A Few Thoughts on the Situation in Israel-Palestine and on the Campuses. By Josh Marshall

A Few Thoughts on the Situation in Israel-Palestine and on the Campuses

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April 29, 2024 1:47 p.m.

I wanted to share a few thoughts on the ongoing crisis and mess in Israel-Palestine and also on America’s elite college campuses.

First, a thought on the campus situation and this question of whether these protests are tainted by anti-Semitism. I know most about the situation at Columbia, which certainly isn’t to say I’m an expert on it. To me it seems clear that non-students operating on the periphery of the campus have been responsible for the most egregious comments or incidents that almost no one would deny are anti-Semitic. There’s been some of that from students on campus, usually in heated instances when visibly Jewish students are in the proximity of protesters.

But to me these instances obscure a deeper issue. The groups which are spearheading most of these protests — specifically, Students for Justice in Palestine but also others — support the overthrow of the current Israeli state and the expulsion of at least some substantial percentage of the current Jewish Israeli population. This is sometimes talked about as though this is envisioned without people actually being killed at a mass scale or under the pretense that Jewish Israelis have other home countries they can relocate to. But that’s not how overthrowing a whole society works. These views are also embedded in the big chants and manifestos, which you can hear just by turning on your TV.

Is this anti-Semitic? Not as such. It’s a political view that the Israeli state never should have come into existence in the first place and that the events of 1948 should simply be reversed by force, if a solution can’t be voluntarily agreed to. But since a bit over half of Jews in the world live in Israel, that is a demand or an aim that can’t help but seem wildly threatening to the vast majority of Jews in the world, certainly the ones in Israel but by no means only them.

There’s also quite a lot of express valorization of Hamas and the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. That, again, can’t help but seem pretty menacing and threatening to most Jews. But I don’t think this is as important as the first point I noted. The valorization is mainly the kind of revolutionary cosplay that is often part and parcel of college activism.

This gets us to the definition of Zionism. People have used this term to mean many different things over the last century. But the simplest and broadest definition is that it was a historical movement to re-found a Jewish state in Israel-Palestine. Understood as such, Zionism is essentially moot. There is a Jewish-majority state in Israel-Palestine and has been for 75 years. All Zionism really means is that state continuing to exist. If you have leaders of the protests getting caught saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” … again, pretty threatening. And also unsurprising given the social milieu of groups like SJP.

We can also take a short detour to make a more general observation about college campuses and our society generally. And that is that in educational institutions over the last decade there has been a big push around the idea that it is the obligation of the institution and greater community to ensure that students are not just physically safe but have a subjective perception of their physical and emotional safety. It is certainly the case that this standard does not appear to be applied to Jews and that is in part because in the governing ideology on many campuses they are not seen as actually a minority group or the target of oppressive ideologies in the same way other groups are.

But back to our core point. If it is true that the groups spearheading the protest expressly hold eliminationist goals and beliefs about Israel, it is just as clearly true that the real energy of these protests isn’t about 1948 or even 1967 — they are about what people have been seeing on their TVs for the last six months. And that is a vast military onslaught that has leveled numerous neighborhoods throughout Gaza, led to the substantial physical destruction of much whole strip and lead to the deaths of more than 30,000 people. That’s horrifying. And people know that the U.S. has played a role in it. It’s not at all surprising that lots and lots of students are wildly up in arms about that and want to protest to make it stop.

To me, you can’t really understand the situation without recognizing that Hamas started this engagement by launching a massacre of almost unimaginable scale and brutality and then retreated to what has always been its key strategic defense in Gaza, which is intentionally placing their military infrastructure in and under civilian areas so that the price of attacking them militarily is mass civilian casualties that are then mobilized internationally to curtail Israeli military attacks on Hamas.

This is unquestionably true and no one can honestly deny that this is Hamas’s central strategic concept: employing civilian shields to limit Israel’s ability to engage Hamas in military terms.

But that being true doesn’t make tens of thousands of people less dead. And most of the dead aren’t Hamas. So if you’re a student you say — along with quite a few non-students in the U.S. — all that stuff may be true, but what I’m seeing is the ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocents and I absolutely need that to stop, especially if it is being carried out directly or indirectly with arms my tax dollars bought.

Both of these things are true. And this was brought home to me by a post on Twitter over the weekend by an academic named Dov Waxman who is the chair of Israel studies at UCLA and runs a center devoted to Israel studies at the university. I recommend reading the post. But the gist is essentially that he agrees on protesting what has happened in Gaza, is a long time opponent of the occupation and supports greater equality for Israel’s Arab minority. But he can’t participate or support these protests because of what I noted above — because the groups running the protests (which is different from the participants) want Israel itself dismantled.

All of these things are true. They can be true at the same time.

In these moments we sometimes hear people say, well, don’t try to police the decisions of an oppressed group. This gets to the rub of this issue. The real world isn’t black and white. Groups don’t fit neatly into boxes of oppressed and oppressor. People can have whatever beliefs they want and protest about whatever they want. But the groups who are the targets of eliminationist political goals can make their own decisions about what to associate with and what not to.

And here let me shift gears to my next main point. The last six months has thrown me very hard back on to defending the existence of Israel, its historical connections to Jews in Europe and the Middle East before the 20th century, its origins as the political expression of a people who are in fact indigenous to Israel-Palestine. And that’s because all of these things are now questioned and attacked as core questions.

But the reality is that these conversations, often harrowing and angry, are simply diversions from anything that creates a path forward from the terrible present. There are two national communities deeply embedded in the land. Neither is going anywhere even though there are substantial proportions of both communities who want that to happen to the other one. There’s no way to build something sustainable and dignified without both peoples having a state in which they have self-determination and citizenship. That’s the only plausible endpoint where violence doesn’t remain an ever-present reality. How you get there is another story. And yes, if you think one unified state makes sense, God bless you. If you can get majorities of both groups to agree to that, fine. I don’t live there. If that’s what they want, great. That’s almost certainly never going to be the case. And it’s a failed state in the making.

But none of these arguments about 1948 or 1967 or indigeneity or “settler colonialism” really impact or have anything to do with getting to some two state/partition end point. And no I’m not saying for a moment that that will be easy to get to. It seems terribly far off. But fantasies and alternative histories won’t get us there.

Oslo gets a bad name today. And perhaps that’s fair since it failed. And failure is a bad thing. But we shouldn’t ignore the irony that we have spent the last six month in the grip of Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu. And if you look back at the period from 1993 to 1996, there are two players who destroyed Oslo, as a matter of strategy and design. Netanyahu and Hamas. They both saw it as in their interests to kill it and they did kill it. You can question the good faith of the key actors of both sides of Oslo. But those two are the ones who set out to kill it and did kill it. They have always been, in effect, allies.

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Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else. Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 13 minutes

The youngest cohort of Americans is less white, less religious, and better-educated than the national average, so naturally it’s more Democratic-leaning and less conservative than older cohorts.

But young people also pay less attention to politics, know less about politics, are less rooted in their communities, and are less likely to vote than older people. So across multiple cycles now, Democrats have understandably tried to “mobilize” young people — i.e., get them to actually vote. Younger Democratic Party primary voters (a group that is distinct from young people writ large) also famously did not love Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in their respective primary campaigns, preferring the more left-wing Bernie Sanders. As a result, progressive advocacy groups often argue that the key to youth mobilization is adopting strident progressive stances on the groups’ issues.

Note, though, that this is largely a fallacy.

Here are two true propositions:

    Young people are less engaged than older people

    The young people who are engaged love Bernie Sanders

Logically, nothing about (1) and (2) implies that if more Democratic candidates were more like Bernie Sanders, more non-engaged young people would engage with politics.

In fact, the median young person self-identifies as moderate, just like the electorate as a whole. And at all ages, less-engaged people are less ideological and more moderate than consistent voters. Your socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe is not representative of the typical member of her generation, who is on the bubble as to whether to vote for Joe Biden. You probably don’t hear a lot about the political opinions of politically disengaged young people because they are politically disengaged. Into the void step opportunists who try to convince Democrats that they have the key to the youth vote, even though on the most plausible measurements, the stuff that young people care about is very similar to the stuff that everyone else cares about.

In particular, the idea that there’s some magic trick to mobilize young people via progressive messages on climate change has basically no evidence behind it.

Despite all my moaning and complaining, I am actually quite a bit more progressive than the average American, so I think it would be great to have a reasonably high carbon tax and split the revenue between a Child Tax Credit and deficit reduction. But as even the most strident climate change advocates in the world agree, a broad-based carbon tax is toxically unpopular. When gasoline prices spiked early in Joe Biden’s presidency, nobody stood and cheered and said “hooray, we are getting closer to our climate goals!”

And that’s the basic paradox of climate politics.

If you ask people “is climate change important?” they often say “yes.” But if you ask them to make small personal financial sacrifices to address climate change, they rebel. My interpretation of this is that most people don’t care much about climate change, and that Democrats’ decision to elevate this to the top of their priority stack is their central political difficulty.

The Harvard Institute of Politics did a good polling exercise in their most recent youth poll where they gave respondents a bunch of pairwise comparisons — they asked them to consider two issues and pick which one is more important. Then they aggregated the winners of the head-to-head matchups to see which issues young voters care about most. Climate does not crack the top 10.

Note that two other issues that are frequently said to be politically important to young people — student loans and Israel — ranked even lower than climate change.

The top issue for young people is inflation.

Inflation, of course, is a tough issue for Biden. So he is lucky that number two is health care, which remains the thing that I think Democrats should talk about more. Unfortunately for Democrats, abortion rights rank higher than climate, but still not that high.

I think this carries a few implications. The main one is that if you’re a Democrat and you need to address a persuadable group of young people, you should probably talk about the same stuff you’d talk about to any audience. Threading the needle on inflation is tricky, but Trump really would make inflation worse. Biden has a bunch of good health care ideas. Young people seem to care more about housing and less about immigration than the general public, and that’s an underlying strength for Democrats.

In terms of organizing and mobilizing work, I know that Israel critics like to say they are trying to help Biden by coercing him into shifting his position to one that’s more popular with the Democratic base. But look at these numbers — most people don’t care about this issue. When you stage protests and do other things to try to drive up its salience, you are driving up the salience of a Trump-friendly wedge issue and making it more likely that a candidate who is relentlessly hostile to Palestinian interests will win. If you can’t in good conscience actively work to help Biden get elected, that’s fair enough, but don’t be deluded about what’s happening here. Conversely, if we’d had University of Texas students getting arrested last week staging a pro choice protest at the Texas Capitol, that would have driven up the salience of an issue that is much better for Democrats. Organizing on abortion rights is very valuable precisely because this issue has a tendency to fall out of the headlines.

Not only are events at Columbia and Yale not representative of American higher education, college students are not representative of young people in general. Most people in the 18-24 bracket are not in college.

It is true that most high school graduates do enroll in higher education, but the completion rate is a rather low 62 percent.

I would not particularly suggest making boosting college completion rates a major point of rhetorical emphasis on the campaign trail. But if you want to understand a substantive policy issue impacting young people, the fact that 38 percent of people who enroll in college don’t finish seems like a big problem. Some of those people probably shouldn’t be enrolling in the first place, and the rest of them should be either getting more help with their work or enrolling at better institutions.

Note that one reason the student debt issue is not as high a priority for young voters as many Democrats seem to believe is that a majority of young people owe $0 in student debt.

Think about a cranky old boomer who has no student loan balance and thinks it’s weird that at a time of high inflation and interest rates, the government would give free money to random recent college graduates. Now consider that the typical American under 30 is in the exact same position. It’s true that this situation is less common among young people than it is among boomers. But it is still the case for the majority.

If you want to make a pitch to young people, my advice would be to find an issue that is impacting a majority of them. Most young people care about inflation, so you might be able to persuade them that Trump’s plan to explode the deficit, tax bananas and coffee, and shrink the workforce is going to make prices higher. And young people care about health care! Trump’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act impacts every single young person in the country.

Most of all, though, I think it’s absolutely crucial that Democrats not let themselves get snowed by climate advocates.

There is currently an effort under way to convince Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency,” which would allegedly unlock sweeping authority to block fossil fuel extraction projects. This is being pushed by youth activists who are claiming that it will help galvanize climate voters.

I am begging anyone who is contemplating this issue to try to think it through logically.

Everyone agrees that raising the gasoline tax would not be popular. And the reason it would not be popular is that people like cheap gasoline. So why would you block domestic oil projects? One possibility is that blocking these projects won’t influence gasoline prices. But if it doesn’t influence gasoline prices, that’s because foreign producers are fully substituting for the lost output and there’s no impact on global emissions. If there is an impact on global emissions, then the mechanism through which the impact occurs has to be higher prices.

Note that Joe Biden has been reluctantly forced to re-impose sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry due to human rights abuses by the Maduro regime. I say “reluctantly” because the administration had been trying to score Venezuela generously precisely because the were afraid of the impact on global oil prices. Venezuela, unfortunately, did not play ball and the sanctions are getting tougher again. It’s completely reasonable for Biden to consider the impact on world oil prices and the US domestic economy when making foreign policy decisions. But he should consider the exact same issues when it comes to the so-called climate emergency.

Most of all, he shouldn’t fall for the idea that there is some secret youth exception to the rule that people care about cheap energy. It’s right there in the Harvard poll — inflation is a much, much bigger concern for young people than climate is. Advocates tend to talk around this reality by interpreting the fact that young people often don’t know what Biden has done on climate as evidence that he needs to do more left-wing stuff:

    “We’re seeing a number of especially young people and people of color who are not convinced right now that Biden is doing enough on climate change. And many of them are actually feeling disappointed,” [Anthony] Leiserowitz from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication said. “And he’s going to have to win them back. He's going to have to help them understand what he has done and what he will do with a second term, because right now he has not sealed the deal.”

I think a much more natural interpretation of this set of facts is that many young people don’t know what Biden has done on climate — which was, after all, the centerpiece of his biggest legislative initiative — because they don’t care that much about climate change.

It’s not some big secret that he signed legislation creating big subsidies for zero-carbon energy, for electric cars, and for clean home appliances. There was a huge, months-long legislative debate about this, and there have been tons of articles about it. I’m sure lots of people don’t know these facts, but that’s because they don’t care that much about the issue in particular and don’t care that much about politics in general. Of course, you don’t need to care a lot about politics to notice that there was a huge surge in inflation and find that annoying, and if you don’t follow politics closely, you might wrongly assume that Trump has good ideas to fix this. The best thing Democrats can do right now is to tell these people why Trump is bad on inflation and Biden is good on inflation, not take dramatic steps to indicate that they don’t care about energy prices.

timothyburke.substack.com. Academia: On The Inside?

timothyburke.substack.com

Academia: On The Inside?

Timothy Burke

14 - 17 minutes

Many of us are looking on with sadness and shame as university administrations all over the country are falling into profoundly self-harming overreactions in coping with protests on their campuses.

For many faculty and students, many of these decisions—cancellations of graduation ceremonies, ordering students and faculty arrested for trespassing on the campuses that they study and work at, bizarrely one-sided readings of “safety” and so on—seem all the more incomprehensible in light of restrained and tolerant administrative reactions to protests from the mid-1970s into the pandemic.

In the mid-1980s at my alma mater, anti-apartheid activists were once arrested when we blocked access to the main administration building, but we expected to be arrested. It was standard civil disobedience, very politely done, and no one was charged. We also had an encampment called “Free University” that went on for a week where students taught mini-classes and it was all fine. In the years I’ve been a professor, I’ve seen many protests. Some of them were more disruptive in various ways than anything this year, in one case by a considerable margin. Administrators behind the scenes were very frustrated, but they reacted with great restraint and patience nevertheless. The basic wisdom has held for decades now: this is part of the learning experience, be patient, don’t incite by over-reacting. That has worked, by and large. I think in many cases protestors themselves have on later reflection recognized where they either didn’t know as much as they should have or where they made tactical mistakes. That kind of learning was only possible because nobody in authority over-reacted, because administrative leaders understood where their first and last responsibilities were vested.

So the question is what has changed? It’s nothing in the tactics of protesters, especially not the current round centered on encampments. It’s very obviously at least partly in the content of protests, in multiple ways, despite all the mealy-mouthed attempts to claim otherwise coming from various administrations.

But I’m trying to think about what it looks like inside the room where university presidents and their cabinets are sitting at the moment that they decide to bring the police into play or decide to suspend and expel students en masse or decide to cancel graduation ceremonies or decide to hold classes virtually rather than finish out the semester. I’m trying to understand why Minouche Shafik thinks she can do anything that will satisfy Elise Stefanik. Or why Shafik doesn’t understand that she is prolonging and intensifying the enormous and deliberate distraction this whole issue is providing the GOP, who have no genuine or deep-seated concern about anti-semitism or the security of elite universities but are straightforwardly chasing anything that will change the political momentum in their favor before November.

In the case of public universities, I don’t have any trouble imagining what’s going on in the room where it happens. The threat from red-state governments is immediate: administrators will be fired if they refuse. Sorry, UTAustin faculty and students: you’re in Texas, and Greg Abbott would be happy to put “I destroyed the flagship campus of my own state” on his list of professional accomplishments.

In the case of wealthy private universities, I have to work harder in guessing at the specifics of their decision-making process.

In doing so, I’m trying to be as sympathetic as I can manage in assessing what they’re coping with. Here’s what I come up with as I think it through.

    This is the consequence of the institutionalization of ‘safety’ as a pre-eminent discourse about social justice on campuses. Here is the one place where some critics are right to say that this is the campus left being hoisted on its own petard. I have been worrying about this point myself for a long time—I particularly raised it during some protests here on my own campus in 2013, where students were demanding a much more aggressive, top-down response from the college administration to complaints about discrimination and micro-aggressions by privileging the language of safety. I understand the difference between then and now, between the cases, but it should just be understood that empowering an institutional apparatus to act assertively following an open-ended logic is always a dangerous move. But it’s not mostly a cynical move on the part of administrations, either—many are trying to do right by the concept of safety for everyone because they really have embraced that idea. And because administrations in higher education have learned to speak an almost-utopian language about such ideas—to promise something like safety for all with little care for the real-world trade-offs involved, or the competing values that weigh against it.

    Close on the heels of this point is the soaring stock of risk management and protection against liability as a comprehensive ideological frame that has replaced older paradigms like “fiduciary responsibility”. Within the upper reaches of most administrations in higher education, protecting the endowment and the institution’s other assets against any perceived risk that might produce legal claims is now the single paramount value that precedes all others—and advice about what constitutes risk is now by its nature permanently shrouded from scrutiny or debate, since it mostly comes from counsel in forms that are protected and in some sense unspeakable. To even admit you are acting out of a perception of potential liability is thought in some circles to create a risk of liability. But this thinking in some cases creates enormous risk because the people who are articulating risk only think along one line of vulnerability, the one they understand—or because their logic is easily bent towards a pre-determined conclusion by ideologues prepared to manipulate it.

    Some university leaders have long enough memories—or have listened to the testimony of a previous generation of leaders—to regret having not acted against past protests in a more forceful way. That tempts them into thinking that if they had acted differently, they wouldn’t be dealing with the issue of the moment. I think that’s a profoundly incorrect counterfactual proposition: a more harshly punitive response in the past would do nothing to prevent successor protests, not the least because student culture has a 4-year cycle that produces serial amnesia. But I also do understand why administrative leadership feels like their time gets taken up year after year by protests that they see as unstrategic, histrionic and focused on issues that they can’t do anything about anyway, protests which occasionally are also aimed at individual administrators in professionally threatening ways that seem unfair or disproportionate. There is some justice to those characterizations. If I could magically shift the ground in many of these current protests, I’d argue that they should see the university simply as a convenient venue for staging protests that are focused elsewhere, not as the target, and lodge their demands elsewhere. Though now, unfortunately, the issue has legitimately become the universities that have acted so harshly and foolishly against their own students and faculty.

    There’s a kind of herd logic to many decisions in higher education. When enough institutions do a thing, refusing to do that thing makes you a prominent target in some fashion. If you decide to reject U.S. News rankings, then U.S. News goes out of their way to damage you in retaliation. You might not be that interested in admitting more low-income first-generation students when it’s just Amherst moving aggressively on that goal, but when the New York Times publishes a ranked list of institutions based on the number of Pell Grant recipients they matriculated, suddenly it becomes urgent to embrace that goal. The herd logic is in very strong play now and it will take a mighty degree of common sense to refuse to follow it.

    I’ve found that over the last two decades, it’s become harder and harder for most administrators to see protest as a pedagogical occasion. Or in the case of certain students, professional development. When I first started as a professor that seemed like a much more common insight—as a very junior professor here, I once sat with a former president here and several colleagues in a big circle with students who were highly aggrieved about what they believed was a defacing of a space set aside for intercultural understanding, and we all treated the discussion like a classroom conversation, patiently untangling their demands and gently challenging their understanding of what had happened. The former president and several other administrators completely understood that the moment wasn’t something to manage or make policy about, but a teaching moment. For whatever reason, that frame has just become very hard to access inside decision-making conversations in these kinds of moments.

    Equally, I’ve found that administrative leaders increasingly feel the need to defend the formal prerogatives of their leadership, both for themselves and as a way of establishing precedent. That becomes the principal value they are defending in certain kinds of confrontations: the right to be the person who decides what will happen. The oddity of this insistence in this particular moment is that leaders at Columbia, NYU, Vanderbilt, USC and elsewhere don’t look like they’re defending their autonomy as leaders, their prerogatives to make decisions: they look weak, they look mostly like they are appeasing hostile outsiders who have no intention of being appeased. Here the need to be “the decider” is really leading them astray, because they’re in effect doing the exact opposite.

    But this is because it’s not just hostile outsiders. When I started my career, for the most part, trustee boards at most elite universities and colleges were composed of modestly wealthy executives, prominent professionals, and highly accomplished individuals in the arts, in civic leadership, and so on. For the most part, they stayed out of the everyday affairs of their institutions and deferred to the president and their cabinet. (Selection of board members was also often effectively controlled by administrations rather than boards themselves.) They were there as donors, as genial cheerleaders for the institution, and as a kind of “in case of emergency, break glass” authority of last resort, to be called on in the case of a major crisis. In the few cases where a forceful personality really insisted on getting their way, you’d either humor them if what they wanted was sequestered enough from the core of the institution (say, building a new stadium or hiring a new coach) or you’d do what they wanted and then regret it, as Yale did in accepting a big donation from Lee Bass back in the 1990s. Today many of those same boards are peppered with micromanaging interventionists, many of them part of an extraordinarily small hyper-wealthy elite that has arisen since the 1990s. They’re accustomed to getting their way, often see the president and administration as subservient to them, and more than a few have little respect for universities as such and even less for many of the underlying values that animate life on campuses. So if you’re inside that decision-making room, you can’t just blow off or ignore that small subset of trustees who not only expect to have your ear but increasingly demand your obedience, where once upon a time your development staff would have insulated you from that kind of pressure. You can’t ignore it because on paper, the board is in charge, and the students and faculty are not. But this is a situation where university presidents and their staffs got themselves into hot water by losing some of the insulating safeguards of the past through incautious pursuit of the biggest wallets. That’s what happened at Penn, for example, where Amy Gutmann ended up exposing her successor to strong personalities who wanted to be in charge first and foremost and are open about their disdain for the basic ethos of university life. 

All of this amounts to the anatomy of an enormous mistake, however: these leaders at various institutions are pleasing no one and alienating everybody, and this is not going to be the kind of moment that people just forget. They aren’t calming things down, they’re escalating them. They aren’t protecting their values, they’re undercutting their brand. They are pursuing strength via an accelerating weakness.

It’s true that in American history, it’s often been politically profitable to take credit for actions taken against college protestors. A lot of people forget that the Kent State shootings were popular. Antiwar protests were disapproved of by a supermajority of Americans polled until the waning days of the war itself, and really only rose in common estimation much later on. (Sort of the same way that suddenly everybody claims to have been against the invasion of Iraq now that it’s obvious that it was one of the worst decisions in modern American history.) Older Americans being glad for an opportunity to hate young Americans, especially people in college, is kind of an evergreen part of post-1945 American life.

Two things to consider, though. First, it’s politicians who get a boost, not university leaders, whose professional viability is often at risk when they don’t protect and sustain their own institutions. (It is especially hard to forgive the invocation of ‘safety’ by universities who are exposing their students to serious danger.) And even that boost doesn’t last for long, especially as a counter-discourse rises and pushes back.

And second, if I were Joe Biden, I’d be really careful about trying to claim a share of the demagoguery coming from the GOP on this issue. Not just because that kind of triangulation has been a consistent loser for the post-New Deal Democrats, but because there’s a real and present electoral danger to him if the overreaction by campus leaders coalesces a single-issue protest movement into a full-blown generational grievance. And an electoral danger to Joe Biden is, unfortunately at this point, not just his risk alone to manage.

Regardless of what you think of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. By Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

Regardless of what you think of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. By Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

Regardless of what you think of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and I’m definitely not a fan, his statements at the World Economic Forum in Riyadh were on point regarding several issues. Notably, he made a reference to Israel having a right to “full security” that Palestinians acknowledge and, in turn, that the Palestinian people deserve the right to self-determination, as is the case with peoples of the world. This point about Israel’s right to security is nothing new for the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Abbas, who has insisted on maintaining security coordination with Israeli authorities, a contentious point that has cost him lots of credibility within the Palestinian Territories. Nevertheless, his point is absolutely valid in that Israel, regardless of one’s view of its policies, history, formation, or territorial disputes, has a right as a sovereign, internationally recognized nation to be secure and to have its citizens live free of constant fear of loss of life.

Importantly, however, security here doesn’t refer to the right to expand the military occupation in the West Bank to provide protection for illegal settlements and the IDF’s abuse of Palestinian civilians, nor does security justify the excessive use of force and the horrendous conduct of the war in the Gaza Strip. Instead, I’m talking about what took place on October 7 – a massacre that Israel, just like any other nation, has a right not to experience. Unfortunately for Abbas and the cause of coexistence and peace, Netanyahu, who relied on settlers for electoral considerations, ignored Abbas’ willingness to cooperate on security issues in the West Bank and opted instead to expand the aggressive settlement activities, further weakening the PA and allowing Hamas’s armed resistance program and narrative to posture as the only viable alternative. Still, without Abbas’ security forces maintaining a hold of the areas under PA control, the West Bank would have descended into complete chaos, and a Third Intifada would have been inevitable.

Multiple things are true at once: Israel has a right to security and to not experience random stabbings, car rammings, shootings, rockets, suicide bombings, or other violent incidents; Israel’s security cannot be used to justify an oppressive military occupation in the West Bank or the wholesale destruction of Gaza; the PA and Abbas were willing security partners with Israel but were deliberately weakened by the Netanyahu regime; and an independent and sovereign Palestinian state can only exist if the legitimacy of Israel’s security needs is recognized.

Separately, Abbas warned that a Rafah operation is expected in the coming few days, something that’s in line with most analysts and observers’ opinions, urging the US to stop Israel’s assault on the coastal enclave’s southernmost city and warning of catastrophic consequences for the entirety of the Palestinian people if the invasion were to commence.

Lastly, Abbas has meager approval rates, is highly loathed by most Palestinians, and, at 88 years old, is considered a lethargic, out-of-touch leader who’s well past his presidential term/mandate. He should step down and let new blood and leadership take over the PA to revive it and position the body as a viable alternative to Hamas in Gaza.

Learning Loss Was a Problem Even Before the Pandemic - Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 5 minutes

It’s well known that US education has only partially recovered from the learning loss induced by the pandemic and associated school closures. Less well-known is that America’s students were losing ground even before Covid-19.

What went wrong? New research from Stanford economists points the finger squarely at the obscure Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which passed in 2015 with little public debate by a huge bipartisan vote. The bill, as critics noted at the time, represented a major retreat from the ambitions of the previous effort at education reform: Another law known by its four-letter acronym, 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act.

NCLB broke with the tradition of decentralization in US education and required states to start regularly testing their students and demanding that schools either meet standards of performance or show that they were making progress. NCLB did not magically transform US the educational system. But student learning, at least as measured on the National Assessment of Education Progress, did slowly rise during the NCLB years.

Nonetheless, NCLB generated significant backlash from multiple directions.

On the one hand, teachers unions resented the effort to hold their members’ job performance to a higher standard. On the other hand, many upscale parents didn’t love the idea of schools refocusing attention from their kids to the neediest cases. On the left, there were demands for more focus on systemic social justice. On the right, there were demands for a renewed emphasis on privatization on vouchers. From all corners was the reality that NCLB simply cut against the traditional organization of American schooling.

So with ESSA, the federal government stepped back and devolved more authority to the states. As a result, as the research documents, many states moved to “retreat from the use of output-based policy toward teachers.”

What exactly is “output-based policy”? Roughly speaking, it means increasing the pay of teachers who do a measurably better job of teaching students. It stands in contrast to “input-based policy,” such as giving higher salaries for more years of experience or extra graduate degrees. Throughout the NCLB years, reform-oriented mayors and chancellors championed output-based policies — often with the support of the federal Department of Education, especially during Barack Obama’s first term — and it worked.

But teachers didn’t like it. ESSA “consistently gave development of teacher evaluations and teacher policy back to the states,” the paper notes, and they used it to shift away from output-based policies and toward input-based ones.

The researchers found that this hurt students, albeit modestly, reducing learning on average by about 0.2-0.025 standard deviations.

That’s not a huge amount. But the estimate is based on comparing those states which changed policy during the relatively narrow 2015-2019 window with the majority of states that did not. In other words, the retreat from education reform during this period was harmful but relatively small.

Then came Covid, which hurt students in the states that imposed prolonged school closures and set them back even in the states that didn’t.

Unfortunately, the backsliding on education reform has only continued. The big cohort of reform mayors is long gone, blue-state legislatures are backtracking on things like mayoral control of schools, and conservative states are going all-in on privatization.

It’s a shame, because in many respects the Obama-era reform push came under the worst possible circumstances. State budgets were ravaged by the Great Recession, and a sluggish economy made it hard for young people to secure good jobs. This meant the push for output-based assessments of teachers was about sticks more than carrots.

The strong labor market of recent years, when school districts are wrestling with teacher shortages rather than layoffs, creates a much more politically appealing opportunity for merit pay. Rather than threatening the worst-performing teachers with losing their jobs, a solid output-based policy could simply make sure to adequately reward the very best teachers.

For that to happen, however, there has to be a national consensus that school quality matters. Unfortunately, that consensus has unraveled — which is ironic in light of the greatly increased salience of racial equity over the past decade. It was Black and Hispanic students who lost the most from ESSA, and Black and Hispanic students who lost the most from Covid-era school closures.

Yet reform efforts have often been opposed in the name of anti-racism. Academics such as Ibram X. Kendi have argued that the academic achievement gap that NCLB aspired to close is itself a racist idea, founded on the observation that Black and Hispanic students score worse on tests of reading and math than do White and Asian ones. If the tests show a gap, according to Kendi, that must mean the tests are racist. Once that idea is out there, the idea of using tests to measure teacher effectiveness is hard to advocate for.

There is an older, wiser perspective on education reform: The tests were telling us about failures of the system, and with improved management schools could do a better job of teaching Black and Hispanic kids how to read and do math.

It’s certainly true in retrospect that NCLB was guilty of overpromising. The idea of completely eradicating achievement gaps was unrealistic given the different background conditions facing different kids. And labeling schools as “failing” for achieving less than 100% proficiency among their students was unduly harsh and promoted misunderstandings about the actual policy.

Still, the lesson from the last few decades of education reform is clear. When America really tries to improve educational outcomes, it can. But when the political will fades, or a pandemic comes, that progress can start to slip — and then collapse altogether. Given the current temper of national politics, it’s hard to imagine a return to the earnest bipartisanship of 20 years ago. But America’s students deserve it.

Is ‘Bronze Age Pervert’ Born to Rule? By Matt McManus

What BAP tells us about the hard Right

Matt McManus

November 19, 2023

Far-right Politics Philosophy

Ruins of the Roman Forum (Flickr)

Karl Marx famously wrote that all history repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as farce. So it has proven with the political movements inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche. Weimar Germany went through a Nietzschean-inflected “Conservative Revolution” in the 1910s and ’20s, which contributed to the tragedy about to occur there and throughout Europe. Now the United States seems to be going through a cheap and silly version of vulgar Nietzscheanism: Thus Spake Zarathustra delivered via Dr. Oz-style pitches for flaxseed and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories. What has been dubbed the American “Nietzschean right”—or, as John Ganz calls it, the rise of the “super-duper man”—has generated a fair amount of attention. It is fast becoming the third wheel of an American hard Right (the other two wheels: “national conservativism” and “post-liberalism”). It’s easy to dismiss the Nietzschean Right as nothing more than an attempt to jazz up resentment toward liberals with a few phrases from The Quotable Nietzsche. And no doubt a lot of it is just that. But Nietzschean Rightists shouldn’t be dismissed without further inspection. Despite their outrageous and often fatuous rhetoric, they have managed to gain a hearing among some fortunate Americans eager to hear that the biggest problem in the country is a lack of reverence for natural winners.

Without a doubt the most influential figure on this Nietzschean Right is the writer who calls himself Bronze Age Pervert. His real name is Costin Alamariu. A lot of what has been written about Alamariu’s past is speculative or reconstructed, since, like Batman, he hasn’t officially acknowledged his double life. By most accounts, Alamariu is from a comfortable and undistinguished middle-class background, and he has never completely forgiven the world for this embarrassment. He attended a series of Ivy League schools, where his fellow students and mentors have described him as bright and creative, but also fixated on hierarchy and self-consciously attention-seeking to the point of awkwardness. After completing a PhD in political philosophy at Yale in 2015, Alamariu took a few bored stabs at an academic career while writing for far-right outlets. By 2018, he had mostly disappeared from public view.

“BAP,” as he’s often called, began gaining notoriety with the publication of Bronze Age Mindset in 2018. Here the reader finds what would become Alamariu’s signature mix of flowery bombast and jokes about women’s genitals. It was not clear how much of Bronze Age Mindset was meant to be taken seriously, how much flippantly, and by whom. Alamariu’s writing is deeply influenced by the work of Leo Strauss, and especially by Strauss’s insistence that many important thinkers have had an “exoteric” philosophy for the people and a more sincere “esoteric” philosophy for their elite readers. One of the most dramatic examples was Strauss’s Socratic argument that, contra conservative doctrine, our political convictions are in fact questionable and always open to contestation. If most people knew this, it might lead to the nihilistic consequence of everyone everywhere believing that everything is permitted. This is why in the public square philosophers must preach an ideal of eternal justice and order, while, when speaking among themselves, they should have great liberty to discover or—for Nietzscheans—invent new value systems. This idea of a secret lesson available only to the highly educated, while the mob has to make do with shibboleths, has always enticed a certain kind of reader who imagines himself (it’s usually a man) a natural aristocrat. Intellectual vanity leads such readers to project onto various canonical philosophers secret lessons that somehow all lead to the conclusion that people like the readers themselves should be in charge.

 

The substance of Bronze Age Mindset is a foamy mixture of vitalism, Nietzschean pomp, tips on bodybuilding, travel anecdotes, and shock-jock racism and misogyny. As Ganz points out, a lot of the desperately attention-seeking language is probably intended to provoke easily offended liberals into condemning BAP, thereby increasing his appeal amongst the easily placated crowd who think “wokeness” is the biggest single threat to Western civilization. A lot of Bronze Age Mindset consists of rants about hookers, booze, and blue-collar tourism, simultaneously sneering at these things as emblematic of modern decline and admiring them as a tonic reaction to the soft conformism of WASP-y liberals. From BAP’s perspective, liberal civilization has its nose buried so deep in the dirt it can survive most signs of decline by ignoring them. Only the most debased excesses succeed in alerting us to the rot.

 

BAP is not really a conservative or even a reactionary. In fact, he despises conservatives almost as much as he detests the Left.

Many of the disagreements between the Left and Right center on whether ordinary people are capable of thinking for themselves and fully participating in self-government. The Left usually thinks they are (though some technocratic liberals have doubts); much of the Right thinks that ordinary people are better off with what Burke called “all the pleasing illusions” that make their subordination easier to endure. BAP’s claim that the “vermin” just need laws to obey while the elite may do as they wish may also remind discerning readers of Joseph De Maistre’s insistence that ordinary people should treat authority as “dogma.” But unlike Burke or De Maistre, BAP is not really a conservative or even a reactionary. In fact, he despises conservatives almost as much as he detests the Left.

Every author on the hard right has their own pet reasons for why “conservatism is no longer enough.” For BAP, normie conservatives are basically like the foils in Plato’s dialogues, defending conventional wisdom. BAP follows Strauss in thinking that appeals to custom, tradition, and common sense will never serve the hard Right in the long run. For BAP, what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” and Burke described as the contract between the “living, the dead, and those yet unborn” is still far too democratic and left wing. He finds it “ridiculous to hear these ‘conservatives’ yap on about honor, or glory, or sacrifice, or any of this garbage. The respect in all institutions and all leadership classes and all traditional authority has already been lost long ago, and for good reason.” Here, too, BAP follows the example of Nietzsche, who wrote in The Gay Science that he wanted to “conserve nothing, neither do we want to return to any past periods, we are not by any means ‘liberal’…. [W]e think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery—for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.”

But if BAP isn’t a conservative, then what is he? BAP is a fascist thinker, but not the kind of fascist who endorses populist ultra-nationalism. He isn’t opposed to the strategic use of populism, of course. At the end of Bronze Age Mindset, he argues that his followers should strategically align with populist movements like Trumpism and Orbanism because if “Ann Coulter or Pat Buchanan were in charge, you would get 99 percent of what you want. Therefore use them as models to solve the problems that face you, and don’t scare the people with crazy talk if you want to move things politically. Let the normies have their normal lives, and paint our enemies as the crazies…which they are…and as the corrupt vermin they are. If you haven’t compromised yourself go into political life maybe, and use Trump as a model for success.”

But BAP’s ideal society would dispense with such pragmatic concessions to the rabble. BAP is better understood as a kind of ultra-fascist of the Julius Evola stripe: someone for whom classical fascism is too democratic, too populist, and too vulgar. BAP’s fascists would be philosopher tyrants who both oppress and exploit the common people as need be. This outlook was already clear in his more guarded Yale dissertation—recently published as Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy—which stressed how pre-philosophical societies in Greece advanced only after being conquered by a warrior race that bred a new aristocracy. The basics of BAP’s politics are nicely summarized, with a kind of Bronze Age English, in his 2021 essay “Communittar Fools”:

I never thought problem of modernity or problem of man in general is primarily economic or will ever have economic solution. But I will say brief: that America or the West is “hypercapitalist” is one of the most absurd claims floating around now. I don’t want to enter these debates very much because it would make me take, however temporarily, the side of “classical liberals.” I don’t believe in liberalism of whatever kind because it is, as Nietzsche say, itself a path to the herd-animalization of man. I believe in Fascism or “something worse” and I can say so unambiguously because, unlike others, I have given up long ago all hope of being part of the respectable world or winning a respectable audience. I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics. I am indifferent to economics as long as economic activity is subordinate to the interest of this caste and their project.

Imagining how his fascism-or-something-worse worldview would shock liberals, and then bragging about his indifference to that shock is part of BAP’s schtick: here is someone who doesn’t secretly crave the approval or even the attention of the “bugmen,” someone immune to the seductions of the “respectable world.”

It is important for liberals to recognize the staunchly “aristocratic radicalism” in Nietzsche’s work and understand his appeal to the hard Right. Ronald Beiner has done excellent work on this legacy in books like Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Return of the Far Right. But BAP’s work lacks everything that made Nietzsche’s thinking interesting: its deep ruminations on human psychology; its disdain for nationalism and endorsement of being a “good European”; above all, Nietzsche’s recognition that his own contest with Christianity and its secular egalitarian offshoots, liberalism and socialism, required him to treat them as worthy opponents. Nietzsche may have believed that Christianity and post-Christian modernity had corroded the “pathos of distance” and aristocratic “master moralities” needed for any deep culture, but he also believed that Christianity had enriched the human soul by turning it inward, leading to new kinds of conscience and emotional depth. For Nietzsche, a decadent like Rousseau was only possible in a post-Christian society, but so too was a Dostoevsky. This is why Nietzsche’s projected ideal wasn’t an uber-bro Achilles, but a kind of “Caesar with the soul of Christ.”

BAP’s fascists would be philosopher tyrants who both oppress and exploit the common people as need be.

BAP’s ideas are never this interesting or complex. He may like to play with the conceit of the esoteric-versus-exoteric. But far from conveying secret codes available to different audiences, his jarring rhetorical turns all serve a one-dimensional ideology. In a cynical mood, BAP will insist that there are no real revolutions, only replacements of one aristocracy by another. This of course is intended to underscore the stupid futility of the Left’s struggle for equality and freedom. But this rhetoric tends to undermine BAP’s pose as a heroic antagonist of the oppressive herd that seeks to smother every spark of aristocracy. It isn’t clear whether he is oblivious of this contradiction or just indifferent to it. Is the Left pathetic and impotent, or is it ruthlessly totalitarian? From one sentence to another, BAP can’t make up his mind.

BAP also breaks from Nietzsche in arguing that the “problem for man as for other animal [sic] isn’t stress or suffering, but the feeling that one can’t escape: the despair and panic of exhaustion and entrapment.” This ignores Nietzsche’s most mortifying lesson that the major problem of life is indeed a peculiar kind of suffering: the all-too-human fear that our pain is stupid and meaningless; it is this fear that becomes unendurable and leads us to invest our struggles with meaning. By reducing one of Nietzsche’s deepest thoughts about the universal human yearning for meaning to yet another lesson on the aristocratic soul’s need to expand and break boundaries, BAP loses the residual awareness of others that made Nietzsche’s writing, at its best, something deeper than ideology.

In fact, BAPs writing rarely demonstrates any of Nietzsche’s psychological acuity; instead, it casually dismisses the mass of humankind as vermin, yeast, bugs, etc. These tedious tirades ignore Nietzsche’s insistence that, at his most noble, the superior man is too far above the herd to bother hating it. The irony is that by constantly referring to the swinish multitude and comparing himself to them, BAPs writing seems to seethe with the kind of ressentiment that Nietzsche regarded as a deadly intellectual vice. In this case it’s the ressentiment of a man who regards himself as superior and wishes to be recognized as such, but despises anyone who could actually affirm his superiority. This comes through most clearly in BAP’s weird little sermons on friendship, in which he alternates between yearning for the “self-destruction” of the “heaps of biological refuse” that constitute most of humanity and asking why no one wants to be his friend—before concluding ruefully that none is worthy of that honor. The sense conveyed in these passages is less Dionysian revelry than late-night drunken pity party. BAP sometimes insists on the need to be cruel to one’s self, and not just to others, because it is only through cruelty to one’s illusions and superficial joys that a kind of will-to-truth is demonstrated. But how much self-cruelty is really entailed in declaring yourself a born aristocrat, both intellectually and physically superior to the common run of men?

When BAP claims that Christianity suppressed the “natural spirit of man, the innate reverence of man for the magnificence inside animals and inside things. In the end, nothing can be trusted, that you can’t see and feel yourself,” this represents not an ennobling expansion of consciousness but a shrinking of the self down to its immediate sensations and impulses. So reduced, the aristocratic soul is supposed to think and will only one thing. “Single minded purity of purpose is true manliness,” BAP writes. The external world, and all others in it, disappears in a blinding fog of manic self-regard.

The thing one notices most about reading BAP’s writing is just how quickly it becomes stale. It feels less like a penetrating attack on liberal pieties à la Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals or Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology than like listening to a late-2000s Eminem album like Relapse: an aging troll cheerfully declaring he is the GOAT and no one can touch him while also offering a wretched cri de coeur about the pain and isolation within. It’s hard to understand how anyone can think of BAP as a role model, but an alarming number of young would-be fascists apparently do.

The moral ugliness of the hard Right, as represented by the Bronze Age Pervert, predictably translates into an awful aesthetics: grandiose, self-indulgent, and monotonous; more fool’s gold than bronze. That shouldn’t surprise us. Justice makes a society beautiful by giving to the human will what a lust for power never can: a sense of creating a shared world together. We forget this at our peril.

In Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War there is a classic scene usually read as an expression of the “might makes right” outlook. The Athenian delegation declares that the “strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” The Athenians, thinking themselves strong, meant this more as a boast than a lament. But Athens was punished for its hubris—defeated in battle and then occupied by its enemies. So in the twentieth century fascist regimes insisted that democracies, ruled by decadent fat cats and populated by the genetically impure, could never resist them. Then the fascists, like the Athenians before them, were punished for their hubris, as the rest of the world closed ranks to defeat them. By their own measure of success, the champions of “might makes right” have turned out to be history’s losers. It turns out, to (only) their surprise, that cruelty is no proof of strength.

TopicsFar-right Politics Philosophy

Matt McManus is a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan and the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Right and Inequality.

Troll in Chief

Troll in Chief

Can democracy survive the age of social media?

Matt McManus

April 22, 2024

Among the many troubling phenomena social media has introduced or amplified in our politics is the troll. Crawling out of the shallow swamps of 4chan or the parts of YouTube not yet dominated by Taylor Swift, internet trolls have managed to rise to surprising heights of notoriety. Trolls like Bronze Age Pervert and L0m3z write best-selling books and big thought pieces for venerable right-wing magazines. A troll disguised as a politician, Vivek Ramaswamy, even ran for the Republican presidential nomination and is now angling to be Donald Trump’s running mate. The term is new, but the reality is not entirely unfamiliar. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre described a rhetorical technique that we might call pre-internet trolling: 

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.

How the troll has come to occupy his role (it’s usually a man) in the collective id is the subject of Jason Hannan’s engaging Trolling Ourselves To Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Hannan, an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, is an eclectic and imaginative thinker writing in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan. He argues that trolls “first emerged as social parasites, digital delinquents who abused the collective trust of an online community. By posting manipulative questions and provocative comments as bait, they lured unsuspecting users into arguments and then relished the ensuing flame wars.” Hannan claims that in their “essence,” early trolls were not much more than “pranksters who got a kick out of sowing discord online.” But things soon got more sinister as many anonymous trolls matured from posting the odd Holocaust-denial joke now and then to actively participating in fascist politics.

One of the most significant factors in the emergence of the troll is, of course, changing technology. Here, Hannan owes a debt to the iconoclastic media theorist Neil Postman, whose Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) inspired Hannan’s title. Postman famously argued that with the advent of television, politics was becoming more one-dimensional and simplistic. During the nineteenth century, when people got their political information from books and newspapers, they found it easier to absorb a high level of complexity and nuance. But TV news boils everything down to five-minute soundbites and makes every story as entertaining and adversarial as possible. Hannan argues that something similar has occurred with the rise of the internet. Social media in particular fosters a “hyperemotional environment of visceral reactions and paranoid instincts” that feeds into the “psychology of reactionary right-wing movements.” It is the manure-rich soil from which figures such as Trump or Boris Johnson can emerge. It rewards anyone who can master the dubious art of the angry three-hundred-character tweet that triggers liberal squares. They and their admirers are “in it for the lols.”

When the troll is not just a provocateur, he is usually a counter-puncher. And this is perhaps one reason so many trolls are right-wingers. As Hannan points out, the contemporary Right is riddled with contradictions: it will defend “limited government” and free markets while also endorsing “government bailouts of private business” and “bloated military budgets”; it will lament the decline of the nuclear family on Sunday and laugh as ICE tears “migrant children away from their parents” and imprisons them in cages the next day. For Hannan, these contradictions make sense if one grasps that the political Right is not so much a principled movement as a reaction against the claims of reason and a blind embrace of hierarchy and prejudice. On this view, the Right is very much a “politics of resentment,” which “does not so much say what it stands for as highlight what it stands against”—anything that undermines the status, wealth, and power of the Right’s constituencies. Grounded in reaction, the Right does better with stylish ridicule than with systematic argument. Distrustful of theory, its natural genre is the one-liner or the tweet.

All this might give you the impression that Hannan is one more in a long line of left-wing Enlightenment critics of the Right, with a lineage going back to Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In some respects, that’s true. But one of the strengths of Hannan’s book is his recognition that there is a dark side to Enlightenment that naturally produces reactionary and prejudicial tendencies. Here, he is very much inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. MacIntyre famously argued that the Enlightenment’s moral project had run into a dead end somewhere around the time of Nietzsche. Constantly seeking a foundation for morality, it ended in emotivism: the conviction that morality is at best a matter of taste, and moral preferences are, in principle, no different from a preference for chocolate ice cream or key-lime pie. As Hannan notes, for MacIntyre, this mapped perfectly with the ideology that has come to govern many developed states: the “culture, values, and ethos of the marketplace.” In this context, people come to treat one another largely as “means” rather than “ends.” Evoking Mad Men, Hannan claims modern subjects are “architects of deception, seeking to persuade, influence, convince, control, shape, mold, deceive, and manipulate each other for the realization of private and individual gain.” 

Dark stuff. It gets darker still when Hannan points out how this eminently modern market morality helps produce not just internet trolls, but conservative mega-influencers like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. For Hannan, these figures “fought to inoculate conservatives against guilt and remorse for cruel, obnoxious and antisocial speech. They taught conservatives to enjoy their cruelty and to delight in provocation for its own sake. In short, they turned American conservatism into a vast community of political trolls.”

Donald Trump has presented himself as the Troll in Chief. In The Art of the Deal, he claimed that “people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” what he called “truthful hyperbole.” In the old days, when he was merely a failing businessman, Trump’s “truthful hyperbole” was just typical business bullshit. In politics, the same casual cynicism has had a much more destructive effect. Plenty of centrist commentators have decried Trump’s habitual mendacity and the reflexive hyperbole of his language, as if these things made him an outlier. They fail to recognize the extent to which Trump is very much a predictable symptom of our culture, a postmodern conservative who plays fast and loose with the truth because he has discovered that his audience is more interested in being entertained than in being informed.

Hannan’s Trolling Ourselves to Death is short but vital. Hannan suggests—but only suggests—that a new kind of politics is necessary to keep us from trolling ourselves to death. What exactly this politics would look like isn’t clear. But it would involve more than a change of tone. Hannan’s analysis implies that the morality of the market is the real source of our current ills. Until we change the material conditions that encourage us to look at other people—and the whole world, for that matter—as mere means to our own ends, the troll will survive and proliferate, delighting in easy mockery, peddling brazen lies, and gleefully echoing Pilate: “What is truth?”

Trolling Ourselves to Death

Democracy in the Age of Social Media

Jason Hannan

Oxford University Press

$24.95 | 184 pp.

Published in the May 2024 issue: View Contents

TopicsDonald Trump Domestic Affairs Technology Nonfiction

Matt McManus is a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan and the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Right and Inequality.

12 thoughts about the Columbia University protests and what is happening on campuses across the country. By Isaac Paul

1. I have to be honest about something: I'm really starting to hate writing about anything related to Israel or Gaza. I feel like I can't write authentically about this latest controversy without acknowledging that first. I’ve written this newsletter five days a week for nearly five years, covering COVID, abortion, gun control, trans issues, immigration, and every other controversial topic out there. I’ve never felt the kind of deranged tension I feel right now. For every sentence I write, there are people on one side accusing me of being complicit in a genocide and people on the other side accusing me of contributing to the killing and hatred of Jews. For anyone speaking on this topic publicly, the environment is so untenable, so unhelpful, so fraught, that it's no wonder we are seeing protests like these play out on college campuses. It makes me both want to run to my corner of like-minded people and just shut up and disappear. 2. A very, very large part of me does not care at all about what is happening on these campuses. I understand these students are “future leaders” and the “next generation,” but we should remember what it’s like to be their age. I went to college not that long ago. I barely remember it. When I was a teenager, I was still learning not to call things “gay” that I didn’t like. In college, I thought Natural Ice was a good beer and Barack Obama was going to unite the country. In 10 years those kids are going to look back on some of their ideas and actions now and think they were idiots. I’m sure in 10 years I'll look back on some of the things I believe now and laugh. 20-year-olds are not wizened foreign policy experts; 20-year-olds are 20-year-olds. I’m interested in their opinions, but they don’t keep me up at night. They are growing, evolving, ignorant young adults who deserve space to be wrong and screw up. That’s what college is about. When I see 30 college kids from NYU chanting "from the river to the sea," a chant that means vastly different things to different people, it ranks as about the 212th most important or notable or interesting thing I saw that hour, let alone that day or week or month. I do not know why we continue to focus on these kids so much, or call for ruining their careers, or insist we need to send in the troops against them. I hate feeling like I am falling into the trap by giving the protests any more coverage. 3. If I were ranking the importance of the actions of Hamas and the Israeli governments to the war in Gaza on a scale from 1 to 100, I would put them both somewhere in the 90 to 100 range. If I were ranking the importance of what was happening on a half-dozen elite college campuses in the U.S. on the same scale, I'd score them less than 5. Yet, in the context of the conflict, government actions and campus protests receive about the same amount of media coverage in the U.S. I have no idea how to reconcile this. I am happy to say we've covered the former a lot more than the latter, but I can't figure out the obsessiveness of so many reporters and pundits — on both the left and the right — with such minor players in the story. 4. All students have a right to protest. In fact, I encourage them to protest (though they should find some time to study, too). Movements like the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement are perfectly rational ways to protest Israel. Personally, I hope the BDS movement fails because I oppose its goal. I sometimes scoff at it because I do not think getting Columbia to rid itself of some $200,000 investment in an Israeli company is going to meaningfully change anything (not to mention, genuine divestment is easier said than done). I do not think Columbia University, its professors, its dean, or anyone on its faculty are “complicit” in anything Israel’s war cabinet decides to do 7,000 miles away, and I actually find the idea pretty silly. But guess what? It is a non-violent form of protest that offers tangible action for genuine objections to policy. When you criminalize or stifle non-violent protests like that, you often get violent protests instead. This is one thread of the story of pro-Palestine activists: Many non-violent, peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators end up being criminalized, silenced, or killed. Criminalizing or trying to destroy movements like BDS is therefore dangerous and counterproductive. Argue with them if you like, but let them be. 5. Student activism is a great way to learn and participate in democracy. Non-violent student activism is excellent. It is legal. It is not (and should not) be a violation of school rules. At the same time, if you are a student and your school makes simple rules about student protests like, say, "you can't protest on this lawn or at this time," and then you break those rules, you should be prepared to get suspended or arrested. Schools are responsible for not making rules so arduous they effectively restrict or end student activism, and students are responsible for following reasonable rules. Columbia’s initial update to their rules on protesting were overly restrictive and were rightly criticized. Then they set some reasonable rules that ensured students could attend class without too much interruption, and many of the protestors intentionally violated those rules. So they got in trouble. 6. I've never felt my own Jewishness more acutely, and never felt so surrounded by antisemitism more definitively. I know there is a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. I preach that difference. Many of the pro-Palestine protestors at Columbia and on these campuses are, in fact, Jewish. But in the last few months, I am telling you that I have seen more videos of blatant antisemitism and more social media posts from friends that promote antisemitic ideas than ever before in my entire life. I feel like my perspective on how many people out there hate Jews or see us as evil, self-righteous, conniving people has shifted in an irretrievable way. I am not typically prone to these thoughts or feelings, so I can’t imagine how other Jews who are prone to those thoughts are feeling. This is deeply disturbing to me. 7. There are some genuinely frightening things happening on or around Columbia’s campus. We need to delineate between students and outside protestors who show up and do awful things. For instance, a video has been widely circulated of pro-Palestine protests outside Columbia University cheering on the militant leaders of Hamas and calling for the bombing of Tel Aviv, a city of half a million Jews, Muslims, Arabs, and Israelis. These are violent threats that should not be tolerated anywhere on a college campus. They are representative of a thread of the extremist pro-Palestine movement that I find incredibly frightening. Still, as far as I can tell, those aren’t students and they don’t appear to be on campus. So let’s not conflate the two. 8. That doesn’t mean some students aren’t doing some objectively awful things at Columbia. There are videos and firsthand accounts of Jewish students being assaulted, told to “go back to Poland,” or prohibited from entering spaces on their own campus. This is an affront to the safety and the freedom of Jewish students, and the university president must ensure that those students can participate in campus life freely. That a rabbi at Columbia feels the need to warn Jewish students they aren’t safe on campus (however alarmist it might have been) is quite frightening. 9. There are also some genuinely embarrassing videos of “pro-Israel” people trying to make innocent things look violent or make themselves into victims. For instance, a pro-Israel account tweeted a video of a bunch of protestors cheerfully dancing in a circle and called it a “cult-like tribal dance.” Another X user posted a video of a woman in a shirt that says “Jew” with a Star of David painted onto it standing in the middle of protesters while precisely zero people pay her any mind or care that she is there. Then there’s the Israeli professor at Columbia, Shai Davidai, who makes me very uncomfortable. He seems to seek out cameras, viral moments, and confrontation as much as he can, to get attention, clicks, and social media clout. Victimization porn is becoming more and more common in our country, but I assure you there are enough bad actors out there that no one needs to manufacture any additional tension. 10. I can’t believe I have to say this, but the vast majority of the students protesting on these campuses are probably good kids who feel horrified by the things they see happening in Gaza. It’s really that simple. They log onto social media and see heartbreaking videos and feel compelled to do something – anything. That is a human and normal and empathetic reaction to war. War is horrific. Many of us become numb to it as we age, but we shouldn’t. Having that reaction doesn’t make them evil Jew-hating terrorist-lovers. Even the ones doing or saying the worst things are almost certainly retrievable, having followed a good impulse into dark territory. As of this morning, many of the protestors are now cooperating with the school to break down tents and keep non-students off campus. Isolating and demonizing these kids now in response to their earnest commitment to a cause will only radicalize them further. 11. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: In the news, we are inundated with stories of protest, clashes, and division. There are never headlines that read “Peaceful Day On 99% Of U.S. College Campuses!” even though that headline could run any day of the year, including yesterday. There was no front page story about the Palestinian and Israeli who both lost relatives in this conflict and then shared a TED stage together last week. The people who organize interfaith meetings to have dialogue about the conflict don’t get invited onto CNN or Fox News. Most of us will learn the names of Israel’s war cabinet or the head of Hamas’s military wing, but far fewer will learn about the people leading peace negotiations and ceasefire deals. This is how things are, and I hate it; but don’t be fooled into thinking the entire world is burning with animosity. It isn’t. 12. All of this campus obsession is distracting from the actual war that is going on in Gaza right now. When we covered Israel’s strike that killed workers from World Central Kitchen, I said it provided another example of how continuing this war is going to do long-term damage to Israel’s image and thus Israel’s future — which is core to my “Zionist case for a ceasefire” argument. I have to point out that the unrest and division this war is causing in the U.S. is also part of the Zionist case for a ceasefire. It is part of what I mean when I say this war is making Jews across the globe less safe. Animosity toward Israel is sometimes just anti-Zionism. It is sometimes antisemitism. And sometimes, anti-Zionism morphs into antisemitism before our eyes. Along with the 11 other thoughts above, one takeaway I have from all of this is that my worst fears about what would happen without a ceasefire continue to come true.

George W. Bush was a terrible president. By Matthew Yglesias

Looking back at the last — disastrous — era of efficacious conservative policymaking

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

APR 24, 2024.

If you’re in the DC area, I’m hosting a book talk for Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld about their new book “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” I wrote about it last year after I read the manuscript, and it’s the best book on politics I’ve read in several years. We’ll be at Johns Hopkins’ DC building, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, on May 7 from 5:30 to 7:00pm in Room 422. I’ll ask them some questions, we’ll get some questions from the audience, and hopefully everyone will learn something. Official event flier here. Sign up here. I hope to see you there!

George W. Bush was elected president in the flukey, unfair election of 2000.

Not only did Al Gore (like Hillary Clinton) win the popular vote, but the median voter selected Gore (this was Gary Johnson in 2016), and Gore clearly would have won in a runoff system (this is less clear for Clinton in 2016). And though people remember the infamous litigation around a Florida recount and continue to disagree over who would have won had the Supreme Court let one take place, that leaves out the larger issue of the Palm Beach County ballot design. As Nate Cohn reviewed recently, the evidence is overwhelming that Gore lost a critical margin of votes because people who intended to vote for Gore accidentally checked the box for Pat Buchanan.

Which is just to say that the election was, in every possible way, a moral victory for Gore.

Earlier, Bill Clinton moved to decisively moderate the image of the Democratic Party. He won two elections, and he was popular and effective as president. His chosen successor suffered from a less charismatic personality, from the standard third-term curse that hurts incumbents, and from the fact that the dot-com bubble was unraveling. What’s more, Bush made efforts to moderate the GOP’s image, preaching a gospel of “compassionate conservatism” and ditching the hard-edged anti-immigrant policies of Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich.1

Still, in the face of all those headwinds, Gore was the candidate that the American people preferred, and he should have been president.

Instead, Bush won, and the immediate reaction of many elite commentators was that the accidental and unfair nature of his victory meant he would need to redouble his efforts at moderation and run something resembling a grand coalition or national unity government. This is not what happened. Instead, Bush took the reins of government and acted like every other modern newly elected president, charging ahead with an ideological agenda and rapidly losing standing in the polls. But then came 9/11. His approval rating shot up. The GOP scored an anomalous midterm victory in 2002. A bunch more conservative policy passed after the midterms. And then Bush got re-elected fair and square in 2004, winning the only GOP popular vote victory of the modern era.

The wheels fell off Bushism relatively rapidly after its triumphant reelection, but the period between Bush’s inauguration and the 2006 midterms is a striking and important one.

It’s the only time since Reagan that the conservative movement was truly governing the country. It also falls into a weird kind of gap where the Bush presidency is too recent to be history but too distant to be vividly remembered by many. And I think it’s worth taking a look back and trying to genuinely assess his administration’s major initiatives.

An effective Republican president

When I say the conservative movement was genuinely governing the country, I mean to draw a contrast with the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

He was, obviously, in office. And he enacted some policies. But despite the persistent fears engendered by Trump’s clear aspirations to dictatorial rule, he was in practice a remarkably weak and ineffectual president.

My sense is that Trump benefits politically from this inefficacy. Contemporary political parties are not like the patronage machines that dominated the Gilded Age. Those parties tried to win elections primarily in order to reap material rewards from running the government. That meant, in turn, they made policy with the primary aim of winning elections and maintaining power. Today’s parties are dominated by people with much more sincere policy motivations who want to “hire” presidential candidates who will get things done. But the public generally doesn’t favor large policy changes. So you end up with the Biden administration complaining that they don’t get the credit they deserve for all that they’ve accomplished, when I think the problem is mostly that voters don’t actually want an effective president.

And with Trump, they got what they wanted.

A president who was better at his job probably could have repealed the Affordable Care Act, but that would have generated political backlash. Trump postured a lot about ending NATO and massively scaling-up the interior enforcement of immigration laws, but didn’t actually do either. The largest policy impact of his administration, overturning Roe v Wade, is toxically unpopular, and he benefits politically from confused low-information voters not realizing that he is responsible for it. In the eyes of a crucial swathe of swing voters, Trump is an inept blowhard who ran a chaotic clown show of an administration — which they see as better than government dominated by effective polarized elites.

Bush, though, wasn’t like this. He had a lot of charisma, he was good at giving speeches, and a bit like Biden, he was good at the interpersonal schmoozing aspect of policymaking and was often underestimated because he wasn’t a detail-oriented policy wonk.

But a lot of Bush’s efficacy was a matter of circumstance — 9/11 gave him a uniquely commanding political position and a lot of latitude to try stuff. And I will say that to his credit, Bush seems to have correctly understood the relationship between political opinion and doing things. After his re-election, Bush said that he had “earned political capital” by winning and intended to spend it down in his second term by deliberately tackling a Social Security privatization campaign he knew would be unpopular. The other presidents I’ve covered all seem to have believed, erroneously, that their achievements would be additive. Bush understood that doing stuff only hurts you politically, that the reason to do it is you believe in it.

A bunch of terrible ideas

Unfortunately, the ideas Bush believed in were mostly catastrophically bad.

The invasion of Afghanistan, for example, made sense as a punitive raid against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And Bush’s initial reluctance to get deeply involved in a long-term project of Afghan governance also made sense. But then Osama bin Laden escaped, which was embarrassing, and Bush reacted to that embarrassment by denying that it was a big deal and insisting that actually American troops weren’t there to punish the perpetrators of 9/11 at all, thereby backing the country into an unwinnable, open-ended war that spanned multiple administrations. By forcing his successor’s successor’s successor to be the one to take the political hit for admitting that this was all pointless, Bush hoarded his political capital. But tons of people died and vast sums of money were spent as a result.

And then there’s Iraq, which was supposed to unleash a domino effect of pro-American regime changes in the region but instead — at great direct cost to the United States — created a pro-Iranian arc.

I am less critical of the prior bipartisan decision to open American markets to Chinese imports than the current bipartisan consensus — an underrated part of the “China Shock” paper says Americans benefitted on average — but there’s just no excuse for the fact that the Bush administration made zero effort to take meaningful action on behalf of the people who were harmed by it. The way this argument played out in progressive circles is someone would say “we shouldn’t trade with low-wage countries, it hurts workers.” Then someone else says “sure, it hurts some workers, but it helps Americans on average — we should use that additional prosperity to help the vulnerable.” But then the first person says “well, but in practice we’re not actually doing that — just stop the trade.” And the second person says “okay, but your plan leaves most people poorer.”

It’s a frustrating situation, and Bush was the guy who was in a position to do something about it. But there was no Marshall Plan for the Midwest. Instead, fiscal capacity was blown on two rounds of regressive tax cuts and failed wars that somehow managed to leave us without a defense industrial base. His policy initiatives around marriage-promotion and faith-based institutions totally failed. In reviewing the Bush presidency, you’re supposed to be high-minded and acknowledge how effective PEPFAR was, and it absolutely was effective. That said, PEPFAR was a small amount of money relative to Bush-era initiatives. And I think it mostly underscores how plastic the political environment was, especially in 2002-2004, and how sad it is that the political capital was mostly spent on bad ideas.

Two big mixed bags

The partial exceptions to this, I think, are No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act.

I already wrote a four-part series on the rise and fall of the education reform movement, so I don’t want to go on at much length about NCLB. I’ll just say briefly that a lot of the specific things that went into NCLB were good, in my opinion, and that in particular, the much-criticized push to get schools to give kids standardized tests so that we can assess how much learning is taking place was correct and important. On the other hand, the further removed in time we are from the episode, the crazier it sound in retrospect that the whole thing was framed around eliminating “achievement gaps” between socioeconomic groups rather than just raising performance levels. That’s just an obviously impossible goal. It was a good way for a Republican Party president to get over on the teachers unions, but it’s been a delayed-fuse mechanism for some bad left-wing ideas in a way that should have been incredibly foreseeable.

The Medicare bill, meanwhile, is style of conservative politics that has been very influential in world history but that we haven’t seen much of in recent years.

When Medicare was created, it didn’t include any prescription drug coverage. Over time, this omission became more and more glaring, and the idea that Medicare should include prescription drug coverage was one of Gore’s best issues in 2000 and one of Democrats’ best issues in 2002. Bush, even though he won those races, decided that he should accede to the basic progressive demand (give seniors drug coverage) but do it in a conservative way. That had two prongs. On one, he created a drug plan that was less generous to patients than what Democrats wanted, but also more expensive because it didn’t allow the government to negotiate bulk purchasing discounts. On the other, he greatly expanded the “private option” inside Medicare, renaming it Medicare Advantage. That’s great branding — who wouldn’t want the more advantageous form of Medicare? This was a big battle, featuring both bipartisan negotiations and legislative chicanery. And it ultimately became the last piece of legislation of its kind. A conservative bill passed the House, and a bipartisan bill passed the senate, and then a conference committee wrote a compromise bill that was closer to the House vision. It passed the senate with fewer than 60 votes because Democrats felt it would be inappropriate to filibuster a conference report.

The prescription drug benefit worked out pretty well. A lot of seniors got access to coverage and outcomes for things like congestive heart failure improved. Pharmaceutical R&D spending increased.

Democrats have since modified the prescription drug benefit to be more generous (this was part of the ACA) and also to include lower prices for a handful of drugs (this was part of the IRA), so it’s drifted a little closer to the Democrats’ original vision. But it’s still basically Bush’s policy and it’s fine. Of course, if Democrats proposed a major expansion of the welfare state, people would ask how they planned to pay for it, and even if they planned to pay for it by taxing the rich, people would still complain that somehow that doesn’t count and they’re making the debt situation worse. Bush just straightforwardly financed the program with borrowed money, and people still think of Republicans as the deficit hawks.

Speaking of which, the Medicare Advantage part of this mostly seems like a waste of money.

Bush promoted this aspect of the plan to skeptical conservative as part of a long-term strategy to reduce entitlement spending. And you can find studies from the American Enterprise Institute that claim it’s working. But the basic problem with having the government pay insurance companies to provide elderly people with insurance rather than providing the insurance itself is that the insurance company needs to find a way to make money. You could do that by making the coverage worse, but then who’s going to want to enroll? Well, what if you made the coverage a good deal worse, but then invested some of the savings into marketing and some into nice-to-have features that primarily appeal to younger and healthier seniors? Then you might end up with a client base that has below-average health expenses, and that creates your profit margin. But the margins basically just come from ripping off the government.

Policymakers aren’t totally naive; the amount of money a Medicare Advantage provider gets is supposed to be based on the health profile of its client base. But it’s still the case that the dominant strategy here is to find ways to game the system. What we find in practice is that as seniors get sicker, they drop out of Medicare Advantage, so the MA “savings” come from having clients who don’t have extensive health care needs. This is disputed territory, of course, but I think the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is a credible arbiter of questions like “what policies reduce government spending,” and they say Medicare Advantage has $100 billion per year in overpayments.

The fire next time

I bring all this up because I think Americans are under-concerned about the “normal” risks associated with a GOP electoral win this fall.

That’s not to say that I’m not concerned about the risk that America will slip into quasi-fascist rule — Trump’s lawless and authoritarian behavior is very worrying. But it’s also covered extensively, and I think it’s worrying in the sense of “there’s a five percent chance this could happen and that’s way too high” rather than in the sense of “this is likely to happen.”

What is likely to happen if Trump wins is that he’ll have a senate majority at his back that is larger and more conservative than the one he had in 2017. And while his skills operating the levers of power are still sub-par, he’ll be better at this aspect of the job than he was the first time around. What’s more, corporate America and the other normal bulwarks of conservative politics no longer regard Trump as an aberrant figure who is likely to depart the scene. He’ll have what Bush had: solid backing from all the usual forces of conservatism.

What will a freshly empowered conservative coalition actually do in power?

I have no idea, in part because Trump doesn’t like to communicate about public policy ideas, in part because Trump is a huge liar, and in part because there’s very little journalistic interest in this question.

But I’ve seen very little to suggest that conservatives have reckoned in any meaningful way with why Bush-era decision making was so bad or tried to figure out how to do better. There’s a vague sense that the upshot of all this is that “neocons” are bad and so we should let Russia conquer Ukraine. Maybe they’ll flip from embracing free trade while lazily refusing to do anything to address the downsides to just embracing the most blinkered and fallacious defense of protectionism. But the conservative movement seems to have lost the brainpower and capacity required to analyze issues on the merits. Their stated governing agenda is to walk into a situation with high interest rates, increase inflationary pressures, and create a huge fiscal crisis. I’ve written an entire article on Bush screwing everything up, and I didn’t even get to the huge recession that ended his term. I’m worried!