The Hamas Vote

From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch

A conservative, the saying goes, is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. And there have been a whole lot of muggings in recent days.

Democrats horrified by Hamas’ pogrom in Israel on October 7 have spent the weeks since absorbing the fact that some of their progressive allies either don’t care about the bloodletting or are downright gleeful about it.

For the past few weeks, social media has been teeming with videos (usually from an American campus somewhere) of protesters chanting about the elimination of Israel, spitefully tearing down “missing” posters of Israeli hostages, or intimidating Jews nearby. Pro-Palestinian sympathizers have also been active online, policing rhetoric that they deem too morally sympathetic to Israel. When a writer at New York magazine pointed to one grisly account of the atrocities committed on October 7, he was pressured into issuing a clarification the next day: Just because Israeli babies were found afterward without heads, he acknowledged, doesn’t prove that they were beheaded.

In war reporting, accuracy is important. Sometimes.

The perspective of pro-Hamas progressives on the pogrom was captured succinctly and memorably hours after it began in a widely viewed post on X: “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” Many mainstream liberals seem to have believed that progressive advocates for Palestinian “liberation” would draw the moral line at orgiastic mass murder and rape committed by jihadist fanatics. Now they know better.

Indeed, a lot of Democrats have been forced to reckon with the belief among formerly trusted allies that the ends of “decolonization” justify any and all means.

Hence the sudden flowering genre of punditry by normie liberals mugged by the reality of who they’re in a coalition with. Tool around online this week and you’ll find numerous op-eds with titles like “Hamas Killed My Wokeness” and “The Day the Delusions Died.” “The left in America has really let us down,” one Jewish socialist complained to the Los Angeles Times. “The clear message from many in the world, especially from our world—those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity—is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate,” a progressive rabbi lamented.

You saw the Gallup poll I featured in Thursday’s newsletter. The antagonism on the left between by-any-means-necessary progressives and those opposed to infant decapitation could become a major variable in next year’s election.

How “conservative” might these newly mugged liberals be when the time to vote arrives?

“U.S. urges Israel against Gaza ground invasion, pushes surgical campaign.”

That’s the headline on a story by the Washington Post that broke as I was writing this newsletter. We’re less than three weeks into this conflict, with Israel yet to fully unfurl its ground offensive into Gaza, and already Team Biden is urging the Israeli military to back off.

Why? At least in part because the Democratic Party has begun to crack.

“In protests, open letters, staff revolts and walkouts, liberal Democrats are demanding that Mr. Biden break with decades-long American policy and call for a cease-fire,” the New York Times reported on Friday. One former Bernie Sanders adviser interviewed for the story conceded that he’ll turn out for Biden in 2024 to defeat the Trumpian menace no matter what happens in Israel, but not everyone is so stalwart. “I feel very betrayed by Biden,” a protester who claimed she had volunteered for his last campaign told the Times. “I definitely will not be voting for him again.”

Muslim voters are a sizable voting bloc in Michigan, a battleground Biden won by less than 3 points in 2020. Per NBC News, their disillusionment with the president over Gaza is already costing him.

I did not have “Palestinian sympathizers help reelect Trump” on my 2024 bingo card.

The obvious reply to all that is to note that Biden might be losing votes among Hamas apologists on his left flank but he’s surely gained some votes among the pro-Israel American majority on his right. Perhaps so. But how long will that last?

The status quo can’t hold. The president isn’t going to risk hemorrhaging presumptive Biden votes among his progressive base indefinitely for the sake of wooing centrists who already drifted away from him two years ago. At some point, the White House will be forced to recalibrate and pivot toward the anti-anti-Hamas position, eventually arriving at something resembling neutrality.

Per the Post, it appears we’ve already reached that point.

Team Biden had already lobbied Israel to delay its ground incursion into Gaza last week, allegedly to buy time for hostage negotiations and the delivery of humanitarian aid, but pro-Palestinian activists wanted more. On Thursday, the president met privately with Muslim community leaders to hear out their objections to his alliance with Israel. They told him that there’s no military solution to the crisis and pushed him to call for a full ceasefire; Biden and his team reportedly sounded open to a “temporary pause.”

Today, per the Post, came news that he wants to cancel the ground campaign altogether and stick with “surgical” strikes in Gaza instead.

Again, the formal ground offensive has barely even begun. The leadership of the group responsible for the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust remains almost entirely intact. Yet Biden is under such pressure from his own base to run interference for Hamas that he’s been forced to trot, not walk, toward the left’s position on the conflict.

The Muslim leaders in attendance at Thursday’s meeting even had the gall to scold him for questioning the veracity of Palestinian death-toll estimates—despite the fact that those estimates are provided by Hamas.

Regular readers know they can always count on me to deliver the worst-case scenario, so here it is: This ends with no one happy.

“Hamas voters” won’t forgive Biden for enabling Israel’s offensive in Gaza in the first place. If Israel ignores him and insists upon a “long ground war,” the casualty count will be grim; Palestinian activists will blame him for those deaths. If and when the conflict expands to neighboring countries and the U.S. military gets sucked in—and don’t look now but it already has—they’ll lay the deaths of American soldiers at his feet as well.

Centrist voters, on the other hand, will recoil at the influence of the Hamas lobby over the party as Biden is dragged toward equivocation on the war. The callousness of the pro-genocide “decolonization” faction will lead normies to question whether their political home truly remains in the Democratic Party. They may even come to view Biden contemptuously for relenting from the strong moral stance he took on Israel’s behalf at the start of the war. Anger at party leaders for letting themselves be taken prisoner ideologically by the worst elements of their base is a familiar feeling to Dispatch readers. Why shouldn’t we expect to see it happen in the other party too?

If the president ends up losing votes among progressives, especially young progressives, and he can’t replace them with votes in the middle, that’s … not great.

But the left’s coalition isn’t the only one that could be scrambled by the politics of this war.

On Friday morning, I was chatting with one of our editors about how Donald Trump might respond to Israel’s conflict with Hamas. He could surprise us, I told him.

“Uh, didn’t he just call for another Muslim ban?” he replied.

He did. He’s pretty predictable, admittedly. And in a war like this one, he has only so much room to maneuver.

Post-liberals on the left and right view politics, including foreign affairs, through a tribal lens. For progressives, the battle between Israel and Hamas is one between oppressor and oppressed, colonizer versus colonized. That framework determines which side merits supporting; every argument, moral or political, flows from that. The same is true for right-wing populists but in their case the relevant tribes are Judeo-Christians versus one of the most austere, barbaric, irredentist Islamist outfits on Earth. The Israeli tribe is closer to “our tribe” than the Palestinian tribe is, therefore the right—and Trump—will necessarily lean toward Israel.

But perhaps not as far as we think.

For starters, Trump holds a grudge against Israel’s leader for not supporting his coup attempt in 2020. It seems unlikely that Netanyahu will last as prime minister until January 2025, as his failure to prevent the October 7 pogrom has destroyed public confidence in him among Israelis. But never underestimate the extent to which Trump is motivated by spite. If a close Netanyahu ally ends up as prime minister, that may color how a second Trump administration handles diplomacy between the two sides.

Consider also what I wrote about a few weeks ago, that right-wing populists have begun to circle each other warily on the question of what support America owes Israel. One bloc has inherited the “peace through strength” attitudes of the pre-Trump GOP, especially when it comes to “clash of civilizations” conflicts like Israel and Hamas. Another takes “America First” more seriously: Whatever one’s sympathies for the Israelis, there’s no justification for diverting American treasure from domestic purposes to aid the IDF.

The “peace through strength” bloc is bigger, for now, but the “America First” bloc has some major influencers lobbying the Republican base.

On Friday morning, Candace Owens casually wondered why pro-Palestinian activists on American college campuses are being blacklisted when every other sort of left-wing activist, even illiberal ones, were left off scot-free.

How do you suppose she, Tucker, Vivek, and other “America First-ers” will react next week to the news that Biden is now bombing Iranian-backed proxies in Syria?

It would be risky for Carlson, Owens, and the rest to assail the U.S. alliance with Israel directly. Too many right-wingers support it, including Owens’ boss at The Daily Wire. But it’s trivially easy to imagine them shifting grassroots opinion leftward over time on “not our war” grounds, emphasizing that Israel’s conflict with Hamas risks becoming America’s conflict with Iran. (Neocon designs on Iran is a hobby horse of Carlson’s.) They did the same with Ukraine by insisting that material support for Ukrainian troops risked World War III, didn’t they?

They were wrong about that, but their political project succeeded. Republican support for the Western side in Ukraine’s war with Russia gradually eroded. The grand project of post-liberalism would benefit if the same happened to Israel in its war with Hamas. The weaker the Western liberal order looks on the battlefield, the stronger the argument becomes for replacing it with something new.

If Tucker, Candace, and the rest of the MAGA vanguard gain traction in steering the GOP base away from supporting Israel, Trump will be forced to steer a different path as well. (It might have happened before.) I suspect he’d land where he landed on Ukraine, promising to broker a very strong peace deal, a peace deal so strong you wouldn’t believe it, within 24 hours of taking office. In practice, that would mean in Israel’s case the same thing it means in Ukraine’s, appeasing the illiberal right by forcing America’s Western ally in the conflict to agree to a bad, unsatisfying compromise.

Trump might even see electoral advantage in it. As absurd as it is to imagine him courting Muslim voters while pushing a Muslim ban, this is the same guy who signed a criminal justice reform bill as president while running as a law-and-order authoritarian the other 99 percent of the time. He thought doing so would help him win African American voters, even as he went about assuring suburbanites on the campaign trail that he’d keep the wrong element from moving into their neighborhoods.

He thinks he can talk any constituency into voting for him, even if his policies are actively harming them. He’s running as the most moderate Republican in the 2024 field on abortion, hoping to woo pro-choice centrists, despite the fact that he appointed the three Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Why wouldn’t he show up in Michigan before Muslim voters and assure them that many people are saying his peace proposal for Israel and the Palestinians is the strongest in history?

He might even win some votes from it—while losing a bunch among traditional Republican hawks who already can barely stand him.

See what I mean about the war scrambling coalitions?

The last factor in all of this is partisan polarization, of course.

The “Hamas vote,” normie liberals, hawkish Trump-skeptical Republicans, and MAGA: Each of those blocs is watching not just how Biden and Trump respond to the conflict, but how the other blocs respond. It would be nice to live in an America in which people formed policy opinions based purely on what they support, not what their enemies support, but we do not live in that America.

Had Biden remained staunchly aligned with Israel, that would have been grist for the “America First-ers” to push harder on the right for neutrality in the conflict. Now that the president has begun to equivocate himself, the narrative that Biden is weak and functionally pro-Hamas will prove irresistible to Republicans. The prime directive, “Democrats are weak and always wrong,” will tempt the GOP into supporting Israel without qualification the better to draw a contrast with Biden. Center-right hawks who might have thought hard about supporting the president had he stuck firmly by Netanyahu’s side will begin to sour on him anew.

Meanwhile, on the left, Trump is and will forever remain Trump. However much contempt progressives might feel for Biden’s early—but now fading—support for Israel, the thought of letting someone back into the White House who tried to steal their last presidential victory from them will weigh more heavily as Election Day approaches. Some will resign themselves to the reality that Biden, warts and all, is the lesser evil. Normie liberals who might have opted to distance themselves from the Democratic Party by voting for a Nikki Haley or Tim Scott in the general election will decide that even an uneasy coalition with Hamas apologists is preferable to another term of Trump.

Many normie conservatives have had the scales fall from their eyes over the last eight years about the right’s true political ambitions, yet most go on voting for the GOP all the same. If they can rationalize joining hands with illiberal goons to defeat “the real enemy,” we shouldn’t assume normie liberals will have considerably greater difficulty doing so.

In a country that wasn’t evenly divided, where Trump’s ongoing domination of the right had produced a lopsided and durable Democratic electoral advantage, Biden might be able to kiss off the “Hamas vote” and govern from the center as an unwavering Israeli ally. In the country we actually live in, he can’t. So long as swing voters remain open to returning a demagogue to power, they’re undependable; so long as most Republican voters remain cultishly committed to that demagogue, they’re ungettable. Democrats can’t rely on anyone outside their own base to do the right thing, and so every election ultimately and necessarily becomes a base election. That’s almost certainly what 2024 will be too.

Israel and its allies will suffer for it.

Click here for more coverage of the war in Israel.

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