A question from a reader from overseas. Maybe I should follow American politics more closely, but I must say I first heard of the DSA on Noahpinion. How many phone booths would it take to comfortably house the whole group, assuming that there still a few of these relics standing in the world today?
Thank you for the answer, and just to be clear: the "relics" I referred to are the phone booths, not the members of the DSA. I agree that my wording was confusing.
The GOP-Speaker clown show over the past month just proved how disruptive a handful of extremists can be in a highly polarized political environment without solid majorities that can over-ride the extremes. You are assuming groups like this want to make something happen, like passing legislation, in order to be effective. In many cases, extremists want to stop things from happening which is far easier to do and can be done with a handful of people in the current environment.
You can't possibly equate the massive power of an extremely well-funded right-wing extremist majority (with a captured Supreme Court) with 3 House members and a tiny minority of hapless college students (many of whom won't bother to vote) whose collective political power is almost nil.
Maybe consider doing a similarly long article about the Freedom Caucus & their ilk who just shut down legislation for a month and took over the Speakership of the House- you know, actual political actors with power. Examine their motivations, background and ideology. Maybe nice just for context and perspective on how relevant the DSA is.
Or consider an article examining the Israeli state, its occupation and subornement of Palestine, its stated ideology, how that ideology aligns with the American values you cherish and how this all ties back into the geopolitical chess game that you love to write about. Give your readers some perspective to the context and complexity of this conflict from someone nice and centrist they trust. Bonus points for using the word Nakba
The latter article in particular strikes me as an ...illuminating bit of prose for your readers.
Is it a political party? It's sort of hard to tell from Wikipedia. It sounds like a party but the P-word doesn't appear, and I thought everyone in Congress was either R or D.
They are a faction within the Democratic party that exists because US politics ony have two parties. In an MMPD system like much of the world they would be a left wing fringe party.
It's a funny quip, but to echo what everyone is saying below, Gabriel, they are more numerous than you'd think, and they DEFINITELY make a lot of noise online, on social media, and in podcasts (so, all less traditional forms of media and somewhat harder to shine a spotlight on, unless, like Noah, you're dedicated to writing think-pieces about them and providing a lot of links). A lot of their bullshit comes from Twitter, so it's extremely diffuse and normally an amalgam of "takes." This is why, as Noah suggests in his post, their thinking tends to be bombastic but superficial and extremely topical.
Every Wednesday night the leftists get together with BLM and Antifa to discuss Noah's latest musings. There's a Dunkin' around the corner so somebody always brings snacks.
Stop equating ALL the left. This is strawman, bullshit. The VAST MAJORITY of the left hates Hamas. Hamas does not equal Palestineans, just as the fascist Israel government does not equal Jews. Unsubscribed.
This sort of reactive, "you're not saying what you're supposed to," Israeli government is fascist stuff is proving Noah's point. The left is brittle and super reductive. It's not attractive, and frankly it needs to attract if it's going to have any relevance.
"Unsubscribed" - Leftist got triggered hard by the truth, LOL.
P.S. Palestinians EQUAL Hamas. Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas and voted for it, a poll from 2021 shows that "53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is 'most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people'":
Israel did not create Hamas. That was the Muslim Brotherhood.
You are just trolling with half truths. The Israeli government did try to play Hamas against other Palestinian terror groups for a time, that's the true part. That they created or boosted is not accurate.
Ya, "create" is the wrong word, but only by a little, so thanks. Netanyahu didn't play Hamas against "terror groups," he played Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, the goal being preventing a two-state solution with an eye towards keeping control of the West Bank forever.
If one gets too specific it will be revealed that their beliefs are tautological and therefore sheer object level speculation, revealing that one is a silly neurotypical making up fairy tales.
I've tried to listen in to the place where I get the most awful, regular "socialist" thoughts, Chapo Trap House, and since October 7th, it's just been a steady narrative of "USA EVIL." It's laughable that some people actually take that kind of thing seriously, and it should be ignored and pilloried, with enthusiasm. Your post does an excellent job of walking the reader through where a lot of what I'll call the neo-Socialist views have led in the U.S. Hint: a lot of it has been exposed as being extremely kooky and is speaking specifically to the extremely online.
Let's hold that thought and pivot to Israel-Palestine: I've been thinking a lot about how, with this latest flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence, we are finally getting an example of a difficult situation that our current mess of social media-based information-sharing just cannot handle. I think that it exposes our social media sickness for what it is. What I mean by that is, the morass of social media horrors we have been dealing with for at least the last decade has finally run into a problem that it cannot handle in the way most contentious issues have been bounced around in the previous 10-odd years: it's a conflict of extreme complexity, where there are no real "good" guys, where there are a LOT of emotions involved, and where the U.S. bears some responsibility, but the degree to which it is culpable depends a lot on whom you ask.
Why I am thinking about it in this way: I happen to have an academic background in IR, and I spent a not-insignificant amount of time on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the 2006-2007 Gaza pull-out and rise of Hamas in Gaza, however, I just completely tuned out. I concluded that the situation was getting worse, that the two sides simply did not want a peace process to work, and that we were headed for a "new norm" of something bad. I was largely correct about this.
Now, fast-forward to today, and I've noticed a lot of social media posts, as Ian Bremmer (a political scientist and IR specialist of some note) mentioned on the 538 Politics podcast on Monday, have gotten more insane than ever. Some examples: no, the Israeli's are not an example of "colonization" in the way that cheap critical theory-based takes typify it, and what they are doing to Gaza certainly involves the idea of war crimes but it is not an example of "genocide." Hamas is not in ANY way an organization we should be sympathetic to, but yes, the Palestinian people should be sympathized with. Yes, Israel has been doing awful things to the Palestinians for decades, but also, the Palestinians have not had good leaders to advance their cause, some of them have resorted to spectacular terroristic violence against Israeli civilians, and the Palestinian people are often not even supported by their supposed-advocates in the Arab world. And I am being extremely high-level with this summary, as it is incredibly complex and full of depressing, violent history.
So, to conclude: I just watched Alexandra Pelosi's most recent documentary on HBO, "The Insurrectionist Next Door," about a number of January 6th individuals who are all going to jail for their actions that day. In interviews, Pelosi has stated that she doesn't think these people are necessarily crazy, she just thinks that they have ENTIRELY different social media feeds than the rest of us, which leads them to these crazy conclusions. Well, I think the same can be said for the particularly bad socialists, as well, and I think the recent Israeli-Palestinian flare-up serves as an excellent example of why we need to regulate, and in some cases completely dismantle, social media platforms. Again, to quote Bremmer, "I don't think that social media is the entire problem, but I do think that it is over 50% of the problem."
In re the "Insurrectionist Next Door" idea that social media somehow warped minds, I like to point out the Jane Coaston-Bari Weiss "amoral pudding" dialogue.
Insurrections aren't mentally ill. Their minds aren't poisoned by algorithms. It's something else. That something else is, Insurrectionists have agency. They are searching for, and actively seeking out, information that aligns with their lurid curiosity. Algorithms are really good at giving them what they yearn for.
Personally, though, I am against pathologizing political viewpoints. As a liberal, I would find it frightening to be labeled mentally ill because my side lost an election.
I also don't think people have a maga or other fashoid worldview because of some undiagnosed or unexamined depression, schizophrenia or something clinical as found in the DSM.
Ideology isn't something to be treated, because if it is, it will inevitably lead to political manipulation and a dictatorship of the psychiatrist.
There's ultimately some agency, or a rudimentary awareness of ideas and actions, at the root of every decision. In politics, it's important to be able to answer for every idea, action and consequences.
So, I understand what you're saying, but the reason why I think the critique lands is as follows, if you don't mind my addressing your points:
1.) As a liberal, you wouldn't be labeled mentally ill if your side lost an election. You would have to lose an election, and then dispute the results of the election, and then deny the evidence that the election had no significant problems in it and insist that you actually won the election. If you did that, you would be no longer be a liberal, you would be illiberal, which is what these people are.
2.) I agree that ideology isn't supposed to be viewed as something that should be treated, like a mental illness. Recall that what I said was, Alexandra Pelosi said that these people are not crazy, they just rely on a completely different social media feed than other people do. That social media feed is full of misinformation and crazy bullshit, and you are correct to point out that these people "want" to believe that stuff for a variety of reasons.
3.) If you watch the documentary, surprisingly, all of these people save one admit that what they did, they did by their own choice. So, they accept that they had agency in storming the capital.
All minds are poisoned by the media they consume, it's how human cognition works. There are safeguards from this natural behavior but they are not taught in Western cultures...if anything, the opposite is taught.
Thank you. That’s a wonderful essay articulating so well my own nascent and emerging views. Much the same analysis applies to “the left” in the U.K. and Ireland. I find many on the left especially irrational critics of the USA are Libertarian at heart and frankly almost indistinguishable from Trumps MAGA morons.
If only they *were* Libertarian at heart. A Libertarian can happily accept the sharing of views that are not his. Instead, the "left"ish grassroots has not only a fiery intolerance of heterodox viewpoints (right now over in the Twittersphere they're busy pilloring Sascha Cohen and Stephen Fry, among others, for daring to sign their names to an open letter calling for the release of all Hamas hostages), but a sneering, anti-intellectual contempt for the very process of free and open discussion.
Say what you will about libertarians, but you can't say they're not at least willing to discuss their points in the face of counterpoints, and discuss them and discuss them and discuss them some more.
This is simply untrue of the U.K. The country has many, many problems but U.S. levels of partisanship are not one of them. I suggest following Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, on twitter for extensive data on this. Of course there are always some idiots but that’s irrelevant to the overall very positive trend. Thanks
Yes conservatives in Britain are to the left of democrats on some issues and moderately to the right of them on others. This doesn’t stop people who are themselves driven by US “progressive” ideology to claim the Tories are importing culture wars though.
Thanks, this is interesting. I lived in England, I am living in the US, so it is not a total surprise. On the other hand, that the numbers are showing it so clearly is a surprise.
This touches on many issues, but is missing the core diagnosis of what has gone wrong with the socialist left.
I'll offer my theory as someone who went deep in this world in 2016 via Sanders and left a couple years later in disgust.
My diagnosis: as the democratic party moved left on a lot of reasonable issues in response to Sanders, these leftists wanted to maintain their identity of being truly left - not progressives or liberals in the corrupt DNC fold - and so further radicalized. In particular, they have an intense focus on reading/understanding/reviving Marx - which helps explain a lot of the bad views both in terms of economics and theories of power you describe.
The only place I'd quibble is with regards to your argument against the theory of change by moving the Overton window.
I would argue that Bidenomics is in fact a cooptation of Bernienomics - and would never have defined the Biden presidency were it not for Bernie and the socialist left having so effectively moved the Overton window - and thus the entire democratic party - to the left.
This shift left many Bernie supporters far fewer defining wedge issues - and many had built an identity around being the vanguard and anti DNC. Some, like me, responded to the leftward shift by being more positive about the Democratic party as a whole- while those left in the DSA responded by finding new wedge issues and reading Marx - basically going from democratic socialist to communist.
That's my theory of what went wrong with this crowd: it started winning on the issues and started gaining power, and didn't know what to do with that because so much of its ideological identity was wrapped up in never having power, never compromising, and always losing.
I think this is getting close. I voted for Sanders twice in the primaries and am now a huge admirer of Biden, by far the best president of my lifetime and the best since LBJ. I think the world changed more than I did.
Looking back to 2016 you have to remember how apparent it was that Obama-era liberalism had completely failed since 2010. Obamacare was a huge accomplishment but really the only lasting one. The Democrats had been driven out of power in most states and the GOP was not too far from having enough governorships and state houses to do a constitutional convention. Clinton dead enders seemed to have no answers to this problem - I listened to Chapo Trap House not only because it was funny but because it was one of the few sources of media that made me feel like I wasn't crazy in noticing this.
It turns out that younger voters, the Squad, Bernie's campaign etc. did successfully move the Democrats' Overton window to the left, and Biden is governing way further to the left than most give him credit for. But, just as Clinton supporters were stuck in 2016 the left got stuck in 2020 - 2016 was an obvious disaster but also a thrilling crack in the status quo and an opportunity to drag the US leftwards as much as rightwards. That moment ended in the pandemic, and liberalism (temporarily) proved itself a lot more resilient than activists thought. They still want that moment back.
I think part of it was a massive misreading of 2016-2020. The trump ascendance was never due to economics, just racial anxieties. When Biden got nominated and then elected they had to confront that the BLM marches and other social attitudes were not some awakening of "class consciousness" but a push against racism in institutions.
You are correct that the left was a protest movement who briefly caught the car that they never expected to and I don't think they ever had a plan for what happened when they did that
I think it may be the case that millennials think of the economy the same way boomers think about urban crime - permanently bad, because that's what they experienced in their young adulthoods and they never update their priors.
There is some psychological truth to what you said. And it is experienced at the scale of culture. Think of scarcity mindset, shared by a generation.
The Great Depression loomed heavily over Americans for basically the entire 20th century, and people who lived through it harbored a scarcity mindset throughout their lives -- even when after World War II brought times of unprecedented economic growth and plenty. Bob Hope was the most famous case of this. He became a supremely wealthy entertainer as well as a very successful investor (he had a hand in turning the San Fernando Valley from farmland to postwar suburbia). Yet throughout his life, he himself lived very frugally and shopped at the store and dined at fast food restaurants with coupons. All while having millions of dollars to his name.
I think it's mostly other stuff right now. Rent and housing are unprecedently expensive now that we're finding out what cutting off the urban growth machine actually did to housing markets and inflation is newly a phenomenon for the first time in lots of adults' lives. I also frankly suspect that a lot of millennials in the middle and upper professional classes just genuinely liked the slack labor market/ZIRP economy of the 2010s through the Trump era. Turns out that when service workers can start demanding wages of $20/hr or more things get a little pricier.
Sidenote: All those copypastas about Danish McDonald's worker making roughly that amount of money and the Big Macs costing the same never mention that Americans in the upper half of the income distribution outearn their counterparts in Western Europe by wide margins, even in the richer parts.
However, millennials being conscripted into the smiley-face precariat has pretty much described their whole adulthood.
Millennials have only known two kinds of adulthood: The Housing Theory of Everything Adulthood and The Great Recession Adulthood.
The Housing Theory of Adulthood, roughly the Clinton dot-com boom to 2006-07, and from 2010 to the present, is where there is plenty of work but everything is expensive and you'll be a debt serf for life. Then there was the Great Recession Adulthood, where housing and everything else was cheap but that is also because unemployment is sky-high and people with advanced degrees are competing with immigrants and single mothers for retail and security guard jobs.
We ended up coming out of the Great Recession with the realization that real estate is the prosperity monopsony. We have a collective belief that real estate's value as an asset can never go down, lest we get another Great Recession and affordability the hard way. Or, alternatively, housing cannot be affordable without shearing the value of all existing real estate.
You are so right about this: "As the democratic party moved left on a lot of reasonable issues in response to Sanders, these leftists wanted to maintain their identity of being truly left - not progressives or liberals in the corrupt DNC fold - and so further radicalized." I noticed some of my progressive/leftist friends and acquaintances starting to coalesce their political ideology around loud, angry opposition to "liberals" who they criticized as often, or even more often, than the MAGA right who I used to think were our shared antagonists. When this particular wing of the left began anchoring their discourse in "owning the libs" almost to the same extent as right wing reactionaries, I should've known we were doomed. Even so, watching leftists actively celebrate Hamas's mass murder and torture of Jews has been sobering and devastating.
yeah i think this is the main thing, the people attracted to socialism are the highly educated downwardly mobile, but it's been intellectually dead for decades, so it ends up being people concerned with being left-er then everyone else that embrace nonsense political positions and strategies because they don't even particularly want to accomplish anything.
I have never trusted DSA, even back in the days when it was DSOC. Why? Well, I remember their behavior in the 1980 election. In the 2000 election.
But those memories pale to my lived experience as a political activist. Whenever I raised concerns about women, about minorities, I was always put off by the DSA/DSOCers with a dismissive "Oh, the class revolution will take care of that." Yeah. Right.
Meanwhile I was observing racist and sexist behaviors in the leadership, along with accelerationist inclinations and a lack of interest in organizing at the local level in favor of high-visibility national organization. The only interest they showed on the local level involved trying to monetize political organizing through the use of paid canvassing for assorted organizations.
For those of you who read Seth Cotlar's Rightlandia Substack, I was observing the Walter Huss organizing efforts in the Oregon Republican Party in real time and trying to get someone, anyone, on the Left interested in doing that sort of organization on the left/Democratic party circles. I wrote essays and talked to people.
Crickets. Dismissive comments that added up to "there, there, don't worry your pretty little head."
Now, in my elder years, I see exactly the scenario I dreaded coming into fruition. I feel a little bit like Cassandra. Sigh.
With respect to 2000 obviously America would be stronger had Gore won…but Nader actually contributed many positive things to not just America but to the world. Obviously Africa would have at some point started receiving HIV meds as India and Brazil solved the AIDS crisis by 2000…but Nader was instrumental in speeding up the process in breaking the Big Pharma patents that eventually led to the life saving drugs being distributed in Africa. I just don’t think Bernie and Warren compare to Nader and his myriad of accomplishments.
Oh, and I supported Kerry and volunteered for him but 2021 shows that had Kerry won it would have been a disaster. An incompetent president like Bush and Trump deserves to be president when their cynical and reckless policies lead to disastrous outcomes like 2005-08 and now…although Biden is doing a solid job navigating everything but his approval is still relatively low.
Oh please. Nader was best at promoting Nader. He and his followers had no concept of how to govern, and I will never, ever forgive him or them for giving us Bush Too.
Our elections are very close…I think Elian Gonzalez and Republicans taking an extremely irresponsible position on that case is what lost Florida and that election. The fact Democrats saying let the legal process play out while Bush said give him citizenship and screw his commie father was able to get Cuban Americans riled up in Florida is one of the stranger things in America political history. Obviously I care about all Americans but the Americans that did the worst under Bush were Republicans which is why GOP voters rejected Bush/Cheney/Hastert in favor of Trump. I feel sorry that people in Ohio’s jobs were shipped to China while their sons were shipped to Iraq…but elections have consequences.
"If you’re going to complain about a whole group of people, it’s important to be clear about who’s in that group."
So when you verbal tick that "right wing" people do not want immigrants who are not white-skinned, maybe you could heed your advice and be clear about what you mean by "right wing"
BTW, I'm with you whole-heartedly regarding Israel (a place I have visited many times in the past) the topic of your post. Hamas roughly translates to "Party of Shit," though scholars argue in the precise meaning.
The old school socialism of a voice for the working class isn't the socialism of today. More Americans would be on board with economic liberalism, a higher minimum wage, and worker empowerment, if it didn't come as a package deal with progressive orthodoxy on issues like abortion, racial justice, policing, gay rights, transgender issues, or the proper way to deal with climate change. Black Americans are the hypothetical median group for a workable socialism for America, they're economically liberal, but socially conservative, which aligns with the larger group of White Americans without a college degree who on average hold similar views on social issues, and Hispanic Americans who probably fall somewhere in the middle. Some progressives don't realize or don't hang out with people who don't have degrees, so they don't realize how far outside the median opinion they are on social issues, or they don't care because they have an unerring belief that they'll be proven right eventually. Maybe, maybe not, but I'd rather win elections and help people in the present day, and work with the electorate we have.
Americans want some of the same things as the progressive left, but they're not gonna align themselves with people they think are immoral or crazy, by defunding the police, when most Black Americans want more police in their neighborhoods, but better quality policing, or no limits at all on abortion, when most Americans want exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or when the mother's life is in danger, but with a ban after 20 weeks, excluding medical complications past that point. These people are a subset of American society, but they act like they speak for the majority of Americans.
100% spot on! The first party that figures out that left-wing economics and right-wing social policy is a winning combination will win in a landslide. The GOP is closer than the Dems right now, but we'll see what happens. Yesterday's speakership vote was a huge step in this direction for the Republicans.
This seems like a good synopsis of what is described in the large Corporate/Richy Rich owned press, NY Times, WAPO, Wall Street Journal, but not accurate to the people. It keeps the divide and conquer going. Defund the police was picked up by the Corporate Press to discredit what was truly meant, which was better policing for all. Think of all the Congress folk who make their decisions while smoking dope, doing coke, supplying coke (big money, of course it is a DC thing), but none are ever arrested ( which is the current law)..
How interesting is it that women in Texas, since you'll seem to support the demise of Roe, have died in childbirth at 1,000 more than ever prior, since Roe was destroyed by a group of Supreme Jesters. There were limits in Roe, as you write. But, once again, this is lost in the Evangelistic, illegal ( US has a constitutional amendment to get religion out of government), male oriented (perhaps we need to do something about your privates, as with a knife and in your throat to overcome overpopulation for a generation or two-now that would really have an effect, to do something to your genitals).
There are folk with only high school formal education who have open minds. However, there are many more, whose minds are closed. Many privileged, college graduate white men and their families who refuse to recognize the beneficial effect of their privilege for themselves, just because they don't want to loose it, or share it, or acknowledge it, or live with what it means to have done this to other people.
I find the polls, have glimpses of reality, but no real hold.
One reason for the Left's / left's focus on Palestine which tends to go unstated is that it's worth criticising Israeli policy because there's at least a chance of influencing it whereas with China and Russia etc. you're simply wasting your breath. Israel is a corner of a foreign field that is forever Western. But views about how to keep it that way differ wildly.
This is a good point, although I hardly think this reason tends to go unstated. I hear it all the time. It is often expressed as a rejoinder to a question like "Why are you so focused on Israel, when there have been 3x as many deaths in the Syrian Civil War since 2011 than in all Israel-related conflicts since the 1920s?"
I just don't think that argument stands up to much scrutiny. There absolutely is a way to influence China and Russia, it's a multi-national coalition called NATO, and lefties are firmly opposed to it. A key part of standing up to China and Russia is defending our allies and not allowing them to be swallowed up (in this case by Iran).
Moreover, in the context of the present-day Israel-Hamas war, the US is supporting a long-time ally in a multi-front proxy fight with Iran. This is something you will never hear lefties acknowledge. There is just Israel and Palestinian victims.
The thing is, throw away this crucial context, and all the takes that follow are just silly.
Iran is a present-day imperial power. They have militias on the ground right now that have overthrown or are presently overthrowing governments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine. They are hard at work at reproducing the same in every other Middle Eastern country. The US has been engaged in this multi-headed conflict for decades, allying with more moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
None of those three Arab states, all long-time US allies, have anything close to clean human rights records or proper democracy. Where is all the lefty outrage about the (lethal) support they receive from the US?
Lefties are trapped in a stupid "Israel Colonizer Thief" narrative, that is totally detached from the actual situation on the ground, and US interests in the region.
Absolutely, the inconsistencies and double-standards are absurd. But the Left we're talking about here isn't about values and policies, it's Christianity without God. They're the intellectual heirs to St. Francis and Savonarola for the global age: distrust wealth, attack existing institutions, love the other and mistrust your own. They are perverse so who they choose to criticise reveals who they feel close to.
The real problem with this part of the Left is that they simply don't consider the consequences of the positions they take - why should they? most of them have no skin in the game and they intentionally bypass policy-makers out of high-minded contempt. In the context of UK politics 'A Left for Itself: Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism' by David Swift is very good on this theme.
I keep wondering who the heck you folk are talking about. Do you live in RED states?
Do you read widely ? Are you from the Middle East, a complex history, sadly wrongly harmed by US interventions over at least 60 years? You hate all Blue states, left thinkers, but we are the ones who are economically self sufficient, have not destroyed the entire environment of the middle of the country, like the Red states, who listened to Monsanto, instead of ecological health. WE lefties, are paying for you to live, if you are in a RED state. YOU have only reinforced my work for Blue state Secession. You cut the hand that feeds you. YOU are unable to be competent. You are unable to discuss ideas, when mostly you name call and deliver partial information. wow.
Of course, many bad things are happening in the US. But the source is Richy Rich and the Corporations. the Common good, which those of us 'elitists' were educated in as young folk, were also educated that we had a deep and serious obligation to give more than we might imagine, toward US 'common good' . A concept, Richy Rich and the Corporations have deconstructed over 45 years, starting with the actor , Reagan. Many of my baby boom colleagues appear to have given up on this and gone for comfort. But, not all of us. And, certainly, I am not going to keep paying for people who are taking my country back 400 years. Go back by yourself.
Leftists look at the world through the prism of victim and opressor. The victim is always right, and the opressor is always wrong.
Doesn't matter if the purpoted victim is not a victim at all but a brutal murderer that decapitates babies and cuts open fetuses out of pregnant women's bellies. This is 'justified' because 'this is how decolonization looks like'.
Leftists are like children that keep believing in fairytales long after they are proven to be just that - fairytales.
The same people that claim "real communism has never been tried" are claiming "real peace with murderous Arabs has never been tried"... even though Israel did the Oslo accords (and got 10000 victims of terror in return), then it got out of Gaza in 2005 (and got rockets and thousands of victims since then). If only Israel gives the Arabs more concessions, maybe they will stop murdering Jews and actually do something useful with their lives.
P.S. I would just like to reminder again that majority of Palestinians voted and support Hamas. Palestinians ARE Hamas.
Dozens of polls clearly show that Palestinians overwhelming and consistently voted and support Hamas:
Something I've struggled with the last 3 weeks is what the appropriate response to having 2M genocidal people on your border actually is?
I keep thinking of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. If they had a magic button in 1941 that could vaporize every Nazi soldier and sympathizer, would it have been ethical for them to use it? Even if it resulted in the extermination of large portions of the German population (the Nazis also "won elections")? I have to conclude that it would have been. Even without the benefit of hindsight, the Nazis were clear about what they wanted to do. Had Jews had the ability to stop it, it would have been unethical for them NOT to use it, regardless of the cost.
What if the only way Israel can be safe is to (figuratively) nuke Gaza? To push that button? Is it still ethical? I don't know.
The fact that you would even conceive of this thought experiment is telling of your morality, sympathy and ability to empathize with strangers. How could you ever reduce this Palestine Gaza question “what if you could push a button and commit genocide instantly?”
I hope noone ever puts you in charge of life and death of anyone. Its clear to me that you could find a way to justify mass slaughter. You are an empty vessel, filled with no moral principles to call your own.
You also need to do some reading about the Nakba and what Israeli occupation looks like.
Calling people names is easy, but what is your solution?
And please don't pretend that any form of "occupation" (an odd term when Israel has been 100% out of Gaza for 15 years) can justify the modern-day "massacre of the innocents" that we witnessed 3 weeks ago.
The Gazans have elected Hamas. All polls prior to October 7th indicated that if new elections were held, the Gazans would do so again. Where Hamas lost support is not to more moderate groups but to groups like Islamic Jihad that never stopped launching attacks against Jews. Calling Gazans a "genocidal" people is not a stretch at all.
I take it from your comment that you believe Polish and German Jews had an obligation to allow themselves to be slaughtered by the millions instead of "vaporizing" those that sought their deaths? Do they still have that obligation? Do Christians? Does everyone? Are you willing to apply that to yourself personally? Lay down your life instead of fight back against someone who seek to hurt or kill you? These are very old ethical questions that you seem unwilling to honestly wrestle with.
I'm not trying to rag on you personally. Honestly. I think you are reflective of a large percentage of Westerners who simply cannot conceive of large scale "kill or be killed" scenarios.
I don't need to present a solution to the current conflict to tell you that your genocide-as-a-button thought experiment is prima facie sociopathic, barbaric nonsense. If you believe in any - any - moral values at all besides might makes right then you would know that this is a complete non-starter. If you understood the history of these kinds of sectarian conflicts being resolved you would know that its possible to solve this kind of shit without contemplating genocide AT ALL.
Like seriously, thats what you are suggesting.
Before I comment on a solution I would also like to say that Israel has not earned my blind loyalty and sympathies. Not with their past actions - consider that Gaza faces a land and sea blockade and had their only airport bombed, for example, or their actions in illegally settling *and occupying* the West Bank - but their current government; who is in it and what they have done. People like:
- Bezalel Smotrich, current Minister for Finance, who believes that the Gaza Strip, all of the West Bank, parts of Lebanon and Jordan make up "greater Israel" and has advocated for literal pogroms of Palestinian towns
- Itmar Ben Givir, a literal convicted Jewish supremacist terrorist who is the Public Security Minister, who is trying to subvert the election process at the municipal level and install preferred candidates extrajudicially and is withholding funding from Muslim majority towns and villages and leads religious incitement marches to the Al Aqsa mosque constantly
- Netenyahu himself, a snake in the grass who noone trusts, under investigation domestically for a bribery scandal involving manipulating the local media, who gives as PM state support to illegal settlements in the West Bank, who has written disparagingly of the humanity of Palestinians on human terms. This guy reeks.
The current Israeli government has for the last 10 months had protests against anti-democratic, we-pick-the-judges reforms.
These people will not get a blank card from me because of a tragedy to do what they want with no critique or scrutiny, for the same reason that I would not trust the Trump administration to prosecute a reasonable and proportionate response to 9/11 (Or any Republican since Eisenhower really, but thats neither here nor there).
Then we talk about the actual actions being taken. These people are not level headed actors. The current 8000 people dead and completely levelled neighbourhoods are case and point. No access to food, water, fuel and electricity supplies. As for the other Palestinian region, well, the Israeli government is patrolling the West Bank nightly and arresting political activists. Internally in Israel itself, they passed a law allowing them to suspend the media license of Al Jazeera because of critical news coverage.
Externally, the Abraham Accords across the Middle East have fallen apart. The Middle East points out the hypocrisy with new anti-Israeli furor in public polls across the region. Turkey's Erdogan just yesterday got a standing ovation in Parliament saying that he supports Hamas as liberation fighters because of the senseless violence. Thats new.
... and I'm to accept all of this without any critical thought.
How is this making Israel safer? These people, at the end of this conflict will have to live next to each other quite literally forever. How does angering everyone, fracturing alliances, burning bridges and making hypocrites out of your allies secure Israel's future? Do you not see how levelling Gaza is radicalizing? How it creates support for Hamas, culls support for non-violent protest and creates terrorists tomorrow?
My solution to the conflict starts with an immediate ceasefire and the end of US vetoes in the Security Council on a resolution saying exactly that. This a calamitous tragedy and needs to stop immediately. Then blockades must be relaxed so the Palestinian people do not starve to death or have healthcare system completely fail as it will in ... a day as of their reporting yesterday.
After that then hostages can be released and ideation on a new status quo can be discussed. Its clear that Qatar, Turkey, the UAE, Saudi, Iran, Hezbollah and Jordan all have different stakes in helping to mediate. The US should be at minimum be looking for some kind of grand negotiation table with some/all parties - assuming ofc that Joe Biden still after going on television and saying that Palestinians are lying about how many people are dead can convene anything. At the very least the Israeli government will need to change too; the people in power now will never lead a non-genocidal resolution to this conflict. Hamas is by far the weaker power and while material does have anything close to the agency that Israel does over the situation.
Finally, the boot must be removed from the throat of Palestinians; they must be allowed to exercise non-violent protest. The pressure campaign to see BDS movements banned globally must stop. UN resolutions need to not be vetoed. Israeli police will have to stop arresting every new Palestinian leader with political aspirations other than the status quo, and they will have to stop dying mysteriously.
In the my conversations with *gasp* actual Palestinians, a negotiated settlement to both 1 state and 2 state solutions are possible, if things like this are achieved.
Final point - as to the dichotomy you present at the end. That dichotomy is a false one. This is not the 1967 war. There are a wealth of other options available to Israel. It could have for example, exercised tact and gotten the support of Arab states before exacting revenge. It could have chosen to not refer to the Palestinians on the news as human vermin before invading. It could have chosen to allow water, food, medicine, fuel and electricity to Gaza. Those are just the obvious substantive differences. This siege is a blood price being exacted from the Gazan people not because there are no other choices, but precisely because this is the desired choice; the preferred choice.
Neville Chamberlain called. He wants his foreign policy back. Here are the likely effects of your plan:
"immediate ceasefire" - Hamas will once again rearm, redig the tunnels, get resupplied by Iran, and continue killing Jews at every opportunity.
"end of US vetoes in the Security Council" - The UN security council will pass a resolution condemning Israel while Russia blocks a resolution condemning Hamas. Neither will matter a whit on the ground, but will provide international PR cover for Hamas continued reign of terror.
"the boot must be removed from the throat of Palestinians; they must be allowed to exercise non-violent protest" - Can you show me where Israel has intentionally bombed a non-violent Palestinian protest? Because I can show you where Palestinians have repeatedly bombed busloads of Israeli schoolkids on their way to classes.
"pressure campaign to see BDS movements banned globally must stop" - So those opposed to BDS must be stopped by the power of the state so that only 1 side (and anti-Israel side) can ever be heard? And you would favor this in America and other electoral democracies?
"the Palestinian people do not starve to death" - Egypt can supply the Palestinians through the Rabat border crossing at any time. They have refused to do so. They've also refused to take refugees (for good reason, as it would result in the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt).
"After that then hostages can be released" - Why would they be?
"the Israeli government will need to change too" - And how will you arrange that in a democratic country?
You criticize me for calling the Palestinians genocidal for electing Hamas but you declare the Israeli govt genocidal and illegitimate despite it being democratically elected just a year ago? Democracy means the people's will prevails in law, not RM's will, or Joe Biden's will, or my will, even Enlightenment liberalism in general... but the popular will of the people in that country. The Israeli citizenry has broadly supported a 2 state solution for decades. (Whether they still do today is debatable.) It has always been the Palestinians who have rejected living next door to Israel, not the other way around.
"looking for some kind of grand negotiation table with some/all parties" - I don't know how old you are, but this happened during the Clinton Administration. It was called the Camp David accords and Yasser Arafat was offered legal status as his own country in (I think it was) the West Bank. He flew all the way to Maryland and refused to sign on the dotted line. Turns out being a religious "freedom fighter" (terrorist) is a lot more fun than actually governing. You get to blow stuff up without having to do the hard stuff like build sewer systems and levy taxes and educate a population.
At a fundamental level, just ask yourself what happens if we could snap our fingers tomorrow, take down the militarized border, and suddenly have 2 functional states living next door to each other. No rocket attacks. No blockade. No air strikes. Would Israel spontaneously start a war with its Palestinian neighbor simply out of hatred for them? Would Hamas (the elected leadership of Palestine) start a war with Israel simply out of hatred for them?
My answers to those questions are respectively "no" and "yes". I do not see how you can hold the rest of the positions if you agree with that assessment. Nor do I see how any sane person can conclude that the answer to the second question is "no" under any realistic circumstances. And that's what really causes the problem here. If your neighbor consistently shoots at you every time you leave your house, at some point, you start shooting back. Eventually you might even get a machine gun a lay down cover fire to get to your car. Israel vs Palestinians is that problem writ large.
I know the sentiment that "war never solves anything" is quite fashionable, but it's just not true. In many conflicts throughout world history, war was the ONLY thing that solved them, by killing the most vigorous advocates of the losing side. Go lookup the bombing of Dresden or Tokyo. We did slaughtered 100K Japanese civilians in 1 night. Before Hiroshima. And we were right to do so. Because that's how you win a war: by totally crushing your enemy and forcing his surrender. The only alternative is to leave him capable of doing the same to you. As I said, many Western liberals are very uncomfortable with this reality. Their discomfort doesn't make it untrue.
I'm not giving Israel a blank check here. I largely concur with King Abdullah of Jordan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqgzcw0ISU8). But I simply do not believe both sides have the same genocidal intent. Israel dropped millions of Arabic language leaflets warning Gazan civilians to flee south; I don't recall Hamas dropping any warning leaflets on that music festival.
A more ethical solution is to just pay them to immigrate.
Take the billions of dollars that UNRWA and other NGOs spends to continue the misery of the Gazans, and instead pay each $10K to fly to a country of his/her choice. I'm sure Norway/Sweden/Germany/Insert-generic-Immigrant-loving-EU-country would love to have them. Many hundreds thousands of them have already left and are living in Germany today.
The solution of ANY refugee problem is resettlement, not perpetuating the refugee status for generations until they will eventually 'regain their land'. It isn't going to happen.
Consider that they dont want to leave because they consider the land theirs, because it was before Israel took the land to make the state. You cannot pay people to leave. You cannot make countries - who agree with their right to exist on the land call palestine - take them in. What an ignorant opinion.
Saying "they consider the land theirs" is like saying "Germany considers Poznan theirs" (they built it) or "Spain considers Mexico theirs" (they used to 'own' it). If you start a war, and lose it- you lose the land. You can consider whatever you want but surely you must face reality after 70+ years and realize they are never getting "their" land back.
Arabs already had 80% of the land of Israel in the UN partition decision of November 1947, they were not happy with 80%, and they started a war trying to capture all the land and slaughter all the Jews in Israel. Happily they failed (as they always fail), and they lost the war.
Moral of the story? Don't start wars if you don't accept the stakes.
And the moral for you is to learn more history and stop believing in fairytales.
Every piece of ground in the world has been owned by someone else at some point, and that someone was violently pushed off by another someone, who later was violently pushed off by another someone... wash, rinse, repeat.
Are you equally rabid in your demands for Hungary to regain all its lost territory from the Treaty of Trianon? For Mexico to reclaim California? For Kashmir to become autonomous? Perhaps for American Indian tribes to reclaim all of North America? I'm sure there are some Huguenot descendants we can find to give them central France.
At some point, historical grievances must give way to current practicalities lest we all descend in perpetual blood feuds over things that happened decades or centuries ago.
Go to Gaza then and explain to the destitute stateless masses the "current practicalities". Maybe go find a Palestinian and talk to them and explain that they simply need to accept that they have no rights to live where their grand^10th-father lived because you, Brian Villanueva, say so. That they must be practical in their desire for rights; to live in a place that is not permanently blockaded and that people illegally settle on. They must do so because the acrimony they cause is noisy, annoying and dangerous.
I'm sure some lovely centrist people like yourself told MLK and Mandela similar things. It must feel amazing to be in the position of the "white moderate."
Or you can consider that they will have the right to be there forever and will need some kind of political settlement that will require concessions from more than just them, the much weaker power.
> Maybe go find a Palestinian and talk to them and explain that they simply need to accept that they have no rights to live where their grand^10th-father lived because you
I mean, I have no right to live where any of my 1024 grand^10th-fathers lived either, and I don't lose any sleep over that fact.
Or pay them to use birth control. Gaza has one of the world's highest fertility rates, intentionally. They're in a fertility arms race with Orthodox Jews.
Agreed. I would love that solution. And you're right about the long term answer being resettlement.
Do you know any countries that would take them (even with bribery)? Iran funds them. Iraq wouldn't want an Iranian allied militant group inside its borders. Jordan fought off a Palestinian coup attempt in the 70's. Saudi Arabia could but the Sunni monarchy categorically refuses. Egypt would fall to the Muslim Brotherhood if they did. Lebanon rides a delicate sectarian political balancing act and is broke. Syria is still in a state of civil war. Libya is a failed state (thanks George W Bush).
Turkey is a possibility; I don't know much about Turkish politics. Europe can't assimilate the Muslim immigrants they've already taken (witness Sweden and Germany, as you said.) Further afield... China won't take them as they're already committing genocide against the Muslims they have. Hindu nationalist Modi in India obviously wouldn't. What about Pakistan? Bangladesh? Indonesia? I don't know much about these places, but they might be bribable.
Oddly enough, America is probably the best able to assimilate a large number of militant Muslims, but there is no political will here to do that, not o I think it would actually be a good idea.
One appropriate response is to give your head a shake, because you are hallucinating. You have no way of knowing whether each individual in that group is genocidal, you are imagining it because you have consumed information that has trained your brain to think that way.
Why is everyone in this thread so silly? What is happening on this planet? 🤔
Polling indicates that they would win elections again today.
Hamas says they want to eradicate Israel ("Jordan River to the Sea")
100's of thousands came out to celebrate on Oct 7th on Gaza.
Based on these data points, the conclusion that the vast majority of people in the Gaza strip would kill the vast majority of Jews if given the chance is entirely reasonable.
This is hardly unexpected. What's shocking is the number of Western college students and journalists who are apparently equally genocidal. That's scary.
Only artificial worlds (ala Euclid) contain things that are 100% provable. The real world always contains uncertainty. Based on inference from all available data, I believe calling the Gazans genocidal is valid.
I don’t find the outrage against Chomsky’s “armchair quarterbacking” that compelling - it is a natural tendency to discuss what you think *should* be done and I see no harm in it.
It’s particularly odd coming from a blog that does quite a bit of “armchair quarterbacking” itself, whether it is planning Gaza’s economic miracle, a “three-state solution”, or revitalizing America’s bureaucracy. Yes, negotiation is Ukraine’s choice - but it is not verboten to think the negotiations should go a certain way nor to push for that outcome.
I honestly don't get picking on that Chomsky quote. He just thinks the chances of Ukrainian victory are much lower than Noah thinks, and the odds of nuclear war are higher. If Noah thought Ukraine was embarking down a course leading to certain defeat or possibly much worse, surely he would also support the US forcing them to negotiate.
This is a factual disagreement, not a value disagreement.
The US has never respected Ukrainian agency. Just listen to this leaked phone call where US bureaucrats pick out the entire administration of Ukraine post Euromaidan (just classic US king making).
Unconditional aid for Ukraine is both increasingly politically non-viable and also just not sensible. Ukraine is not going to win back Crimea (a population that massively favors Russia) and making that a condition of any peace settlement will only lead to more war and more violence.
I don't literally mean forcing them, I mean making US aid contingent on Ukrainian decisions. Which is already the case, if Ukraine did something absurd or started committing atrocities the aid would be withdrawn.
I think that although there is so when some truth in your description of the left, you've constructed a straw man. Maybe the left half is more diverse. Here's where I sit: I think money has a lot to say in controlling power in America. You need a lot of money to win elections and than has corrupted both parties and made the Republicans captives of right wing oligarchs. Read Merchants of Doubt, Dark Money, Shadow Network, and Democracy in Chains. All four pretty solid reporting that makes the case for a "vast right wing (and Christian) conspiracy." But I'm very hawkish on Ukraine and wish Biden hadn't been so stupidly measured and slow to respond to aggression. (This from a Vietnam dove willing to go to jail rather than fight in Vietnam.) The reason is that if Putin (a mass murderer who would not honor any peace deal) wins, Xi will be sinking our aircraft carriers and taking Taiwan. That's serious. As for Israel, I agree that Islam is a problematic religion (as are fundamentalist Christianity and Hinduism). But I think one can sympathize with the Palestinians and ask for them to be treated better by Israel precisely because that may be Israel's best long term chance of survival. Israel needs peace. Relying on strategies that increase hatred will eventually run into 3 billion nuclear armed Muslims. And Netanyahu has split Israel a country which cannot afford disunity. The U.S. Constitution initially valued a black as equal to 3/5ths of a white. Israel apparently feels that the value of Palestinian lives must be about 1/10th of Israeli lives, based on the kill ratios they achieve. I can support Israel and hate racism. Racism is what caused the suffering of Jews for 2000 years. If Jews forget about justice they don't have a religion anymore. It's not simple or easy. There's no quick fix. But there are directions that lead towards peace and directions that don't. Killing kids does not lead towards peace--no matter who is committing the "collective punishment" atrocities.
"Israel apparently feels that the value of Palestinian lives must be about 1/10th of Israeli lives, based on the kill ratios"
Pure, unadulterated BS. Israel protects her citizens, Hamas flaunts their suffering. By your definition, every war ever is "collective punishment". Sloppy.
No need for a pissing match, but I do feel Israel has done a bit of "flaunting" about those killed by Hamas. The word "flaunting" (your word) is inappropriate and insensitive when people are mourning deaths of loved ones and pointing out war crimes and atrocities. Whether killed by Hamas or Israel. Collective punishment is when we call the other side "animals" and bomb children. Let me repeat: if I have to choose sides, Israel is my choice. Peace in the Middle East has to include Israel's survival. But I do not think everything Netanyahu has done promotes Israel's long run survival. The continued deposits by both side into the bank account of hatred leads as Gandhi said to everyone blind and toothless at a minimum. And another thing. It is getting way to hard to talk to people we disagree with. Too much self-righteousness. Too quick to go to ad hominem when our arguments are weak. And abandoning the ethics of Judaism is a self-defeating path.
I'm extremely disappointed in this beat you've taken on after October 7th: An obsession with a few leftist freaks and their dumb viral tweets saying "this is what decolonization looks like" or whatever. These people have no real legitimate power and do not represent the majority of legitimate progressives, who are united in simply calling for a ceasefire. Mohammed El-Kurd, arguably the most followed Palestinian activist who is also very left, literally tweeted: "If you’re refusing to heed [the call for a ceasefire] because it’s a “liberal ask,” take a hard look at your breathing family."
Meanwhile, nearly every person with legitimate power in America has refused to even entertain humanitarian pauses or critique the blockade of food and water shipments into Gaza. And America actually has power over Israel, so what they say/do matters!
Leftists can be annoying. I understand the impulse to critique them. With some right-wing internet voyeurism, you would find equally annoying or more appalling things, like TikToks making fun of dead Palestinian children. The difference is US policy towards Israel is within striking distance of the latter.
One more thing: I write this as someone in my late 20s who used to be engaged within the left, but have consistently become more "neoliberal" or whatever vulgarized term is close to your ideology. I've dared to feel patriotic and bought-in to American power, even as family members in Iran suffer from sanctions. Today, I feel like my winds have shifted left... and it's because of stuff like this.
I mean, what other country's government has made it very clear that it wants to do ethnic cleansing as a treat, and completely raze a territory of 2.3M with very little regard for civilian suffering (something it imposes by cutting off food, water, and fuel)? Israel is a bad actor and maybe should be treated like one.
The problem with all this is that Biden's policy on the Middle East, and that of the US polity in general, is every bit as bad as that of the (mostly unnamed) leftists you criticise. He's backed murderous tyrants like MBS, and done nothing effective to restrain the most extreme elements of the Israeli government. There's a bit of realpolitik here about Iran* and oil**, but the core of the problem is that the US polity as a whole is emotionally committed to backing Israel and supporting the oppression of the Palestinians. This is exactly what Washington warned about in his farewell address "“The nation which indulges toward another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”
The sections of the left obsessed with Israel-Palestine are the mirror image of this.
* And the Iranian regime is a monster of the US' own creation, thanks to the overthrow of the Mossadegh government and its replacement of the Shah.
** Irrationally now, since the US is mostly self-sufficient
MBS might be a murderous tyrant, but he is quite moderate compared to Iran or the Qataris.
US-Saudi relations pre-dated Biden, and Biden has been pretty scathing in his criticism of MBS.
The US is backing more moderate non-Iran-backed regimes against an imperial Iranian threat. Iran-backed militias are overthrowing currently, or have overthrown, governments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine.
I was once quite critical of MBS over the execution of the journalist. It's a terrible thing, but if we are going to cut off all ties with anyone who does that, we would have no partners in the region and the whole thing will just fall right into China and Russia's arms.
MBS wants to make peace with Israel. We should support him in that.
"We would have no partners in the region". And that would be the correct policy, rather than trying to pick the least bad of the regimes there. Russia and China are already discovering the costs of trying to exert influence in the region, and will find that out even more if they try to replace the US.
As for "MBS wants to make peace with Israel.", it's precisely the attempt in Trump's Abraham Accords, to broker such a peace while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, that has produced the current disaster.
First paragraph. I don't agree, but it's a reasonable opinion.
Second paragraph.. I don't really agree. Peace between nations seems good, even without "World Peace", as it were. It seems Iran is behind this mess, not Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
So you think countries should be in a state of belligerency with Israel until they can solve the Palestinians?
Nice to see people come out and show their true colors.
Noah gets way more wrong then he gets right here. If you actually want to learn about what the American Left believes instead of knocking down straw men, I suggest you read my work at JoeWrote.
A question from a reader from overseas. Maybe I should follow American politics more closely, but I must say I first heard of the DSA on Noahpinion. How many phone booths would it take to comfortably house the whole group, assuming that there still a few of these relics standing in the world today?
Well, they looked like relics in 2014, but today they have 77k members and three congresspeople.
Thank you for the answer, and just to be clear: the "relics" I referred to are the phone booths, not the members of the DSA. I agree that my wording was confusing.
3 out of 435? 77k out of 330 million.
This is loud but hardly a defining faction in the US, nor even an effective faction in the government.
The GOP-Speaker clown show over the past month just proved how disruptive a handful of extremists can be in a highly polarized political environment without solid majorities that can over-ride the extremes. You are assuming groups like this want to make something happen, like passing legislation, in order to be effective. In many cases, extremists want to stop things from happening which is far easier to do and can be done with a handful of people in the current environment.
You can't possibly equate the massive power of an extremely well-funded right-wing extremist majority (with a captured Supreme Court) with 3 House members and a tiny minority of hapless college students (many of whom won't bother to vote) whose collective political power is almost nil.
True. But point is, it's growing - and fast
I see no evidence that this is true.
I mean, well, they do have 3 seats now, right? is that nothing?
3 out 435...
Cool.
Maybe consider doing a similarly long article about the Freedom Caucus & their ilk who just shut down legislation for a month and took over the Speakership of the House- you know, actual political actors with power. Examine their motivations, background and ideology. Maybe nice just for context and perspective on how relevant the DSA is.
Or consider an article examining the Israeli state, its occupation and subornement of Palestine, its stated ideology, how that ideology aligns with the American values you cherish and how this all ties back into the geopolitical chess game that you love to write about. Give your readers some perspective to the context and complexity of this conflict from someone nice and centrist they trust. Bonus points for using the word Nakba
The latter article in particular strikes me as an ...illuminating bit of prose for your readers.
All the best.
Is it a political party? It's sort of hard to tell from Wikipedia. It sounds like a party but the P-word doesn't appear, and I thought everyone in Congress was either R or D.
They are a faction within the Democratic party that exists because US politics ony have two parties. In an MMPD system like much of the world they would be a left wing fringe party.
It's a funny quip, but to echo what everyone is saying below, Gabriel, they are more numerous than you'd think, and they DEFINITELY make a lot of noise online, on social media, and in podcasts (so, all less traditional forms of media and somewhat harder to shine a spotlight on, unless, like Noah, you're dedicated to writing think-pieces about them and providing a lot of links). A lot of their bullshit comes from Twitter, so it's extremely diffuse and normally an amalgam of "takes." This is why, as Noah suggests in his post, their thinking tends to be bombastic but superficial and extremely topical.
Every Wednesday night the leftists get together with BLM and Antifa to discuss Noah's latest musings. There's a Dunkin' around the corner so somebody always brings snacks.
Pretty sure they're more likely to stick in their parent's basement than go somewhere that requires them to pay for a coffee
Do they steal the donuts as reparations?
DSA is tiny, but they have focused with laser like precision on staffing pipelines and elite universities.
Stop equating ALL the left. This is strawman, bullshit. The VAST MAJORITY of the left hates Hamas. Hamas does not equal Palestineans, just as the fascist Israel government does not equal Jews. Unsubscribed.
This sort of reactive, "you're not saying what you're supposed to," Israeli government is fascist stuff is proving Noah's point. The left is brittle and super reductive. It's not attractive, and frankly it needs to attract if it's going to have any relevance.
"Unsubscribed" - Leftist got triggered hard by the truth, LOL.
P.S. Palestinians EQUAL Hamas. Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas and voted for it, a poll from 2021 shows that "53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is 'most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people'":
https://apnews.com/article/hamas-middle-east-science-32095d8e1323fc1cad819c34da08fd87
In the West Bank the keep postponing the elections because they know that Hamas would win there as well. Educate yourself.
Unironically using the word triggered is a 🚩
Its pathetic and makes clear your character and what kind of debate you are willing to actually engage in.
Thanks for showing me you have nothing factual to say but only ad hominem attacks. It makes clear your lack of argument and substance :)
You're about one sentence away from calling everyone you disagree with a snowflake. Its, as I said, pathetic.
All the best
Oh the irony!!
Lol
Another reminder that Hamas EQUALS Palestinians.
Dozens of polls clearly show that Palestinians overwhelming and consistently voted and support Hamas:
https://thehill.com/opinion/4273883-mellman-do-palestinians-support-hamas-polls-paint-a-murky-picture/
Just posting this for some people here who may actually be open to the facts.
Since Israel created and boosted Hamas, I guess that means Palestinians overwhelmingly support Israel. Yay!!
Israel did not create Hamas. That was the Muslim Brotherhood.
You are just trolling with half truths. The Israeli government did try to play Hamas against other Palestinian terror groups for a time, that's the true part. That they created or boosted is not accurate.
Ya, "create" is the wrong word, but only by a little, so thanks. Netanyahu didn't play Hamas against "terror groups," he played Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, the goal being preventing a two-state solution with an eye towards keeping control of the West Bank forever.
The PA is run by the PLO, who were behind many terror attacks. Facts.
I can see you're new to all of this, so I'll just let you alone now.
The Left is not the same as Leftists
If one gets too specific it will be revealed that their beliefs are tautological and therefore sheer object level speculation, revealing that one is a silly neurotypical making up fairy tales.
Excellent post, Noah.
I've tried to listen in to the place where I get the most awful, regular "socialist" thoughts, Chapo Trap House, and since October 7th, it's just been a steady narrative of "USA EVIL." It's laughable that some people actually take that kind of thing seriously, and it should be ignored and pilloried, with enthusiasm. Your post does an excellent job of walking the reader through where a lot of what I'll call the neo-Socialist views have led in the U.S. Hint: a lot of it has been exposed as being extremely kooky and is speaking specifically to the extremely online.
Let's hold that thought and pivot to Israel-Palestine: I've been thinking a lot about how, with this latest flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence, we are finally getting an example of a difficult situation that our current mess of social media-based information-sharing just cannot handle. I think that it exposes our social media sickness for what it is. What I mean by that is, the morass of social media horrors we have been dealing with for at least the last decade has finally run into a problem that it cannot handle in the way most contentious issues have been bounced around in the previous 10-odd years: it's a conflict of extreme complexity, where there are no real "good" guys, where there are a LOT of emotions involved, and where the U.S. bears some responsibility, but the degree to which it is culpable depends a lot on whom you ask.
Why I am thinking about it in this way: I happen to have an academic background in IR, and I spent a not-insignificant amount of time on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the 2006-2007 Gaza pull-out and rise of Hamas in Gaza, however, I just completely tuned out. I concluded that the situation was getting worse, that the two sides simply did not want a peace process to work, and that we were headed for a "new norm" of something bad. I was largely correct about this.
Now, fast-forward to today, and I've noticed a lot of social media posts, as Ian Bremmer (a political scientist and IR specialist of some note) mentioned on the 538 Politics podcast on Monday, have gotten more insane than ever. Some examples: no, the Israeli's are not an example of "colonization" in the way that cheap critical theory-based takes typify it, and what they are doing to Gaza certainly involves the idea of war crimes but it is not an example of "genocide." Hamas is not in ANY way an organization we should be sympathetic to, but yes, the Palestinian people should be sympathized with. Yes, Israel has been doing awful things to the Palestinians for decades, but also, the Palestinians have not had good leaders to advance their cause, some of them have resorted to spectacular terroristic violence against Israeli civilians, and the Palestinian people are often not even supported by their supposed-advocates in the Arab world. And I am being extremely high-level with this summary, as it is incredibly complex and full of depressing, violent history.
So, to conclude: I just watched Alexandra Pelosi's most recent documentary on HBO, "The Insurrectionist Next Door," about a number of January 6th individuals who are all going to jail for their actions that day. In interviews, Pelosi has stated that she doesn't think these people are necessarily crazy, she just thinks that they have ENTIRELY different social media feeds than the rest of us, which leads them to these crazy conclusions. Well, I think the same can be said for the particularly bad socialists, as well, and I think the recent Israeli-Palestinian flare-up serves as an excellent example of why we need to regulate, and in some cases completely dismantle, social media platforms. Again, to quote Bremmer, "I don't think that social media is the entire problem, but I do think that it is over 50% of the problem."
Am I on to something here?
In re the "Insurrectionist Next Door" idea that social media somehow warped minds, I like to point out the Jane Coaston-Bari Weiss "amoral pudding" dialogue.
https://twitter.com/janecoaston/status/995021881899089920
Insurrections aren't mentally ill. Their minds aren't poisoned by algorithms. It's something else. That something else is, Insurrectionists have agency. They are searching for, and actively seeking out, information that aligns with their lurid curiosity. Algorithms are really good at giving them what they yearn for.
I think that’s a good point! I don’t think that is all of them, though. It’s a mix, right?
Mathematically, it's a mix.
Personally, though, I am against pathologizing political viewpoints. As a liberal, I would find it frightening to be labeled mentally ill because my side lost an election.
I also don't think people have a maga or other fashoid worldview because of some undiagnosed or unexamined depression, schizophrenia or something clinical as found in the DSM.
Ideology isn't something to be treated, because if it is, it will inevitably lead to political manipulation and a dictatorship of the psychiatrist.
There's ultimately some agency, or a rudimentary awareness of ideas and actions, at the root of every decision. In politics, it's important to be able to answer for every idea, action and consequences.
So, I understand what you're saying, but the reason why I think the critique lands is as follows, if you don't mind my addressing your points:
1.) As a liberal, you wouldn't be labeled mentally ill if your side lost an election. You would have to lose an election, and then dispute the results of the election, and then deny the evidence that the election had no significant problems in it and insist that you actually won the election. If you did that, you would be no longer be a liberal, you would be illiberal, which is what these people are.
2.) I agree that ideology isn't supposed to be viewed as something that should be treated, like a mental illness. Recall that what I said was, Alexandra Pelosi said that these people are not crazy, they just rely on a completely different social media feed than other people do. That social media feed is full of misinformation and crazy bullshit, and you are correct to point out that these people "want" to believe that stuff for a variety of reasons.
3.) If you watch the documentary, surprisingly, all of these people save one admit that what they did, they did by their own choice. So, they accept that they had agency in storming the capital.
All minds are poisoned by the media they consume, it's how human cognition works. There are safeguards from this natural behavior but they are not taught in Western cultures...if anything, the opposite is taught.
You are onto post-hoc rationalization of socially conditioned beliefs at least.
Thank you. That’s a wonderful essay articulating so well my own nascent and emerging views. Much the same analysis applies to “the left” in the U.K. and Ireland. I find many on the left especially irrational critics of the USA are Libertarian at heart and frankly almost indistinguishable from Trumps MAGA morons.
If only they *were* Libertarian at heart. A Libertarian can happily accept the sharing of views that are not his. Instead, the "left"ish grassroots has not only a fiery intolerance of heterodox viewpoints (right now over in the Twittersphere they're busy pilloring Sascha Cohen and Stephen Fry, among others, for daring to sign their names to an open letter calling for the release of all Hamas hostages), but a sneering, anti-intellectual contempt for the very process of free and open discussion.
Say what you will about libertarians, but you can't say they're not at least willing to discuss their points in the face of counterpoints, and discuss them and discuss them and discuss them some more.
This is simply untrue of the U.K. The country has many, many problems but U.S. levels of partisanship are not one of them. I suggest following Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, on twitter for extensive data on this. Of course there are always some idiots but that’s irrelevant to the overall very positive trend. Thanks
Yes conservatives in Britain are to the left of democrats on some issues and moderately to the right of them on others. This doesn’t stop people who are themselves driven by US “progressive” ideology to claim the Tories are importing culture wars though.
To be honest, I think some are trying but inevitably failing. As I suggested, have a look at Katwala’s work. There’s also this from the FT https://www.ft.com/content/a2050877-124a-472d-925a-fc794737d814
Thanks, but this is behind a paywall.
Ah, sorry, it was free to view for me but maybe because I’m registered. I’ll try to find his Twitter thread that summarises . Here: https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1662061344814768129?s=46&t=KOx7Ovj8T13Bn2ohrOGcaw
Thanks, this is interesting. I lived in England, I am living in the US, so it is not a total surprise. On the other hand, that the numbers are showing it so clearly is a surprise.
I had a look at Sunder Katwala's Twitter but it was not clear to me which point you want to make.
This touches on many issues, but is missing the core diagnosis of what has gone wrong with the socialist left.
I'll offer my theory as someone who went deep in this world in 2016 via Sanders and left a couple years later in disgust.
My diagnosis: as the democratic party moved left on a lot of reasonable issues in response to Sanders, these leftists wanted to maintain their identity of being truly left - not progressives or liberals in the corrupt DNC fold - and so further radicalized. In particular, they have an intense focus on reading/understanding/reviving Marx - which helps explain a lot of the bad views both in terms of economics and theories of power you describe.
The only place I'd quibble is with regards to your argument against the theory of change by moving the Overton window.
I would argue that Bidenomics is in fact a cooptation of Bernienomics - and would never have defined the Biden presidency were it not for Bernie and the socialist left having so effectively moved the Overton window - and thus the entire democratic party - to the left.
This shift left many Bernie supporters far fewer defining wedge issues - and many had built an identity around being the vanguard and anti DNC. Some, like me, responded to the leftward shift by being more positive about the Democratic party as a whole- while those left in the DSA responded by finding new wedge issues and reading Marx - basically going from democratic socialist to communist.
That's my theory of what went wrong with this crowd: it started winning on the issues and started gaining power, and didn't know what to do with that because so much of its ideological identity was wrapped up in never having power, never compromising, and always losing.
I think this is getting close. I voted for Sanders twice in the primaries and am now a huge admirer of Biden, by far the best president of my lifetime and the best since LBJ. I think the world changed more than I did.
Looking back to 2016 you have to remember how apparent it was that Obama-era liberalism had completely failed since 2010. Obamacare was a huge accomplishment but really the only lasting one. The Democrats had been driven out of power in most states and the GOP was not too far from having enough governorships and state houses to do a constitutional convention. Clinton dead enders seemed to have no answers to this problem - I listened to Chapo Trap House not only because it was funny but because it was one of the few sources of media that made me feel like I wasn't crazy in noticing this.
It turns out that younger voters, the Squad, Bernie's campaign etc. did successfully move the Democrats' Overton window to the left, and Biden is governing way further to the left than most give him credit for. But, just as Clinton supporters were stuck in 2016 the left got stuck in 2020 - 2016 was an obvious disaster but also a thrilling crack in the status quo and an opportunity to drag the US leftwards as much as rightwards. That moment ended in the pandemic, and liberalism (temporarily) proved itself a lot more resilient than activists thought. They still want that moment back.
I think part of it was a massive misreading of 2016-2020. The trump ascendance was never due to economics, just racial anxieties. When Biden got nominated and then elected they had to confront that the BLM marches and other social attitudes were not some awakening of "class consciousness" but a push against racism in institutions.
You are correct that the left was a protest movement who briefly caught the car that they never expected to and I don't think they ever had a plan for what happened when they did that
I think it may be the case that millennials think of the economy the same way boomers think about urban crime - permanently bad, because that's what they experienced in their young adulthoods and they never update their priors.
There is some psychological truth to what you said. And it is experienced at the scale of culture. Think of scarcity mindset, shared by a generation.
The Great Depression loomed heavily over Americans for basically the entire 20th century, and people who lived through it harbored a scarcity mindset throughout their lives -- even when after World War II brought times of unprecedented economic growth and plenty. Bob Hope was the most famous case of this. He became a supremely wealthy entertainer as well as a very successful investor (he had a hand in turning the San Fernando Valley from farmland to postwar suburbia). Yet throughout his life, he himself lived very frugally and shopped at the store and dined at fast food restaurants with coupons. All while having millions of dollars to his name.
I think it's mostly other stuff right now. Rent and housing are unprecedently expensive now that we're finding out what cutting off the urban growth machine actually did to housing markets and inflation is newly a phenomenon for the first time in lots of adults' lives. I also frankly suspect that a lot of millennials in the middle and upper professional classes just genuinely liked the slack labor market/ZIRP economy of the 2010s through the Trump era. Turns out that when service workers can start demanding wages of $20/hr or more things get a little pricier.
Sidenote: All those copypastas about Danish McDonald's worker making roughly that amount of money and the Big Macs costing the same never mention that Americans in the upper half of the income distribution outearn their counterparts in Western Europe by wide margins, even in the richer parts.
However, millennials being conscripted into the smiley-face precariat has pretty much described their whole adulthood.
Millennials have only known two kinds of adulthood: The Housing Theory of Everything Adulthood and The Great Recession Adulthood.
The Housing Theory of Adulthood, roughly the Clinton dot-com boom to 2006-07, and from 2010 to the present, is where there is plenty of work but everything is expensive and you'll be a debt serf for life. Then there was the Great Recession Adulthood, where housing and everything else was cheap but that is also because unemployment is sky-high and people with advanced degrees are competing with immigrants and single mothers for retail and security guard jobs.
We ended up coming out of the Great Recession with the realization that real estate is the prosperity monopsony. We have a collective belief that real estate's value as an asset can never go down, lest we get another Great Recession and affordability the hard way. Or, alternatively, housing cannot be affordable without shearing the value of all existing real estate.
You are so right about this: "As the democratic party moved left on a lot of reasonable issues in response to Sanders, these leftists wanted to maintain their identity of being truly left - not progressives or liberals in the corrupt DNC fold - and so further radicalized." I noticed some of my progressive/leftist friends and acquaintances starting to coalesce their political ideology around loud, angry opposition to "liberals" who they criticized as often, or even more often, than the MAGA right who I used to think were our shared antagonists. When this particular wing of the left began anchoring their discourse in "owning the libs" almost to the same extent as right wing reactionaries, I should've known we were doomed. Even so, watching leftists actively celebrate Hamas's mass murder and torture of Jews has been sobering and devastating.
yeah i think this is the main thing, the people attracted to socialism are the highly educated downwardly mobile, but it's been intellectually dead for decades, so it ends up being people concerned with being left-er then everyone else that embrace nonsense political positions and strategies because they don't even particularly want to accomplish anything.
I have never trusted DSA, even back in the days when it was DSOC. Why? Well, I remember their behavior in the 1980 election. In the 2000 election.
But those memories pale to my lived experience as a political activist. Whenever I raised concerns about women, about minorities, I was always put off by the DSA/DSOCers with a dismissive "Oh, the class revolution will take care of that." Yeah. Right.
Meanwhile I was observing racist and sexist behaviors in the leadership, along with accelerationist inclinations and a lack of interest in organizing at the local level in favor of high-visibility national organization. The only interest they showed on the local level involved trying to monetize political organizing through the use of paid canvassing for assorted organizations.
For those of you who read Seth Cotlar's Rightlandia Substack, I was observing the Walter Huss organizing efforts in the Oregon Republican Party in real time and trying to get someone, anyone, on the Left interested in doing that sort of organization on the left/Democratic party circles. I wrote essays and talked to people.
Crickets. Dismissive comments that added up to "there, there, don't worry your pretty little head."
Now, in my elder years, I see exactly the scenario I dreaded coming into fruition. I feel a little bit like Cassandra. Sigh.
With respect to 2000 obviously America would be stronger had Gore won…but Nader actually contributed many positive things to not just America but to the world. Obviously Africa would have at some point started receiving HIV meds as India and Brazil solved the AIDS crisis by 2000…but Nader was instrumental in speeding up the process in breaking the Big Pharma patents that eventually led to the life saving drugs being distributed in Africa. I just don’t think Bernie and Warren compare to Nader and his myriad of accomplishments.
Oh, and I supported Kerry and volunteered for him but 2021 shows that had Kerry won it would have been a disaster. An incompetent president like Bush and Trump deserves to be president when their cynical and reckless policies lead to disastrous outcomes like 2005-08 and now…although Biden is doing a solid job navigating everything but his approval is still relatively low.
Oh please. Nader was best at promoting Nader. He and his followers had no concept of how to govern, and I will never, ever forgive him or them for giving us Bush Too.
Our elections are very close…I think Elian Gonzalez and Republicans taking an extremely irresponsible position on that case is what lost Florida and that election. The fact Democrats saying let the legal process play out while Bush said give him citizenship and screw his commie father was able to get Cuban Americans riled up in Florida is one of the stranger things in America political history. Obviously I care about all Americans but the Americans that did the worst under Bush were Republicans which is why GOP voters rejected Bush/Cheney/Hastert in favor of Trump. I feel sorry that people in Ohio’s jobs were shipped to China while their sons were shipped to Iraq…but elections have consequences.
"If you’re going to complain about a whole group of people, it’s important to be clear about who’s in that group."
So when you verbal tick that "right wing" people do not want immigrants who are not white-skinned, maybe you could heed your advice and be clear about what you mean by "right wing"
I will attempt to be clear about whom I am criticizing.
BTW, I'm with you whole-heartedly regarding Israel (a place I have visited many times in the past) the topic of your post. Hamas roughly translates to "Party of Shit," though scholars argue in the precise meaning.
Using English? 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
The old school socialism of a voice for the working class isn't the socialism of today. More Americans would be on board with economic liberalism, a higher minimum wage, and worker empowerment, if it didn't come as a package deal with progressive orthodoxy on issues like abortion, racial justice, policing, gay rights, transgender issues, or the proper way to deal with climate change. Black Americans are the hypothetical median group for a workable socialism for America, they're economically liberal, but socially conservative, which aligns with the larger group of White Americans without a college degree who on average hold similar views on social issues, and Hispanic Americans who probably fall somewhere in the middle. Some progressives don't realize or don't hang out with people who don't have degrees, so they don't realize how far outside the median opinion they are on social issues, or they don't care because they have an unerring belief that they'll be proven right eventually. Maybe, maybe not, but I'd rather win elections and help people in the present day, and work with the electorate we have.
Americans want some of the same things as the progressive left, but they're not gonna align themselves with people they think are immoral or crazy, by defunding the police, when most Black Americans want more police in their neighborhoods, but better quality policing, or no limits at all on abortion, when most Americans want exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or when the mother's life is in danger, but with a ban after 20 weeks, excluding medical complications past that point. These people are a subset of American society, but they act like they speak for the majority of Americans.
100% spot on! The first party that figures out that left-wing economics and right-wing social policy is a winning combination will win in a landslide. The GOP is closer than the Dems right now, but we'll see what happens. Yesterday's speakership vote was a huge step in this direction for the Republicans.
These ideas don't even sound like left-wing economics or right-wing social policy, they just sound like vaguely sensible centrism.
This seems like a good synopsis of what is described in the large Corporate/Richy Rich owned press, NY Times, WAPO, Wall Street Journal, but not accurate to the people. It keeps the divide and conquer going. Defund the police was picked up by the Corporate Press to discredit what was truly meant, which was better policing for all. Think of all the Congress folk who make their decisions while smoking dope, doing coke, supplying coke (big money, of course it is a DC thing), but none are ever arrested ( which is the current law)..
How interesting is it that women in Texas, since you'll seem to support the demise of Roe, have died in childbirth at 1,000 more than ever prior, since Roe was destroyed by a group of Supreme Jesters. There were limits in Roe, as you write. But, once again, this is lost in the Evangelistic, illegal ( US has a constitutional amendment to get religion out of government), male oriented (perhaps we need to do something about your privates, as with a knife and in your throat to overcome overpopulation for a generation or two-now that would really have an effect, to do something to your genitals).
There are folk with only high school formal education who have open minds. However, there are many more, whose minds are closed. Many privileged, college graduate white men and their families who refuse to recognize the beneficial effect of their privilege for themselves, just because they don't want to loose it, or share it, or acknowledge it, or live with what it means to have done this to other people.
I find the polls, have glimpses of reality, but no real hold.
One reason for the Left's / left's focus on Palestine which tends to go unstated is that it's worth criticising Israeli policy because there's at least a chance of influencing it whereas with China and Russia etc. you're simply wasting your breath. Israel is a corner of a foreign field that is forever Western. But views about how to keep it that way differ wildly.
This is a good point, although I hardly think this reason tends to go unstated. I hear it all the time. It is often expressed as a rejoinder to a question like "Why are you so focused on Israel, when there have been 3x as many deaths in the Syrian Civil War since 2011 than in all Israel-related conflicts since the 1920s?"
I just don't think that argument stands up to much scrutiny. There absolutely is a way to influence China and Russia, it's a multi-national coalition called NATO, and lefties are firmly opposed to it. A key part of standing up to China and Russia is defending our allies and not allowing them to be swallowed up (in this case by Iran).
Moreover, in the context of the present-day Israel-Hamas war, the US is supporting a long-time ally in a multi-front proxy fight with Iran. This is something you will never hear lefties acknowledge. There is just Israel and Palestinian victims.
The thing is, throw away this crucial context, and all the takes that follow are just silly.
Iran is a present-day imperial power. They have militias on the ground right now that have overthrown or are presently overthrowing governments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine. They are hard at work at reproducing the same in every other Middle Eastern country. The US has been engaged in this multi-headed conflict for decades, allying with more moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
None of those three Arab states, all long-time US allies, have anything close to clean human rights records or proper democracy. Where is all the lefty outrage about the (lethal) support they receive from the US?
Lefties are trapped in a stupid "Israel Colonizer Thief" narrative, that is totally detached from the actual situation on the ground, and US interests in the region.
Absolutely, the inconsistencies and double-standards are absurd. But the Left we're talking about here isn't about values and policies, it's Christianity without God. They're the intellectual heirs to St. Francis and Savonarola for the global age: distrust wealth, attack existing institutions, love the other and mistrust your own. They are perverse so who they choose to criticise reveals who they feel close to.
The real problem with this part of the Left is that they simply don't consider the consequences of the positions they take - why should they? most of them have no skin in the game and they intentionally bypass policy-makers out of high-minded contempt. In the context of UK politics 'A Left for Itself: Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism' by David Swift is very good on this theme.
I keep wondering who the heck you folk are talking about. Do you live in RED states?
Do you read widely ? Are you from the Middle East, a complex history, sadly wrongly harmed by US interventions over at least 60 years? You hate all Blue states, left thinkers, but we are the ones who are economically self sufficient, have not destroyed the entire environment of the middle of the country, like the Red states, who listened to Monsanto, instead of ecological health. WE lefties, are paying for you to live, if you are in a RED state. YOU have only reinforced my work for Blue state Secession. You cut the hand that feeds you. YOU are unable to be competent. You are unable to discuss ideas, when mostly you name call and deliver partial information. wow.
Of course, many bad things are happening in the US. But the source is Richy Rich and the Corporations. the Common good, which those of us 'elitists' were educated in as young folk, were also educated that we had a deep and serious obligation to give more than we might imagine, toward US 'common good' . A concept, Richy Rich and the Corporations have deconstructed over 45 years, starting with the actor , Reagan. Many of my baby boom colleagues appear to have given up on this and gone for comfort. But, not all of us. And, certainly, I am not going to keep paying for people who are taking my country back 400 years. Go back by yourself.
The international left had this same problem during WW1. Nationalism and historical animosity destroyed any solidarity.
Leftists look at the world through the prism of victim and opressor. The victim is always right, and the opressor is always wrong.
Doesn't matter if the purpoted victim is not a victim at all but a brutal murderer that decapitates babies and cuts open fetuses out of pregnant women's bellies. This is 'justified' because 'this is how decolonization looks like'.
Leftists are like children that keep believing in fairytales long after they are proven to be just that - fairytales.
The same people that claim "real communism has never been tried" are claiming "real peace with murderous Arabs has never been tried"... even though Israel did the Oslo accords (and got 10000 victims of terror in return), then it got out of Gaza in 2005 (and got rockets and thousands of victims since then). If only Israel gives the Arabs more concessions, maybe they will stop murdering Jews and actually do something useful with their lives.
P.S. I would just like to reminder again that majority of Palestinians voted and support Hamas. Palestinians ARE Hamas.
Dozens of polls clearly show that Palestinians overwhelming and consistently voted and support Hamas:
https://thehill.com/opinion/4273883-mellman-do-palestinians-support-hamas-polls-paint-a-murky-picture/
Something I've struggled with the last 3 weeks is what the appropriate response to having 2M genocidal people on your border actually is?
I keep thinking of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. If they had a magic button in 1941 that could vaporize every Nazi soldier and sympathizer, would it have been ethical for them to use it? Even if it resulted in the extermination of large portions of the German population (the Nazis also "won elections")? I have to conclude that it would have been. Even without the benefit of hindsight, the Nazis were clear about what they wanted to do. Had Jews had the ability to stop it, it would have been unethical for them NOT to use it, regardless of the cost.
What if the only way Israel can be safe is to (figuratively) nuke Gaza? To push that button? Is it still ethical? I don't know.
The fact that you would even conceive of this thought experiment is telling of your morality, sympathy and ability to empathize with strangers. How could you ever reduce this Palestine Gaza question “what if you could push a button and commit genocide instantly?”
I hope noone ever puts you in charge of life and death of anyone. Its clear to me that you could find a way to justify mass slaughter. You are an empty vessel, filled with no moral principles to call your own.
You also need to do some reading about the Nakba and what Israeli occupation looks like.
Calling people names is easy, but what is your solution?
And please don't pretend that any form of "occupation" (an odd term when Israel has been 100% out of Gaza for 15 years) can justify the modern-day "massacre of the innocents" that we witnessed 3 weeks ago.
The Gazans have elected Hamas. All polls prior to October 7th indicated that if new elections were held, the Gazans would do so again. Where Hamas lost support is not to more moderate groups but to groups like Islamic Jihad that never stopped launching attacks against Jews. Calling Gazans a "genocidal" people is not a stretch at all.
I take it from your comment that you believe Polish and German Jews had an obligation to allow themselves to be slaughtered by the millions instead of "vaporizing" those that sought their deaths? Do they still have that obligation? Do Christians? Does everyone? Are you willing to apply that to yourself personally? Lay down your life instead of fight back against someone who seek to hurt or kill you? These are very old ethical questions that you seem unwilling to honestly wrestle with.
I'm not trying to rag on you personally. Honestly. I think you are reflective of a large percentage of Westerners who simply cannot conceive of large scale "kill or be killed" scenarios.
I don't need to present a solution to the current conflict to tell you that your genocide-as-a-button thought experiment is prima facie sociopathic, barbaric nonsense. If you believe in any - any - moral values at all besides might makes right then you would know that this is a complete non-starter. If you understood the history of these kinds of sectarian conflicts being resolved you would know that its possible to solve this kind of shit without contemplating genocide AT ALL.
Like seriously, thats what you are suggesting.
Before I comment on a solution I would also like to say that Israel has not earned my blind loyalty and sympathies. Not with their past actions - consider that Gaza faces a land and sea blockade and had their only airport bombed, for example, or their actions in illegally settling *and occupying* the West Bank - but their current government; who is in it and what they have done. People like:
- Bezalel Smotrich, current Minister for Finance, who believes that the Gaza Strip, all of the West Bank, parts of Lebanon and Jordan make up "greater Israel" and has advocated for literal pogroms of Palestinian towns
- Itmar Ben Givir, a literal convicted Jewish supremacist terrorist who is the Public Security Minister, who is trying to subvert the election process at the municipal level and install preferred candidates extrajudicially and is withholding funding from Muslim majority towns and villages and leads religious incitement marches to the Al Aqsa mosque constantly
- Netenyahu himself, a snake in the grass who noone trusts, under investigation domestically for a bribery scandal involving manipulating the local media, who gives as PM state support to illegal settlements in the West Bank, who has written disparagingly of the humanity of Palestinians on human terms. This guy reeks.
The current Israeli government has for the last 10 months had protests against anti-democratic, we-pick-the-judges reforms.
These people will not get a blank card from me because of a tragedy to do what they want with no critique or scrutiny, for the same reason that I would not trust the Trump administration to prosecute a reasonable and proportionate response to 9/11 (Or any Republican since Eisenhower really, but thats neither here nor there).
Then we talk about the actual actions being taken. These people are not level headed actors. The current 8000 people dead and completely levelled neighbourhoods are case and point. No access to food, water, fuel and electricity supplies. As for the other Palestinian region, well, the Israeli government is patrolling the West Bank nightly and arresting political activists. Internally in Israel itself, they passed a law allowing them to suspend the media license of Al Jazeera because of critical news coverage.
Externally, the Abraham Accords across the Middle East have fallen apart. The Middle East points out the hypocrisy with new anti-Israeli furor in public polls across the region. Turkey's Erdogan just yesterday got a standing ovation in Parliament saying that he supports Hamas as liberation fighters because of the senseless violence. Thats new.
... and I'm to accept all of this without any critical thought.
How is this making Israel safer? These people, at the end of this conflict will have to live next to each other quite literally forever. How does angering everyone, fracturing alliances, burning bridges and making hypocrites out of your allies secure Israel's future? Do you not see how levelling Gaza is radicalizing? How it creates support for Hamas, culls support for non-violent protest and creates terrorists tomorrow?
My solution to the conflict starts with an immediate ceasefire and the end of US vetoes in the Security Council on a resolution saying exactly that. This a calamitous tragedy and needs to stop immediately. Then blockades must be relaxed so the Palestinian people do not starve to death or have healthcare system completely fail as it will in ... a day as of their reporting yesterday.
After that then hostages can be released and ideation on a new status quo can be discussed. Its clear that Qatar, Turkey, the UAE, Saudi, Iran, Hezbollah and Jordan all have different stakes in helping to mediate. The US should be at minimum be looking for some kind of grand negotiation table with some/all parties - assuming ofc that Joe Biden still after going on television and saying that Palestinians are lying about how many people are dead can convene anything. At the very least the Israeli government will need to change too; the people in power now will never lead a non-genocidal resolution to this conflict. Hamas is by far the weaker power and while material does have anything close to the agency that Israel does over the situation.
Finally, the boot must be removed from the throat of Palestinians; they must be allowed to exercise non-violent protest. The pressure campaign to see BDS movements banned globally must stop. UN resolutions need to not be vetoed. Israeli police will have to stop arresting every new Palestinian leader with political aspirations other than the status quo, and they will have to stop dying mysteriously.
In the my conversations with *gasp* actual Palestinians, a negotiated settlement to both 1 state and 2 state solutions are possible, if things like this are achieved.
Final point - as to the dichotomy you present at the end. That dichotomy is a false one. This is not the 1967 war. There are a wealth of other options available to Israel. It could have for example, exercised tact and gotten the support of Arab states before exacting revenge. It could have chosen to not refer to the Palestinians on the news as human vermin before invading. It could have chosen to allow water, food, medicine, fuel and electricity to Gaza. Those are just the obvious substantive differences. This siege is a blood price being exacted from the Gazan people not because there are no other choices, but precisely because this is the desired choice; the preferred choice.
That alone should make you stop and pause.
Neville Chamberlain called. He wants his foreign policy back. Here are the likely effects of your plan:
"immediate ceasefire" - Hamas will once again rearm, redig the tunnels, get resupplied by Iran, and continue killing Jews at every opportunity.
"end of US vetoes in the Security Council" - The UN security council will pass a resolution condemning Israel while Russia blocks a resolution condemning Hamas. Neither will matter a whit on the ground, but will provide international PR cover for Hamas continued reign of terror.
"the boot must be removed from the throat of Palestinians; they must be allowed to exercise non-violent protest" - Can you show me where Israel has intentionally bombed a non-violent Palestinian protest? Because I can show you where Palestinians have repeatedly bombed busloads of Israeli schoolkids on their way to classes.
"pressure campaign to see BDS movements banned globally must stop" - So those opposed to BDS must be stopped by the power of the state so that only 1 side (and anti-Israel side) can ever be heard? And you would favor this in America and other electoral democracies?
"the Palestinian people do not starve to death" - Egypt can supply the Palestinians through the Rabat border crossing at any time. They have refused to do so. They've also refused to take refugees (for good reason, as it would result in the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt).
"After that then hostages can be released" - Why would they be?
"the Israeli government will need to change too" - And how will you arrange that in a democratic country?
You criticize me for calling the Palestinians genocidal for electing Hamas but you declare the Israeli govt genocidal and illegitimate despite it being democratically elected just a year ago? Democracy means the people's will prevails in law, not RM's will, or Joe Biden's will, or my will, even Enlightenment liberalism in general... but the popular will of the people in that country. The Israeli citizenry has broadly supported a 2 state solution for decades. (Whether they still do today is debatable.) It has always been the Palestinians who have rejected living next door to Israel, not the other way around.
"looking for some kind of grand negotiation table with some/all parties" - I don't know how old you are, but this happened during the Clinton Administration. It was called the Camp David accords and Yasser Arafat was offered legal status as his own country in (I think it was) the West Bank. He flew all the way to Maryland and refused to sign on the dotted line. Turns out being a religious "freedom fighter" (terrorist) is a lot more fun than actually governing. You get to blow stuff up without having to do the hard stuff like build sewer systems and levy taxes and educate a population.
At a fundamental level, just ask yourself what happens if we could snap our fingers tomorrow, take down the militarized border, and suddenly have 2 functional states living next door to each other. No rocket attacks. No blockade. No air strikes. Would Israel spontaneously start a war with its Palestinian neighbor simply out of hatred for them? Would Hamas (the elected leadership of Palestine) start a war with Israel simply out of hatred for them?
My answers to those questions are respectively "no" and "yes". I do not see how you can hold the rest of the positions if you agree with that assessment. Nor do I see how any sane person can conclude that the answer to the second question is "no" under any realistic circumstances. And that's what really causes the problem here. If your neighbor consistently shoots at you every time you leave your house, at some point, you start shooting back. Eventually you might even get a machine gun a lay down cover fire to get to your car. Israel vs Palestinians is that problem writ large.
I know the sentiment that "war never solves anything" is quite fashionable, but it's just not true. In many conflicts throughout world history, war was the ONLY thing that solved them, by killing the most vigorous advocates of the losing side. Go lookup the bombing of Dresden or Tokyo. We did slaughtered 100K Japanese civilians in 1 night. Before Hiroshima. And we were right to do so. Because that's how you win a war: by totally crushing your enemy and forcing his surrender. The only alternative is to leave him capable of doing the same to you. As I said, many Western liberals are very uncomfortable with this reality. Their discomfort doesn't make it untrue.
I'm not giving Israel a blank check here. I largely concur with King Abdullah of Jordan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqgzcw0ISU8). But I simply do not believe both sides have the same genocidal intent. Israel dropped millions of Arabic language leaflets warning Gazan civilians to flee south; I don't recall Hamas dropping any warning leaflets on that music festival.
A more ethical solution is to just pay them to immigrate.
Take the billions of dollars that UNRWA and other NGOs spends to continue the misery of the Gazans, and instead pay each $10K to fly to a country of his/her choice. I'm sure Norway/Sweden/Germany/Insert-generic-Immigrant-loving-EU-country would love to have them. Many hundreds thousands of them have already left and are living in Germany today.
The solution of ANY refugee problem is resettlement, not perpetuating the refugee status for generations until they will eventually 'regain their land'. It isn't going to happen.
Consider that they dont want to leave because they consider the land theirs, because it was before Israel took the land to make the state. You cannot pay people to leave. You cannot make countries - who agree with their right to exist on the land call palestine - take them in. What an ignorant opinion.
As I said, leftists believe in fairytales.
Saying "they consider the land theirs" is like saying "Germany considers Poznan theirs" (they built it) or "Spain considers Mexico theirs" (they used to 'own' it). If you start a war, and lose it- you lose the land. You can consider whatever you want but surely you must face reality after 70+ years and realize they are never getting "their" land back.
Arabs already had 80% of the land of Israel in the UN partition decision of November 1947, they were not happy with 80%, and they started a war trying to capture all the land and slaughter all the Jews in Israel. Happily they failed (as they always fail), and they lost the war.
Moral of the story? Don't start wars if you don't accept the stakes.
And the moral for you is to learn more history and stop believing in fairytales.
Every piece of ground in the world has been owned by someone else at some point, and that someone was violently pushed off by another someone, who later was violently pushed off by another someone... wash, rinse, repeat.
Are you equally rabid in your demands for Hungary to regain all its lost territory from the Treaty of Trianon? For Mexico to reclaim California? For Kashmir to become autonomous? Perhaps for American Indian tribes to reclaim all of North America? I'm sure there are some Huguenot descendants we can find to give them central France.
At some point, historical grievances must give way to current practicalities lest we all descend in perpetual blood feuds over things that happened decades or centuries ago.
Go to Gaza then and explain to the destitute stateless masses the "current practicalities". Maybe go find a Palestinian and talk to them and explain that they simply need to accept that they have no rights to live where their grand^10th-father lived because you, Brian Villanueva, say so. That they must be practical in their desire for rights; to live in a place that is not permanently blockaded and that people illegally settle on. They must do so because the acrimony they cause is noisy, annoying and dangerous.
I'm sure some lovely centrist people like yourself told MLK and Mandela similar things. It must feel amazing to be in the position of the "white moderate."
Or you can consider that they will have the right to be there forever and will need some kind of political settlement that will require concessions from more than just them, the much weaker power.
> Maybe go find a Palestinian and talk to them and explain that they simply need to accept that they have no rights to live where their grand^10th-father lived because you
I mean, I have no right to live where any of my 1024 grand^10th-fathers lived either, and I don't lose any sleep over that fact.
When they demonstrate a willingness to accept a "political settlement", I'l all in 100%. See my comments below about the Camp David accords.
Or pay them to use birth control. Gaza has one of the world's highest fertility rates, intentionally. They're in a fertility arms race with Orthodox Jews.
Agreed. I would love that solution. And you're right about the long term answer being resettlement.
Do you know any countries that would take them (even with bribery)? Iran funds them. Iraq wouldn't want an Iranian allied militant group inside its borders. Jordan fought off a Palestinian coup attempt in the 70's. Saudi Arabia could but the Sunni monarchy categorically refuses. Egypt would fall to the Muslim Brotherhood if they did. Lebanon rides a delicate sectarian political balancing act and is broke. Syria is still in a state of civil war. Libya is a failed state (thanks George W Bush).
Turkey is a possibility; I don't know much about Turkish politics. Europe can't assimilate the Muslim immigrants they've already taken (witness Sweden and Germany, as you said.) Further afield... China won't take them as they're already committing genocide against the Muslims they have. Hindu nationalist Modi in India obviously wouldn't. What about Pakistan? Bangladesh? Indonesia? I don't know much about these places, but they might be bribable.
Oddly enough, America is probably the best able to assimilate a large number of militant Muslims, but there is no political will here to do that, not o I think it would actually be a good idea.
But they don't want to leave. It's their holy land...
42% percent of Palestinians in Gaza would like to emigrate due to “political, security and economic":
https://www.timesofisrael.com/pa-israels-encouragement-of-gaza-emigration-extremely-dangerous/
Lots of them want to leave, UNRWA/NGOs etc should encourage and pay them to leave.
One appropriate response is to give your head a shake, because you are hallucinating. You have no way of knowing whether each individual in that group is genocidal, you are imagining it because you have consumed information that has trained your brain to think that way.
Why is everyone in this thread so silly? What is happening on this planet? 🤔
Hamas won election.
Polling indicates that they would win elections again today.
Hamas says they want to eradicate Israel ("Jordan River to the Sea")
100's of thousands came out to celebrate on Oct 7th on Gaza.
Based on these data points, the conclusion that the vast majority of people in the Gaza strip would kill the vast majority of Jews if given the chance is entirely reasonable.
This is hardly unexpected. What's shocking is the number of Western college students and journalists who are apparently equally genocidal. That's scary.
It may be "reasonable", but that which can be reasoned is not guaranteed to be correct.
A stricter bar: is it epistemically flawless?
Only artificial worlds (ala Euclid) contain things that are 100% provable. The real world always contains uncertainty. Based on inference from all available data, I believe calling the Gazans genocidal is valid.
What's this....a human that agrees with their own opinion? Wow, how rare!!
You have literally no way of knowing the Truth of your claims - this, your comment is ironic, and hilarious.
You people are going to ruin this planet before you're done, time to wake up! 😇
I don’t find the outrage against Chomsky’s “armchair quarterbacking” that compelling - it is a natural tendency to discuss what you think *should* be done and I see no harm in it.
It’s particularly odd coming from a blog that does quite a bit of “armchair quarterbacking” itself, whether it is planning Gaza’s economic miracle, a “three-state solution”, or revitalizing America’s bureaucracy. Yes, negotiation is Ukraine’s choice - but it is not verboten to think the negotiations should go a certain way nor to push for that outcome.
I honestly don't get picking on that Chomsky quote. He just thinks the chances of Ukrainian victory are much lower than Noah thinks, and the odds of nuclear war are higher. If Noah thought Ukraine was embarking down a course leading to certain defeat or possibly much worse, surely he would also support the US forcing them to negotiate.
This is a factual disagreement, not a value disagreement.
I don't think Noah supports forcing Ukraine to do anything. He has emphasized Ukrainian agency and criticized Chomsky for ignoring it.
The US has never respected Ukrainian agency. Just listen to this leaked phone call where US bureaucrats pick out the entire administration of Ukraine post Euromaidan (just classic US king making).
Unconditional aid for Ukraine is both increasingly politically non-viable and also just not sensible. Ukraine is not going to win back Crimea (a population that massively favors Russia) and making that a condition of any peace settlement will only lead to more war and more violence.
https://youtu.be/JoW75J5bnnE
I don't literally mean forcing them, I mean making US aid contingent on Ukrainian decisions. Which is already the case, if Ukraine did something absurd or started committing atrocities the aid would be withdrawn.
OK, but that's now what you are describing. You are saying we should condition aid on their seeking a negotiated settlement with Russia.
Respectfully, fuck Chomsky. We should stand up for our allies.
I think that's what Chomsky means too
I think that although there is so when some truth in your description of the left, you've constructed a straw man. Maybe the left half is more diverse. Here's where I sit: I think money has a lot to say in controlling power in America. You need a lot of money to win elections and than has corrupted both parties and made the Republicans captives of right wing oligarchs. Read Merchants of Doubt, Dark Money, Shadow Network, and Democracy in Chains. All four pretty solid reporting that makes the case for a "vast right wing (and Christian) conspiracy." But I'm very hawkish on Ukraine and wish Biden hadn't been so stupidly measured and slow to respond to aggression. (This from a Vietnam dove willing to go to jail rather than fight in Vietnam.) The reason is that if Putin (a mass murderer who would not honor any peace deal) wins, Xi will be sinking our aircraft carriers and taking Taiwan. That's serious. As for Israel, I agree that Islam is a problematic religion (as are fundamentalist Christianity and Hinduism). But I think one can sympathize with the Palestinians and ask for them to be treated better by Israel precisely because that may be Israel's best long term chance of survival. Israel needs peace. Relying on strategies that increase hatred will eventually run into 3 billion nuclear armed Muslims. And Netanyahu has split Israel a country which cannot afford disunity. The U.S. Constitution initially valued a black as equal to 3/5ths of a white. Israel apparently feels that the value of Palestinian lives must be about 1/10th of Israeli lives, based on the kill ratios they achieve. I can support Israel and hate racism. Racism is what caused the suffering of Jews for 2000 years. If Jews forget about justice they don't have a religion anymore. It's not simple or easy. There's no quick fix. But there are directions that lead towards peace and directions that don't. Killing kids does not lead towards peace--no matter who is committing the "collective punishment" atrocities.
"Israel apparently feels that the value of Palestinian lives must be about 1/10th of Israeli lives, based on the kill ratios"
Pure, unadulterated BS. Israel protects her citizens, Hamas flaunts their suffering. By your definition, every war ever is "collective punishment". Sloppy.
No need for a pissing match, but I do feel Israel has done a bit of "flaunting" about those killed by Hamas. The word "flaunting" (your word) is inappropriate and insensitive when people are mourning deaths of loved ones and pointing out war crimes and atrocities. Whether killed by Hamas or Israel. Collective punishment is when we call the other side "animals" and bomb children. Let me repeat: if I have to choose sides, Israel is my choice. Peace in the Middle East has to include Israel's survival. But I do not think everything Netanyahu has done promotes Israel's long run survival. The continued deposits by both side into the bank account of hatred leads as Gandhi said to everyone blind and toothless at a minimum. And another thing. It is getting way to hard to talk to people we disagree with. Too much self-righteousness. Too quick to go to ad hominem when our arguments are weak. And abandoning the ethics of Judaism is a self-defeating path.
I'm extremely disappointed in this beat you've taken on after October 7th: An obsession with a few leftist freaks and their dumb viral tweets saying "this is what decolonization looks like" or whatever. These people have no real legitimate power and do not represent the majority of legitimate progressives, who are united in simply calling for a ceasefire. Mohammed El-Kurd, arguably the most followed Palestinian activist who is also very left, literally tweeted: "If you’re refusing to heed [the call for a ceasefire] because it’s a “liberal ask,” take a hard look at your breathing family."
Meanwhile, nearly every person with legitimate power in America has refused to even entertain humanitarian pauses or critique the blockade of food and water shipments into Gaza. And America actually has power over Israel, so what they say/do matters!
Leftists can be annoying. I understand the impulse to critique them. With some right-wing internet voyeurism, you would find equally annoying or more appalling things, like TikToks making fun of dead Palestinian children. The difference is US policy towards Israel is within striking distance of the latter.
One more thing: I write this as someone in my late 20s who used to be engaged within the left, but have consistently become more "neoliberal" or whatever vulgarized term is close to your ideology. I've dared to feel patriotic and bought-in to American power, even as family members in Iran suffer from sanctions. Today, I feel like my winds have shifted left... and it's because of stuff like this.
What other country would be demanded to 'ceasfire' immediately after a terror attack killed 1400 of their citizens?
I mean, what other country's government has made it very clear that it wants to do ethnic cleansing as a treat, and completely raze a territory of 2.3M with very little regard for civilian suffering (something it imposes by cutting off food, water, and fuel)? Israel is a bad actor and maybe should be treated like one.
The problem with all this is that Biden's policy on the Middle East, and that of the US polity in general, is every bit as bad as that of the (mostly unnamed) leftists you criticise. He's backed murderous tyrants like MBS, and done nothing effective to restrain the most extreme elements of the Israeli government. There's a bit of realpolitik here about Iran* and oil**, but the core of the problem is that the US polity as a whole is emotionally committed to backing Israel and supporting the oppression of the Palestinians. This is exactly what Washington warned about in his farewell address "“The nation which indulges toward another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”
The sections of the left obsessed with Israel-Palestine are the mirror image of this.
* And the Iranian regime is a monster of the US' own creation, thanks to the overthrow of the Mossadegh government and its replacement of the Shah.
** Irrationally now, since the US is mostly self-sufficient
MBS might be a murderous tyrant, but he is quite moderate compared to Iran or the Qataris.
US-Saudi relations pre-dated Biden, and Biden has been pretty scathing in his criticism of MBS.
The US is backing more moderate non-Iran-backed regimes against an imperial Iranian threat. Iran-backed militias are overthrowing currently, or have overthrown, governments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine.
I was once quite critical of MBS over the execution of the journalist. It's a terrible thing, but if we are going to cut off all ties with anyone who does that, we would have no partners in the region and the whole thing will just fall right into China and Russia's arms.
MBS wants to make peace with Israel. We should support him in that.
"We would have no partners in the region". And that would be the correct policy, rather than trying to pick the least bad of the regimes there. Russia and China are already discovering the costs of trying to exert influence in the region, and will find that out even more if they try to replace the US.
As for "MBS wants to make peace with Israel.", it's precisely the attempt in Trump's Abraham Accords, to broker such a peace while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, that has produced the current disaster.
First paragraph. I don't agree, but it's a reasonable opinion.
Second paragraph.. I don't really agree. Peace between nations seems good, even without "World Peace", as it were. It seems Iran is behind this mess, not Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
So you think countries should be in a state of belligerency with Israel until they can solve the Palestinians?
Nice to see people come out and show their true colors.
Noah gets way more wrong then he gets right here. If you actually want to learn about what the American Left believes instead of knocking down straw men, I suggest you read my work at JoeWrote.
https://joewrote.substack.com/