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What’s missing in the Gessen and Silver’s article here is that our ideological backdrop is largely realpolitik. If we’re talking about saying certain things to get re-elected, then yes, the notion of what public opinion is and how that affects potential votes is purely an academic matter. If it’s the case that Palestine alone will torpedo Biden’s re-election, then for sure he will change his tone. But as Silver points out, it’s not obvious that Palestine is big enough of an issue to affect him. For the most part, Democrats run on being a big tent that represents teachers, unionists, college grads, progressives, globalists, democratic socialists, neoliberals, etc. It’s going to be watered-down, that’s a feature, not a bug. Trumpism is much more straightforward. The irony in Gessen’s complaint is that the more “fringe” views you see on college campuses are largely correct in a narrow sense: what’s happening in Gaza is a product of The West. We are the Bad Guys. If you look at the world with no nuance whatsoever, then yes, binary logic would say Hamas are the Good Guys. Obviously, that’s insane. But the colonial West analysis is fundamentally true. It’s true if we set our scope of history to the last century (British Mandatory Palestine) or the last 500 years. It’s true in an obvious sense, in how the US supports Israel today. Historians a thousand years from now will see The West as one long, colonial Empire, and Israel is its beachhead in the Middle East. The “woke” kids on the campuses see this in a maximally socially constructivist sense, i.e, of course things like cops, oppression, capitalism, etc are all related to Gaza. So much of our way of life is built on violence… but if you’re a liberal (not a leftist!) you still believe you need these things to maintain society… Which is how you end up with Biden’s realpolitik neutrality, which means supporting Israel to win an election. What Gessen ought to hope for is that public opinion does reach critical mass such that it is guaranteed that Biden would be re-elected if he was pro-Palestine. That is more or less their implicit desire: a free Palestine, but no Trump. That is not impossible. But it will require a sustained political strategy from the ground up, not from the DNC. And the only viable political strategy is not one of utilitarian vote counting, because that’s what begets this kind of violence to begin with, but appealing to people’s pathos towards the suffering of others. |