The Case For Hard Truths Told Well
The Democratic establishment wants to avoid conflict with the people it’s trying to persuade; the insurgent left wants to beat them over the head with hard truths. We need a path between.
What do we suppose was going through Hakeem Jeffries’s mind when he agreed to meet in secret with Jared Kushner?
Here’s a hypothesis that doesn’t rest on any conspiracy theories not in evidence but does draw on recent history. It also matches Democratic Party temperament to a T.
Jeffries says he and Kushner met to “discuss the affordability crisis that exists, that is not a hoax.”
I don’t get the sense that many people find this version of events terribly satisfying. But even if you think it doesn’t wash, you don’t have to assume Jeffries is lying. Things can be true, and still be mostly bullshit.
At the very least, there’s no reason to believe anyone involved contemplated a great brainstorm of ideas, or thinks Jeffries and Trump will become Washington DC’s new Tip and Ronnie.
But it’s very easy to imagine that both Jeffries and Kushner see an upside in a future where Democrats win the House and at least stage negotiations over what they’d each describe as an “affordability agenda.”
To conjure it, you only have to remember as far back as eight years ago. When it became clear Democrats would win control of the House in the 2018 midterms, they changed affect to lower expectations. One day they were promising accountability, the next day Adam Schiff was publishing a New York Times column to head off calls for Trump’s impeachment.
Then, when Democrats took power, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi didn’t kick off the new Congress by rolling out a comprehensive oversight agenda. To the contrary, Pelosi reined in her chairmen, and set up a meeting with Trump to discuss helping him pass a $2 trillion infrastructure bill. They didn’t necessarily believe these negotiations would go anywhere—and of course they went nowhere. The point was to seem constructive, rather than hostile. Focused not on partisan conflict but on Working Families and their Kitchen-Table Concerns. If Trump scuttled the deal, so much the better. No legacy achievement for him, and the unflattering contrast with Democrats would speak for itself. They got exactly what they wanted, and established a political paradigm that has defined their party ever since.
Perhaps Kushner learned from that experience that Democrats can be lured off the scent of accountability with meaningless gestures that allow them to demonstrate that they’re “ready to govern.” And perhaps Jeffries’ willingness to take the meeting—and to keep it secret—suggests Democrats still think that’s a savvy approach.
Regular readers are well familiar with this pathology by now. With the party’s obsession with survey data, which misleads them into believing the public doesn’t care about corruption or the assault on democracy, only home economics. With the swaddling of frontline members, who have much less to worry about when Trump is unpopular, but fear the process of making him unpopular through confrontation, because they represent so many Trump voters.
These contributing factors create a predicament where leading Democrats do not believe they can respond to the emergency of hostile fascist rule with requisite vigor. Whether or not they believe the truth—that Trump, his family, and their inner circle are engaged in a conspiracy to weaken or destroy the country so they can more easily plunder it—they lack confidence that they can win an argument with the public on those terms.
A big majority of Americans disapproves of Trump, and the overwhelming majority of those Americans despise him. But the most reluctant converts—the people who’ve likely voted for him one or more times—won’t accept it. Or so Democratic leaders tell themselves. They can accept that the country faces challenges (affordability!) and that Trump hasn’t resolved them. They can accept he’s made some things worse. But they cannot accept that his reign is fundamentally aberrant—a humiliating failure; a fraud; a threat to our way of life.
There’s a reason Jon Ossoff’s incredibly promising campaign for reelection to the Senate stands out among all the others. It is the exception to this rule. The rule is that Democrats are poor avatars for any message that resembles tough love; that they are unqualified to prescribe strong medicine to the median voter. The rule is that telling swing voters the truth about Trump would be an affront—akin to, say, sending Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg into black communities to tell young men to hike up their pants.
I don’t mean to suggest there’s nothing to this concern. It’s not always enough that a message be correct or defensible—it often matters how it’s delivered and by whom.
Consider the case of the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who has now been condemned by approximately every Democratic officeholder in America, for—as Cory Booker put it—his “dangerous and hateful language… [s]uggesting that Jewish Americans bear responsibility for hatred or violence directed against them.”
Booker’s characterization, echoed by many other Democrats, is wrong. Not, as Piker would have it, because AIPAC and Democratic leaders conspired to smear him. But because his own mode of discourse is hostile to mutual comprehension—and politicians (particularly Democratic Party politicians) are inclined to take cover from controversy rather than embroil themselves in it. This has set off a recriminatory cycle: In misrepresenting Piker, in order to hold the center, they’ve encouraged his fans and people who agree with his point to dig in and seek more factional conflict.
But even a fair-minded characterization underscores the importance of calibrating rhetoric to be persuasive rather than inflammatory.
A transcript would unfortunately run thousands and thousands of words. You really do have to listen to a very long clip, starting around 1:53:00, to ascertain Piker’s true meaning. There are many contiguous segments across about 30 minutes in which, if you tune in late or tune out early, it sounds like he’s blaming Jews for fomenting antisemitism and even justifying antisemitic violence.
The actual argument is basically this:
Many pro-Israel organizations, politicians, right-wing Jews, far-right Republicans, and others who profess to speak for the entire Jewish community, insist support for Israel should be a high U.S. priority, and equate opposition to Israel with antisemitism. True.
Antisemites also want people to treat jewry and Judaism as synonymous with Israel. Also true.
This intentional line-blurring or line-erasing will work. It will increase the number of people who equate Israel and Judaism and, thus, increase Jew-hatred—even among people who once understood and maintained the distinctions. And that, as Piker put it, makes the intentional conflation “dangerous.” True again.
Ergo, it’s important for Jews who do not support Israel to get loud—not just in defense of their own beliefs and values, but to insulate themselves, their loved ones, and their communities from indiscriminate, antisemitic backlash. Arguable, at least.
This is not at all the same as arguing that people who adopt AIPAC’s line deserve violent backlash. Paraphrased accurately, with the incendiary language stripped out, I don’t even find it offensive. I basically agree! But it was never likely to get a fair hearing from many people who don’t already agree with Piker.
What Piker does not say is that anybody who would resort to violence—whether neo-Nazi or Islamist or Palestinian liberationist—would be doing something very wrong. The onus to discourage people from embracing antisemitism, or from resorting to political violence or hate crimes, should fall on everyone who values true pluralism, but Piker places it on anti-Israel Jews.
Most American Jews are pluralist; many if not most deplore the Netanyahu regime. But few will open their minds to this kind of advice when it comes from someone outside their community, who doesn’t clearly have their interests at heart.
For many years after 9/11, mainstream discourse in the U.S. was bloated with loose talk about peace-loving Muslims, and their supposed duty to condemn al Qaeda: If you don’t want Americans to lash out at Islam and Muslims, you better speak up!
Not everyone who said stuff like this was a bigot—and in a bloodless, strategic sense, it might even have been sage advice. But more enlightened people—most of them liberal or progressive—saw through to the problem. Who is, e.g., Bill Maher to tell anyone what their civic or political or religious obligations are?! To demand respectability politics from people outside his community? Why isn’t he demanding it of the yahoos who might assign collective guilt and attack innocent Muslims?
If you thought that rhetoric was Islamophobic 20 years ago, you should at least understand why Piker’s jeremaid struck people as antisemitic.
To the extent progressives want more American Jews to condemn Israel, or oppose U.S. aid to Israel, choosing avatars who refer to CNN as ZNN, and CBS as ZBS, is a mistake. Whatever’s in Piker’s heart, he should know that’s the idiom of people who want to make common cause with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other bigots who rant about the ZOG. It’s not how anyone sincere would seek to appeal to pluralist Jews.
To the extent those same progressives want to salvage Piker’s argument, they need to find better messengers. Because it is a challenging message.
But the mere fact that a worthy message might prove challenging to a potentially receptive audience doesn’t mean it should be shelved.
Consider these two poles.
Speaking on the stump about his Republican opponent, Iowa Dem gubernatorial nominee Rob Sand frequently admonishes his own supporters: “The most important thing that you need to remember about my opponent [Zach Lahn] is he’s a human being. And he’s got people that he loves, and there are people in the world that love him too. And we can have a conversation about who’s better, and we can have sharp disagreements without getting worked up.”
Up in Michigan, by contrast, Abdul El-Sayed says things like, “[Mike Rogers] has the charisma of a doorknob.”
Now these are different states and different races, and if Trump’s electoral track record teaches us anything it’s that ad hominem politics aren’t fatal in the upper midwest. But surely there is a way to campaign that appeals to persuadable voters without either putting them off or evading hard truths about the nature of the modern GOP. Would it really be fatal to Sand’s (very promising) campaign to tell Iowans who’ve voted for Trump one or more times that he’s enraged on their behalf? Because Trump violated their trust? Because he lied to them and continues to lie? And that Zach Lahn knows it and goes along with it anyhow?
Would it be fatal to say, we, collectively, as Americans must do a better job sniffing out con artists and demagogues? When someone tells us people who are different, or people who are weak, are responsible for the problems in our lives, we shouldn’t give in to the temptation to assign blame. Rather, our spidey senses should tingle. We should suspect our pockets are being picked. We should recognize it as the hallmark of a bad person.
We have tried the alternate approach for a decade now. We have tiptoed around Trump, and antivaxers, and various other false prophets, for fear of offending the sensibilities of their followers. And in all that time, their malign influence on society has only deepened.
The Jeffries controversy makes me fear we’re going to try for an eleventh year. The Piker controversy makes me fear too many of the country’s rising leftists would miss the sweet spot of persuasion. But there is a middle way.