When Kamala Harris lost the election, a lot of centrist Democrats blamed progressives (as they did when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016), and it’s been a constant drumbeat of recrimination ever since. I’m talking about folks like Quentin Fulks, who blamed Harris’ loss on activists forcing politicians to apologize and “men don’t like people who apologize.”
Personally, I blame Trump’s election first and foremost on Trump voters. Wacky of me, I know.
A lot of people (including me) have blamed 2024 for being a terrible year for incumbent parties worldwide – but I just read an argument that the popular wisdom is wrong about that one.
A lot of people blame stay at home voters – but the problem with that is, stay at home voters would probably have voted for Trump.
(I’d definitely blame the press’ determination to sanewash Donald Trump, but that’s a subject for another cartoon).
But if I had to blame Democrats, I would blame the people who actually ran the Harris campaign. People like Quentin “men don’t like people who apologize” Fulks, who was Harris’s deputy campaign manager.
Progressives didn’t select Clinton, Biden, or Harris (all of them centrists). Progressives didn’t decide to have Biden run for a second term – or for Biden to drop out less than four months before the election. Progressives didn’t select the very centrist Harris, didn’t decide on her campaign strategy, didn’t write her speeches or choose her issues.
I don’t really blame the centrists for Harris’ loss. Maybe there was no way for Harris to win. She had less than four months to go, and swing voters seemed really down on the Biden administration.
But the self-serving pretense by centrists that progressives are to blame – when they themselves made every decision in the Harris campaign – is ridiculous.
Man, the dude’s office in panel three was a pain to draw. But it gave me a lot of opportunity to put in chicken fat.
The most fun bit? Probably the woman’s tattoos. Frank Young did a bang-up job coloring them, too. (One reason I enjoy drawing fat characters: More room for tattoos.)
What’s the origin of the idiom “bang up job”? I wasn’t able to find it. But it’s been in use since the early 1800s.
I don’t have a cartoon syndicate and I’m not in newspapers. But I get to do this for a living because lots of readers support my Patreon with mostly small pledges! I also have prints and books for sale.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four regular panels, plus a tiny “kicker” panel under the bottom.
PANEL 1
A large caption says “PRE-ELECTION.”
Two people, a casually dressed woman and a more business-dressed man, are talking in an office. The man makes a dismissive gesture.
WOMAN: Progressives have some ideas for this election…
MAN: Here’s my idea. Step one: donate to our campaign. Step two: you get lost.
PANEL 2
The man pushes the woman out of the office.
WOMAN: Hey!
MAN: No insult, but you woke special interest social justice freaks repel normie voters. Leave us in charge of this election so we can win!
PANEL 3
The man sits behind his desk, looking very pleased.
MAN: Good riddance! Now we can run a winning campaign – a centrist campaign with a centrist candidate and centrist strategies!
PANEL 4
A large caption says “POST-ELECTION”.
The same man and woman are in a hallway. She glares at him, while he yells at her, jumping with fury.
MAN: WE LOST AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!
KICKER PANEL
The man smiles as he talks to Barry the cartoonist.
MAN: Centrist Democrats can’t fail! We can only be failed.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is archaic cartoonist-speak for fun little details that don’t matter.
PANEL 1: On the shelves in the background: A book called “Really Big Book.” A framed picture of Tintin. There’s a framed picture of Amy from “Futurama” on the wall. The woman’s shirt says “Woop Woop.”
Her arms are covered with, well, random doodles, including a Rubik’s cube flying on angel wings, a cloud that says “meh,” a sake, and a explosion with a “BOOM” sound effect.
PANEL 2: The snake tattoo has moved to her other arm, which also features a hand hatching from an egg and a paper saying “8675309.” Her shirt now ways “Hi Mom!” There’s a framed picture of Groucho Marx on the wall.
PANEL 3: There are framed photos on the wall of Kermit the Frong, Marcie, Peppermint Patty, the Mayor from “Nightmare Before Christmas,” and Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons.
On the shelves are: A globe with a goldfish-shaped continent; a stack of three books: Really Big Book, RBB Strikes Back, and Return of the RBB. The photo of Tintin has been replaced with Tintin’s dead, decapitated head. A photo of a seagull with a fish in its beak. A mouse with a bow and arrow, taking aim at an apple on the head of another mouse. A mouse painting a picture of cheese. A napping cat.
On the desk: The book says “Scary” on the spine and “Boo” on the front cover. The icon on the back of the laptop is a cracking egg.
Finally, a mouse or rat is clinging to the arm of the chair in the foreground.
PANEL 4: The snake tattoo is back! Now looking at a tattoo of a mug of steaming liquid. There are framed pictures of Popeye and Olive Oil.
I guess I should add centrist Dems to my list of things that cannot fail, only be failed, along with
* AI (you didn’t prompt engineer enough/just wait six months)
* Weight loss diets (you didn’t try hard enough)
* Minecraft or Bethesda games (you can just install a mod)
* D&D or Pathfinder (you can just house rule it)
* God (You didn’t pray hard enough/mysterious ways/free will/Satan)
“Progressives” were not to blame for Harris’ loss. The reason Harris lost was that
1) The Democrats undemocratically made sure that no one challenged Biden in the primaries – I speculate that it was because that would expose Biden’s declining mental capacity.
2) Once the above decline was exposed in a debate with Trump, they dumped the candidate that won the primaries and then instead of having an open convention (which would have been pretty damn interesting) they undemocratically bypassed the party members and anointed Harris. I speculate that in part was because dumping her would leave them open to charges of racism.
3) Once having been anointed and after hitting the campaign trail, a plurality (if not a majority) of the electorate decided that she couldn’t speak sensibly (or at times coherently) on important subjects, had bad policies, and would not be an effective leader. Plus, she blew ridiculous amounts of campaign money on ridiculous things, like hiring Beyonce for a fabulous sum of money. I mean, a) who gives a f**k what Beyonce thinks, and b) if she really supported Harris, why did she charge her for an appearance?
With regards to panel 3: is it your contention that Harris is a centrist?
In general, I agree with the point of the cartoon. However, in the specific context of the 2024 election, it didn’t matter. The Democrats could have run AOC and Sanders and they would have lost. They could have run Joe Manchin and Sinema. They would have lost. The oligarchs wanted Trump in power and that was that. There’s no way anyone else could have won. They put their power behind electing him, got him elected, and are now looting the country as their reward for putting a demented pedophile in the presidency. And it has been very profitable for them.
Which means that the Democrats (and any even slightly reasonable Republicans) will lose again. If a centrist is run, the progressives will say that they lost because people wanted a progressive. If a progressive is run, the centrists will say that they lost because the progressives were too “radical”. And that will keep us from examining the underlying issue which is that the US is slowly (or, at this point, rapidly) sinking into an oligarchy.
Whereas RFK spending an undisclosed amount of taxpayers’ money to make a video of himself shirtless with Kid Rock is a completely sensible thing to do. Sure. Definitely no double standard and rationalization there.
RonF:
And they thought Trump was better?
That’s a rhetorical question of course. Yes they did, in their millions, but that’s an indictment of the electorate, not the Democrats.
Diane:
I don’t agree. IIRC, if just 0.6% of the electorate had voted for Harris instead of Trump in the marginal states that swung to him, then she would have won them, and the college. Oligarchs have inordinate power and influence, but it would take one heck of a conspiracy theory to give them the ability to fine-tune elections to that degree.
I agree that the Democrats will lose again, not because of the power of oligarchs, but because Trump won’t permit free elections to happen.
And you think that Fox News, Bezos’ WaPo, Musk’s Twitter, and other sources of propaganda had nothing to do with 0.6% of the electorate in those states either voting for Trump or staying home? They control much of the media and control what people hear. For example, people heard that Biden was failing mentally and Trump was fine–neither was true, but people believed both and that influenced some voters to either vote Trump or not vote at all. Not to mention the claim that Trump was better for the economy. Yeah, only if you’re a billionaire.
I disagree insofar as I think Trump is incapable of permitting or preventing anything. His handlers, though, they are not going to permit a fair election. But it’s not just Miller et al. This has been going on for years. Consider the Economist Democracy Index. The US has been slipping since the Economist (hardly a hotbed of radical progressivism) started keeping track. It is still in relatively good shape compared to much of the world, ranking #34, between Poland and Botswana, but has lost ground consistently since 2006 and never regained any ground. This is more than Trump and Trump’s departure won’t fix it.
Incidentally, if you’re thinking of visiting the US please don’t.
It’s truly not safe right now.
Dianne, I really don’t see how you get from “I don’t agree that there’s no way anyone else could have won” to “I don’t think Fox, etc, had anything to do with Trump’s victory.” I don’t doubt they had a big influence. Probably a lot of different factors swung the margin by 0.6% or more, and some of them were under Democratic control.
I don’t know, and I’m largely past caring. Just treat the word “Trump” as a synecdoche for whoever’s hands, feet, or slumped comatose body is on the tiller.
I don’t know if that remark was aimed at me in particular, but the US has been on my never-visit list since airport security went mad after 9/11.
No, RFK Jr. making a shirtless video of himself with Kid Rock was a ridiculous thing to do. But what does that have to do with what the people running for President did? And I still want to know why, if Beyonce was really supporting Harris for President, did she charge her for the appearance?
Do you think that then MSNBC, CNN, the NYT, etc. are a) not sources of propaganda, and b) are less influential, etc., than Fox News?
As far as Twitter goes, I’d say it’s full of propaganda from both the left and the right – and permitting the right to match the left and drawing it away from purely leftist was Musk’s contribution.
I’d love to see the specific questions and metrics that the Economist uses.
“And I still want to know why, if Beyonce was really supporting Harris for President, did she charge her for the appearance?”
I’m sure Beyonce will be providing you the answers you need as soon as she possibly can.
This statement puzzled me at first since the article I linked to outlined the methodology and provided links for further details. Then I saw that the link failed. Trying again.
Also to note that the EIU’s assessment is consistent with those of other organizations like V-Dem.
I meant the statements about Fox et al as support for my claim, not criticism of yours.
I am relieved. It’s not that I expect any given person from outside the US to be kidnapped and put in a concentration camp if they come to the US, but there’s always a chance and it’s an unnecessary risk to take.
Not that I’m wildly enthused about visiting the UK right now, given UKIP and all.
Yes, MSNBC, CNN, NYT, et al have propaganda elements. I’ve always enjoyed the NYT’s propaganda because it’s (relatively) subtle, compared to, say, the NY Post. Or post-Bezos WaPo. That being said, as far as I know, none of the above have tried to defend themselves against a lawsuit in which they were accused of propagating false information by saying that their broadcast was “entertainment only” and that no reasonable viewer would take them seriously. So even Fox News acknowledges that Fox News is propaganda and nothing but propaganda. Why they still have any viewers after calling their viewers fools who can’t tell fact from fiction, I don’t know.
Ref to one example.
“Not that I’m wildly enthused about visiting the UK right now, given UKIP and all.”
UKIP is a shadow of a whisper of a ghost of its former self, still formally in existence but irrelevant even on the far right. I suspect you might be mixing it up with Reform UK, which has not only inherited its base, but also pretty much all of its policies and its most famous leader, but is officially a different party.
Yep. Thanks for the correction.
The Harris campaign did not pay Beyonce $11 million to endorse her or to perform, as Trump has claimed. They paid her production company $165,000 for production COSTS, because not doing so would have constituted an illegal campaign contribution.
And, to back up Diane’s point, this is the difference between Fox and the NYT et al., Fox uncritically repeats bald faced lies, while the centrist NYT and left of center MSNBC place inordinate focus on facts that support their perspective (often to the detriment of Democrats as well as Republicans – see, but her e-mails and Biden is old). In fact, your first two points about why the Democrats lost are, to me, clear examples of the rightward spin of NYT and old CNN.
As opposed to Obama in 2012, Bush in 2004, Clinton in 1996 and Reagan in 1984, who all faced robust primary challenges? You need to go back to Carter in 1980 to find a sitting president with a hard-fought primary, and that didn’t end well, did it? And, do you really think accusations of Biden’s declining metal capacity were hidden? It was the “but her e-mails” of the 2024 election cycle. Biden was still perfectly capable of leading his well-chosen, talented team in running the country, which is what really counts. Trump, on the other hand, is mentally, morally, and tempermentally unfit to be president. Trump’s incapacity was clear at the time, and the NYT and CNN still chose to focus on Biden’s age. I agree that it is a major part of the reason why we lost in 2024, just as “but her e-mails” was a major part of why we lost in 2016.
Harris was elected to be vice president. Literally the only two jobs the vice president has are to certify the next election, and to step in should the president become incapacitated. When Biden became unable to continue campaigning, she stepped in. That was her job, as vice president. And, yes, dumping her would have been racist, although I think sexism harmed her even more. There’s no way a white male vice president in similar circumstances would have been dumped.
Yes, Harris is a centrist. She would have governed slightly to the right of Biden on most thing. That’s why we lost progressives. She’s only coded “too far left” because she’s a black woman from California. None of her policies were far left.
Diane:
I have an inkling you’re Canadian, though I could easily have misremembered. Reform aren’t in power, so I don’t think you need be concerned about the state kidnapping you so long as your papers are in order. If you’re not dark-skinned, discernibly Jewish or Muslim, or rabidly MAGA, then nobody else will be mad at you for being here, and if you are any of these things, then I’m not convinced you are better off where you are than you would be here.
“She’s only coded “too far left” because she’s a black woman from California. ”
That is true, but it’s also true that every Presidential candidate who runs for the Democrats is villified as “hard left/far left” by the Republicans. Clinton, the quintessential centrist dad Dem and the straightest whitest man who ever experienced sexual desire towards cisgender women, is still regarded as some kind of wild socialist by Republicans. If Joe Manchin had somehow managed to swallow the Democratic presidential candidacy, he’d have been smeared by Republicans as a kulak-murdering Bolshevik. That’s just how they do. And people like Corso would not only swallow this propaganda, they’d repeat it for free, and then be perplexed at the fact that the rest of the world, for some unaccountable reason, doesn’t go along with it.
“Reform aren’t in power”
While Reform are a clique of vampiric monsters, there’s no doubt about it, I don’t factor them in to my travel plans. Like, if I was to refuse to go to countries with visible/active far right parties, then I’d have to stay at home (actually, come to think of it, I’d have to leave home). I’m sure there are some exceptions but it’s hard to think of them – and I’m not limiting my thinking to Europe/North America either, there’s equivalents in Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc etc. The UK isn’t even especially bad on this front – Reform are at a historic polling high, but they’re doing worse than the National Rally in France, the People Power Party in South Korea, the AfD in Germany, the BJP in India, the Brothers of Italy in Italy, etc etc (and the last two actually are in power :-( ).
Since Corso hasn’t participated in this thread so far, I wonder if you meant to say RonF.
I did, pardon me. I admit I often mix them up.
Fair enough. Republican will always try to sell that line about Democrats. But, people didn’t buy it about Biden in 2020. That’s part of the reason why he won.
Also, I realized that I left out casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate among the duties of the vice president. My point still stands.
“But, people didn’t buy it about Biden in 2020. That’s part of the reason why he won.”
Yes, nor did they for Obama. It’s an effective tactic for Republicans but it’s not necessarily a silver bullet. But the reason I mentioned it was simply that every Democratic candidate, no matter what their substantial positions, whether they win or lose, and no matter how they govern, will always be regarded as hard left by Ron and people like Ron.
I wasn’t going to comment, but then I saw my name a couple of times and am invoking Beetlejuice rules.
I think what some of the commentariat is missing is that a lot of the rhetoric about people running on the Democrat ticket as being extremist is exemplary of the longest running strategy in politics: Lying about your opponent. I’m old enough to remember the Romney and McCain campaigns, when both men were brutally and viciously smeared, heck – both were straight-up lied about… And as Harry Reid famously said after being called out about lying about Romney not paying taxes: “Romney didn’t win, did he?” All the complaints about people unfairly targeting Joe Biden because his age caught up with him felt really tinny when juxtaposed against what McCain (who could still string a sentence together without a teleprompter) went through.
My point in bringing this up is that comments like this:
Amount to special pleading. I wouldn’t personally repeat anything I didn’t believe, frankly, I think there’s enough criticism that has the benefit of truth that it would be silly to, but bitching about the phenomenon when it comes to your team ignores the reality that the base fact pattern is a shared trait among all people running for high office. Why should your people be special?
The winning determination is usually a weighing exercise: Who has the better talking points? Who is better at shedding their opponent’s attacks? Someone pointed out that Joe Biden (who won, by the way) managed to duck the extremist allegations. Sure… The attempt was made to paint him as an extremist, but those criticisms dissolved. You know how he did that? By being the oldest, whitest, most milquetoast centrist candidate on the face of the planet and run on a platform of returning to sanity.
Why couldn’t Clinton or Harris run like that? What shifted six million Biden votes away from Harris?
I want to broach the idea that people like Fulks (but not necessarily Fulks himself, I’m not that familiar with him) might be correct – Progressives may very well be turning off some amount of normie voters. Why can’t that be right? I mean, we can walk and chew gum… Clinton and Harris were deeply flawed candidates, and their losses weren’t particularly close, so maybe we don’t use them as the examples… But there were 435 House seats, 34 Senate seats, 11 gubernatorial seats, and an ungodly number of state level positions up at the exact same time as the presidential in 2024, and no one really thinks that those things happen in a vacuum… Some positions were won or lost on less than 100 votes. Do we think that at the margins, progressivism was more of a boon or a burden for the party?
“I wasn’t going to comment, but then I saw my name a couple of times and am invoking Beetlejuice rules.”
Well, sorry guys, I got to admit, this one’s on me.
How often does this happen, which elections (local, state, federal), which election years, and how does this break down by party?
It appears you are suggesting this happens frequently and largely for meaningful seats that benefit Democrats. Your circus, your monkeys. This is relevant?
Your concern for Democrats is about “normies” in a year the normies turned to them for special local, federal, and judicial elections, as well as referendums for redistricting. Are Republicans obligated to moderate their extremism in your world? Or can they only ever be failed by the electorate. No question mark, this one is rhetorical.
*a pundit-theorized demographic that bears a great deal of similarity in the US to the “working class,” generally not signifying employment, education, or income, but race, gender, and residence. Normies include white women, I guess.
Tight races? Less than 100 votes? A few. Less than 1000? Dozens. How does this break down by party? It’ll change depending on who is surging. If one party is having a good year, seats that used to be held by their opponents become more competitive.
Only because the comic was about progressives and centrists. I’m just as convinced this happens on the right as well. Elections are complicated, they are a net-sum result of thousands of factors. The question was simply: As one of those factors, how do we think progressivism effected the result?
Absolutely. First party to sanity wins, but if both parties are insane, you’re playing a stupid game and are going to win stupid prizes. The electorate is obviously willing to vote responsibly (Biden), so why did Clinton and Harris lose? You can’t blame their opponent, because their opponent didn’t change. You can’t blame the electorate, because the electorate didn’t change. Heck, Trump didn’t get significantly more or less support in any of his elections, but Joe Biden got almost 20 million more votes than either Clinton or Harris. I think if the election was Harris vs. someone sane on the Republican side, say… Cruz, or Rubio, Harris would have gotten even more shellacked than she did. And that’ll eventually bite them in the ass, and it should.
I mean…. Yeah, but doesn’t that reinforce what I’m saying? The Trump administration is well and truly off the rails, the Democrats seem content to lean back and let him crash and burn. The party of sanity is winning. Please don’t fuck that up.
I think the electorate did change – from a goldfish during Trump’s first term, to a goldfish more than four seconds after it ended.
Are we ignoring the obvious difference that Biden is a man and Clinton and Harris are women? None of them are actually progressive – they are all pretty much “let’s keep the status quo” candidates. I think the current system in the US is not serving a larger and larger swath of the population, and many people are checked out politically since it feels futile. Personally, I’ve been sick of the gerontocracy for many years now, and thought both Biden and Trump were too old in 2020 let alone for Round 2. Ditto for the ancient Senate. The truth is that a large number of Americans actually like progressive policies when asked specifically about them, but there is no chance of any of them actually being enacted without throwing a lot of the bums out.
It must be wonderful to be able to go through life never having to take responsibility for any personal failing because you can blame sexism. Remember that the people you’re accusing of sexism were willing to cast Democrat votes, you aren’t talking about hardcore Republicans.
Which doesn’t mean that sexism is impossible, I suppose, but it ignores the fact that Clinton and Harris were two of the worst, most unpopular candidates to ever make the general as head of a major party. They ran historically bad campaigns. I mean… Clinton never stepped into Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania during the campaign, swing states that she lost and Biden won…. He showed up. Harris had the sense to at least drop out of the primary before getting less than 2% support out of her home state, Elizabeth Warren had something like 8%…. Which is still losing, but it’s a whole lot better than 2%.
This is both a needlessly hostile personal attack, and a very illogical point.
OnceOne can believe that sexism had a significant effect on outcomes (recalling, as I think you yourself pointed out, that in tight elections outcomes can be determined by relatively small differences) without believing the ridiculous view you’re seemingly attributing to Jane here.If you’re unable to make intelligent arguments or refrain from being openly insulting, then please take a break.
(Also, Clinton made about 20 appearances in Pennsylvania, more than Trump made. She made 8 visits to Michigan. The claim that she “never stepped into” those states is ridiculous. You’re right about Wisconsin, she didn’t appear there, but I don’t believe that more campaign appearances in Wisconsin would have turned the election.)
I honestly don’t see it that way. After their 2016 and 2024 losses, some Democrats have made a cottage industry out of ignoring the reasons why they lost, defaulting to their normal excuses of sexism and racism. I really do think that’s cheap and lazy – 20 million Americans didn’t change their voting habits because Harris is a woman. You want to make the point that sexism is one of the thousands of factors, sure… But how big of one? Gretchen Whitmer is the governor of Michigan. Michigan’s Democrats seem willing to elect women… Whitmer beat a Republican man in 2018 by 10%, and a republican woman in 2022 by 11%. Fun fact: Whitmer got more votes in both 2018 and 2022 than Trump did in 2020. But in both 2016 and 2024 Michigan voted for Trump. Are we really going to say sexism was determinant? Really?
I’m not sorry, but I will take a step back.
What I said was “during the campaign” and yeah, sure, technically Clinton spent a lot of time in the last two weeks of the year-long campaign in Penn, particularly after it became obvious that having taken them for granted for most of a year, she had a problem. If you’re taking issue with the characterization of “never stepped in”, because she did… Sure. If you’re saying she ran a good campaign… That wasn’t even controversial in 2016.
FFS, this week? Google Eric Swalwell and Justin Fairfax. Sexism is still a problem in the Democratic party.
Men of color and conservative religious minories in particular are a significant part of the Democratic base, but they are no less likely to be sexist than white men/conservative Christians. Many either vote Republican or stay home when the candidate for president is a woman, because they think women are inherently too weak to be commander-in-chief (check out Sarah Longwell’s focus groups). They are more open to voting for women in lesser offices, hence the ticket-splitting.
Both Clinton and Harris consistently polled roughly equal with Trump in popularity. Which is not very popular for a winning presidential candidate in any of their cases! 2016, 2020 and 2024 were all hard fought, very close races.
Neither Clinton nor Harris is a great campaigner. But, the fact that Biden won and they lost is an argument in favor of the proposition that sexism was a factor in thier losses. I love Uncle Joe, and I think he did a pretty good job as president. Everything I do object to about him is now worse under Trump. But, Biden was never a great speaker or campaigner. In terms of policies, there’s not a dimes worth of difference between Clinton, Biden and Harris. In terms of experience, they were essentially equals (former senators with four years national executive experience).
Biden won in 2020 in part because he could use COVID as an excuse not to make campaign appearances. I don’t think a female candidate could have gotten away with that. I don’t think a female candidate could have gotten away with a fraction of his gaffes. Men are allowed more latitude.
Clinton won the popular vote. This despite a decades long press campaign to smear her and demean her and put her in her place, the likes of which no man has ever had to weather. Her campaign missed a bunch of voters in rust belt states who generally don’t come out, but who came out big for Trump. So did everyone else, all the pollsters, except maybe Trumps internal polling (although he seemed pretty shocked that he won at the time).
Harris lost by a relatively thin margin in a year in which incumbants were being blown out all over the world because of global inflation. The only reason why any incumbant had a chance in that year is because Trump is so awful. Still, I think a standard issue white man probably would have pulled it off.
It is idiodic, but Trump won his second term because he got credit for the good economy at the beginning of his first term (created by Obama), and did not get blamed for the fiasco that was the COVID response that happened on his watch. Only a white male Republican could pull that off. Perhaps only Trump himself could pull that off.
Dianne: “Whereas RFK spending an undisclosed amount of taxpayers’ money to make a video of himself shirtless with Kid Rock is a completely sensible thing to do. Sure. Definitely no double standard and rationalization there.”
Well, Harris lost. If she’d won, she and you would have a point. But her courting the Cheney crime family, rebuffing people critical of Israeli atrocities, and generally tacking to the right did not in fact work for her.
And do you think that progressives had nothing to say about RFK’s stunt?
I know I said I’d take a step back, and I fully intended to, and I think I’ll just not check for a week, but this was egregious:
What I said:
What you said:
Does anyone think Eric Swalwell or Justin Fairfax was ever in any danger of voting for Trump? Anyone think they failed to vote for either Hillary or Harris? I actually think Swalwell endorsed both Clinton and Harris… I even think he endorsed Harris twice. The question wasn’t whether sexism exists in the DNC, of course it does, the question was whether it was a significant factor. Would a historically Democratic voter be so turned off by the candidate being a woman that they would either vote for Trump or stay home?
I really don’t think so. Some, at the margins, maybe. 20 million?
You have a point for Clinton, but I’ll address that later. For Harris… I think that is an awful benchmark because by the time you get to the general, most people just line up along party lines, and a fire hydrant would probably poll at more than 40%. When Harris was actually in a race where people could compare her to other candidates, I mentioned the primary, we got a great idea of how excited people were to have her as their president: They weren’t.
On that… Yeah. But one thing the EC does and does well is to make sure that a Candidate can’t get by simply by being very concentrated regional support. It’s not good enough to be queen of California and New York, which she won by 13 million votes, you have to have broad base appeal, and she didn’t. Almost every other state she did worse than Obama, and Obama was running against better candidates.
For the record… I don’t think that. But let’s take that rhetorically for a second. If you believe that, that even Democrat voters are turned off by women so much that it’s cost you not one, but two elections…. Why continue to forward women?
Nomination from a major political party isn’t supposed to be an affirmative participation trophy, you’re trying to win the presidency. There are stakes. If you think being a woman is such a handicap to the prospect to win, why are you playing such a stupidly high stakes game with that handicap?
@Corso going to follow Amp’s lead and ignore the attack. But this:
is another weird argument. Is the US no longer racist because Obama was once president?
With regards to the last presidential election, I know people (as in more than one person) who said they voted third party, stayed home, or voted Trump because just couldn’t pull the trigger for a female president. People who don’t usually seem sexist in their words or deeds. The people I personally know can’t possibly be the only ones that feel that way. In a tight election there certainly are enough of these people to swing an outcome…
Like many people who comment here, neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party represent my political views. Since one party is functional and the other is bat shit crazy, I will have to hold my nose and vote sanity when I vote in the US. While the Democrats are not who I would freely choose, I am not so blind as the folks who claim that there is no functional difference between the two major US parties. Thus, I won’t vote third party unless it is for something 100% safe for sanity or there is a major shift in US politics. I am just glad I don’t live there anymore.
I addressed that in the paragraph directly after the one you quoted:
“Men of color and conservative religious minorities in particular are a significant part of the Democratic base, but they are no less likely to be sexist than white men/conservative Christians. Many either vote Republican or stay home when the candidate for president is a woman, because they think women are inherently too weak to be commander-in-chief (check out Sarah Longwell’s focus groups). They are more open to voting for women in lesser offices, hence the ticket-splitting.”
I don’t think we should risk it again any time soon.
Corso:
Well, Harris isn’t old and white, but other than that…they kinda did?
It’s arguable that Clinton ran a more progressive campaign in 2016 than Harris did in 2024, but that was coming off of two terms of Obama, and it felt (to many) like progress was unstoppable, and that a guy like Trump could never win. Even so, her major primary opponent was Bernie, and she was less progressive and more centrist than him. She was also more centrist than her general opponent, Donald Trump.
Kamala Harris ran a significantly more centrist campaign in 2024 than she did in her 2020 primary, where she positioned herself to the left of Biden on several issues. In fact, a big factor that likely hurt her was saying she wouldn’t do anything differently than Biden. But she campaigned on stricter border control, a stronger military, and a much more centrist policy on Israel than any progressive wanted.
The problem wasn’t necessarily progressivism vs. centrism. It was status quo vs. a shakeup. Promising a return to normal worked in 2020 when the world was in chaos and people didn’t trust the current guy to manage it. Promising to continue as normal in a world that was just kinda meh (for most Americans, anyway) didn’t work in 2024 because people wanted change and they didn’t trust the current guy or his VP to bring it. Asking why Harris didn’t run the same kind of campaign as Biden is the wrong question. In some ways she did, and even if she hadn’t, that style of campaign wouldn’t have worked.
And of course sexism and racism were factors in both elections. Not necessarily because Harris and Clinton lost, but because Trump, a sexist and racist, won. In November 2016, the Access Hollywood tape, the proposed Muslim ban, and Trump’s attacks on Judge Curiel and Columba Bush for nothing other than their Mexican ancestry were all public knowledge. By November 2024, Trump had demonized legal Haitian migrant workers by calling them illegal pet-eaters who should be deported, claimed Kamala Harris couldn’t really be Black because she was also Indian, and, oh yeah, was found liable of sexual assault in court. Anyone willing to vote for him might not necessarily hate women or people of color, but they’re certainly willing to tolerate having a racist and sexist president, and that makes them racist and sexist as well. Yes, even the ones who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020 (as Trump-Biden-Trump voters are a not-insignificant share of the voting population).
Jane:
Obviously not, but it does show that it’s possible for minorities to win the presidency. My point was whether sexism was determinant to the 2016 and 2024 elections, and I don’t think it was: Michigan, a state that has elected a woman as governor with double digit margins, voted Republican both years Trump won in elections that sandwiched his win. Either the electorate only breaks out their sexism for presidential elections, or maybe there’s a difference not controlled for by that metric.
I mean…. Hillary won the popular vote, even if her support was hyper-concentrated in two states. Harris didn’t do that – That election wasn’t tight. Trump won by 2.3 million votes, and lost Cali and NY by 4.5 million. I’m not saying that sexism doesn’t exist, or that there aren’t people out there willing to vote by their organs, but do we really think millions? And again… Not millions of Republicans: Democrats and Independents. Are there millions of Democrats and Independents so sour on women that it colored their vote? Or are we ready to admit that there might have been some individualized problems with those two in particular?
Kate:
I respect the consistency. I don’t think it will come up though, I think there are women out there that could theoretically win… But I can’t think of any real up and comers with name recognition like Newsom. It’s early though.
Chris:
It would have to be an argument, because I’m not sure what Harris’ positions were in 2024. Part of the reason I think she failed was because over the course of her career, Harris has basically staked out every position possible on every position imaginable. She had an authenticity problem and a communications problem – Contradicting policy positions, horrible optical problems like affecting different accents in different places, an absolute inability to string a sentence together in a meaningful way, and the lead anchor of her last four years of resume, which she had to both distance herself from, but not criticize too hard… Because you know… That was her administration too.
You can say she ran a centrist campaign, and depending on the day of the week, you might even be able to scratch together a quote to supports that idea, but I don’t think there were many people that believed her. Honestly… Hillary kind of had the same problem, but in reverse… She ran as a progressive, but I don’t know that people were convinced of that.
Oooh…. Interesting. I’m going to take this from the other side: Do you think there were there people so turned off by Trump’s sexism and Racism that they refused to vote for him?
Because the answer is obviously yes, particularly among women. The DNC obviously thought so too, because they spent an ungodly amount of capital pointing it out. Similar to my previous question (If you believe that Democrat voters are so turned off by women that it cost you two elections…. Why continue to forward women?):
If you believe that sexism is a benefit to a male candidate against a female candidate, why would the female candidate run nonstop ads pointing out that the male candidate is also sexist? Was that a mistake?
Obviously these two things can both be true at the same time – that “millions” of voters (to put that in perspective, 156 million Americans voted in the 2024 election, and depending on how you measure – this is obviously not a hard-numbers area – 15-25 million were “persuadable”) are sexist enough for that to color their vote, AND that there were individual problems with Clinton and Harris as candidates.
In a close election, there are a lot of factors that could have made a difference. This both means many factors could reasonably be seen as making a difference, and, paradoxically, it’s probably not fair to blame the outcome on any single factor.
Also, it’s wrong to imply that, in terms of popular vote, Clinton/Trump was tight but Harris/Trump was not. The popular vote margin was objectively larger for Clinton/Trump (2%) than for Harris/Trump (1.5%).
In the last thirty-five years, the only closer Presidential popular vote margin than Trump/Harris (1.5%) was Bush/Gore (0.5%). Honestly, in that period the only two elections that weren’t close in popular vote were 1996 (8.5% lead) and 2008 (7% lead). But even in this group of close popular votes, Trump/Harris was the second-closest.
In terms of the electoral college margin, Trump (2024) had a healthy lead, slightly higher than Biden’s and Trump (2016)’s leads. Bush’s two election wins were much closer than Trump’s, and Obama’s and Bill Clinton’s leads were much larger than Trump’s (or Biden’s).
* * *
But the real reason I’m posting. You wrote:
When I pointed out this was a needlessly hostile personal attack, you said “I honestly don’t see it that way,” and you weren’t sorry, but you’d step off the thread.
I accepted that and didn’t reply.
And then you kept posting on this thread anyway.
Two things bother me about this:
1) In effect if not intent, you lied to me to avoid moderation. (That you said you were sincere at the time doesn’t help; all that means is that your sincere statements may not be trustworthy.)
2) That you “honestly don’t see” how what you said was a needlessly hostile personal attack actually makes it worse. If you honestly can’t tell when you’re being aggressively insulting, you can’t credibly promise to avoid doing it in the future.
I’m not banning you from the thread, because I genuinely do appreciate how you catalyze discussion, and because other people are discussing things with you and I don’t like cutting conversations off mid-stream. But please consider yourself warned, and try to do better, if only out of politeness because you’re metaphorically a visitor in my home.
“I’m not banning you from the thread… because other people are discussing things with you and I don’t like cutting conversations off mid-stream. ”
As one of the people discussing things with Corso, please don’t hold back on banning him because of me!
Fair. “lied” might be a little strong – I hadn’t meant to, and I had meant “step away” as a cool down period as opposed to a complete exit (there was a two week break in there), but I obviously did neither. I have a hard time not responding to people, it’s legitimately a personal failing. I think I could handle a ban better than a self-imposed exile, and I’ll take it, if you think it ever gets there.
Remember that what I wrote was:
I still don’t see how this is personal or hostile. Personal in particular… To who? Jane? What is she responsible for? For the record, I’d meant for it to tie into something that both your comic (“Centrist Democrats can’t fail! We can only be failed.”) and Saurs (Are Republicans obligated to moderate their extremism in your world? Or can they only ever be failed by the electorate.) had touched on. Once you recognize the pattern, the instances become obvious and you can start to ad lib – It must be amazing to never have to have to take any responsibility for a bad election result when you can blame voter fraud. The point is a lack of responsibility, either given to or taken by, the person who is in fact responsible.
When I said that, I was talking about Clinton, Harris, or any other candidate who might not even use the excuse of sexism themselves, but have built in support structures that will do it for them. It was a little tongue in cheek, but I’m not even being entirely hyperbolic: I have the impression that it might in fact be wonderful, at least for them, to be able to fail the way they have, and then blame the voters for failing them.
Yes, it seemed like a personal attack on Jane. It also seemed a little illogical, but that’s hardly unusual in personal attacks.
Jane herself seemingly read it the same way I did.
If that’s not how you meant it, then okay; but since both Jane and I read it the same way, I think that’s really how it came across.
Regarding the idea that Clinton blames everything on sexism, my impression is that Clinton blames her defeat not primarily on sexism, but on James Comey. (And I think she’s sort of right about that – yes, there are dozens of things that might have made a difference, but Comey’s October surprise is the clearest “if not for this one person’s one act, the outcome would have been different” to happen in that election).
This is not only untrue, it’s a deranged thing to say when you consider that her oppositon was Donald Trump.
You can find a few jumbled or even incoherent statements from Kamala Harris if you look for them. But it is not at all true that she was unable to string a sentence together in a meaningful way. And if you’re saying this about her and not Donald Trump…that’s a really weird thing to do in a conversation where you’re trying to disprove claims of unfair bias.
Of course. How is that relevant? He still won. The people that voted for him were still, at the very least, willing to tolerate his sexism and racism.
I didn’t say that, and nothing I wrote implies it. That a sexist and racist won doesn’t necessarily make those things in and of themselves benefits to candidates in general.
In which election? 2016? Maybe. But Kamala Harris didn’t do that, and in fact consistenty tried to ignore Trump’s sexist and racist attacks on her, even when asked about it. She was praised for not leading with the fact that she was a woman of color and focusing on “the issues.” And that didn’t work either.
Cosco, could you please clarify which female candidate ran “nonstop ads pointing out that the male candidate” is sexist, and link to something documenting that claim?
It’s a weird question, because I think that if I knew the intent behind the question, I would answer it differently, depending.
Because if you wanted to make the argument that PACs are separate from Candidates, and the Candidates may not have run as many ads as were run throughout the generals… Sure. But I think we can all agree that Clinton or Harris associated PACs weren’t false flag operations, and they ran ads that they thought would benefit the candidate. My overarching point is the effect of sexism on the outcome, not who specifically ran the ads. If you want to differentiate like that, you could ad lib in “PACs” where I wrote “female candidate” and the question is identical: Regardless of who ran them, were the ads a mistake?
If the question was really just as simple as “examples and citation please”, the Clinton campaign was by far the most gender-centered race. But I have no idea how I’d quantify or link “ran ads nonstop”.
I could point and out that there were a whole lot of individual ads (“Mirrors”, “Role Models”, “The Woman Card”) There was commentary on things he said, quotes from prepared speeches, quotes from interviews. I’ll even point out that the Clinton campaign didn’t only aim at Trump, they called Bernie and his supporters for being sexist.
And remember… I’m not saying they were wrong, I’m saying that the campaign thought it was advantageous to point it out.
I guess… What are you looking for?
When you say “nonstop ads,” I’m assuming you’re claiming that Clinton (thanks for clarifying that it’s Clinton you were talking about) ran ad after ad after ad after ad after ad about Trump’s sexism. As in, they ran such ads without stopping.
But that’s not at all what happened. “Mirrors” is what you describe. “Role Models” alluded to Trump’s misogyny in four seconds of a sixty second ad. (Both of those ads came from the Clinton campaign, not PACs). As for “Woman Card,” the Clinton campaign circulated clips on social media for a news cycle as part of a successful fundraiser, but afaik – correct me if I’m wrong – they never broadcast a commercial about it.
You could find a couple of other commercials that fit what you describe – “Tiffany” and “Daughters” – but now we’re talking about three out of fifty or so commercials the Clinton campaign produced; describing this as her running “nonstop ads” on Trump being sexist is a vast exaggeration. Yes, she talked about Trump’s misogyny, but it was one of many topics her ads talked about.
I wasn’t making any larger point than that; I just wish you’d try to be more accurate.
As to why the Clinton campaign ran those ads – obviously, they did so because they thought they’d provide an advantage with swing voters. No one questions that Clinton’s campaign believed that; with hindsight, some people question if that belief was correct.
Edited to add: Before 2016, I think that a LOT of people believed that open misogyny like Trump’s would be terrible for a Presidential candidate – and not only Democrats. Before 2016, I think that was the conventional wisdom.
So you’re saying that a candidate running for office should not point out that their opponent is saying objectionable things?
It was Hume that pointed out that you cannot get to “should” from “is”, or by extension from “was”. Corso is commenting upon what “was”. Whether he is right or wrong, his utterance is purely descriptive.
@Daran You are undoubtedly technically correct, but my interpretation of Corso’s comment was that they were judging the act negatively, rather than just describing it. My apologies to Corso if I’m wrong about that point, but if so I have to say that I don’t understand their argument at all.
@Diane
I started drafting my earlier comment with “they/their” pronouns for Corso, but I switched to “he/him” because I thought it was potentially confusing in a discussion about plural female candidates. My apologies to Corso if I have this wrong.
My understanding is that his argument is 1. that Clinton, Harris, and their respective campaigns engaged in certain actions and behaviours that were ineffective or even counterproductive (and refrained from others which might have been effective) in winning them votes either generally or in the battleground states, and 2. that this, rather than voter sexism or racism, accounts for their election defeats.
He may be right about either point or he could be wrong, but both points are purely descriptive. It is for him, not me, to clarify and defend his arguments if he chooses to do so. I intervened because my experience is that shifts from “is” to “should” in responses to my own arguments so ubiquitous, that I find myself making extra mental effort to try to forestall them. I really wish people would stop doing this.
Tangential to the topic…
Here in the UK, we have just had local elections in England and general elections to the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales. (Northern Ireland will hold theirs next year.) As midterm incumbents UK-wide, and the party in government in Wales, it is no surprise that Labour has done badly there and in England, however their share of the vote fell only 2.4% and 1.8% in the constituency and regional votes in Scotland, where the Scots Nats won for the fifth time in a row with swings against them of 9.5% and 13.1%. As expected, Reform have done fairly well nationwide, as have the Greens and Lib Dems.
It’s been a colossal disaster for the Conservatives. As the mid-term opposition party UK-wide, and incumbent nowhere, they should have done well. Instead they have large losses everywhere. They spent their time in office whipping up xenophobia in an attempt to impose a hostile electorate on the other parties, only to have the racist vote hoovered up by an even more bigoted party. Leopards ate their votes.
@Daran: I think what has happened is that Conservatives are no longer seen as The Opposition (caps used advisedly). Officially they are since they’re the second biggest party in the Commons. But in public discourse, most people who are unhappy with Labour are either going right to Reform or left to the Greens/the Nationalists – or of course, not voting. The Conservatives are no longer the default catcher of “I don’t like Labour” voters that they have been for almost a hundred years. I’m sure some people are leaving Labour for the Conservatives but it’s a relatively small factor.
This might be a temporary state of affairs, but it is possible we are seeing the first fundamental transformation of the UK political system since the death of the Liberals in the 1930s. One writer I saw compared Reform to the Social Democrats in the 80s, except on the Left rather than the Right – if that comparison is apt then the Conservatives may eventually claw back. I wouldn’t count them out, we are talking about the oldest political party in the world and they have come back from some dark places where they looked devastated before. But right now, it is, as you say, very bad for the Tories. I don’t take any satisfaction in the rise of Reform but I admit there’s a non-rational part of me that enjoys watching the Conservatives flounder.
@Watcher
for the benefit of those unfamiliar with British political history, by “death of the Liberals” you mean the Liberal Party was reduced to political irrelevance in the 30s, not that it ceased to exist. In fact it continued until the 80s when it merged with the new Social Democratic Part which itself had split off from Labour. The merged party is now the Liberal Democrats.
I doubt the electorate cares about who the official opposition is. They vote for the party that tells them what they want to hear and which they think has a chance of getting elected. Another factor, relevant to earlier discussions about US politics, is the fact that the current Conservative leader is black and a British child of immigrants. Sunak has the same status and I’ve heard one self-identfied Conservative voter denounce him as “not British”, though how common this attitude is among potential Conservative voters. is hard to tell.
One of the ironies of British politics is that the Conservatives have a much better track record of choosing leaders who aren’t white men, five so far, of whom four became Prime Minister. Labour has only ever appointed a woman as interim leader, and never anyone not white.
Yeah I don’t mean their literal death, I mean their political death. What happened in the 80s was, in my schema, a resurrection. But whatever we call it, it was the last major shift to the British party system. Even the Lib Dem’s entry into coalition government wasn’t really a major shift, since the Lab/Con dyarchy remained essentially intact. It briefly appeared that the SocDems might change it in the 80s, but in the end they didn’t manage it.
I think there’s a hardcore of Conservative voters who have distaste for non-white, non-christian and non-male politicians (it’s notable not only that Sunak was the first non-christian Prime Minister, but that this was barely commented and, when it was, was treated as just a bit of colour to his biography). But this hardcore is probably shrinking for a range of reasons. Sometimes it feels encouraging, but sometimes it’s depressing – because we see so many politicians who are PoC, women, queer, from immigrant backgrounds, or even a combination of the above, yet their politics are so violently conservative. Some of the UK’s most outspoken and effective agents of repression are PoC and women. There hasn’t yet been a queer arch conservative, but I could see it.
This isn’t unique to the UK, though. In New Zealand, the National Party (effectively the local franchise of the British Conservatives) has had Maori leaders, but New Zealand Labour never has. The other right wing parties also currently have Maori leaders.
Quiet around here lately.
“Too quiet.”
(Pause as we all wait for the slasher to jump out from somewhere and attack.)
OK, This is completely off-topic, but I’ve got a question for you guys: What is the mood among Jews and Jewish communities within the United States (and other countries, if you know) at the moment regarding antisemitism? I ask, because the recent media narrative has been that British Jews are terrified. There have indeed been two violent antisemitic attacks in Britain since 10/7, as well as other attacks targeting property. The Community Security Trust – a Jewish organisation which publishes statistics on antisemitic incidents reported to them, have indicated a significant rise in incidents since 10/7. And of course we are all aware of the Bondi Beach atrocity, which has stoked fear internationally.
Without wishing to deny or minimise any of this, it is clear that baseless accusations of antisemitism intended to delegitimise criticism of Israel are ubiquitous. The many protest demonstrations have been characterised by members of the former government as “hate marches”, without pushback, as though this were an established fact. The phrase implies that the demonstrations exhibit antisemitism to a degree that is more than incidental, and I have never seen any evidence to that effect. Likewise, I have never seen any evidence that the phrase the word “Zionist” is often used as a synonyn for Jew, that “from the river to the sea” is intended by its chanters to be a call to exterminate or expel all Jews from the region, or even that Hamas has this goal. These are all things which are routinely stated within the media as though they were established fact, with no evidence whatsoever.
So I wonder to what extent Jewish terror is a response to the actual increase in antisemitic incidents, and how much is due to the epidemic of baseless claims of antisemitism.
Hmmm. Does this make me the slasher?
I wouldn’t say American Jews as a whole are terrified. But some are – more than usual. I think it’s understandable. The Tree of Life attack was in 2018, but I think it feels much more recent to many Jews. (There have been other, more recent attacks on synagogues in the US, but none as deadly, fortunately). Plus there’s the two Israeli embassy staffers killed a year ago. And the ADL says that 2025 set a record for antisemitic assaults in the US. Even if you don’t trust the ADL (I don’t necessarily, I’d need to see methodology), it’s still something a lot of American Jews hear about.
Plus a lot of Jews, myself included, are at least a little hooked into the Jewish press, which of course gives a lot of focus to antisemitic incidents and threats.
So yes, definitely more fear than usual.
I’d be careful with the “intent” there – it depends on who it’s coming from. Sometimes that’s the intent, and sometimes people are just sincerely making baseless accusations of antisemitism.
(Still baseless, and still sucks, regardless. And I agree this happens a lot).
Same. (Regarding the US demonstrations, some of which I’ve attended).
I’ve anecdotally seen “zionist” and “Jew” used interchangeably by antisemites, although of course there are also many non-antisemites who criticize zionism.
I’ve never gotten the feel that the chanters I’ve seen (and been part of) mean that, either. Given the huge numbers of people in the world who have used that slogan, though, I would not be surprised if it’s been used that way at some point.
Hamas definitely once had that goal – it’s not explicitly stated in the first Hamas charter, but there’s plenty of language about looking forward to the big Muslim war against the Jews, that Israel will be obliterated, and various antisemitic garbage, using the word “Jews” rather than “Zionist.”
That was in 1988. Their second charter, in 2017, said that their conflict is with Zionists and not Jews as a whole; people vary in how sincere they think Hamas is about that.
Hamas was basically the government of Gaza. If you worked for the government – if you were a schoolteacher, for instance – that made you a member of Hamas. As you’d expect, this means that the opinions with Hamas vary widely; they’re not all violent militants. But obviously, October 7th happened, so I assume there is a significant portion of Hamas that wants to see all the Jews wiped out of the region.
(And likewise, a significant number of Israelis want Gaza cleansed of Palestinians).
Is saying that you want Israel obliterated anti-semitic, as opposed to anti-zionist?
It’s a little bit like asking “is calling someone who happens to be Jewish a moneylender really an antisemitic insult, if the person is in fact a moneylender?”
And the answer is, it depends on the context. It certainly CAN be an antisemitic insult, but it isn’t necessarily so.
In the context of an antisemitic document about “our struggle against the Jews,” saying that Israel will obliterate Israel is antisemitic. (As I see it.)
Another quote from the same document:
A lot of time passed between 1988 and 2017. Gaza’s population is, on average, quite young. So the people saying that their conflict is with Israel not Jews as a whole are probably not the same ones who said that they were making a war on Jews as a whole, rather than Israel. Which is not to say that they are sincere, but it is possible that the attitude of the organization as a whole has changed.
That being said, I am afraid that I think this idea is more wishful thinking than reality. It’s hard to see how attitudes could have softened in Gaza given the way Israel is and has been behaving.
On the third metaphorical hand, acting like their fight is with Israel and Israel alone seems to me to be politically advantageous to Hamas, so they may act according to their 2017 charter, regardless of their true feelings.
Conclusion: I have absolutely no idea how sincere they are and/or how they will act.
I mean probably they are something less than wholly sincere and wholly insincere, and it isn’t possibly to truly pin it down because it depends on who you ask, when you ask, how you ask and what you consider to be the border between anti-zionism and anti-semitism.
It’s a really tough question, to be honest. Like even if we can identify specific anti-semitism within Palestinian society (let alone within specific Palestinian organisations like Hamas), it has to be viewed in context. To use a metaphor many will probably dislike, an African-American who holds prejudiced views against whites just isn’t morally equivalent to a white American who holds prejudiced views against blacks even if their views are identical except for the target. The power dynamic is an inescapable fact. And the power dynamic is, if anything, even more yawning in the case of an Israeli vs a Palestinian.
Synagogues have been fortified A LOT over the last 10 years or so, so I think it’s fair to say that American Jews are terrified.
I’ve seen Jews who equate “anti-Zionist” with “anti-Semitic”, for sure. I think that the conflation works in both directions.
I don’t care who uses the phrase “from the river to the sea” (and I’ve seen it used by both supporters of Palestinians and by supporters of Israel), it’s a genocidal slogan.
I don’t agree. If someone says “from the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free” – which is a very common chant – that says to me “we will be free in all places in that zone,” not “we’ll throw everyone else out or kill them.”
Supporters of Israel use the phrase “from the river to the sea”?
I think the more common chant is “…Palestine will be free”, which seems to me to express the view that the entire region is illegitimately occupied by Israel, as opposed to the view that only the parts outside Israel’s original borders are. So I take it as expressing dissolutionist stance. I don’t agree with JSO that it is necessarily genocidal.
Watcher:
The alleged power gap in favour of the Israeli over the Palestinian must have seemed very academic to Jews hiding behind – mercifully silent – rocks and trees, while their family and neighbours were being butchered.
I’ve seen this online from pro-Israel commentators.
Likud’s 1977 platform didn’t use that exact phrase, but it said “Between the Sea and the Jordon there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Israeli politician Uri Ariel said “Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there will be only one state, which is Israel.” I don’t think anyone’s proven where “from the river to the sea” originated, but some historians argue that it originated with the Revisionist Zionist movement when they were pushing for Israel’s founding.
Daran, are you arguing that no large scale power dynamic of X over Y can exist, if one can point to any examples of Y people murdering X people?
Like, do you think there was never a white-over-black power dynamic in America, since we can find examples of Black people murdering white people? I’ve certainly seen racists make that exact argument, but I didn’t expect it from you.
Do you think there wasn’t a power dynamic favoring whites over blacks in Apartheid South Africa? “The alleged power gap in favour of the whites over the blacks must have seemed very academic to whites gasping hiding under – mercifully silent – pews while their family and neighbours were being butchered” at St James Church.
Neither October 7th or the St James Church massacre were justifiable. They were both unforgivable massacres (on a much larger scale on 10/7, obviously), in which for a moment the people perpetuating the massacres had the power of life and death over the massacred. But that doesn’t magically mean the events didn’t take place in an overall context of Israeli and white power, respectively.
“Is saying that you want Israel obliterated anti-semitic, as opposed to anti-zionist?”
“Obliterated” sounds quite violent. Why would you use that word, instead of a more neutral one, such as “dissolved” or “abolished”?
No of course not. I do, however, reject the idea that large-scale power dynamics are solely or necessarily determinative of how we should evaluate individual bigotry. Sometimes intermediate, local, or temporary dynamics are more significant – to the point of rendering the large-scale dynamics irrelevant. That the IDF was and is overwhelmingly more powerful than Hamas overall was no help at all to the attacked civilians when they were too far away to act.
Ampersand:
Don’t know about the ADL but I’m very impressed by the methodological rigour of their British equivalent, the CST, who also seem to satisfy my special criterion for trustworthiness on the topic of antisemitism, which is that they do not engage in apology for Israel’s actions against Palestine. (They have condemned the 10/7 attack by Hamas. As best I can tell they have never commented one way or the other on Israel’s response.)
You also satisfy my special criterion, as does the Alas comentariat, which of course, is why I posted my question here.
Disregarding the background noise of baseless accusations made in good faith, the bad faith ones are still ubiquitous.
I’ve never attended a pro-Palestine demonstration as such. I’ve seen some, and I’ve attended left-wing events that weren’t specifically about this issue, but where a large contingent of pro-Palestinians were present. The only references to Jews or Jewishness I’ve heard or seen have been anti-antisemitic slogans on placards.
The only unambigous example I have ever heard of was a social media post referring to “six million Zionists killed by Hitler”. A single example does not make a dogwhistle.
I’m sure it has, but as you point out, there’s no reason to believe that street protesters in the UK/USA generally mean this.
I’ve read the charter, and you describe it accurately. As you said, there’s not explicitely stated intention to eradicate Jews entirely from the region. What is, explicitly in the charter is the following statement “Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – to coexist in peace and quiet with each other.” But this would not be possible (in respect of Judaism) if Jews were eradicated.
So my reading of the charter, taking into account this, as well as the virulently and violently antisemitic language elsewhere in the charter, some of which you’ve quoted, is that their intention was and is to overthrow Israel by force, that an awful lot of Jews will be killed in the process, and that once their Palestinian State has been established, from the river to the sea, then they hope to sit down with the surviving Jews and Christians and sing Kumbaya.
It’s a ridiculous fantasy, of course, but it is the better reading of their expectations and intentions that maximal genocide, in my view.
I find it consistent with their original charter, and indicative that they feel that the original was misunderstood.
By “Hamas” I meant the Hamas leadership.
The first question regarding October 7 is, were the attacks on civilians sanctioned by Hamas leaders? Israel says they have evidence that they were, but they haven’t released it fully to public scrutiny. Hamas has denied that their troops were even responsible – blaming unaffiliated militias that joined the attack. I don’t trust either of them, but Hamas’ denial does indicate that they are embarrassed by the result.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the civilian killings and abductions were authorised by Hamas, then this is consistent with an intention to massacre Jews until Israel is overthrown, sing Kumbaya afterwards.
” I don’t think anyone’s proven where “from the river to the sea” originated, but some historians argue that it originated with the Revisionist Zionist movement when they were pushing for Israel’s founding.”
It would be ironic if it was originally a Zionist phrase repurposed by Hamas.
“The alleged power gap in favour of the Israeli over the Palestinian must have seemed very academic to Jews hiding behind – mercifully silent – rocks and trees, while their family and neighbours were being butchered.”
I honestly don’t even feel the need to refute this, it’s so transparently idiotic.
“The first question regarding October 7 is, were the attacks on civilians sanctioned by Hamas leaders? Israel says they have evidence that they were, but they haven’t released it fully to public scrutiny. Hamas has denied that their troops were even responsible – blaming unaffiliated militias that joined the attack. I don’t trust either of them, but Hamas’ denial does indicate that they are embarrassed by the result.”
It may look like I am arse-covering but I don’t really believe Hamas’ leaders. Specifically, the areas they sent their troops into were mostly civilian, so if the intents wasn’t to kill civilians, what was it? I doubt that sufficiently large militias existed outside Hamas’ control in the Gaza strip at the time that were capable of killing so many people out of nowhere, and then promptly disappearing. It may just be that Hamas are lying defensively, because even a pretty transparent lie might fool 5% of the most gullible people, and it doesn’t cost much to lie.
It was repurposed long before Hamas. Hamas was founded in 1987, while the slogan was used by Palestinians as far back as the 1960s.
I can say that Jewish people where I live outside the US are more nervous. There have been more attacks on synagogues (thankfully no one was hurt) and more incidents involved harrassment. Many synagogues here are hardened – mine has the “airlock” style controls with preregistration required for entry. This is new since Oct 7, and is a source of much unhappiness, since openness is very much a traditional value of our community.
If there ever was a strong line between “Jewish” and “Israeli”, it is now very blurry, and I resent that Israel’s actions have made it much harder for Jews in the rest of the world.
That said, the Jewish community here is definitely divided between those who think Israel can never ever be criticized for “self-defense” and those who think the IDF is now a bunch of butchers. Personally, I think a good friend tells you when you are making a dreadful mistake, so supporting Israel in this case means holding a mirror up and saying WTF are you doing!!!!
Many of the pro-Palestinian protest groups here have batshit crazy demands (like boycott/disinvest in every company that sells anything in Israel to anyone), but I think most of the people who attend the protests just want the bombings to stop. I have definitely seen protests that advocate for the murder of Jews in Israel, but those are in the minority, since it does not reflect popular opinion.
“If there ever was a strong line between “Jewish” and “Israeli”, it is now very blurry, and I resent that Israel’s actions have made it much harder for Jews in the rest of the world.”
This is to a large degree the Israeli government’s fault. It explicitly positions itself as the representative of all Jews everywhere and of Jews as a whole, including those who have no particular interest in or connection to Israel, let alone are actively (or even passively) anti-Zionist.
To be fair it isn’t unique in doing so – quite a lot of countries see themselves in some ways as responsible for or contributing to the lives of their diaspora communities even if there’s no formal link of citizenship. But few are so aggressive about promoting it or invoking it militarily as Israel is. Russia would be the only equivalent I can think of – not a very flattering comparison
I suppose at least Israel isn’t aspiring to annex Jewish areas of Paris or New York to protect the Jews there from anti-semitism. Although as I write that it doesn’t sound as ridiculous as it should.
Watcher:
I wrote it in sincerity, so please do refute it, as though you were talking to an idiot.
My wording was perhaps more equivocal than I intended. I don’t for a second believe that Hamas soldiers weren’t committing atrocities.
Do we know that they were sent into these areas? Or merely that they went into these areas?
Perhaps to draw the defenders out of their bases.
I’m not saying I believe this. My point is that there is limited evidence of what was intended, as distinct from what was actually done. Do you think Hamas troops are a well-disciplined force that only ever do what they are commanded to do?
The evidence we do have has come largely from Israeli sources, which is reason enough to be skeptical.
“Human Rights Watch found strong evidence of the participation of at least five Palestinian armed groups from Gaza in the attacks: Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades; the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, the Quds Brigades; the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s armed wing, the National Resistance Brigades or Omar al-Qasim Forces; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s armed wing, the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades; and the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, formerly linked to the Fatah political faction.”
https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/07/17/i-cant-erase-all-the-blood-from-my-mind/palestinian-armed-groups-october-7
I think it less about percentages and more about target audiences. I doubt Hamas cares one jot what you or I think, but they will be sensitive to what Palestinian residents within the region think, and to a lesser extent Palestinian diaspora and other Arab populations.
But Watcher’s post, that you were replying to, didn’t state that idea. You may have inferred it from what Watcher wrote, but that’s an enormous (and extremely uncharitable) stretch.
Daran
Amp
There’s a modified motte and bailey argument thing happening here, kind of like what happened with the fiery but mostly peaceful BLM protests… It functionally, if inadvertently, sane-washes insane positions and gives people cover for their hate. You can say, with the benefit of truth, that there are a lot of people, probably a solid majority of people, who chant that slogan with entirely peaceful things in mind… But it is hard for some people to see that when the slogan is also being used as a call to genocide. It doesn’t take much effort to find examples of people saying that when they say from the river to the sea, they mean to wipe Jews out of Israel.
It’s an interesting problem, with BLM in particular the extremists were the ones hiding under the banner, with “from the River” I actually don’t know who started using it first. I don’t know what you do about it, but it’s certainly a thing, and it makes the conversations harder, even without people trying to pretend the extreme position doesn’t exist. There has to be some recognition of a shared reality.
Amp
Dianne
I mean, it’s true that the average age of a Palestinian is very low, and there aren’t a whole lot of people who first hand remember the history of the conflict from their side, but I don’t see any evidence that the upcoming generation of Palestinians are less radicalized. I also think that you’re being a little too hand-wavey about the idea that there are (or were) significant portions of the Hamas government that are moderate in their ideology. When first hand experience dies, the family history takes over, these are Montagues and Capulets, or Hatfields and McCoys… They’re passing down their version of history, and my impression is that the young generations are being fed propaganda from almost the moment of birth, and I have no idea how that produces anything other than extremism.
Watcher
Daran
Amp
Daran
Amp
I don’t agree, Amp, I think Daran’s response was perfect: The power dynamics aren’t relevant. The question was whether Hamas’ stated differentiation between Israelis and Jews was a legitimately held belief. The answer to that question might be contextualized by those dynamics, but the simple truth of the answer isn’t. In trying to contextualize why someone might have a hard time making that separation, I think it’s a self-report that gives up the larger point: They wouldn’t have to contextualize like that if they thought the people were legitimately making that distinction.
Daran
I think that’s incredibly naïve, at best, obtuse at worst. Even if Hamas’ leadership had pure as the driven snow intentions of hitting only military targets, but their soldiers went off-script and started massacring civilians, it’s still their fault because they should have known that their own people were an unruly mob. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to infer that, and I also think that it’s just not true that we have no idea what their intentions were, these guys were equipped with go-pros, they live streamed their atrocities.
I don’t know about whether the Jewish community in my region is terrified. My impression is that they’re not in a lot of danger, but I live in Manhattan and the culture is different from that of Alabama or Utah. So in the US overall, yes, I can see being terrified.
That being said, I suspect Muslims in the US are a lot more terrified right now, between the rhetoric and the recent attacks.
I think Muslims in the US have been in a constant state of terror since 2001. Not that everything was great before then.
There certainly is.
Bailey: “From the river to the sea” is a genocidal slogan.
Motte: It’s easy to find examples of people saying that when they say from the river to the sea, they mean to wipe Jews out of Israel.
The motte may not be as defensible as you think. Chatgpt couldn’t find a single one. Here’s the prompt I used:
Later I clarified that “eradicate” means kill, expel, or some combination of the two, so that no Jews were left living within the region. Still no examples.
Finally I softened the requirement to “violence toward Jews significantly beyond that needed to achieve the abolition of Israel and establish an Islamic state from river to sea”. Still no unambiguous examples. Only when I dropped the requirement that “from the river to the sea” be used, did it come up with two examples, while acknowledging that they were, in fact, hard to find.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-distances-itself-from-official-who-urged-murder-of-jews-everywhere/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/did-netanyahu-put-anti-semitic-words-in-hezbollahs-mouth
Maybe you can do better.
For the record… I’m struggling here, because I think I reject your framing of the motte. This might be a conversation about standards. If we accept for a moment, rhetorically, that the slogan is used genocidally, are you saying that it ceases to be a genocidal statement if there’s a usage for it that isn’t genocidal? Because I think there’s a strong argument that even if there is some benign usage, it’s still a genocidal slogan. Would the N word cease to be a slur if there were examples of it not being used as one? Or is it a matter of how well known or prevalent the offensive usage is? I don’t think either, I think the N word would continue to be a slur, and I’m old enough to remember when progressives would argue that the OK sign was offensive because some white supremacists were using it to signal white power, even though that usage was orders of magnitude less commonly known than From The River. What would be the articulable standard where the OK hand gesture is offensive, but From the River isn’t?
But there’s a second part of this… For the first I asked you to assume rhetorically that it was a genocidal slogan, but you actually took issue with the idea that anyone used it like that.
I don’t think ChatGPT is dispositive. The problem here is that it’s a complex context, and one I think ChatGPT is uniquely ill suited to handle. The question is what would a genocidal usage of From the River look like? And that’s actually kind of a hard question to articulate an answer for. This problem is functionally identical to “All Lives Matter”. The term itself is innocuous: All lives do matter. But it wasn’t accepted as an affirmation of the value of life, it was seen as a refutation of Black Lives Matter. And fair enough, it was seen that way because of the context it was used, and the people who were using it.
So I think if you were going to do this exercise in a way that Chat GPT was more likely to be able to process, you’d ask it who were the most militant people to say From The River to The Sea, and then see if those people had genocidal intentions. Because the likelihood is that someone who wanted to, for instance, sweep all the Jews into the sea, probably didn’t also want to live in peace with them.
Now, if I did that exercise and found examples of people willing to commit genocide adopting the chant, would that be sufficient for you? And as a follow up to try to stave off belaboring the obvious… Would you concede that I’d be able to do that?
I’m old enough to remember in 2017 when 4Channers created that hoax and some online randos (both left and right) picked it up.
It is genuinely embarrassing that a handful of leftists were fooled by the hoax.
But it should be more embarrassing that right-wingers still use the hoax as the racists who created it intended – as a way of scoring points against the left in internet debates.
” If we accept for a moment, rhetorically, that the slogan is used genocidally, are you saying that it ceases to be a genocidal statement if there’s a usage for it that isn’t genocidal?”
Lots of language can be used to discuss genocide without being innately genocidal. In Rwanda, the euphemism used for the murder of Tutsis on Radio de Mille Colines was simply “travail”, e.g. “work” in French. At the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn’t mean that everybody who uses the word “travail” or one of its variants is advocating genocide, or that the word itself is innately genocidal.
Sorry, but I can’t give this to you. Reality asserts at some point.
I’ve never been to 4Chan, but I’ve seen people, actual progressives, not false flag operations, making those points. Regardless of the origin of the thing, the way they reacted to it was real, and my reaction to a real thing that’s happening, I think, is orders of magnitude more reasonable than the people who reacted to a hoax. I’m sorry, but I the trolls had a point – There was such a fervent hunger and appetite at that point in time for things to get outraged over that to this day there are still progressives that think it’s offensive.
But if you don’t like that one, you can ad lib one of the dozens of stupid de minimus niche things progressives naturally decided to target over the years… We’ve talked before about the guy from Jeopardy who signaled three wins the “wrong way” with his fingers, no one made those people call and threaten his family. That certainly happened. How about all the times people got rang up because someone thought their nordic rune tattoo was problematic, or someone made a poster and they thought some of the lines roughly resembled a swastika?
Progressives have been famously thin skinned about things like this, but all of a sudden, they develop this deep skepticism of “From the River” being a problem?
Again… Articulate the standard. Maybe I’m an idiot, explain it to me like I’m five. Make it make sense.
Could you clarify for me: Do you think this is a typical thing most progressives do, while conservatives never do it (or only rare, unrepresentative conservatives do it)? Or do you think this is a “both sides have outliers that do this, not much difference” thing? Or what?
I’d say that there are people who do this on both sides, but the hate is much more amplified and encouraged by high-up Republicans than high-up Democrats; i.e., Trump spreads rumors that Haitians are killing and eating your house pets, but Biden isn’t saying that people who use the OK sign are Nazis.
I think there are two connected but dissociable things here, and the sides of the political spectrum approach them differently. I think Republicans are much more likely to speak generally about groups, and when they target individuals, they tend to be high-profile individuals. I think Progressives are much more likely to go after individuals, and no one is too small to dogpile. I also have the impression that while there are crazy people on both sides willing to do awful things, progressives are more likely to target families and children. Even when someone like Matt Walsh goes out and picks on some small TikTok creator, those people at least put themselves out there politically and publicly, a lot of the cases I take most offense to are when progressives target people that someone made internet famous with a cell phone video, if for no reason other than there but for the grace of God go I.
I’m not sure that actually answers your question though. I don’t know if this is a typical thing progressives do. I kind of doubt it. I’ve already separated progressives from the larger categories of Democrat or Leftist, because I think the population is much smaller, and I do think that people who self-identify as progressive are more likely to be extreme than people who self identify into the larger categories, if that helps?
Two things though… First is that I think progressives are good at amplifying their voice to seem like they’re disproportionately representative. I think that Twitter mobs of a couple of thousand people had very outsized effects on things, and so I’m not entirely convinced that how small the population is really matters. Frankly, I think you’d want to argue something similar for people who are legitimately extreme-right, whatever label you want to use.
Second is that I think you’re dodging the question, and I’d like an answer to it: What is the standard for something that should be criticized, as opposed to excused? Please, write it out, something that I can look at and even if I don’t agree with it, or decide to use it personally, I can at least nod and acknowledge your consistency. All the things that progressives have spilled ink over, from microaggressions to appropriation to hand gestures, again… you can pick whatever thing to compare it against that you want. How does someone care about those things but give From the River a pass?
“Please, write it out, something that I can look at and even if I don’t agree with it, or decide to use it personally, ”
You know you’re very keen to assign other people homework in these kinds of discussions, but you don’t really reciprocate.
I’m still waiting for Corso to post a single example of people saying that when they say from the river to the sea, they mean to wipe Jews out of Israel. According to them, this should be easy to find.
@Daran: Yeah, and yet he is often very aggressive about “You’ve ignored my point/you haven’t answered my question…”
Dude definitely believes these interactions are a movie where he’s the star.
Let’s not make the thread about Corso, and yes, mea culpa as much as youa.
@Daran: That’s a good call.
I think I’ve been pretty good about responding to any question put at me, including the question you think I haven’t answered.
Daran:
For the record…. You never actually asked that. You said that Chat GPT couldn’t come up with an example of the “motte” position that “It’s easy to find examples of people saying that when they say from the river to the sea, they mean to wipe Jews out of Israel.”
For the record, I rejected the premise and said I was fine with the “bailey” position that “From the river to the sea” is a genocidal slogan, even if there are some benign uses of it. Then I went further and actually interacted with your point as stated:
Say the word, I have a couple examples I could cite to. I’m holding off because I want to avoid doing useless work and shifting goalposts, if you tell me that you’d be convinced by that evidence, I’ll go through the effort of laying it out.
I also want to point out that my exercise is a more defensible version of the position that some people who say that Israel is committing a genocide take. They’ll show that people in the Israeli government have said some overtly genocidal things and then extrapolate that to the government of Israel as a whole. I’m doing something more discrete: I’m just saying that the individual is genocidal because they’ve said genocidal things, and that person probably doesn’t also hold the idea that they want to live in peace with their enemy.