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NYT calls for conditioning military aid to Israel

Dan Nexon has a pretty good (not that I necessarily agree with every word) blog post in which he endorses today’s NYT editorial (paywall-free link) about conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel. Nexon has some specific suggestions on implementation. He also, among other things, links to a piece in the Guardian which reports that “Ireland and Spain have reiterated their intention to forge an alliance of countries that will soon recognise Palestine as a nation-state.” (I haven’t read most of the Guardian piece but I’m not sure this kind of piecemeal recognition in the absence of an I/P negotiation is the best way to get to a real two-state solution. But that’s a subject for another time.)

Does it matter whether one calls Trump “fascist”?

I might have once thought so, but now I think it makes little difference whether one uses the F-word or goes with a label like “right-wing populism.” This piece by Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker, “Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Trump is a Fascist,” reaches pretty much this conclusion, though not in so many words. Marantz prefers “right-wing populist” to “fascist,” but he also notes: “If we’re going to be intellectually honest about the ways in which the fascism analogy doesn’t hold, then we should also be willing to acknowledge the ways in which it does.” Right.

From enmity to “live and let live”

Before Oct. 7, Netanyahu’s agenda was basically to ignore the Palestinians as much as possible. He was perhaps laying the groundwork for a formal annexation of the West Bank, while Gaza was to be left in a condition of permanent siege/blockade under an Israeli-Egyptian condominium. One likely effect (I don’t have the data at hand to back this up but it seems a reasonable supposition) of Netanyahu’s agenda was to make a “rejectionist” stance toward Israel more popular among Palestinians than it had previously been (or to put the same point differently, to make a rejectionist stance even more popular).

Generalizing the point, it seems reasonable to suggest that extremists on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have tended to strengthen each other and in a sense have come to need each other. This dynamic has been called “adversary symbiosis” (I take the phrase from Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics [Cambridge U.P., 1999], pp. 274-275, who cites a 1982 article by Howard F. Stein, “Adversary Symbiosis and Complementary Group Dissociation,” in International Journal of Intercultural Relations). Once two parties start to see each other as enemies, those representations or beliefs can easily become self-reinforcing. Wendt describes this “logic of enmity” (p. 263) mainly with reference to states in a particular kind of international “culture,” but his description also can apply in a different context such as the one at hand, in which one of the parties to the conflict is not a state. (As he writes on the first page, Wendt draws “on structurationist and symbolic interactionist sociology” — hence his use of “Self” and “Other” in the following passage.)

“Enemy images have a long pedigree,” he observes (p. 261). “The Greeks represented the Persians as ‘barbarians’; the Crusaders perceived the Turks as ‘infidels’; medieval Europeans feared their defeat at Liegnitz at the hands of the Mongols heralded Armageddon; later Europeans treated the peoples of the Americas as savages; conservatives thought civilization was threatened by the French Revolution; and, in our own [i.e., the 20th] century, we have the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the early Cold War, Northern Ireland, Pol Pot, Palestinian and Israeli fundamentalists, the Bosnian Civil War, Hutus and Tutsis — all based on representations of the Other as intent on destroying or enslaving the Self.”

“It is important to emphasize,” he continues, “that this concept implies nothing about whether enemy images are justified. Some enemies are ‘real,’ in that the Other really does existentially threaten the Self, as the Nazis did the Jews, and others are ‘chimeras,’ as the Jews were to the Nazis…. Real or imagined, if actors think enemies are real then they are real in their consequences.”

Israeli right-wing extremists and Palestinian rejectionists view each other as enemies in this fundamental sense, seeing each as dedicated to the negation of the other’s existence and/or basic aims. Each party’s actions have confirmed these perceptions. The result has been “a self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 263). This is not only a cycle of violence, in which a violent act by one side is met with violence in return, but also a cycle of perceptions, in which each side’s acts reinforce the enemy images held by both.

Persuading extremists on both sides to give up their political and psychological investment in the logic of enmity is likely impossible. So the path to a solution lies where it always has: in marginalizing the extremists and mobilizing or creating (or re-creating) constituencies on both sides that are open to a negotiated settlement. In the wake of October 7 and Israel’s very disproportionate (in the ordinary dictionary sense of that word) response, this of course won’t be easy. Assuming Biden is re-elected, his administration should engage with (one hopes) a reconstituted Israeli government and be prepared to use both carrots and sticks, while Qatar, the UAE, and others with influence on the Palestinians should do the same on that side.

A two-state settlement should entail Palestinian acceptance not only of Israel’s right to exist but also, at least tacitly, its identity as a state with an “ethnic” or “ethno-national” foundation, while Israel should accept a Palestinian polity as a state with all the attributes of sovereignty — material, legal, and symbolic — including some kind of army. Once a genuine settlement on the key issues is reached, a Palestinian state’s army would pose no more threat to Israel than Jordan’s army does now — which is to say, basically none. And the existence of a Palestinian army, while posing no real threat to Israel, would help give the new Palestinian state the necessary self-validation and national pride that a national military, at least in many parts of the world, still confers.

Some or many of the roughly 700,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank would likely have to move, or be moved, back to Israel, while others could remain as Jewish citizens of the Palestinian state (just as there are Palestinian citizens of the Jewish state). Those (many) settlers whose ideology makes them unwilling to live in the Palestinian state would have to be moved back to Israel, by force if necessary. Manlio Graziano has argued, in a paywalled Foreign Policy piece of which I was able to read only the title and opening sentences, that a two-state settlement would result in bloodshed on a scale of the 1947 partition of India. This strikes me as overdrawn, though the difficulties involved in moving substantial numbers of settlers will be considerable.

A two-state agreement would end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which has been illegal since its inception in 1967. It would also be, to use Wendt’s terms, a move from a Hobbesian culture of “kill or be killed” to a Lockean culture of “live and let live.” Both the path to a settlement and its basic ingredients have been pretty clear for the last half-century. Once the current war has ended and there have been leadership changes on both sides, the parties should — this is an exhortation, not a prediction — finally get it done.

Crises in “the meritocracy”

Elites in the contemporary U.S. — whether they be business elites, political elites, cultural elites or academic elites — tend, as a general rule, to think of the U.S. as a meritocracy. That belief is, at best, highly questionable, and more likely simply false, but it is psychologically appealing: people who have “made it” like to think they have done so because they are smarter, more talented and/or more hard-working than those who have not. The advantages that many (though not all) successful people began life with — and for which accordingly they cannot take personal credit — tend to get minimized or occluded altogether in the stories they often tell themselves about their success. (These points are not original and are likely fleshed out in, e.g., D. Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap, which I haven’t read.)

It is in the nature of most societies, and certainly of the contemporary U.S., that “success” must be rationed: if everyone were successful then no one would be, and the notion of success would lose its meaning. Thus, to put it bluntly, success (of some) requires failure (of others). Middle-class and upper-middle-class people who have children are aware of this, and also of the perhaps somewhat narrowing opportunities to acquire upper-middle-class incomes, which accounts for their concern, sometimes amounting to panic, about giving their children every possible leg up in the “meritocratic” competition.

As is widely known, much of this concern in recent years has focused on getting children into “elite” colleges and universities. There is a widespread perception — partly, though only partly, rooted in fact — that attending one of a set of elite institutions gives one significant advantages in the battle for success. The precise list of such institutions is debatable, but at a rough cut it would comprise: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford (HYPS, for short) plus the rest of the Ivy League (Columbia, Penn, Brown, etc.) plus, probably, Duke, Univ. of Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, maybe certain state flagship universities such as Chapel Hill or U.Texas Austin or U.Michigan Ann Arbor, and then Amherst, Williams, maybe Swarthmore and Haverford, and perhaps a few others. Institutions of this sort enroll a very small percentage of the total college students in the U.S., but attendance at them is perceived to confer various sorts of advantages, a perception that (to repeat) has a partial, but only a partial, grounding in empirical reality. That reality is more complicated than perception goes almost without saying: for instance, look at the elite business or professional circles in any medium-sized or even large city, especially in areas other than the Amtrak northeast corridor, and you’re likely to find a good many people who have attended regional universities or colleges with no particular national reputation, or even in some cases no university at all. Still, if you’re a kid whose ambition in life is, say, to work in the upper reaches of financial capital or in the upper reaches of management consulting (McKinsey, etc.) or perhaps in Silicon Valley, attending one of the aforementioned places may well confer a not insignificant advantage. (ETA: A commenter at another site has repeatedly observed, presumably mostly correctly, that the likes of McKinsey restrict their entry-level recruiting and hiring to a small list of schools.)

As is also well known, the perceived privileged position of these elite institutions has subjected them to an increasing amount of public scrutiny and, in some cases, resentment. Running these places has become increasingly something of an administrator’s nightmare. They are overrun with applications, with far more qualified students applying than they can admit, and they are increasingly perceived as producing too many students who have managed to pass four years in an environment that reinforces their pre-existing views and predilections rather than challenging them.

In addition, these places have come under scrutiny for the ways they educate (or try to educate) and also to assess their students. Grade inflation at Harvard was only a semi-problem in the late 1970s; now it is a Problem capital P. A recent column in Harvard Magazine by an undergraduate, Aden Barton ’24, describes a “high-level seminar” in which students did almost all the reading at the beginning of the semester but then increasingly stopped doing it, giving preference to extracurricular and other commitments, until by the end of the course no one was doing it: “As time went on, the percentage of readings each of us did went from nearly 100 to nearly 0.” All of them got an A anyway. Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, Amanda Claybaugh, was quoted in the NYT (a quote reproduced, with proper attribution, in the student’s column) as saying that “students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom” — a point that probably applies with even more force to humanities and social-science classes than STEM ones.

This gives rise to more than one problem. First, it relieves students of the need to make trade-offs; since real life requires hard choices and trade-offs, being a student should require some of that too. If one will get an A without doing the work, fewer people will do it, and they may end up feeling, as Barton seems to, that they have missed out on something important (i.e., an actual education). Second, it reinforces what Barton refers to as a “transactional attitude toward the whole college experience.” Third, it may further undermine the legitimacy and standing of elite universities in the public’s perception. A college that (1) admits 5 percent or fewer of its applicants, while giving thumb-on-the-scale preferences to legacies, athletes, and children of faculty and large donors, and (2) hands out A’s the way cupcakes are handed out at an elementary-school birthday party is not positioning itself well to maintain its supposed position as (to quote the opening lines of a recent lawsuit) “America’s leading university.”

Elite universities not only reproduce privilege; they also, to at least some extent, legitimate it. Race-based affirmative action in admissions, now outlawed by the Supreme Court, contributed not only to students’ experiences but also to this legitimating function, helping to persuade the public at large that such places were trying, in however partial or superficial a way, to mirror the increasing diversity of a multiracial society. The multi-pronged attacks on elite universities that have captured the headlines, coupled with self-inflicted wounds such as the trends described in Barton’s column, give rise to a sense that the (supposed) meritocracy is grappling with crises that, if left unaddressed, may eventually reach an “existential” climax.

McConnell

Mitch McConnell has announced that he is stepping down as leader of the Senate Republican caucus in the fall. I recall reading an analysis some years ago — don’t remember exactly where — that pointed out that no one has carried water more effectively for large corporate interests than McConnell. Put that together with his blocking of Garland’s nomination to the Court, and his record is truly retrograde. No doubt he has also brought home the bacon for a not insignificant number of Kentuckians in the form e.g. of projects of various sorts, which is something that electorally successful Senators of both parties tend to do, though some are more focused on that than others. McConnell and Biden even appeared together a while back to bless a major bridge renovation in Kentucky that the bipartisan infrastructure legislation was funding.

Recently McConnell has made it clear that he supports funding for Ukraine, which sets him apart from certain others in his caucus, such as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), an Army veteran, Yale Law School graduate, bestselling author, and former denizen of Silicon Valley who has become plus monarchiste que le roi, with le roi in this case being Donald Trump. Vance went so far as to show up at the Munich Security Conference to “explain” to Europeans in attendance why support of Ukraine should not be a U.S. priority. Yuck.

RFK: I’ll take the father (1968 version), not the son

The radio program On Point today opened with clips of Robert Kennedy speaking in Indiana during the 1968 Democratic primary. This was when he was talking about the common interests of poor Blacks and poor and working-class whites, trying to build a cross-racial coalition. In May 1968, I was 10 (turned 11 in June ’68, the month RFK was assassinated), and while I had read something about RFK’s ’68 campaign, I didn’t really recall how he sounded. If he had lived and had been elected President in ’68 (the former would not have guaranteed the latter, of course), the history of the U.S. in the latter 20th century might have been quite different.

The two faces of containment

In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (2021), Louis Menand wrote: “The [U.S.] policy of containment…had two faces. One looked outward to identify threats to democratic self-determination around the world; the other looked within, to detect dangerous trends and vulnerabilities within the liberal polity.” (p. 38)

These two faces of containment worked, in a way, against each other. ”Dangerous trends and vulnerabilities” was given a broad definition. Hence “inward-facing” containment, in addition to fueling mini-panics about, e.g., comic books and juvenile delinquency, devolved into McCarthyism. A less tolerant, more fearful society was perforce less able to confront Communism abroad intelligently. Seeing a Red under every bed at home reinforced the tendency to see a row of teetering dominoes overseas. 

George Kennan had warned in his famous Long Telegram of 1946 that, as Menand quotes him, “[w]orld communism is like a malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue” of an unhealthy society. However, the 1950s Red Scare, echoing a Red Scare earlier in the century, while intending to eliminate what was perceived as diseased tissue, probably had the opposite effect, heightening anomie, apathy, distrust, and disillusionment. Beneath the surface conformity, middle-class solidification, and population growth of the ’50s, there was discontent and narrowness, caught at least partly in J.K. Galbraith’s contrast between “private affluence” and “public squalor” (Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 1958). There was also the continuing existence — albeit increasingly challenged — of Jim Crow and the subordination of Black Americans (Brown v. Bd. of Education, for instance, didn’t start being seriously implemented in the South until roughly 15 years after the decision came down in 1954). Women were still, with an increasing number of exceptions, confined in the public mind (and in real life) to the realm of domesticity.

The militarized version of “outward-facing” containment, criticized by Kennan as a distortion of what he had proposed as Mr. X in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” led, of course, to Vietnam. The attitude toward the Third World was that democratic self-determination was to be applauded, provided it did not produce a leftist government that would flirt or ally with Moscow or Beijing. Non-alignment, kicked off or formalized by the Bandung Conference in 1955, was viewed with suspicion. Capping off a series of smaller interventions and engineered coups (Guatemala, Iran, etc.), the U.S. launched an intervention in Indochina that, as Michael Walzer put it in Just and Unjust Wars (1977), “failed in the most dramatic way to respect the character and dimensions” of the Vietnamese civil war. He concluded: “Searching for a level of conflict at which our technological superiority could be brought to bear, we steadily escalated the struggle, until finally it was an American war, fought for American purposes, in someone else’s country.” JFK’s statement that “in the final analysis it is their war” went by the boards. Thus the two faces of containment ultimately collapsed into a single face of defeat, and not even the eventual disintegration of the USSR and the Communist bloc, nor George H.W. Bush’s assertion that “the Vietnam syndrome” had ended, was enough to erase its memory.

Is this the dumbest amicus brief ever filed?

This Thursday SCOTUS will hear oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson, the Insurrection Clause case. Among the amicus briefs listed here is one filed on behalf of a group of children’s rights advocates. The brief is ostensibly in support of neither party and claims not to take a position on how the case should come out on the merits. Rather, the brief urges SCOTUS to take into account the interests of the 74 million children in the U.S. under 18 and the interests of future generations. Glancing at the brief’s summary of the argument and reading between the lines (though not very between), it seems reasonably clear that the brief wants the Court to rule in favor of Colorado and keep Trump off the ballot, inasmuch as it implies that future voters have an interest in upholding constitutional “guardrails” such as the Insurrection Clause. But, as I said, the children’s rights advocates purport not to be taking a position on the merits. Instead, they intone: “Amici respectfully offer that the rights of children and future generations may ultimately provide a more stable anchor on which to moor such a profound decision than the waves and swells of today’s political storm.” (p. 3)

Please. It makes little sense to conjure up the prospect of “a more stable anchor” for a decision and then decline to advise the Justices about which harbor they should drop that anchor in. It makes one wonder whether these “children’s rights advocates and legal scholars” have perhaps been indulging a bit too much in one of Colorado’s prized products, namely cannabis.