Bending the Argument

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

 

I have moderate aquaphobia. 

 

This is not to be confused with hydrophobia, which refers to a fear of water induced by late-stage rabies rather than the fear of water induced by the fear of drowning. I always thought it was weird that a disease would cause a phobia. I mean, it’s not like people with salmonella suddenly get scared of heights. Apparently the reason rabies causes hydrophobia is that it’s a side effect of dysphagia, the medical term for difficulty swallowing. You get scared of water because you’re scared of the pain of swallowing. This is why animals drool so much when they have rabies—they don’t want to swallow.

 

Anyway, my aquaphobia is less about fear of drowning than an involuntary kind of panic I get from especially cold water. The fact that I almost drowned a couple times in my life doesn’t help. But it’s not the reason I take forever to get into the ocean when I go swimming. It’s just the need to work up the will to conquer my involuntary response. 

 

I bring this up because I have a similar feeling when it comes to writing about this election. I need to work up the will to jump in. (Hence, this anti-dysphagic throat clearing.)

 

Ironically, one of the reasons I find it so unpleasant to write about this stuff—aside from election fatigue bordering on election Epstein-Barr—is that I have a bad case of political dysphagia these days. I just have a hard time swallowing all the garbage being thrown around by, heh, rabid partisans. 

 

Speaking of garbage, I wasn’t particularly offended by Tony Hinchcliffe’s garbage island joke. I mean, I didn’t think it was particularly funny, though I think it could have seemed a lot funnier in the right venue. (I’m not sure that watermelon jokes about blacks are ever funny, not because they’re offensive—which they are—but because it’s such an outdated cliché.) The old saw that the three most important things in real estate are “location, location, and location” was never entirely true about real estate—a lot of people would rather live in a mansion in a middling part of town than in a refrigerator box on Park Avenue. But you get the point. Location matters. And it matters for comedy and politics, too. 

 

Lots of jokes that are really funny in a bar or nightclub aren’t funny at Uncle Morty’s funeral or your daughter’s wedding. That’s what offended me more about Hinchcliffe’s set: the setting. It was political malpractice. Even many in the audience at Madison Square Garden realized it, going off of the relative silence punctuated by groans. Ethnic humor, even really offensive ethnic humor, can be funny. Jackie Mason did a lot of that stuff. And while I’m not a huge Mason fan, it worked (even his Puerto Rico material). 

 

When a comedian is working a club, the rules are different than at a political rally. The bargain with the audience is different. You can tell jokes at a political rally, but the understanding is that the jokes will have a political intent. Signaling that Trump superfans like coarse ethnic humor is a bad political decision, not just because it offends the ethnic voters the campaign needs but also because it reaffirms the stereotypes about the Trump campaign that turn off a lot of other voters. George W. Bush didn’t campaign with Colin Powell in 2000 to win over the black vote, but to reassure white suburbanites.  

 

But let’s get back to garbage. Last night Joe Biden said something really stupid. I should be more specific because that’s not exactly a rare occurrence. From the Associated Press:

 

“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. Well, let me tell you something, I don’t, I don’t know the Puerto Rican that I know, the Puerto Rico where I’m fr — in my home state of Delaware. They’re good, decent honorable people,” he said.

 

The president then added: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

 

If you’ve spent the last week wondering why the Harris campaign hasn’t used Biden as a surrogate more, there you have your answer.

 

I think it is entirely fair to read this as Biden saying exactly what he literally said: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” I also think it’s fair to believe that’s not what he meant to say. If you watch the video, Biden is slurring and stunted and kind of a mess. But he said what he said. To his credit, Biden quickly issued a clarification and Kamala Harris distanced herself from Biden’s original statement. This, of course, came only after the White House tried to cram a face-saving apostrophe into the word “supporters.” If you’re old enough to remember the old Electric Company’s “The Adventures of Letter-Man,” it had a similar vibe. 

 

For a lot of people, none of this matters. J.D. Vance—who spends his days turd-polishing every weird and gross Trump statement—pounced. “A mother mourning her son who died of a fentanyl overdose is not garbage. A truck driver who can’t afford rising diesel prices is not garbage. A father who wants to afford groceries is not garbage. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

 

It’s all fair game politically. Though I find it a little amusing that Vance could go from dismissing the garbage island stuff—“I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m just — I’m so over it”—to profound outrage at the insult to grieving mothers and struggling fathers. Yeah, sure, there’s definitely a difference between a sitting president and an insult comic. But come on. 

 

One fascinating thing about all of this is the near-elation of Trump supporters about Biden’s (non-Kinsley) gaffe. There’s a certain subset of Trump supporters who are still milking Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment nearly a decade later. These people have zero problem with Trump hurling insults and slanders at political opponents, voters, immigrants, indeed whole countries, while simultaneously nurturing profound and enduring grievances about a dumb comment by Clinton in 2016. Biden’s garbage line scratched the same itch. 

 

The double standard is really quite astounding if you can maintain objectivity. Trump routinely and indiscriminately calls vast numbers of people fascists, communists, vermin, scum, stupid, criminals, etc. But when people who once worked closely with him said he fit the definition of fascist, they were outraged. The Trump campaign denounced Harris’ rally last night for her “name-calling,” as if the Trump campaign has a sincere problem with name-calling. If you actually believe this stupidity, you may not be stupid, but you are definitely so drunk on partisanship that you can’t see straight. 

 

Some of this is easily explained by the fact that defenders of Trump are thin-skinned precisely because they know in their hearts how incredibly flawed and deformed Trump’s character is. After all, people tend to be hyperdefensive about things their insecure about. 

 

If you can’t beat them, join them.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I’ve written a lot about how partisan affiliation operates as a form of identity politics. From Suicide of the West:

 

“Partisanship, for a long period of time, wasn’t viewed as part of who we are,” explain political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood. “It wasn’t core to our identity. It was just an ancillary trait. But in the modern era we view party identity as something akin to gender, ethnicity or race— the core traits that we use to describe ourselves to others.” But now partisanship is becoming a bigger predictor of behavior and attitudes than race. 

 

As other sources of meaning wither, and as we think of ourselves as residents of the national community rather than local ones, the stakes of politics inevitably increase, not just in terms of policy but psychologically. The logic of sports and war takes over. If they win, we lose, and vice versa. Citizens in California and New York become invested in partisan fights in North Carolina or Indiana as if they were skirmishes in a larger war.

 

I think a lot of people, mostly white people, have victimhood envy. Understandably and rightly exhausted with identity politics and all the finger-wagging that comes with it, they’ve given up fighting against it and decided that they want to get in on the action. A huge slice of MAGA world wallows in victimhood—against whites, Christians, the working class, the “forgotten man,” masculinity, etc. They’re not always wrong. Indeed, it’s precisely because they have a point that they’ve made “elite” disdain central to their political identity—which, again, is a redundancy for them. Political identity has become their identity. So, just like the Puerto Rican who is justifiably offended by calling Puerto Rico garbage, or blacks offended by watermelon jokes, or Jews offended by money-grubbing tropes, they’re offended by the insult to what is psychologically a kind of de facto ethnic identity. 

 

This is a big reason why I’m so exhausted with what passes for politics. I like arguments about policy. Traditionally, to be a partisan in American politics is supposed to be about things, not people. What I mean is that if you were a partisan in, say, the 1980s, you were on one side or another about a political agenda, a series of policy proposals, represented by one party or the other. Sometimes it meant you were a partisan for a specific issue, sometimes for a whole slate of them. 

 

A lot of people still think that way. I have friends who will vote for Trump despite loathing him. They tell me, and themselves, that they’re doing it because of “the issues.” Some of them are 100 percent telling the truth. Some of them, however, are lying to me and themselves. 

 

The ones who are lying, I think, have bought into the identity politics conception of partisanship. They just hate those people so much, in part because those people hate them so much. The insipidity and asininity of binary choice voting has become binary choice tribalism. 

 

Now, when I say they hate “those people,” I don’t mean they hate blacks, gays, immigrants, or women. The people they actually hate are the (mostly white) scolds who tell them that if they don’t agree with Democrats or progressives it’s because they hate blacks, gays, immigrants, or women. Watch MSNBC on any given day and you’ll soon hear from someone explaining that the only or the “real” reason Republicans dislike or disagree with Harris or Democrats is because they hate some or all of the Coalition of the Oppressed. After decades of working and living in the world of the American right, I have known vanishingly few conservatives who hate racial minorities. I’ve known hundreds of conservatives who hate affluent white people who sanctimoniously insist with an air of academic expertise that conservatives secretly hate racial minorities. 

 

(And, in fairness, you can find similar stuff on Fox. It won’t take long to find someone telling you that the only or the “real” reason anyone can dislike or disagree with Donald Trump or Republicans is because they hate Christians, traditional values, America, etc.) 

 

And then there are the people who aren’t lying to anybody. The ones who straight-up love Trump are wholly committed to wearing their love of Trump and MAGA identity like a tribal tattoo—in some cases literally. 

 

Look, I’m a passionate believer in the idea that all poisons are determined by the dose. There’s always been some of this in politics because you can’t take human nature out of politics. People get caught up in team spirit. The religious instinct can be tricked by politics. It has ever been thus. I’m reminded of the Progressive Party convention in 1912, which I wrote about in Liberal Fascism:

 

The New York Times described it as a “convention of fanatics,” at which political speeches were punctuated by the singing of hymns and shouts of “Amen!” “It was not a convention at all. It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts,” the Times reported. “It was such a convention as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp meeting done over into political terms.” The “expression on every face” in the audience, including that of Jane Addams, who rose to nominate Teddy Roosevelt for his quixotic last bid for the presidency, was one “of fanatical and religious enthusiasm.” The delegates, who “believed—obviously and certainly believed—that they were enlisted in a contest with the Powers of Darkness,” sang “We Will Follow Jesus,” but with the name “Roosevelt” replacing the now-outdated savior. Among them were representatives of every branch of Progressivism, including the Social Gospeller Washington Gladden, happily replacing the old Christian savior with the new “Americanist” one. Roosevelt told the rapturous audience, “Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness … We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

 

In such moments, arguments about things are an afterthought, rationalization, or betrayal of partisan commitment. Everyone is expected to join a team and then bend their arguments to benefit the team. Disagreeing with Trump about, say, tariffs is a sign of disloyalty. Disagreeing with Harris about “price gouging” is denounced as a lack of commitment to the war effort to defeat Trump. After all, if Trump is a fascist, then why bring up facts that muddy her appeal? If America will be destroyed by a Harris presidency, why point out that Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about? 

 

My both-sidesism isn’t symmetrical. Outside a relative handful of people, there really isn’t a Harris cult of personality. But there really is a Trump cult. And cults are always and everywhere the enemy of good-faith arguments. He craps on America and conservatism daily, and his superfans eat it up. And nothing triggers my political dysphagia more than political coprophagia.

 

I can’t wait for this crap, and the crapping, to be over. 

If Israel Is Alone, What Do We Do About It?

By Bret Stephens

Thursday, October 31, 2024

 

The prose style of Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most recognizable public intellectual, is not to everyone’s taste. He is prone to grandiloquence, self-reference, and metaphor salads. In the margins of my galley copy of his latest book, Israel Alone, I scribbled “O.M.G.” next to some of his more rococo flourishes, like his scorn for the “shameful dialecticians” who “could still be found putting themselves in the shoes of the pyromaniacs and seeing in these arrhythmias the last false notes of a concert of nations struggling to emerge.”

 

It’s easy, almost fun, to mock.

 

It’s also a mistake. Israel Alone is an imperfect but important book. Its importance stems, first, from Lévy’s unabashed Zionism, which today is an act of moral and even physical courage, especially in Europe. It stems, also, from getting all of the important things about the war in Gaza right: that Hamas, in its bottomless cynicism, is responsible for every death, Israeli and Palestinian alike; that the behavior toward Israel by groups like Amnesty International and the Red Cross is a disgrace; that calls for cease-fire are “merely a disguised manner of inviting compromise and peace with assassins”; that anti-Zionism is the most effective method for today’s anti-Semites to express their hatred of Jews; that the core problem between Israel and the Palestinians is a 76-year Palestinian refusal to genuinely accept a Jewish state in any borders; that the “yes, but” arguments constantly made against Israel by its faux friends are the work of “professional excusers of evil.”

 

Most of all, it stems from Lévy’s understanding of what October 7 fully laid bare: “a colony of germs that were already present in the sewers not only of Gaza, but of the world.”

 

Which germs? Anti-Semitism, for starters. The “blunt, mad, almost limitless hatred” of Jews—seen in the euphoria that their mass murder elicited from Times Square to the Sydney Opera House—is the glue that binds militant Islamists to queer progressives, the bien pensant at Harvard to American white supremacists.

 

Hatred of freedom, for another: As with the invasion of Ukraine, the most significant outcome of October 7 is that it has consolidated a global alliance of despots—China, Russia, Turkey, Iran and its proxies, including Hamas—against the free world, even if the free world has mostly failed to appreciate that Israel’s fight is part of the global fight for freedom.

 

A third germ: moral inversion. Lévy observes the ways in which October 7 was immediately blamed on the victims and not on the perpetrators; how Israel’s war of self-defense was treated from the start as an act of aggression; how “genocide” became the preferred way to describe Israel’s war against a genocidal enemy.

 

With those inversions came another: the inversion of reality. October 7 was the most documented pogrom in history, with the murderers filming themselves butchering their victims. Yet within weeks, their deeds were being obfuscated, trivialized, forgotten, or simply denied. Of all the horrors of October 7, none is greater than its attempted erasure.

 

All this leads Lévy to his central point: “The Jews,” he writes, “are more alone than they have ever been.”

 

It is, on the one hand, an absurd claim: More alone than they were on the MS St. Louis, let alone at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen? So alone that, as of this writing, so many of the high places in American life are held by Jews—from the secretaries of state, Treasury, and homeland security, to the Senate majority leader and eight of his colleagues, to six of the 10 richest Americans?

 

Yet Lévy might eventually be proved right. In the early 1920s, the most important political figure in Germany, Walther Rathenau, was a Jew. So was Germany’s greatest scientist, Albert Einstein, along with its most notable philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Within a few years, one was assassinated, the other forced into exile, the third banished and humiliated. The recurring nightmare of Jewish history is that our zenith often proves to be our precipice.

 

A more decisive point: Until October 7, the idea that the Jewish state was a haven for Jews appeared to be empirically true, notwithstanding the terror, menace, and calumny of Israel’s enemies. A French Jew, tired of hiding his kippah and fearful for the everyday safety of his children, knew that in a city like Ashdod his family could be free and, if not entirely safe, better protected. But now, as Lévy writes, “the refuge has become a trap, and the place that was the symbol of ‘never again’ was where ‘again’ had come down like a bolt of lightning.” October 7, he adds, “marks the alignment, for the worse, of Israel with the diaspora.”

 

In other words, Lévy is suggesting that what might have died on October 7 was the conviction that Zionism still provided the best answer to the Jews’ most pressing problem—the need to survive. Now Jews face the prospect that no place is safer, never mind safe. From Minneapolis to Marseilles to Metula, Jews are at risk, everywhere. And the solicitude that Gentiles feel for our plight seems to be diminishing, everywhere.

 

***

 

So what’s to be done?

 

On this question, Lévy has almost nothing to say. Maybe that’s for a follow-on book. But it’s a subject that thoughtful Jews, with our Gentile friends, must address. The task involves many challenges, most beyond the scope of this essay. But we can begin by observing this: Prior to October 7, Israel’s isolation was diminishing, not increasing.

 

This was true, most obviously, for Israel’s foreign policy. The 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and Morocco were the capstone of three decades of diplomatic openings for the Jewish state, from India in 1992 to Chad in 2019; the Accords also seemed to anticipate the eventual normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia. It was true for the Israeli economy: The value of Israeli exports more than quadrupled between 2002 and 2022: Israel currently has contracts to provide more than 130 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Egypt and Jordan; supplies the British army with protective systems for their tanks and sells spyware to the FBI (even as the Biden administration was publicly denouncing the company from which it was buying the merchandise). It was true about tourism: Between 2014 and 2019 the annual number of visitors to Israel rose by over 50 percent, to just under 5 million, while the annual number of Israelis traveling abroad also nearly doubled, to 9 million, in the same period. Those numbers fell during the Covid epidemic but had rebounded by 2022. As for universities, in 2019 Haaretz reported that Israel was the “No. 1 exporter of academic talent to the United States,” with enough scholars in America to equal “the entire faculty of two to three typical Israeli institutes of higher education.”

 

No wonder that Dan Senor and Saul Singer, the authors of Start-Up Nation, wrote a convincing sequel, The Genius of Israel, that was on the cusp of publication last fall and that I reviewed in these pages. For all the unsuspected national shortcomings that led to October 7—to say nothing of the torrent of hate that the massacre exposed and fueled around the world—Israel was a nation visibly on the rise.

 

This raises two distinct but related questions. How do we reconcile the broad optimism about pre-October 7 Israel with the post–October 7 pessimism typified by Lévy? And what was it that Israel was doing right before that dark day—so that it may do it again?

 

The answer to the first question is that the picture Lévy paints in Israel Alone is too dark. It ignores the dogs that didn’t bark in the night—the virtual absence of anti-Israel protests on the vast majority of university campuses outside of Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and a handful of other schools. It ignores the support Israel did get, including more than 50,000 tons worth of arms shipments, from a Democratic administration. It ignores the mostly full-throated support the Republican Party gives to Israel, along with some notable progressives like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and New York Representative Ritchie Torres. It ignores Israel’s continued ties, after a year of war, with its Arab partners.

 

None of this is to deny that things are worse for Israel, and Jews, almost anywhere one looks. But they are not unrelievedly bleak. We continue to have millions of friends and admirers, at home and abroad. Israel maintains an astonishing capacity to persevere through trials that would have broken weaker nations. Israel’s weaknesses were exposed on October 7, but more so were the weaknesses of its enemies, exemplified by the pager explosions in Lebanon and the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran safe house. Perhaps most important, an ancient Jewish instinct for danger, dormant too long, has been reawakened. 

 

Which brings us to the second question: How do we return to our former trajectory? Here it’s worth noting the very separate approaches taken by Israelis and American Jews in the past two decades.

 

Broadly speaking, American Jews, at least outside of the Orthodox world, opted not just for assimilation. Too often, they went for self-erasure. More than 60 percent of Jews who have married in recent years have done so with a non-Jewish spouse. Non-Orthodox Jewish women have the lowest fertility rate of any ethnic group in America. Swedish, Polish, and German Americans were once culturally and religiously distinctive subgroups in America, before they dissolved into the great American mainstream. That could be the fate of secular American Jewry.

 

Nor is the problem merely demographic. Secular Jewry has largely embraced identity politics for everyone—except ourselves. We have looked with benign indifference as Jewish enrollment numbers at elite universities fell year by year. We have embraced DEI programs that ignored and despised us because we are “white” or “white passing.” We have participated in a kind of soft calumny of the Jewish state, meekly defending Israel’s right to exist while endlessly second-guessing the means by which it chooses to defend itself. We have loudly denounced an occupation that in Gaza hasn’t existed for 19 years and continues in the West Bank only because Israel’s enemies remain sworn to its destruction. At a graver extreme, some American Jews have joined sides with our enemies, giving those enemies a veneer of pseudo-respectability. There’s always a wicked son in the mix.

 

The consequences of this self-erasure bear directly on the return of anti-Semitism, which had been rising before October 7 and exploded after it. Dwindling numbers erode the political power Jews once enjoyed, not least vis-à-vis other minority groups. A diminished presence at elite universities (especially when so many of the Jews on these campuses, both students and faculty, veer left) shaped a campus culture that looked on Jewish concerns with growing indifference and hostility. The koshering of antipathy or hatred for Israel from “As a Jew” Jews (to borrow a term from Eli Lake’s essay in the March issue of Commentary) paved the way for more vicious forms of anti-Jewish politics. The eagerness to empower “alternative voices” in publishing or the arts begat the exclusion of Jews in industries they had once dominated. And the broad failure of Jewish organizations to represent much beyond their parochial interests and obsessions has led to a politics where everyone speaks for the Jews—and nobody does.

 

If a single word captures this type of Jewish-American politics (in the broadest sense of politics), it’s ingratiation. With noteworthy exceptions, the Jewish strategy in America has been to make ourselves likeable: funny, vulnerable, generous, accessible, transparent, sweetly neurotic, individually successful but always at the side of the needy. When we tell our story, we tend to emphasize what’s universal to it, not what’s unique. American Jews want to be lovable, and loved, not for being different, much less better, but for being just like everyone else.

 

There are virtues to ingratiation, and often a necessity for it, especially for a minority living amid frequently hostile host nations. But a politics that mainly seeks to curry favor through a combination of conspicuous achievement and constant self-effacement can generate as much envy as it does admiration, as much contempt as it does love. It’s the recipe by which American Jews have arrived at the place we find ourselves today.

 

***

 

Now turn to an alternative approach. Throughout most of the 1990s, Israelis also chose the path of ingratiation, beginning with the White House handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat that inaugurated the Oslo Accords. It led to Nobel Peace Prizes, a peace treaty with Jordan, and, briefly, an era of good feelings for the Jewish state, at least in certain corners of the world.

 

It also led to disaster, for two principal reasons. Israel’s enemies smelled weakness, and Israel’s friends—its supposed friends—expected pliancy. Oslo created a dynamic by which every Israeli concession became the occasion to demand another concession (euphemistically described as “taking risks for peace”), and every concession became an opportunity for Palestinian incitement, terrorism, and rejection. By the end of Israel’s seven-year quest to earn the world’s favor—including the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, most of Gaza, and nearly every Palestinian city and town, along with Israel’s declared willingness to accept a Palestinian state on nearly all the West Bank and Gaza—the Jewish state had conceded, on the ground or in principle, everything it could reasonably concede. It wasn’t, and could never be, enough. When the long train of concessions was met with a storm of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and a lynching, it was Israel, not the Palestinians, who were blamed.

 

In short, long before Israel was alone after October 7, 2023, it was alone after the outbreak of the second intifada. I lived through that period as editor of the Jerusalem Post, and I recall a time nearly as bleak as the present: cafés, buses, discos, malls, and ballrooms blown up on a weekly basis; a drumbeat of calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions; denunciations of every Israeli act of self-defense as a war crime; endless slander of the Jewish state by the world’s great-and-good; the tut-tutting of experts who declared there could be no military solution to Israel’s problems.

 

This time, however, the Israeli government under Ariel Sharon defied world opinion—including, at times, the wishes of the Bush administration. It sent tanks into Ramallah to surround and isolate Arafat. It initiated an intensive campaign of arrests and targeted assassinations of terrorist kingpins, from Fatah’s Marwan Barghouti in Ramallah to Hamas’s Sheikh Yassin in Gaza. It built the security fence. By 2004, the second intifada had effectively been defeated. In 2006, Israel went to war with Hezbollah employing a strategy of heavy bombardment intended, as then–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it, to show that “the boss has gone mad.” The war was in many ways a failure, but the ferocity of Israel’s military campaign did create a stable border for 17 years. In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office and, for all his many personal and political failings—which I detailed in Commentary in the summer of 2021—showed a repeated willingness to defy Western pressure to accept a Palestinian state or go along with the Iran nuclear deal. His 2015 speech to Congress, in which he made the case against the deal and openly defied Barack Obama, did more to cement Israel’s ties to the Arab states than had any Israeli concession to the Palestinians.

 

Israel thrived throughout these years. It did so, in part, because it stuck to sound economic policies and created an atmosphere of relative security that attracted investors and retained entrepreneurs. But it also succeeded because it ceased hankering for the love and approval of liberal Western elites and instead demanded, and showed itself worthy of, the respect of adversaries, allies, and potential allies. It was not concessions to Mahmoud Abbas that persuaded Emiratis and Saudis to grow closer to the Jewish state; it was Israel’s demonstrated ability to infiltrate and humiliate Iran and set back its nuclear programs. It was not Israel’s popularity on the streets of Cairo that led Egyptian strongman Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to strengthen ties with his eastern neighbor; it was the capabilities Israel brought to the fight against ISIS in the Sinai.

 

***

 

There is a lesson in this for how Israel should move forward. As I write, in late September, the Netanyahu government is under intense international and domestic pressure to reach a deal with Hamas that might free at least some of the hostages in exchange for a cease-fire that would effectively guarantee Hamas’s long-term survival as Gaza’s dominant political and military entity. It’s a deal fraught with peril, because Hamas will use the hostages it doesn’t release to extract ever-greater concessions (and treat those remaining hostages even more cruelly), and because a Hamas that survives will eventually recover its strength, resume its assault, and re-gain an aura of invincibility.

 

But the greatest danger will be to Israel’s reputation: to the belief, among enemies and allies alike, that the Jewish state knows how to pick itself up, that it can win wars against inferior enemies, that it doesn’t capitulate in the face of moral pressure, that it is the strong horse of the Middle East.

 

Precisely the same logic applies to Israel’s other conflicts, above all with Hezbollah. The brilliance of the pager/walkie-talkie strike in Lebanon has done more to restore Israel’s regional reputation than 11 months of relative restraint and tit-for-tat reprisals against enemies to the north. A similar lesson will also have to be given to the Houthis, especially since the Biden administration seems incapable of doing so. “Who Dares, Wins,” the motto (borrowed from the British) of Israel’s special forces, should be the motto for the Jewish state as a whole. The path out of loneliness is always a path of action.

 

What about American Jews?

 

The resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States has begun to force a fundamental rethink of the way in which at least some American Jews contemplate their place in society: I call them “October 8 Jews”—those who woke up the day after the attack with a clear understanding of who our friends are not. Those Jews include the donors who revolted at the idea of continuing to give money to Harvard, Penn, Brown, or Columbia; who are investing heavily in new educational institutions that adhere to classically liberal values; who are calling out the DEI/anti-racism complex for being the anti-Semitism incubator that it is; who are breaking out of the stale orthodoxies of traditional media; who are investing all of their philanthropic energies in strengthening Jewish life.

 

They are the vanguard, but we are only at the beginning. So many institutions in American life that were once welcoming places for American Jews have turned bad: elite private schools; human-rights organizations; the literary world; social work; Mideast-studies departments; public-school curriculums—the list is long. In every one of these fields or institutions, October 8 Jews have a clear choice: Reject, reform, or reinvent them. What’s no longer possible is to pretend that what we have now is acceptable, or that indifference and inaction are viable options.

 

Just as the Bush administration spoke of a “whole of government effort” after September 11, 2001, we need a “whole of American Jewry” effort after October 7: to make high-quality Jewish day-school education available and affordable to every Jewish family that wants one; to cut off all giving to colleges and universities that are hostile to open and vibrant Jewish life and Zionist expression; to create a new ecosystem of literary prizes, faculty chairs, “genius awards,” and grants that reward and celebrate true merit; to fund and tell stories on large and small screens that richly and empathically explore the Jewish experience; to deepen American ties to Israel through corporate and academic partnerships; to expose and shut down the opaque and potentially illicit networks that fund and support the anti-Israel student protests.

 

This is a partial list, but you get the point. If we don’t want to wind up alone, we cannot afford to stand still, think small, or look back. The questions are no longer “Who betrayed us?” or “Why is the world this way?” They are “What do we do now?” and “How soon can we get it done?”

 

Israel and the Jewish people aren’t alone—yet. Ensuring that we never wind up alone is going to take courage, work, nerve. And a demand for respect.

Jeff Bezos Is Right

National Review Online

Thursday, October 31, 2024

 

The Washington Post’s decision to avoid an endorsement in next week’s presidential election has been greeted with the sort of indignant squealing and self-righteous disappointment that one would more typically associate with the confession of a crime of high moral turpitude. As a practical matter, there is not much evidence to suggest that the advice of famous newspapers swings the behavior of even a single voter, but, to a certain sort of person, it performs a crucial function nevertheless. Like Harvard or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Washington Post enjoys a certain cachet among the bien pensant class, and its imprimatur provides an affirmation that its readers are prone to seek. In essence, its endorsement plays a role as a sorting mechanism, which, when switched on, serves to separate People Like Us from People Like Them. When it is forthcoming, the Post’s subscribers feel that they can read its coverage in the knowledge that its authors are of sound political mind. If it is not, an ineffable fear begins to creep in: that someone, somewhere, might be struggling with heretical thoughts. And we can’t have that from a newspaper.

 

In a missive explaining his decision, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, explained that the shift was not the product of intimidation, of a conflict of interest, or of a dirty quid pro quo, but of the American public’s catastrophic lack of trust in journalists as a group. “Our profession,” Bezos writes, “is now the least trusted of all,” and, in his view, this cannot be fixed while the members of that profession are seen openly siding with the politicians they have been asked to cover. Ending political endorsements, Bezos concluded, “is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” Henceforth, it will be the paper’s routine approach.

 

This, to put it mildly, was not the view of a majority of the newspaper’s staff and contributors, a handful of whom quit. Neither did it please the 250,000-plus readers — about 10 percent of the total number — who canceled their subscriptions in anger. But, in his core assessment of the problem, Bezos is correct: Americans do not trust the media, and the trend line is getting worse, not better. In the short run, it will be unpleasant for him to own a newspaper whose staff is in revolt and whose subscriber base has been decimated overnight. In the long run, he has little choice. Last year, Bezos lost $77 million running the Post. It is a passion project, not a business endeavor. One can understand why certain of the paper’s reporters might like the idea of their esoteric political preferences being subsidized by a billionaire, but one cannot see why Bezos would. If, as he insists, Bezos believes good journalism to be a vital component of American democracy, he is obliged to take seriously the contempt in which journalists are held. “We must be accurate,” Bezos proposed, “and we must be believed to be accurate.” Currently, “We are failing on the second requirement.”

 

That assessment is charitable. But the first step on the road to recovery is admitting that one has a problem. Jeff Bezos has admitted that he — and the broader industry into which he has dipped his toes — has a problem. Given the scale of that problem, the next few years will be difficult. Bezos will face internal revolts and orchestrated campaigns of pressure. He will be called a fascist and a coward and a dilettante. And, inevitably, he will lose more staff and more subscribers along the way. But he has the benefit of being very rich and of being very correct and, perhaps most important of all, of being very patient. For years, Amazon eschewed profits in the name of building trust and market share, and ensuring that it was well-placed to fill the hole in the market that Bezos had identified at the outset. Restoring the American media will take the efforts of more than one eccentric billionaire, but if one were looking for a trailblazer to get the whole thing started, it is hard to think of a better candidate than him.

Why Joe Biden’s ‘Garbage’ Stinks Worse

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

 

I’m persuaded by Phil Klein’s theory, which should temper Democratic expectations around the political benefits they could expect to extract from “garbage-gate.” The off-color joke delivered by a comedian with niche appeal and limited name recognition at Donald Trump’s weekend Madison Square Garden rally is more likely to resonate with partisans than persuadable voters. But that’s not nothing. Assuming we take the tight public polling at face value, the margins matter. Events that mobilize dedicated, partisan voters in the final week of the race might, in the aggregate, have an outsized effect on the results next Tuesday.

 

Now, however, we have a competing “garbage”-related scandal to adjudicate. So, whose garbage stinks worse? That of Donald Trump’s lesser-known supporter, Tony Hinchcliffe, or that of Kamala Harris’s universally known surrogate, the president of the United States?

 

Some have sought to evaluate the proportional impact of these two late events on the race by performing a quantitative analysis on the number of people each of the campaigns’ agents insulted. After all, Hinchcliffe disparaged just about 10 percent of the Hispanic stateside population, whereas Biden appeared to have denounced roughly 47 percent of the electorate, right? That strikes me as the wrong way to look at it.

 

And just as the vulgar joke isn’t likely to upend many persuadable voters’ perceptions of either candidate, it’s possible that Biden’s remark won’t move the needle with those voters either — regardless of the office he occupies. Those voters are, by definition, not Trump supporters precisely. At least, they don’t think of themselves that way, or they wouldn’t be persuadable. They might even buy the spin that Biden was referring specifically to the individual whose remarks he was condemning, not the universe of Trump voters. (That is hardly a charitable interpretation of Biden’s remarks. Rather, it’s an indictment of the chronic absent-mindedness that got him booted from the presidential ticket.)

 

Biden’s mush-mouthed gaffe could remind that narrow segment of voters of why they soured on the president in the first place, and it might trigger in them some latent misgivings about Harris’s role in the effort to cover up his deteriorating condition. But the Biden problem will be remedied in January, one way or the other. On balance, it’s hard to see how a crucial mass of soft partisans and undecideds in the middle of the electorate would subordinate the issues they regard as salient in this election to the discovery of yet more evidence that reconfirms their conclusion that Joe Biden is unsuited to the presidency.

 

But, also like the joke, Biden’s remark has the potential to ignite the white-hot passions of Trump’s most loyal voters. Moreover, it’s liable to activate precisely the voters he needs.

 

It’s no secret that the Trump campaign devoted so much of the candidate’s time to appearances at mixed-martial-arts exhibitions and alternative-media podcasts to reach the young male voters who already gravitate toward his candidacy. That was always going to be a gamble. Young males tend to be the least reliable voters, and that hasn’t changed this cycle according to data provided by Harvard Institute of Politics polling director John Della Volpe. While 71 percent of 18- to 29-year-old Harris-backing men say they are “definitely voting,” just 59 percent of Trump supporters in this cohort say the same. Likewise, 71 percent of Harris-voting women in this age range say they are “definitely voting,” while 61 percent of young female Trump voters are similarly engaged. Again, if we take the polling as we get it, Harris enjoys a modest enthusiasm edge among these voters.

 

But then Joe Biden opened his mouth.

 

We can now conjure in our mind’s eye a portrait of a youngish, generally apathetic but dissatisfied male voter. He has already been primed by his exposure to Trump’s appearances in unconventional media venues. He tries to avoid exposure to Harris, but when avoidance invariably fails, he doesn’t like what he sees. An encounter with the Biden clip — and he will encounter it given how perfectly tailored it is for maximum virality — may provide the enthusiasm that was otherwise lacking. The positive factors motivating him to cast an affirmative vote for Trump were already present. Now, so too is a negative motivating factor. He has but one opportunity to jam a thumb in the eye of the people in American public life who so look down on him. He finally Googles his polling place.

 

That reaction is probably exclusive to voters who were already inclined to cast a ballot for Trump — Americans who consciously regard themselves as “Trump’s supporters,” with or without an apostrophe. And yet, whereas Biden’s line is likely to motivate voters who sorely needed motivation, the comedian’s botched joke hits home with voters who weren’t lacking for inducements to vote against Trump. On net, if these two sordid events matter at all, they’d probably matter more for Trump’s prospects.

Voting: The Long View

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

 

Contrary to what some newspaper owners think, this is the time for endorsements. Look elsewhere if that’s what you came here for. 

 

Instead, I’ll just focus on how I personally think about the election, starting with my vote.

 

I’m not going to vote for either of them.

 

But that doesn’t mean I’m neutral about the outcome of the election. If I lived in a swing state rather than District of Columbia, I might vote for Kamala Harris. I certainly wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump. But, given that Harris will carry D.C. by at least 30 points, the “it’s a binary choice!” harangues leave me cold.

 

If I were to vote for Harris, it would only be as a way to vote against Donald Trump. I don’t think Harris she’s been a compelling candidate, senator, or vice president. I think she’s exceedingly wrong on a number of issues. But as P.J. O’Rourke said when endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016, “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

 

I don’t think Harris is wrong about absolutely everything, but the framing is right. Trump is simply unacceptable. The mere fact that he violated the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is inherently disqualifying. All of the other reasons—and there are many—amount to shoving another 10 pounds of manure into a 5-pound bag.

 

Moreover, speaking of manure-shoveling, the willingness of most Republicans to spin Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election is a reason to want him to lose. Sen. J.D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson have both embraced the embarrassing lie that we had a peaceful transfer of power because Trump ultimately left office on time. That’s like saying a prison riot didn’t happen because eventually everyone went back to their cells and served their sentences.   

 

Breaking this stranglehold Trump has on the party is worth a conventionally bad Democratic president for four years, particularly given the fact that Harris will have a hard time getting much through Congress, never mind anything catastrophic.

 

Of course, Harris could surprise me and be better than I expect. But the mostly likely scenario for that to happen would require her to move to the center. That, too, would be good for conservatism. A more moderate Democratic Party would move the center of gravity of American politics rightward, which is supposed to be the goal of the conservative movement.

 

If Harris is a moderately failed president, that will be good for a post-Trump party (Herbert Hoover was great for Democrats, Jimmy Carter was a boon to Republicans). If she’s a moderately successful president, it will be because she worked with Republicans on her “to-do list.”

 

So, I will vote strategically rather than emotionally. People invest a lot of cosmic significance to voting. Tell me how you voted, and I’ll tell you who you are, seems to be the modern incarnation of Schmittian logic. I think this is pernicious nonsense. Elections are simultaneously job interviews and performance reviews, in which we hire and fire public servants. We’re not anointing kings and queens. So, I will write in some normal decent Republican—Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse, I’m taking suggestions—because I want to send the signal that I was a gettable vote for a sane Republican Party.

 

In short, I’m thinking beyond this election, because politics is a marathon, not a sprint. The Madisonian structure of our system assumes there will always be another election. We have elections constantly in this country, from dogcatchers and insurance commissioners to governors and senators. Before polling, this was how politicians and parties took the temperature of the electorate.

 

None of this makes sense for those who believe that the fate of the world hinges on this election. But such “Flight 93 Election” thinking is a big reason our politics are so broken. It makes political contests about competing policies into religious wars about the nature of reality. A conservative, we are told, is not a conservative if they don’t vote for Trump. Nonsense. I won’t vote for him because I am a conservative, and I think this country needs a healthy and sane conservatism.

 

Given this opinion, many people tell me that I should therefore have the courage of my convictions and not only vote for Harris but shill for her. I earned a lot of strange new respect from the left for refusing to lie for Trump. That’s nice. But I see no reason to lie for Harris either. That’s not my job.

How to Prevent the Worst From Happening

By Peter Wehner

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

 

Many Republicans would say that it is one thing, and quite an awful thing, to withhold a vote from Donald Trump—but that voting for Kamala Harris, a “San Francisco Democrat,” is nothing short of a betrayal, an act of apostasy, impossible for any true conservative to justify.

 

They’re wrong, though in one respect it’s understandable why they’re wrong. Harris is hardly an avatar of conservatism. She is, after all, a lifelong Democrat who, in her ill-fated campaign for president in 2019, positioned herself as a progressive champion. She embraced positions that I believe ranged from silly to harmful. But it’s a more complicated story than that.

 

During Harris’s pre-Senate career, when she served as district attorney in San Francisco and then as attorney general of California, her record was generally pragmatic and moderate. In those roles, according to Don Kusler, the national director of Americans for Democratic Action, her record was one “that would have many liberals, particularly our California colleagues, angered or at least rolling their eyes.” Progressives had a much deeper relationship with President Joe Biden than with Vice President Harris; according to The Washington Post, “They fear that under Harris they would lose the unique access they had to the West Wing.” The New Democrat Coalition, a moderate faction in the House, says it’s the part of the caucus most closely aligned with Harris.

 

Nor are progressives particularly happy that during the 2024 campaign, Harris has broken with some of her previous liberal stances, such as opposing fracking, decriminalizing border crossing, and ending private health insurance. Harris has spent the closing stretch of the campaign appearing with the likes of Liz Cheney, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has emphasized her support for Ukraine in its war of survival against Russia, and risks losing Michigan because she is viewed by some in her party as too supportive of Israel. During the campaign, Harris has shared that she owns a Glock, said she’d appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, and declared that she’s a “capitalist” who wants “pragmatic” solutions. Her economic focus is on tax breaks for the middle class and on creating opportunities for small businesses. Her economic plan, the Post points out, contained few items on the liberal wish list. Progressive groups say they are finding a “significant enthusiasm deficit” among left-wing voters.

 

It would be an affectation to say that Harris is a conservative champion, just as it would be a caricature to portray her now as a far-left liberal. She is neither, and if she’s elected president, she is likely to govern from the center-left, at least on most things.

 

***

 

But the strongest conservative case for voting for Harris doesn’t have nearly as much to do with her as it has to do with her opponent. Trump remains a far more fundamental threat to conservatism than Harris. Trump has, in a way no Democrat ever could, changed the GOP from within and broken with the most important tenets of conservatism. That’s no surprise, because his desire isn’t to conserve; it is to burn things to the ground. In that respect and others, Trump is temperamentally much more of a Jacobin than a Burkean. He has transformed the Republican Party in his image in ways that exceed what any other American politician has done in modern times.

 

Start with character. The GOP once championed the central importance of character in political leaders, and especially presidents. It believed that serious personal misconduct was disqualifying, in part because of the example it would send to the young and its corrosive effects on our culture. It lamented that America was slouching towards Gomorrah.

 

In 1998, when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president and embroiled in a sexual scandal, the Southern Baptist Convention—whose membership is overwhelmingly conservative —passed the “Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials,” which said, “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” It added, “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”

 

Yet for a decade now, Republicans, and in particular white evangelicals, have celebrated as their leader a felon and pathological liar; a person whose companies have committed bank, insurance, tax, and charity fraud; a sexual predator who paid hush money to a porn star; a person of uncommon cruelty and crudity who has mocked the war dead, POWs, Gold Star families, and people with disabilities. Under Trump, the party of “family values” has become a moral freak show.

 

Trump has also profoundly reshaped the GOP’s public policy. The GOP is now, at the national level, effectively pro-choice, and, due in part to Trump, the pro-life movement is “in a state of political collapse,” in the words of David French, of The New York Times. The Republican Party, pre-Trump, was pro–free trade; Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and referred to tariff as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” (In July, Trump proposed across-the-board tariffs of 10 to 20 percent, and rates of 60 percent or higher on imports from China.) He epitomizes crony capitalism, an economic system in which individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are favored.

 

For several generations, Republican presidents have, to varying degrees, promoted plans to reform entitlement programs in order to avert fiscal catastrophe. Trump has done the opposite. He has repeatedly said that entitlement programs are off-limits. As president, Trump shredded federalism and made a mockery of our constitutional system of government by his use of executive orders to bypass Congress. He made little effort to shrink government, and lots of efforts to expand it.

 

On spending, $4.8 trillion in non-COVID-related debt was added during Trump’s single term, while for Biden the figure is $2.2 trillion. Trump added more debt than any other president in history. A Wall Street Journal survey of 50 economists found that 65 percent of them see Trump’s proposed policies putting more upward pressure on the federal deficit than Harris’s, and 68 percent said prices would rise faster under Trump than under Harris. And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that Trump’s policies would increase budget deficits by $7.5 trillion over the next decade, compared with $3.5 trillion for Harris.

 

Pre-Trump Republican presidents celebrated the diversity that immigrants brought to the nation, and the contributions they made to America. “All of the immigrants who came to us brought their own music, literature, customs, and ideas,” Ronald Reagan said in a speech in Shanghai in 1984. “And the marvelous thing, a thing of which we’re proud, is they did not have to relinquish these things in order to fit in. In fact, what they brought to America became American. And this diversity has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped us.” George W. Bush urged America to be a “welcoming society,” one that assimilates new arrivals and “upholds the great tradition of the melting pot,” which “has made us one nation out of many peoples.”

 

Trump is cut from a very different cloth. He curtailed legal immigration during his presidency. Temporary visas for highly skilled noncitizen workers were reduced. Refugee admissions were slashed. Trump, who peddled outrageous lies against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, says he plans to strip them of their legal status. (At his rallies, Trump has whipped the crowds into a frenzy, getting them to chant, “Send them back! Send them back! Send them back!”)

 

Edith Olmsted pointed out in The New Republic that during his first term, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, “placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.” Trump, who refers to America as an “occupied country” and “a garbage can for the world,” also said he plans to reinstate a ban on travelers from some countries with Muslim-majority populations. And although previous Republicans have attempted to slow illegal border crossings, none has dehumanized those crossing the border by using language from Mein Kampf (“poisoning the blood of our country”). Trump believes American national identity is based not on allegiance to certain ideals but on ethnic and religious background.

 

It is in foreign policy, though, that Trump may be most antithetical to the policies and approach of modern conservatism. Reagan was a fierce, relentless opponent of the Soviet Union. “The one thing Reagan was more passionate about than anything else was the unsupportable phenomenon of totalitarian power, enslaving a large part of the world’s population,” according to Edmund Morris, a Reagan biographer.

 

Trump is the opposite. He admires and is enchanted by the world’s most brutal dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and others. Trump is at best indifferent to the fate of Ukraine in its war against Russia; one suspects that deep down, he’s rooting for his friend Putin. Reagan mythologized America; Trump trash-talks it. Reagan was a great champion of NATO; Trump is a reflexive critic who, according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, would withdraw from the alliance in a second term. Reagan made human rights a centerpiece of his foreign policy; during his term, Trump praised China’s forced internment of a million or more Uyghurs as “exactly the right thing to do,” according to Bolton.

 

Here and there, now and then, Trump is conservative—on court appointments, for example—but it’s something that he’s stumbled into, for reasons of political expediency, and that he’s just as liable to stumble away from. (Trump was pro-choice before he was pro-life before he moved once again toward the pro-choice camp.) Trump is fundamentally a populist and a demagogue, a destroyer of institutions and a conspiracy theorist, a champion of right-wing identity politics who stokes grievances and rage. He has an unprecedented capacity to turn people into the darkest versions of themselves. But he is something even beyond that.

 

***

 

In recent weeks, Trump has been called a fascist—not by liberal Democratic strategists, but by people who worked closely with him. They include retired General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff; retired General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump presidency; and Mark Esper, Trump’s former secretary of defense, who has said that Trump has fascistic “inclinations” and is “unfit for office.” In addition, retired General James Mattis, who also served as Trump’s secretary of defense, has said he agrees with Milley’s assessment. And Dan Coats, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, has said he suspects that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin.

 

The historian Robert Paxton, one of the nation’s foremost experts on fascism, was initially reluctant to apply the term fascism to Trump. The label is toxic and used too promiscuously, he believed. But January 6, 2021, changed all of that.

 

“The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told Elisabeth Zerofsky, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”

 

Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” Paxton wrote in Newsweek shortly after Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

 

Paxton could add to the parade of horribles the fact that Trump encouraged the mob to hang his own vice president, came very close to deploying 10,000 active-duty troops to the streets of the nation’s capital to shoot protesters, invited hostile foreign powers to intervene in our election, and extorted an ally to find dirt on his opponents. Paxton could have mentioned that Trump threatened prosecutors, judges, and their families; referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy from within”; and called the imprisoned individuals who stormed the Capitol “great patriots.” He could have cited Trump’s call for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution and his insinuation that Milley deserved to be executed for treason.

 

Trump’s supporters may be enraged by the fascist label, but they cannot erase the words or the deeds of the man to whom the label applies. And the only way for the GOP to become a sane, conservative party again is by ridding itself of Trump, which is why even conservatives who oppose Harris’s policies should vote for her. Harris’s election is the only thing that can break the hold of Trump on his party.

 

Acquaintances of mine, and acquaintances of friends of mine, say that they find Trump contemptible, but that they can’t vote for Harris, because they disagree with her on policy. My response is simple: The position she once held on fracking may be bad, but fascism is worse. The position she holds on any issue may be bad, but fascism is worse.

 

A friend told me he won’t vote for either Harris or Trump. If Trump wins a second term, he said, “I suspect he will give more attention to his golf game than to siccing the IRS, FBI, or whoever on his political opponents.” His message to me, in other words, is to relax a bit. Trump may be a moral wreck, but he won’t act on his most outlandish threats.

 

My view is that when those seeking positions of power promote political violence, have a long record of lawlessness, are nihilistic, and embody a “will to power” ethic; make extralegal attempts to maintain power and stop the peaceful transfer of power; and use the words of fascists to tell the world that they are determined to exact vengeance—it’s probably wise to take them at their word.

 

If Trump wins the presidency again, conservatism will be homeless, a philosophy without a party, probably for at least a generation. And the damage to America, the nation Republicans claim to love, will be incalculable, perhaps irreversible. The stakes are that high.

 

Harris becoming president may not be the best thing that could happen to conservatism. But if she becomes president, she will have prevented the worst thing that could happen to conservatism and, much more important, to the country.

Democracy Is Alive and Well in Brian Kemp’s Georgia

National Review Online

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

 

It’s a good time to be a voter in Georgia. The state, with a solid-red state government and nine Republicans in its 14-member House delegation but two Democratic senators, flipped from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in 2020 and is a key presidential battleground once again. Voters are responding.

 

In spite of extensive damage from Hurricane Helene to some parts of the state, early voting is booming. As of Tuesday, with a week to go before Election Day, more than 3 million Georgians have voted already, over 2.8 million of them in person. At least 130,000 mail ballots have been requested, beyond the number already returned. As Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office reported on Monday, when the tally stood at 2.74 million, these have been record-breaking numbers compared with 1.98 million votes at the same point in 2020, 1.64 million in 2022, and 1.2 million in 2018. Just under 5 million people voted in Georgia in 2020 amid record-high turnout in the state; the early vote is already more than 60 percent of that figure. Even CNN described the surge as a “record number of early votes cast in Georgia as election gets underway in battleground state.”

 

My, how times have changed. In 2021, when Georgia passed a new voting law, Joe Biden described it as “Jim Crow on steroids.” Stacey Abrams (remember her?) wove it into her narrative of massive voter suppression in the state, even though 54.1 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in Georgia when she lost the governor’s race to Brian Kemp in 2018, up from 38.6 percent in the prior midterm election in 2014. Virtue-signaling corporations postured and threatened the state, and Major League Baseball even pulled the All-Star Game.

 

The constantly shifting justifications for the overheated rhetoric illustrated what became obvious when Georgians went to the polls in 2022 and delivered a thumping mandate for Kemp and Raffensperger: There was never anything to it. It was all a lie. A survey after the 2022 election found that 0 percent of black voters reported a bad experience voting. Democrats couldn’t even muster a court challenge or a press campaign against any of the primary or general-election outcomes in the state — and neither could Donald Trump, whose endorsees against Kemp, Raffensperger, and others were largely routed in the Republican primary. Even baseball announced that it will return the All-Star Game to Atlanta in 2025.

 

Biden hasn’t changed his rhetorical tune, and we don’t expect an apology anytime soon for the egregious campaign of falsehoods he led in 2021, abetted by his party, the press, and corporate America. But the relative silence about voting laws in Georgia this fall speaks volumes. As for the voters, they are having no trouble being heard.

Neither the President Nor His Party Will Ever Stop Condescending to You

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

 

Joe Biden usually isn’t allowed to do events (or probably even remain awake) after his bedtime, and if today’s hilariously ill-timed gaffe is any indication, then his bedtime is getting earlier and earlier. He was on camera for a Voto Latino get-out-the-vote Zoom call — under most circumstances, perhaps the least interesting place in the United States to be. But in a zombified half-rant responding to the mess made by Tony Hinchcliffe at Donald Trump’s weekend rally, he bitterly dismissed Trump’s supporters — and therefore half the country — as “garbage.” Here is a link.

 

And here is a transcript of what he actually said:

 

Just the other day, a speaker at his [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. Well, let me tell you something, I don’t—I don’t know, the Puerto Rican that I know, the Puerto Rico where I’m fr—in my home state of Delaware. They’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.

 

Those were his words, transcribed with 100 percent fidelity, as you can verify yourself with your eyes and ears based on the countless clips now circulating. I would know because I transcribed them myself, as I do with all quotes from video interviews that I use in my pieces. I consider it proper journalistic practice to always take the time to do one’s own transcriptions, for long ago I found that other people’s can be unreliable — outlets often redact or “clean up” a favored subject’s words, as we are about to see.

 

But, before that, a note on what Joe Biden said. It’s really quite to the point, isn’t it? Biden thinks that Trump’s supporters are garbage. Democrats are trying to clean up the mess of that simple statement by arguing that Biden was really referring only to Tony Hinchcliffe. But, in all honesty, the second half of that statement above indicates to me that, by that point, Biden was back to talking about Donald Trump, not Hinchcliffe — and in any event, his words were clear enough. It’s a spill for the Dems to clean up, and a particularly unfortunate one in the final week of the campaign, when Democrats are trying to turn Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally into their big final messaging note.

 

So why do they have to do it so insultingly? Why must cravenly servile media partisans try to rewrite history? Once the AP’s and CNN’s accounts and transcripts went around, Biden spokesman Andrew Bates tried to shop a hilariously rewritten transcript that “cures” Biden’s language by magically inserting an apostrophe into the line quoted above and (pathetically) making his words read incoherently rather than clearly and precisely (which, for once, they were). Then Politico‘s Jonathan Lemire wrote it up with even more inventive repunctuation, in a transparent attempt to shore him up. This new version instantly became the universally agreed upon talking point on social media, as both mainstream-media commentators and the mad rabble alike desperately clinged to this branch.

 

Which is why it was at least somewhat satisfying when Biden’s own team, as well as other national Democrats, immediately sawed out the limb from under his desperately shilling defenders. They know what they saw on the tape, and they have concluded that there’s no getting away from what was said — it can’t be denied away by an eager media. The video is what it is. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro appeared on CNN tonight to flatly say that the president wasn’t helping by denouncing Trump supporters as “garbage.” Shapiro understands the stakes in his own state, after all.

 

Then Biden himself went to Twitter to “clarify” that he was trying to refer to Tony Hinchcliffe — as predictable a spin as could be imagined and one that nobody is under any requirement to accept with a straight face. I know what Joe Biden said, and I have every reason to believe that it is what he thinks, given that he shares a party and a legacy with Hillary “Basket of Deplorables” Clinton. You, with your partisan beliefs as they are, can choose to accept his “clarification.” Instead, I believe that a nasty, angry old man slipped his leash — as he has countless times in the past few months — and said what he and everyone else around him really believes.