Late, but maybe not too late

My social media feed has a lot of people pointing to Chris Armitage’s post I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%. I want to complicate it.

Once they win elections, it’s already too late.

[⋯]

Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age.

They tried anyway.

But here’s the thing: we already missed our chance. The window isn’t closing; it’s closed.

The Supreme Court declared Trump above the law. He’s threatening to arrest political opponents. He’s already sent the FBI after elected officials when they haven’t committed crimes. Congress is his. Most state governments are his. Billionaire oligarchs openly coordinate with him. The window slammed shut.

So let’s stop pretending we’re in the “prevention” phase and start talking about what you do when fascists already control the institutions but haven’t fully consolidated power yet. Because historically, nobody’s been here before, not like this.

I recommend reading the whole thing. I have had a number of conversations with folks over the last few months in which I said pretty much the same thing.

And I want to expand on that last point. Nobody’s been here before, not like this. Armitage observes:

No wealthy democracy with nuclear weapons has ever fallen to fascism. The 1930s examples everyone cites were broken countries. Weimar Germany was weakened by World War I and hyperinflation. Italy was barely industrialized. Spain was largely agrarian. They didn't have the world’s reserve currency. They didn’t have thousands of nukes. They didn't have surveillance technology that would make the Stasi weep with envy.

America has all of that. Plus geographic isolation that makes external intervention impossible. Plus a population where 30-40% genuinely wants authoritarian rule as long as it hurts the “right people.” The historical playbook is useless here. We’re in unprecedented territory.

All of that is both true and scary. But other unique aspects of our situation point to opportunities and give me hope.

The US military

If you know anything about authoritarian takeovers, you know that there typically comes a moment when the police & military take sides. If they side against the regime, the regime falls.

I am profoundly pessimistic about American police. But listening to people who understand US military structure & culture makes me optimistic that the US military is structurally resistant to becoming an instrument of domestic authoritarian control.

It is hard to imagine US soldiers killing other Americans. We have a uniquely strong political culture of distinguishing domestic law enforcement from military action outside our borders. We have a particularly strong military culture of refusing illegal orders. (Yes, we still do plenty of war crimes; mortifyingly, our contemporary military really is better than most on this score.) Our military is profoundly hesitant to act on American soil. We have a longstanding problem of our far right in our military — as every military does — but our volunteer-with-economic-coercion troops are significantly poor, Black, and brown, with every reason to reject the MAGA dream.

Plus Iraq & Afghanistan have produced military protocols favoring decentralization of command initiative, which makes it harder for the President to order the military around. It is hard to make them do things and there is no winning them over as a bloc.

Federalism

The complexity of American governance institutions is not quite unique, but it is pretty weird. Our overlapping municipal, county, state, and federal institutions are an unruly mess. If you ask me, the governance problems which this creates contributed to our current crisis. But it also makes it tough for the MAGA regime to command all government institutions from DC. We can already see this demonstrated in the theatre of intervention in cities including the nation’s capitol … and how badly that has mostly gone for the regime.

American ideals

Democracy and universal rights hold a uniquely important place in our “civil religion”. In many ways, this has made us vulnerable to hypocritical perversions of those ideals in this moment, which should surprise no one who knows our history. But our history also shows ways in which it has been a sword & shield in the hands of our better side. It may serve us that way again.

The information ecosystem

We are in a new moment of communication & information infrastructure. Everyone recognizes the profound impact of the internet on political culture & process in the last decade or two, and how destabilizing it has been.

I believe that on top of that we have also seen a phase shift over just the last few years. Our messy information ecosystem is at once poweful and fragmented. It seems unmistakable that this helped MAGA fascism spread and seize power. But it remains to be seen whether it is compatible with authoritarians holding power.

No, the public has not resisted as vigorously as we need to. But many informed observers have remarked on how, compared to historical parallels, a lot of us have named what is happening early, a lot of us have demonstrated resistance, and resistance has ramped up quickly.

Hope

The situation is dire. I do not believe a Restoration to the status quo ante is either possible or desirable. We all need to step up more.

But no doomerism, please. It helps the fash, and it does not reflect reality. We still have strong cards to play.

More

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
U.S. Democratic Backsliding in Comparative Perspective

The paper establishes that the Trump administration’s overall political project conforms to the general model of executive aggrandizement, and is best understood as taking place at three interrelated levels:

1. Establishing the president as supreme within the executive branch ⋯
2. Making the executive branch dominant over other parts of government ⋯
3. Weakening societal constraints on executive power ⋯

The paper then compares the path of U.S. politics under Trump to seven other recent or ongoing cases of democratic backsliding—Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Poland, and Türkiye—highlighting distinctive features along three comparative dimensions:

1. Focus: The Trump team’s agenda has several priorities that set it apart from other backsliding cases. These include its unique emphasis on intra-executive dominance, delegitimization rather than institutionalized attacks on horizontal checks, and coercive use of the robust federal funding ecosystem to pressure U.S. civil society.
2. Rapidity: The administration has carried out its political program with striking speed. Compared to other backsliding cases, it has sought to centralize power with greater momentum and rapidity. And while other leaders often eroded democratic checks piece by piece, Trump’s team is working to weaken such checks across multiple levels all at once.
3. Severity: The degree of democratic erosion in the United States is not yet as severe as that of most of its backsliding peers. The country has not yet seen the deep-rooted institutional changes that have characterized many of the comparative cases. And repressive measures like coercive force or criminalization have been limited by U.S. democratic norms and institutions.

While some comfort can be taken from the fact that the relatively deeply rooted U.S. democratic norms and institutions compared to those in the other cases have resulted in a less institutionalized process of backsliding thus far, the distinctive speed and aggressiveness of Trump’s aggrandizement agenda is cause for serious concern. Numerous avenues and sources of resistance to democratic erosion continue to exist, but U.S. democracy is being put to the test as never before in the country’s modern history.

A novel system for proportional representation with ranked ballots

Restless about the gawdawful American electoral system, I have come up with a crackpot proposal for a system for electing a legislature or other body of respresentatives. It seems so simple and elegant to me that I cannot understand why I cannot find anyone else proposing anything like it.

Or debunking its flaws! Knowing the tragic reality that Arrow’s Theorem makes a perfect electoral system impossible, I worry about what gotchas I might have missed. My amateur perusal of the standard ways of analyzing voting methods has not helped — they don’t address the way I handle proportionality, and I cannot work out the math alone. I write this partly in hope that a real expert can set me straight.

The essence

Most systems of proportional representation assume that each seat in the legislature exercises equal strength, so they may give a party a proportion of seats in the legislature corresponding as well as possible to the proportion of voters who cast a ballot for that party, giving a seat to the party’s most popular candidate, second most popular, and so on.

My weighted seats proposal invests different legislative representatives with different strength, proportionate to voters’ support for that rep. Big voter support might give a rep a seat with a strength of 1000, which would outweigh the combined efforts of a pair of less popular reps holding seats with a strength of only 400 each.

To elect a legislature with N seats:

1. Citizens cast ballots listing candidates in rank order of the voter’s preference. A ballot may list as few or as many candidates as the voter wishes.
2. An initial seating tally of the ballots identifies the top N candidates. They get seated as representatives.
3. A second strength tally of the ballots determines the power of each rep’s seat. Each citizen’s ballot delivers the strength of its vote to the seated rep ranked highest on that ballot. Reps’ power in the legislature equals the the votes the rep received in the strength tally.

Example

There are 7 candidates for 5 city council seats:

• Armstrong
• Bartlett
• Cole
• Davenport
• Eagle
• Furlong
• Gordon

Jane, a voter who liked upstart candidate Furlong, cast this ballot:

1. Furlong
2. Cole
3. Armstrong

Though Jane’s ballot supported Furlong, not enough other voters agreed. Furlong failed the seating tally, which produced a city council comprised of:

• Armstrong
• Bartlett
• Cole
• Davenport
• Eagle

In the strength tally, Jane’s ballot contributes its vote to the strength of her second choice, Cole. Tallying all 200k ballots produces these seat strengths:

• Armstrong — 65k
• Bartlett — 50k
• Cole — 45k (including 1 from Jane!)
• Davenport — 30k
• Eagle — 10k

This creates a few cases where a minority of strong reps can out-vote a majority of reps who are weak. Armstrong & Cole (65k + 45k = 110k) voting together out-vote Bartlett, Davenport, and Eagle combined (50k + 30k + 10k = 90k).

This should appeal to voters

Intuitive, honest voting

This system produces little need & advantage for voters to vote strategically. They just name the candidates they like, and rank their preferences honestly.

Wide candidate choice

Even when incumbency confers strong advantages, voters may choose from at least as many options as there are seats to fill, so they probably need to make compromises on less positions to pick a candidate to support.

A transparent proportionality mechanism

Unlike in complex proportional systems which cascade ballots’ votes to lower-ranked candidates, voters always have their vote strengthen the successful candidate they liked best.

Practically nobody feels they had a “wasted” vote

If a voter’s ideal candidate wins a seat by a big margin, it was still worth them taking time to vote, because their ballot makes that rep a little bit stronger.

If their ideal candidate does not win a seat, their vote still counts, lending strength to the seated rep whom they ranked highest.

Determining the seating tally

The overview above hand-waves identifying how we determine the candidates seated in Step 2. How should we define the “top” N candidates?

I’m not sure about the ideal method. I suspect that a range of methods would deliver fair and sensible results — and would feel both clear and fair to citizens. And this is the space with an opportunity to “tune” the system to prevent perverse outcomes and get characteristics we prefer — stronger or weaker tendency to support moderation, incumbency, et cetera.

Broad approval?

A simple method would be to tally every candidate appearance on every ballot as a vote for that candidate, much like approval voting. The candidates with the highest N tallies would get seated.

This can theoretically produce odd results. Imagine an election for a 5-seat legislature in which nobody ranked Candidate X in their top 5 … but everyone listed them on their ballot somewhere, so they get a seat. It is wildly improbable, but possible, that this could produce a rep with a seat with zero strength, because every ballot ranked another seated candidate higher.

It does seem likely that this system will produce occasional reps who have a very weak vote because many voters accept them but few prefer them. But a few reps with an equal voice but a weak vote may not be such a bad thing.

Top rank?

Another simple method would be to tally each ballot as a vote just for its top-ranked candidate. The N candidates ranked ^#1 most often would get seated.

This could get weird in a highly fragmented race. A candidate ranked ^#2 on every ballot would not get a seat, and it is reasonable to think that they should. Imagine an election for a 5-seat legislature in which 20 candidates are all ranked ^#1 on 4% of ballots … with 5 candidates ranked ^#1 on 5% of ballots. Those last 5 candidates would get seated despite not being categorically more popular. But again, these kinds of perverse results seem improbable with real ballots.

A blend?

We could tally a vote for only the three highest ranked candidates on each ballot. Or the four highest, or whatever. A mass of low-ranked support for a candidate could not win them a seat.

We could tallying a vote for every listed candidate, then tally an extra vote for each ballot’s ^#1 pick, so that between …

• Armstrong — 100 ballots as ^#1, 100 ballots ranked lower
• Bartlett — no ballots as ^#1, 250 ballots ranked lower

… Armstrong would get a seat with 2x100 + 100 = 300 votes over Bartlett’s 2x0 + 250 = 250 votes.

Something more sophisticated?

A lot of work has been done on various sophisticated positional voting rules which should inform yet more options. Condorcet methods have a lot of advantages, but they present implementation challenges and are complex enough that ordinary voters will find them opaque, so I hesitate to embrace them in this context, since it is not enough for the system to be fair, it also needs to support democratic consent by feeling fair.

Intended advantages

Undercuts gerrymandering & other districting challenges

So long as a district sends multiple reps, voters in the district can expect reasonably fair representation whatever the size & shape of their district, since each voter has their vote contribute equally to the strength of their preferred rep no matter what district they inhabit. Smaller districts produce weaker reps; bigger districts produce stronger reps, but a voter’s ballot delivers the same one-vote power of representation in either case.

Better matching of reps to voter preferences

Rather than having to choose from a few (or in the US, just two) political parties whose platforms may not map well to their preferences, a voter may pick a specific candidate whose program & priorities matches theirs well and expect that candidate to have a shot at a seat in the legislature. In many ways this should work as if there are as many different parties as there are reps in the legislature, which further suggests …

Complex issue-oriented coalitions

Reps would have more opportunities to assemble ad-hoc coalitions around specific issues. A “libertarian” rep might vote together with a “progressive” rep to decriminalize soft recreational drugs, then vote together with a “pro-business” rep to de-regulate an industry.

Less incumbency bias?

This system should do even better than many other ranked-ballot systems like IRV in allowing voters to support challenger candidates without worrying about spoiler effects. Incumbents will still tend to do will if they maintain popular support, and …

Democratic accountability reflected in reps’ shifting strength

Each election will redistribute power. Reps with growing popular support get stronger; reps with waning popular support get weaker. More frequent elections make reps more responsive to popular will; less frequent elections protect reps from popular whims.

Complex unicamiralism

I originally started thinking about this system as a refinement to an old proposal for a nationally-elected Senate in the US. Having opened that door, I realized that this system enables multiple different types of representatives all voting together in a single legislature. For example:

A unicameral US Congress

Choose senators nationally

Why have two geographically-determined sets of national representatives? Choose senators in a national election using this method. Everyone in the country votes, and the top candidates become the Senate.

Having made that change, how about just ten senators? That’s about the maximum number of people who can have an unstructured discussion.

This helps significant but thinly-distributed minorities. If 10% of the American population shares interests but don’t hold a majority in any particular state or district, they could still elect a senator.

Replace the House Of Representatives with county councilors

To address regional interests, instead of tangling with creating fair congressional districts, leverage the somewhat-organic boundaries of counties. Have each county elect five councilors using this method. This eliminates districting fairness problems: though different counties would have different populations, it would be OK because councilors would have different voting strengths in Congress, each voter represented with an equal contribution to their councilor’s power.

With 3000+ counties in the US, that would require over 15,000 councilors! Best to have them cast votes electronically from their home county rather than send them to DC, which would make them more available to constituents.

Different reps vote together

Rather than having the weird two-stage process of current American bicameralism, in this system the two types of reps would vote together, at the same time. The senators would not just get drowned out by the councilors because each senator (representing millions) exercises so much more strength than any councilor (representing thousands). A measure supported by a strong majority of senators could pass if it was a bit short of a majority of councilors, or vice versa.

Assemblors chosen by sortition

Since the system accomodates two types of congressional reps voting together, how about a third?

Add 50 assemblors: citizens randomly chosen by sortition like a jury. Each would vote in congress with the strength of ⅟50^th of the voting population. That creates a big enough group to smooth out the bumps of weird individuals, but a small enough group that they could convene in a room together and build real relationships.

A new type of supermajority

Parliamentary systems typically require some kind of supermajority for particularly strong measures. F’rinstance, it currently takes a 2/3 majority in the Senate to ratify a treaty.

Under my proposal, requiring not just a majority vote of the Congress as a whole but a majority among each of the three types of congressional representatives creates another such threshold.

Distinct powers for different classes of representatives

There may be particular functions assigned to one set of Congressional reps or another. Perhaps only senators can introduce new legislation, or judicial appointments are approved by a vote of only the assemblors.

Intra-Congressional checks-and-balances

This structure presents opportunities to make each class of representatives accountable to the other classes.

Perhaps senators do not vote on impeachment proceedings against other senators; instead, impeachment requires a majority of both councilors and assemblors. Likewise impeaching an assemblor would require a majority of senators and councilors. (Since councilors are relatively small fry, they would need a different mechanism for accountability.)

This system also includes an implict check on assemblors. If they do their job well, fewer people might bother to vote for senate, giving assemblors a greater proportion of power in Congress, but if assemblors do badly, it would produce higher election turnout which enables the combined senators & councilors to outweigh the assemblors’ power.

Broader Constitutional implications

A Congress using these elements enable some other changes to constitutional order which I like to daydream about.

A parliamentary executive

Presidential systems have problems; the US got lucky for a long time, but it seems our luck has run out.

My proposal above goes nicely with a prime minister chosen by Congress as chief executive. I think that this kind of Congress picking a PM with ranked ballots would not be vulnerable to the deadlocks which prevent some parliamentary systems from forming a government. With the PM directly answerable to Congress, we might be able to do without Congressional approval of executive appointments.

A president, too?

Unlike countries with constitutional monarchies, in the US the presidency awkwardly combines the chief executive with the ceremonial head of state. Given the poetry of the presidency, it would be nice to keep it to serve as the latter, the kind of job that Ronald Reagan would have been great at and Donald Trump would have been relatively harmless at.

The president would have to be chosen with a national popular vote. For consistency, the presidency could have ranked ballots where voters can list anyone they like, just as they do for senators and councilors, though with a single victor they would have to be evaluated differently; given the much lower stakes, any method would do.

In their ceremonial function, the president would deliver an annual State Of The Union address, award medals, et cetera. I imagine putting the PM in the Old Executive Office Building and leaving the White House for the President. I like the idea of the president also having a discretionary budget of maybe 0.1% of the national budget, plus a bouquet of ombudsman-like powers — the pardon creates a conflict of interest in the hands of a chief executive but might be reasonable for this kind of president, and it might be actually useful if the president could compel Congress to vote on a question.

Stronger counties

Rather than having overlapping jurisdictional relationships between municipalties, counties, states, and the federal government, I imagine vesting power in just counties and the national government, grandfathering in municipal & state entities as elements of or agreements between counties which those counties may alter.

Americans tend to assume that members of the House Of Representatives also have power in their home districts. I propose that councilors would also govern the counties they represent; each local governing council would include those councilors plus local assemblors chosen by sortition who do not vote in the national Congress.

This would enable a distinct form of checks-and-balances if the system were unitary like the UK. The counties hold the powers delegated to them by the national government … but since the councilors also vote in the national Congress, they get a significant say in what those powers are.

Further, frustrated by the current American system which creates dramatic inequities in local resources like schools, I have been imagining that only the national government would be permitted to levy taxes, with each county funded out of the national budget at a rate per resident set in Congress. Since councilors vote in Congress, the national government would not starve the counties of funding, but senators & assemblors considering policy at the national scale would balance the assemblor’s appetite.

With the counties so important, I wonder about making it possible to split, merge, and otherwise re-draw their boundaries. Perhaps councils could propose changes and put them to a plebicite requiring majority approval in each region affected: both counties which want to merge, both regions which would be created with a split, et cetera.

Judiciary?

This system is compatible with any number of approaches to judicial reform I have seen. I have given this aspect much less thought.

Say, f’rinstance, that the Supreme Court works much the way it does now, but instead of our weird system of death and gerentocracy we appoint a new Justice each year and retire the longest-serving justice if that gives the Court more than nine (or however many) Justices. Much like now, the PM might propose appointments subject to approval by Congress … or perhaps that is a job for just the assemblors?

Anti-corruption measures

Any such surgery on the Constitution is a good time to get the money out of politics. There are familiar proposals like public funding of political campaigning. I have a radical proposal of my own.

I propose that any elected official, and perhaps also appointed officials above a certain threshold of authority, become Public Citizens subject to tightly constrained rules for their personal finances. They get a lifetime pension of twice the national median income … but are forbidden to take any other money from anyone. Expensive, and tricky to enforce, but it would make government service a very good deal for an ordinary person and a very bad deal for a rich person, which seems very dramatic to me.

More radical ideas

For now, I have just one more radical proposal:

Candidates for legislative office may pre-commit to specific votes. If legislation they have pre-committed on comes to a vote, they don’t get a choice, they must cast the vote they promised. To avoid shenanigans, this would have to be bound to very specific legislative language.

Related

re: Constitution

Another interestingly novel proposal for structuring an elected government.

Unicode faves

I keep these in a plaintext file on my computer so I can get at them easily:

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No triangulation on trans liberation

The Democratic Party has nothing to gain and everything to lose by compromising on trans liberation.

A lot of the Democratic Party establishment see an opportunity to do Clintonian “triangulation” by giving ground on a few policy points protecting trans people, to win over some swing voters. Usually this starts with preventing trans women athletes from competing with cis women, a point which may seem legitimate if one has not thought about it. (It isn’t.)

Dems should be much less reliant on triangulation in general, but I grant that there are contexts where it is tactically effective. If I believed it would work on this point, despite my own preferences I might accept the Dems gritting their teeth, trimming their sails, and waiting for another day to fight for better. I understand why a lot of supporters of the Dem establishment make the mistake of reflexively resisting “over-reach” by their left flank .

But triangulation on trans liberation is a very bad move. A hard line in defense of trans people is the only place to stand, morally, tactically, and strategically in the forthcoming legal, legislative, and electoral fights.

Morally, the case is crystal clear. Opponents of trans liberation are flat wrong at best, and are actively evil at worst.

Tactically, no viable soft position beneficial to Dems exists. Whatever concessions Dems make, opponents of trans liberation will lie about where Dems stand and move the goalposts to something new, confusing inattentive voters with “questions”. The Democratic Party has more to gain by standing on principle and showing some fight than it can possibly get by trying to scoop up swing voters with concessions on trans liberation. Taking a hard line on protecting trans people is not a sacrifice. It is an opportunity.

Strategically, one misreads the stakes if one takes these wedge issues as addressing the peripheral needs of a small group. The right cast themselves as responding to the trans liberation movement Finally Going Too Far, when in fact athletic competition had long been a non-issue; the right chose to re-visit and emphasize it as an invented wedge issue, a BS move the left should recognize by now. The broad left should not take the bait.

The terms of dispute are integral to the fascist character of MAGA. Transphobia performs the same function for MAGA fascism that antisemitism performed for the Nazis. We already know that we must grant fascism nothing.

More

Understanding cowardly liberals

I think some advocates for trans liberation could do better at meeting cis supporters of pols pulling this triangulation move where they are. I have seen a lot of people saying to them don’t think you can save yourselves by throwing a marginalized group under the bus, which makes a subtle mistake I am trying to avoid with this post.

Inattentive, not-very-transphobic cis people consider it at least plausible that there is a legitimate question of fairness in athletic competition, because that is a reasonable thing to think … if you have not researched it or given it significant thought. They see a question of fair athletic competition as different from a question of fundamental rights. The organization of sports leagues & divisions in general do not threaten fundamental rights, do they?

Those folks think they are being tactically savvy, keeping their powder dry to protect trans people on the important stuff. They think saying “the right are nutty about trans people in bathrooms but have a point about athletic competitions” is a move like saying “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” instead of “… and available on demand”, a concession to anxieties which may get in the way of winning the important point.

So when we say “you are throwing trans people under the bus to protect yourselves”, they feel misread. If we don’t understand them, why should they listen to what we say about anything? Why should they believe us about athletic competitions? Why should they believe us about the stakes?

This dynamic is why transphobes and the right chose this battleground.

Yes, there is low-grade transphobia in not doing the homework, in not accepting what trans people say, in the enthusiasm for trans athletes making sacrifices. Yes, there are a lot of liberals with a lot more than low-grade transphobia animating their thinking. Yes, it is unfair having to take the time to talk cis people out of this mistake.

But this is the challenge before us. We have to walk inattentive cis liberals through the reasons why the bargain they think they can strike won’t work. It’s why this post exists.

Answering the question

The world being what it is, Dem pols are going to face these questions. Here’s the kind of thing I’d like to see them say:

I just don’t see the big deal.

I guess when same-sex couples vowed to love and cherish one another and the world didn’t end, some sourpusses felt so disappointed that they decided to try to make trans people scary. What? Trans people? They’re not scary.

Nobody is trying to sneak into your bathroom. Nobody is trying to trick children into getting surgery. That’s absurd.

Let’s not examine kids’ genitals before letting them play basketball. That’s gross.

It is American to respect everyone. It is American to respect trans people. So I don’t see the big deal. Can we talk about something real?

I’m not married to this phrasing; maybe it hits the wrong note. But here are the virtues I’m trying to cultivate:

• Sounding like a human being rather than delivering anodyne Politician blather.
• Speaking from principle.
• Calling shenanigans on the right’s BS.
• The redirect to the positive vision of what Dems want to do, which means the Dems need to have one and talk about it consistently, plausibly, and persuasively.

Will the “this is as dumb as being afraid of gay people getting married” move work? I dunno. Olds remember everyone who said the sky would fall, and youngs find that dread absurd. (There are people in a different place, but Dems are never going to get them, anyway.)

Is “it is American to respect everyone; it is American to respect trans people” the right phrasing? I dunno. I am a radical egalitarian idealist and I know that most Americans are not — but they like to think they are — and threading the needle of appealing to them is hard. But some version of We Are All Americans is not just the right place to stand morally, it’s the savvy offer to make, because if our answer to fascists is that we want to purge people too — but less of them, and a bit less brutally — we surrender the premise to fascists.

Jeff Eaton

GOP influencers and politicians didn’t suddenly respond to a grassroots uprising of “trans concern.” They made it a signature issue in the same way that they made other culture war issues central pillars of their campaigns.

Reactionary conservatism is not policy-driven, it is identity-driven, and there is no reason to pretend that people who align with fellow-travelers on a fresh target for hatred will flock to Dem candidates if they “triangulate” on that hate. Dems are already The Enemy; the policy is irrelevant.

That doesn’t mean “give up on swing voters” or some shit like that. It means recognizing that you are trying to convince someone to re-align their sense of which group they should consider “theirs;” when they do that policy support follows.

This is why leftists and activists are so angry when Dem candidates throw vulnerable constituencies under the bus in hopes of shaving off a few swing votes; they are not insisting on “purity tests,” they just recognize the craven stupidity of doing the reactionary right’s work for them.

Once the trans kids or the black women or the homeless people or the asylum seekers or the gay couples or the women voters or whatever group you decide can be cut loose for Bipartisanship Points is fucked, there is no payoff. The right knows you didn’t hate them hate them, you just caved.

So they’ll move on to the next group, the next euphemism, and they’ll keep carving until there’s nobody left for you to carve off, and then there will be no reason for them to even bother with you, the responsible centrist who sees What A Complex Issue This Is, The Hating Of The Next Group To Hate.

If you give a shit—hell, if you don’t but you’re just savvy enough to see how this will play out—you have to stand and say, “No, that’s not how this works. Those people you’ve been whipped into terror of and hatred towards are Us, too, and we don’t toss people to the wolves for a percentage.”

Evan Urquhart

Also, imagining that many, most, or all Dems agree with [transphobes] is just stupid. Trans people can have all the story times, parades, bars, businesses, or sports leagues that they want. I can limit an adult from doing one thing without advocating for their total erasure from society.

I think it’s useful to unpack this. If Democrats agree with Republicans on excluding women’s sports, what’s the harm? Is it primarily harm to trans women who play sports, or is there something more to it?

A reasonable person who doesn’t know much about trans issues could ask these questions.

Many people who follow me will already know that the biggest harm is allowing Republicans to ignore fairness and science and solidify a bonkers definition of trans people as “really” members of our birth sex.

Not going to rehash that — let’s talk instead about something no one is discussing.

I mean that literally — no one is discussing the massive loss of rights trans people have experienced throughout the country.

When Dems talk about trans women in sports, they’re not just giving ground on sports. They’re giving ground on everything, because sports bans were the big issue 3 years ago.

Trans people have been expelled from the military and punished and humiliated throughout. We’re fighting in court to retain a right to accurate US Passports. Books mentioning us are banned in classrooms in much of the country. In Florida, trans teachers are required by law to misgender themselves. In some states, as a trans man who passes for male, I’m legally banned from using a men’s restroom but practically banned from using a women’s. My choice is between breaking the law and being arrested for breaking it.

Few Democrats are talking about how much trans people have lost, and how quickly.

Trans people are rapidly losing access to healthcare. It is unobtainable for trans youth in most of the country, and adult care is also under assault by congress and the Trump administration.

The only Dems for whom this is a priority are in state office. No national Dem is talking about it.

So, when a Democrat makes their only statement on trans issues about trans women in sports, they are saying that this is their priority on trans issues — not restoring our equality under the law but joining Republicans in eroding it.

It’s unconscionable that in a time of such grave peril for a vulnerable minority, one who has borne the brunt of all Trump’s hatred and extremism in executive order after executive order (and I didn’t even scratch the surface BTW) that a single Democrat is making trans women in sports their focus.

A. R. Moxon
Fighting In The Dark

I’m aware that responsibility for this falls upon different people differently. These are ideas most applicable to people like me, upon whom the fascist threat only touches generally and glancingly. For those in groups directly targeted for fascist hatred, these may be useful ideas at times, but sometimes the goal will simply be getting to safety or staying alive another day, or putting one foot in front of the other.

Let me suggest three simple and broadly applicable precepts of differentiation.

• As much as possible, we should do things fascists cannot do.
• As much as possible, we should not do things fascists want us to do and we should do things fascists don’t want us to do.
• Never accept the fascist offer.

NYT | Masha Gessen | The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People

You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population, the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights, the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. (Trump spent about five minutes of his recent address to Congress specifically attacking trans people and 10 minutes attacking immigrants; the Democratic rebuttal mentioned immigrants once and trans people not at all.) Then I finish with the standard exhortation: The attacks won’t stop here. If you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you.

But I find that line of argument both distasteful and disingenuous. It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

And we know that attacks on the fundamental humanity of a group never stop with the people in that group.

The Pink News | Cis woman ‘fired after customer accused her of being trans’ says it felt like a ‘stab in the back’

Ian Rennie

So it goes without saying, but let’s say it anyway: the concentration of attacks on trans people isn’t because trans people are the only people fascists hate (although they absolutely do hate them). It’s because they’re the people they think non-fascists are least likely to defend.

If they can get you to accept their narrative on trans kids in sports, it’s easier for them to push their narrative on legal recognition of trans people. If you accept that “gender ideology” needs to be taken out of schools, you’re more likely to accept that “DEI” needs to go too. Not defending the most vulnerable groups makes everyone else more vulnerable, not less.

And just to drive a point home for the Gavin Newsoms of this world: You think that fascists give a single fuck about women’s sports? You’re finding common cause with people who are unconvinced women should be allowed to vote, and you’re taking them at their word?

‪Noah Berlatsky‬

When people argue for giving in to fascism it’s generally because they find fascism appealing. Like, when Seth Moulton says we should throw trans people under various buses, it’s framed as him saying we need to compromise to win, but in fact he doesn’t see trans people as fully human. Same with lots of Ds and immigration. they are willing to compromise with the right on immigration because they are prejudiced against immigrants.

Bigotry and prejudice are fairly pervasive. Fascist victories lead people to embrace their own inner bigot.

So, when people argue for compromise, they say it like, “this is how we can beat the fascists,” but what they really mean is, “the fascists are right and we should join them in making our country at least a little more fascist.”

This is maybe most clear in D statements about Palestinians, where they walk right up to the line of acknowledging they don’t value Palestinian lives at all. (Rs are happy to jump over that line.)

This is what the Martin Niemöller quote is about, though people don’t really understand it entirely. Like, the quote is presented as being about indifference. “First they came for … and I did not care because I was not …”. But Martin Niemöller wasn’t just indifferent. He was a conservative nationalist who voted for the Nazis over and over. He was violently opposed to socialists and communists, and was an antisemite (though he objected to Nazis persecuting converted Jews.) So Niemöller wasn’t indifferent. When he said “first they came for the communists” or “first they came for the Jews” he’s downplaying the extent to which the “they” who came for Communists and Jews was him! He hated Communists and Jews! He supported the Nazis not because he was indifferent, but because they targeted people he hated. He wanted to see Jews and Communists harmed.

He slowly came to realize that the Nazis would not stop with the groups he wanted to see them harm. And that led him to realize that wanting to harm those groups was also wrong. His change of heart was real and admirable. But also that poem is self serving in ways that have misled people about the causes of Nazi support.

The lesson people take from the poem is that you can’t look away, you have to speak up immeidately, not just when you are affected. Which isn’t wrong, but downplays the extent that Nazis gain power because they target groups that are widely despised. So the danger is not just indifference; the danger is that you may see the fascists as a chance to crush groups you don't like.

One thing I have tried to emphasize in various places is the extent to which fascism is not a binary on / off switch. We see Niemoller today as a brave opponent of the regime, and he was … except when he wasn’t. Part of the reason people are reluctant to see parallels between Trump and the Nazis is because there’s this idea that the Nazis were like Sauron or something, and that anyone supporting them was a kind of soulless orc. But … the Nazis were just people. those who supported them had a range of investments, from genocidal hatred of Jews through financial incentives and kind of everything in between.

Erin Reed
Do Not Comply: A Lesson From the Last Three Months of Anti-Trans Attacks

A lesson can be found in all of this. The most devastating damage from these executive orders hasn’t come from their direct mandates but from their vagueness. The orders are deliberately opaque and create just enough uncertainty to push institutions into overcompliance. Risk-averse legal teams, fearful of losing federal funding or becoming political targets, preemptively erase transgender people from policies, programs, and public language. The cruelty lies in the ambiguity. These orders don’t explicitly bar specific conduct but deputize decision-makers to interpret them in ways that inflict the greatest harm on disfavored communities.

Maki Ashe Pendergast
Should Trans People Flee the United States

This moment demands tangible, actionable solidarity from cisgender folks both within and outside the United States. Those within the U.S. must provide immediate practical support—housing, legal assistance, financial resources, and community defense. It is crucial to help establish secure networks that protect vulnerable trans individuals. Those abroad can actively advocate for policies supporting LGBTQ+ asylum and resettlement in their countries, provide direct support to trans people attempting to relocate, and help create international networks of solidarity and refuge. Now is the moment to leverage privilege, resources, and influence to protect trans lives tangibly and urgently.

Daphne Lawless
SWERF and TERF: The Red-Brown alliance in Policing Gender

Analysing TERF politics as a variety of fascist ideology might seem shocking or over-the-top; particularly because to do so would require us to categorize many veteran socialists in Aotearoa / New Zealand to have slipped over into the “Red-Brown” camp. But defining fascism as a movement in defence of the threatened privilege of the downwardly mobile middle class seems to make the parallel unavoidable. As does the habit of TERF ideologues of suggesting that trans people are part of some kind of conspiracy of “elites”, as in the tweet reproduced below: TERF conspiracy theories on Twitter about “elites backing the trans movement” are not dissimilar to fascist ones.

Laurie Penny
TERF Island: the embarassing truth about Britain’s Trans Panic.

When I travel overseas, I’m constantly asked why British culture has become so openly transphobic. How our moderate, liberal society could have allowed this ugliness. Even bloody Americans bloody ask me this, and when I try to explain they look at me with the same pity and confusion I feel when they start talking about, say, gun control. Around the world, transgender people are being made scapegoats for every sort of social ill — but almost everywhere else, transphobia is the territory of religious crackpots and right-wing cranks. In fact, since Donald Trump stomped back into the White House, moderates who might once have been on the fence are now actively rallying to protect the trans community.

Only in Britain has the anti-trans moral panic taken over the liberal mainstream. In recent years, we’ve joined Hungary and the United States in pumping out petty regulations targeting trans and non-binary people. British schools are now explicitly required to discriminate against transgender students. Anyone who doesn’t make their birth sex clear to a partner, even by accident, can now be charged with rape. And just yesterday, in response to the Supreme Court, the Equality and Human Rights Council rushed out guidance that goes much further. Schools, workplaces, public institutions and even community clubs must now take steps to ensure that trans people are clearly segregated.

To be clear, there’s no precedent for this crackdown. Before this, trans women had been using the women’s facilities for decades without much issue — but now? Now every single trans person in the UK will face a humiliating choice between outing themselves multiple times a day on the way to the bathroom or breaking the law. Because all trans people are henceforth to be treated, first and foremost, as potential predators — identified and excluded for the comfort of normal people everywhere.

Tracy Slater
How Trump’s Anti-Trans Policies Mirror the WWII Persecution of Japanese Americans

This obsession linking biology, morality, and public safely, reached its apex with the U.S. government’s Mixed Blood Policy in the camps for Japanese Americans. This policy mandated which families of mixed ethnicity could be freed and under what conditions. The smaller the percentage of “Japanese blood,” the less menace a citizen was assumed to pose. Beyond “blood percentage,” camp administrators promoted incarcerees’ request for release based on attempts to read biological markers. One official supported release of two mixed-race brothers by noting they were “definitely Caucasian in appearance.” In backing the release of a native Japanese woman married to a white American man, another official—defying logic—wrote, “Her appearance is that of Chinese,” adding for good measure, “her mannerism is more Americanized.”

Simon, King of the Witches

A while back I stumbled across the almost-forgotten 1971 “horror” film Simon, King of the Witches. The film is much better than the title suggests, with a compelling performance by the lead actor playing Simon … and a surprisingly thoughtful depiction of 20^th century “ceremonial magick” practice.

Doing a little internet digging, trying to make sense of how the heck the film got made, I stumbled across an astonishing Amazon review full of lore about the world from which it emerged. I must capture it here:

An Insider’s Look at the insider’s look: Hollywood Occult Scene, 1970
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2008

This film has several levels of meaning. Superficially it appears to be a stylish excursion through the Southern California psychedelic pop-culture era of self-styled warlocks and witches circa 1970. This was a time when magick was in the air and even the mundane world had a mysterious shimmer and sparkle. There will never be a time quite like it again — And for those of us caught in the spell of that bygone era, Southern California was the Land of Oz.

You can recapture the flavor and mystery of that now-ancient time and faraway place with the excellent DVD reissue of the 1971 film Simon, King of The Witches. How do I know this? Because according to urban myth, I was the real-life (if any of our lives at that time could be called “real”) model for the character of Simon Sinistari, the Hollywood warlock in the film.

Now that requires some qualification: I never lived in a storm drain, I never performed an 11^th degree operation (gay sex magick), and I never killed anybody, but other than that, how many black bearded, cigar smoking, wine drinking, witch-bashing, self-proclaimed mighty wizards were there prowling the streets of Hollywood during the 1969-70 years? I ask this question because, in the excellent commentaries included in this reissue, both the actor Andrew Prine and the director Bruce Kessler state that screen writer Robert Phippeny was himself “a warlock” and the model for his own character. If this is true I will be more than happy to concede Simon’s tarnished crown to Phippeny — but I would like to know where he was while we were “doing his thing.”

The general consensus among the “old guard” (some of us did survive!) is that Robert Phippeny was at least a first-hand observer and a student of “The Black Arts.” He kept a low profile, whereas I did not. He may have used another name on the street. Many of us did. He had obviously read Aleister Crowley and Franz Bardon (putting him light years ahead of most witches in the magick department). The “magick” depicted in Simon comes closer to actual practice than anything previously shown on the screen — or subsequently for that matter. But just to be picky we should point out that there is no such thing as an “effluvial condenser” although effluvium is an appropriate ingredient for certain “fluid” condensers which could be charged sexually but would then have to be applied to the magick mirror, not hung over it as in the film. However this error may have been intentional in order to achieve a more dramatic effect. Phippeny’s knowledge of Bardon on sex magick is apparent in the colors of Simon's and Linda’s ceremonial robes: Simon wears blue and Linda wears red, reversing the polarities to create a dynamic interchange (see Initiation into Hermetics page 247 or 308 in the 2^nd edition).

But we still want to know just what astrological aspect Simon was trying to exploit in his major magical working set for 1:33 p.m.?

Robert Phippeny certainly did his homework, but don’t try to use Simon as a training film anymore than you would use Saving Private Ryan as a guide to actually saving Private Ryan.

Beyond all the technical expertise demonstrated in the film we have what I consider a very good story — perhaps too good, and certainly too deep for the market the distributors appealed to. Director Bruce Kessler laments this in his commentary. The screen play is witty, sharp and well-crafted, although it gets a bit confusing in the end, obviously due to budget and time constraints. With all the limitations and the brief production time, Kessler and as his crew were really trying to make a meaningful film. Along that line I should point out that the novelized version of Simon, King of the Witches (Dell 1971) is an excuse for hack pornography by “Baldwin Hills” (name taken from a Southern California community) and serves only to remind the aspiring screen writer never to permit any novelized version of his work over which he has no control.

So, if Robert Phippeny is still out there somewhere, here’s a five-star review from “the old guard.” Let’s hear from you. Same goes for Andrew Prine and Bruce Kessler. You gave us a terrific memorial to our personal, funky, trippy, long-gone Land of Oz.

But perhaps the biggest unsolved mystery in Simon, King of the Witches are the identities of its stars? I always thought Andrew Prine and Brenda Scott had top billing. Who are Allyson Ames and Norman Burton?

Who has the swagger to claim to be the “real” Simon? He signed it:

Poke Runyon
Writer-Producer: Beyond Lemuria

Whoa.

Fonts

I need to start indexing typefaces I like, if only so I can find them again. This is just a start.

• Indices
• Faces
  • Big free families
  • Workhorses
  • For sketches
  • Interesting
  • Font tools for games
• Mac tools
• About type

Indices

Type foundry directory

Extensive!

Linotype Pilgrim’s list

Well-curated

Blambot

A foundry making faces for stuff like comics with other applications

Fonts for wireframing

A short index doing what it says on the tin

Free Font Alternatives

A useful list of free fonts to do the job of some spendy classics

Faces

Big free families

Deja Vu

A huge family

Noto

Created by the Google Fonts team

IBM Plex

Has just a hint of the Future Of The Past

Workhorses

Verdana

The sans serif which is always there for you

Georgia

The serif’d face for use on screens which is always there for you

Monaspace

A versatile & nifty family of monospaced fonts

Input

A sophisticated family of fonts for coding

Futura

The perennial face for people who have graduated from Helvetica

Volkhorn

A “bread-and-butter” serif’d face

For sketches

I use these in UX design wireframes to underline that they are sketchy

Squiggles instead of text

Redacted (Google Fonts)

Turns text into squiggles or blocks suggestive of words; includes a range of weights

Fillr

Turns text into rougher squiggles suggestive of words

Flow Rounded

Turns text into plain strokes

BLOKK

Turns text into chunky blocks

Handwriting-ish faces suggesting sketchiness

Pulp Fiction

A serif’d face for comics which has both bold and italics for when one needs to show examples of real copy while still hinting at sketchiness

Winky Sans

A slightly whimsical face which implies a neat but unfinished sketch

Comic Neue

A less janky descendent of Comic Sans, for that “do not take this seriously” feeling

Interesting

Doves Type

A facsimile of an elegant early 20^th century face. Evidently they fished the original typeset out of the Thames.

Bureausign

A nifty wayfinding font influenced by science fiction movies.

Piazzolla

A serif face with a lot of weights and a distinctive chunky character

Atkinson hyperlegible next

A sans serif face designed for accessibility

Bastaleur

A fancy pseudo-arcane face I like to use in game materials.

Gentium

A serif’d face with just a bit of character

Sylexiad

An eccentric face designed to support dyslexics

Skribblugh

A deliberately janky-unto-scary face which is surprisingly readable which I used for character sheets for a TTRPG about insomniacs

Noteworthy

A very legible face which resembles handrwriting

Science Gothic

A blocky face evocative of science fiction movies

Analog Digits

A family of numerals that look like segmented displays and nixie tubes

Font tools for games

Dicier

Useful icons

Prompt font

Useful icons

Hexpaper pro

An easy way to make hex grids

Raygun Rockets

An easy way to draw rayguns & rockets

Aetherships

An easy way to draw zepplins and steampunk spaceships

Fate Core

A few key glyphs for the TTRPG

Mac tools

PopChar

A tool for handling fonts’ special characters

Typeface

A tool for surveying & organizing one’s fonts; included with a SetApp subscription, which I recommend to all Mac users

About type

Severance’s evil type design

An article about the show’s production design with an interesting word about how no, that is not Helvetica.

Type.Method

A game-like tool for exercising kerning skill

Keming Revisited

A fun collection of commentaries & resources about the joke term “keming” to refer to bad kerning.

We must use the word “genocide”

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

For a long time, reasonable people of good conscience could refuse to call Israel’s brutality in Gaza “genocide”. That time has now passed.

I have referred to Israel’s attack on Gaza as “genocidal” since a week after 10/7.

At the same time, I have respected those who have rejected the word “genocide”.

First because the term evokes eliminationist violence — wholesale mass expulsion or even mass murder of a people. I think we must register violences short of that as genocide, but other informed people fear that it dilutes the potency of the term “genocide” to apply it to anything less. In 2024 it was wrong to dismiss the brutality of Israel’s attack on Gaza, but that brutality was short of eliminationist.

Second because Palestinian liberation is a noble cause which has long attracted monstrous supporters, for obvious reasons. Since 10/7 we have seen people exercise the term “genocide” in bad faith, to persuade unsophisticated people of good conscience to embrace transparently antisemitic ideas, to implicitly justify the genocide of Israeli Jews. I respect refusing to grant those voices any ammunition.

I disagreed with those who hesitated over the word “genocide” because my unwholesome interests include attention to how genocides happen. I believe that we must recognize genocide as genocide early, because attacks on peoples as peoples modest in comparison to eliminationism — the most damningly faint praise imaginable — tend to escalate to eliminationism. A broad conception of genocide cultivates a frame of mind which moves us to preëmpt escalation from horrors to yet greater horrors. But my disagreement has been respectful disagreement. All people of conscience have had an obligation to oppose the brutality in Gaza, but there has been room to oppose it using different language.

We have seen the Likudniks in control of Israel’s government escalate step by step since 10/7 in word and deed. One may take that as supporting either the case for using the term “genocide” early … or supporting the case for using it sparingly.

In recent months, Israel’s brutality has crossed the threshold into unmistakably eliminationist violence. One can and must oppose this in terms which avoid antisemitic demonization of Jewish Israelis. One cannot avoid the term “genocide” any longer.

This post was inspired by the Corey Robin Facebook post below, which is sympathetic to the bitterness of the word on many people’s tongues. I know that taste all too well. It is past time to accept it.

This post is not for you. I want to repeat: This post is not for you.

Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza. Many of my readers here are already clear that the State of Israel — as it was designed and constructed as an ethnocracy, apartheid state, Jewish supremacist state, what have you — is a historic injustice.

This post is not for you.

This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify with the Zionist project, who have supported the military actions of the Israeli government in Gaza (even if they oppose Netanyahu), people who call for a return of the hostages and a ceasefire and say no more, people who fear that anti-Israel protests on college campuses are a sign of rising antisemitism in the US, people who believe, or hope, that Israel as a Jewish state is a cause worth defending.

This post is for you.

It’s for you because, given the way algorithms go and online communities sort themselves out, you may not have seen some developments in the last few days, among people who hold or once held views similar to yours. I’m posting these statements here (with links), just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing, and that it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm.

1. July 15: Omer Bartov, born in Israel in 1954, fought in the Yom Kippur War as a company commander, one of the leading international scholars on Nazism and the Holocaust, writes a piece titled, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” (A side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation and comparison of Bartov’s Holocaust research and his claims about the war on Gaza, they could be disciplined and fired.)
2. July 29: Michael Ben-Yair, former Attorney General of Israel, writes, “Jews, who went through a genocide 80 years ago, are committing genocide in Gaza.” (Side note: were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation and comparison to the Holocaust, they could be disciplined and fired.)
3. August 3: Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose father fought in the Irgun, and who is head of J Street, a mainstream pro-Israel organization in the US, writes, “Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide. I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention. Based on the law as I read it, the Prime Minister and others in his government will have to answer for what they have done and will be held accountable … The stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this. Far too many have been far too silent.”
4. July 26: Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, former interim President of Israel, former chair of the Jewish Agency, former chair of the World Zionist Organization, writes, “Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since … The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist.” (Side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its questioning of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, they could be disciplined and fired.)
5. August 2: Lihi Ben Shitrit, Henry and Marilyn Taub Associate Professor of Israel studies at NYU and director of NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies: “As an Israeli political scientist researching Israeli and Palestinian politics, I’m regularly invited by different universities to speak about the Middle East. Inevitably, someone in the audience asks what I think about the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. While I have been unequivocal about my opposition to the current war, I tell them that I’m not a lawyer or an expert on international law. Therefore I have no authority with which to judge on the question of genocide. This is a copout …… I think there are several reasons for many liberal Jews’ tremendous difficulty in seriously confronting the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, including a misunderstanding of what genocide can look like. None of these, however, if we are truly honest with ourselves, justify turning away from it … I am familiar with emotions of outrage and revulsion with the conduct of the Israeli government and the dissemination of Jewish supremacy, but the question of genocide, I now understand, provoked new feelings I had not encountered before — shame and guilt. As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility.”
6. August 1: Dov Waxman, Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies, UCLA: “I initially rejected the genocide charge, but I have changed my mind …… It has been a long and emotionally difficult process over the past 22 months of horrific violence and heartbreaking suffering in Gaza for me to conclude that Israel is guilty of genocide. The possibility that Israel, a Jewish state legitimized by the Nazis’ genocide of Jews, could itself carry out a genocide was one that I, probably like most Jewish people, could barely countenance. I also struggled to accept the possibility that Jews, the victims of genocide, could become the perpetrators of one. Because my conception of genocide was based on the Holocaust, it was also hard for me to recognize that genocide does not have to involve the deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire people, nor does it have to be the ultimate goal. The Holocaust was significantly different from the genocide in Gaza today in many ways. However, this fact should not prevent us from recognizing that what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza amounts to the crime of genocide.”

Again, for many of you, this is old news, too little, too late. This post is not for you. It’s for those readers of mine, many of whom I know personally, who are still wrestling with these questions, and who feel that the only people who would say that this is a genocide or that Israel is in a condition of profound moral wrong, are people who are not like them. I’m trying to show that people who are like them, or once were like them, have also come to this position.

For opponents of the State of Israel, many of whom are my readers, this may seem like a fool’s errand. I do not think it is.

In my lifetime, I’ve undergone some profound changes of belief in position. As many friends of mine from graduate school will tell you, when I arrived at Yale, I was staunchly opposed to the effort to unionize graduate students. Staunchly. Spoke against it repeatedly. I wound up leading the union and leading it on strike.

On the question of Israel, I was raised in a very Zionist household. My family and I went to Israel in 1977 on a trip sponsored by our temple. I continued to support the State of Israel through my years in college. But a combination of factors, between the ages of 20 and 26, changed my mind. It took me a long time to come to that position. It was painful. It often has involved bitter, emotional arguments with people I love very much, including my mother. So while I understand that for many readers here I am in one camp, and perhaps can’t even be trusted on this question, I do have a very clear memory and sense of where a lot of people who disagree with me on this issue are coming from. And I understand, I think, how uneasy and uncertain one can be, not knowing whom to trust, fearing that antisemitism underlies or accompanies every criticism. I get it. I’m hoping some of these other voices here can provide a path, I hope closer to my own position, but even if not, at least to some understanding.

Against “centrist” Dem anti-leftism

I have now had decades of dumb arguments with grumpy liberals kvetching about the “purity politics” of loudmouth leftists refusing to vote for Democratic Party candidates. These days, grumplibs have escalated to blaming The Left for producing the Trump regime.

I share grumplibs’ exasperation with loudlefties’ crowing about “holding the Democratic Party to account” by refusing to vote. I have had decades of arguments with noiselefties about how that doesn’t work, how in our first-past-the-post system, the savvy voter casts a ballot for their preferred candidate in primaries then for the lesser evil in the general election.

But the rest of the grumplib rap is bizarre.

The loudlefties assert that they speak for a bloc of leftist voters both big enough to sway elections and coherent enough to have meaningful political interests. But grumplibs kvetching about loudlefties draw a bunch of bizarre conclusions from that premise.

• Why focus so much interest on the foolishness of loudlefties in particular? Why not grumble about the much bigger bloc of non-leftist non-voters? Or, y’know, Republican voters?
• Why fault the loudlefties, rather than fault the Democratic Party for refusing to address loudlefties’ interests? Even if those interests are dumb, isn’t the Democratic establishment being at least as foolish leaving those votes on the table?
• Why fault the loudlefties — and the handful of progressive back-bench electeds they like — who have not held actual power? Shouldn’t we fault the people who did have power? The movement-conservative-neoliberals who controlled the Republicans 1980-2015? The Clintonian-neoliberals who have controlled the Dems since 1992?

All that said, I do not believe that grumplibs accept loudlefties’ premise about a leftist voting bloc.

They have been telling me for decades that they do not believe in that bloc. They told me that there are too few to be worth pursuing. They have told me that non-voting leftists are too fickle and won’t show up at the polls even if Dems try to get them.

More importantly, the loudlefties’ premise is wrong. The evidence has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the loudlefties (and netroots progressives of the ’00s like me) were wrong. The loudlefty bloc is neither big nor coherent, much less both. It’s a non-issue.

Loudlefties don’t know what to do to win political power back from the fascist regime in power, or they would have done it. Fair enough; I don’t have answers either.

I do know that the current Democratic Party establishment cannot do it. If they could, we would not be here. Grumplibs’ talking about how loudlefties need to get with the Dem establishment’s program are wasting time and energy. It ain’t gonna happen.

What is to be done?

I finally spat out this post because of yet another discussion in which my interlocutor wanted to tell the Left “you are the reason we can’t have the things we both want”, saying that an untapped left voting bloc could swing elections. If I am wrong and that does exist, it is both dumb and offensive to imagine that hectoring them more about how All This is their fault will deliver their votes to Dems.

Vote Blue No Matter Who is right both on the merits and in pursuit of leftists’ own interests, and I have not been shy about telling my left comrades that any other strategy is foolish and irresponible. The fantasy that leftists withholding our votes will compel the Democratic Party to reach left is one of loudlefties’ persistent delusions — along with the significance of our voter bloc, the ease of enacting our policy agenda, the appeal of that agenda to the public, and the relevance of the Dem establishment’s moves against us in the big picture. But it as rude as it is logically absurd for the Dem establishment to punch left to keep us out of power for two generations … and then fault the Left for the results, rather faulting actual power players of the Dem establishment.

Aside from alienating the Left, this nonsense lets the Dem establishment lazily avoid a strategic reckoning they damm well need to do.

I grant good reasons to think that Clintonian triangulation was the best possible strategy in the 1990s to counter the capture of the Republican Party by movement conservatism, as demonstrated by Actual Bill Clinton.

That case gets weaker looking at the ’00s & ’10s. Obama campaigned to the left of his actual governance, and made countless moves which compromised the strength of progressive organizing. Are lefties like me right to suspect that this squandered an opportunity to break the neoliberal consensus? Only a fool would feel confident that they understand the political dynamics better than BHO.

But I am certain that at this point we have nothing to learn from the dynamics of the 1990s. We face a MAGA fascist Republican Party, not movement conservatism. We face fragmentation of the entire information environment, not Fox News rivaling mainstream political journalism. Triangulation is very bad under these conditions.

I have my own informed guesses about what the Democratic Party should do. I’m open to alternatives. I am certain that the Clintonian playbook will not work. HRC’s candidacy in 2016 would have crushed a movement conservative candidate like a bug, and her failure shows how that playbook fails in our current environment. I would like to find loudlefties’ proposals more persuasive than I do; I support a lot of them on the merits.

Advocates for a Democratic Party agenda of Restoration — “return to stability and normalcy” — point to Biden’s victory in 2020 as their template, but 2020 was a unique moment. The course of Biden’s administration and the collapse of voter enthusiasm for him which undercut Kamala Harris’ candidacy in 2024 demonstrates that Just Be Normal cannnot win elections; voters do not see that as either possible or desirable for the Republic. We face a national institutional crisis at least comparable to the moment which gave us the New Deal, if we are lucky; if not so lucky, Fort Sumpter.

To save the Republic, we need a popular front uniting the liberal establishment with leftists. The Democratic party has the obligation and opportunity to reach out for one.

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Sibling post: against dumb anti-liberal leftist antifascism.