By Andrei S. Markovits · Monday, April 29, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative The following text is an expanded English-language version of the German article “Palestine Avenue,” published in Konkret 2/24, pp. 38–39.
 I remember it well. It was in the spring of 1987 when I commenced my lecture in Osnabrück on the German left with these remarks: “So that we understand each other: Regardless of my heavy criticisms and profound objections to many facets of its current affairs, I fully accept the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and do not want its destruction!” People looked at me as if I had lost my mind!
But I said: “Such a fundamental statement of situating the speaker’s normative orientation is de rigueur at the beginning of every discussion involving anything relating to Israeli politics, society, and culture. The very existence of the country has simply never been accepted as a matter of course. Thus, it must be affirmed in every case.” Nothing has changed in the ensuing forty years. None of the 193 UN members must experience this every day in the most varied discussions all over the world, be it about their politics or society, culture or food, language or habits. None of these items are legitimate in Israel’s case. Just witness the bitter conflicts involving “inauthentic” Israeli food and its alleged appropriation of “authentic” Palestinian food, conveniently forgetting that all foods everywhere are appropriations and amalgams of various cultures. The more appropriation, the better, I would argue. Look at how much better food in Germany has become by appropriating Italian, Turkish, and Greek food.
Following violent conflicts, hostile neighbors may not accept each other’s post-conflict existence for a while, but none have had the temporal length (seventy-five years and counting) or the spatial dimension (reaching across the globe, far from the respective country’s borders) that pertains in the case of Israel. Serbia may not accept the existence of Kosovo, nor Georgia that of Abkhazia, but either’s alleged nonexistence does not matter in a discussion about them in Nigeria or Thailand. What makes the Israeli situation so unique is that this ubiquitous unacceptance exists in all corners of the globe and among the most varied publics. Making it more pernicious still is that this unacceptance is perhaps more prominent in spaces of civil society than in those of governments. Even in the case of apartheid-ruled South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s (with which Israel is always associated), it was South Africa’s apartheid regime that was anathema, not the country’s existence per se. One did not have to begin any discussion about South African apartheid by stating that one did not desire the destruction of South Africa as a country.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Monday, February 8, 2021 Matthias Küntzel is a German political scientist with a focus on the Middle East. He provides astute analyses of the German and more broadly the European role in responding to the challenges posed by the Iranian regime; two of his books are available in English from Telos Press. His current piece, published here, sheds important light on the challenge of the moment: the Biden administration’s vocal commitment to returning to the JCPOA—a long-standing position during the presidential campaign—but facing continued intransigence from Tehran, willing to accelerate its nuclear program, indeed all the more so in the wake of the Biden election. Once it became clear that Trump and Pompeo were on their way out and that the incoming administration, which had been advertising its support for the Obama-era deal, would take over, Tehran became more, not less, aggressive on the nuclear front. It is presumably calculating that increased pressure will lead Washington to buckle by lifting sanctions first, in a way that would certainly not have succeeded with the previous administration. That makes the moment all the more fragile and fraught. Küntzel leads us through this maze.
Continue reading →
By Tony Stigliano · Thursday, October 29, 2020 Isaac Lopez has argued in a commentary published recently on this site that Trump has a good chance of winning this November because the liberals have replaced “American values” with laws and norms that are foreign and enraging. In response, the “silent majority” (in fact, a minority) of Americans elected “a very stable genius.” This essay is about the nature of an aspect of Donald J. Trump’s governance that has been overlooked: his cult. None of the usual political arguments can explain the desperate stances taken by his followers. The explanation offered here is twofold: One is the need for reversing a feared path to secular “socialism.” The second is that Trump has asserted that reality is subject to his will and personality. Ancillary to this is the idea that Trump’s persona can unify America by subordinating “difference” to a mythic national identity.
Donald Trump has, for a large minority (possibly 40 percent of the electorate), the persona of a mythic Hero. A Hero who can overcome all obstacles by sheer will. Through a close reading of Trump’s angry language, one realizes that Trump has woven a recognizable myth for citizens bereft of purpose and power. This is Trump’s will-to-power. Trump has given meaning and purpose to people losing out to technology, urban wealth, science’s truth, and social helplessness exacerbated by the pandemic. He is a hero of revenge against regulators, the media, and modernity itself. Even the pandemic cannot overcome him; he overcomes the pandemic, until recently.
Continue reading →
By Florindo Volpacchio · Tuesday, October 27, 2020 Isaac Lopez’s comments in “Why Trump Will Win” anticipate Trump’s reelection as the result of a reactionary backlash by a conservative moderate public. This backlash is directed at a weak and failing leadership in the Republican Party and a Democratic Party that has abandoned the “silent majority” for the interests of minorities and women. Yet not only is it questionable whether this analysis of the backlash offers any insight, it is questionable whether the backlash is even representative of mainstream public opinion. There is more of a consensus for the progressive agenda than Lopez is willing to admit. The wealthy suburbs of New York are as much inclined to vote for a progressive Black gay candidate as a working-class district in Queens is inclined to elect a progressive Latinx. Most of all, let us not forget that even in the face of personal animosity, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes. So how does all of this square with the reactionary backlash of the “silent majority”?
As we all know, Trump won the presidency through the Electoral College by winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania with about 70 thousand votes. It is possible that the reactionary backlash in these states flipped them for Trump. But not only does this not make them representative of public opinion, given the fragmented, unverified, and biased sources that feed public opinion today; it is questionable whether the reactionary backlash is itself founded on serious grievances. With demographic inequalities shifting the balance of federal power to states less representative of the national consensus, the outcome of presidential elections is determined by a few states where local opinion, whether informed, uninformed, or dis-informed, can determine the long-term outcome of national politics.
Continue reading →
By Mark G. E. Kelly · Friday, October 23, 2020 As we near the denouement of the 2020 U.S. general election, the actual in-person one-day ballot—which will surely be less decisive this year than previously, due to the relative prevalence of early voting—Donald J. Trump’s presidency looks doomed. Polling resolutely predicts his demise. Of course, pollsters are cautious this year after almost equally decisive predictions in 2016 proved misguided, and indeed there is still reason to think that Trump might nonetheless triumph (see in particular Isaac Lopez’s recent prediction to this effect in this very blog in his “Why Trump Will Win”).
Trump’s defeat would in a way provide a logical end point to a consistent wailing for his blood from the most vocal sectors of the American public sphere, which began well before he became president. The consistency of the discourse against Trump is nothing short of uncanny—indeed, in some ways it seems unchanged, fossilized, left over from when it was intended to prevent the unthinkable election of Trump from ever taking place. We might read in this determined carrying-on of the rhetorical electioneering of 2016 over the entirety of Trump’s term a kind of denial that Trump’s election ever happened. Indeed, Trump’s election was for urbane liberals so unthinkable that their capitalized “Resistance” to Trump has not been so much a political resistance movement as a reaction of psychological resistance to the very existence of his presidency. From such a perspective, Trump’s defeat might seem to offer a return to sanity and normality, one that will allow “Resisters” to pretend his presidency never happened.
Continue reading →
By Isaac Lopez · Thursday, October 15, 2020 Donald Trump will win in November because the same forces that propelled him to victory in 2016 are even stronger today in 2020. This year is shaping up to be the most turbulent in American history since at least 1968, if not 1941: we are living in the era of black swans. But if you keep spotting them, are black swans still so rare? Common sense dictates that Trump will lose resoundingly in November given the chaos of the past eight months, public fatigue from the last four years, and near-daily October surprises. Then again, common sense also dictated that Trump and his campaign would have gone the way of the 9-9-9 Plan and Original Mavericks within three weeks of descending the escalator at Trump Tower. At the risk of eating my own words in a bit less than one month, here is the quant- and wonk-free case for why Trump will win, poll numbers be damned.
The reason for Trump’s 2016 victory is simple: support of Donald Trump was and is a reactionary backlash against eight years of progressive overreach during the Obama administration and twenty-five years of weak Republican leadership. Donald Trump is crude, ill-tempered, unprofessional, and unfit to be president—much less a cultural figure—but was elected almost exclusively for these reasons. Contrary to the media catechism, Russia did not throw the election to Donald Trump, fake news articles from Macedonian click farms did not convince hordes of Baby Boomers on Facebook that Hillary Clinton leads a ring of satanic pedophiles, and 46.1% of voters in 2016 were not white nationalists. Trump won because a plurality of voters hated the elite class so much that they were willing to vote for such a man just to humiliate the GOP in the primary and the overall political establishment in the general. Trump’s victory was because of voters’ frustrations, and any retrospective analysis of 2016 applied to the current election year must start and end with them.
Continue reading →
|
|
