Who Puts These Ideas in his Head?
There’s an old D.C. joke about how every political memoir could have the subtitle “If Only They’d Listened to Me.” I get a similar sensation watching President Biden languish toward re-election; which, as it happens, is also similar to the sensation I get when I watch one of my kids use the step stool to awkwardly get a plate out of the cabinet — just wincing and white-knuckling through it. Everyone likes to imagine that any given president would win 50 states if they merely adopted my politics, I suppose, though I’ve spent enough time in the political wilderness at this point to understand that my policy preferences do not enjoy broad support at the moment. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel like the president has been receiving terrible advice of late that he would do well to ignore.
It’s important to remember that [by my lights, anyway] Joe Biden largely secured the Democrats’ nomination and ultimately got elected by ignoring his crank leftist base that lives on social media. I think the median American voter is roughly where Joe Biden is politically [for better or worse, usually worse], and after four years of Trump, Americans were eager for a return to normalcy and Joe Biden was supposed to fit that mold — center-left but not crazy, familiar with the nuts-and-bolts of government, not going to embarrass America on the world stage, etc. And I think Biden was mostly set to check those boxes until some historian [whose name escapes me] got in his ear about how he could be the next FDR if he really swung for the fences.
That was terrible advice, not only because the American people were not looking for the next FDR, but because Biden did not have the political capital of FDR. When FDR was elected for his third [!] term in 1940, Democrats had a more than 100-seat majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Meanwhile, when Biden got elected in 2020, Democrats had a single-digit majority in the House and the Senate was dead even. Trying to pursue FDR-like goals in that environment would have required a political savvy that Joe Biden simply does not have. Biden would have been much better served pursuing more [what’s known as] “popularist” policies — things that enjoy wide bipartisan support. To Biden’s credit, he did this with his bipartisan infrastructure effort, but that seems like a distant memory compared to his other — much less popular — efforts like the Afghanistan withdrawal, student loan forgiveness, and now his posture toward Israel.
Again to his credit, Biden remained a staunch supporter of Israel and their war against Hamas for the first five months, much longer than I would’ve thought. But I guess the same advisors who convinced him he could be the next FDR also started getting nervous about his poll numbers with Arab-Americans, particularly in Michigan, and thus the president has spent the last several weeks attempting to straddle the irreconcilable positions of the “Ceasefire Now” club and Israel’s stated goal of eradicating Hamas as a political entity. This hapless straddling culminated earlier this week in a shameful spectacle at the United Nations in which the United States failed to veto a U.N. security council measure calling for a ceasefire in Gaza [without tying it to the release of the remaining hostages].
I worry that the president is trying to split this proverbial baby, and if King Solomon couldn’t do it, I don’t have much faith in Joe Biden [who, despite his favorite saying “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative,” remains, uh…Joe Biden].
There was an article in the Atlantic this week that captures just how irreconcilable the differences are with the sort of voters — i.e., young Arab-Americans — that the president is trying to reach [with one of the most incredible ledes I’ve ever read]:
One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.” […]
“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. […]
During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. […] Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds. […]
Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.” […]
Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees [of an event dedicated to combating anti-Semitism]. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying. […]
At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.
“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.
“But are you a Zionist?”
“Yes.”
“Then we are enemies.”
Surely not every Arab-American voter in Michigan is that radical, but I feel confident in saying that the sort of people who are claiming they won’t vote for Biden because of his Israel policy aren’t going to be placated by “well we abstained from vetoing a security council resolution.” Many of them [more than we’d be comfortable with, I’m sure] want a ceasefire because they don’t want Israel defending itself, because they tacitly [and some even explicitly] agree with Hamas’s, uh, “resistance.” As such, there is limited utility in even feinting in that direction, particularly when doing so could alienate voters that the president is already counting on for his reelection coalition.
It reminds me of a scene in the 2004 Ray Charles biopic where Ray is quibbling with his would-be manager over how many cents per record he should be getting, to which his would-be manager replies “If you think pennies, Mr. Charles, you get pennies. If you think dollars, you get dollars.” Similarly, if President Biden goes chasing a few thousand votes in Michigan, he might get a few thousand votes in Michigan. He should instead be focused on winning the presidency, which might entail spurning parts of his radical base in exchange for goodwill from, uh, almost literally everyone else. Support for Israel is like a 70-30 issue nationally. I understand the president has concerns about narrow electoral coalitions, but it seems to me that he has more to gain from staunch support of Israel than this hermaphroditic, half-in-half-out waffling that pleases no one.
Ideological Muscle Memory
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to really let my conservatism fly, but this week was a reminder of why I’ve always had a John-Bolton-esque view of the United Nations. It somewhat impressively manages to be simultaneously evil and useless. On the evil front, it gives China and Russia permanent veto power on the Security Council: two of the most oppressive regimes on the planet, one of whom is currently engaged in a brutal war of aggression, and the other who has been engaged in an elaborate effort of ethnic and religious cleansing for years. Oh, those schmucks have opinions on Israel’s self defense, do they? I’m sure it’s useful insight. But at least it’s also a non-binding resolution, so what it lacks in decency it makes up for in uselessness.
I favor some sort of international organization that serves a similar purpose that the U.N. [allegedly] serves, but that has a higher standard of membership than existing. There’s no reason autocracies should have any input into the affairs of democracies, nor should we lend them legitimacy by placing them on equal footing in an international organization.
Don’t Worry Be Happy
The World Happiness Report was released last week, and for the first time since the data has been tracked [since 2012] the United States fell out of the Top 20 happiest countries, mostly due to the outright misery of Americans under the age of 30. To an extent, I kinda feel for the whipper-snappers. It’s not as if we 40-year-olds have had the easiest go of it — 9/11 happened my freshman year of college, followed closely by the Iraq War, then the financial crisis hit when I was 25, soon after that Barack Obama got elected and half the country went insane — leading into the Trump era like night leads into day — just in time for COVID to hit in my late 30s. Personally I’ve thus far managed to Forrest Gump my way through it all, so I can’t complain. But it’s a lot, I get it. I also think social media creates something of a feedback loop of catastrophism, leading people to think things are worse than they are.
But at the same time, I can’t help but be reminded of the classic Louis CK [scandal noted] bit about how everything is awesome and yet everyone is miserable. I talk a lot about how I think much of the dour zeitgeist recently comes from a lack of gratitude. We can recognize that there are problems while still realizing that this, right now, is the bleeding edge of human advancement. I have a laundry list of ideas for how we could improve society, sure, but one of the biggest things we can do is realize that there is no time in history that we would rather live. We have ubiquitous luxuries that would have been unfathomable to even the richest people in the world during our grandparents’ lifetimes. Maybe think about that from time to time.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Biblical Sayings
Clue: The concept of turning these weapons into plowshares is mentioned in both Micah and Isaiah.
Swords
Today’s clue:
Category: U.S. Geography
Clue: This state is the only one to share a border with Maine.
Dispatches from the Homefront
We have one of those Google Home locks on our front door that can be opened with a numeric code [and I can assign a code to anyone I want so I can see who unlocks the door], and over the weekend my wife and kids were taking a walk in the neighborhood while I was getting dressed. I got a text from my wife saying that our oldest was coming back early and asked if I could let her in; I said sure, but I’m not quite ready. By the time I got downstairs, however, my daughter had already let herself in. Unbeknownst to either my wife or me, she had apparently watched my wife unlock the door enough times that she had memorized the six-digit code. I often forget that she’s four. I have no idea where she falls in relation to other four year olds, but I don’t think I could’ve unlocked a digital lock when I was four.