing the Two State Solution Act). But more and more frequently, we'll see cases like Omari Hardy: candidates who are laboring at the back of a crowded field and are looking to stand out and get a burst of cash and volunteers, or safe seat backbenchers yearning to garner a national profile and internet likes, will view BDS as a promising avenue for rising for obscurity. It won't win them national or competitive races; it often won't even succeed in fragmented contests amongst Democrats. But if you're going to lose the race anyway, it's a cost-free gamble. And if you don't care that much about the issue to begin with, plenty of people will be happy to roll those dice.

Blindness or Short-Sighted Caution: Memmi on the Jew-of-the-Right

 "How can a man be a Rightist when he is a Jew?," Albert Memmi asked in A Portrait of the Jew.

The alliance of Jewry with Right wing movements can never be anything but temporary . . . To preserve the existing order, the Right has to stiffen and emphasize differences while at the same time having no respect for what is different. To preserve itself as a privileged group, it must repulse, restrict and repress other groups. Now it may be that a Jew may desire the survival of a given social order in which, by chance, he is not too unhappy. But in addition, he wants the differences between himself and the non-Jews in that class to be forgotten or at least minimized. The Right, either openly or covertly, drives the Jew back to his Jewishness and can only condemn and burden his Jewishness. Not to speak of times of crisis when the Rightist doctrine, whipped to a frenzy, is driven to violent solutions, to the use of sentiments and methods that debase the lives of Jews (218-19).

In his next book, The Liberation of the Jew, Memmi reiterated the point more bluntly: "[A] Jew is conservative only out of blindness of some short-sighted caution" (228). If you are a Jew and you find right-wing movements appealing, it's because you're not paying attention, or because you aren't looking more than six inches in front of your own feet. The end of the story is all too predictable, only an idiot could not see it coming. And this is an observation Memmi makes in the midst of a searing critique of the left and its treatment of the Jews. That critique notwithstanding, Memmi still wants to be crystal clear that the Jew-of-the-right is a fool.

Much has been made over the way in which the anti-CRT frenzy, first confined to local offices like school boards, may have accounted for major conservative victories in the elections yesterday. Juxtapose that account with this story, also from this week, about how that rhetoric is playing out in one such school board meeting in Arizona:

During the public comment portion of the meeting of the Chandler Unified School District board, a woman who identified herself as Melanie Rettler spoke for over a minute about critical race theory and vaccines — topics not listed on the meeting agenda but at the center of heated public debate nationwide.

Her comment crescendoed with an antisemitic claim drenched in the language of right-wing conspiracy theories.

“Every one of these things, the deep state, the cabal, the swamp, the elite — you can’t mention it, but I will — there is one race that owns all the pharmaceutical companies and these vaccines aren’t safe, they aren’t effective and they aren’t free,” Rettler said. “You know that you’re paying for it through the increase in gas prices, the increase in food prices — you’re paying for this and it’s being taken from your money and being given to these pharmaceutical companies and if you want to bring race into this: It’s the Jews.”

If you think for a second that this anti-CRT hysteria is even going to slow down, let alone reverse course, insofar as it predictably breeds rank hatred like this (not to mention both-sidesing the Holocaust, and banning books on the Holocaust, and blocking an antisemitism envoy for the crime of opposing antisemitism ...) you are out to lunch. Whatever faint concern some conservatives might have for Jews and Jewish safety won't even be a speed bump in their race to power by way of right-wing authoritarianism. To cozy up to this darkness out of blindness or short-sighted fear -- well, fortunately most Jews know better. But every group has its idiots and its fools, and I suppose we are no different.

A Question for Journalists: What If White Racism Causes GOP Wins?

Shortly after the 2016 election, I posted something on Facebook observing that Trump's victory proved that White racism was alive and well in America and remained a winning electoral force. My most all-in MAGA classmate from law school replied with a half-enraged, half-taunting rant to the effect of "calling White Americans racist is why Trump won, and that you're still doing it now is why we're going to keep on winning."

Spit-flecks aside, I recognized an interesting puzzle. It is entirely plausible for both of the following to be true: (1) That White racism is an important causal factor in contemporary Republican success, and (2) That saying that aloud makes Republican success even more likely. In other words, there's a potential disjuncture between how the social scientist and the political strategist should characterize "why Republicans are winning." It could be that, in terms of public discourse, accurately describing the political lay of the land is antipathic to changing it.

With GOP victories across the country yesterday, most prominently in Virginia, it is a plausible hypothesis that White racism is a significant part of the explanation for GOP success. Some of you think "plausible hypothesis" is far too gentle, others think the very idea is outrageous. I frame it as a "plausible hypothesis" to bracket that debate, for while I think the hypothesis is very strongly supported by the evidence, to the persons who are more skeptical I merely want them to concede that it surely is not outlandish, beyond the realm of what one could reasonably investigate, to think racism played a sizeable role in GOP successes yesterday or indeed over the past decade. Glenn Youngkin, the incoming GOP Governor of Virginia, ran an explicitly race-baiting campaign centered on ginned-up fears of "Critical Race Theory". I hardly need repeat the well-worn notion that "Critical Race Theory", in this context, has no analytical content other than "discussions about race or racism that I don't like"; this of course emphasizes that the anti-CRT push really is nothing more than White resentment politics at fever pitch. By the end of the campaign, Youngkin supporters were a half-step away from calling Terry McAuliffe's call to diversify the ranks of K-12 teachers a form of White genocide. There are reasons to think that the "CRT" narrative didn't really have much purchase beyond the already partisan, and other factors explained the GOP's victory. But again, it is plausible to think otherwise -- clearly plausible, in fact, such that fair-minded and independent journalists should at least think about what the implications are for Democrats, if it is true.

Yet I'm not sure I've ever seen a mainstream journalist grapple with that question. Which is strange, since journalists love nothing more than taking a few off-cycle election results and saying "this is what this means for Democrats" or "here's what Democrats have to do to win." They'll give various answers to that question tailored to the various explanations they have on tap for why Republicans succeeded -- do this if the reason Republicans won is "economic anxiety", do that if it is that Democrats are "out of touch with the heartland", do this other thing if GOP victories stem from "progressives going too far" (boy they love that one). So in that line of thought, we could also ask: what should Democrats do if the reason Republicans won in 2021 is "because White racism is a powerful electoral force"?

Journalists don't have an answer to that -- or at least, not one they are willing to express. In part, they don't ask the question because they refuse to even accept the premise -- calling GOP voters "racist" is rude, it is mean, it is Not Done (none of this has any relation to whether it is true). There may be nobody more fragile on the planet than the White GOP-leaning voter asked to reckon with racism as a partial feature of their life. Certainly, the anti-CRT campaign provides ample evidence of this: parents who saw Connor was a bit sad upon learning about U.S. history and concluded that totalitarianism had been reborn (or just read David Bernstein's origin story for how he became an anti-CRT zealot -- somehow, he thinks that he isn't the obvious villain of this tale). If you're going to give Connor that medicine, by golly he better get ten scoops of sugar to help it go down -- and hey, wouldn't he be even happier if we just skipped the medicine altogether and only ate the sugar?

But to some extent, I think part of why they refuse to ask the question is that they are just constitutionally incapable of coming up with an acceptable answer. For one, at the most basic level, if it is true that the GOP wins insofar as White racism is powerful, the "correct" response is that there is something diseased in America that needs to be cured. Yet framing the problem in this way -- as Republicans doing something wrong they need to fix -- is a clear violation of Murc's Law (that Democrats are the only agential actors in American politics). 

If there is any defense of refusing to go with the obvious answer, it is that an explanation for what Democrats should do can't really rely on problematizing what voters want, let alone asking Republicans to leave off a winning strategy ("because it's hideously immoral? Hah -- good one!"). Politics is partially about persuasion, but for the most part one takes the electorate you have, not the one you wished you had. "I would have won if I had better voters" is a pretty pathetic excuse. So the other obvious, if bloodless, response to any explanation of the form "voters want X" is "Democrats should provide, or at least accommodate, X." Of course, that's far easier to say aloud when X is "more restrictive trade policies" or "focusing on bread-and-butter issues" than when X is "racism". Put simply, under the prevailing way political journalists talk about politics, once you admit that racism is what the electorate wants, the only way to complete that story is to advise Democrats to "be more accommodating to racism".

This is why journalists are insistent, to the point of franticness, to recharacterize "racism" as something legitimate that it is fair to ask Democrats to be responsive to. It's not "racism", it's "economic anxiety" or "extreme theories being taught at Berkeley" or "cancel culture gone haywire". At one level, these are just more PC ways of saying "Democrats need to be more accommodating of White racism". But the reason we bother with the altered frame is that, on face at least, it is reasonable to ask Democrats to be responsive to those concerns, in a way one can't just baldly state "Democrats should come to terms with racism". They are more convenient explanations; they allow the standard political story -- voters want X, Democrats should be responsive to X -- to be completed. But convenience aside, whether or not "economic anxiety" versus racism is actually the explanation for GOP electoral successes is an empirical question; "racism" does not fail as an explanation simply because it'd be an awkward one for journalists to explore.

Yet the dismissal of "racism" as an explanation on grounds of convenience is the reality of contemporary political journalism. And it's a problem, for a host of reasons, not the least of which being the puzzle I identified at the outset. If White racism remains an exceedingly powerful political force, what should Democrats do, as a matter of political strategy, in order to win elections? This is a genuinely hard question, and I don't have a clear answer -- I wish I had a silver bullet to make racism less appealing, but I don't and I don't pretend to. Which is all the more reason why it'd be nice if thoughtful political journalists started asking this question. Yet they don't, and they won't, no matter how much evidence piles up suggesting that racism is a viable explanation for our current state of political affairs.