Privilege, Palestine and Penises

Who's to blame for stunning Democratic losses?

Something I’ve been trying to understand in this whiplash week is why are the Democrats offering an objectively unpopular product, and who’s to blame for that? Certainly the party doesn’t lack resources — Harris spent 3x over Trump — nor does it lack educational, economic or social status. Party insiders sit at the pinnacle of the American pile. Why aren’t they offering a product people want? Who’s to blame for that?

Yes, this is an ur Jewish way of framing things. Jewish intellectual culture tells us to ask questions that beget questions. We tell ourselves the questioning is better than the answer, but honestly it can be a frustrating dialectical method. I want some answers! I need them! Which I’m not going to get a few days after an epic realignment of American politics, the final apotheosis of Trump’s remake of the Republican party and the coming potential please-God-make-it-so rebuilding of the Democrats.

Who’s to blame? The party is the easy target — they’re the group who ran the candidate. It was a scandal-free, incredibly well-financed and brilliantly executed campaign helmed by an objectively good candidate endorsed by every celebrity you’ve ever heard of and who gave brilliant speeches at jam-packed arenas.

It was flawless. It was pointless.

Voters vote for a person and a party; they also vote for what those people and institutions represent. Democrats represent the left, which as I’ve been arguing re: the Israel-Iran wars and for much longer, hasn’t evolved since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. The left views everything, absolutely everything, through that prism, even if it’s 100% wrong for other countries, genders, economics, curricula, etc — that’s just the deal with the left. It’s race race race with some gender/not-my-penis thinking thrown in just to keep you guessing. Don’t you worry, we’re going to talk a lot more about penises.

For the Dems, the left is manifest as either a malleable, change-with-the-times Center Left like Harris who doesn’t run an explicitly identity-based campaign but, ahem, she’s a black woman who went to Howard! It’s inescapable to observe that she’s the one who’s running — and not other, possibly more voter-attractive, insiders like Buttigieg, Shapiro, Newsom et al. I’m not saying a black woman from Howard shouldn’t run, she should give it a go for sure and I voted for her, but you can’t say it’s not about identity when her very title as nominee seems to be… a lot about identity.

The Dems offer Center-Leftist shape-shifters or they offer Far Leftists “progressives” spearheaded by legislators like Cortez, Sanders and Tlaib. (But not Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman! Trend forming perhaps?) Where these progressives progress to is fair to ask. It seems to be an anti-Western Burning Man for non gendered people who only eat plants and send emojis to each other instead of having sex. Good times.

You have to look hard within the party to find Centrists who, wouldn’t you know it, also appeal to working class people of all backgrounds except one: rich. Their pronouns are hard/work. I think the handful of Dem centrists are the exception that proves the rule: Shapiro, Fetterman, a few Long Island congresspeople and apparently one congresswoman in rural Washington who cares a lot about elks and knows a ton about cars. I hope she has a long and enduring political career: Marie Perez.

On a deeper level, I’m curious to understand the difference between left wing cultural norms, with it’s focus on genetics, genitals and genocide, and the party who seems to spend a lot of time catering to them. Is this left wing, um, obsession with not-the-right-important-things heading our nation in the wrong direction? Put another way, do you think a $400,000 college degree in Reverse Gender Colonial Plant-Based Studies is a smart investment?

My sense on day 3 of processing an earthquake I certainly didn’t predict, is that, by the fall of 2024, leftist cultural norms have moved so far from the concerns, identities and politics of average Americans that the many inexplicable coalitions for Trump (like Michigan Arabs and Orthodox Jews) are explained more by culture than party. They’re explained by affinities more than institutions.

So who’s to blame for that? Who’s to blame for the Democratic party not standing for something a majority of people care about? This is what I want to understand.

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A dear friend who’s far smarter than I am doesn’t see or feel this alienation from the left as acutely as I do. He doesn't think they are utterly dominated by cross-dressing Hamas supporters. As an aside, just to be helpful, I think “Not My Penis for Palestine” would be a great slogan for the next university-condoned antisemitic protest. Who knows, maybe I’ll put on a mask and vandalize a subway car too as we usher in the great revolution!

His point is that the left isn’t so virulent, potent or frankly, terrifying as I see it. I’m overexcited and reactionary. (C’mon, those are two of my favorite settings!) I’m sure in many ways he’s right and I’m right. We have different perspectives. He lives in a beautiful rural setting surrounded by apparently always very happy people who spend time outside. He’s not as traditional a Jew as I am in this current incarnation of my life, living in Brooklyn where people in my own nerdy, insular community are split between, on the one side, Jewish performance arists for Palestine and those of us who are terrified of Islamic mass murderers.

Am I being reactive and overexcited? I feel I can connect the dots between 9/11 and 10/7 pretty easily. Zero people on the left make this connection. Why?

I feel like I know how to respond to all this. I feel like rooting for Israel to win an existential war is better than it losing an existential war, but I am literally shouted at in the streets by leftist activists for having these thoughts. (Helpfully, they also called me a Nazi while filming me.)

I do not think it’s wildly political or radical to say that a peaceful, democratic, economically viable two-state solution isn’t coming tomorrow or even the day after tomorrow. I feel a truly Free Palestine is as likely as me waking up as a 6’ adonis instead of a Tom Cruised-sized dude who likes ice cream.

There are differences of opinion and perspective. I think that the left is so far off course that the only good thing about this election is the opportunity for profound change. (And while we’re at it, for regime change in Iran.)

If you agree that the overall trajectory of lefism is way off target, and that’s in part to blame of the stunning Democratic losses, then let’s change it.

The places where this off kilter leftism festers, I mean, inhabits, is in our universities — both in elite institutions and large public schools. It lives in blue state elementary classrooms, in corporate HR guidelines that have people write their pronouns in their email signatures as if I need to communicate with their genitals, and certainly in most of the media that transmits and amplifies these genital-based messages. The media isn’t to blame per se, the media is a platform for information and conversation that is vital for democracy, but they’re certainly now caught with their pants down after poll-driven coverage gave Harris a seeming chance to win. In fact, she was toast from day one.

One example of this: There were news stories about people leaving Trump rallies early. I wanted to believe, I feel like I was led to believe, these people left because they were souring on Trump since he’s a raving malignant narcissist. Turns out they went home early because they didn’t need to stay. They already knew they’d vote for him. That’s a difference in interpretation I would have enjoyed understanding.

I consume the news to understand things, not to have a hysterical graduate from a highly selective liberal arts school who’s saving up for a six-figure EV scream at me about privilege, Palestine and penises, which is apparently 130% of newsrooms.

It’ll be comparatively easy to change the Democratic party. It’s an organization of people. Fire some — I would start with all and go from there — and cultivate the folks who empirically win elections. That seems to be one handful of centrists and two handfuls of progressive extremists, but perhaps with the Bush and Bowman bow outs, those divisive extremists will be tempered in a bid to keep their paychecks.

Or… they’ll win the intramural fight, take over the party and double down. Sanders, Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley are plenty powerful.

Changing the culture will be harder. How do you get the phrenologists out of the faculty lounge — again? How do you explain that yes, the Lenape were in Manhattan when the Dutch arrived in giant ships and killed their way to domination which I now very much enjoy four hundred years later, but who was here when the Lenape arrived? They didn’t evolve from chipmunks and oak trees, they migrated here from somewhere else by killing and copulating their way across the continent. Is that bad? Is it worthy spending six figures of college credits and a lifetime of debt to ground your political identity?

I don’t know how to change left wing culture. I do know that I confuse it with the Democratic party — as much as right wing culture gets conflated with Trump’s party. Teasing this all apart reveals threads for weaving something better.

To me, on day 3, this is the challenge I’m seeing. We need to change the Democratic party and left wing culture. We need educational institutions to produce intelligent people to tackle hard problems and to enhance our culture, not to become perverted by false narratives that leads us to affinity groups like Queers for Palestine who will fight to their vegan deaths to promote terrorism but won’t fat shame me for ice cream consequences.

Vegan Death is a cool band name. Vegans promoting my death, not so much.

Shabbat Shalom.