Your October Questions, Answered: Part 2 (Feat. Special Guest Expert Dave Weigel!)

The 2024 election, Israel, Gaza, basketball, Slay the Spire, The Simpsons, and all the other most important things in life

As I noted earlier this month, I got too many good responses when I solicited Ask Me Anything questions in October, so I decided to break my responses into two parts. Here’s Part 1, and now for Part 2, which covers. . . a wide variety of issues. This, uhhhh, may have crept up to over 10,000 words. I will not be offended if you skip questions that don’t interest you, but I’m hoping there’s at least something here for everyone. I also apologize for the delay in publishing Part 2 of this post about the empirical evidence for/against color-blind approaches to discussing race and racism, which I’m eager to get up. You’ll have it in December. And premium subscribers, don’t forget to submit an aviation question for Patrick Smith if you have one.

For now, the first question is about this “election” we are supposedly having about 11 months from now:

If Joe Biden hired you tomorrow to run his 2024 campaign, how would you maximize his chances of winning re-election? —Eli Youngs

If Joe Biden hires me to run his 2024 campaign, that will, on its own, be evidence that he is not cognitively competent to serve as president anymore.

But, okay, this being a wild hypothetical, and acknowledging that I know very little about this stuff: Apparently Biden is in trouble (or isn’t, if you adopt the theory that a lot of voters presently batting their eyes at other candidates will come back home to Sweet Daddy Joe when the alternative to another four years of him becomes clearer). 

Either way, it seems like you (I’m now referring to the president directly) should really focus on abortion! It’s an absolute weak spot for the GOP. Seems you should also obviously spend a lot of time in swing states campaigning on meat-and-potatoes economic issues. You’ll really need to rekindle the flame with various non-white constituencies (particularly non-college-educated blacks and Latinos), because they are drifting toward the GOP and because you performed disastrously poorly with them in 2020 and were instead, thankfully, buttressed by whites who strayed from their usual GOP leanings because of how Trumpy Trump is. This means talking frankly about issues like wages and crime and staying away from radical-chic bullshit. And also. . . 

You know what? I’m speculating slash regurgitating stuff I’ve heard on the politics podcasts I don’t listen to enough. Let’s bring in an expert. Dave Weigel, who has been covering American politics and campaigns forever, currently for Semafor, and who also wrote The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, was kind enough to get on the phone with me. I basically framed our conversation as “Tell me if I’m being stupid in believing these things about the next election,” but he did a lot more than answer that question — it was an interesting conversation.

“No, I think that's not unreasonable,” he said after I laid out the basic, 101 theory of the election you just read in the preceding paragraphs. Then he started discussing something he’s been thinking a lot lately: the role “wokeness,” or whatever you want to call it, will play in 2024 — especially transgender issues. “There’s an idea on the right that you can appeal — and I saw some of this in Texas in 2022 — that you can win even more Latino, Asian voters, and Muslim voters too by saying, ‘Democrats want to teach your kid that a boy can be a girl.’. . . I mean, I think if you sat somebody down for 10 minutes to explain to them the Biden policy of tying school lunch support to gender inclusive policy, you can probably convince a lot of people that’s not a great idea.”

But for the most part, what Weigel is seeing is Republicans overestimating the political potency of these controversies. “These individual issues, they’re confusing Republicans. They’re like ‘I don’t get it.’ Like, “child sex surgery” is incredibly unpopular. Puberty blockers, once you get Billboard Chris in front of a crowd, they’re incredibly unpopular. But people don’t care about everything that they’re [Billboard Chris et al.] annoyed with. They’re just like ‘Why do I care about this? My kid’s not gonna come home from school with a new identity — he’s my kid. I’m not worried about this.’ ” 

These issues just require too much explaining, in many cases. But Weigel did say that the Democrats understand that this is a losing issue once you have to get deeply into the weeds, so he certainly expected Biden’s team not to lean into progressive gender-identity orthodoxy. “I think if it comes up,” he predicted, “it’ll be in the context of ‘My opponent is a crazy, vindictive, fascist bully, and here’s another group of people he’s trying to victimize.’ ” That is to say, Democrats will not be going out of their way to initiate debate-stage conversations about the evidence base for youth gender medicine.

Weigel noted that, as he just argued in Semafor, wokeness has faded as a campaign issue. “[Ron] DeSantis and [Vivek] Ramaswamy are the anti-woke guys, and they’re dropping it from the menu because it’s not playing,” he explained. “Like Tim Scott was running on ‘I’m just proving the lies of the George Floyd movement’ and everyone was like ‘Yeah, we don’t care anymore. We’re putting that in the past.’ ”

He cited Loudoun County, Virginia, as an example of a place that might have led some on both sides of the aisle to adopt the wrong lessons. Because I don’t follow American politics closely enough, and because I’m not on Twitter and therefore am not seeing Weigel’s tweets, I didn’t realize that, as he put it a couple weeks back, “Dems ran the table in Loudoun County [in the elections that just took place] — even the school board races[.]” Whatever overreach or shadiness occurred on the part of lefty school board types, not only on the complicated bathroom scandal (Charles Homans wrote the best rundown of that) but on issues like school reopenings that likely played just as large a role in motivating parents to vote red as anything “wokeness”-related, it doesn’t appear to have done lasting damage to Democratic prospects there.

That’s not to say Dems don’t understand the risk of preventable backlash on these sorts of issues, Weigel explained. He referenced the textbook wars of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the literally violent one that unfolded in Kanawha County, West Virginia (which I was totally ignorant of). In the minds of Democrats, he explained, “There’s a long memory of ‘Shit, we overreached and now our liberal educators are very unpopular,’ but it feels like that just didn’t happen as much in Virginia [meaning Loudoun County] and it has cooled a lot of the political enthusiasm for this as a winner.”

Weigel also mentioned the ever-important divide between the Twitterati and the real world, in the context of “the way that Biden juggled the crime issue in 2020. You and I have memories, we remember it, and he would repeatedly denounce Defund The Police and people on Twitter were like ‘He’s going to lose the black vote,’ and it turns out, No, that’s not how you lose the black vote.” Because this is a hobbyhorse of mine, I mentioned to Weigel how silly a view this is if you know anything about black public opinion polling on policing, which tends, at the level of averages, to be far more complicated and nuanced than support for fewer and less-well-funded police officers in high-crime areas. “Yeah,” Weigel replied. “I mean, living within New York and DC — I imagine DC in particular — there’s a very clear division between the actual black working class and how they want more cops, and like the white people who read Ibram X. Kendi who are “ACAB!” or whatever.”

Thank you to Dave Weigel! It’s nice having an actually talented voice in this newsletter for once.

Having successfully resolved the issues of the 2024 elections, race, and policing, let’s move on to a less challenging subject: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Here I’m going to pair two questions together:

As an admittedly heterodox progressive, but an undeniable principled progressive (as opposed to the more practical-based center-leftism of, e.g., Yglesias and Chait), how has the left-wing embrace of Hamas caused you to reconsider who you consider as allies? Even those who are normally opposed to identity politics and with whom you often relate (for instance, Freddie deBoer) have toed the line of outright anti-Zionism, and it’s hard to find any unabashed leftist who acknowledges the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and security, even if they are against the actual politics of that Jewish state. (As an aside, their cheerleading of terrorism and stoking of anti-Semitism up to and including clear pogroms only reinforces the practical need for Israel, of course.) Why is it so hard for leftists to acknowledge that Israel is entitled to exist? Why is a one-state Yugoslavia an obvious nonstarter, but a one-state Palestine (to be ruled, naturally, by genocidal and fundamentalist Muslims) the sine qua non of the political left? Why can’t criticism of Israeli policies (especially settlement policy in the West Bank) be separated from Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza? Why do so many lefties decide that there’s room in their coalition for murderers who execute gays on sight, but not a well-meaning liberal who uses the wrong pronouns sometimes? —wes brooks

And:

Jesse,

Are you upset at all [by] the genocide apologia in this AMA? Like I totally get being angry about antisemitism — my grandfather had his grave desecrated by Nazis in 2016 — but this heterodox embrace of Zionism and its consequences is stunning and abhorrent. What Hamas did is unspeakably evil FOR SURE, and many on the left didn’t immediately condemn it (but many also did!), but Netanyahu’s retaliation has killed SIX THOUSAND CHILDREN. Babies! Not to mention the ongoing treatment of Palestinians preceding (and precipitating. . . ) the attacks. Calling a spade a spade isn’t antisemitism, which is why thousands of American Jews are occupying public spaces and calling for a cease-fire.

I don’t know. I feel really let down and disappointed by the responses in these comments. I also find many progressives off-putting, but it feels like many in this space are ignoring reality based on the figureheads who are calling for justice in Palestine. —Duane

Taking the second question first, of course I’m not seeing calls for genocide in the comments. Rather, if you follow the thread, you’ll see that Duane was relying on this reasoning:

I’m following the lead of Craig Mokhiber, a recently resigned director of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights. I think he knows a little bit about what a genocide is.

“The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt.”

The problem with this conversation is that everything is so high stakes, involving thousands of deaths of innocent people, that the mere suggestion that things have gotten rhetorically overheated generates some understandably angry responses.