I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan. But here goes. This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated: To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters. Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it […]
Donald Trump this morning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” New York Times tonight: “One big question: Experts say Trump’s threatened attacks could be unlawful. It comes down to: What defines a civilian target?”
In June 2013, thirteen years ago, President Obama nominated Samantha Power to serve as US Ambassador to the United Nations. During her Senate hearings, Power was grilled by Marco Rubio, then serving as Republican senator from Florida, about an article she had written many years earlier in The New Republic, suggesting that the United States should take stock of its history and acknowledge with humility some of the mischief it had made in the world. The following exchange ensued. Which makes for some grim reading today, when people wonder how the US got into the mess it has gotten into under Trump in Iran. Reading Power’s words, knowing who became Rubio became, it all seems there, in black and white, […]
According to this latest NBC News poll, 67% of Democrats say that their sympathies lie with Palestinians over Israelis. This is an astonishing sea change in the opinion of a major part of the electorate. Just thirteen years ago, in 2013, only 18% of Democrats said that their sympathies lay with the Palestinians. This shift, moreover, is not confined to Democrats. Thirty-seven percent of independents claim that their sympathies lie with the Palestinians; only twenty-seven percent claim that their sympathies lie with the Israelis. In 2013, those numbers were nearly reversed: 37% of independent voters claimed that their sympathies lay with the Israelis, while only ten percent of independent voters claimed that their sympathies lay with the Palestinians. As NBC […]
Under the headline, “There Were Good Reasons to Depose Maduro,” Bret Stephens writes: Whether failing to remove the regime is a possibly disastrous oversight or part of a yet-to-be-revealed plan, the administration will have to figure out how to get rid of it for good in favor of a legitimate, stable and democratically elected government. Now Stephens is someone who’s on record as claiming that Trump and/or his regime are fascist, authoritarian, and autocratic. Just this past year, he has compared both to North Korea, Nero’s Rome, and much else. Yet here he is, writing as if it’s a real question as to whether this very same leader and this very same regime can create “a legitimate, stable and democratically […]
The opposition of Jewish voters to Zohran Mamdani has been, and will continue to be, a flash point of commentary and conflict over the mayor. It reminds me a bit of how Black voters were often the flash point of commentary and conflict over Bernie Sanders in 2016. In the last year, Michael Lange has emerged as the sharpest analyst of NYC electoral politics. When it comes to the unlikely campaign and career of Mamdani, hardly anyone has equalled Lange’s record of analysis and prediction. In his latest post, Lange takes on the question of Jewish voters and Mamdani. Long story short: Cuomo performed best…among wealthier and older Jewish voters, while Mamdani performed best among younger Jewish voters and those […]
Like many of you, I woke up this morning to the news that the United States government had attacked Venezuela and captured its president, spiriting him out of the country. Though this part of it got hardly got any notice, two days ago, Jumaane Williams, in his inaugural address as NYC public advocate, explicitly invoked Maurice Bishop, the leader of Grenada where Williams’s family is from, as an influence and an inspiration. Bishop, a left-wing revolutionary, came to power in Grenada in 1979. In 1983, his government began building an airport in Grenada, which made the Reagan regime nervous. As rumblings in the US grew, Bishop was toppled in a coup and executed by forces within his own government. Six […]
I finally had a chance to read that long Astead Herndon profile of Zohran Kwame Mamdani in The New York Times, which I recommend. I was especially struck by this passage. Gaspard first met Mamdani in South Africa in 2016, at the premiere for “Queen of Katwe,” a Disney movie set in Uganda and directed by Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair. Gaspard said the young man, just 24 at the time, showed flashes of the charisma that would later serve his entrance into politics. He compared the curiosity and demeanor of young Mamdani to that of — yes — Barack Obama. But Mamdani’s is a story that, like that of many other first-generation immigrants, doesn’t fit neatly into American political conventions […]
He’s been called the best writer to occupy the Oval Office since Ulysses S. Grant. Yet when it comes to Israel’s starving the Palestinians, he sounds like one of those apparatchik academics George Orwell pilloried in “Politics and the English Language.” On the topic of deliberate mass starvation, Primo Levi, in If This Is a Man, his memoir of his time in Auschwitz, wrote, “The lager is hunger: we are hunger, living hunger.” Starvation in Auschwitz—which could easily have been the title of his memoir, and not Survival in Auschwitz, as it was translated into English—was an experience that Levi kept returning to, in all his writing, across his life. These are just a few screenshots of a small selection […]
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s—and this continued into the aughts and 2010s—the dominant idea in liberal foreign policy circles was that of “humanitarian intervention.” The claim was that though states should ordinarily respect the sovereignty of other states, under extreme circumstances, say of genocide or ethnic cleansing, it was not just the right, but the obligation, of the international community, to take coercive action, including using military force and violence, to stop the genocide or ethnic cleansing. Occasionally, the theory went, this might involve or entail toppling the regime that was engaged in the genocide. Thus Vietnam was allowed to invade Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge, Tanzania was allowed to invade Uganda and topple the […]
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Categories
Foreign Policy, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, The State, Violence
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Tags ethnic cleansing, genocide, Idi Amin, Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam
People, particularly political scientists, don’t often read Rip Van Winkle anymore, which is a shame because it’s a story about change in America and how it’s perceived. A man falls asleep before the American Revolution, wakes up after it, and discovers the world has been completely transformed, down to the tiniest details of society. Now imagine a man who fell asleep in 2005. A Republican president has been bombing the shit out of a Middle Eastern country that begins with an I. He’s been cutting taxes for rich people. The New York Times has been warning that Social Security cuts are necessary to preserve its solvency. The man wakes up in 2025. And everyone is saying the world has changed.
In the New Left Review, I think out loud about the longue durée of the tariff question in American politics. Tariffs occupy an outsized place in the American imagination. The first proposal entertained by Congress was a tariff. The slaveholding South first pondered secession, in 1832, over a tariff. After the Civil War, Republicans declared the tariff ‘the foundationstone’ of their crusade against the Democrats. In 1896, William McKinley ran on the slogan ‘Protection and Prosperity’. In 1930, Herbert Hoover destroyed whatever chance he had at reelection for the sake of the tariff. Teddy Roosevelt caught the crazed drift of the country when he declared that, in any discussion of the tariff, ‘I am not meeting a material need but a mental […]
One of the claims that you often hear on the left is that fundamental violations of human rights in the United States are a case of chickens come home to roost. That is, vicious policies that the government enacts abroad or on non-citizens on native soil eventually migrate to how the state treats its own citizens. Yet, listening to the Press Secretary of the White House deal with the administration’s vicious treatment of immigrants, it’s clear that in the right’s imagination, the causality often works in the opposite direction. Here’s the NYT: Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, took aim at the media’s reporting on deportation cases Tuesday, accusing journalists of caring more about the due process rights of […]
MSNBC had on Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor, who claimed there that Signalgate, as it’s now being called, is “likely the biggest national security debacle that any professional can remember.” My first thought was, really? The biggest national security debacle that anyone can remember? Forget Vietnam, which might have well have happened under the Holy Roman Empire. What about, oh, I don’t know, the Iraq War? My second thought was, yeah, probably from the perspective of the “professional” class in DC, who can’t remember what happened two days ago, let alone what happened two decades ago, this probably is the biggest debacle that any of them can remember. My third thought was, wow, even when she’s obviously trying to […]
For the past week, there’s been a lot of discussion on Russia, Putin, Trump, and how leftists are responding to the issue. I’ve been participating in these conversations on social media. This past weekend, the conversation got a little crazy, when Columbia Law lecturer and Harper’s contributor Scott Horton engaged in some wild and irresponsible speculation about how the Russians may be backing certain Democratic primary candidates in the current elections. This morning, Ryan Cooper weighed in on the issue at The Week. I disagree with where he comes out on the issue. I want to say at the outset that I consider Cooper an ally. I don’t know him personally, but I very much admire his work. We follow each other […]
For me, 9/11 will always be a time of tremendous fear, stifling conformism, forced patriotism, and vicious nationalism. Which is why I’ve always found the claim that Trump represents a new authoritarianism, even fascism, to be so fanciful and false. There was a moment in the recent memory of this country when dissent really was stifled, when opposition really was suppressed, when the military and police were sanctified and sacralized, when the Constitution was called into question (not a suicide pact, you know), when the two-party system was turned into a one-party state, when the entire nation was aroused and compelled and coerced to rally behind the dear leader, when questioning the nation-state’s commitment to violence and war provoked the […]
Trigger-warning: some morbid thoughts here, wrought by the day’s events. The one thing that’s made me super-nervous since the election, the major thing that has given me the kind of anxiety a lot of folks have been feeling nonstop since election night, is the possibility of him leading us into war. Not a 9/11-type event but the more old-fashioned escalation to battle, where reckless rhetoric leads nations to stumble or bumble into war. If I’ve had any precedents in my mind for the worst that may lie ahead, it’s not been Hitler, Mussolini, Berlusconi, and all the rest. It’s been World War I. It’s been senseless murder on a grand scale, of the sort the United States is more than capable […]
As I write, migrants and refugees from around the world seeking a respite, refuge, or home in the United States are being detained at JFK Airport. An airport named after a man who, whatever his many failings and faults (I’m no enthusiast or subscriber to the Kennedy mystique), was passionate on the subject of immigration and the migration of peoples. Kennedy was a sharp critic of the country’s immigration restrictions and was, I believe, one of the inspirations, after his assassination, for the 1965 immigration reform bill, which Ted Kennedy pushed hard on the Senate floor. Right now, there is a growing contingent of protesters at JFK; if you can, join them in Terminal 4. In the meantime… We are […]
Donald Trump thinks it’s appropriate to leave out any mention of the Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. So what happens when we remove any mention of the Jews from Hannah Arendt’s final statement in Eichmann in Jerusalem? And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with…the people of a number of other nations…we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. We get an apt description of Donald Trump’s executive order regarding immigrants and refugees—and of our revulsion for it, and for him.
As some of you know, more and more of my commentary now appears on Facebook rather than on this blog. If you’re not averse to joining Facebook, you can catch it there; I encourage you to do so, as the conversations can be quite lively and good, involving lots of different folks. I’m maxed out on friends, but you can follow me. But since a lot of readers don’t want to join Facebook, I’m going to try to make it a regular feature—monthly or semi-monthly—to catch you up to speed on what I’ve been saying there. I’m going to collect various Facebook posts and post them here as a kind of regular journal or diary. Some will be out of date […]
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Categories
Foreign Policy, Middle East, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Al D'Amato, Andrew Jackson, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Israel/Palestine, Muslims, Neil Gorsuch, Obama, Richard Spencer, sanctuary city, Scott Stringer, Steve Bannon, Tish James, Trump
1. Christ on a stick, this is what I didn’t count on with the Kaine pick as VP. The problem isn’t the pick itself: it is what it is (see #2 below). The problem is the ejaculations of joy it prompts among the pundit class and the Twitterati, who now have to sell it to us as the greatest choice of a second since Moses appointed Aaron. And not because the pundits are on the Clinton payroll: I’d have a lot more respect for them if they were. No, they do this shit for free. Out of love. Rapture. And bliss. 2. I’m not one of those people who cares much about a VP pick. I don’t think it tells you […]
Last night, Donald Trump shocked the world, or at least the pundit class, when the New York Times published a wide-ranging interview Trump had given the paper on the subject of foreign policy. Trump said some scary things: that he didn’t think, for example, that the US should necessarily come to the aid of a NATO country if it were attacked by Russia. But he also said some things that were true. Like this: When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger. And while the article makes a muchness of Trump’s refusal to pressure Turkey over its response to the failed coup, the fact is that Obama hasn’t […]
On Friday, in an email to a journalist with whom I had been discussing the murder of five policemen in Dallas, I repeated a point I had been making since Dallas to various friends in private conversations and on Facebook: We’re going to be seeing more [anti-police] violence. The combination of returning military vets, with real training (and in some, perhaps many, cases, PTSD); the widespread availability of firearms; and the persistence of the fundamental grievance at the heart of all of this: it’s a witches’ brew. On top of that, I just have to believe there are some groups out there — less the lone wolves, more little groups — who are asking themselves these very questions [about the legitimacy […]
Michael Tomasky today, seven days after the attack in Orlando: I want to advance a theory: Americans in 2016 may have a less reactive response to terrorism than they had 15 years ago….We may also have figured out, or most of us may have, that the bluster and gasconade of the fear-mongers hasn’t really done us much good. Michael Tomasky in December, four days after the attack in San Bernadino: …the rights you [Muslims] have as Americans have to be earned, fought for….If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If […]