I Don't Get It

 Maybe it's time for me to admit that I really just don't know or understand what's happening in the mind of the great American public. The past few weeks have brought a raft of data showing that the people of this nation, at least in the most relevant swing states that will determine the outcome of the next election, are thinking very differently about the 2024 race than I am. 

From what I can see, at my vantage point, this looming election is an existential choice that will decide the fate of American democracy. On one side, we have a basically normal candidate—flawed in some ways, admirable in others—who, whatever else he may do, is at least not likely to overturn our democratic institutions and become a dictator. On the other side, we have a would-be strongman, currently under multiple federal and state indictments for trying to subvert the last election, who has made no secret of the fact that his goal in a second term will be to persecute his enemies, eviscerate the independence of the Justice Department and transform it into a political weapon of the presidency, rip apart communities by expelling millions of undocumented immigrants, and empty the federal government of all but his most craven lackeys. 

That's how I see it, and how most people I know see it; how, though, do the American people see it? They are perfectly ready to re-elect Trump, at least according to the latest polls. And why is that? Is it because they disagree profoundly with Biden's policies? Is it because they are so utterly disaffected and disillusioned with American government and institutions that they want to join Trump in burning it all down? No, not at all. By all accounts, the opposition to Biden is not ideological. Most people support his policies when they are described to them. The vice president of the same party outperforms Biden in the same polls. 

What then do they dislike about him? He is old, they say. The economy stinks. And okay, maybe there's some truth to both (though the status of the economy is actually far better than anyone could have predicted a year ago!); but is that a reason to end our democracy? 

Nor is this even the worst of the weirdness. It's not just that Trump is ahead in the polls, a year out from the election; it's also that even traditional Democratic constituencies seem to favor him by a wider margin than they have any Republican in the past. I was listening to the 538 Politics podcast yesterday, and one of the guest pollsters said that she has been hearing from many Democrats lately that "If Trump were president, we wouldn't be in all these wars [in Ukraine and Israel, that is to say—not that the U.S. is 'in' these wars in a traditional sense]" The other hosts stopped her and asked her to repeat. They assumed, as I did, that she had misspoken. But no. She repeated: Democrats were the ones telling her that. 

I sometimes get the feeling that, like the rays of light from a distant star, it's almost as if people always finally pick up the right idea when it is too late, and has long since become inapplicable to present realities. 

Perhaps what we're seeing in these responses to the pollster, for instance, is that there was a long delay between Bush's invasion of Iraq and the moment when the American public finally developed some skepticism about the overweening projection of U.S. military force abroad. And we might be tempted to say: better late than never! But no, I can't agree with that, because the American public appears to be belatedly discovering this lesson at exactly the wrong moment—exactly the moment, that is to say, when there actually is a powerful geopolitical adversary invading his neighbors in blatant acts of aggression. People finally turned against the Neocons, therefore, at exactly the time when they had more arguments in their favor than they ever did before!

If there's any truth to the notion that the Ukraine war would have ended by now, if Trump were president, for instance, it is of course only in the sense that Trump would have done nothing to stop Putin; he may even have endorsed his invasion; and the Russian military would have long since quashed the Ukrainian resistance and annexed perhaps the whole country to Russia, or else installed a supine puppet government in Kiev. Is this what the American people would prefer? 

We are seeing a similar dynamic unfold with regard to Israel. I am honestly astounded by how little support Biden has received from his constituents—and even members of his own administration—for the policy he has pursued. And as with skepticism about U.S. military aid, one might think this would be a good thing. The elite consensus around offering knee-jerk support for the Israeli government and silencing all human rights criticism of the IDF's actions seems to have evaporated. Yet, this sea-change of opinion is coming, bizarrely, at exactly the moment when Israel actually has faced the worst and deadliest attack on its citizens in decades—at precisely the moment when it can argue with great plausibility that it does indeed face an existential threat that must be countered with military force. 

Overnight, people finally woke up to the idea that maybe the IDF is doing bad things in Gaza and the West Bank. But they seem to have come to this true-if-belated conclusion immediately after Hamas actually did launch a wholly unprovoked, vicious, premeditated attack against Israeli citizens, killing over a thousand innocents and taking hundreds of civilians hostage. Why on earth have people chosen this moment to become critics of Israel? And of course, I do understand that the civilian carnage unleashed by Israel's retaliation is horrific and should be condemned. But people seem to have no awareness of how much this was the deliberate and foreseen consequence of Hamas's actions. 

This is the terrorist group's MO, after all: launch outrageous provocations against Israel that effectively goad the Israeli government into a military response. Given conditions in Gaza, this response will all-but-inevitably harm civilians. Meanwhile, Hamas really does seem to use civilian infrastructure to hide its weapons and personnel. Then, when IDF strikes, meant to target Hamas leaders and ammunition caches, damage this infrastructure and kill civilians, Hamas can benefit from the propaganda victory and see global opinion turn against Israel. 

To be sure, by failing to take sufficient steps to protect civilians and unleashing carnage from the skies on Gaza, the IDF has walked into Hamas's trap. They took the bait, and Hamas is the only winner from them doing so: now, the global community—and even large segments of the U.S. State Department, according to the internal dissent channels—seem to have already lost sight of the original Hamas attack that started this round of violence, and now they seem to perceive Israel as the aggressor.

If Israel is playing into Hamas's hands by killing civilians, though, we also have to recognize that we as critics of Israel's response are also falling into the trap. Hamas knew by its actions that this carnage in Gaza would result. They incited it and welcomed it, because they foresaw that it would yield a propaganda victory for them. And the global community seems to be going along with it—including many Democratic voters and members of Biden's administration—blithely forgetting the October 7 attack and portraying the whole conflict as an Iraq-style case of U.S. imperialism. 

The State Department internal dissent memo mentioned above no doubt spoke for many Democratic voters when it said, "Furthermore, Americans do not want the U.S. military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle East.” Yet, this war is hardly senseless. It was certainly not unprovoked. Did everyone already forget why Israel is doing this in the first place? Did they miss that 1,200 Israeli civilians were butchered in cold blood? Do they think that any nation on Earth would simply decline to respond to such an attack? Do they think Hamas can be left alone to regroup, just so it can strike again a month or a year or several years from now? 

Generals are always fighting the last war, they say, and perhaps that is what we are seeing here. The mood of the country and the electorate seems to have finally caught up with the lessons of Iraq and to have soured on the idea of foreign military adventurism. Great!, one might say. But they have apparently learned this lesson too well. They are now overcompensating in precisely the opposite direction. Because now, the foreign conflicts in which the U.S. is involved do not have to do with any adventurism on our part. They stem from the fact that our democratic allies are actually facing existential threats. And of course, it is no doubt true that both Ukraine and Israel are flawed democracies (we—too—for that matter, are a flawed democracy). But that does not mean that we should just abandon them to be destroyed by our adversaries!

There has often before, of course, been a pendulum swing in American life between these two extremes. The United States engages in aggressive imperialism abroad, and then retreats into isolationism. And I guess what concerns me is that both extremes seem to be motivated by our worst and most selfish impulses. As Richard Hofstadter once observed, for instance, it's hard to say—in reexamining the debates around imperialism at the turn of the century from an historical perspective—which side was more racist. Both the pro- and anti-imperialist sides used racist arguments to press their case. And so it went likewise, on through the twentieth century—Americans were far too gung-ho to intervene in World War I, and then—when they saw what a brutal and nasty thing that war was—they overcompensated in the opposite direction; all too many of them embraced an inward-looking "America First" isolationism at exactly the moment when rearmament was needed to defeat Hitler. 

I fear we're doing the same now. We are learning the right lesson at the wrong time. We ought to have questioned our lockstep support for the actions of Israel's military when all it was doing was occupying the West Bank and enforcing a blockade on Gaza—not when it is now fighting for Israel's life against a group that has proven it wants to kill Israeli citizens simply for existing. So too, we ought to have questioned U.S. military force when it was being used to start a blatantly aggressive and unnecessary war in Iraq, not when a small amount of U.S. military aid is the only thing enabling our Ukrainian allies to defend their country's existence against Putin's invasion. 

It is this dynamic I had in mind in a poem I wrote back when Trump was first running for office, and it seemed that the Republican party was about to shift from its previous hawkish stance to a newfound isolationism. Addressing the great American public, I wrote: "Every single time you make the right choice/ (From the consequentialist way of viewing it)/ You make sure that first you’ve found the/Very worst reason for doing it." 

Even all of this, however, is providing more of a logical explanation for what is really happening in the mind of the great American public than is perhaps warranted. Even here, after all, I am pretending that I can explain Biden's polling numbers via the "overcorrection effect." But it's not clear that this is what's actually happening. After all, as noted above, most of the opposition to Biden appears to have nothing to do with his foreign policy, or any other policies of his administration. It is largely non-ideological. It is because he is old, or boring, or uncool, or prices are too high, or something. 

The possibility that there is no logical explanation for this, and that no one really knows how to explain it, is becoming ever more apparent. It was borne in upon me earlier this week, when I read two Politico articles about the president's current polling troubles back-to-back. Both articles were by political strategists and consultants, and both sought to advise the president on what he should do differently to win back voters. Both articles even appeared on the same day. Yet they gave precisely opposite advice. One said: Biden should talk more about "Bidenomics" and how well his policies have worked for the economy! He just needs to keep repeating this message and eventually it will break through! The other said, with equal confidence, that the one most important takeaway from his recent conversations with Democrats is that Biden needs "to heave 'Bidenomics' in the dumpster."

I have often stood in the same position as these pundits. I worked for several years as a policy and communications strategist for an advocacy group, claiming to have some insight into the public mind and how to influence people's decisions and viewpoints. But perhaps it is time to admit a little humility. Perhaps I can't actually fathom what is going on with people. 

This is why I admire so much something Francis Fukuyama once said, in responding to a journalist's questionnaire asking various political prophets and prognosticators why U.S. politics had become so toxic and polarized. Alone among the respondents, Fukuyama said, in effect: I don't know. "The single most confounding thing about the Trump era," he wrote three years ago, "is that we still do not really understand why more than 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump, and why there remains a smaller core of fanatical supporters who will believe anything he says." I second that.

Maybe then, we should just concede, at this point, that we really don't know what's going on with the voters. And that maybe the reason we don't know is because there is no logical explanation to be found. Perhaps "there is no light beyond the curtain," as James Thomson wrote, in his "City of Dreadful Night." Perhaps the reason why all the political consultants keep getting it wrong and offering conflicting advice is because there is no right answer. Perhaps the reason why "all the oracles are dumb or cheat," as Thomson put it, is "Because they have no secret to express." Perhaps it is time for a little epistemic humility at last. I join with Gottfried Benn in this regard, who once closed out one of his haunting poems with the line: "I don't know it to this day, and now must go myself." (Hofmann trans.)