‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in Israeli Politics - Meaningless?

For revolutionary Leon Trotsky, politics was about principles and ideas: permanent revolution, opposition to socialism in one country, internal party democracy. For Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, who sent his NKVD to murder Trotsky with an ice-ax on August 20, 1940, politics was mostly about the quest for personal power. (*)

Mercifully, by 2015 when Binyamin Netanyahu ousted the last of the followers of Ze'ev Jabotinsky from Likud, no ice-ax, God forbid, was involved. 

The Prime Minister needed to solidify control of the party. 

Having principled naysayers piping up about liberalism, tolerance, the rule of law, or setting personal examples of probity was just not on.

The 1949 First Knesset was comprised mostly of ideological parties very much concerned with principles and ideas: Mapai (including Hapo’el Hatza’ir and Ahdut Ha’avoda) led by David Ben-Gurion; Mapam (Soviet-leaning socialist); Religious Bloc (Mizrahi, Hapo’el Ha’Mizrahi, Agudat Yisrael, and Po’alei Agudat Yisrael ); Herut (Jabotinsky-oriented, liberal nationalist, Menachem Begin-led); General Zionists (liberal-capitalist); Progressives (European-style liberal); Sephardic; Communist (pro-Soviet, mixed Arab-Jewish); Arab (Mapai-affiliated Arab list); Fighters’ List (Lehi-affiliated); Women’s International Zionist Organization, and Yemenite Party

I do not much mourn the withering of dogmatic Left-right ideological parties from Israel’s scene. The disappearance of principles and rectitude that had usually gone hand-in-hand with the parties and personalities of yesteryear is what I lament. These have been replaced today by tribal, religious, or ethnic entities sometimes led by parochial, not-yet-indicted leaders (though some were previously convicted or are presently charged with graft).

Nowadays, Israel’s main parties and players are barely distinguishable on issues of principle. Sometimes it is for the good that they mainly agree on the big picture – the Jewish ethos of the state, government intervention in the economy, welfare safety nets, and the intractability of our conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Sometimes the consensus is unhelpful as when they mostly disregard Israel’s income disparity problem.

Instead, the main cleavages are tribal, religious, and cultural. 

These are important issues, don’t get me wrong. The demands by the ultra-Orthodox-leaning national religious (חרד״ל) and the non- or anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox (חֲרֵדִים‎) to turn Israel into a demi-theocratic state could well tear the country asunder. 

However, the problems don’t lend themselves neatly to placement on the standard left-right political spectrum. Some theocrats are dovish on war and peace. Most are proponents of big government and favor a redistribution of income.

In the March 2020 elections, about 48 percent of the combined vote went to rabble-rousing Likud, ultra-Orthodox Shas and UTJ, and Yamina, which would like to see a Knesset majority empowered to overrule Supreme Court decisions. A terrible idea. 

The largely illiberal Arab parties (pro-PLO or Islamist) garnered nearly 13 percent. Roughly six percent went to the small-minded Russian-speakers’ Yisroel Beitenu (led by Netanyahu's former righthand man and now unwavering enemy Avigdor Leiberman), and the mostly secular, mindlessly dovish Labor-Meretz.

That left a mere 27 percent of the electorate to vote for the new (and now probably moribund) centrist Blue & White Party led by Benny Ganz.

Israel’s political system encourages bespoke parties. For example, Degel Hatorah, a component of the aforementioned UJC, claims to look after the interests of “Lithuanian” Ashkenazi Haredim. Aguda, another component of UJC, saves a seat for Hassidim who tuck their trousers into their socks. 

The electoral system offers citizens an incentive to cast ballots for custom-made parties with no mainstream appeal because they can “win.” Just 3.25 percent of the proportional vote can catapult a flash-in-the-pan or narrow interest party into the 120-seat Knesset. In a country where no party in history has won a Knesset majority, even flash-in-the-pan parties hold sway in forming a government.

Broad-based centrist parties that entice politicians to embrace moderation and pull voters from the margins toward a common purpose do indeed come and go. These “third-way” parties (melding left and right and a dose of reform-minded civic responsibility) invariably implode because the system provides little incentive in the long term for them to hold together.

The chances are slight for political reform that would move Israel away from pure proportional representation, disincentivize tribalism, and pump the breaks on our drift in the direction of tyranny-by-majority-rule.

Between that First Knesset in 1949 and our 2020 23^rd Knesset, principle and ideology faded like a masterpiece exposed to the sun. Prime Ministers and their families used to live in modest apartments and make their breakfasts. Golda Meir might guiltily ask friends to bring her a carton of Marlboro’s from abroad. 

Today, despite having a chef on staff, the Netanyahu’s ordered $96,000 worth of catered meals to impress foreign dignitaries. The taxpayers picked up the family’s $2,700-a-year tab for ice cream. The PM received more than $280,000 worth of cigars from Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. And so on and so on.

The fading of principles happened as Ben-Gurion’s Mapai incarnated in today’s Labor Party, which is down to three seats. Mapai in its time was corrupt but in a political sense in order to maintain a monopoly of power.

Ehud Barak, one of modern Labor's former leaders who started off as a kibbutznik, is now worth over $30 million. Having capitulated and joined Netanyahu’s current government, polls suggest Labor, which played a pivotal role in founding the state, may disappear in the next election.

Mapam’s successor party is Meretz (dovish and now social democratic) with three seats. 

The Religious Bloc has morphed and expanded. Its workers’ factions, Hapo’el Hamizrahi and Po’alei Agudat Yisrael, have gone extinct (together with the idea that the really frum should work for a living and that only outstanding Talmudic scholars should be exempt from IDF service). 

Mizrahi, which once represented the knitted kipa politically moderate religious Zionists, is also extinct. 

Agudat Yisrael, though, has thrived as the party of the non-Zionist Hassidic Haredi camp. It runs on a ticket with the non-Zionist Lithuanians under the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) banner and has seven seats.

While the Sephardic and Yemenite parties have disappeared, their successor party is the non-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Shas (most of its Talmudic students do no army service) with nine seats in the current Knesset.

Yemina, which wants to render ineffectual the independent liberal-leaning judiciary, has five seats in the current Knesset. It is an amalgamation of several Orthodox parties and reflects settler-hardel ideology. However, curiously as this may seem, its leaders Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, are malleable on religious issues and adept at rebranding. Their long-term goal is to replace Bennett’s former mentor, now arch-enemy Netanyahu as prime minister using whatever party vehicle is expedient.

Herut’s successor party is Likud; portraits of Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin still hang at party headquarters. However, Netanyahu-led Likud with 36 seats is purged of Jabotinsky/Begin liberals and anyone else who might have been considered an immediate political threat to the leader. 

Likud stands for whatever Netanyahu wants. As the longest-serving prime minister, he defines Likud; and he epitomizes brand Israel to the world for better or worse.

Under multiple indictments for corruption Lord Acton’s line, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” expresses what Bibi has become. 

Alongside his strategic brilliance, diplomatic ingenuity, and intellectual depth, he is duplicitous to the core, both for and against a Palestinian state. For and against caving-in to Hamas demands. For and against a complete COVID-19 lockdown. For and against extending Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. His foremost goal is to buy one day at a time for himself politically.

The metaphorical successors of the 1949 General Zionists and Progressive Party are Blue & White and Yesh Atid led by Benny Ganz and Yair Lapid, respectively.

In the last election, Yesh Atid ran with Blue & White. With 14 seats, Ganz broke his promise to the electorate and joined Netanyahu’s government, Lapid stayed out with his 17 seats. Lapid’s central tenet, beyond steadfastly seeking Netanyahu’s defeat, is opposition to theocracy. His voters tend to be middle class and middle of the road. Beyond that, the former TV talk show host is, like Ganz, politically pliable.

Blue & White serves as an example par excellence of a centrist party that emerged before an election only to disappoint and (if history is a guide) eventually to disappear.  

Like I said, I don’t miss the parties of yesteryear with their unbending allegiance to the Workers, or Greater Israel, or the Comintern. That said, whatever else they are, today’s ideologically promiscuous and principle-compromised parties can’t usefully be slotted into any left-right political continuum.

Left and right don’t mean much in the Israeli political setting.

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See too:

What does it even mean to be a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’?

(*)  See Dmitri Volhogonov's TROTSKY: THE ETERNAL REVOLUTIONARY:

"Trotsky's individuality lay primarily in his obsession with the Idea. For him the Idea was the equivalent of a philosophical temple, in which everything created within it belonged to eternity. For him the greatest spiritual luxury consisted in the ability to think and reflect freely..." (page 488)

To be fair, according to Volhogonov,  Stalin appropriated some of Trotsky's ideas making them his own. And Trotsky along with Lenin set up the system (including the bureaucracy) that Stalin exploited in his genocidal reign. Ideas aside, the men -- both profoundly arrogant -- hated each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Addicted to the News

News seized my attention in elementary school and never let go. The most fun I had in the classroom was when our seventh-grade social studies teacher handed out a weekly magazine called Current Events. How that innocuous periodical breached the ramparts of our insular ultra-Orthodox Yiddish-oriented yeshiva, I do not know.

In contrast to most of my classmates, my mother read a tabloid newspaper regularly, and we had a television.

By the time I was finishing high-school (at a somewhat less inward-looking yeshiva), I had begun picking up the New York Times at the newsstand. That sufficed through college. When I started graduate school, I had discovered kiosks that sold out-of-town newspapers and started getting The Washington Post. At some point, a newspaper home delivery company belatedly began servicing our Lower East Side neighborhood. I “took” the Times, Washington Post, and either the Daily News or the New York Post.

The mailman delivered The Christian Science Monitor (because John K. Cooley, based in Beirut, provided coverage of Palestinian Arab affairs available nowhere else). On Fridays, the weeklies arrived, such as the Village Voice, The New York Jewish Week, The Washington Jewish Week, and the Forward (between 1983-2000 a balanced must-read).

Separately, I’d buy the pricey Economist weekly and the Manchester Guardian (which carried Le Monde), both printed on thin airmail newsprint.

Clipping file 'Hamas' 1996

Through involvement in Zionist politics, I met NR (Ricky) Greenfield, a Wall Street guy who went on to buy the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, who subscribed to a slew of newspapers, magazines, and Jewish periodicals. Ricky would send out a weekly packet of photocopied opinion clippings, and I felt privileged to get on his mailing list. In the pre-Internet age, getting Ricky’s clippings helped me know what pundits were saying.

Still, I had a craving for more. I was taking the JTA Daily News Bulletin (awfully expensive to private subscribers like me but, in those days, a unique fair-minded resource) and Beijing Review, the airmail edition of The Jerusalem Post – and who remembers what else. The Beijing Review weekly because I was researching China’s policy toward the Arab-Israel conflict. Eventually, I built clipping files (anti-Semitism to Zionism) something newspapers and organizations did on a bigger and better scale in the pre-Internet age.

The written word didn’t satiate. So, I tuned into Kol Israel over shortwave and watched (what is today) the PBS Newshour and C-SPAN (which transmitted congressional proceedings). When I could, I also listened to Morning Edition and All Things Considered on NPR. 

The news and views that I was hooked on were explicitly about politics. Fortunately, it was a compulsion I could feed legally without having to mug anyone.

I knew there was no way to maintain my expensive habit once I gave up my job and moved to Israel. I did arrange for the New York Times Book Review and a handful of other subscriptions to be forwarded to me via my Israeli family, knowing I probably would not renew them.

Fortunately, by 1997 the Internet had taken off, and soon I was reading online newspaper websites. I’d still buy the International Herald Tribune (in those days a joint endeavor of the Washington Post and The New York Times), which arrived in Israel from Paris within a day or so of publication. When I started working at The Jerusalem Post, I began to read the news in Hebrew laboriously. The Post used to print several Haredi newspapers, and I began perusing those to get a sense of their jargon and sensibilities.

My obsession with current events was undiminished, but it narrowed parochially to Israel (with an eye on the Old Country and perhaps Britain). Now, I faithfully watched the Hebrew news on television, switching between the channels.

However, my world broadened again when I began working for a US news outlet, and I had to refamiliarize myself with the personalities and players.

As I soaked-up news and views, it dawned on me that people around me not only did not take in much news many conscientiously avoided knowing what was going on. Israelis no longer reflexively stopped in their tracks for the hourly radio news bulletin.

Nowadays, my impression is that Israelis do not routinely watch the nightly news broadcasts on TV or read newspapers or make it a point to tune into radio news broadcasts. Israel’s various tribes, clans, and demographic clusters get views/news tailored to their worldview via provincial newspapers, wall posters, or blinkered social media posts.

Now, instead of being passively uninformed, the masses (Millennials & Gen Z especially) are actively stupefied by news packaged as entertainment, tendentious misinformation, or purposeful disinformation.

Even as the 24/7 news cycle churns, and websites and social media platforms proliferate, fewer and fewer sources of firsthand reliably reported news survive. Media outlets who don’t rightfully subscribe to a news gathering agency such as AP or Reuters might cannibalize information gathered by others and repackage it to fit their worldviews – perhaps burying a hyperlink to the real source of the story.

This watered-down product that passes for news and views today was playing havoc with my habit, as was the intensification of brazen advocacy journalism, particularly at The New York Times.

It was as if high-grade heroin had been cut so often that the only ingredient remaining was the talc filler. I was effectively being weaned off original news/views and consequently going through uncomfortable withdrawal pains. I’d anyway shifted professional gears to book editing and website content writing. After decades of dependency, my news cravings were easing.

These days I can limit my daily intake to several newspapers (which I prefer to read in PDF form) and media outlets — and a few visits to Twitter. I restrict how much time in toto I devote to news/views.

A significant aid to curbing my intake is the availability of newsletters whose editors vet and aggregate the torrent. I don’t feel I may be missing something.

Those that I have come to rely on most are:

The Drudge Report (flagship of aggregators, right-leaning but unpredictable/US focus), News Nosh (left-left-leaning/Israeli focus/ opinionated), JI Daily Kickoff (excellent, balanced, comprehensive/Israel/diaspora), Politico’s Playbook (US politics/liberal), and the Daily Alert (Israel/Middle East/center) and Real Clear Politics (which aggregates opinion and averages polls).

It is even possible to blend these aggregators into one funnel through platforms such as Feedly, which aggregates the aggregators.

It’s been a hard slog, but I’m drinking in less news/views without going off the grid entirely — one day at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What the Pandemic Reveals about Human Nature: Homo Homini Lupus

Public health authorities uniformly agree that if you put distance between yourself and people who don’t live in your household, cover your mouth and nose with a mask when around others, and wash your hands often – COVID-19 would stop spreading.

Thinking about this recalls the Jewish legend that if every Jew were to observe two consecutive Shabbats, the Messiah would come.

But human nature keeps getting in the way.

During ordinary times, the continuum of human nature finds most of us somewhere between self-interested and altruistic. However, during prolonged periods of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic in which we find ourselves people gravitate toward extreme self-interest.

So what our pandemic reveals to me about human nature is, as Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote, paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes that Homo Homini Lupus “man is a wolf to other men.”

Garden variety liberals being optimistic about human nature, would take exception to this glum view. While utopians – be they communists and anarchists on the left or nazis on the right – claim that they know how to alter human nature. The genocide carried out by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge was intended to perfect humanity.

But what does the Corona pandemic show us about human nature? Consider how political systems (Israel, China, or the US, for instance), organizations (such as hospitals, HMOs, and universities), and the private sector (like big technology) have deported themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At best they have mostly failed in their missions.

It is easy to blame a nincompoop president, a distracted prime minister, or a sclerotic public health bureaucracy.

It is right to doubt the decency of clerics, who would wantonly endanger their flock to preserve control and insularity.

However, in the last analysis, isn’t the refusal by so many to take individual responsibility the crux of the problem?

The davka decision not to wear face masks, wear them as bracelets, or with noses protruding spotlights varying degrees of self-centeredness. Individuals or groups who demand to exercise their absolute right to crowd together for rowdy street demonstrations or pack into confined interior spaces to pray or party are being maliciously egocentric. Of course, that’s not how they see it.

In his legendary The Tortoise’s Little Green Book, Robert Ringer offers this maxim about human nature: “The most prudent way­  of dealing with people is to assume that their way of defining things is: Good is what I do; bad is what you do. Right is what I do; wrong is what you do. Ethical is what I do; unethical is what you do.”

The protesters shrieking at police near Israel’s Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem see themselves not as vaporizing virus-laden aerosol but as warriors for justice. Everyone thinks the best of themselves, from youthful party animals and attendees at illicitly large Arab weddings, to Haredim jammed into mega-synagogues and politicians negotiating the contours of a lockdown with politics, not public health their paramount consideration.

Thinking about human nature and what makes people selfish or considerate delivers me to the intersection of philosophy-theology and psychology.

Philosophy

Thucydides tells us that left to their own devices, people will commonly exacerbate chaotic situations instead of pulling together. Aristotle understood that by nature, the Masses are Asses. Whatever else, he believed, Spinoza agreed that people were not inherently well-intentioned.

Likewise, James Madison believed foremost that men were not angels – human nature could go either way. That given the opportunity, individuals would choose to tyrannize their fellows. While no form of government could protect people from each other’s passions, in crafting the US Constitution, Madison, taking human nature into account, designed the US not a popular (majoritarian) democracy but as a republic. The people did not elect the president; they did not elect their senators. The original US Constitution also constrained the ruling elites (through checks and balances and a separation of powers) so that they did not act rashly in the heat of the moment. In Madison’s eyes

…Man is known to be selfish… We all know that conscience is not a sufficient safeguard and besides that conscience itself may be deluded may be misled… into acts which an enlightened conscience would forbid…

Theology

Jewish tradition instructs that individuals have free will. God expects us to choose wisely. By creating us in His image, humans were endowed with reason. For Maimonides, following Aristotle, reason should move a person to behave in a virtuous manner, which means pursuing the Golden Mean. I suppose in Corona terms, that requires acting neither solely self-interestedly nor self-sacrificingly altruistic.

A midrash suggests that God created man because angels were, well too angelic, and animals, perhaps, too bestial. Our assignment is to balance our good and bad inclinations.

Jewish civilization holds that reasonable self-interest is perfectly normal. The sages also figured that a person’s real character is revealed when their guard is down. Nothing takes your guard down more than a pandemic.

Psychology

Sigmund Freud argued that civilization hangs on our ability to sublimate the desire for immediate gratification. The constraints placed on us by political society compete with base instincts. Only the discipline of living in society caps our instincts. “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization,” Freud says in Civilization and its Discontents.

When individuals or groups lose their sense of shame – when shanda disappears – the foundations of civilization are undermined. Guilt is the price we pay to advance civilization, Freud argued. Now that we’ve stopped worrying about “what the goyim will say,” we’ve compromised ourselves.

Perhaps Israelis’ collective ennui has made us angrier. We appear incapable of expressing remorse for acting against the greater good. On the contrary, the dissonance between what we know is right and how we behave leads us to self-justification and finger-pointing.

While the Messiah tarries and COVID-19 spreads we pay pre-Yom Kippur lip-service to introspection and repentance.

Alas, the morbidity and mortality numbers two weeks hence are likely to reveal the truth about our natures.

 

What does it even mean to be a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’?

 During a political argument, when someone calls you a liberal, they probably mean you are a hypocrite. To be tarred a progressive or leftist is to be declared at best naïve, at worst, a bloody communist.

If the slur is you’re a conservative, they mean you’re heartless. To be slugged right-wing means you’re on the reactionary-fascist continuum.

The premise of these political putdowns is that your interlocutor holds your thinking – maybe you too – to be not just disagreeable but bordering on devilish.

Since many of us are locked into this weltanschauung, the prospect that the camp we disagree with will be ascendant is downright terrifying.

Liberalism and conservatism are ideologies.   

Political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died in 2012, defined ideology as “a coherent and consistent set of beliefs about who ought to rule, what principles rulers ought to obey, and what policies rulers ought to pursue.”

Liberalism and conservatism have been defined and redefined over time and place. The Liberal Party of Australia is conservative by the American definition. In Israel, left and right only approximately mean what it does in the US.

In the contemporary American setting, liberalism meant championing liberty in personal matters, free-market capitalism in economics, and gradualist reform in the social sphere. A liberal would favor decriminalizing abortion and homosexuality, support low tariffs on international trade, and favor welfare and health coverage for the indigent.

Conservatism arose in the face of reforms gone too far (specifically, the 1789 French Revolution which overthrew King Louis XVI but led to the Jacobian Reign of Terror). A conservative would be someone who wanted to safeguard enduring values and the traditional way things were done. Change, more often than not, was to be resisted. Conservatives tend to be skeptical of the government’s ability to be efficient and effective.

Liberals were those who favored government intervention to make things better in the economy and the social sphere. They argued it was the government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans had access to a socio-economic safety net. While conservatives were worried that if the government became too interventionist, it would become overbearing and interfere with personal liberties.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a quintessential liberal who instituted Social Security for older Americans. Ronald Reagan was the archetypal conservative who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

In a healthy polity there are few pure liberals and conservatives. Most thinking folks calibrate their positions as they grapple with thorny real-life challenges. For example, a social conservative might in principle oppose abortion but not in the case of rape or incest.

Today, it seems to me, ideologues have moved from Wilson’s description of “coherent and consistent” to calcified and fanatical. We seem to have lost the ability to adjust – to determine the Golden Mean.

A realignment of America’s political spectrum is underway. Liberals and conservatives are embracing increasingly extreme positions. Liberals are becoming less tolerant and open-minded. Trumpian conservatives are interested in radically changing the liberal status quo.

Partisan trench warfare predominates. Ideological nonconformists who stick their heads up to utter something that sounds vaguely nondogmatic are liable to get their brains blown out. There is no place for anti-Trump conservatives in the Republican Party. There is less and less safe space for old school liberals in the Democratic Party.

New Conservatism

These days Trumpian conservatism stands broadly for championing protectionist capitalism, neo-isolationism, nationalism, opposition to gun control, partial re-criminalization of abortion, and robust individual rights against an overprotective and intrusive state.

Trumpian conservatism not only holds that the government can’t competently address climate change, but it also denies global warming is even a problem. According to the president, California’s forests are burning because the state has neglected to clean the leaves from the forests’ floors. Remnant conservatives who care about environmental conservation carefully package their concerns so as not to infuriate the Trumpians.

On the porous margins of Trumpian conservatism are the conspiratorial-minded neo-fascist extremists who run the gamut from nazis and klaners to militiamen and white nationalists.

New Liberalism

Over in the liberal camp nowadays, the push has gone way beyond equal opportunity in race matters, beyond affirmative action quotas in hiring and education. Today’s liberals want the government to guarantee economic and social outcomes, use taxes to profoundly redistribute societal resources, robustly regulate the private sector, and take sweeping steps to repair the despoiled environment. The government’s role is to steer citizens toward healthier more just lives.

That the seam from reform-oriented liberalism to change-oriented progressivism has been crossed is nowhere better reflected then in vanguard media outlets like The New York Times. If liberals in the 1960s sought to protect criminal suspects from self-incrimination and to guarantee legal due process, in the 2020s progressives want suspects arrested for nonviolent felonies (subway turnstile jumping, belligerent panhandling, or vandalism) to be released without having to post bail.

The Trump era seems to have accelerated a shift that has delivered many liberals into the progressive bloc. As progressives they are reoriented to be mortified that whites continue to dominate the United States. Support for the amorphous Black Lives Matter movement, whatever its rolling open-ended demands, is axiomatic irrespective of reactionary, supremacist, or anti-Semitic positions voiced by some BLM figures. Jewish liberals once felt sufficiently secure to challenge the excesses of the Black Lives Matter narrative. Now, making BLM engageable is the order of the day.

Taking a page from Maoism, progressives aim to refurbish human nature with an emphasis on those of European white origin. Prejudice regardless if it is subconscious or dormant must be excised through a process of self-criticism and reeducation. Individuals who fall short should be prepared to be publicly humiliated. At the same time, white progressives must take care to avoid cultural appropriation by, for example, relocating into a historically black neighborhood.

Progressives are trained to acknowledge that whatever good fortune birth bestowed upon them is an illicit privilege. This has led some progressives to defend looting by people of color as legitimate. Male progressives have additional obligations to be “woke” or acutely attuned to political and social transgressions and patriarchal tendencies. Men need to abjure interrupting a woman while she is speaking or mansplaining, which is talking to a woman in a way that could be perceived as condescending. Progressive individuals need to unconditionally support LGBTQ+ culturally and politically, though the highest level of woke might also endorse the idea that the endgame should be the abolition of the family.

On the margins of the progressive camp is the hard-left amalgamation known as Antifa. Anarchist, Antifa follows a utopian philosophy aimed at repairing human nature and opposing all forms of hierarchy, including the state. In other words, they do not want a change in government. They want to collapse the state. Adherents, dressed in black, come together to fight the police and their right-wing adversaries.

To further muddle matters, some anarchists belong on the radical right because their goal beyond the downfall of the United States is the rise of whites-only enclaves.

Whatever the terms “liberal” and “conservative” once meant, their definition continues to evolve and not, it seems to me, in a politically healthy direction.

The Trumpian camp commands the GOP and the conservative brand. I assume his followers will continue to do so even if Donald Trump is no longer president.

While tensions between liberals and progressives are rife within the Democratic Party, these have mainly been put on hold to present a united front against Trump. Should the Biden/Harris liberal ticket be victorious, the Sanders/Warren/ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez progressive wing can be expected to demand their due.

For those Americans who are not at home either among Trumpian conservatives or woke progressives there is – for now at least – only the political wilderness.

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Presidential Character and Scholarly Priorities

 If you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is not the way to go.

The people left to their own devices.

THE ANNUAL conference of the American Political Science Association will take place in cyberspace on September 9 – 13.  This year’s theme is “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization.”

In a chilling commentary, conference planners caution that longstanding certainty about the US Constitution as “solid and prescient enough to thwart — or at the least contain — the more authoritarian impulses of citizens and elected officials” has been called into question by the presidency of Donald Trump.

I could quibble with the rest of the statement’s woke tone and presuppositions but not with its bottom line conclusion: “America is as polarized now as it was on the cusp of the Civil War because of forces which polarize Americans into ideological, hyper-partisan camps.”

“Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization” has a catchy ring to it. However, in searching for a way forward, the program chairs ask a misguided question: “How inclusive and representative of our country’s diversity are democracy’s institutions and practices?” Pretty diverse, actually. The US Congress has more women than ever before (131); there are 53 African American House Members and three in the Senate; 51 Latinos in the House, 20 House Members who are of Asian or Indian origin, plus an unprecedented four American Indians in the House. The percentage of people of color on the Federal bench is for most jurisdictions in the double digits.

The question political scientists should be asking is: How can we reimagine representative democracy for the remainder of the 21t century – along the constitutional lines envisioned by James Madison.

The Madisonian model of democracy has no greater nemesis today than President Donald Trump. By dint of his character, Trump has manipulated the demos, exploited differences, and spurred destabilization. If you do not believe me dust off Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, take a fresh look at Dye and Zeigler’s The Irony of Democracy, and re-read The Federalist Papers, particularly No. 10.

The point is if you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is counterindicated. This lesson is something America’s responsible elites need to relearn – fast.

Trump’s presidency has played out as foretold. Americans knew about his character before Election Day 2016. Yet 62,980,160 voters put a pyromaniac in charge of an already combustible situation. When Americans contrasted Trump’s character with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s, maybe they saw difference without distinction. They were sorely mistaken. Clinton’s character may be out of kilter. Trump’s is putrefied. Or perhaps by voting for Trump, Americans were saying character does not much matter.

In our dopamine-drenched social media environment, Trump succeeds by mobilizing his doltish supporters even as he goads the hordes who oppose him into self-defeating militancy.

Alongside Trump drones are his more rational enablers who perfunctorily concede that the president’s character is problematic but argue that his policies are worth the discomfiture. I suppose they mean trying to pack the Supreme Court with justices inclined to re-criminalize abortion; or using regulatory authority to reverse irksome environmental laws, or just plain trying to keep America as white as possible for as long as possible.

To be fair, some of his policies on trade, illegal border crossings, and NATO are hardly outlandish at face value.

Like a broken clock, even Donald Trump can’t be wrong 24/7. 

It would be churlish of me as an Israeli not to admit what a relief it is to have a denizen in the White House who does not instinctively challenge every IDF military operation or decry every Jewish home constructed over the 1949 Armistice Line. It is fitting that the US Embassy is now in Jerusalem and that President Barak Obama’s 2013 Iran deal was reversed. Too bad that Trump’s administration seems no less helpless than its predecessors in preventing the mullahs from lurching toward an atomic bomb. And I shudder to think where Israelis would be if the PLO and Hamas had cleverly finessed their response to Trump’s deal of the century instead of rejecting it outright. 

I get that Trump’s America is understandably finished with endless wars in the Middle East. Still, as salesman-in-chief, Trump is delighted to flog F-35s and EA-18G Growlers to the UAE, Patriots to Kuwait, an old guided-missile frigate to Bahrain – and just about anything that goes boom to the Saudis. A welcome byproduct of this transactional approach to US foreign policy is that Israel’s zero-sum conflict with the Palestinian Arabs has been dissociated from its bridgeable differences with the broader Arab world.

Trump’s policies, for better or worse, tend to be divulged in a slapdash, circuitous manner that reflects his disordered personality. Staffers are left scrambling to justify his impetuous actions after the fact.   

His policies and character are intrinsically linked – as they have been for all previous presidents.

September 12 marks the 16^th anniversary of the death of the scholar who literally wrote the book on presidents and character, James David Barber. What better time than to revisit The Presidential Character – Predicting Performance in the White House, first published in 1972.

Barber, who was the chairman of the political science department at Duke University until 1995, was renowned for blending psychology and political science. He hopefully figured that people would factor a candidate’s character in deciding how to vote. “If there is such a thing as extraordinary sanity, it is needed nowhere so much as in the White House,” he wrote decades before Americans sent a self-described “very stable genius” there.

In 2016, voters seemingly ignored Barber’s advice to look for patterns of behavior before casting their ballots. They didn’t have to know that Donald Trump grew up in a home with a mother who was cold and withdrawn, and a father who withheld his love as punishment for perceived failure. A family where cheating and bullying were endorsed, and introspection, soul-searching, and apologizing were inexcusable signs of weakness to intuit that Trump’s personality was psychologically stunted.

Naturally, a person’s character is not determinative; it is not destiny. Humans have the capacity for growth. Or, as Barber put it, “starts, do not define finishes.” Still, he hypothesized that a president’s early life would be an essential element among a confluence of factors affecting presidential style, specifically: rhetoric, interpersonal relations, and homework. “Character is the way the president orients himself toward life not for the moment, but enduringly,” wrote Barber.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman added in Emotional Intelligence that “The bedrock of character is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have observed, is based on self-control” to be able to set aside self-centeredness, to do real listening and to allow yourself to be empathetic. For Barber, character is what emerges when who we are comes up against what we must deal with in daily life. Personality and temperament matter because citizens look to the president for reassurance in times of crisis. The president ought to be able to personify the better angels of our nature.

Barber categorized presidents roughly speaking from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter (in a revised edition). His classifications were anchored in two criteria: whether these individuals were active performers and whether they took pleasure from their job.

As presidential types went, Barber judged Thomas Jefferson as active-positive, John Adams as active-negative, James Madison as passive positive, and George Washington passive-negative.

Trump, who denigrates opponents as “low energy,” spends chunks of his days in frenzied TV watching and tweet storming clearly derives little pleasure from the presidency. Given his apparent low self-esteem and grandiose schemes, most observers identify him as active-negative.

Barber had found that active-negative presidents do not try to sway those who disagree with them. Their rigidity impels them to double-down on failing policies. They sometimes work themselves to exhaustion, become isolated and paranoid. Anger is a constant. “As the process of rigidification moves along, the President finds among his enemies an individual who, to him, personifies the threat. That person becomes the focus for the President’s aggression,” according to Barber. 

Active-negatives do little or no presidential homework. They have no use for anyone who offers an adverse opinion; total loyalty is demanded. The glass always looks half-empty. So as not to hurt them emotionally – since they are fragile and desperate for adoration – bullied advisers tell them only what they want to hear. Tormented, they cannot relish victory. They find it hard to show compassion. These individuals assume complex problems can be solved by backslapping, flattery, and personal appeals.

Barber published before Donald Trump entered politics, but he analyzed him uncannily: “His natural medium was the world of the deal, the world where a man at the right place and time could patch together a bundle of power, doing some good for himself and some for others at the same time.”

What active-negatives have in common is “strong deprivations of self-esteem” in childhood as a result of “parents who denigrated or abandoned them.” Elect an active-negative character, and you run the risk turning one person’s tragedy into a massive national and social catastrophe, warned Barber.

He might also have added that you could be unleashing a pedagogical catastrophe. Besides the immense power Donald Trump has as president, he also sets an example for children. Remember Vladimir Lenin’s mantra: “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” 

Think about what Trump could do with four more years.