Caroline Glick on Trump, Israel, and America’s secular Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

Caroline Glick has some good news about the Trump administration, and some sobering news about the leaching away of America’s Jews from any sort of meaningful Judaism:

Earlier this month Norway, Denmark and Switzerland did something surprising.

Norway announced that it was demanding the return of its money from the Palestinian Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Secretariat, for the latter’s funding of a Palestinian women’s group that built a youth center near Nablus named for PLO mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi.

Denmark followed, announcing it was cutting off all funding to the group.

And last week, the Swiss parliament passed a resolution directing the government to amend Swiss law to block funding of NGOs “involved in racist, antisemitic or hate incitement actions.”

For years, the Israeli government has been urging these and other European governments to stop funding such groups, to no avail. What explains their abrupt change of heart? In two words: Donald Trump.

For years, the Obama administration quietly encouraged the Europeans to fund these groups and to ratchet up their anti-Israel positions. Doing so, the former administration believed, would coerce Israel to make concessions to the PLO.

But now, Trump and his advisers are delivering the opposite message. And, as the actions by Denmark, Norway and Switzerland show, the new message is beginning to be received.

I’m not sure of the exact details of that “message”—does it involve persuasion, rewards, or threats, or just leading by example?—but I think an utterly different tone is being set now regarding Israel.

But here’s what Glick has to say about the position of the American secular Jewish population on the subject of the anti-Israeli BDS campaign:

When Israelis think about the BDS movement, they tend to think that the American Jewish community is the place to turn for assistance.

This is not merely incorrect.

As two studies published in the last few weeks show, the notion that Israel can look to the American Jewish community for help with anything is becoming increasingly dubious.

To be sure, there are several American Jewish groups that devote massive resources to combating BDS on campuses. But their actions are tactical…

On a strategic level, the effective moves made to date against BDS have been initiated by Republicans.

Alan Clemmons, the South Carolina lawmaker who initiated the anti-BDS bill in his statehouse and has since gone on to spearhead the state government anti-BDS drive nationally, is a Christian Zionist.

Glick goes on to say that, although there are certainly Jewish organizations fighting BDS, the main political thrust against the movement is at the hands of the Republican Party. Also, most secular Jews (that’s the majority of younger Jews in the US) are far more leftist than they are Jewish.

That latter point is one I’ve made many time on the blog: when people talk about “Jews” in this country, they often lump together the religious Jews and the vast number of Jews who are JINOs or cultural Jews only. It’s the religious Jews who are far more likely to support the Republican Party than the secular Jews are, although interestingly enough Donald Trump received the votes of about a quarter of self-identified Jewish voters in 2016 (24%)—somehwat more than Bush’s 19% in 2000 and McCain’s 21% in 2008, similar to Bush’s 25% in 2004, and significantly less than Romney’s recent high of 30% in 2012. These statistics certainly don’t indicate an increased turning away from the GOP for Jews in recent years (that is, if you believe polls these days); on the contrary, there’s been a slight increase during the past two elections as compared to 2000 and 2008.

I can’t find recent polls on the subject of Jewish approval of Trump, but this article from March indicates that at least at that point Jewish approval of Trump was at 31%. That’s low, but it’s higher than the number who voted for him, and indicates increased approval rather than decreased. What’s more, that lowish figure of 30% represents the fact that so many Jews are Democrats rather than anything else that’s special about Jews, because Jews who are Democrats approve of Trump in figures very very similar to Trump=approval among Democrats as a whole, and Jews who are Republicans have Trump approval rates that are very very similar to those of Republicans as a whole.

But back to Glick’s article [emphasis mine]:

Young American Jews aren’t turning against Israel because their values are different from Israeli values. By and large, they have the same values as Israeli society. And if they know anything about Israel, they know that their values aren’t in conflict with Israeli values.

Young American Jews are turning on Israel for two reasons. First, they don’t care that they are Jewish and as a consequence, see no reason to stick their necks out on Israel’s behalf.

And second, due in large part to the political BDS campaign on college campuses, supporting Israel requires them to endanger or relinquish their ideological home on the Left. Since their leftist identities are far stronger than their Jewish identities, young American Jews are joining the BDS mob in increasing numbers.

Anyone interested in the question of why so many Jews are Democrats should read this 2009 book by Norman Podhoretz.

Ruth Madoff today

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a story about Ruth Madoff’s life these days. My question is: why the story, and in particular why the need to reveal where she lives? So people can harass her even more than they already do?

I’ve written about the Madoff relatives and my opinion about their guilt or innocence. I’m not going to rehash that argument again, except to say I have never wavered from the idea that they had no idea what was going on. I’ve seen zero credible evidence to dissuade me from that viewpoint. I see the sons as having been among Madoff’s most heartbreaking victims, since he betrayed them both in the fiduciary sense and as a father and as a person. The same for his wife Ruth, only substitute “husband” for the word “father.”

But people continue to want to blame. I think they’re really saying some form of “I would have known. I would be smart enough to know. No one can put anything over on me.” But my belief in the (now-deceased) sons’ innocence and my belief in Ruth Madoff’s innocence is not naivete on my part. It’s actually the opposite: a profound appreciation for how secretive and successfully psychopathic some people can be.

You know what’s naive? Statements such as this, found in the article:

“How do you sleep with a man for all those years and don’t know what he is up to?” asked an Old Greenwich shop owner who did not want to be identified because Ruth frequents her store. “I just don’t buy the story that she knew nothing, and that she’s had a hard time. She hasn’t been through what half the people went through. People committed suicide because of the Madoffs. Please!”

One of those people happened to have been the older of Ruth Madoff’s two sons.

What’s more, thinking that if you sleep with someone for decades you must know all there is to know about them is naive. Some people have huge secrets, and even a completely secret life. It’s a combination of arrogance and stupidity to think otherwise. As though sleeping with someone tells you their business secrets!

Try sleeping with a sociopath, or a spy. See how much you find out.

I see Ruth Madoff as a tragic figure. She married her high school sweetheart when neither had any money to speak of. He did well—very well—and she had a good ride for quite a while. By all accounts, she was the “people person” in the marriage, the warm one as opposed to Madoff’s coldness. Their two sons gave them plenty of nachas, too.

And then it all fell through, suddenly and spectacularly and publicly. Ruth Madoff is no heroine—far from it. She actually seems rather ordinary as a person, at least that’s what I’ve observed. But her tale has all the marks of tragedy: a rise to spectacular heights and then a huge fall, betrayal by the man she had trusted and loved her entire adult life, the death of both her sons, disgrace, and the hatred of much of the world.

It’s a lot. No wonder she compulsively walks the streets of the suburban town where she lives.

See you later, alligator

The New Neo Posted on by

I spend a lot of time on computers and I’ve developed many pet peeves about them.

One concerns a phenomenon that’s grown more and more frequent over time: the stupendously annoying coercive forced-choice. It is presented by the pop-up window that offers you something you don’t want and didn’t ask for—be it an update or a service or a product or a website link—and then gives you a choice of responses. But the responses aren’t a simple “yes” or “no.” And definitely you never get to choose “go away and leave me alone forever.”

Instead, you get a variant of something snide and sarcastic, where the supposed “no” response reads something like “I don’t want this wonderful free service because I’m a moron.” Or you get a response that isn’t “no” at all but “later.” Sometimes it’s literally the word “later.” Sometimes it’s “remind me later.” But the idea is that this screen will come back to haunt you until you go where they want you to go and do what they want you to do.

I hate, hate, hate it.

Trump tweets again

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t watch TV news or opinion shows these days, and haven’t for well over a year. And I’ve never watched Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzenzski on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

But if you read the news it’s virtually impossible to ignore the enormous brouhaha about Trump’s nasty tweets about Mrzenzski “bleeding from a facelift.” Trump seems to have a special interest in newswomen’s facial bleeding, if you recall his remarks early in the 2016 campaign about Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her eyes.”

I said I don’t watch Joe and Mika’s show and never have, but it’s covered regularly on Legal Insurrection and so I am aware that they are heavy and pretty vicious Trump criticizers. That’s their prerogative. But anyone who knows anything about Trump knows he’s going to fight back in just this way. His tweets are personal, often about appearance, often (although most definitely not always) directed at women, and in my opinion extremely offensive. It’s one of many things about Trump that I dislike and of which I disapprove. And yes, I know that sometimes he does it strategically, either to deflect attention from something else or with the general aim of defending himself. But there are other ways to defend yourself, and I very much wish he’d eliminate this one.

But you know what? If you elect Donald Trump president, you’re going to get this sort of thing. Over and over and over. It’s his nature and his modus operandi. And at this point it’s a big yawn to me, although it’s red meat (blood-red meat?) to the MSM:

Collectively, the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) dedicated a total of 12 minutes and 14 seconds to Trump’s attack against the MSNBC personality. ABC’s World News Tonight gave the tweet three minutes 45 seconds, CBS Evening News a whopping five minutes 29 seconds over two different segments, and NBC Nightly News set aside three minutes. All of them led their evening news program with Trump’s tweets.

The more important development of the day was a pair of laws passed by Congress that were designed to protect American citizens. Anchor Lester Holt was the only one to mention the passage of the laws, but only in this mere 26-second news brief…

That’s the way it is, folks.

Then there was this more serious accusation towards Trump from Scarborough:

According to Scarborough, White House staff called him and said the National Enquirer had a story about Joe and Mika they were going to run and that President Trump would have them spike it if Joe called the President and apologized for their coverage of the president.

There’s more at the link, but I find the accusation suspicious. First of all, the calls were supposedly made in April and May, so they would appear to have nothing to do with the current Trump tweet story. Secondly, was the Enquirer story ever published, and what was it about (it’s not clear, according to this article)? No Trump apology was ever issued, so if the threat had occurred you would think the story would have been published by now. Thirdly, is it blackmail to refuse to honor a request that a story already in the works be spiked? Fourthly, why is this only coming out now? The charges are explosive, and why would Joe and Mika have sat on this since April and May?

For what it’s worth, here is a statement on the subject from the Enquirer:

At the beginning of June we accurately reported a story that recounted the relationship between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the truth of which is not in dispute. At no time did we threaten either Joe or Mika or their children in connection with our reporting on the story. We have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions,” Dylan Howard, chief content officer and vice president for American Media, said in a statement Friday morning.

the National Enquirer is a tabloid. But news in general has become tabloid-like. And President Trump’s tweets fit right into the general atmosphere.

I’m with Sharyl Attkisson on this

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought I’d make today mostly a Trump-free day on the blog. But not a media-free day. And where there’s media, there’s Trump, at least by implication. You can’t get away!

So I’m quoting Sharyl Attkisson from a recent interview:

…[W]hen you [criticize politicians and other people in power] in such a way that the public no longer believes what they’re getting is the whole truth or sometimes the truth at all, you’ve undercut yourself because we’re getting to an era where people hardly believe anything they hear at first blush, at least that’s how I am. No matter who reports it, I feel like I have to do my own independent work to know whether it’s true or not, because there have been so many, so many, serious mistakes, even by formerly very well-respected news outlets.

Remember, this is a fellow journalist speaking. If it has come to that for her, what about the rest of us? For me, this feeling started way back during my political change over 15 years ago, and was one of the things that drove it. And one of the things that drove me to blogging was the need to “do my own independent work” to know whether things I read are true or not.

Nor are these actually “mistakes” by the press—not in the usual sense, anyway. And Attkisson is well aware of that, as you’ll see if you listen to the whole clip. Her new book The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote about what she calls “transactional journalism” sounds pretty darn interesting, too.

Unscheduled stops

The New Neo Posted on by

For the last decade or more, when I fly cross-country I’ve flown Jet Blue almost exclusively. I’ve nearly always had an excellent experience with it: comfortable seats, efficient service, and a tremendous on-time record.

But on a recent trip to California, for my return flight to Boston from the San Francisco area I got to the airport for a redeye and was told that the plane wouldn’t be taking off for 6 more hours. The reason given was that the plane itself—which was coming in from Boston—had to make an unscheduled stop.

That was troubling, and I wanted more information. “Oh, it happens all the time this time of year because of weather” said the man at the Jet Blue counter.

Happens all the time? I’d never heard of it before, except for when there are thunderstorms, and there were no thunderstorms that day. What’s more, I’ve been told that usually in that situation the weather is known beforehand and the takeoff is delayed rather than an unscheduled stop being made.

So I probed a little further. This time the counter guy said that when planes go from east to west in the US they meet with headwinds, and tailwinds going in the other direction. I already knew that; flights are uniformly longer for that reason when going east to west as compared to west to east.

But surely that was taken into account in the schedule? He explained that, when the headwinds were very strong, the planes use up more fuel and sometimes have to stop to refuel, often in Salt Lake City for this particular run.

I didn’t want to wait in that airport for six hours, so I asked him to switch me to the same flight on the next night. But sure enough, the next night the same thing happened—only this time the delay wasn’t as long, and I made sure to check for updates before I left for the airport (for some reason, even though I’d signed up for text messages, they weren’t coming through).

On this second night, however, Jet Blue was sending me emails with a split personality. One email would say that the flight takeoff had been delayed two hours, and then four minutes later I’d get another email saying that the flight was going to leave at the original departure time, no delay at all. This happened several times as I prepared to leave for the airport, wondering whether I ought to leave or whether I still had two hours before I needed to get a ride there.

As it turned out, the flight left about an hour and a quarter late, splitting the difference between the sets of paired emails. I talked to several people in the waiting area who said they’d gotten the same talking-out-of-both-sides-of-the-mouth emails that I’d received, and been puzzled by them.

So here’s my question: what gives? Has anyone else had this experience? Why would it be commonplace at this time of year? Is Jet Blue the only airline with the problem? Does it have something to do with the size of the planes? I couldn’t find a thing about it when I Googled, and I would have thought delays of this magnitude and unscheduled stops being “commonplace” would have gotten some sort of media attention. I did find this WSJ article from five years ago about a similar problem with transatlantic flights during the winter, but it was a different airline and a different type of airplane:

Dozens of Continental Airlines flights to the East Coast from Europe have been forced to make unexpected stops in Canada and elsewhere to take on fuel after running into unusually strong headwinds over the Atlantic Ocean….

United’s Continental unit””which relies on 757s to link its Newark, N.J., hub to numerous European destinations””has been most adversely affected. And recently, Continental began deploying some of its 757s on two traditional United routes out of Dulles””to Paris and Amsterdam””that used to be served by larger planes, exposing some westbound fliers to the same diversions that have played havoc with its schedule and reputation…

The workhorse 757, which entered airline service in 1983 and was produced until 2004, can carry more than 220 passengers in one class. In the U.S., it was initially used for domestic flights, including coast-to-coast trips, and for trips to nearby overseas destinations. But once the FAA in the early 1990s granted airline operators permission to use it on over-water routes, carriers including American, Northwest, US Airways and Continental found the 757 a fuel-effective way to serve cities in Western Europe that had previously been reached with larger, more costly wide-body planes that consume more fuel but have greater range.

Sounds like something very similar is going on now with Jet Blue transcontinental flights. And—at least from my personal experience—it’s something new. The plane involved in my trip was an Airbus A320, but Jet Blue has been using them since 2000, so they’re not new in that sense. But when I looked up the on-time record of my particular flight, I saw that delays of many hours have been happening at least once a week, and several cancellations as well in just the last couple of weeks.

I got home safely, slightly the worse for wear and a day later. Getting home safely is by far the most important thing, of course. But I’m asking all you airplane and airline experts (and I know you’re out there; you know who you are!) if you can explain what’s really going on here.

Why writers lie

The New Neo Posted on by

No real answer is provided in this Vanity Fair article, although the title [“Why Writers Lie (and Plagiarize and Fabricate and Stretch the Truth and…”)] would have you believe it will offer one.

This is the closest it comes, and the quote just refers to one person named Jonah Lehrer:

A Rhodes scholar and a best-selling author in his 20s, he fell in love with the sound of applause at book gatherings and with the sight of his e-mail inbox, crowded with invitations. He got busy, and he got sloppy.

So I’ll jump into the gap with my own theories.

Some writers—just like some people—are habitual liars anyway, in their lives as well as their writing. You might just as well say, “why liars write.”

But the profession of writing presents special hazards and temptations, even to those who are generally truthful. Fiction writers, for example, are so used to making stuff up that the segue into extending their imaginative powers to non-fiction might seem small and insignificant, even though it’s not.

Writers feel the need to churn it out, and some become desperate for material.

Some writers might actually lose the distinction between truth and fiction along the way. Memoirists, for example, often condense or simplify or combine incidents, and that’s not considered to be lying. But perhaps it becomes a slippery slope, and the writer starts changing more than that. Affer all, writers want to engage the interest of their readers. I happen to think that truth is stranger than fiction, but others would differ and might like to embellish their tales in order to make a better story. An embellished tale told too often can start replacing the truth, even in the storyteller’s own mind.

These are explanations, not justifications.

Sarah Palin sues the NY Times…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for defamation:

Former Governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is suing the New York Times for defamation over a recent editorial tying one of her political action committee ads to a 2011 mass shooting that severely wounded Arizona Democrat Gabby Giffords and killed six people, including a 9-year-old girl”‹, The Post has learned”‹.

The Manhattan federal court lawsuit, filed Tuesday by lawyers Kenneth Turkel, Shane Vogt and S. Preston Ricardo, accuse”‹s”‹ the Gray Lady of having “violated the law and its own policies” when it accused her ”” in a “fabricated story” ”” of inciting the 2011 attack by Jared Lee Loughner.

The Times editorial that can be easily found appears to be the corrected version rather than the original. The relevant portion of the corrected version reads this way:

Was this attack [the Scalise shooting] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs. But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.

But if no connection to the Giffords shooting was ever established, then why mention Sarah Palin at all? Clearly, an equivalence is implied in the editorial between the overt and obvious political motivations of the Scalise shooting and the Giffords shooting (in which 6 people were actually killed, making it far worse in its consequences) despite the complete and utter lack of political motivations for Giffords’ shooter Loughner.

Bad as that is, the original Times editorial was much worse. It read [emphasis mine]:

In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

Pretty pernicious stuff, and completely untrue. Readers will picture a graphic of the actual politicians, including Giffords, as being targets. But that was never the case and furthermore has long been known to have never been the case. And far from the link being “clear” between that “incitement” and the shooting, there was no link whatsoever, except as manufactured by the Times and other liberal outlets and pundits. The Times’ correction revises the specifics about the crosshairs, and takes away the reference to an explicit link between the PAC’s graphics and the Giffords shooting, but leaves the implication of a link untouched.

No wonder Palin is suing. But I don’t think she’ll win. Maybe she doesn’t expect to; maybe she just wants to highlight the devious duplicity of the Times. I don’t think the suit will succeed because the standards for defamation of a public figure are so very high, and this involves a PAC rather Palin herself anyway.

Obamacare replacement bill wildly unpopular…

The New Neo Posted on by

…says article after article and poll after poll.

Well, why shouldn’t it be unpopular?

The drumbeat of the MSM that’s been denouncing it goes like this: It will kill millions and millions of people. It only favors the rich. It cuts many more millions off from health care. It is secret.

There’s probably more I haven’t listed, but you get the picture.

And then there’s the right, much of which only wanted “repeal.” Vast numbers think that this bill is merely craven establishment-Republican-style Obamacare-lite (and not all that “lite,” at that).

So who on earth would be supporting it?

I’d like to see another poll. This one would ask those same people questions about exactly what’s in the bill. Most of the respondents probably could answer nothing more than to parrot the thoughts in those headlines I listed, such as “it will kill millions of people.” In fact, if there actually was a quiz in these polls about the point-by-point provisions of the bill, I’m pretty certain that, if people were honest, at least 95% of respondents would have to choose the option of “have not heard enough about it to have an opinion.”

CNN chaos

The New Neo Posted on by

Something big happened at CNN, but it’s not really clear what it was.

Here’s what’s been revealed so far:

Three CNN journalists, including the executive editor in charge of a new investigative unit, have resigned after the publication of a Russia-related article that was retracted.

Thomas Frank, who wrote the story in question; Eric Lichtblau, an editor in the unit; and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, have all left CNN.

“In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignations of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a spokesman said Monday evening.

An internal investigation by CNN management found that some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published, people briefed on the results of the investigation said.

The journalists who “resigned” (my guess is it wasn’t entirely voluntary, although the reports would have you think it was) are higher level employees. This isn’t a case of the little guys taking the fall. CNN has made errors before and/or published “fake news,” but this sort of mass resignation of top reporters is very unusual, even when errors are made. Something quite egregious must have happened, or else there was a threat to sue that must have been exceptionally serious in its possible consequences.

The story, which reported that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials,” cited a single anonymous source.

These types of stories are typically reviewed by several departments within CNN — including fact-checkers, journalism standards experts and lawyers — before publication.

Anonymous sources have become standard these days, and anonymous sources who are wrong—or liars—are pretty standard these days as well. This source must have been especially shady, and there was no corroboration from another source. In addition, it sounds as though even the most rudimentary rules about the chain of checkers were not followed.

In a staff meeting Monday afternoon, investigative unit members were told that the retraction did not mean the facts of the story were necessarily wrong.

Are we supposed to believe that three major players at CNN were fired or asked to resign for a story that was essentially true but just didn’t follow the rules? That completely strains credibility.

Here are the resumes of the three:

Frank worked for USA Today and Newsday for three decades, pursuing investigations and covering the Iraq war as an embedded reporter, before coming to work at CNN.

He was part of an ambitious new investigative unit that was created last winter, bringing together existing teams from within the company and new hires like Lichtblau.

A veteran of The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2006, Lichtblau joined CNN just three months ago.

Haris, who was named the executive editor of CNN Investigates in January, was previously the executive editor of CNNMoney.

These aren’t just reporters, these are seasoned investigative reporters and one is a Pulitizer Prize winner. I no longer find any of that a reason to trust a journalist to tell the truth. Maybe they got cocky, but I think the basic impetus was almost certainly the hunt for the smoking gun that will finally implicate the hated, hated Trump once and for all. Cutting corners must have seemed a righteous thing for this crew to do in the pursuit of journalism’s great white whale.

Some Democratic soul-searching

The New Neo Posted on by

An interesting article in the Atlantic by Franklin Foer entitled “What’s Wrong With the Democrats?”:

If there’s any consolation to the realization of terrible fears, of worst-case scenarios springing to life, it’s that they are invigorating. Donald Trump’s presidency has rocked a long-complacent Democratic Party like nothing in recent history.

True. However, he follows that with a claim that is as laughable as it is common among the left:

Liberals, with their confidence that the trajectory of the country points in their direction, never had quite as much practice as conservatives in expressing their anger. That’s what makes the “Resistance”””the many marches, the seething hostility at town-hall meetings, the anti-Trump placards shouting at passersby from bungalow windows””a transformational break in the pattern.

Sure, Franklin, sure. I guess you haven’t been paying much attention to liberals or the left for the last fifty years, or 100 years, or even more.

But once Foer gets that absurdity out of the way, its back to business again:

Resistance has given the Democrats the illusion of unity, but the reality is deeply conflicted. Two of the party’s largest concerns””race and class””reside in an increasing state of tension, a tension that will grow as the party turns toward the next presidential election.

To produce a governing majority, the party will need to survive an unsettling reckoning with itself. Donald Trump didn’t just prevail over the Democrats; he called into doubt their old truths.

Foer goes on to describe the problem as Clinton’s—and the Democrats’—failure to appeal to the white working class. This is an analysis that is commonplace, and probably largely true. And when Foer writes this sentence, I wonder if he understands that there’s an inherent contradiction there, and it’s not just Hillary’s fault:

She never fully met her most important political challenge: the need to both celebrate multiculturalism and also cushion the backlash against the celebration.

I don’t think there’s any way to do that. What’s more, I think Foer makes the typical liberal’s mistake of thinking that Trump support is a backlash against some sort of celebration of multiculturalism. We’re not talking about “celebrations” here—not about ethnic restaurants or dress or diversity. We’re talking about immigration policies that let in significant numbers of people who do not believe in our form of government, and who are given benefits at the expense of the white working class Foer’s talking about, and a Democratic Party that supports economic measures that hurt that same white working class as well.

Foer does understand that the Democratic Party seems to be in trouble: “Clinton’s defeat reflects badly on her candidacy, but also exposes the limits of the Democratic Party, which has sustained failures at nearly every tier of government over the past eight years.” But then he goes on to cite an analysis from the Reagan years that studied why the white working class living in the Detroit suburban area of Macomb had turned from the Democratic Party to the GOP, and the reason given is that they were bigots:

Many political analysts who puzzled over Democratic losses described how the backlash against the civil-rights era had propelled white voters away from liberalism, but none gave racism quite the same centrality as Greenberg did. He found “a profound distaste for black Americans, a sentiment that pervaded almost everything” that Macomb residents thought about government and politics. Denizens of Macomb””the county was 97 percent white””did little to disguise their animosity. African Americans, they complained, had benefited at their expense. Their tax dollars were funding a welfare state that plowed money into black communities, while politicians showed no concern for their own plight. (That plight was real: The auto industry, which provided the undergirding for middle-class life in Michigan, had collapsed in the face of foreign competition.)

But was it “A profound distaste for black Americans…that pervades everything,” as in racism, or was it a “profound distaste” for the fact that yes, indeed, black Americans had “benefited at their expense”? What were the residents of Macomb county to feel, but that what was happening was unfair to them, and that therefore the party in charge of the redistribution was no friend of theirs?

And funny thing, Obama carried Macomb county in both 2008 and 2012. Some racists! But Foer goes right back to the possibility of that “racist” explanation when many of those very same voters veered to Donald Trump just four years later:

Not only did Trump reclaim Macomb for the Republicans””trouncing Clinton by 12 percentage points there””but he turned the Democratic establishment back to Greenberg’s central question about working-class whites: Did racism put many of them beyond reach?

The “racists” of Macomb would have to be chameleon-racists, apparently. One moment they’re voting for Obama, the next they’re voting for “his racist successor.” Greenberg (and Foer) were so stunned by this that they went back to Macomb to study those Obama-turned-Trump voters, and what did they find? No overt expressions of racism against blacks. But hey, now Greenberg says the group is bigoted against Muslims, and here’s the evidence:

Prejudice, however, remained very real. The old complaints about African Americans had affixed themselves to immigrants. Dearborn, which has a thriving Muslim immigrant community, is a short drive away. Just as Macomb’s whites had once accused African Americans of prospering at their expense, members of Greenberg’s focus groups spoke openly about being displaced by immigrants. “We need to take care of home first,” one participant said, as if the immigrant neighbors weren’t also living at home…

It’s one thing to know that nativism exists; it’s another to hear it espoused so casually in the presence of strangers. Many of the voters Greenberg had gathered seemed beyond the grasp of any plausible Democratic appeal, their hatred of immigrants racialized, paranoid, and unshakable.

If Foer and Greenberg really want to suggest how Democrats can appeal to such voters, I have a few suggestions to make: stop condescending to them, and stop accusing them of racism, bigotry, and hatred when they are only describing what they observe and what has actually happened to them as a result of Democratic policies on immigration. But I think that Democrats right now are incapable of doing such a thing; it would threaten too deeply ingrained a belief. After all, it’s seen as a tautology that racism is behind such attitudes on the part of people voting Republican (even temporarily). The idea of an article such as Foer’s is to help the Democratic Party to victory by appealing to the white working class despite their racism. I think that most working class people can see through that sort of ploy.

Democrats could certainly win back the presidency in 2020 or 2024; Trump’s victory was paper-thin, there’s a lot of time for things to change, and the GOP won’t always be facing a candidate as repugnant to so many people as Hillary Clinton was. But sentences like one this from Foer are part of a mindset that’s the problem for Democrats:

A decent liberalism, not to mention a savvy party, shouldn’t struggle to accord dignity and respect to citizens, even if it believes some of them hold abhorrent views.

You wouldn’t—you couldn’t—respect someone who holds “abhorrent views.” Maybe instead the Democrats should strive to understand that their cries of “racist” and “bigot” and “hater” might actually be misplaced, and that there are fact-based reasons that Trump voters might feel displaced and ignored at the expense of new immigrants. But to do that would rob Democrats of one of their most cherished (and useful) beliefs—the idea that Republicans, and those who vote Republican, are evil racists. If you don’t want to be an evil racist too, vote Democratic!