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It’s Dangerous to Criticize Israel

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Israel is one of the sacred cows of American politics. Thou shalt not speak ill of Israel. A Democratic politician made a questionable statement this week. Reaction was swift and, according to Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, “hysterical”:

Last weekend, Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat who is chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, made a significant political error. She called Israel a “racist state,” instead of simply a state that has racist leaders who treat many of the people under their authority as second-class citizens or worse on account of their ethnic and religious background.

Her rhetorical misstep generated international headlines and rebukes from Democrats and Republicans alike, demonstrating that, no matter how far Israel veers from liberal democratic norms, when it comes to American politics, it’s still protected by a thick lattice of taboos.

Jayapal’s gaffe occurred at Netroots Nation, a progressive conference held in Chicago, where pro-Palestinian activists interrupted a panel she was on…. Seeking to placate the demonstrators, Jayapal agreed that Israel is a “racist state” — one of their key contentions — and said that the “Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us.”

Almost as soon as she got off the stage, Jayapal told me on Monday, she realized she shouldn’t have used the phrase “racist state.” Sure enough, she was soon deluged by criticism not just from the right, but from some in her own party.

One group of centrist Democratic lawmakers circulated a draft of a letter blasting her words as “unacceptable” and saying that efforts to “delegitimize and demonize” Israel are “dangerous and antisemitic.” House Democratic leaders declared that “Israel is not a racist state” in a statement of their own….. On Sunday, Jayapal offered an apology and a clarification, saying, “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist,” even though there are “extreme racists” enacting “outright racist policies” in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Jayapal’s clarification was wise: It’s good to be as precise as possible when discussing an issue as fraught and complex as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Her words at Netroots Nation could have been interpreted as ideological opposition to Zionism, which does not reflect Jayapal’s views; like most Democrats, she wants to see a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one. Nevertheless, the ferocity of the backlash was striking, suggesting a brittle political denial about Israel’s increasingly authoritarian, jingoistic turn.

It’s telling that Democratic House leaders referred in their statement to Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, which pledges that Israel will “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex.” We can argue about whether that promise was ever compatible with a political project that, in creating a national home for one oppressed and stateless people, made refugees of another. What’s important today, however, is that Israel’s leadership no longer even appears to aspire to this founding ideal.

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” Netanyahu wrote in 2019. “According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people — and only it.” He was referring to a 2018 law, which, among other things, downgraded the official status of Arabic, the language of about a fifth of Israel’s population.

Today, there are nearly equal numbers of Jews and Palestinian Arabs living in Israel and the occupied territories. For Palestinians living under occupation, there is no pretense of equal rights: They are subject to regular land seizures and home demolitions and constant restrictions on their freedom of movement. But even Palestinian citizens of Israel face legal as well as social discrimination. Israel’s Palestinian citizens, for example, cannot obtain citizenship for spouses who are from the West Bank or Gaza, dooming thousands of couples to live separately.

Israel’s security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple of the fanatically anti-Arab rabbi Meir Kahane, was once convicted of inciting racism and supporting terrorism. He used to have a photograph of Baruch Goldstein, a settler who massacred 29 Muslim worshipers in 1994, hanging in his living room. Israel’s government is considering creating a security militia under his control.

Of course, a state’s leaders and policies can be bigoted without the state itself being irredeemable. That’s basically Jayapal’s stance, which is why she’s not an anti-Zionist. But the rush to condemn her offhand remarks is not about encouraging linguistic rigor. It’s about raising the political price of speaking about Israel forthrightly. If you believe in liberal ideals, Netanyahu’s government is very hard to defend. It’s easier for Israel’s most stalwart boosters to harp on a critic’s slight misstatement — especially when denunciation of Israel is likely to ramp up ahead of the address by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to Congress on Wednesday, which several progressive lawmakers are refusing to attend.

Israel’s most die-hard backers, Jayapal told me, are “feeling that they’ve lost credibility because the Netanyahu government’s policies are so racist, and they want to silence any discussion of any criticism.” She’s right. If Israel’s champions are truly worried about the fallout from accusations of racism, they might act to make them seem less credible.

Two Very Different Presidents, Two Very Different Paths

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Like so many others, the historian Kruse Kruse now has a Substack newsletter. In this edition, he sheds light on a famous speech from 43 years ago that attempted to make America better but failed.

Today [July 15th] marks the anniversary of [President] Jimmy Carter’s deeply unpopular “Malaise speech,” which actually was not deeply unpopular and actually never used the word “malaise.”

In the late 1970s, the United States was reeling from crises on several fronts, ranging from economic “stagflation” (a new term coined to describe the previously unimaginable mix of high inflation and high unemployment) to an energy crisis sparked by the one-two punch of Middle Eastern oil embargoes and OPEC’s price hikes.

In early July, President Carter scrapped plans for an address on the energy crisis, deciding that he needed to dig deeper to diagnose what was ailing America. The president assembled a cast of political figures and public intellectuals for ten days of free-ranging discussion and frank deliberation at Camp David. The conversations covered a great deal of ground, but the president focused in on what became the actual title of his misremembered speech: the country’s “Crisis of Confidence.”

On July 15, 1979, Carter delivered the speech in a nationally televised address.

Pairing the Camp David conversations with feedback he’d gotten from “other Americans, men and women like you,” Carter rattled off a series of seemingly disconnected comments that, taken together, spoke to the dissatisfaction, distrust and discontent of the American people. “The erosion of our confidence in the future,” he warned, “is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Carter offered a clear-eyed vision of how, and why, Americans had come to doubt their government and, as a result, to doubt themselves too:

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

We remember when the phrase “sound as a dollar” was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973 when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

As he well understood, the general dissatisfaction and distrust in government had been a main reason for Carter’s own election. While presidential candidates had long campaigned on a résumé thick with political roles and posts in Washington D.C., Carter leveraged his identity as “an outsider” — in a move others would quickly copy — who bore no responsibility for creating these crises and who could therefore have a better shot at fixing them.

But two and a half years into his presidency, Carter was “Washington” and these problems were now his own. Still, he tried to ally himself with unhappy Americans: “You don’t like it, and neither do I. What can we do?”

The president offered a blunt assessment:

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path — the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

Carter then laid out a detailed plan for common action on the energy crisis, one that called for reducing oil imports, diverting resources to alternative fuels, imposing stark conservation efforts and rationing gasoline.

There were, as one might expect, calls for government programs — a version of the War Production Board of World War II that would focus on energy, a plan for greater investments in public transportation, a tax on windfall profits to fund it all, etc. — but the emphasis was on the private, voluntary action of the American people. President Carter was confident they would rise to the challenge. “With God’s help and for the sake of our nation, it is time for us to join hands in America,” he urged in closing. “Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.”

Despite later memories of the speech as a disaster, it was actually a tremendous success. News coverage was generally positive, with political leaders heaping praise on the president for his mixture of blunt talk and bold faith.

Most notably, President Carter’s approval rating, which had been an abysmal 26% before the speech, shot up to 37% after the speech, an impressive 11-point bump that seemed to many to signal a turnaround in his political fortunes.

But that good luck was short-lived. As he moved from words to deeds, Carter made some serious missteps, most significantly securing formal offers of resignation from his entire Cabinet and several senior White House aides…. Carter meant this to be a sign of how serious his administration was taking the crisis, but most Americans saw it [as] a sign of chaos and confusion. The good will of the speech was quickly wiped away, and as additional problems arrived, like the Iran hostage crisis, Carter only found himself discredited again.

Meanwhile, an alternative vision — the first path of “self-interest” that the pious Carter had dismissed — was advanced by former California Governor Ronald Reagan as he secured the Republican nomination and challenged the incumbent president. Like Carter’s critics on both the left and right, Reagan ignored much of what Carter had actually said and instead latched onto a word the longtime Democratic operative Clark Clifford had casually tossed out to reporters in describing the speech: America’s sense of “malaise.”

“That is really the question before us tonight,” Reagan said the evening before the 1980 election. “For the first time in our memory many Americans are asking: does history still have a place for America, for her people, for her great ideals? There are some who answer no; that our energy is spent, our days of greatness at an end, that a great national malaise is upon us.”

Carter had offered a blunt assessment of the country’s problems but expressed a sharp faith in Americans’ ability to come together and conquer them, but in Reagan’s hands the underlying optimism of that message was spun into nihilistic pessimism. “I find no national malaise,” Reagan said. “I find nothing wrong with the American people.”

Carter called on the American people to join together in common cause and to make personal sacrifices for the sake of the nation. Reagan dismissed all that as needless pessimism and confirmed their complacency….

Seeking to echo FDR’s famous first inaugural address, Carter had bluntly addressed the nation’s “crisis of confidence” but expressed his faith that, with a little hard work and personal sacrifice, Americans could pull themselves out of their problem. There was, in effect, nothing to fear but fear itself.

In sharp contrast, Reagan simply insisted there was nothing to fear, nothing to sacrifice, nothing to work together to do — except show Jimmy Carter the door.

It’s not surprising which message ultimately resonated with voters, between the challenge of self-sacrifice and the comfort of self-interest.

And it’s not surprising that political leaders, from both parties, took notice.

Bidenomics as Transformational

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Ronald Reagan gave us Reaganomics, for which he should never be forgiven. The next “n” president was responsible for Clintonomics, a set of policies somewhere to the left of Reaganomics. Now we have Bidenomics. Journalist and lecturer John Stoehr is very impressed:

Joe Biden ran for president as Mr. Normalcy. During the pandemic, with the body count rising and the economy teetering, he looked pretty good next to a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who refused to lead the nation or take responsibility for it. Compared to [that other guy], Biden was a no-brainer. All he had to do was brush his teeth and mind his posture.

But Biden is not Mr. Normalcy…. Last month, during a speech in Chicago, he embraced the fact that he is what his former boss (you remember center-left Obama) had always wanted to be: a transformational president. “Bidenomics is working,” he said….

This is a BFD, and not because he’s reclaiming an insult. “Bidenomics” is real, new and, most of all, believable. Its namesake is self-consciously embracing it, indeed he’s running for reelection on it. Biden is saying the old regime is dead, and if I win, I’ll make sure it stays that way.

That’s a BFD.

“Bidenomics” is real. The economy is adding jobs at rates unseen since the 1960s. Private firms hired nearly half a million people last month, doubling expectations. (Inflation has also been slowing, for months) [now at an annual rate of 3% according to the government’s latest estimate].

“Bidenomics” is new. The last time the government invested in the economy, in the way that it’s currently investing in it, was six decades ago, which is also the last time jobs were added at such rates.

“Government is no longer shying away from pushing investment toward specific goals and industries,” wrote EJ Dionne. “Spending on public works is back in fashion. New free-trade treaties are no longer at the heart of the nation’s international strategy. Challenging monopolies and providing support for unionization efforts are higher priorities.”

But the biggest reason “Bidenomics” is a BFD is that it’s believable.

Since I came of age in the 1980s, most people most of the time have been receptive to the claim that “government interference” in a free market society – taxing wealth progressively, regulating critical industries, expanding opportunities, investing in public works – is something akin to socialism. To be sure, no one really knew what socialism was, not even the so-called socialists. It just sounded right….

For one thing, the Great (Long) Recession showed us that a free market society can’t be free. If you’re too big to fail, you’re also too big to jail – full stop. For another, the pandemic showed us that “government interference” isn’t as bad as we thought, given that we’d have died without it. The lucky survivors among us would be much poorer, too.

So Biden is not arguing that the old political order is dead. He’s pointing his finger at its moldering cadaver and saying, look! It’s dead! In Chicago, he declared that the regime of the last 40 years, which included the policies of his Democratic predecessors, is no longer viable. New conditions, challenges and urgencies call for a new regime.

Normal presidents try to appear to break from the past.

Transformational presidents do not try to appear to break. They break.

But the past was already broken.

Biden is not leading us toward regime change as much as he is leading us toward a consensus that the old regime has already changed. The old regime (sometimes called “neoliberalism,” sometimes called “Reaganomics,” after Ronald Reagan) started OK. It privileged tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and free trade. But that was at the expense of normal people, their standards of living, and the democracies they inhabited. The old regime was good — for the very obscenely rich.

Even so, every president since 1980, including Biden’s former boss, protected that political order, even as it immiserated the middle class over time. (Wages were higher in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation, than today, though, thanks to “Bidenomics,” they are finally catching up.)

Joe Biden is the first president in my lifetime, going back to Richard Nixon, to self-consciously take the side of people who work for a living while also self-consciously making enemies of people who own so much they don’t have to work. That’s a transformational president.

That’s regime change.

That’s a BFD.

“Bidenomics” Could Be a Very Big Deal

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It seems to me that there were articles saying Democrats needed an “industrial policy” back in the 70s. It looks like they’ve finally got one. From E. J. Dionne for The Washington Post:

President Biden might not seem like a revolutionary, but he is presiding over a fundamental change in the nation’s approach to economics. Not only is he proposing a major break from the “trickle-down” policies of Ronald Reagan, as Biden highlighted in a speech in Chicago on Wednesday. He is also departing from many orthodoxies that shaped the presidencies of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Government is no longer shying away from pushing investment toward specific goals and industries. Spending on public works is back in fashion. New free-trade treaties are no longer at the heart of the nation’s international strategy. Challenging monopolies and providing support for unionization efforts are higher priorities.

You can trace the break in part to new circumstances and challenges, as national security adviser Jake Sullivan argued in an important speech of his own in April.

Heightened competition with China and the urgency of dealing with climate change are part of the story. So is the long rise of wealth and income inequality accompanied by the collapse of many of the country’s industrial communities. The breakdown of supply chains during the pandemic put an accent on resiliency and an emphasis on bringing home manufacturing, for semiconductors especially but for other products, too.

The shift also has to do with [with Biden’s] unease with the Reagan-era economic consensus that hovered over Democratic administrations….

The confidence Biden and his lieutenants have in the new path is reflected in their eagerness to tout the word “Bidenomics,” a label the president now embraces after initially being abashed about paternity for a school of economic thinking….

As a political matter, Biden wants to show that his signature policies on technology, climate action and infrastructure are working. On Wednesday, he stressed they are producing well-paying jobs for those who have been on the short end of economic growth: Americans without college degrees and those living in places with “hollowed out” economies….

[In his speech, Sullivan proposed] a “new consensus” to replace “a set of ideas that championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action and trade liberalization as an end in itself.” The old formulas, Sullivan argued, not only failed to address new problems; they didn’t work on their own terms.

“In the name of oversimplified market efficiency,” he said, “entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that made them, moved overseas.” The idea that freer trade “would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He stressed the need for “a modern American industrial strategy” and the benefits of “moving beyond traditional trade deals to innovative new international economic partnerships”….

The Post’s Jennifer Rubin expands on the topic:

The economy has created 13 million jobs, inflation has been more than cut in half, huge investments are being made in infrastructure and green energy, wage growth has begun to outpace inflation, the first drug price controls are going into effect and the biggest corporations will finally be forced to pay something in federal taxes. Yet polls show voters incorrectly think we are in a recession and remain negative about the economy [note: although the polls could be wrong].

Beginning this week, the White House is making a focused push to narrow the gap between performance and perception. On Monday, senior Biden advisers … released a four-page memo explaining the president’s vision, which they call “Bidenomics”:

Bidenomics is rooted in the simple idea that we need to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up — not the top down. … Implementing that economic vision and plan — and decisively turning the page on the era of trickle-down economics — has been the defining project of the Biden presidency.

They then ticked off a list of accomplishments: an economic recovery five years earlier than expected, … nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs, a higher job-participation rate for working-age Americans than at anytime in the past 20 years….

[The strategy has three parts:] “targeted investment” that encourages private investment (comparing it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rural electrification and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway program); empowering workers (made-in-America provisions, increasing Pell grants…); and promoting competition (enforcing antitrust rules, cracking down on noncompete clauses, Medicare negotiation for lower drug prices)….

According to a White House fact sheet, the bipartisan infrastructure law has already created 35,000 projects across the country. Its green energy push has spurred more than 150 battery plants and 50 solar plants. “In all, we’ve seen $490 billion in private investment commitments in 21st century industries since the President took office, and inflation-adjusted manufacturing construction spending has grown by nearly 100% in just two years,” the fact sheet announced. “New data … shows the clean energy workforce added nearly 300,000 jobs in 2022 and clean energy jobs grew in every state in America. … Inflation-adjusted income is up 3.5% since the President took office, and low-wage workers have seen the largest wage gains over the last year.”

A recent Treasury Department report emphasized the volume of that investment and the quality of jobs created. “Real manufacturing construction spending has doubled since the end of 2021.” It found: “Within real construction spending on manufacturing, most of the growth has been driven by computer, electronics, and electrical manufacturing. Since the beginning of 2022, real spending on construction for that specific type of manufacturing has nearly quadrupled.” Because such investments increase productivity, the result should be both increased growth and downward pressure on inflation.

Biden’s [and the Democrats’ electoral] success will depend on continued growth, job creation and inflation reduction. But it’s hard to deny the results so far have been impressive. Economists may look back on this time as an inflection point when historic investments ushered in a new era of domestic manufacturing, gave a new lease on life to the Rust Belt and improved the balance sheet of middle–class Americans.

He’s Calling It the “John Roberts Two-Step”

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One thing about getting old is that you don’t often encounter new ideas. You’ve heard them before expressed one way or another. Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times is one of the best columnists writing today. Here he discusses an idea called “racecraft”:

In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1, which struck down race-based “tiebreakers” in school admissions programs in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” Roberts famously wrote, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Last week, in his opinion for the majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Roberts echoed his earlier self with a similar assertion which I also discussed in my column on Friday: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Both lines encapsulate Roberts’s view that the Constitution is colorblind and sees no racial distinctions.

One thing I noticed, reading both opinions, is that while Roberts may mention “race,” “discrimination based on race” and “racial discrimination,” he doesn’t discuss racism. In both opinions, Roberts underpins his argument with the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

“Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” the chief justice wrote in Parents Involved. Similarly, in Students for Fair Admissions, Roberts writes that in Brown, the court had finally determined that “The time for making distinctions based on race had passed.”

The issue here is that Brown v. Board of Education was not about states making distinctions based on race. The question before the court was whether state governments could use racial classifications to separate Black Americans from white Americans in order to deny rights to the former and extend privileges to the latter. The question, in other words, was whether racism was a legitimate state interest.

“Brown did not raise the issue of whether states could use race-conscious classifications to integrate schools,” wrote the legal scholar Joel K. Goldstein in a 2008 analysis and critique of Roberts’ opinion in Parents Involved. “With one pertinent exception, the briefs and oral arguments focused entirely on the way in which the government then used racial classifications — to segregate and demean blacks.”

I want to highlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a prime example of “racecraft,” the term coined by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields to describe the transmutation of a set of actions (racism) into a set of qualities or characteristics (race).

Racecraft, the Fieldses write in “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.” They offer a useful and pertinent example:

Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color”— a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.

This, you might say, is the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism, that is, race. A landmark case about the legitimacy of race hierarchy — Brown v. Board of Education — becomes, in Roberts’s hands, a case about the use of race in school placement.

To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that there’s no social force to push against — no inequality to rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the Constitution cannot recognize.

The result is a society that continues to reinforce and reconstitute these previous patterns of domination, except hierarchy is now hidden from law, and what is a feature of society becomes, instead, a quality of the people afflicted.

Unquote.

There may be other examples of this phenomenon. Discuss bad behavior but somehow make the subject something to do with the victims, not saying outright that it was the fault of the victims, but making something about the victims the subject. It’s an interesting and, to me anyway, new idea.