Hopefully, Trump is convicted in New York, loses the election and then is convicted of multiple other crimes. He fades from American politics as an inmate of federal prison.
Who comes next? Who taps into the meanness and anger that Trump did?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Texas governor Greg Abbott.
There appears to be a significant shift happening in Israel right now. The Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, appears to be articulating the - roughly speaking - American position, but what should rightly be understood as the consensus opinion of anyone to Netanyahu's left. Basically, there is no political solution that ends the invasion of Gaza. Members of the IDF have echoed this criticism and it remains the major problem that Netanyahu faces.
Roughly, if Netanyahu advances a plan for Gaza that defines "winning" in any meaningful way and describes what will come next for Gaza...then his coalition collapses. The Right can't countenance anything that looks like a feasible plan for the Palestinian Authority to assume control of Gaza - that's a step towards a Palestinian state, which they oppose vehemently. If he doesn't propose such a thing, he loses everyone to his left, which includes Gallant's party.
The collapse of Netanyahu's government has been forestalled by the war, but if the war has no strategic endgame, then it merely reinforces the idea that Netanyahu is dragging this out to prevent an election. Frankly, the sooner he is gone and in a jail cell, the better.
It looks like the current NY hush money/campaign finance case will be Trump's only criminal trial before election day.
In short:
- The documents case - which is a slam dunk - was handed to a manifestly partisan and unfit judge who has succeeded in kicking the case further and further down the road. Aileen Cannon seems to be the only lawyer actually capable of keeping Trump out of trouble.
- The Georgia case is currently in limbo during an appeal of Fani Willis' poor judgment in hiring Nathan Wade while dating him. Like the NY trial, this is a state matter, but the appeals court seems in no hurry to let the trial proceed.
- Finally, the most serious case of election interference is being interfered with by the Federalist Society clique on the Supreme Court. The completely bullshit decision to hear this case meant pushing it off...and off...and off. I hope that if Democrats clean up in November, they expand the Court and neuter the partisan ideologues in robes.
Campos began the post linked above by blaming Garland, and I get it. However, if anything the decision to make sure every I was dotted and every T crossed seem wise considering the shit that conservative judges are pulling. Where Garland no doubt dropped the ball was in thinking that there were five members of the current Supreme Court who were not incontrovertible hacks.
I do agree with Campos that if Trump is convicted in his current case, that's the game. It would be delicious irony if the least "serious" of Trump's crimes is the one that lands him in prison.
The Times had a researcher from Oxford talk about teenaged anxiety and depression among teens. As someone who has seen in very many forms this phenomenon - including serious clinical cases - I think she's hit on something.
As she very careful explains (but what will probably be ignored in the coming backlash), there really is anxiety and depression, and it does seem to be growing among young people. I will say that I definitely suffered from depression in my teens and twenties, and every now and again, I have a bout of mild depression. What I did not have is much framework or license to "be depressed." It was stigmatized and that's bad. What's more, I never had suicidal ideation or impulses to self-harm. I was angry - typical of depression in men - and drank. I played relatively violent sports.
In the end, mild depression and anxiety are likely simply part of being human. And in my experience, having free time was like throwing fuel on the fire. Once I really had a full time job, once I had a job that gave me purpose, those episodes got further and further apart and shorter and shorter. Some of it is that I know I will come out the other side; it's not forever.
Kids don't know that. They can see transient episodes of anxiety and depression for being transient. Are you anxious meeting new people? No kidding. Are you sometimes really sad? Yeah, that happens.
The question the woman in the video above raises is how much have we created a system where we rush to diagnose and pathologize what is really part of the human experience? And - this is important - when we do that, we bleed the urgency from those with more significant mental health issues. As she puts it, "If everything is an illness, then nothing is."
It's Mental Health Awareness Month, and she had to know this would be a controversial thing to say. I do think that this is an underrated way that social media is making our kids mentally unwell.
The interesting dynamic we are seeing is that Biden is doing MUCH better among Likely Voters than Registered Voters. This is the inverse of voting during the '90s and '00s as Democrats tended to do better with the at-large voting population but struggled to get those voters to the polls.
Some of this is the demographic shift in the Democratic Party towards more college educated voters. That is going to help them win and hold the suburbs and it's a direct outcome of Trump's malignant populism.
One thing that struck a number of people with the Times poll yesterday was the complete collapse of support for Biden among young, Black and Latin voters. Now, maybe there really is a historic collapse in those populations (that is not really being measured in other polls). But when I think about those Registered/Likely screens and about the general theme of "polling is broken", I have to wonder who exactly is picking up the phone in those demographics?
Continue to keep an eye on both the Likely Voter numbers and Biden's performance among those demographics that Democrats traditionally do well with.
The NY Times poll has been a significant drag on Biden's polling numbers among credible pollsters. You see people like Jon Chait talking about how Biden's defeat might be seen as pre-ordained, because of inflation.
So, I guess a quick Google search is in order to see where Obama stood in 2012. Gallup had him losing the week before the election. Here's the Harvard poll, but it's a year out from the election.
Back in 2012, the CBS/Times poll had Romney up 3 at roughly this point in the race. The Economist had Romney up 4. If you look at the polling it tended to narrow - especially if you throw out the Rasmussen polling, and you should always throw out the Rasmussen polling.
Throughout the fall, the race remained pretty close, though again Rasmussen threw off the averages. Very few polls ever had Obama over 50%.
He won with 51.1%.
Now, Biden is not Obama: a supremely charismatic figure. However, Trump is not Romney. Whatever you think of Romney, he's not facing the sort of legal and ethical headwinds that Trump is facing. What is true is that Obama faced issues because the tail of the 2008 financial crisis was still anchoring his support. Biden's main problem is that inflation from the 2020-22 pandemic period (and invasion of Ukraine) has not fully abated.
Will it make a difference to people worried about inflation that every single policy Trump wants to implement would make it worse? I think it might. I'm hopeful. I'm also heartened by the fact that Biden has a vigorous ground game up and running and Trump is looting his campaign funds and the RNC coffers to pay his legal bills.
It would be super great if inflation died out, but I still think people will balk at voting for the insurrection supporting, tax avoiding rapist or the guy with brain worms and mercury poisoning.
Josh Marshall has been pointing out since October just how poor a war leader Netanyahu is. His argument yesterday was that Netanyahu has no strategic vision for a post-war Gaza because his coalition would collapse if he put one forward.
Basically, Netanyahu is held rightly responsible for the failures on the Israeli side that led to October 7th. If there are elections, he will almost certainly get trounced. His argument was "Sure, I'm corrupt, but I kept us safe." He can't say that anymore.
What's more, his coalition in the Knesset currently includes the center and the far right. Lose either of those and his government collapses. If his postwar plan is too harsh, he loses the center. If it's too lenient, he loses the right. As a result, his solution is simply not to have a plan.
This is all coming to a head with the conflict within the Israeli coalition and many of its allies over the proposed assault on Rafah. Again, Netanyahu cannot provide a postwar plan and stay in power, so the assault on Rafah - which will be bloody on both sides - has no endgame.
Clausewitz' famous dictum that "war is politics by other means" requires there to be a political endpoint to war - increased national security, economic annexations or reparation...something beyond simple killing. Netanyahu's failure here is why he's simply the worst war leader in Israeli history.
For years, Jon Chait has been chided for focusing on the flaws of leftist politics, because the flaws in rightist politics are potentially lethal to American democracy. I shared in that somewhat, as I thought his repeated columns on the issue were rather a pointless use of column inches.
Today, he explains himself within the context of a book, Solidarity, that makes the case why liberals need to shut up and support leftist groups, but leftist groups need not support liberalism. One subject he did not delve deeply into in this column is the undemocratic nature of the left. He sort of talks around the issue, but I think it's the critical rebuttal to leftist political ideals that you only have to motivate and mobilize the right groups of minority political position and the majority will bend to your will.
One point that he and Yglesias talk about a lot is how the Biden Administration is largely staffed with the progressive left, even if it's helmed by many old school liberals. The result has been both a surprisingly effective administration and a surprisingly left wing one. The problem with the "professional left" is that getting 3/4s of what they want isn't a victory, but a defeat, so they tend to spend more time criticizing Biden for somehow not getting around the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court than for the many things he's actually done.
Of course, the current focus is on campus protest groups, and they do exhibit strikingly anti-democratic ideals and practices. A lot has been written about horseshoe theory, and while this isn't that, it is an example of how neither the far left nor the far right is interested in democratic practices. On either side, the basic idea is that the purity of their ideas is more important than the will of the majority.
Building majority support is, of course, hard to do. It involves compromises and a lot of half measures. The whole point of Yglesias' Substack is Weber's dictum of politics being the "slow boring of hard boards". In fact, today he makes the following observation about the difference between "being heard" and "solving a problem."
In practice, though, a lot of political engagement is almost purely expressive, and that’s especially true in a world where social media has flattened the distinction between “blowing off steam with your friends at the bar” and “communicating ideas about politics to the mass public.” It’s understandable that people experiencing subjective distress sometimes want to be heard and validated on social media in exactly the same way that we often want to be heard and validated in our personal lives. But it pollutes mass understanding of issues if public discourse is swamped with validating behavior rather than helping behavior. One place I’ve seen this a lot recently is with a situation that I actually do have personal experience with. Attending a good college in the United States is at least in part a fun consumption experience. You may then graduate, and find yourself in an entry level job that pays dramatically less than tuition plus room and board at your school. This means that, in practice, you experience a precipitous decline in your living standards right after you graduate.
That sucks, and it sucks for anyone living through it, so I think it’s completely understandable that lots of recent college graduates like to hear that they, personally, are living through an unprecedented period of economic distress. And they do not like to hear some middle-aged man saying “it was way worse for people who graduated 10-15 years ago and slightly worse for people like me who graduated ~20 years ago.” But it’s still true. And the solutions to this problem, such as they are, would mostly involve making the college experience less nice and less fun, which is just going to further alienate people. I don’t know what the answer to that is. It would be nice if TikTok and Twitter and Instagram had wholly separate lanes for “just mouthing off” and “having a serious discussion about issues.” But it doesn’t work like that, so we are doomed to muddle.
Earlier in the column, he basically admits he has little empathy. The issue of student debt and being kinda poor after you graduate is real, I guess. I was both poor and not poor after college. My parents were well off so there was always a safety net, but I worked crap McJobs, I sold possessions to make the rent (but had the possessions in the first place). And I didn't have student debt to worry about. So, yes, I went through a rice and beans phase of life, but -like Yglesias - I was never really poor.
There are glaring needs surrounding college debt, and they are structural and institutional, and that requires structural and institutional reforms. However, leftist critiques are largely about tearing the whole edifice down.
It all reminds me of my visit to a friend in Argentina who said he supported Milei because everything was so broken. I cautioned that tearing things down is easy, but building them back is hard. Liberalism's great strength is its adaptability, its ability to change with new information. That allows it do to the "slow boring of hard boards."
Are things perfect? Absolutely not, but if you believe that everything is horrible, then tearing down the whole structure of society makes sense. But it gets weird. Gaza is a tragedy - and it's a tragedy that Hamas bears some responsibility for, but that nuance gets your censured on the left. However, if we care about "genocide" then we should look at what Myanmar is doing to the Rohingya. It's just as bad as what Israel is doing in Gaza but its not even prompted by an event like 10/7. Since the perpetrators aren't "white" then it - like similar atrocities in Africa - doesn't warrant encampments.
The failure of those encampments is that they are neither seeking to educate nor be educated. They KNOW what they FEEL and the primacy of their opinions is gospel. Liberalism tests and picks apart arguments and positions because the goal is better policy, better outcomes. Even actual conservatism is part of that process. The far left and right simply do not operate under those conditions - dissent and argument is heresy and we all know what happens to heretics.
UPDATE: This from an Atlantic article on protests:
Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail—including the Women’s March and the pro–gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators—they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.
As the marginal cost of reaching hundreds of thousands, even millions, of potential protesters drops to zero, organizers have mastered the art of gaining attention through public demonstrations. Mass actions no longer require organized groups with members who pay dues, professional staffers who plan targeted actions, and designated leaders who can negotiate with public officials. They just need someone who can make a good Instagram graphic. But notwithstanding the clear benefits of social media for protest participants, the lure of racking up views on TikTok or X and getting on the homepage of major news sites can overwhelm other strategic goals. Protests are crowding out the array of other organizing tools that social movements need in order to be successful—and that has consequences for our entire political system.
Slate has a very detailed account of the infighting in the Michigan GOP. It's a doozy of a read. Generally speaking, it's fair to assume that the election could come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada...again. Biden looks to be doing well in Wisconsin, at least in part because Wisconsin has started to restrict abortion rights in ways that Michigan and Pennsylvania haven't. Michigan is important because there are quite a lot of Palestinian-Americans in the Dearborn area and Biden is vulnerable there.
So, when you read about the utter chaos and dysfunction in the Michigan GOP - with QAnon nutters and the likewise conspiratorially minded running the show - it makes you wonder about whether the GOP can pull in one direction long enough to once again break the Blue Wall of the Upper Midwest. In fact, it's doubtful that this level of crazed dysfunction is unique to Michigan.
I thought this graph was interesting:
Michelle Smith, another old-guard Michigan GOP veteran, has a simple theory about what’s going on: Trump’s sudden rise and surprising 2016 victory attracted a new cohort of activists who had not previously been politically engaged and did not, on some level, understand that it is possible to lose an election. “I’ve suffered losses before,” Smith told me on the morning of the convention. “A loss is a loss. But they say, ‘I got off my couch—why didn’t we win?’
A lot has been said about how Trump mobilized Karl Rove's "missing white voters" from 2012 into his victory in 2016. It is worth recalling how abnormal his victory was - narrowly eking out wins in traditionally Democratic states because of "her emails", latent misogyny and his ability to pay off Stormy Daniels. These hardcore Trumpists simply don't grok how politics works. It's purity tests all the way down. Winning elections in America is about expanding your coalition, but for the zealots in the GOP, it seems to be about restricting it to the true believers.
This is a description of where they are coming from (bolding is mine):
I asked Hall if she didn’t think there was something a little counterproductive or unusual about putting so much energy, in a presidential election year, into a conflict with a state leader that the presidential nominee helped put in place. She reminded me that she got involved in politics because of election integrity, mask mandates, and the loss of medical freedom, not because of Trump. He’s often described as the leader of a cult of personality. But for some modern Republicans, he appears to be more like a symbol of tribal affinity—a symbol of a deeper allegiance to conspiratorial beliefs, or to beliefs about having been treated unfairly by the rest of society. (The number of new Michigan Republicans who have criminal convictions or fraud accusations in their pasts—for the record, Angela Hall does not have any!—is striking.) “I’m very wary of putting my hope and trust in one person,” McMahan told me. “But I also see that he’s the only candidate that we have right now that could become president. I don’t like that there’s only one person, though—I would love it if we had some backup.”
When you describe the hard core of Trumpism, it really does reflect Trump's personality. It's deeply conspiratorial, it's crime-adjacent, and willfully opposed to things like wearing a mask during a pandemic that killed more Americans in a couple of years than in all the wars in our history combined.
The idea that this is somehow unique to Michigan beggars belief. This is why I do think Biden is going to win - as close as the election seems now. The larger question is what happens if Biden wins - not just whether these self-styled patriots try another January 6th. What happens to the GOP when Trump is in prison or dies?
The only writing I consistently like from Erik Loomis is his series on American graves, where he visits the graves of notable people and writes biographical sketches of them. Today he did Eldridge Cleaver.
In the bio, Loomis notes the various horrors that Cleaver perpetrated in his life, while lauding his leftist critiques of White Capitalist America. For instance, he blames Cleaver's youthful rapes and other violence on the racist structure of America. Except...that racist structure was present for every young Black man in America and they didn't all become rapists. Look, structural racism produces all sorts of horrible side effects, but to blame Cleaver's monstrousness on racism is to ignore that Cleaver himself was a monster.
Loomis notes that Cleaver "went off the rails" late in life becoming a Moonie, a Mormon and then a Republican. It seems to me that this sort of "horseshoe" movement from far left to right is fairly common. I would wager it's fairly common for two reasons. One is a sort of person who wants to see the world burns and doesn't care if their lawn chair is to the right or the left.
The other is that for people like Cleaver, leftist politics isn't a conviction, it's a pose. It takes his snarling hatred and gives it a sheen of political respectability. It was convenient (and probably kept him out of the jail cell that he belonged in), and once that convenience was unnecessary, so was the politics.
If there is one thing Biden has going for him, it's the character of his opponents. Mainly, they can't seem to stop self-immolating.
You have the Kristi Noem dog willing own goal, and she likely was Trump's favorite for VP, because she's "Real Murica" and she's kinda hot. Her absolutely incredible series of own goals is really remarkable.
Then you have Trump's Time interview where basically writes Biden's ads for him.
Then - and this one is really off the rails - you have RFK, Jr. admit unprompted that he had a worm in his brain. As the Times points out, Kennedy was basically running as the physically healthy alternative to Biden and Trump, even though he's also old. Kennedy also has had mercury poisoning! The combination of having a dead parasite in your brain and being poisoned with a neurotoxin is perhaps not the best argument that he's the best alternative to Trump and Biden, because he's "healthy". Oh, and he has atrial fibrillation. Oh, and he had Hepatitis C from intravenous drug use when he was younger.
But Biden has a stutter, so it's pretty much all the same.
I consider myself a fairly engaged consumer of news. It might also come as a surprise to anyone who actually reads this blog that I have made my mind up about Trump. So my lack of engagement with the hush money/campaign finance trial isn't really surprising to me. He's guilty, but like anyone I worry that a hung jury might roil the waters surrounding his guilt.
It occurs to me that there are three things that complicate my hopes that the law will finally catch this career criminal. The first is the Republicans on the Supreme Court's clear plan to slow walk the January 6th case. The second is Aileen Cannon acting as Trump's only competent defense attorney by basically tabling the secret documents case. The most damning cases will be held off until after the election. We need to come to peace with that. I have no idea what's happening in the Georgia case; hopefully Fani Willis is getting her shit together.
The third thing is actually less about the law and more about the consequences for Trump. There are no cameras in the NY courtroom for the hush money trial. That's...unfortunate.
The reason is linked to Trump's psychology, one that extends to his particular brand of politics. Trump is about dominance (Marshall lays out how this will play out in his Veep pick). His entire "brand" is that "he alone" can vanquish the dark forces of wokeness and socialmalism that Biden is cramming down American's entirely heterosexual throats. His appeal is exactly to those Americans who crave a strong man dictator to punish the enemies and boogeymen that Fox News and AM radio have been cramming into the fetid and dark recesses of their brains since the '90s.
This trial - regardless of the outcome - is a systematic dismantling of that strong man mythos. Today's testimony was a good example of that. Melania sleeps in a separate bedroom; Trump compared Daniels to his daughter; Trump was needy. Then there is Trump's alleged flatulence and falling asleep. If this was on camera, it would be devastating to him.
As it is, I would expect that today's testimony was so psychically damaging to him that he will violate the gag order in the next 72 hours. He won't be able to help himself.
It is meaningless, at this point, to note that Trump has been given every latitude in all of his cases that non-ex-presidents would not be given. He will attack Daniels soon. His need for dominance demands it. Hopefully, Merchan will follow up and throw him in jail. Sadly, it might be the only time he sees prison bars before the election.
A good piece of actual journalism on the new migration. One thing that I think it may have downplayed too much is that these new migrant networks have been funneling people to Europe, a phenomenon that led to Brexit and Orban in Hungary.
It's easy to compare this problem to narcotics since drug cartels have supplemented their income with migrant smuggling. But in many ways this is a problem similar to climate change - even if climate change is probably amplifying the desire to leave the Global South. Because the primary will to address this issue is in America and Europe, the needs of those poorer countries are largely ignored. A country like Niger might simultaneously want to solve climate change and want economic development and need to facilitate "excess" people into migrant chains and want to keep its most skilled and motivated workers at home.
Interdiction and deportation are about as effective in solving this problem as it was with drug smuggling networks. However, the fact that the existing system is indeed broken was the point of the bipartisan Senate bill that the House GOP killed.
Finally, it's worth noting an underlying truth to this story: seems like a lot of people want to risk everything to come to this country. Which is weird, because both Trumpists and Leftists keep saying how much is sucks here.
Josh Marshall has been tracking the story - or non-story - about the people who attacked the protest encampment at UCLA. Let me start by clarifying my position, since I think I've written a fair amount about the protests, but it's an on-going story with myriad facets.
- Encampments should be allowed as much as possible, as long as they do not interfere with instruction or other important campus functions.
- Breaking and entering buildings or threatening people is not protest.
- What constitutes a threat can be very tricky in the context of these protests.
- Instruction and dialogue should precede police action.
- There are a host of conditions (both unique to these protests and emblematic of our society right now) that can easily empower those looking to escalate things.
At UCLA, a group of people attacked the encampment. It appears deliberate and premeditated. It's an actual example, apparently, of "outside agitators".
Marshall notes that there have been no arrests, despite the mobilization of both journalistic and police investigative resources. This isn't surprising when unraveling what appears to be a conspiracy. They are still arresting January Sixers.
Here's the thing. Let's assume that these are, in fact, right wing militia types - Proud Boys and the like - whose Islamophobia is stronger than their anti-Semitism. Let's also assume that they get arrested.
A story like this tends to disappear, because it doesn't fit an existing narrative in people's minds. Biden has quite rightly called for an end to violent and threatening protests on campus, but that won't really matter, because Biden is "pro-college students" in general. People rely on these frames at the exclusion of actual evidence. The most perverse of these frames is the idea that Republican administrations are better for the economy (and thus Trump's economy was better than Biden's). The GOP is "pro-business" but that often results in poor outcomes for most people. However, that frame insulates them from answering for bad policy.
There are a lot of ways that our media is unequal to this moment, but we have to acknowledge that some of that inadequacy is because their audience simply can't grok the truth.
Erik Loomis does Erik Loomis things by highlighting an essay by Stephen Hahn on America's illiberal past. It's a litany of things that America and Americans have done since their founding that are not part of the Fox News-type history.
Loomis concludes:
I suppose their is still room for the kind of happy, celebratory histories of this nation that many people want, I guess if people want to lie to themselves, that’s their right.
The problem with this, is that it's quite easy to read this as any history that celebrates America's very real accomplishments and ability to change is Pollyanna-ish whitewashing of America's sordid past. This reading of history - Hahn's and Loomis's - erases the broader context of America in the world at large. Europe and almost every other major culture was highly hierarchical. America tried to build a similar class structure, but it failed because land was so available for poorer classes to move into. Instead, America built its hierarchies on race.
Hahn mentions anti-Catholic bigotry, and I do to in my classes. It's a hugely important and underrated force in American history. The fact that we have a Catholic president - and no one really knows he's Catholic - is a fairly interesting development. Kennedy's Catholicism was a huge liability for him in 1960; Biden's and even John Kerry's is completely unremarkable.
The problem with America-As-Great-Satan history is that it becomes just as flat and opaque as hagiography. If the point of history is to understand the complicated relationship between cause and effect, then reading Howard Zinn and only Howard Zinn is overcompensating, to put it mildly.
There's a direct line between this presentist view of history that leads to Princeton removing the name Woodrow Wilson from their school of international relations, because Wilson was, indeed, a very racist person. He was not, however, unusually racist for his time and especially his place. What's more, until recently, he was not primarily known for his racism; he was known for articulating a new vision of international relations. John C. Calhoun of Yale, on the other hand, was known primarily for his defense of slavery. Same goes for just about every Confederate officer and official.
Once you flatten Wilson to just his racism, then you aren't learning history - you're proving your bona fides and uttering the shibboleths that open doors in academia. It's less important that Jefferson was a racist that it is in understanding how an otherwise admirably person could be so seduced by so toxic a form of illiberality.
Of governor Kristi Noem continues to lie and engage in psychopathic behavior, it seems pretty clear that she's a shoe-in to be Trump's VP. Game respects game.
This is a good idea: a global tax on the very richest people on the planet. The reason it has to be global is because wealth - especially investment wealth - is highly mobile and there will always be a poor country that will lavish attention on the super-rich to get them to move there.
Enforcement becomes trickier, since the UN generally can't figure out how to open a paper bag with instructions, and you'd worry about pariah states like Russia ignoring international enforcement.
Still.
Imagine what a global wealth tax could do to create a global climate action fund.
The early reporting on these type of incidents is almost universally crap. How many protestors were students? Did police use tear gas? It's almost always fog of war type situations.
There have been some good articles today that I think help clarify what is happening.
First, it seems pretty clear that a lot of college administrators overreacted or looked at Columbia as a blueprint of what to do instead of what to avoid. As Tyler Austin Harper writes at The Atlantic, universities have marketed themselves as places were student activism is lauded and encouraged...right up until it isn't. Under my new mantra "Administrators Mostly Suck", the incentive for administrators is not a pedagogical response, but one that "makes the problem go away" which inevitably makes the problem worse. By trying to find a short cut they manage to piss off everyone. Excellent job, give yourself a raise!
Second, Nick Kristoff makes the, I think unassailable, point that the romanticism of 1968 clouds the fact that massive student unrest likely contributed to Nixon's election that year, and Nixon prolonged and even expanded the war. In sheer tactical terms, those protests didn't work - even if they were right on the overall merits of the futility and therefore immorality of the Vietnam War.
Kristoff writes:
I think that history is worth remembering today. Good intentions are not enough. Empathy is not enough. I’m sure we all agree that it’s outcomes that matter. So the question I would ask you to ask yourselves is: Are your encampments and sacrifices — more than 1,000 protesters have been arrested so far, and unknown numbers have been suspended or expelled — actually helping Gazans?
Of course, most protestors aren't really thinking about outcomes - or if they are, it's largely wishcasting. It reminds me of the woman arrested for threatening the Bakersfield (I think) city council, because they wouldn't issue a call for a ceasefire in Gaza. How - exactly - was Bakersfield the linchpin in a ceasefire strategy when it has largely been Hamas who have turned their back on ceasefire negotiations? In fact, I could see Hamas seeing the protests in the US as an incentive to NOT negotiate a ceasefire. Since the hostages are likely dead, they can vaguely hand waive away actual plans for a ceasefire, Israel will invade Rafah and thousands more martyrs will be created, and Israel will get the blame.
As usual, Josh Marshall makes the most sense. He relates an episode from his college days when there was a protest and discussion turned to breaking into and seizing an administration building. One person argued for using some sort of noxious gas to empty the building and a few agreed with this position before others shouted the dumb idea down. I'll return to Kristoff:
A thought: Humility is an essential tool in persuasion (not that I always get this right!). The challenge is to take an unflinching moral stance while acknowledging that one may eventually be proved wrong. Holding onto that contradiction curbs the tendency toward self-righteousness and the impulse to shout down others — both of which have persuaded exactly zero people ever.
Many students are peacefully calling attention to injustice in Gaza, combining passion with humility, and I believe that unnecessary violence from the police is also inexcusable and makes it harder to resolve this campus crisis.
Still. At Yale, protesters set up tents and blocked off a “liberated zone” in a public space that for a time people were allowed to enter only if they committed “to Palestinian liberation” and related principles, according to The Yale Daily News. It strikes me as ironic that one of those principles was zero tolerance for discrimination of any sort.
The natural idealistic ardor of young people can very easily curdle into its own form of intolerance. There can only be one true church, after all.
Marshall concludes with an observation that echoes Kristoff's concern about what the protestors think they are accomplishing:
In any case, images of public disorder seldom redound to the benefit of parties of liberalism or the center-left. And they basically never “heighten the contradictions” and lead to a new revolutionary millennium. They almost always redound to the benefit of the political forces of reaction. They also play a necessary role in our society and our politics. The devil is in the details.
Erik Loomis thinks we shouldn't frame the protests as what impact they have on the coming election, but he's the worst sort of Ivory Tower leftist. The most important thing in America right now is whether we degenerate into democratic backsliding. If these protests help elect Trump, then that is objectively bad for Gaza, Palestine and Muslim Americans in general.
The romance of protest movements is what makes them seductive to a rootless population of young people craving a place where they feel both at home and important. That romance, however, needs to be tempered by knowing what you are actually trying to accomplish. No matter how many student are arrested, it's not going to lead to a revolution. It might actually prolong the fighting in Gaza and help elect Trump.
Florida's abortion ban went into effect today. Now, women fleeing across state lines is not as cinematic as police clearing dozens of protestors from a student body of thousands of kids from a camping site on the campus green, but it's arguably more important a story.
I have my doubts that it will get breathless coverage on CNN.
Hamas just rejected the latest ceasefire offer. Fundamental to any ceasefire is a return of Israeli hostages, and it's likely that many of them are dead. Also, Hamas likely thinks - somewhat accurately - that they are winning the PR war. I think, perhaps, they overestimate the ardor of the terminally online, but Israel will likely find a way to screw up Hamas' rejection.
Columbia and several other schools have really stepped on their own dicks here. There are examples of colleges that have engaged with student protestors in the way that educators should. Then there are the schools that somehow think they can appease Elise Stefanik (R-Trump's Ass) and engaged the protestors in exactly the way that they hoped to be engaged.
The historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a book called The March of Folly, where she examined great historical blunders. What made them "folly", argued Tuchman, was that people at the time knew it was a bad idea. It's easy to look back in hindsight and criticize a decision, but if a lot of people in the moment knew it was a bad idea and then people did it anyway, that's folly. Think the invasion of Iraq.
What's been so dispiriting about all the events since October 7th is that each side is being hijacked by the absolute worst voice, if your hope is peace. Netanyahu and Hamas obviously go without saying. However, on college campuses, you have people who are generally and rightly outraged over Israel's indiscriminate use of force in Gaza. You also have people who wish to erase the state of Israel, and yes, you have people who are generally anti-Semitic. What's more, on some campuses you have pro-Israeli actors who want to escalate things and discredit the protestors by shouting anti-Semitic things on the sidelines.
In other words, within a broader protest movement that has real merit there is a subset who want to take things up a notch by blocking access to parts of a college campus. This allows administrators (remember, they suck) to "look tough" for Stefanik and their donors by calling in the cops.
As a result, each side is managing to squander whatever goodwill the extreme actions of the other engenders in "normie" observers.
Because it's Columbia, natural parallels are being drawn to 1968. Several commentators have said things like "When have the students ever been wrong?" (Uh, the Cultural Revolution? The Khmer Rouge?) However, protesting against Vietnam was the right thing to do. Storming Hamilton Hall - whether in '68 or '24 - is taking things up a notch. In both instances the police we called in.
In 1968, Nixon ran as the "Law and Order" candidate and explicitly ran against student protestors (and sort of the riots that attended MLK's assassination). Authoritarianism craves social disorder as a reason to seize power, and Nixon was able to seize on general antagonism towards student radicals. Hell, the same thing happened in 1848 in Europe. Student protestors are easy rhetorical targets as rich, spoiled dilettantes (whether they are or not).
If it's true that anti-Vietnam protests helped elect Nixon, it's worth noting that Nixon:
- Scuttled peace talks that Johnson was holding to try and end the war before election day in 1968. Nixon sabotaged that chance at peace.
- Continued the war for 5 more years.
- Made it palatable to Americans by withdrawing ground troops and bombing the everliving shit out of North Vietnam and invading Cambodia.
So "When have the students been wrong?" would have to include not just the morality of their cause, but the consequences of their actions. The 1968 protests did not end the war - it continued for another 5 years and almost as many Americans died after Nixon's election as before and Vietnamese casualties were probably worse. If - as some historians and political scientists have argued - those protests, especially at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, helped elect Nixon, then that would be an argument that the student's were wrong.
The Law and Order president turned out to be a huge crook, and now we have an actual indicted Trump running on his brand of "American Carnage" that will feed on images of clashes on college campuses.
Ideally, summer vacation disperses some of the vitriol that is currently seething through both extremes of this latest societal divide.
UPDATE: This piece in The Atlantic is a good examination of the tactical pointlessness of the demonstrations.
