I appreciate your take on many issues but I don’t see Haley or her voters as center right. They seem solid right. Some of them like Liz Cheney do believe in democracy. So I see that as the only reason they are willing to vote for Harris. They don’t see themselves as white supremacists but they might need to look harder. I think substantial numbers of us don’t see ourselves as card carrying white supremacists yet some of our actions cause harm to non whites.
I hope to see US foreign policy with regard to Israel do a 180. I am sure there will be a political price to pay for that shift. I don’t see Harris announcing any change of foreign policy over the next few days.
I think down the stretch we will see her emphasizing reproductive rights and showcasing Trump’s vile plans should he manage to win. A Trump victory means everything everywhere will be worse.
Michigan voters who are trying to defeat Harris are working against their own interests. Or that is how it looks to me. Are they acting on principle? Most likely they are. If they defeat Harris, they will without question see far far greater suffering. This is not debatable even. Anyone who thinks a Trump win makes their lives better is in some sort of denial.
I suppose my essay is a form of wishcasting. Not even that, really, because I'm writing against the immense cynicism that has banked up inside of me. I'm hoping against hope that Democrats generally and Harris in particular will demonstrate some basic sense of shared humanity. She still has time! That's my whole point. If she were holding back because of this nebulous fear that AIPAC or some other well-organized group would penalize her for being outspoken on the Gaza issue, I think that the time factor does come into play here in terms of snagging the logistics necessary to carry out that implied threat. So she has a clear lane to the basket, to use a sports metaphor, if she chooses to take it.
I am attempting to juggle some portions of my schedule as I've been working on another project, so I may not be able to address in full the fact that the Knesset has voted to outlaw UNRWA from operating within Gaza and the West Bank (perhaps all of the Occupied Territories). This is devastating and may cripple the agency altogether. That being the case, again, if Harris so chose, she could take this new fact (which is going underreported because of the wall-to-wall election coverage) and pair that with the almost-certainly leaked letter from the US to Israel saying that if they do not permit more aid by mid-November that we might -- might! -- withhold offensive weapons. Harris should take this new fact on the ground and say this changes the calculus, and that due to this move by Israel to deny the one aid agency that has the capability of feeding the vast number of Gazans in need that she is compelled to take action. That brings this move by the Knesset into the spotlight and puts pressure on Israel to reconsider their draconian action.
As for Michigan voters, I keep highlighting the Uncommitted movement to underscore that this energy has been in the state for nearly a year. I think that Biden thought he could ride out the turbulence, that surely by this point in the electoral calendar the hot part of the hostilities in Gaza would have wrapped up by now and that voters would experience the usual amnesia about such things. He was wrong in February, and Harris is wrong today. People are incandescent with anger because they feel betrayed and ignored. That's not even taking into account the Abandon Biden movement (which has morphed into the Abandon Harris movement), which explicitly wants to punish Democrats for their stance on Gaza. Those people want to demonstrate political power, and the one way they think they can do this is by producing an upset.
It's remarkable that, apparently, 40% of Arab-American voters polled say that they plan to vote for Jill Stein. This is not a knock on Jill Stein as a person or candidate, but she has no path to victory. The plan obviously is to deny Harris a win, and those Abandon Harris voters are clear-eyed about this objective. I've never agreed with that stance -- for me, it's always been about urging my party to live up to its own promises and values. I don't understand the people, one of which commented on one of my previous essays, who say that Harris could do or say nothing that would get them to reconsider their vote. Really? Nothing? Then what are we talking about here? If a third-party vote is (what some derisively call) a protest vote, but then the major-party candidate adjusts to accomodate what it was one was protesting, why would one stick with the plan to punish? There's a lack of consistency there.
So that's why I'm putting it out there in the universe that I hope Harris will make a modest shift in her rhetoric to indicate an intention to modify policy. Just enforcing U.S. law -- who can be against such a platitude? I think she wins more than she loses by taking such a tack.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I don’t really have much faith in our foreign policy being changed in the way that it needs to be. I hope Harris does way more than the minimal moves that MIGHT be possible while not hurting her election chances. But I hope she makes these drastic moves after she wins. True enough, she MIGHT win back some of the Arab-American votes by making some move before Nov 5. I think it could cost her the win. As I stated, I would like to see an entire reset. Israel is doing horrible, unspeakable things and doing that with our help. I do not understand it. Or maybe I do. Maybe we are not at all about freedom, equality, democracy, human rights and the values all of the elected officials promote by talk. Maybe all of it is just talk. Here domestically we hold in place a system that is certainly not based on equal rights. We have made incremental progress. I read a quote attributed to Malcolm X that resonated. It went something like “If someone knifes you and then pulls the knife out a little, that’s not progress”. I agree. We have done a great job of shoveling out propaganda. And for sure, we are not as bad as we could be. We have made steps in the right direction. But we could use bold and honest leadership that does more than talk about human rights and equal right. Anyway… I have hope for Harris. I don’t see her announcing any change before Nov 5.
I wonder what would happen if on Nov6 Biden announced that we are cutting ALL aid to Israel? That might shake things up. Plus it would give Harris a bit of cover from the political fall out. If we ran foreign policy based on human rights we would cut ALL aid to Israel. Let those genocidal maniacs make their own security. If you are carrying out a genocide, you deserve insecurity. The world would be better off if genocidal practitioners had less power and thus had to pay a high price for their actions.
Ha. Good thing I’m not in charge of US foreign policy. I would have us in a very different place. Anyway, thanks again for your thoughtful response.
The Harris campaign has been so mismanaged that it makes me wonder if this really is all rigged, like pro wrestling. Presidential elections are about bringing out your base. Instead, Harris is insulting and condescending towards her ostensible base, while courting the sort of people that the DNC claimed were “fascist” twenty years ago. Seriously, who in the year of our Lord 2024 is going to be swayed by a Dick Cheney endorsement? It seems like many rank and file Republicans have completely memory holed GWB’s tenure, so it can’t be aimed at them. Rank and file Democrats aren’t going to be impressed, and neither will these “moderate suburban Republicans” that the Democrats have been chasing for the past thirty years. The only explanation I have is that it’s a signal to the other neocons that it’s time for them to switch teams again. I’ve long thought that while both parties are afraid of the Republican base, they actively despise the supposed Democratic base, and Harris’ bone-headed strategy proves it.
I looked on OpenSecrets to see how much, if any, AIPAC had invested in Harris. I couldn’t find anything because the list seems to mostly be congresspeople. I wish there was a way to filter by name, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. I did see that Joe Biden was the number one recipient of AIPAC money from 1990 to the present: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind=Q05&recipdetail=S
AIPAC has no need to rally against Harris. She’s already bought and paid for. AIPAC and J Street are often pitted against each other in political discourse, but to me they’re just two sides of the same coin. Money aside, I also think that Harris genuinely believes that what Israel is doing is right, as does Biden. The money is nice, of course, but this is what they truly believe in. A much younger Biden once said that if Israel didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. No matter who wins, it’s genocide yesterday, genocide today, and genocide tomorrow. If you don’t want genocide, the beatings will increase until you learn to love it.
You mention mismanagement, which brings to mind a YouTube video I recently viewed. When I consume news commentary, I tend toward that with a left-leaning analysis (though sometimes I seek more 'independent' or even contrary opinion). Yesterday I happened to come across The Leftist Mafia, which is just a panel of YouTubers, most of whom have their own individual platforms, who come together periodically to shoot the breeze. The title of the segment was "PLEASE Do Better," with the subtitle "Kamala Harris's outreach to Arab American voters is ... NOT good."
I must say, I was ultra-gratified to hear them talking about many of the very same points I'd raised in my previous essay. (It's nice to know that others who have a much more extensive platform share similar views, as those views have a broader outreach through those channels. And it's nice to know that I came to my conclusions without being influenced by them, yet we came to the same analysis.) Mike Figueredo spoke about Harris committing "so many unforced errors" and lamented that with Donald "I'll be a dictator on Day 1" Trump as her opponent that the race shouldn't be this close. "Kamala is fucking up strategically speaking, because every election is going to be about mobilizations for Democrats, not about persuading Republicans."
As for their dismissive attitude toward their left flank, I don't think it's a matter of despising the left (though I'm sure some players individually do hold that attitude). I think part of it is purely ideological, in terms of neoliberalism not be able to metabolize left-leaning thought about economic systems. Mainly, though, I've been chewing over a bit of information I learned in that series about political systems I mentioned before. The lecturer talked about this interesting tension that seems only to exist in two-party systems. It's where the main party can afford to disavow their extremity because the flank has nowhere else to go. It's a calculated decision. The lecturer specifically brought up the example of Bill Clinton repudiating Sister Souljah so as to make inroads and prove his centrist bona fides in the 1992 contest. (I was too young at the time to appreciate all of these nuances, but clearly Clinton had calculated his move as part of his strategy of triangulation.)
Now, why is it that the Democrats rebuff the left while Republicans court their extreme factions? I think that's a deeper conversation, because that turn, that volta, would help explain the point at which American politics went into a tailspin. Because it was not always this way. It's true that the right has tolerated fringe elements for many decades going upon centuries, the modern GOP had tamped down on the really unusual elements for quite some time. Was it in response to losing the WH in the middle of GHWB's term, an interrupted presidency? Was it when the Moral Majority was brought on board? When did politics go haywire? I would posit that when Republicans ushered their weird ones into their inner circles is when the dynamics changed. At such a point, the left was still being iced out by the Democrats because they could "afford" to do so; but the ultra-right wing was being wooed, pooling the party around such folks as the new center.
As for this piece, I focused on the hypothetical of AIPAC spending money against Harris because I've seen so many people whisper or say outright that Biden and Harris can't speak out against what Israel is doing in Gaza because they'll pay a price at the ballot box. Well, how would they pay a price? Who's going to lead a charge against Harris for saying that she'd follow the law? It'd have to be coordinated. At the level of presidential politics, it'd have to be an organization with some clout. Not many fit this particular bill. Personally, I think the idea that the election could hinge on political apostates by such a move is far-fetched, as some polling (I'm pulling from memory) had 2 out of 5 undecided voters saying that a commitment from the Biden administration to limit weapons to Israel while they are out of compliance with international law would make them more likely to vote for Democrats. Also, as I recall, upwards of 66% of Democrats agree that an arms embargo should be implemented. The majority of Democrats want to see a policy change. Add to that the fact that around 70% of Jewish Americans identify as Democrats. I highly doubt that a large contingent of them would flip on voting for Democrats if Harris simply stated that she would enforce U.S. law. But I do think that enough incensed Arab-American, Muslim-American, and activist voters in Michigan would return to the fold in numbers that would make the difference, because this election will be won at the margins.
If Harris wants to win, she has to do something major in order to break out of the static pattern she finds herself in.
Thank you for your reply. I’ve never really understood the Sister Soulja controversy, presumably because I was even younger than you when it happened. Sister Soulja doesn’t strike me as someone who’s involved with or cares about electoral politics. The Wikipedia page on the matter says that it was an excuse for Bill Clinton to further distance himself from “radical Blacks” like Jesse Jackson (lol). The Jeremiah Wright controversy I remember, but I the hypocrisy there is more apparent to me. I’ve seen the whole sermon on YouTube and what Wright said is a common theme in Black churches (ie The US will always disappoint you but God won’t). To me, this just indicates that white people don’t really know what happens in Black spaces.
Discussing the origins of the Religious Right would be too complicated for a Substack comment. It’s worth noting that white evangelicals didn’t get involved in the antiabortion movement until the early to mid-1980s. When Roe v. Wade was first handed down, only three religious groups objected: the Catholic Church (obviously), the Mormons, and the Orthodox Jewish Union. Of these, only the Catholic Church had national reach, and even then, it was limited by the fact that the US was and is hyper-Protestant. For evangelicals at this time, being anti-abortion was just a weird Catholic thing like the rosary. If you dig around enough on the Southern Baptist Convention website, you can find a resolution from this period where they state that abortion is a matter between a woman and her doctor. Francis Schaeffer is generally regarded as the one to bring white evangelicals into the antiabortion movement, and that process took about a decade. Once people that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell got involved, it seems like the die was cast, since as conservative low church white evangelicals, they represented the “default” form of American Christianity.
The main reason that the Religious Right was able to accumulate so much power in the first place was because of the Cold War. If the Soviet Union was full of “godless commies,” the US had to up the piety. For “freedom,” of course. This is why “In God We Trust” was added to the coinage and the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s. This is also why we’re never going to have elected politicians who are going to build a real wall (which never existed in the first place) between church and state, as no politician wants to be seen as being “against religion.” The advances in rights for women’s, LGBT, and racial minorities also led to a backlash that was eagerly exploited. Like Trump, Reagan was religiously indifferent, but knew how to validate the feelings of white evangelicals in particular. Even now, these evangelicals act as the shock troops for the conservative movement, especially at the local level and there is no equivalent for them on the Democratic side.
The lingering effects of the Cold War mean that anything that smacks of “socialism” or “communism” is immediately considered off limits. This includes (but is not limited to): school desegregation, investing in public transportation, having a more robust rail system, single payer healthcare, public libraries, public schools, environmentalism, being against the death penalty, challenging the MIC, being in favor of rehabilitation in prisons, and so on. Because even mild social reforms have become unthinkable, American society continues to rot like an abandoned building. Before WWI, the Progressive Movement tried to apply scientific principles to make life better. Even Black sharecroppers in Mississippi engaged in experimentation to figure out how to increase their yields. Now, after marinating in one hundred years of red scare propaganda, it seems like our politicians just shrug and say, “What do you expect me to do about it?” when confronted with a problem that they were presumably elected to try to solve.
Cold War rhetoric moved the Overton window so far to the right that being right-wing to the point is fascism isn’t considered a problem. With the actual left COINTELPROED back in the 1970s, that just leaves the center right and the far right as our options. By the time the Clintons started ascending in the DNC, the country was already much more conservative than it had been in the 1970s. Purging the Rainbow Coalition was the last thing that needed to be done to complete the neoliberal takeover. If the US government in general and the Harris campaign in particular really thought that the Republican Party was a radical threat, they’d be setting up the House Committee on UN-American Affairs 2.0 to purge them, not trying to invite them into the latter’s hypothetical administration. The US has never had a problem with fascism, so long as the fascist government in question does what it wants.
To bring this back to the issue of AIPAC, the Israel issue must be something that Biden and Harris are willing to sacrifice their careers for. Why that might be, I don’t know; they certainly wouldn’t do so for, say, France, Germany, or frequent parter in crime the UK. Even realist political scientists like John Mearsheimer admit that they don’t understand why the US is so committed to Israel at the expense of its own interests. The only answer I have is that Israel acts as a rabid watchdog for US interests in West Asia, combined with the fact that Palestinians are being used as test subjects for new forms of killing, surveillance, and imprisonment. But even if we assume that that is true, the fact that so many politicians are willing to act contrary to what their constituents want further illustrates how little public opinion matters in liberal democracy.
I appreciate your take on many issues but I don’t see Haley or her voters as center right. They seem solid right. Some of them like Liz Cheney do believe in democracy. So I see that as the only reason they are willing to vote for Harris. They don’t see themselves as white supremacists but they might need to look harder. I think substantial numbers of us don’t see ourselves as card carrying white supremacists yet some of our actions cause harm to non whites.
I hope to see US foreign policy with regard to Israel do a 180. I am sure there will be a political price to pay for that shift. I don’t see Harris announcing any change of foreign policy over the next few days.
I think down the stretch we will see her emphasizing reproductive rights and showcasing Trump’s vile plans should he manage to win. A Trump victory means everything everywhere will be worse.
Michigan voters who are trying to defeat Harris are working against their own interests. Or that is how it looks to me. Are they acting on principle? Most likely they are. If they defeat Harris, they will without question see far far greater suffering. This is not debatable even. Anyone who thinks a Trump win makes their lives better is in some sort of denial.
Thanks for commenting, FC! :)
I suppose my essay is a form of wishcasting. Not even that, really, because I'm writing against the immense cynicism that has banked up inside of me. I'm hoping against hope that Democrats generally and Harris in particular will demonstrate some basic sense of shared humanity. She still has time! That's my whole point. If she were holding back because of this nebulous fear that AIPAC or some other well-organized group would penalize her for being outspoken on the Gaza issue, I think that the time factor does come into play here in terms of snagging the logistics necessary to carry out that implied threat. So she has a clear lane to the basket, to use a sports metaphor, if she chooses to take it.
I am attempting to juggle some portions of my schedule as I've been working on another project, so I may not be able to address in full the fact that the Knesset has voted to outlaw UNRWA from operating within Gaza and the West Bank (perhaps all of the Occupied Territories). This is devastating and may cripple the agency altogether. That being the case, again, if Harris so chose, she could take this new fact (which is going underreported because of the wall-to-wall election coverage) and pair that with the almost-certainly leaked letter from the US to Israel saying that if they do not permit more aid by mid-November that we might -- might! -- withhold offensive weapons. Harris should take this new fact on the ground and say this changes the calculus, and that due to this move by Israel to deny the one aid agency that has the capability of feeding the vast number of Gazans in need that she is compelled to take action. That brings this move by the Knesset into the spotlight and puts pressure on Israel to reconsider their draconian action.
As for Michigan voters, I keep highlighting the Uncommitted movement to underscore that this energy has been in the state for nearly a year. I think that Biden thought he could ride out the turbulence, that surely by this point in the electoral calendar the hot part of the hostilities in Gaza would have wrapped up by now and that voters would experience the usual amnesia about such things. He was wrong in February, and Harris is wrong today. People are incandescent with anger because they feel betrayed and ignored. That's not even taking into account the Abandon Biden movement (which has morphed into the Abandon Harris movement), which explicitly wants to punish Democrats for their stance on Gaza. Those people want to demonstrate political power, and the one way they think they can do this is by producing an upset.
It's remarkable that, apparently, 40% of Arab-American voters polled say that they plan to vote for Jill Stein. This is not a knock on Jill Stein as a person or candidate, but she has no path to victory. The plan obviously is to deny Harris a win, and those Abandon Harris voters are clear-eyed about this objective. I've never agreed with that stance -- for me, it's always been about urging my party to live up to its own promises and values. I don't understand the people, one of which commented on one of my previous essays, who say that Harris could do or say nothing that would get them to reconsider their vote. Really? Nothing? Then what are we talking about here? If a third-party vote is (what some derisively call) a protest vote, but then the major-party candidate adjusts to accomodate what it was one was protesting, why would one stick with the plan to punish? There's a lack of consistency there.
So that's why I'm putting it out there in the universe that I hope Harris will make a modest shift in her rhetoric to indicate an intention to modify policy. Just enforcing U.S. law -- who can be against such a platitude? I think she wins more than she loses by taking such a tack.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I don’t really have much faith in our foreign policy being changed in the way that it needs to be. I hope Harris does way more than the minimal moves that MIGHT be possible while not hurting her election chances. But I hope she makes these drastic moves after she wins. True enough, she MIGHT win back some of the Arab-American votes by making some move before Nov 5. I think it could cost her the win. As I stated, I would like to see an entire reset. Israel is doing horrible, unspeakable things and doing that with our help. I do not understand it. Or maybe I do. Maybe we are not at all about freedom, equality, democracy, human rights and the values all of the elected officials promote by talk. Maybe all of it is just talk. Here domestically we hold in place a system that is certainly not based on equal rights. We have made incremental progress. I read a quote attributed to Malcolm X that resonated. It went something like “If someone knifes you and then pulls the knife out a little, that’s not progress”. I agree. We have done a great job of shoveling out propaganda. And for sure, we are not as bad as we could be. We have made steps in the right direction. But we could use bold and honest leadership that does more than talk about human rights and equal right. Anyway… I have hope for Harris. I don’t see her announcing any change before Nov 5.
I wonder what would happen if on Nov6 Biden announced that we are cutting ALL aid to Israel? That might shake things up. Plus it would give Harris a bit of cover from the political fall out. If we ran foreign policy based on human rights we would cut ALL aid to Israel. Let those genocidal maniacs make their own security. If you are carrying out a genocide, you deserve insecurity. The world would be better off if genocidal practitioners had less power and thus had to pay a high price for their actions.
Ha. Good thing I’m not in charge of US foreign policy. I would have us in a very different place. Anyway, thanks again for your thoughtful response.
The Harris campaign has been so mismanaged that it makes me wonder if this really is all rigged, like pro wrestling. Presidential elections are about bringing out your base. Instead, Harris is insulting and condescending towards her ostensible base, while courting the sort of people that the DNC claimed were “fascist” twenty years ago. Seriously, who in the year of our Lord 2024 is going to be swayed by a Dick Cheney endorsement? It seems like many rank and file Republicans have completely memory holed GWB’s tenure, so it can’t be aimed at them. Rank and file Democrats aren’t going to be impressed, and neither will these “moderate suburban Republicans” that the Democrats have been chasing for the past thirty years. The only explanation I have is that it’s a signal to the other neocons that it’s time for them to switch teams again. I’ve long thought that while both parties are afraid of the Republican base, they actively despise the supposed Democratic base, and Harris’ bone-headed strategy proves it.
I looked on OpenSecrets to see how much, if any, AIPAC had invested in Harris. I couldn’t find anything because the list seems to mostly be congresspeople. I wish there was a way to filter by name, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. I did see that Joe Biden was the number one recipient of AIPAC money from 1990 to the present: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind=Q05&recipdetail=S
I also saw that J Street, a “liberal Zionist” lobbying organization, raised over $6 million for Harris to date: https://jstreet.org/press-releases/j-street-raises-over-6-million-for-harris-walz-campaign-consolidating-status-as-largest-jewish-organizational-fundraiser-for-kamala-harris/
AIPAC has no need to rally against Harris. She’s already bought and paid for. AIPAC and J Street are often pitted against each other in political discourse, but to me they’re just two sides of the same coin. Money aside, I also think that Harris genuinely believes that what Israel is doing is right, as does Biden. The money is nice, of course, but this is what they truly believe in. A much younger Biden once said that if Israel didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. No matter who wins, it’s genocide yesterday, genocide today, and genocide tomorrow. If you don’t want genocide, the beatings will increase until you learn to love it.
Thanks for engaging with this piece, LM.
You mention mismanagement, which brings to mind a YouTube video I recently viewed. When I consume news commentary, I tend toward that with a left-leaning analysis (though sometimes I seek more 'independent' or even contrary opinion). Yesterday I happened to come across The Leftist Mafia, which is just a panel of YouTubers, most of whom have their own individual platforms, who come together periodically to shoot the breeze. The title of the segment was "PLEASE Do Better," with the subtitle "Kamala Harris's outreach to Arab American voters is ... NOT good."
I must say, I was ultra-gratified to hear them talking about many of the very same points I'd raised in my previous essay. (It's nice to know that others who have a much more extensive platform share similar views, as those views have a broader outreach through those channels. And it's nice to know that I came to my conclusions without being influenced by them, yet we came to the same analysis.) Mike Figueredo spoke about Harris committing "so many unforced errors" and lamented that with Donald "I'll be a dictator on Day 1" Trump as her opponent that the race shouldn't be this close. "Kamala is fucking up strategically speaking, because every election is going to be about mobilizations for Democrats, not about persuading Republicans."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsr_A81zYow
As for their dismissive attitude toward their left flank, I don't think it's a matter of despising the left (though I'm sure some players individually do hold that attitude). I think part of it is purely ideological, in terms of neoliberalism not be able to metabolize left-leaning thought about economic systems. Mainly, though, I've been chewing over a bit of information I learned in that series about political systems I mentioned before. The lecturer talked about this interesting tension that seems only to exist in two-party systems. It's where the main party can afford to disavow their extremity because the flank has nowhere else to go. It's a calculated decision. The lecturer specifically brought up the example of Bill Clinton repudiating Sister Souljah so as to make inroads and prove his centrist bona fides in the 1992 contest. (I was too young at the time to appreciate all of these nuances, but clearly Clinton had calculated his move as part of his strategy of triangulation.)
Now, why is it that the Democrats rebuff the left while Republicans court their extreme factions? I think that's a deeper conversation, because that turn, that volta, would help explain the point at which American politics went into a tailspin. Because it was not always this way. It's true that the right has tolerated fringe elements for many decades going upon centuries, the modern GOP had tamped down on the really unusual elements for quite some time. Was it in response to losing the WH in the middle of GHWB's term, an interrupted presidency? Was it when the Moral Majority was brought on board? When did politics go haywire? I would posit that when Republicans ushered their weird ones into their inner circles is when the dynamics changed. At such a point, the left was still being iced out by the Democrats because they could "afford" to do so; but the ultra-right wing was being wooed, pooling the party around such folks as the new center.
As for this piece, I focused on the hypothetical of AIPAC spending money against Harris because I've seen so many people whisper or say outright that Biden and Harris can't speak out against what Israel is doing in Gaza because they'll pay a price at the ballot box. Well, how would they pay a price? Who's going to lead a charge against Harris for saying that she'd follow the law? It'd have to be coordinated. At the level of presidential politics, it'd have to be an organization with some clout. Not many fit this particular bill. Personally, I think the idea that the election could hinge on political apostates by such a move is far-fetched, as some polling (I'm pulling from memory) had 2 out of 5 undecided voters saying that a commitment from the Biden administration to limit weapons to Israel while they are out of compliance with international law would make them more likely to vote for Democrats. Also, as I recall, upwards of 66% of Democrats agree that an arms embargo should be implemented. The majority of Democrats want to see a policy change. Add to that the fact that around 70% of Jewish Americans identify as Democrats. I highly doubt that a large contingent of them would flip on voting for Democrats if Harris simply stated that she would enforce U.S. law. But I do think that enough incensed Arab-American, Muslim-American, and activist voters in Michigan would return to the fold in numbers that would make the difference, because this election will be won at the margins.
If Harris wants to win, she has to do something major in order to break out of the static pattern she finds herself in.
Thank you for your reply. I’ve never really understood the Sister Soulja controversy, presumably because I was even younger than you when it happened. Sister Soulja doesn’t strike me as someone who’s involved with or cares about electoral politics. The Wikipedia page on the matter says that it was an excuse for Bill Clinton to further distance himself from “radical Blacks” like Jesse Jackson (lol). The Jeremiah Wright controversy I remember, but I the hypocrisy there is more apparent to me. I’ve seen the whole sermon on YouTube and what Wright said is a common theme in Black churches (ie The US will always disappoint you but God won’t). To me, this just indicates that white people don’t really know what happens in Black spaces.
Discussing the origins of the Religious Right would be too complicated for a Substack comment. It’s worth noting that white evangelicals didn’t get involved in the antiabortion movement until the early to mid-1980s. When Roe v. Wade was first handed down, only three religious groups objected: the Catholic Church (obviously), the Mormons, and the Orthodox Jewish Union. Of these, only the Catholic Church had national reach, and even then, it was limited by the fact that the US was and is hyper-Protestant. For evangelicals at this time, being anti-abortion was just a weird Catholic thing like the rosary. If you dig around enough on the Southern Baptist Convention website, you can find a resolution from this period where they state that abortion is a matter between a woman and her doctor. Francis Schaeffer is generally regarded as the one to bring white evangelicals into the antiabortion movement, and that process took about a decade. Once people that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell got involved, it seems like the die was cast, since as conservative low church white evangelicals, they represented the “default” form of American Christianity.
The main reason that the Religious Right was able to accumulate so much power in the first place was because of the Cold War. If the Soviet Union was full of “godless commies,” the US had to up the piety. For “freedom,” of course. This is why “In God We Trust” was added to the coinage and the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s. This is also why we’re never going to have elected politicians who are going to build a real wall (which never existed in the first place) between church and state, as no politician wants to be seen as being “against religion.” The advances in rights for women’s, LGBT, and racial minorities also led to a backlash that was eagerly exploited. Like Trump, Reagan was religiously indifferent, but knew how to validate the feelings of white evangelicals in particular. Even now, these evangelicals act as the shock troops for the conservative movement, especially at the local level and there is no equivalent for them on the Democratic side.
The lingering effects of the Cold War mean that anything that smacks of “socialism” or “communism” is immediately considered off limits. This includes (but is not limited to): school desegregation, investing in public transportation, having a more robust rail system, single payer healthcare, public libraries, public schools, environmentalism, being against the death penalty, challenging the MIC, being in favor of rehabilitation in prisons, and so on. Because even mild social reforms have become unthinkable, American society continues to rot like an abandoned building. Before WWI, the Progressive Movement tried to apply scientific principles to make life better. Even Black sharecroppers in Mississippi engaged in experimentation to figure out how to increase their yields. Now, after marinating in one hundred years of red scare propaganda, it seems like our politicians just shrug and say, “What do you expect me to do about it?” when confronted with a problem that they were presumably elected to try to solve.
Cold War rhetoric moved the Overton window so far to the right that being right-wing to the point is fascism isn’t considered a problem. With the actual left COINTELPROED back in the 1970s, that just leaves the center right and the far right as our options. By the time the Clintons started ascending in the DNC, the country was already much more conservative than it had been in the 1970s. Purging the Rainbow Coalition was the last thing that needed to be done to complete the neoliberal takeover. If the US government in general and the Harris campaign in particular really thought that the Republican Party was a radical threat, they’d be setting up the House Committee on UN-American Affairs 2.0 to purge them, not trying to invite them into the latter’s hypothetical administration. The US has never had a problem with fascism, so long as the fascist government in question does what it wants.
To bring this back to the issue of AIPAC, the Israel issue must be something that Biden and Harris are willing to sacrifice their careers for. Why that might be, I don’t know; they certainly wouldn’t do so for, say, France, Germany, or frequent parter in crime the UK. Even realist political scientists like John Mearsheimer admit that they don’t understand why the US is so committed to Israel at the expense of its own interests. The only answer I have is that Israel acts as a rabid watchdog for US interests in West Asia, combined with the fact that Palestinians are being used as test subjects for new forms of killing, surveillance, and imprisonment. But even if we assume that that is true, the fact that so many politicians are willing to act contrary to what their constituents want further illustrates how little public opinion matters in liberal democracy.