It's Not Gaza, Stupid!
The Conflict Is Giving Progressives A Path To Escape Blame For A Biden Loss
Whenever I see another representation of the schism between the Biden Administration and Progressives, I laugh.
The two factions are more intertwined than any Democratic administration in my lifetime. No Democrat since Lyndon Johnson has done more to include progressives and attempt to adopt many of their ideas: A generous spending plan to help boost the economy out of the COVID-19 Pandemic; ending drone strikes and our longest war; an immigration policy that – was at least – friendlier to migrants; an attempt to forgive student loan debt and a working plan to forgive at least some; a Federal Trade Commission that is uniquely tough on trusts and corporate mergers; labor policy that is more worker-focused than any most of us have seen in our lifetime and has led to a resurgence in unionization in unlikely places; and an infrastructure bill that is creating jobs and finally repairing our rusty old roads and bridges.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama could never.
Yet, despite all these things, there’s a real chance Biden is headed for defeat in November against the man he previously defeated; a man twice impeached and indicted 91 times, Donald Trump. A Biden loss, many on the Left say, would be devastating, but deserved. Not because of anything I listed above, but because Biden has been supportive of Israel’s war against Hamas, launched after the terrorist group murdered over 1200 people in Israel last October.
The war has become an all-encompassing issue on the left, so much so that some progressives are suggesting it is worse than Iraq. Some have even gone so far off the deep end, they are arguing that is morally right for us to give up our own rights and allow Trump to win, not to help the people of Gaza who would be even more screwed if Trump wins, but merely to send a message to Biden. To not do this, they suggest, makes you sociopathic. For this and many other reasons, I’ve come to believe the Gaza obsession is not really about Gaza, it’s about Biden and the potential that he may lose in November, and the risk that the Left will bear the blame because of why.
The Left is so laser-focused on Gaza because they don't want to deal with their own culpability in influencing policies that made Biden unpopular on issues like the economy and immigration, which rank way higher on voters' minds than Gaza. They WANT Gaza to be the reason he loses, not the other things, because if inflation and immigration cost Biden the election, the Democratic Party will have no other choice but to shift right on those issues, erasing any influence the Left might have gained in his presidency. They are right to be concerned about that.
Biden's at risk of losing primarily because of Afghanistan, inflation, and immigration. These problems festered because in a good-faith effort to include the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wings of the party, he staffed his administration with idealist leftists who spent 2020 in a Zoom bubble and think their pandemic-era social circle is an adequate representation of America. Leftists have no idea what “normies” think because they’ve never spoken to them. There was little in-person campaigning in 2020 and what little has been done since has so terrified and dispirited progressives that they have completely wiped those interactions from their consciousness.
The Left is so laser-focused on Gaza because they don't want to deal with their own culpability in influencing policies that made Biden unpopular.
In a 2021 New York City Council race in my district (which Biden won by 16 points a year earlier), progressives flooded my neighborhood to campaign for their endorsed candidate Felicia Singh. I was among the locals whom progressive activists sought advice from because of my expertise with the district. I grew up there, covered it for a decade as a reporter, helped on a 2009 campaign for the seat, and regularly spoke about its politics. I even engaged State Sen. Julia Salazar (D-Brooklyn) in a discussion about the political dynamics of my district at an event in Spring 2021.
After several rounds of door-knocking and hearing voters complain about crime and the economy, and in one case mask-wearing, many of the progressives I met abandoned the campaign and fled back to the safety of their socialist bubbles in Salazar’s district. Singh faced Joann Ariola, a longtime civic leader who lost the same race in the same district 20 years earlier and had a controversial and divisive history in civic leadership. My grandmother, a lifelong Republican who was involved in the local party, refused to ever vote for her, as did the former president of a local Republican club and many of her allies. Rather than engage this community, progressives dismissed them because these voters’ top issues were law and order-related and progressives wanted to make it about “working class values.” Singh lost the race by 34 points.
A year later, former Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, a progressive ally of Democratic Socialists of America, ran for Congress in a Manhattan-Brooklyn district that should have been a lay-up for her. A Taiwanese-American, Niou was running in a newly redrawn district that included both Manhattan and Brooklyn Chinatowns. As an Asian-American candidate, she engaged both communities as if they were the same, failing to account for the fact that Brooklyn Chinatown is more conservative. That community was heavily focused on law and order issues after a series of racial-bias attacks on Asian Americans. These voters, largely upwardly mobile Chinese immigrant families, many of whom originally came from Manhattan Chinatown, were also concerned about progressives taking a sledgehammer to the specialty education programs their community has benefited from. The campaign failed to take political advice from those who warned them Niou had to pivot on those issues. Instead, Niou’s campaign lectured critics that as an Asian-American, Niou knew the community better. She lost Brooklyn Chinatown in the Democratic primary to a political unknown who focused on law and order issues, and narrowly lost districtwide to now-U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, a moderate Democrat.
Progressives don’t want this experience again. They dread going out and talking to actual people outside their bubbles, and being forced to face how badly they fucked up; how they dragged the Biden Administration into those fuck ups, and how utterly impossible it is to fix. Therefore, they're retreating into the safety of their bubbles and Gaza is giving them reason to stay there. Armed with polls showing most Americans want a ceasefire, while ignoring polls that show voters approve of and side with Israel, and disapprove of the pro-Palestine protests, progressives think they are writing Biden’s political obituary in a way that favors them. Biden, they’ll say, was a progressive president after all – despite their constant complaints to the otherwise before October 7 – but he threw it all away for a fascist government oppressing brown people in the Middle East.
Their unpopular leftist movement surrounding the Israel-Gaza War was an opportunity for Biden to pull the plug on these people, but ironically Biden himself is pretty progressive on several issues – labor, immigration, and business regulations for example. He doesn't want to hand over his presidency to the centrists. It’s too late to make a convincing pivot now anyway.
If Biden loses, and we do have a 2028 election, Democratic candidates that year will run on austerity, tougher immigration, and law and order, and progressives will run some out-of-touch ideologue of their own, probably U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who will stand on a debate stage and say “It was the genocide” and be out of the race by Super Tuesday. The same band of cynical, self-destructive nihilist Leftists will then cry in their quinoa and throw their quadrennial temper tantrums.
And whether or not a Democrat wins in 2028, one in five Americans in poverty, a right wing Supreme Court, ICE raids in major cities, and drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan will become the new norm.
I think quinoa has been unfairly slandered for its unwilling association with progressives. It is delicious, high in protein, and cooks faster than rice. We should value quinoa, not throw it in with the useless idiots.
The Gaza war is not a genocide---Israel does not seek to kill Arabs. It is no more a genocide than the USSR's "genocide on the Germans" in World War Two or the USA's nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The protestors against Israel are playing into Hitler's hands just as they did in his previous incarnation as Fuhrer of the third Reich. But perhaps the German Communists of the first Fuhrer's time thought "it must get worse before it can get better" and saw the first Hitler as no worse than the "Social Democrat" enemies.