Are the Democrats ready for this election?

I don’t agree with everything in this article, but I do agree that if Biden is going to win he is going to have to go on the offensive. He cannot afford to be the “above the fray statesman,” at least not strictly. He is running against fascism, and he and his advocates need to be explicit about it. The reason there is so much hand-wringing about the Colorado and Maine decisions re Trump’s ballot access is that so much of the country is in denial about the magnitude of what happened on and around January 6, 2021.

“The animating concept behind the Trump campaign will be chaos. This is what history shows us fascists do when given the chance to participate in democratic political campaigns: They create chaos. They do it because chaos works to their advantage. They revel in it, because they can see how profoundly chaos unnerves democratic-republicans—everyone, that is, whether liberal or conservative, who believes in the basic idea of a representative government that is built around neutral rules. Fascism exists to pulverize neutral rules. Indeed, fascism insists that republican democracies’ rules are not neutral at all but are rigged against them—the holders of an old, mythic truth that republican democracy was conjured into being to weaken and obscure.

So they campaign with explicit intention to instill a sense of chaos. And then comes the topper: They have the audacity to insist that the only solution to the chaos—that they themselves have either grossly exaggerated or in some cases created!—is to vote for them: “You see, there is nothing but chaos afoot, and only we can restore order!”

Trump teased this argument in 2016, with his “I alone can fix it” convention speech. This year, the chaos narrative won’t be just a theme of his campaign. It will be its animating force. The argument will center around crime, the border, racial politics in the schools, the rights of transgender Americans, and whatever else he can cram into the narrative that America has lost its way and can be saved only by discarding the democratic rules that have enabled “the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” to flourish.

His rhetoric will get wilder and wilder, as it did with his purported Christmas message to Americans, which included the holiday wish that Biden and special prosecutor Jack Smith, and really anyone who isn’t MAGA, may “rot in hell.” And imagine what those rallies will be like in September and October—especially if he has been convicted of a crime or two.”

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That way is this: When it comes to the terms of our political debate, Republicans are usually on the offensive, while Democrats are more often playing defense. This wasn’t true when I was little, and Republicans were the clear minority party. But once the conservative movement swallowed the GOP, during Reagan’s time, it became emphatically true. Republicans relentlessly attacked the liberal status quo, and Democratic defended it, usually meekly. Often, that status quo was hard to defend: high rates of crime, for example, far higher than today’s numbers, were an easy mark for Republicans. On other matters, Democrats played defense by adopting more centrist positions: Oh, we don’t want big government either; just enough government.

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And here’s another thing they need to do: name their enemies. Not just their political ones, but their corporate ones as well. It’s a fact: People know you by the enemies you keep. Explicitly naming enemies hits people emotionally. If an Alabama fan walks into a bar of fellow Tide backers and says, “I love Bama,” everyone will nod and think that’s nice. If he says, “I despise Auburn more than I hate William T. Sherman,” they’ll buy him rounds ’til closing time. That’s how we’re wired.

Recently, Biden has been talking about price-gouging. Great: It’s high time he spoke about this. (By the way, did you even know this? If not, that points to yet another problem—that congressional Democrats don’t follow the Biden White House’s talking points and just freelance around with little thought to message discipline.) Biden has even called out Big Pharma, which is progress, because most high-level Democrats have been afraid to do that for years. But he still seems hesitant to go after specific companies by name. A December 13 White House fact sheet on Pharma and price-gouging doesn’t call out a single company by name for ripping off consumers. News articles like this one don’t name any specific companies that Biden has mentioned, which suggests to me that he has not done it.

Name names. Name bad guys. Go after them and shame them. This is the only way to get people to really pay attention. Democrats and liberals sit around wondering why Biden, despite all the policy successes, isn’t connecting with the working classes? This is a big reason why. Those voters will far more readily know he’s on their if he’s regularly flaying the people who are picking their pockets. I happen to think the junk fees issue, while no one’s idea of a revolution, is political gold. But the White House has to name specific villains. If Biden managed nothing this year but to end Ticketmaster’s practices, that alone could win him millions of votes from low-information voters. It’s uncomplicated, and it’s the kind of thing everyone sees, like a governor lowering a bridge toll.

Israelis asked about the two-state solution

These selections are hardly scientific, but this one does seem to verify the the claims of my Israeli friends that the Sephardim tend to vote more right wing than the Ashkenazim. There are very complicated reasons for this, much of it having to do with the positioning of many Sephardic communities towards the borders and so they tend to take the brunt of the terror attacks. The physical similarities are what have allowed Palestinian teenagers to go into dancing clubs as suicide bombers. They are also the majority of settlers across the Green Lines. Life isn’t simple.