Posts

Featured

The New Supreme Court’s Extremist Vision

by

Andy Barlow

The Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has profound implications for the future of democracy and the rule of law in this country. The vicious, mean-spirited and triumphant tone of the majority opinion leaves no doubt that the emergent right-wing majority has in mind far more than the end of legal abortions. Indeed, Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion specifically points out that the court’s ruling in this case could directly lead to de-legalizing same sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), to ending non-cisgendered persons’ protection from criminal status (Lawrence v. Texas), and to ending the legality of birth control for married people (Griswold v. Connecticut). Others have already noted that the protection of inter-racial marriage (Loving v Virginia) is also based on the same legal principles eviscerated in this case and is thus endangered. But Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health threatens far more than these legal rights.

The main implication of Dobbs is found not in its legal rationale, but in the right-wing majority’s political reasoning. The Dobbs majority certainly understands that public opinion by 2-1 supports women’s right to choose, and public support for the right of women to choose an abortion if they were a victim of rape or incest is supported by 3-1. They also understand that the Supreme Court is charged with safeguarding the legitimacy of the rule of law in this country and demonstrating that conflicts can be resolved in a non-political way. And they know that polls are showing a steady decline in the Supreme Court’s legitimacy as a non-political (that is, legal) body.  The most salient question is: why would a Supreme Court majority act in a way that will certainly erode the Court’s public support and therefore jeopardize the Court’s own power?

I fear the answer is that these five justices do not care what happens to the rule of law because they see themselves as part of the vanguard of revolutionaries ushering in a new social order in which democracy and the current U.S. Constitution has no place.  In this new America, corporate greed will go unchecked, and popular obedience will be attained by appealing to white male domination backed by unbridled police power. Chief Justice John Roberts could not sign onto Alito’s majority opinion because he is an institutionalist still trying to hold onto the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. But he has clearly lost control: the Court’s leadership is now in the hands of a radical cabal who are gripped by their revolutionary zeal. The new Supreme Court majority was willing to take their radical step because they believe that with half the states ready to enforce their ban, they have the power to make their ruling stick.

The Dobbs’ majority’s radicalism is cloaked in the guise of a legal doctrine called ‘originalism.’ But the Dobbs decision clearly shows that originalism is an intellectually shoddy justification applied in an opportunist and inconsistent way to cover for the new Supreme Court majority’s extremist political aims.

For instance, the Dobbs majority had to demonstrate that Roe v. Wade was not settled law to overturn it. To do this, the majority asserted that abortion had been ‘originally’ illegal for most of American history. This is simply not true. As Kristen Luker demonstrated in her majestic book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Anglo-American common law only prohibited abortion after ‘quickening’ (when fetal movement could be felt). As a result, abortions were widely practiced in the early United States without legal interference until the Victorian Era. It was only in the 1880s that midwives and abortions (as well as homosexuals and pornography) were criminalized. The criminalization of abortion lasted only 80 out of the 233 years of the Constitution’s history, and those years were not the ‘original’ ones.

Of course Roe v. Wade was settled law. Three generations of American women lived in a nation in which they were promised control of their own bodies, their own reproductive destinies.  And in part because of this promise, women grew increasingly confident that even in the face of continual patriarchal resistance they could assert claims to being full and equal individuals. The new Supreme Court majority understands full well that it is not possible to reverse such a fundamental understanding of women’s personhood merely by declaring Roe dead. They understand that the ban on legal abortions—including in some states pregnancies resulting from rape or incest—will take breathtaking use of force by state governments and private vigilantes to make the law effective.  Women will have to be terrorized into submission by the fear of prosecution for murder, charges that can result from the allegations of neighbors and family members.  Women will have to live with the fear that when illegal abortions are performed by untrained people, as they certainly will be, they might die. This is what fascism looks like: the use of coercive force to force women to accept their destinies as childbearing vessels rather than as full individuals.

Women with little money, especially women of color, have already been and will be the primary targets of this reign of terror. Women with money will be able to travel to safe places (inside and outside the U.S.) to get abortions. But women with low incomes, who already are the majority of those getting legal abortions, will not have this option. They are the ones who will have to choose between having an unwanted child that can destabilize her life (and those of her family members) or to risk death in the back-alley abortions which will certainly proliferate.  

The last six years have certainly taught us is that the old rules of governance are no longer in effect. Gone are the days of bipartisanship; gone are the days of respect for the rule of law; gone are the days of respect for science-based expertise. We now live in a nakedly political world, in which the coin of the realm is power, where might makes right. The right wing now has the edge because they came to this realization in 2010, when the Tea Party took over the House majority. The Democratic Party stubbornly held on to the governance rules of the past era, and therefore ceded enormous advantages to the right wing: when McConnell illegally refused to allow the Senate to hold a confirmation hearing for Merritt Garland, Democrats did nothing. When Republicans refused to allow a vote on a new voting rights act, Democrats did nothing. When the President nearly succeeded in overturning the 2020 election, Congress did not even expel House members who had openly committed sedition against the United States.

The radical right has, for good reason viewed the Democrats with disdain. It is possible, however that they have made a significant miscalculation this time. The rightwing had been galvanized since the 1980s by their dream of overturning Roe v Wade, and they have been in a frenetic overdrive to seize the majority of the Supreme Court for over a decade. The Dobbs victory does not galvanize the right; it is for them a cause for celebration for the hard work of the past. But Dobbs most certainly is a wake-up call for most Americans who are not party to this fascist movement. Every woman and every man who respects women, and every parent of a daughter is today personally touched by the arrogance and viciousness of these right-wing justices. The Dobbs decision has the potential to galvanize democratic-minded people to defend the Constitution and democracy itself at this fraught moment in American history. Whether or not they will do so remains to be seen. Will a new kind of political leadership emerge, one that understands the urgency of this moment, one that can arouse people to their higher destinies? This is the test of the moment. We will soon see what this country will do, or not do, to defend democracy from fascism.

MAGA’s Performative Fascism

Yes, the MAGA movement is a wrecking ball, taking down one previously sacrosanct norm and one institution after another.  Many of us have watched with horror as guardrails against autocracy—Congress, the Supreme Court, the Department of Health, universities, law firms, etc.—have failed to blunt MAGA’s momentum.  And yes, Trump himself is a kleptocrat, who loves power and money and cares nothing about the Constitution or democracy. And yes, MAGA deploys white Christian nationalism as its vision of America being great and is terrorizing anyone who is not white or Christian as a result. 

But this is not all that is required for MAGA to be a fascist movement. The most important ingredient, which I believe is missing, is this: fascists not only seek to destroy democracy; they create a new state and society based on fascist principles. And crucially, I will argue, Trump and his followers are incapable of doing this because MAGA is primarily a performance whose real purpose is to provide cover for Trump and his billionaire minions’ kleptocratic impulses and their bizarre psychological needs. 

Trump built a MAGA of toadies and yes-men and women to do his bidding. And for this reason, these people are utterly incompetent at their formal job titles, which require real governance experience and acumen. As a result, MAGA has little capacity (ICE being the major exception) to build new institutions and laws to replace the institutions and norms they are destroying. Their blatant incompetence (RFK?! Pete Hegseth?! Pam Bondi?!) doesn’t bother Trump at all. For as long as Trump can maintain his appearance as a powerful autocrat, he and his billionaire pals can trade on fear of his bullying to make a lot of money. 

Put another way, Trump is neither Hitler nor Mussolini. These real fascists were not in it for the money or to feed their narcissism; they were true ideologues with a vision of a new state and a new society. Trump is just an all-too recognizable American rip-off artist, a made-for-TV huckster performing as a fascist to get rich quick (and stay out of jail). 

In this sense, MAGA is a farce. It performs a white Christian nationalist, anti-democratic show, but it is really a get rich scheme for sociopathic billionaires.

This farce makes MAGA highly volatile. MAGA’s rapid dismantling of liberal democratic institutions guarantees that social and economic crises will certainly appear, and very soon. All it will take is for the AI-driven stock market bubble to burst or steep increases in health insurance premiums with millions losing access to health care (already happening), or a big spike in inflation coupled with job losses due to Trump’s tariffs, and the already widespread backlash against Trump and MAGA for their betrayal of American values will certainly snowball.

Unfortunately, there is one other element that gives MAGA staying power: the utterly shameful inability of the Democratic Party to oppose MAGA.  Sure, Democrats have become good at Trump-bashing and declaring their opposition to fascism. But the Democrats have not articulated a political vision of an alternative to MAGA, and without that, they are toothless and impotent. To effectively counter Trumpism, the Democrats would have to acknowledge the central fact of our time: the hyper inequality that has made the rich richer, the poor poorer and ripped the middle class apart.  But this would require the Democrats to directly repudiate the neo-liberal policies that were embraced by and enriched and empowered an entire generation of Democrats (especially the Clintons and Obama, but also Schumer).

I cannot help but think that the intransigence of the Democratic Party leadership is so severe that only a wrecking ball like MAGA has any chance of breaking their astoundingly stubborn adherence to neoliberal principles. It is a marvel to me that Zorhan Mamdani has brilliantly proven the success of a platform that calls for higher taxes on billionaires and vigorous regulatory and redistributive government programs (free busses, rent control, city-run food stores), yet even now, much of the Democratic Party leadership refuses to endorse him. Their belief that Mamdani’s platform ‘only works in New York City’ is beyond stupid. It might be that their real reason for not embracing Mamdani is his anti-Zionism (or him being Muslim). But read the room, people: most of the world, and most of the U.S., including the majority of American Jews, are now anti-Zionist, and any hesitation to embrace Muslims is simply a capitulation to MAGA’s Christian nationalism.

The only way to stop MAGA is to expose the marriage between their fascist message (white Christians must use any means necessary to retake the country) and the astonishing money grab Trump and his friends are now engineering at the expense of the whole country, indeed, the whole world. Truly, the only way to stop Trump is to expose his billionaire sycophants to be the traitors to America that they are. 

But the paralysis of the Democratic Party leadership has meant that the only way we have effectively opposed MAGA is in the streets. The outpouring of community-based opposition to ICE and the militarization of D.C., Chicago, Portland and LA is our greatest hope today. The enormous No Kings protests show the urgency tens of millions of Americans feel. 

But as important as direct action may be, the only way out of the destructive MAGA era will be through a new politics. We are still looking for the political party that will articulate a vision of the future that can unite most Americans to rebuild our country. So far, the Democrats are failing the test. But Mamdani’s success—and the enormous crowds at Bernie Sanders and AOC’s “Fight Oligarchy” rallies–has underscored the need for a new vision based on fierce opposition to growing inequality, a politics that directly demands the end of deregulated and under-taxed capitalism in the name of human decency.  As frustrating as it is, progressives must lean into the fight for the Democratic Party. It is still has the potential to rise to the challenge because it remains the political home of most working class and minority community organizations.

The fracturing of MAGA as Trump’s performance loses its hold on its followers is all but inevitable. But the birth of a new politics that challenges the hyper inequality that has gripped the capitalist world for the last forty years is not guaranteed.  History is never pre-ordained. It is up to us to make it happen! 

The Bay Area Stopped Trump’s ‘Surge’

If you live in the Bay Area, as I do, the last 48 hours have been really wild.

First, the facts:

*On Wednesday (October 22) we learned that Trump was ordering a full-fledged military “surge” (i.e. invasion) of the Bay Area, with ICE, Border Patrol, FBI and National Guard involvement. And someone leaked that the staging area was a Coast Guard base with only one road in and out.

*On Thursday morning, several hundred people gathered at the bridge to the base to make it clear that ICE, etc. are not welcome here. Despite violence by Border Patrol, the demonstrators remained disciplined and peaceful and prevented all traffic coming or leaving the base.

*On Thursday afternoon, Trump publicly announced he was pulling the plug on the surge, and stated he had done so because of lobbying by his tech. bro billionaire allies, especially Steve Benioff.

Now the lessons as I see them:

*The protest at the Coast Guard base was a clear signal that the entire Bay Area was ready to mobilize at once and massively to protest the surge. I can certainly say that I felt a very palpable tension on Wednesday and Thursday morning everywhere I went. A Wednesday night organizing call had over 5000 participants.

*The long history of progressive politics in the Bay Area guarantees that every elected official in the region opposes Trump and the threatened surge. In the face of this threat, the Mayors of San Francisco and Oakland as well as San Francisco Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Governor Newsom all pledged to prosecute federal agents for crimes against civilians.

*The Bay Area is the home to an important sector of Trump’s sycophants, the techies. Trump cares what they think because they have lavishly funded him and he has deregulated AI research and crypto, which benefits them.  The techies opposed the militarization of the Bay Area because the resulting protests and chaos would directly affect them. When Steve Benioff (Salesforce) publicly called for Trump to send troops to San Francisco two weeks ago, he found out the cost: the head of the Benioff Foundation quit, and anti-Trump billionaires in Silicon Valley as well as Bay Area politicians of every stripe criticized him. A few days later, he apologized for his mistake.

*The mayor of San Francisco, Dan Lurie, is heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, with deep ties to Silicon Valley billionaires. He was perfectly positioned to organize the tech bros. to pressure Trump to recant and did so.   

*Trump cares more about his relationship with billionaires than with his fake “war on crime” and “war on immigrants.” He knows that the military surge is all for show, just to convince his base that he is really a tough guy who is Making America Great. But to pull back publicly after announcing the surge was a defeat for Trump.

*This does not mean that ICE is leaving the Bay. Their kidnappings and terrorist raids will continue throughout the region. Vigilance and resistance will still be needed. This was only one skirmish in a much bigger conflict. But what Trump had in mind was a qualitatively greater show of force aimed at bullying and cowing the Bay Area. Stopping that really does matter.

The main lesson: resistance works. It starts with community-level organizing and rapid mobilization of large numbers of people, which the Bay Area has demonstrated it is very capable of doing over and over again since the 1930s.  Second, resistance is most effective when a section of the ruling elite decide it is in their own interest to take our side. The mayors of both San Francisco and Oakland opposed the surge and pledged to use local police to arrest federal agents if they committed crimes against civilians. The tech billionaires openly opposed Trump. Trump backed off.

This is what happened in the Bay Area in 48 hours. Of course, Trump’s brutal politics will continue, and even today (Saturday, October 25) ICE has been seen in Oakland’s most important Latino neighborhood (Fruitvale) intimidating people a week before Dios de los Muertos.

Stopping Trump’s surge, even if temporarily, was just one small victory. But there are useful lessons to be learned from even a small win.

America’s Universities Do Not Have an “Antisemitism” Problem. They have a Fascism Problem.

Trump’s charge that universities are hotbeds of antisemitism is absurd and is just a pretext to undermine America’s most import centers of liberal values. This assault is a vital piece of the overall fascist project we are witnessing today. 

American higher education has been anything but antisemitic for the last century. Indeed, Jews have been historically overrepresented as a percentage of the faculty and students. While Jews make up 2.2 percent of Americans, they comprised over 20 percent of the faculty at the top ten universities in the 1980s, and an astonishing 50% of the “top intellectuals” of that era. From the 1920s on, Jews have had among the highest rates of college-going of any ethnic group.

There are several reasons for the strong link between universities and Jews in the 20th Century. Certainly, elite universities discriminated against Jews in the early 1900s; Harvard famously placed a quota on Jewish admissions in that era. But, unlike anti-Black, Mexican, Asian and Native American discrimination of that time, antisemitism did not take the form of state-backed legal sanctions; it remained the private purview of colleges, housing developers, businesses and social clubs. That is, while Jews in that era indeed faced private discrimination, they also enjoyed the public recognition that they were white during the Jim Crow era. As a result, Jews were able to find new avenues for upward mobility that only whites could achieve, such as in the new public sector law firms (spawned by the New Deal), and the rapidly growing entertainment industry and fields of medicine of the 1930s. As Jews achieved success through these routes, private sector antisemitism diminished (Although it never disappeared, especially among the very same white Christian nationalists who now are leading the charge against antisemitism!),

Certainly, Jews quickly grasped that higher education was the road to upward mobility. But even more, there was and is an important connection between Jewish cultural identity and the values of modern higher education as well. As Steve Mintz explains in Inside Higher Education (2023):

…(I)t seems to me that one can speak of a secular American Jewish faith—which involves activism, the arts and culture, entrepreneurship, intellectualism and science, behavioral, physical, psychological and social—and an American Jewish legacy—that, at its best, is a commitment to cultural pluralism and social justice, to peshat (intensive study and exegesis of texts), tzedakah (charity as a moral obligation), and tikkum olam (the obligation to repair and improve the world).

These values are not just Jewish values, they are core values of modern liberal thought.  Liberalism itself evolved rapidly in the post-fascist world of the 1950s and 1960s, with the dawning recognition that individual liberty for all can only exist in the condition of political and economic democracy for all.

At their best, American universities embrace a commitment to these values. Of course, universities (and their academic disciplines) did NOT embrace these values before the 1970s. Universities claimed to embrace science and meritocracy even as they actively excluded the voices of people of color, women and queers. The deepening commitment to democratic values resulted from political action by graduate students and faculty in the 1970s-1990s, in which Jewish academics often played a central role. By the beginning of the 21st Century, virtually all universities understood that all academic/professional fields benefit from their commitment to inclusive hiring and culturally plural perspectives.

MAGA’s fascist project aims at remaking the United States into a white Christian nation. The values of American higher education run directly counter to MAGA, and so a vital part of the MAGA strategy is to take down the universities. And, like all fascist movements, their assault on higher education is legitimized by a white nationalist pretext, which in this case is to claim that antisemitism is running amok on American college campuses.

Their parlor trick was to force colleges to adopt a definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that states that criticisms of Israel are antisemitic. This absurd definition (see my previous posts on this topic) label all student and faculty support for Palestinians’ right to simply exist in the face of Israel’s genocidal assault as antisemitism. This definition made it possible for a gang of right-wing Zionists in Los Angeles (who were not UCLA affiliated) to physically attack the non-violent pro-Palestinian encampment of UCLA students and faculty in April 2024, injuring dozens, and get away with it with only one arrest while UCLA then dismantled the encampment. This definition made every Zionist student who said that pro-Palestinian activities “made them uncomfortable” into victims of antisemitism rather than people who were defending genocide. This definition demanded that pro-genocidal speech be given the same protections as all legitimate speech.  This parlor trick allowed universities to try to silence leading Jewish voices against Israel’s genocide, such as Judith Butler at UC Berkeley and Analise Orleck at Dartmouth.  

American colleges and universities have no future in Trump’s fascist state. Every academic field, all the sciences and all humanities, are based on ideas that run counter to MAGA’s belief system. Any attempt to conciliate the Trump administration, such as Berkeley turning in the names of 160 anti-Zionist students and faculty, is simply opening the doors to a political movement that seeks the total destruction of academia as we know it.

American universities must unite into a single voice rejecting the IHRA equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It is a Trojan horse that opens the gates for fascism, and the utter destruction of higher education as we know it.

The Arrogance of the FANGs

(Progressives are looking for ways to effectively oppose American fascism and regain the trust of a broad cross-section of the American people, including some of Trump’s base.  This piece addresses one of the challenges facing progressives today.)

A friend told me that in the non-profit where she worked for many years, people came up with a term for one group of activists, whom they called the FANGS. These were the people who were Former Activists who were Now in Government.

I know many FANGS. Every one of them is brilliant, driven, and following the lode star of their social justice-rooted moral conscience. They are truly public servants in the best sense, who went into government (often after law school) because they wanted to find ways to devise and use levers of power (i.e. to make and enforce policy) to benefit the marginalized populations out of which many of them had come as movement activists and community members.

I think the term FANGS should also include activists who choose to go into any institutional setting to be social justice advocates. This includes the many activists who became professors, as well as health care workers and social workers, to name a few.

I primarily saw my academic job as being a civil rights activist, both as a cheerleader for students who wanted to work for social justice and as a writer of academic books and articles as well as newspaper pieces. In this broader definition I too was a FANG (or, more precisely, I guess, a FANA (in the Academy).

I fear that despite our good intentions and good work, FANGS may have made a serious mistake, one that has been exposed by the ferocity of the current right-wing attack on equity and inclusion, indeed on the institutions of the democratic state.

The mistake was this: we forgot that effective change requires not only powerful state actors (elected officials, judges, lawyers and professors advocating anti-racist laws and policies) but also the presence of a massive and powerful social movement capable of empowering these laws and policies. Put another way, FANGS forgot to define our role in building and maintaining social movements. This is a central task of building the beloved community today.

One of the most important political lessons of the 1960s Freedom Movement was grasping the connection between laws/policies and movement building. For a time (1963-1975) the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in linking the power of mass movements with state power. This link was powerful enough to bring down an entire racial system (Jim Crow) and to begin to lay the foundations for a democratic, inclusive and non-racist society (the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, numerous court decisions upholding affirmative action, etc.) It also played an important role in ending the Vietnam War.

The first generation of FANGS (including myself) were young people who had been activated and trained by the Freedom Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movements in the mid to late 1960s. In the 1970s, many of us decided to get professional degrees because we wanted to be more effective at pursuing the movements’ agendas. By the 1980s, many of us had gained access to institutional positions and were gaining power and influence in these settings. There’s no denying that we activists were very successful within these institutional settings.

But at the same time, we were experiencing the ebb and eventual disappearance of the massive movements out of which we had come.

Of course, we FANGS did anything and everything we could to work with newer social movements (South Africa, Central America, labor, LGTBQ, women’s rights, etc.). But in the increasingly harsh realities of those decades, movement-building was difficult and required a long-term commitment to community building and empowerment. We FANGS were certainly not the ones to do this, we said. We could not squander the institutional influence we had won, we reasoned. Community empowerment through movement building was the job of community leaders, we said. We argued for a division of labor between activists and FANGS, a separation that rarely succeeded.

The gulf between FANGS and activists was often quite wide, with both sides casting suspicions on the other. Activists accused FANGS of elitism, and FANGS accused activists of being naïve about what it takes to have power.  More and more, FANGS, determined to use our hard-won positions and influence for social justice, felt that we had to do it on our own. The fact that us FANGS were making high incomes, and had prestigious jobs, while many activists were poor created a class conflict that also contributed to the tension between FANGS and movement activists.

In the 2000s, FANGS were successful at gaining significant influence in their institutional settings. The Black and Progressive Caucuses of the House of Representatives grew, had real clout and were well on their way to establishing a center-left majority in Congress in the 2010s. Obama and Biden expanded Federal DEI-related rules, and the courts largely let them stand. Progressive academics redefined a number of social science disciplines and made real inroads in STEM fields, and progressive administrators (many themselves former activists) redefined campus life and faculty and staff hiring procedures. Students from top schools entered Silicon Valley jobs with the intention of doing social justice work in tech workplaces.

A final note on this history: most progressive legislators, judges, lawyers, professors, doctors and nurses today are too young to have experienced the powerful connection of social movement and state power manifested in the 1960s and 1970s. They are motivated by progressive ideals but have very different movement experiences, ones in which movements had little power, on which to draw. Their idealism, less tempered by the practical political work of building coalitions, made these progressives more likely to make alliances only with those who shared their ideals, a tendency that made them seem even more elitist.

Even as progressives won important gains, the ground was shifting in civil society. The two red flags, I think, were these: First, the major social movements of the era, Occupy Wall Street and the George Floyd Defund the Police movements, were impressive in their numbers and breadth, but both vaporized in couple of years, with real consequences. The disappearance of Occupy undermined Congressional efforts to rein in the banks (the passage but eventual gutting of the Dodds-Frank Act). And the Defund the Police movement’s decline left dozens of newly elected progressive District Attorneys vulnerable to right-wing attacks, which took down many of them in 2022-2024. The second red flag was the limited capacity of community empowerment efforts to propel candidates into higher offices, most notably Stacey Abrams’ two failed efforts (2018 and 2022) to become governor of Georgia, although Georgia community empowerment work did lead to important local and Congressional election victories.

Most fundamentally, unsustainable social movements and relatively limited community empowerment efforts are unable to broadly impact the culture of civil society. I believe the success of the 1960s Freedom Movement and anti-Vietnam War movement was not primarily their political and legal impacts, as important as those were. These movements were broad enough and sustained for long enough to change the culture of American society, and indeed impact many other cultures around the world. The George Floyd movement was, sadly, unable to produce such long-term change.

Without deeply rooted, well-organized and sustainable social movements, FANGS run the risk of becoming social engineers, trying to change the society from above.  And, as the right wing successfully organized people resistant to progressive policies, FANGs’ isolation from social movements made them easy targets.

The prime example of this dynamic, I think, is the current attack on DEI, and especially affirmative action policies.  Affirmative action programs are a set of legal rules and institutional policies that required employers and schools to demonstrate that they are making demonstrable efforts to increase access and advancement for underrepresented minorities, women and people with disabilities. Advocates of affirmative action have long argued that once a critical mass of previously underrepresented people establish themselves inside these institutions, they would be able to change the culture of the place from within.

Affirmative action policies arose in the 1970s and 1980s in the immediate aftermath of the massive civil rights movement that had eradicated Jim Crow in the 1960s. The first-generation advocates of affirmative action, including myself, were veterans of the civil rights movement, and were young people who had gone to graduate and law schools in the 1970s for the express aim of implementing the civil rights movement’s vision.  By the 1980s, we were beginning to have real influence over public policy, even while the government (Reagan and the U.S. Supreme Court especially) grew increasingly hostile to our efforts. We deluded ourselves into thinking we could make real change “from above” even as the social movements out of which we came were vanishing.

I fear that we advocates made a mistake even then: we thought we could reshape American society by enacting new laws and making new rules but we underestimated the forces standing in our way: first, many people with a vested interest in their institutions resented our efforts at behavioral modification and had many formal and informal ways to resist DEI efforts; and second, efforts to create equitable practices were undermined by the neo-liberal hyper-inequality that was weakening state institutions and civil society alike. (For example, what did it mean to fight for inclusion in an urban school district experiencing long-term disinvestment in per pupil spending and a growing housing crisis?)  Most fundamentally, we FANGs forgot that it takes massive social movements with real community-based power to effect significant change.

And so, as well-meaning as we were and still are, FANGS were becoming elites in a country (indeed, a world) in which neo-liberal globalization was rapidly making them less and less relevant.

So, what should FANGS do? This analysis clearly provides the answer: professionals and government actors must learn how to do their work in a way that builds community and social movements based on community power. (For some examples, see Barlow (ed.) Collaborations for Social Justice). This is easier said than done: to do this will mean a fundamental change in how progressive lawyers, professors, doctors and legislators do their work. In some ways, they will have to step away from institutional power to do so as they adopt methods of professional conduct that are better suited to movement building and community empowerment among marginalized populations than professional advancement.

For example, teachers at every level will have to choose to work in ‘undesirable’ jobs in low-income minority communities, deploying a pedagogy and course content focused on empowering students.

I have great admiration for the hundreds of thousands of young people who continue to strive to become professionals to advance social justice. What we need now more than ever is a clear vision of what we mean by the practice of professional power for social justice, one that clearly grasps the connection between policy/law making and movement building.  

The Crisis of the Democratic Party

I gave myself this long to offer an analysis of the 2024 election because like everyone else,  I needed to absorb a lot, both intellectually and emotionally. To me, it’s clear: the Republicans won because a majority of voters have tied the Democratic Party to the elites on both coasts. For the first time since 1932, the Democratic Party has alienated itself from a real majority of Americans, including growing numbers of people from the Democrats’ core constituency:  workers, including many Black, brown people.

Anyone who thinks this is not what we learned from the 2024 elections is, frankly, living in a bubble and is out of touch with reality.

The reality is that this country, indeed the entire capitalist world, is in a crisis. This crisis is marked by hyper-inequality, rising housing prices, declining wages (as a percent of the total economy), cuts in private sector contributions to health care and retirement, and cuts in public sector protections for workers and for low-income people. A year and half of rapid inflation only threw salt on the wounds. And even more, the trauma of the pandemic threw an untold number of Americans into a dark place from which they have not recovered. The crisis is especially felt by young people, who are rapidly giving up on the American Dream.

The cause of this crisis, I have long argued, is one thing: the financialization of the capitalist system in the 1990s, a set of policy decisions that transformed capitalism from a system of profit made from the production of things into a system that rewards investors for speculation on anything that could be made to increase in price. The policies were called ‘neo-liberal’ because they claimed to enable the free flow of capital and labor across borders (i.e. globalization).

But in reality these policies deregulated banks so they could engage in predatory activities that had been illegal since the Great Depression. For nearly four decades, a handful of big banks destroyed thousands of productive businesses, drove up housing prices, destroyed or greatly weakened labor unions, and demanded “austerity” by government, meaning disinvestment in public education, public health and social services.

Most telling, deregulation of banking was chiefly championed by Democrats (especially Bill Clinton). While claiming to be the party of social entitlement programs and regulation of big business, the Democrats actively supported policies that produced hyper inequality, even while promoting important programs like the Affordable Care Act and civil rights protections for marginalized people. It is only fitting that the policies that created a world-wide social crisis should now have left the Democrats in a political crisis.

The Democratic defenders of neo-liberal policies are, of course, having none of this, and are instead blaming progressives for the 2024 debacle.  Centrists charge that the Democrats went wrong because they tied themselves to leftist “cultural issues” of college-educated elites (DEI initiatives, transgender rights).

Luckily, the Democratic Party is more diverse than the centrist apologists for neo-liberalism. God bless Elizabeth Warren for standing up to the neo-liberals and fighting to re-regulate the banks (remember the Dodd-Frank Act, now all but moribund?). And there was always Bernie Sanders, calling it what it was (however ineffectually). And in the House of Representatives, the Squad (Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Rashida Talib (MI), and later Cori Bush (MO), Jamal Bowman (NY), Summer Lee (PA), Delia Ramirez (IL) and Greg Casar (TX)) established a progressive caucus.

The Democratic Party coalition has been held together by support for women’s reproductive rights, diversity initiatives, environmental issues, and opposition to authoritarianism overseas (esp. Russia in Ukraine) and at home (Donald Trump and MAGA).  But this admirable commitment to diversity and international solidarity was continually undermined by the mainstream Democrats’ steadfast support for financialization, manifest by the ever-growing and yawning gaps between the rich and everyone else. To a lesser extent, progressives too often overreached, and made political demands that they had no capacity to back up with action. Worst of all, when Americans looked at the Democratic strongholds of New York and California, what they saw were progressive politicians committed to social policies of inclusion and economic policies of exclusion. The result was a growing hostility to the progressive agenda as a way for elites to feel good about themselves and to put down everyone else.

The critique of progressive ideas gradually gained political clout. Warren and Sanders were marginalized in the Senate, and in the House the Squad reps had to fight for their political lives in 2022 and 2024 against right-wing and Zionist efforts to unseat them (Bush and Bowman lost, Lee barely survived, and the rest, all from safe districts, had a real fight on their hands.)  Progressive DAs were routed, even in progressive strongholds like San Francisco and Oakland.

Ironically, Biden’s Presidency had the opposite problem as Clinton and Obama’s advocacy of progressive social policies and unabashed support for financial globalization. Biden promoted innovative economic policies that sharply broke with neo-liberalism and had the potential to restart the American Dream. But Biden was unable to explain his economic plan to the American people, let alone get any legislative traction for the most important initiatives. And worse, Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war ran directly counter to the Democrats’ progressive ideals, alienating the very people who might have supported his economic policies.

The 2024 election was clearly a disaster for Democrats (and all people of conscience). But with all such dramatic routs comes a real opportunity. In a moment of crisis, there is always the opportunity to reject the ideas that got us here, and to embrace new ones.

The first piece of good news is that many people who do not identify as progressives now understand that the Democrats have lost their way and are in danger of no longer being the party of the working class.

The problem facing progressive Democrats who want to right the ship, however, is quite daunting. To put it bluntly, progressives have very little power in the current moment. Luckily, some progressives have been quite clear-headed about this problem. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez recently stated, “we have to run from the bottom, not from the left.”  She argues that progressives need to focus on bottom-up organizing of labor and minority communities. She is undoubtably right. But in 2024 we must acknowledge that labor unions are mere shadows of their former selves, and that community organizing efforts around the country (and the Western world), have been difficult and have often failed to produce political results (Stacey Abrams’ failed gubernatorial runs in Georgia, for example). 

Indeed, since I believe that social justice is based on the quality of the relationships we build with one another (see this blog’s home page), this problem is a very big one. But there can be little doubt that the progressive power needed to reshape the Democratic Party depends on the revitalization of community-based and workplace-based organizations, i.e. civil society. There are many good ideas about how to do this, and some support for these efforts (such as the Center for Popular Democracy and some labor unions). 

What is needed more than anything else right now is for progressive-minded people to dedicate themselves to the small and painstaking tasks that bring about long-term and strong community- and workplace-based organizations. Doing this will mean that the era of progressives talking big ideas but having no power must be replaced by one in which walking the walk will be the measure of relevance.

I believe that small steps will yield big results as political conditions change. And the conditions will change because the right-wing nuts who now have complete control of government inevitably (and I think soon) will reveal themselves as the opportunists they are, with nothing but empty promises to offer the American people. In the next few years, I firmly believe progressives will have new opportunities to take the initiative. But doing so will take two things: a new generation of activists committed to community-building must show up to take on this challenge and the old party leaders must get out of their way. Will the Democrats be able to pull this off?  We will see.

Why Israel is Embracing Genocidal Zionism

The goal of the Israeli war is increasingly clear: it is to create conditions that will make it impossible for the Palestinian people to continue to live in Gaza or the West Bank, and perhaps also in southern Lebanon.

Along with its indiscriminate killing of people, Israel is systematically destroying hospitals, universities, electric grids, water systems, and most permanent buildings. There can be no other term for this war’s goal other than genocide—Israel is purposely destroying the infrastructure that undergirds a society’s capacity to exist.  The fact that “only” a small percentage of the Palestinian population has been killed does not alter the fact that Israel intends to make much of what is now Palestinian territory unlivable.

While “only” 40% of Israelis openly embrace the full Israeli annexation of these territories, the war that will accomplish that goal is incredibly popular, with 81% support. Israeli society has radically shifted to embrace what had only a generation ago were ideas associated with a miniscule radical fringe.

As the war grinds on, Israel is becoming more and more isolated in the court of world public opinion. But in the face of global condemnation, Israeli Jews are more and more defiant and determined to go it alone. Just last week, when three Israeli hostages were rescued by the IDF, seemingly all of Israel rejoiced, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the IDF killed or injured over a thousand Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp during the rescue operation.

We are witnessing, in a few short months, not only a genocidal war but the remaking of Israeli society, which is embracing a radical new stage of Zionism. The world is watching with horror the fact that the very people whose ancestors were the victims of the Holocaust are now cheering on a genocidal war against Palestine.

How did a country that a generation ago prided itself on its social democratic achievements and was seemingly on the verge of acknowledging a Palestinian nation become what Israel is today?

It would be far too simple to just start in the 1980s, when a rightwing settler movement first began to use violence to take over Palestinian land in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, a movement that produced the current leadership of the country.  I think we must start at the beginning, with the establishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

The problem, of course, is that the creation of a Jewish homeland in a region largely populated by Arabs required a clear answer to one question: would Jews coexist with Arabs or displace them? The very act of creating Israel firmly answered this question: in 1947, the United Nations mandated the establishment of a Jewish state but not a Palestinian state and authorized  the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the most productive land—the legal basis for the Nakba. The UN Mandate was universally opposed by every Arab and Muslim majority country. But even this mandate was not enough for many Zionist leaders. Calling the UN Mandate a “tactical compromise,” Israel’s first President David Ben Gurion openly declared his intention to annex all of Palestine land in the future.

Despite this origin, many early Israelis were refugees from countries where they had participated in socialist and communist parties and believed that the new Zionist state had to be committed to democratic principles, including equal rights for Palestinian and other non-Jews in Israel. For the ensuing seventy years, Zionists were divided into a left wing and a right wing based on their differing ideas about the society they were building. Left wing Zionists sought to create a European-like social democracy and saw the kibbutzim as the utopian communities of their movement. Rightwing Zionists—a distinct minority of the population– sought to build Yisrael Hal-Shlema, Greater Israel, which they believed to be the Biblical mandate for the Jewish peoples’ homeland, which required the expulsion of all non-Jews from what is now Southern Lebanon, Gaza and much of Jordan.

But from the beginning, the die was cast in favor of rightwing Zionism. First and foremost, the creation of the Jewish homeland was accompanied by the Nakba– the forceable mass expulsion of over a million Palestinian people (Arab, Muslim and Christian alike) from their homes and land. This act alone guaranteed an irreconcilable conflict between Zionists and Arabs. (Not a single Arab state recognized Israel when it was founded).  The Nakba also fatally compromised left-wing Zionists’ dreams of building a social democracy in the Middle East.

Secondly, the Zionist movement resurrected Hebrew as a secular language to replace what was at that time the far more popular secular Jewish language, Yiddish. The adoption of Hebrew as Israel’s official language polarized specifically with Yiddish-speaking  left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews around the world who had come to their conclusion that assimilation of Jewish workers into the working classes of different nations was their best hope for a democratic future.

And third, when facing the inherent contradiction of Zionism with democratic, secular values, Israel steadily opted to build its military into what it is today: the largest military force per capita in the world, complete with nuclear weapons.

For all these reasons, Zionism has consistently bent toward righting expansionist ambitions. But rightwing Zionism faced an uphill fight for as long as Israel was ruled by social democrats, an era that came to a brutal end with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.  In the 2000s, Israeli social democracy, like everywhere else, could not survive.  As financial globalization rewarded the wealthiest Israelis (and Arabs) at the expense of everyone else, nation-states trimmed social spending.  And like in Europe and the U.S. the populations of all Middle East countries became disenchanted with governments that failed to meet their needs and became susceptible to radical politics. In the Arab world, this radicalism was mostly captured by Muslim extremism (after the failure of the Arab Spring in 2010-2012).

In Israel, radicalization meant the rise of rightwing Zionism to power.  The influx of virulently anticommunist Russian Jews and rightwing American religious zealots reshaped Israel in the late 20th Century. In 2018, rightwing Zionists achieved their complete victory with the passage of the Basic National Law, which proclaimed Israel as the nation of the Jewish people alone, a law that completely ended once and for all left-wing Zionists hope for a democratic, secular Israel in which Palestinians and Jews and others could co-exist peacefully with equal rights for all.

All of this is to say that the ‘new’ Zionism is simply the resolution of the contradictions of a Jewish state formally committed to democratic rights but formed by the forced expulsion of over a million Palestinians from their homes, a contradiction that has haunted Israelis since 1948. This resolution also has profound religious implications, as Israel now sees itself not only as a refuge for Jews seeking protection from antisemitism but as the Holy Redeemers, who are gathering the chosen people in Greater Israel as proclaimed by Scripture. (This fanaticism also relegates all other Jews in the world into morally questionable Jews for refusing to “return from exile,” let alone for rejecting either the political or religious implications of Zionism.)

The ‘new’ Zionism is simply the resolution of the contradictions of a Jewish state formally committed to democratic rights but formed by the forced expulsion of over a million Palestinians from their homes, a contradiction that has haunted Israelis since 1948.

What will happen to Israel under this extremist Zionist rule?  Netanyahu is clearly counting on a Trump victory and anticipates getting an American green light to continue its destruction of Gaza and the West Bank and perhaps also to invade Lebanon. But, as a Thomas Friedman has pointed out, the cost of the continual state of war will inevitably sap the Israeli economy and demoralize both the IDF and the Israeli public. Further, the militarization of Israel and its transformation into an open theocracy will lead many intellectuals and high-tech industries (especially biotech) to relocate in Europe or the U.S.  At the end, Israel will become a poor military dictatorship ruled by religious zealots, completely isolated in the court of world opinion, a nation at war with all its Arab neighbors. That is, Israel as a self-proclaimed shining beacon of Western civilization and democracy in the Middle East will be no more.

This emerging reality is extremely challenging for most American Jews, many of whom were raised to believe that support for Israel was a core element of being a Jew. To these Jews, the anti-Israeli protests are a source of much angst, especially because Jews have always been sympathetic to anti-war causes.  These Jews will face an increasingly difficult choice as the war, with all its dreadful human rights violations, drags on.

But the emergence of a blood-thirsty Zionism bent on genocide has also opened up a new space within Judaism for anti-Zionist Jews to claim their legitimate place as Jews for the first time since 1948, a space I have written about in previous posts. The emergence of a genocidal Zionism has challenged Jews to finally realize that there is can be and indeed must be a Jewishness liberated from the dead weight of Zionism.

Universities’ Hypocracy Towards anti-Israeli War Protestors

Panicked university administrators are making a major blunder if they think they can appease rightwing inquisitors by unleashing the police on students protesting the Israeli war against Palestine.  

In the last two days, over 2000 students have been arrested, and many more will face expulsion from their schools for their “disruptive activities.”

University officials claim that they are not violating the students’ (and faculty’s) free speech rights by doing so. Instead, they–like the rightwing McCarthyists in Congress and the police–are depicting the demonstrators as violent antisemites.

Some university administrators argue that the presence of a single student who uttered extremist language about Zionists on a widely circulated video (leaked from one Columbia student’s supposedly confidential disciplinary hearing) proves that the encampments are antisemitic. Some pro-Zionist students and faculty also claim that the encampment makes them “uncomfortable” and “unsafe,” and that the encampment’s presence therefore interferes with their right to an education.

Free speech experts largely agree. Paul French, a First Amendment scholar, maintains that anti-Israeli speech, like all speech, is always conditional, and that universities are obliged to protect it only if it does not interfere with the normal functioning of the institution. The ACLU, in an advisory memo it sent to universities, makes the same argument.

According to university leaders, the right to free speech means that “both sides” have the responsibility of conducting themselves in a civilized manner, by which they mean the Cambridge debate model’s ‘exchange of ideas.’ To them, the presence of the encampments on their campuses has created an unjustifiable disruption of the educational process.

The students who are risking everything by occupying encampments and university buildings see it differently.  They believe that their institutions are derelict in their lack of concern for a massive human rights violation in which they (through their investments) are directly complicit. The protestors refuse to allow the ‘normal functioning’ of universities to render Palestinians invisible continue under these dire circumstances.

The fact that pro-Zionist students (and some faculty) feel uncomfortable is in no way evidence of universities allowing an antisemitic climate to fester on their campuses. Their discomfort is a sign of the success of the protests at insisting that their schools acknowledge the Palestinian peoples’ plight and Israel’s responsibility for it.  Pro-Zionists are outraged that the silent support for Israel’s war has been broken.

The protestors correctly call out a double standard in the concern about antisemitism.  While school administrators are being hammered by Republicans in Congress for allowing “antisemitic protests” to take over the universities, there has been virtually no concern raised for the many people on these campuses who feel that continued silence in the face of the staggering human rights violations of the Palestinian people makes them feel marginalized and unsafe. This is especially the case for the many students of color who see the parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and racism in America.

Let’s be honest here: in their effort to showcase antisemitism on campuses, almost all the major media outlets have failed to cover the sorrow expressed by most protestors for the Israelis who lost their lives or were raped or were taken hostage in Hamas’ October 7 attack. The media has been quick to cover extreme statements made by individual participants, such as the videoed Columbia student saying Zionists have no right to live. The same mainstream media routinely ignore the widespread anti-Palestinian statements often made by supporters of Israel’s war, many of which are overtly racist.

But, much to my surprise, the New York Times has done an excellent job refuting the canard that the protesters were prone to violence. Their reporting–with videos, no less–show that all the violence that happened at UCLA on May 2 was instigated by pro-Israeli thugs who physically attacked students in the encampment for five hours before police were called in only to arrest students and break up the encampment. Similarly, the TImes interviewed “outsiders” arrested at Columbia, and showed that almost all of them were neighbors who rushed to defend the students when the NYPD showed up.

The protests have already achieved a major victory by legitimizing the idea that anti-Zionism is not by itself antisemitic. And, for the many Jewish students and faculty who are participating in the encampments, a really radical idea is now being discussed: that Zionism itself is, in the words of Naomi Klein, “a false idol” that betrays the foundational values of Judaism. Here’s a link to Klein’s speech at a New York rally on April 26. (Readers of my blog can look at my discussion of this idea in earlier posts, which I attributed to Shaul Magid.)

The universities’ self-righteous notion of protestors’ violation of ‘free speech’ is obscene. The protest movement was necessitated by the universities’ complete marginalization of Palestinian voices, as well as students’ concerns about racism, colonialism and militarism that were triggered by Israel’s war against Palestine.  And when students raise their point of view, they have been met by complete resistance, and now, with violence. Universities do not want a real exchange of ideas: they want conformity to their notions of education, with all of their race, class and gender biases.

These schools’ problem is that they do not understand or value the importance of conflict in for the creation of new ideas.

The current battle on college campuses certainly is about a conflict over Israel and Palestine but its also about core educational values. Student protesters are demanding that their institutions change their curricula and their behavior. It’s about students’ refusal to allow their schools to turn a blind eye while Israel, with U.S. backing, commits massive human rights violations against Palestinians (not only in Gaza but on the West Bank and inside Israel itself). But it’s also about their schools’ continuing shortcomings on creating a diverse and inclusive curriculum and campus climate. It remains to be seen if these students have the fortitude and political savvy to force their schools to acknowledge the justice of their cause, and whether they can counter the blood-thirsty calls of rightwing Republicans and increasingly militant Zionists for the violent repression of their movement.

This battle is not the first of its kind. The anti-Vietnam War and civil rights/Black and brown power movements battled their colleges and universities in the 1960s and 1970s and succeeded at creating space for ethnic studies programs, bringing the study of globalization, race and ethnicity into the social sciences, and forcing universities to institute affirmative action programs in hiring faculty and admitting students.

What we who stayed in academia learned in the long, hard struggles of the 1960s-1990s is that institutions do not change quickly, or voluntarily, especially when the demand for changes is coming from marginalized people. But we did make difference, and so can students today.

I am betting on the students: once people have developed the commitment to social justice that they have shown, they do not back down when times get tough. And do not forget: the war still rages, and as Israel commits new atrocities, the students’ call to action will grow even more insistent.

The Gaza Encampments are History in the Making

Students at American colleges and universities are again making history. ‘Gaza encampments’ have been erected at dozens of colleges and universities around the country, making this one of the most important student movements since the 1960s. We are now hearing of new encampments every day, including now in Australia, Great Britain and Germany.

And, unlike in the 1960s, many faculty members are participating in and supporting these encampments, especially after their students face repressive actions initiated by panicked university presidents.

As a student protester myself in the 1960s, I could not be more excited or prouder of what I am seeing on college campuses today.

There are real parallels between the anti-Israeli war movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Just as students in the 1960s mobilized against an unjust war, students today are moved to action by the deeply disturbing role the U.S. is playing in enabling Israel to engage in an aggressive war against Palestine in open defiance of international law and public opinion.

And just like in the 1960s, the anti-Israeli war protests are already forcing a shift in the war itself, as the United States and Israel find themselves increasingly isolated and condemned for human rights violations. Biden is certainly feeling the pressure. He has already defied Netanyahu by building a dock for humanitarian aid to unload in Gaza and by forcing Israel to drastically scale back a planned attack on Iran and by putting economic sanctions on some right-wing extremist ‘settlers.’  It seems likely that as the protests build (especially if and when Israel invades Rafah), the U.S. will start withholding military supplies for some Gaza operations.

Of course, Republicans are sticking to their defense of Israel’s war, and are using all their power to try to force universities to repress the student protesters. Columbia University has emerged as ground zero because of the large Zionist presence on the campus and in New York City as a whole. There, more than anywhere else, university officials are under intense pressure to crack down on the Gaza encampment and have already called hundreds of NYPD officers to the campus to make mass arrests of students, who were then all summarily suspended from school without any academic due process. Despite her efforts to placate Republican lawmakers, Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik is under growing pressure to resign, with House Speaker Mike Johnson demanding her removal for failing to safeguard Jewish students from “violent, antisemitic” protesters. (He also called for the mobilization of the National Guard—perhaps thinking about what happened at Kent State in 1970?).

And who are these “violent, antisemitic protesters?”  They are, like the protesters of the 1960s, those with the deepest commitment to social justice. They are the people who cannot go on with their studies when their country is aiding and abetting the mass murder of Palestinian civilians. They are the people who understand that the Israeli government is now the cutting edge of the worldwide right-wing movement, and that stopping this war is directly connected to stopping Trumpism in the United States. They are people revulsed by the racism of Israel’s callous disregard of Palestinian lives.  And yes, a significant number of them are Jewish, a fact demonstrated by the beautiful celebration of Passover’s feast of liberation for all people at many of these encampments last Monday.

And who are the people referring to the protesters as “violent antisemites”?  Well, most of the vocal Republican members of Congress consider themselves white Evangelical Christians, who until very recently referred to Jews as Christ killers, and many have a history of virulent racism in their political closets.  All support unchecked police violence against Black people and Latinos, and all support the right of every American to carry guns.

If the parallels between the 1960s and the current movement are accurate, we can anticipate two major trends. First, there will be increasing repression of the protests. And second, in response to the repression, more and more people will join the movement. It is useful to remember that as late as 1967 only a small minority of students were even opposed to the Vietnam War, let alone actively protesting it. Yet by 1968, the anti-war movement had become capable of mounting nation-wide mobilizations, broad and powerful enough to force President Johnson to not run for a second term. Planning for national demonstrations against the Israeli war has already begun.  Indeed, in the April 24 NY Times, David Brooks worried that the Democratic Convention (to be held in Chicago in August — as it was in 1968) might well be again the site of enormous protests that might doom the Biden Presidency.

Make no mistake about it: the students who are building the Gaza encampments are aware of the risks they are taking. They know (just as students in the 1960s knew) that what they are doing can lead to their arrest and/or expulsion from school. I would guess, from our experience in the 1960s, that the use of repressive force will grow in the coming weeks and months. But I would also guess that this movement is poised for a mass expansion which will surely happen when the IDF enters Rafah in the coming weeks.

The student movement will soon have to make a number of choices, just as we had to in the anti-Vietnam War movement.  While I have all the confidence in the world in the current movement leaders, I just want to highlight some of the issues the anti-Vietnam War movement had to address as it matured. First, the early anti-Vietnam War movement expressed its solidarity with the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. But the movement could only grow by reframing itself as an anti-war movement to appeal to the broadest number of Americans. Secondly, the anti-Vietnam War movement had to address the fact that it was primarily a movement of white elite student, but that opposition to the war was actually greatest among people of color. Martin Luther King’s decision to oppose the war (and Muhammed Ali’s draft resistance) went a long way to creating powerful links between the anti-war movement and the civil rights/Black Power movements. Finally, the anti-Vietnam War movement become a movement for democracy against militarism. By doing all these things, the movement grew enormously. I am confident the anti-Israeli War movement will be able to navigate these issues with far greater insight than we did over half a century ago.

One side note: I am especially excited to see Jewish students boldly claim their Jewishness while condemning Zionism. As I have written in previous posts, there is no reason why Jews should be beholden to Israel’s current form of Zionism, and a million Jewish reasons to oppose it. The Passover Seders at the encampments were of great importance for the future of American Judaism.

Lastly, I want to point out that the students who are now becoming anti-war activists are being changed in ways they cannot now know, but in ways that most will carry with them for the rest of their lives. A study of people who participated in the civil rights movement in Florida in the 1960s and 1970s found that almost all of them made different life choices than their peers who did not participate. They chose different careers, different spouses, different friends, and lived in different places.

The students who today are daring to call on us to have a conscience are the best and the brightest among us. They understand the real purpose of an education and are now getting schooled in the most important lessons of their lives. I am so proud of them. We all should offer them our support and be prepared to join them in the national mobilizations soon to come.

Distinguishing Anisemitism from Anti-Zionism Part II

In my two previous posts I argued that the failure of the pro-Palestinian left to denounce Hamas’ attack on Israel as antisemitic would come back to haunt them. And, indeed, right wing opportunists, Trump most notably, have positioned themselves as ‘the true defenders of Israel’ and are calling critics of Israel antisemitic.

Make no mistake about it: using this weapon, the rightwing is succeeding at intimidating universities to retract fifty years of racial justice efforts, and there is a real danger that many Jews, who have always been a bedrock of the Democratic Party coalition, will realign and vote for Trump.  Left-wing legislators, most notably Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman, are facing well-funded challengers because of their opposition to Israel’s war.

We need a clear understanding on what is and what is not antisemitism in order to defend ourselves from this rightwing attack

There are three positions on the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The first, held by the right wing of both the U.S. and Israel, is that any criticism of Israel, especially in the wake of October 7, is antisemitic. This position is simple: Israel is the home of the Jews, and any criticism of Israel is therefore an attack on Jews, i.e. it is antisemitic. 

The second position, held by many on the left (including, of course, some Jews in the U.S. and in Israel), is that Israel is an illegitimate settler state that was founded by dispossessing Palestinians of their land, and denying their national self-determination. To many who believe this, all attacks on Israel, including Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israeli civilians, are justified, and are not antisemitic. (To be fair, many who believe Israel is an illegitimate state react defensively to this criticism and say they ‘mourn the deaths of innocent lives on all sides of the conflict.’ But this is not sufficient: the concrete question is whether they directly condemn Hamas.)

The third position (which is barely being heard now) is that criticism of Israel and/or Zionism is not by itself antisemitic, but that there can be antisemitic critiques of Israel and Jews in general. This position has been well articulated by the  Nexus Task Force Statement on Antisemitism (LINK). Most importantly, this position maintains that it is antisemitic to lump all Jews together as collectively responsible for the state of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Or the flip side of the same coin: it is antisemitic to hold (as Trump did on March24) that any Jew that does not support Israel’s war is anti-Jewish.) Distinguishing a critique of Israel from a critique of Jewish people is important because Hamas failed to do so. It targeted Jewish civilians (including women, children and elders) on the grounds that all Israelis are culpable for Israel’s aggression against Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. (Those of us who have bothered to pay attention to the biographies of those killed and captured by Hamas learned that several of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas consisted of Jews who were among the strongest opponents of Netanyahu’s fanatic rightwing vision of Greater Israel.)

The problem of equating all Jews with the current rightwing version of Zionism is a grave error because it renders invisible those Jews both in Israel and in the diaspora who oppose Zionism as it exists today.  Please remember that in 2023 Israel was literally torn to pieces by mostly Jewish protests against Netanyahu’s efforts to nullify important parts of the Israeli constitution. Indeed, it seems obvious to many observers that Netanyahu is waging the current Israeli war precisely to shore up support for his rightwing Zionist regime that was on the verge of collapse before October 7.

The problem with equating all Jews with modern Zionism is that it also cannot appreciate the significance of Senator Schumer’s speech denouncing Netanyahu and calling for regime change. Chuck Schumer built his entire political career on support for Zionism, but that Zionism is now gone. The left must learn how to make a popular front against rightwing Zionism that includes the Schumers of the world who are mourning the loss of their version of Zionism. Whatever one thinks of Israeli policies before 2018 (the year the Nation-State Law declared Israel to be a Jewish nation), the Zionism of the far right that now runs Israel is a far cry from that of the Zionists actively seeking a two-state solution, or the early Zionists willing to live in a secular, non-religious country on equal footing with Palestinians and other Muslims and Christians.

It is essential to understand that Netanyahu is trying to not only destroy Palestine but also to destroy earlier concepts of Israel/Zionism. Indeed, I would argue that the rightwing coup that produced Netanyahu and Israel’s genocidal war is pursuing a path that may well lead to the destruction not only of previous ideas of Zionism, but of Israel itself. But this is a topic for another day….

The critique of Zionism as it now exists is not antisemitic. The new extremist rightwing Zionism seeks to destroy Palestine and make claim to Gaza and the West Bank as part of Greater Israel (with future claims on Lebanon and Jordan certainly in the works). It is incumbent on the entire world to isolate and destroy this extremist regime. And, as the March 25 UN Security Council vote for an immediate cease fire (without a U.S. veto) shows, Israel is well on the way to becoming an international pariah.

The only claim to legitimacy that is propping up this regime is its claim that it is standing up to antisemitism. The clearer we become about what is and is not antisemitism, the more effective we will become on defending democracy against the rightwing of both Israel and the United States.

The Weaponization of Antisemitism

There is a ton of confusion about what is and what is not antisemitism, and right-wingers are making the most out of it.

MAGA Republicans, in the name of rooting out antisemitism, are launching McCarthy-like witch hunts aimed at dismantling DEI (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) initiatives at some of America’s most prestigious and influential universities.  How is it possible that the new allies of the Jews are right-wing Christians—including open fascists– with their own history of virulent antisemitism?

Let’s start with the basics: antisemitism is a real thing. Ever since the Spanish Inquisition (1490s), nation-state builders in Europe targeted Jews as dangerous ‘outsiders’ in order to convince Christians that they shared a common identity as citizens of newly emerging nations. This antisemitism reached its peak during the late 19th and early 20th Century as European nation-states locked horns in imperialist conflicts. Rulers unleashed pogroms across Eastern Europe in order to whip up patriotic support for their wars.  Eventually the most powerful nation-state, Germany, undertook the systematic eradication of all Jews under its control. In the U.S., Jews were red-baited by anti-immigrant rightwing politicians throughout the first half of the 20th Century.

This dynamic abated, partly because of world revulsion at the Holocaust, partly because of the mass exodus of Jews out of Eastern Europe to Israel and the United States, and partly because of a re-configuration of nation-states themselves as economic globalization began to take hold after World War II.  In the U.S. and Western Europe, many Jews assimilated into a white middle class social order, often by changing their names, dropping Yiddish, and becoming religiously non-observant or embracing Reform Judaism.

But now the Western liberal social order is in a crisis. (See other posts on this site). As the middle class falls apart, a new generation of white Christian nationalists has begun a project to re-shape Western nation-states. And a new generation of ultra-nationalist Zionists have seized power in Israel.

The white Christian nationalist alliance with Zionism is of recent origin. Up until at least the 1980s, white evangelical Christians spouted virulent McCarthyist antisemitism, and earlier, had supported Hitler. Why are they rushing to defend Israel now?  It’s quite simple, really: Israel is now the white nationalist project of the Mideast. We could argue about whether it has always been so. (In Israel’s early days, left wing Zionists envisioned a socialist Israel in which Jews and non-Jews were equal citizens even while the Israeli state engaged in the systematic displacement of Palestinians from their land and homes). But certainly, since the 1980s, the self-defined ‘settler’ movement has sought to aggressively expand Jewish claims to land and to remove all Palestinians. The definition of Israel as a nation of Jews alone was not fully enshrined into law until the enactment of the Nation-State Law in 2018. Since then, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have experienced a qualitatively greater level of unrelenting aggression, and the Netanyahu government has systematically attacked democratic rights of Israeli Jews as well. The U.S. white Christian nationalist movement is supporting Israel because Israel is now the vanguard of the world’s rightwing revolution.

For these reasons, anti-Zionism is not antisemitic but is anti-fascist. Furthermore, Zionism does not represent the aspiration of Jews everywhere. As Shaul Magid argues LINK, the region now called Israel does indeed have special significance to many Jews. The problem, he points out, is not that Jews want to live in Judea/Zion/Palestine/Israel. The problem is that the state of Israel claims that Jews and Jews alone own that land, trampling on other people’s legitimate attachment to that area who are Muslim, Christian, Ba’hai, and secular people. To call Israel “the home of the Jews” is also problematic because most of the world’s Jewish population has no desire to live in Israel.

Hamas’ October 7 attack posed a real challenge: was it a legitimate defense against Zionist aggression? There can be no doubt that the Palestinian people have been experiencing a new level of Zionist aggression and expansion of Israel’s claims to land since the passage of the 2018 Nation-State Law.  It is also true that many Arab states were in the process of abandoning their commitment to Palestinian self-determination, leaving Palestinians’ feeling isolated and vulnerable. A military action aimed at stopping Israeli expansionism and galvanizing Arab solidarity for these reasons might have been warranted. But I would argue that Hamas’ attack was not anti-Zionist; it was antisemitic. It was not aimed at Israeli military or government targets: it was aimed at terrorizing Jewish civilians and included mass murders and sexual assaults on elderly people, women and children who were targeted because they were Jews.  This equation of all Jews as responsible for Israeli aggression against Palestinians played right into the hands of the rightwing Zionist project (Israel = the Jewish people). But this equation is empirically wrong. 27% of Israel is not Jewish. And Israelis’ politics is not monolithic. In 2023, millions of Israelis marched in the streets to stop Netanyahu’s attack on democratic rights. And today there are a sizable number of Israeli Jews as well as non-Jews protesting the Israeli war. Many Jews around the world oppose Zionism and support Palestinian self-determination. To equate all Jews as the enemy of all Palestinians is not anti-Zionism; it is antisemitism. 

This confusion about what is and is not antisemitism came to a head in the U.S. when some progressives defended Hamas’ October 7 attack. I was personally offended by online posts made by former comrades of mine who stated that the 1200 murdered Jews were legitimate targets because they were illegal occupiers of Palestinian land. At the time, I wrote a post warning progressives of the consequence of not calling out Hamas’ antisemitism. Sure enough, the rightwing quickly saw the opportunity to use this mistake and used it to whip up Jewish (and Christian nationalist) support for Zionist aggression as well as to attack progressive initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion on college campuses.

The lesson to me is simple enough: we can ill-afford to excuse antisemitism on the grounds that Jews are white and privileged, and in the case of Israelis, occupiers. Jews are people and even people living in a nation based on an illegitimate claim (Zionism) can suffer egregious discrimination as Jews. And when people are attacked because they are Jews, they must be defended. But we cannot let the rightwing get away with their argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitic. Let us be clear what antisemitism is and is not. If we are not, the progressives’ gains of the last fifty years are in jeopardy.