Coalition Politics

 There is a great deal of attention being paid right now to the difficulties Biden faces in pulling together the increasingly fractious Democratic coalition. The New York Times's "On Politics" newsletter yesterday dealt with the challenges Biden may face from the current round of campus protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

The problem, as they rightly point out, is that the Democratic coalition not only includes people with different views on this issue—it includes people whose views of the conflict are diametrically opposed to one another. As a result, many analysts are looking with great trepidation at the upcoming August Democratic Convention, when protesters are likely to pour into Chicago en masse to challenge Biden's response to the war. 

I don't mean to diminish these political challenges; I think they are real. But less attention has been paid so far to the fact that Trump faces almost exactly the same challenge on exactly the same issue. Trump's base has become just as internally divided on Israel and Palestine as Biden's is (or will become so soon)—albeit for profoundly different reasons. The media has been slower to wake up to this fact, but it is nonetheless real.

So, the challenge that Biden faces in stitching together a workable coalition out of such heterogenous material may not be unique to him—it may simply be a fact of party politics more broadly. And studying it therefore sheds light on the nature of politics in democracies in general. 

First, Biden's challenge. The United States's ally Israel is fighting a war that has brought incalculable suffering and horror to the people of Gaza. It has resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and the destruction of most of the habitable structures in the enclave. 

Yet, Israel is doing this—it has to be acknowledged—in response to an appalling provocation, to which any government on Earth would be forced to respond, if it happened to their citizens—namely, the worst terrorist attack ever committed on its soil, and the most deadly attack on Jewish civilians anywhere in the world since the Holocaust. 

It is also fighting this war in an effort to liberate a group of civilian hostages, including U.S. citizens, who may as we speak be suffering torture or other unspeakable acts at the hands of their Hamas captors.

Meanwhile, Israel is also fending off drone strikes from Iran that—however ineffectively—seem to have been lobbed with utter disregard for any civilian lives that might be in their path (and, in fact, the only casualty of these strikes proved to be an Arab citizen of Israel). 

To be sure, Iran launched this attack in response to an earlier tit-for-tat escalation from Israel. But it is worth noting that Israel's strikes at least hit military targets; whereas Iran's retaliation was blindly and haphazardly thrown at any innocent people in its path. 

In the face of this situation, Biden cannot realistically abandon some form of U.S. support for Israel. Nor would he want to. Nor should he. Yet, neither can he ignore the very real human rights violations that Israel is committing in the pursuit of its war in Gaza—as well as in its now half-century-long occupation of the West Bank. 

Biden has tried, however imperfectly, to accommodate the truth about both sides of this conflict. He has condemned Israeli settler violence in the West Bank and called on the Israeli leadership to protect civilian lives in Gaza. At the same time, he has mobilized U.S. forces to shoot down Iranian drones and missiles that were aimed at Israeli civilians. He has also declared his support for Israel's right to defend itself from Hamas's terrorist attacks, even if he condemns some of the means they have deployed to that end. 

I'm not saying Biden's response to all of this has been flawless. I think the U.S. government should attach stronger human rights conditions to its military aid to Israel, so that these weapons and funds will not be used to commit war crimes against Gazan civilians. Biden may not always strike the right balance between the two sides. But it seems to me that any analysis of Biden's options has to acknowledge that there are at least two sides to this conflict. And the moral arguments are not all in favor of one over the other. 

This attempt on Biden's part to find a middle ground, which condemns human rights violations on both sides of the conflict and tries to protect civilians in both Israel and the occupied territories, may seem to be a reasonable way to stitch together a working coalition for the Democratic Party. And it may in fact be the best option available to him. 

Likewise, I thought that Sen. Schumer's speech was a reasonable way to thread the needle: whatever else Democrats disagree on, the vast majority of us can agree that Netanyahu's government has to go. This is a principle on which liberal Zionists as well as partisans of the Palestinian national cause could in theory find overlap: none of us is in favor of Israel's current leadership. 

But Biden's problem runs deeper than this. He cannot simply placate both sides, because there are elements of the Democratic coalition who refuse to cede any possible ground to their opponents. There are people on the pro-Israel side who refuse to tolerate any criticism of the Israeli leadership and its military. These, however, seem less vocal at the moment, and honestly seem like a much less serious problem for Biden than what he is facing on the other side: namely, the rabid pro-Hamas contingent. 

I have spent a long time now observing the campus protest movement, and I truly do not believe this is an unfair characterization of their position (or at least, the position of a substantial bloc of them). Those protesters who wish to differentiate themselves from outright support of Hamas could take steps to do so. But I rarely if ever see them doing it. Instead, they wave signs and shout slogans that easily lend themselves to the interpretation that they are endorsing violence against Israeli civilians. And then they make no effort whatsoever to distance themselves from such an interpretation, but rather ask to be absolved of such an interpretation preemptively. 

I don't mean to say that waving a Palestinian flag or calling for a "Free Palestine" is always and everywhere an inherently pro-Hamas statement. But, when I woke up on a university campus the day after the atrocities of October 7, and suddenly saw Palestinian flags hanging out of windows where I had not seen them the day before, I don't know how else to interpret them. Symbols take on meaning from context. And the message of that flag on that day in the present conflict was unmistakable: it meant people were in effect giving a thumbs up to the mass murder and pogrom that Hamas had just committed. 

Trying to incorporate this segment of the left is a dead end for coalition politics. It is possible to find common ground across the spectrum of opinion on Israel-Palestine when it comes to criticizing Israel's handling of the war and the actions of Israel's government in the West Bank. Such criticisms have long been a mainstay of liberal U.S. politics. But it is not possible to find a position that somehow unites into a single coalition people who believe that Israeli civilians have a right to live with those who think they do not. These are simply incompatible viewpoints. 

So far, Biden has tried to maintain his coalition by speaking with enough sympathy for Palestinian civilians to hopefully peel off a segment at least of the anti-Israel protesters. But a very large number of them have, as I say, adopted a position with which it is not possible to compromise. If campus protesters believe that Biden is "Genocide Joe," and that Israel and all its people—men, women, and children—deserve to be swept into the sea for being a "settler-colonial, Zionist, imperialist, apartheid state" or whatever the rhetoric of the moment happens to be, there is no realistic way he can meet them in the middle. 

The only solution Biden seems to have found to this conundrum is either to go silent, or—if he is forced to speak on the topic—to be as vague as possible. 

To be sure, the White House condemned the "antisemitic protests." But this is rather begging the question. Almost everyone in the Democratic coalition will agree, when the issue is framed in these terms, that we oppose antisemitism. But the campus protesters resolutely say that none of their protests are antisemitic—even when they use rhetoric (the "blood of the martyrs," etc.) that seems to call for the killing of Israeli civilians. And if endorsing the murder of Jewish civilians just because they are Jewish is not antisemitic, I don't know what is!

Biden cannot endorse wholeheartedly what the campus protesters are saying—and for very good reason. But he also cannot disavow everything they stand for—also for very good reasons. Israel's war in Gaza has been horrific; Palestinian civilians in Gaza really are facing the risk of famine and death. It would be inhuman for Biden not to acknowledge in some way the reality of their suffering. 

So he addressed the subject in his brief comment last week, but did so in a rather elliptical way. He said that he condemns people who "don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians." 

In his classic book Public Opinion, which I've been reading the last few days, Walter Lippmann writes about this drift toward vagueness as a common problem in coalition politics. 

Throughout the book, Lippmann seeks to counteract the widespread democratic misconception that "public opinion" will simply bubble up mystically of its own accord. Indeed, he writes, there is no such thing, in a true sense, as public opinion. What there is, is rather a panoply of individual opinions formed by the necessarily limited view and knowledge of every person. 

The art of the democratic politician, therefore, is not so much to intuit a preexisting "public opinion" belonging to the majority, as it is to "crystallize" a single opinion out of this inchoate mass of competing individual opinions. 

The politician is therefore much more the creator of public opinion, in Lippmann's telling, than he is the channeler or interpreter of it. And the way the politician creates this public opinion is by finding a set of symbols that evoke enough potent "stereotypes" in the minds of listeners such that a large enough cross-section of them can get behind the same platform. 

Listening to Biden's recent comments on the war in Gaza, this is very clearly what he is trying to do. He is trying to find the right formula of words that will hold the Democratic coalition together. Sen. Schumer is attempting to find the same thing. They are seeking for common ground among Democrats. And the easiest way to do that is to find one symbol on which they can all agree. Schumer came close to the goal when he settled on Netanyahu as the perfect anti-symbol. Whatever else Democrats may disagree about, they can virtually all get behind the notion that Israel's current right-wing government is bad. 

But the challenge, Lippmann writes, is that the wider the range of opinion that a single politician needs to accommodate within a coalition, the vaguer he has to be in the terms he uses. If Biden not only needs to be able to accommodate liberal Zionists within the Democratic coalition, but also a few hard-right Likudniks, then he really cannot say anything at all that is critical of Israel's government. If he wishes to include both anti-Zionist critics of Israel and liberal Zionists, he can condemn antisemitism, and everyone will agree with him in theory, but he cannot get any more specific about what exactly antisemitism is. He needs to keep this point vague, because as soon as it is defined, the controversies will arise. 

And then there is the problem of the pro-Hamas maniacs on campus. Disturbing as it may be to confront the possibility, they seem to actually represent the views of a substantial bloc of young voters. People who have been getting their news from TikTok for the past year mostly seem to believe that Israel is the Manichaean embodiment of evil, and they therefore are at best complacent as to Hamas's and Iran's attempts to annihilate the country.  

These individuals accord no weight whatsoever to the fact that Israel suffered a mass murder and mass abduction of their citizens on October 7, or that this attack is the reason they are fighting in Gaza right now to begin with. There is nothing that could be described as nuance in their analysis of the conflict. And even if many of them would disavow—if directly confronted on the point—the claim that they would expressly endorse the killing of Israeli civilians—they are also never the least bit punctilious about distancing themselves from such a view, when they are not being directly confronted about it. 

I wish that Biden could ignore and neglect this segment of opinion entirely. But I'm not sure he can. And so, he tries to avoid talking about it. ("[W]hat cannot be compromised must be obliterated," writes Lippmann, in his chapter on "The Transfer of Interest." "[W]hen there is a question on which we cannot all hope to get together, let us pretend that it does not exist.") Or, when Biden cannot escape the question, he gets even more vague, talking about "what's going on with the Palestinians." How's that for a masterpiece of nebulosity? ("Almost always," Lippmann writes, "vagueness at a crucial point in public debate is a symptom of cross-purposes.")

Such a strategy of silence and vagueness can work for a time. It can manage to "crystallize" a single partisan opinion for long enough to win an election. But, as Lippmann points out, it is after the election, once the coalition voters start to actually expect the shared symbol to be put into practice, that cracks begin to appear in the coalition. It is at this stage, Lippmann writes, that the facade of "public opinion" collapses—what seemed to be a "public opinion" is revealed as actually just a mass of individual opinions, which had overlapped for a time around a single symbol. 

(This, Lippmann said, is what doomed Wilson's "Fourteen Points." During the war, they could be phrased in such general idealistic terms, that every ally in the coalition could in principle get on board. But once it came time to settle the details of the peace, the coalition collapsed—it turned out that they wanted concretely different things, and no shared symbol could overcome this.) 

Part of the challenge Biden faces, then, is that he is governing at the same time as he is running for office. If he were purely a candidate, after all, then he could invoke such vague shared symbols that everyone in the coalition would think they still agreed. He could say "I stand for human rights," and both the pro-Israel and the anti-Israel factions would assume he was speaking for them (and they wouldn't be entirely wrong either—since both Israelis and Palestinians have already suffered horrendous human rights violations in this conflict). 

But, Biden is not just a candidate. He is also still governing the country. And so, people can see the real cracks in his coalition. He speaks with sympathy of the Palestinian plight, thereby evoking the "stereotypes" and "symbols" (to use Lippmann's terminology) needed to win over the critics of Israel to his cause. Yet, these same voters can contrast his words with what they take to be the policy of his government. They say: he can't actually mean this, because he is still shipping arms to Israel. 

The practical fissures in the coalition, then, cannot be ignored; the pretense of a shared "public opinion" cannot be maintained. The Democratic Party is revealed to be the heterogenous animal it always was. 

Being out of office therefore gives Trump an enormous advantage. He can be just as vague as Biden on this. Indeed, he has recently become downright self-contradictory on the subject; and nonetheless, this may work for him, because no one is in a position to contrast his words with his current actions. They can simply respond to the emotional stereotypes that he deploys, without having to confront whether his administration would actually implement them in the precise way that each faction wants. 

The fact the Republican Party is internally divided on this issue is being obscured at the moment—mostly by people's general unwillingness to acknowledge just how profoundly Trump is reshaping the party in real-time. To be sure, congressional Republicans are still mostly lockstep in favor of aid for Israel—but the same, it should be noted, is true for congressional Democrats, even in the midst of all the left-wing campus furor over the war. If you look outside of Congress, things appear quite different—for both parties. 

Trump's "coalition," after all, includes a lot more than old-fashioned Republicans as we used to know them (and it includes fewer of those by the day). It also includes a bunch of Neo-Nazis, paleoconservatives, alt-right "nationalists," and similar kindred spirits. They are mostly rabid anti-Semites, virtually by definition (let us not forget that Trump began his 2024 campaign by meeting with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes); and those who are not still embrace some form of so-called "America First" isolationism that is incompatible with sustained U.S. support for Israel. 

There is even a weird emerging offshoot of left-wing opinion that has bent so far around the ideological horseshoe at this point that they have joined the MAGA movement. The New York Times ran a profile of one of them the other week who represents a large and growing part of Trump's Gen Z following. Here is an "influencer" who has made the connection, long before the rest of the world caught wind of it, between the implicit antisemitism of Trump's "America First" agenda and the extreme Left's growing embrace of Hamas. 

The Times profile includes a characteristic statement from this influencer that reflects the internal contradictions of the alt-left-alt-right amalgam that now makes up Trump's base. In the quote, he describes his political positions in the following terms: he is: "American PATRIOT, GOD fearing, Pro-FAMILY, Marxist Leninist, Pro-PALESTINE, RUSSIA & CHINA, Anti-DEEP STATE, Anti-IMPERIALIST, Anti-WOKE, Pro-GROWTH, ANTI-MONOPOLY, Pro-GUN, Pro-FOSSIL FUEL."

Trump's coalition would therefore appear to be every bit as internally divided about Israel-Palestine as Biden's is. It turns out that it is not so easy to unite extreme right Neo-Nazis and paleocons who want to annihilate *cough* "globalists" with ultra-Zionist Christian pentecostals who want Israel to annex the West Bank. Imagine adding in an emerging group of extreme "Left" pro-Hamas, pro-Putin Gen Z radicals who worship Trump's isolationist agenda as the alternative to supposed "U.S. Imperialism," and you have quite the medley of opinion. 

And so, Trump is forced to be just as self-contradictory on this issue as his Democratic opponent. I believe Trump's most recent statement on this issue, if memory serves, was first to excoriate Biden for supposedly "hating Israel," but then to turn around and also bash him for supposedly "hating the Palestinians just as much." 

Trump therefore faces just as many challenges as any politician trying to "crystallize" a party-wide position out of the heterogenous odds-and-ends that make up an any political coalition. But he has the dangerous advantage over Biden that, so long as Trump is not actually in power, he can continue to present himself as all things to all people. He does not need to face the hard moment when some real-world policy judgment will collide with the "stereotypes" that he was willing to invoke in order to animate his followers. 

So long as he is not yet back in office, his ultra-Zionist pentecostal followers can convince themselves that a Trump presidency will mean Israeli control of Bethlehem and the coming of the Christian apocalypse. And his alt-left troll followers can convince themselves that he will punish "Genocide Joe" and bring an end to "U.S. imperialism" and the "Zionist settler-colonial state" by embracing "America First" (which, let us never forget, is the same slogan used in the 1930s by the isolationists who welcomed Hitler's rise). 

The only hope for Biden to counteract this strategy is to continue to make sufficient appeals to the reasonable middle ground, such that he can find an area of Venn diagram overlap in voters' positions. I think that, overall, he is still on the right track. I have to believe that there are enough voters out there who, at least on this issue, recognize that we should care about the lives of both Israeli and Palestinian civilians in the conflict.

But it's not an easy position to be in, least of all when you simultaneously have to govern. You can only preserve the symbolic rhetoric for so long that makes every person—no matter how extreme or one-sided their views of the conflict—feel that they are being heard. After a certain point, you have to concretize your words in action. And if one part of your coalition thinks Hamas is great and that Israeli civilians don't have a right to live—they will inevitably be disappointed and feel betrayed, because U.S. policy certainly cannot fulfill their vision. 

Long may they continue to be disappointed in that regard. I just hope they do not represent enough voters to swing the election.