Table of Contents
Friendly Fire
President Claudine Gay of Harvard University is being assailed for her Ph,D. dissertation for supposed content not properly credited with citations to the literature. I doubt that the timing is unconnected to the controversy concerning whether the war in Gaza should be denounced even in ways considered anti-semetic. Because anti-colonialism.
Breaches of scholarship norms are the preferred tools by which campaigns of academic infighting are waged. If peace prevails any flaws are quietly fixed via errata. Of itself the breach has to be egregious to change the status quo. In times of war, grammar and syntax may be tortured to expose wrongdoing. My Bayesian prior in Dr. Gay’s case is that the kerfluffle over her citations is simply one of those internecine wars.
Implications for 2024
Is the Democratic coalition fraying? Are the differenes among coalition member with each other overtaking differences with the MAGA forces of darkness? Does that explain the Biden polling? Maybe it’s not Joe Biden so much as a feeling that we don’t want to share the same bed anymore with factions who don’t share all our views.
Once the spirit of burn it down appears things can get weird. Barrack Obama becomes president in 2009 and the agenda of the Republican Party becomes solely fixated on a one-term Presidency. A Tea Party caterpillar molts into a Freedom Caucus by 2010. It begins with a renewed fervor for Eric Cantor’s government small enough to be drown in a bathtub. By the 2016, the only ask left is tax cuts. Once those are achieved in 2017, there is nothing left except court packing and crippling the administrative state. Trump’s defeat and attempted coup set off fevered dreams of an Armageddon for the 2024 election. A highly motivated minority learned to game the party system to seize power, drive out the old guard and install loyalists guaranteeing the 2024 nomination for the faction’s nominal leader. (Trump is nominal in the sense that he is entirely dependent on others to get rid of the meddlesome priests; he plays a vicious but shallow game. Fear the people around him with the savvy to implement their own agendas and sell them as Trump’s own.)
It’s a fight to the death, there can be no compromise and no victory short of total extermination of the evil other. But the right has no monopoly on that mindset. The Weather Underground in the US around antiwar agitation, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and Shining Path in Peru all used what they called direct action to promote radical agendas. Direct action is the polite term for violence. This is what the right imagines is the trajectory of Antifa.
Although there is little sign of a pseudo-revolutionary left wing movement employing violence in the United States, attitudes among the left are hardening. However, the hardening comes not against the world of MAGA but against near-spectrum rivals for purity of sentiment. This is most evident in the sudden emergence of hostility between arising out of the Gaza war.
Antisemitism Surges
Before the start of the war, the Israeli government squandered moral capital banked from the Holocaust. The project of Zionism could be defended on the objective necessity for Jews to have a defensible sovereignty so that never again. A heavy-handed occupation, whether an objective view of the situation would find it necessary or not was one factor. The other aspect of Zionism that came to the fore was that of reclaiming the West Bank as a promised land.
In the immediate shock of October 7, Israel had seemed to recover some of its lost moral capital. Israel’s enemies rejoiced, and its friends came forward. Its critics did not cry “this is what has come of Netanyahu’s failed polices” at first. When Israel responded as Hamas intended and with the effect on the Palestinian civilian population as Hamas intended the humanitarian anguish came too. Within days, as it began to be hard to consider the scale of civilian casualties as collateral damage, it became safe to be critical of Israel and chants of “river to the sea” became this era’s Che Guevara chic among trust fund radicals and Palestinian nationalists as well.
Some of the fallout included hate crimes that claimed Jewish lives and lives of Muslims. Jews again feel the premonition of persecution and its understandable that Muslims suffering harm feel treated as somehow second class victims. Biden is not doing enough to relieve the suffering, he’s taken the side of the Jew against the Palestinians is one claim being heard. There are reports of young voters being drawn to Trump over this, as if he were ever to be anyone’s reliable friend.
Demotion of the Trinity
Democrats, Republicans and Independents locked in a three-way game with the tides has been our model since 1964 when Johnson threw over the Solid South that Nixon pounced on in 1968.
- Coastal, urban, unionized, Black and Hispanic and professional classes in one camp.
- Flyover, Big Oil, small business, plutocrats, Evangelical, gun-totters in another.
- Soccer moms, the indecisive and the John Galts in the third.
Suddenly, not only are Establishment Republicans like Liz Chaney making common cause with Democrats against Trump but some of the academic keeps of political correctness appear ready to make common cause with those who decry them for wokeness.
The long crusade to restore the sanctity of human life in utero celebrated Dobbs by demonstrating the underlying aims of a war against women as a political force independent of approved class constraints. The abortion debate was never really about birth control; it was always about woman control and the restoration of reproductive subjugation that weakened with the introduction of safe, effective and legal birth control, including abortion, in the 60s and 70s. State elections in Red states where abortion has been on the ballot show that a strong majority of women does not stand by the party line across the board.
The expectation that the 2024 election will come down to a few hundred thousand votes spread over a handful of swing states and that Trump may take the Electoral College while losing an even greater percentage of the national popular vote, depends on the Trinitarian Model of set menu voters. This cycle, however, voters may be ordering a la carte, rebalancing their political preferences in novel ways.
And snap!
In materials science, a Griffith crack arises from small imperfections and irregularities in brittle materials. Under stress it propagates suddenly and at sonic speed. That is what may be happened within US political coalitions that seemed timeless until recently. The splintering of the Democratic party may be more likely to be into smaller pieces than the Republican, where Trump picked up a large enough shattered piece of the GOP. The diversity of the traditional Democratic coalition may leave many more shards when it cracks.
