The “Everyone’s ‘Welcome to the Party, Pal’ Now!” Edition
2024 is going to be a big year, so I hope you’ve rested up this holiday season
The word cloud speaks! And tells you why you should end 2023 on an optimistic note.
In case you haven’t seen it, this word cloud comes from a Daily Mail poll of 1,000 American voters asked to say one word to describe Trump and Biden. The top words for Biden were “nothing,” “economy,” and “peace.” Here’s why this should make you very happy:
· Only a fraction of Americans want to vote for a guy whom they believe is focused on “revenge, power, and dictatorship;”
· Trump looked at this and thought, “Yes, this is exactly what I feel, and I can’t wait to share that with people!” He’s not going to “pivot to the center” after the primaries are over—he’s running like this all the way to November. “Revenge, Power, Dictatorship” might even be his official slogan. That’s pretty good news;
· While I certainly wish people associated Biden with more than “nothing,” I’d much rather he be associated with “nothing” than with “revenge,” and it’s easier to move people’s opinions to something more positive from the default of “nothing” than “revenge.”
I’m with Simon Rosenberg: I don’t want to tell you things are great and Democracy is safe, but I don’t want you hiding in a bunker yet either. We’re not in bad shape.
Gaza and the Kids
Actually, I’m not going to talk much about Gaza because it’s too work-adjacent. Suffice to say, you should avoid hanging around anyone using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” meant to encompass all the space from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. To Hamas, this space must be filled by Palestinians and cleared of Jews; for Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, it means just the opposite. It is a phrase of genocide whoever uses it, and a good reason to just choose to support neither.
Another group of people you can avoid is people who use the words “settler” or “colonialism” in some combination to refer to Israel. This shouldn’t need pointing out in the season of Chanukah and the birth of a Jewish baby in Bethlehem, but Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all hinge on the belief in Jews being indigenous to the Levant.
Back here in America, we hear a lot about progressives, particularly youth, who are deeply angered by the Biden Administration’s rhetorical and material support for the Israeli government’s response to the Hamas attacks of 10/7. What’s really striking about this is what I raised in “Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond Your Command”—the deep generational divide that shapes our politics.
I’m almost 50. I was a precocious nerd kid who read a lot of military history in the 1980s. Though not Jewish, I devoured histories of Israel. Israel’s story was of a scrappy underdog group who somehow in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 managed to triumph against larger, better-armed Arab states determined to drive this mass of Holocaust survivors into the sea. From Leon Uris to Herman Wouk to cheesy 80s Cannon Group movies like Delta Force, popular culture made the Israelis out to be the heroes. I believe this is the narrative most Americans older than I tend to have, and like a lot of what I learned of American history, it’s not false—it’s just incomplete.
My perceptions started changing when I was in college in the 90s. People younger than I were introduced to Israel via the First Intifada and Israel’s descent into right-wing extremism. Yitzhak Rabin was the man who ordered Israeli soldiers to break the bones of rock-throwing Palestinian teens—the first time I began to think something wasn’t right in Israel. He then managed to make himself a peacemaker, committing to a two-state solution with the Palestinians—and his reward was to be murdered by a Jewish extremist in 1995. What followed was an Israel deciding to put the “Jewish” before “democracy” in the term “Jewish democracy,” leading to whatever you want to call it—apartheid, ghettos, reservations—for the Palestinians. Netanyahu has been prime minister for just over half of that time.
Hamas is no better. It’s as determined to eliminate Jews from the region as extremist Jews are determined to eliminate Palestinians, and its actions on and since 10/7 are depraved in their brutality and complete indifference to their own people. Hey, if they really wanted the violence against Gazans to stop, they always could hand over the remaining hostages and surrender!
What we’re seeing play out in responses to the Biden Administration’s response to 10/7 is generational more than anything else. Youth—defined by me as anyone younger than I—have grown up in a world where the Palestinians, not the Israelis, were the underdogs. While it’s disturbing how many young people seem to give Hamas a pass for its atrocities, their fundamental critique of the injustice of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is not invalid. But hey, older people are more likely voters, and older Americans are more likely to support Israel, giving us yet another lesson in how you can’t expect leaders in a democracy to advocate your views if you don’t vote.
So I’m not shocked by young people’s response to the Biden Administration’s support for Israel’s response to 10/7. What does trouble me deeply is the amazing lack of critical thinking in that anger, and the vows not to vote for Biden in 2024. This is quite the brilliant move when Biden’s certain opponent vows to deport resident aliens who support Palestine, and certainly won’t oppose Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians. It’s especially troubling to see fault lines between Arab and Muslim and Jewish Americans, given that Trump’s supporters will happily kill all of them together. Whatever rivalries may have existed in The Old Country, here in The New World, white supremacy is the overarching threat, and anyone who can’t see that is simply a fool, whatever their age or views on the Middle East.
While we’re talking about youth and the kids these days, let’s talk about all the craziness we see on elite college campuses! Better yet, let’s not! The media trend of journalists-who-attended-elite-colleges-going-on-about-what’s-happening-at-elite-colleges is both annoying and damaging in that it’s its own form of disinformation, given how few people really have anything to do with elite colleges. Honest to God, the amount of panic prosperous adults can get into about what the kids are up to at elite colleges would be hilarious if it weren’t so destructive.
How’s it so bad?
1. You should be thinking more about what’s going on in the Middle East (or any other issue!) than about what kids on Ivy League campuses think about what is going on in the Middle East (or any other issue!);
2. College kids—even those at elite colleges—are stupid. Go back and look at some stuff you wrote in college. It’s stupid. You were stupid. I was stupid. None of it is worth adults worrying over;
3. We adults aren’t that much wiser now ourselves. “America First” was very popular on college campuses in 1940, but college boys still showed up to fight after Pearl Harbor. College kids protested Vietnam and were indifferent after 9/11 because they perceived correctly these wars were ill-considered and their elders were wrong, so instead of getting outraged, consider they might have a point, even as they’re being stupid about it;
4. If your concern is that the Ivy Leagues produce many of our future leaders, your response should be getting more leaders from outside the Ivies, not changing the Ivies. Neither the President, Vice President, nor Speaker of the House went to an Ivy League college. Let’s keep up that trend!
5. Every column-inch of type devoted to what’s going on impotently on college campuses is a column-inch not devoted to discussing something actually affecting your life, like a Supreme Court Justice prostituting himself, or Trump’s plan to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose martial law, or how renewable energy has passed the tipping point of profitability. It’s a distraction you shouldn’t tolerate in a publication you pay money for.
So leave the kids alone. They’ll be fine. Stop worrying about what they’re doing and start worrying about how we’re helping them, and showing them that we’re helping them—or persuading them otherwise, if their views really bother you that much.
The Big Idea IS “Welcome to the Party, Pal!
I’ve long maintained this section of MSU to recognize those mainstream journalists who seemed to be catching on to the idea that Trump and the Magas weren’t playing by conventional American political rules. That doesn’t appear to be a problem now! Mainstream media publications are falling over themselves to highlight Trump’s pledges to invoke the Insurrection Act, build detention camps, and be dictator “just for one day” (pro tip: it only takes one day!). The Atlantic literally dedicated an entire edition to ruminations on what Trump and his coterie pledge to do.
This might almost obviate the need for a More Stable Union. As you’ve doubtless noticed from the drop in my production in 2023, that might be for the best. But no! I’m sure over the course of 2024 issues will arise where my perspective as an expert on foreign conflicts applying that expertise to America might still come in handy. I’m not so sure that’ll be true in 2025. If Biden wins a second time, that might be the moment things can stabilize. And if Trump wins… then there won’t be much point.
Is it possible all this mainstream media attention to Trump’s intentions is overkill, or somehow inadvertently playing into his hands? I’d say “no, it’s actually long overdue,” but with a few important caveats. It’s a simple fact that right now people aren’t happy with the way the country is going, and they are blaming Joe Biden for that. That’s objectively crazy, but hey, we’re in a post-objectivity age where “vibes” rule. And as I co-opt that youthful phrase, don’t blame the youth or say this is all about TikTok. As a good friend of mine recently observed, TikTok might someday be a deadly disinformation channel for the Chinese Communists, but as of today it hasn’t come close to hurting America’s youth the way Fox News has hurt America’s elderly.
I think the Magas remain a relatively small but intensely-focused party, pro-democracy and pro-Biden activists are a big and unruly tent, and most people just don’t follow politics, just as I don’t track what work my car really needs until I get a reminder from my dealership. I think this election still is ours to lose, and I still like our odds over Trump’s. But how do we swing the disinterested, who don’t think the country is doing well, over to our side and keep them there?
I vividly remember from the Obama Administration polls about Obamacare that said roughly 40% of Americans supported Obamacare, while roughly 60% didn’t. This kind of polling dominated the narrative around Democratic losses in 2010. But digging into those polls, one frequently found that the number of people who opposed Obamacare because they didn’t want health reform almost was matched by the number of people who didn’t think Obamacare went far enough. Add the pro-Obamacare and Obamacare-isn’t-enough opinions, and you got a ridiculous supermajority for a better health care system.
I’ll wager there’s a good number of Americans telling pollsters they think conditions stink in America and they’re dissatisfied with Biden because they feel that all the progress he’s made is fragile and on the point of reversal in a second Trump administration, and that’s a deep, deep cause for dissatisfaction with current affairs. Confession: I’M ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE.
So the first thing Dems need to move on is all the good stuff they can do if we return them to office in 2024. Abortion rights! Banning book banning! Gun control! Protections for LGBTQ citizens! Strengthening unions! Supporting democracy against Russia and China! A lot of other stuff! We can’t spend all our time just telling people how bad the other guy is. Biden is right when he says “don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative,” but people still need to know what WE are if we’re neither the Almighty nor the alternative.
We can do that and still remind people that Trump is promising fascism. We only need to quote him! He’ll do most of our work for us here. We just need to point out we are not the people promising martial law, detention camps, and show trials. We need to put it to people as: this isn’t a contest between two doctors or auto mechanics over who can better care for your body or car; it’s a contest between a trained doctor/mechanic and a shaman who’s dancing around your body/car while shouting unintelligibly and throwing feces at it. And if that’s what you really want, shouldn’t you really be voting for RFK Jr.? That’s his lane!
Dan Pfeiffer captured a lot of this here: we have to be careful about threatening Trump will be a “strongman,” because historically Americans tend to like “strong men,” if not “strongmen,” as presidents—it’s just that we’ve been lucky that even the worst of them, like Nixon, felt certain restraints. So we can’t just threaten that Trump is going to be a dictator: we have to make that argument in a way that shows his dictatorial impulses arise from his weakness not his strength, and tie exactly what those dangers mean to people’s personal lives.
Lincoln Project’s Reed Galen also has an important way to look at this: attacking Trump on his weaknesses works because he’s so thin-skinned and vindictive. If you say “Trump wants to be like Hitler,” a lot of people picture badass marching in Triumph of the Will, not what Dresden looked like in 1945. But if you say, “Trump wants martial law because he’s a weak coward who knows everyone hates him and our troops are just simpleton cannon fodder to him,” a) that’s a damn good message, and b) it will set him into a rage and he’ll spend the next 48 hours bombarding you with attacks which c) will totally confirm what you’re saying, and d) throw his campaign off whatever its game plan for that 48 hours was.
As I type, Colorado’s Supreme Court and Maine’s Secretary of State have ruled that Trump is ineligible for office under the 14th Amendment, as I (and much smarter guys like Larry Tribe and Michael Luttig) have said. And of course, the Maine SecState already has been “SWATted.” So this’ll go to the Supreme Guardian Council, where I expect they’ll twist themselves into a pretzel to declare Trump eligible and absolutely torpedo both their and the Constitution’s legitimacy, because they lack the moral courage to grasp this admittedly-unpleasant nettle. Or hey, let’s offer a few hundred thousand dollars to Clarence Thomas and see what his values really are worth.
It’s important to remember the unctuous Republicans who told us “we’re a Republic, not a Democracy” after Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won the popular votes in 2000 and 2016. Fair enough: don’t hate the player, hate the game. But if one can accept that Gore and Clinton can win the popular vote and still lose the presidency because of the Constitution, then one can accept that Trump is ineligible to be president even if a majority of the population wants him to be, just as Greta Thunberg is ineligible, because, ahem, “we’re a Republic, not a Democracy.”
I’ll give him this much: Donald Trump sincerely wants to win the 2024 election fair and square, even if he’s prepared to do so otherwise. No Labels, however, doesn’t even have a pretense of winning fair and square. They just want to hijack the election for their own agenda.
Security Sector Reform
North Carolina’s Maga-dominated state legislature is giving the staff of its government operations committee—a perfectly normal thing for a legislature to have—the authority to enter any facility tangentially related to government funding secretly and without a warrant—not a perfectly normal thing for a legislature to have!
Organized violent groups like the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys are our greatest political violence risk, but Reuters does a great job here noting that our current violence is almost all stochastic terrorism. This is conjecture, but it’s arguable organized groups are better at deterring each other from violence—or easier for law enforcement to infiltrate.
One really frustrating issue for the Biden Administration is that there’s an overwhelming popular perception the economy is bad and crime is up, even when both statements are objectively false. Criminologist Jeff Asher tried to figure out why this was for crime, and what he comes up with is, cell phone camera and social media proliferation and the natural media instinct that’s now carried over to all of us: “we don’t report the planes that land,” as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes once put it. There’s probably a lot of this happening with economics too—prices don’t decline as fast as they rise, and when we’re doing well, we tend to accredit that to our own hard work, not broader forces, which we’re happy to blame when we’re doing poorly.
The teachers and kids at Uvalde followed their training perfectly: the cops didn’t. But I think this otherwise-outstanding Texas Tribune article misses the point: this isn’t a training problem, it’s a culture problem. It doesn’t take much training to do a banzai charge, and that’s what a school shooting demands. What good are professional police when the kids respond better? How could a non-professional force have done worse?
We can’t trust police to report accurate statistics, so we might as well see what information we can gather without them. What jumped out to me here: police violence rose in 2023 even as crime fell, and there were only 14 days this year when a cop didn’t kill someone.
Good Reads
Look, none of us are happy about Biden’s age. But Kaivan Shroff has it right: this is a chance to point out that the elderly can still be vigorous and active people too. Hell, the Rolling Stones just put out their best album in decades!
“Tony Stark” is kind of like me: a national security professional who looks at American politics because we both see that America’s biggest national security threat is America. He has a more China-hawkish orientation than I, but not by much, and his analysis of violence risks in the coming year is really excellent.
If Biden’s Mideast policy is making you struggle with your vote, I implore you to read this article from Hisham Melhem. I’d also point you to 60’s leftist Paul Rosenberg’s piece noting that the protesters who drove LBJ out of the 1968 election over Vietnam haven’t seen a better government since.
We who think the electoral college is bad don’t even get how bad it really is. The number of competitive states is so small, and the ability to ID and target persuadable voters so sophisticated, that fewer than a half-million Americans might have any meaningful vote at all. It’s like a quadrennial sport where the rest of us just wear jerseys rooting on a few players.
Is it possible to ally with rural conservatives on anything? Well, they don’t like school vouchers. They’re not morons; they know they can’t attract enough private schooling to pick up the slack for deteriorating public schools, which are key centers of their communities.
Finally, I cannot recommend enough this amazing piece in Politico from Zack Stanton about his hometown of Macomb County, Michigan. He found that “…white middle-class voters here [in the 1960s] felt betrayed—and that at the heart of that betrayal was a sense that the country’s big institutions that had been so instrumental in the building of the white middle class (i.e. the federal government, organized labor, business interests, the Democratic Party, and even the church) had given up on people like ‘us’ (white, suburban, hard-working, blue-collar) in favor of caring more about people like ‘them’ (Black, urban, the poor, the cultural elite)… not living with Blacks was what made a neighborhood a decent place to live.” But that finding came from the 1980s; today the same county is much more diverse, and a real political bellwether with many lessons for us.
In imitation of David Frum, instead of wishing you a happy New Year, I’m going to wish you a purposeful one. I hope you end 2024 content, if not with the election’s outcome, then that you yourself did everything you reasonably could have done to help build a more stable union.
If you have thoughts, ideas or contributions for MSU, I’d love to get them at monganjh1@gmail.com, and have you follow MSU on Twitter @MoreStableUnion or on Bluesky @morestableunion.bsky.social. Share with all your friends so they can subscribe at morestableunion.substack.com.