Just Because People Vote For Something Doesn’t Make It Right
Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday at 1 PM Eastern, our new regular time.
Our guest will be New York Magazine Editor-at-Large Rebecca Traister, among the best writers on gender and politics (and many other things) in America. This essay she wrote after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 still captures many painful truths about the brutal burden facing not only women presidential candidates, but American women as a whole. We’ll talk about Trump’s victory, the gender divide, and the relationship between reproductive rights and liberal democracy.
Paid subscribers will get an email with the Zoom link this week and the video itself after it airs. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Ask Me Anything
Our monthly Ask Me Anything Zoom calls are usually for premium subscribers. But given the moment, we’re opening the next one to all paid subscribers. It will be this Tuesday, November 12, from 11-Noon. We’ll send out the Zoom link on Tuesday morning.
If you’d like to participate on Tuesday, and hear Rebecca Traister on Friday, please subscribe
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. One of the books that helped me understand the Nakba better is Raja Shehadeh’s Strangers in the House, a beautiful portrait of a relationship between a father and his son in a political environment made impossible by expulsion and oppression.
I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.
Sources Cited in This Video
Ta-Nehisi Coates on why things often just don’t work out.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Arielle Angel talks to Abdaljawad Omar about Hamas, the left, and armed resistance.
Two useful retrospectives on the election. In the first, The New York Times’ Ezra Klein talks to the pollster Patrick Ruffini. In the second, Jacobin’s Daniel Denvir talks to Princeton Professor of African American Studies Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Understanding the Violence in Amsterdam.
See you on Tuesday and Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. There’s an essay that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2015. It’s about the historian Nell Painter and her argument that white supremacy was quite likely a permanent feature of American society. But beyond that, it’s about the necessity of accepting really, really painful truths. And Coates has this really fascinating part of the essay where he talks about the historian Tony Judt’s book, Postwar, about Europe after World War II.
And Judt is, particularly in this passage, talking about the forced repatriation, the ethnic cleansing of really large numbers of ethnic Germans who had lived in Eastern European countries, often for many generations, and were forced from their homes after World War II. And Judt writes: “the scale of this resettlement and the condition in which it takes place are without precedent in history. No one seeing its horrors firsthand can doubt that it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible price.” That’s Judt. And then Coates writes, “I read this and expected Judt to point to the terrible price that eventually came. But in fact, wrote Judt, ‘history has exacted no such retribution.’” He goes on to say, “the resettlement was a ‘remarkable success.’ That section hit me hard because I saw in it a kind of chaos, an argument against justice and righteousness as twin inevitable victors in history.”
And then Coates ends his essay by saying this: “this is neither the stuff of sweet dreams nor hope. But I think that a writer wedded to hope is ultimately divorced from truth. Two creeds can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If your writing must be hopeful, then there’s only room for the kind of evidence which verifies your premise. The practice of history can’t help there. Thus, writers who commit themselves to only writing hopeful things are committing themselves to the ahistorical, to the mythical, to the hagiography of humanity itself. I can’t write that way because I can’t study that way. I have to be open to things falling apart. Indeed, much of our history is the story of things just not working out.”
So, on Tuesday, things just didn’t work out. Donald Trump won a massive victory, which will allow him to do really, really horrifying things, and the consequences of which may reverberate throughout all of our lives—for Americans and indeed for the entire world. And I think it’s really important to remember what Coates said. Which is to say there is a conversation to be had, which is already happening, which is a necessary conversation about the political strategy of the Democratic Party, what the Democratic Party needs to do to win the midterms and then to win the presidential election. I think that’s a legitimate conversation because I think for all of the Democratic Party’s problems, there is an important difference between a party like the Democrats—that believes in climate change, that accepts the results of elections, that believes in reproductive rights—and the Republican Party. And I’ve talked about that in the past. But it’s crucially important—I think this is Coates’ point—to keep that argument about Democratic political strategy and how the Democrats should interpret Tuesday’s elections if they want to win from an entirely separate question, which is about truth, about what’s actually true and what is not true. And I want to give a couple examples.
First, on the question of immigration. It is probably the case that immigration is now a political loser for the Democrats. There has been a shift in public opinion. Trump was able to use that issue to great effect, including even among some non-white voters. That it may well be true that if the Democratic Party had taken a more brutal anti-immigrant position earlier on at the border and beyond, that perhaps they would have blunted some of the force of Trump’s wielding of this rhetoric. All of those things may be true. And it may be the case that if the Democrats want to win the next election, given this moment that we’re in, that it would be shrewd for them to adopt some version of kind of what Bill Clinton did in what was called his Sister Souljah kind of response in the early 1990s, which was essentially that particular incident of Sister Souljah. What Clinton did in a moment of hysteria about crime was he moved to take this very brutally anti-crime position. He even left the campaign trail to oversee the execution of a mentally retarded person. And that probably did help him to succeed where Michael Dukakis had failed in 1988 when Dukakis was hurt on the crime issue, as I think Democrats were hurt on the immigration issue.
So, as a matter of political strategy, that is an argument that one can make. But it is crucial to separate that argument from the question of truth, to not confuse the truth. Because as a matter of truth and morality, the idea that immigration hurts Americans, or that immigration is immoral, is just a lie. It’s just a lie. First of all, I don’t understand any moral system that suggests that our moral obligations are only to those people with whom we share a border, with whom we share citizenship. Yes, we may have greater moral obligations, but those are not the only moral obligations. I certainly don’t know a religious system. It’s certainly not the perspective of Judaism. So, we have moral obligations to all people, which means that the lives and fate and humanity and dignity of people who cross the border into the United States, whether legally or illegally should matter to us, especially because oftentimes the reason they’re having to flee their countries is because the United States contributed to making those countries uninhabitable through our destruction of the global environment or through, in the case of Central America, the wars we be promoted. So, first of all, it’s immoral and untrue, it seems to me, to not factor that in.
Secondly, it’s also untrue to say that immigrants hurt the United States. Study after study shows immigrants are far less likely to commit crime. Study after study shows that immigrants overall benefit the US economy. They benefit the US economy because we have an aging population. We need more younger workers, especially because so much of our social safety net, such as it is, goes to the elderly in the form of Social Security and Medicare. And younger workers basically make that system solvent. It is true that immigration has a redistributive effect upwards, which is just because it benefits Americans in aggregate, doesn’t mean it benefits every American. There are Americans who are losers because they compete for jobs with immigrants. There are communities that suffer because schools and hospitals get overcrowded.
But the right answer in terms of public policy and ethics, it seems to me, is to take the benefits that immigration has produced for all Americans, especially for wealthy Americans, and redistribute those towards the people who have to compete with immigrants for jobs or where communities are burdened, right. That seems to me the true thing to say about immigration. And if you’re going to say that Democrats can’t say that because that wouldn’t work politically, and they need to do a version of Sister Souljah, and become much tougher on immigration and much more brutal as actually indeed the Biden administration already did start to move towards that position. If you want to make that argument, you have to be honest about it. Accept that you are making an argument for political strategy. You are arguing for something that is immoral and is not good public policy. But you’re saying you need to do it because the benefits of having Democrats elected are worth it. That’s an honest argument.
Claiming that somehow because this position is now politically popular, it’s also true and morally correct, that’s what Coates is warning about. Similarly, on the question of the rights of trans people, it is probably sadly the case that this terrible ad that the Trump campaign ran where they went after Kamala Harris because the law said that the government would pay for the transition surgery of an inmate who was in prison. It’s probably true that that hurt Harris. It may be true that the rights of trans people harms Democrats politically more than it helps them, right. And if you’re going to say you’re going to factor that into how the Democrats think politically on this issue, because you think it gives them a better chance of winning, it is incumbent upon you to be honest about what you’re saying. What you’re saying is you’re willing to sacrifice the rights of trans people for what you believe is the greater good of electing Democrats in the future. If you’re going to make that argument, you darn sure better be honest about it, and then allow people to respond. Because it is simply a lie to say that anything that trans people are doing in America is harming other Americans or the cause of the suffering that other Americans are facing. It’s just a lie.
And it seems me one of the problems we have in American political commentary is people are not willing to be honest in the way that Coates is being honest. They want to have it both ways. They want to argue for positions that they think are good politics for Democrats, and they don’t want to face the fact that those political strategies involve telling lies and involve hurting vulnerable people. And they do. And if you want to be involved in that conversation about political strategy, be involved in it, but be honest about it. If you don’t, if you want to be in a position that Coates is in where he says I don’t give politicians political advice, I just try to say what’s true, then do that. But keep the two things separate. It’s never been more important, I think, than it is today.
Don’t Confuse Popularity with Truth