We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already In Progress. By Joel Kotkin.

We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already in Progress. By Joel Kotkin. JoelKotkin.com, February 16, 2016.

Kotkin:

Trump’s America. By Charles Murray.

Trump’s America. By Charles Murray. Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2016.

Murray:

There’s nothing irrational about Donald Trump’s appeal to the white working class, writes Charles Murray: they have every reason to be angry.

If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.

For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”

What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.

As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.

Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in the plight of the working class caught in between.

In my 2012 book “Coming Apart,” I discussed these new classes at length. The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away.

Historically, one of the most widely acknowledged aspects of American exceptionalism was our lack of class consciousness. Even Marx and Engels recognized it. This was egalitarianism American style. Yes, America had rich people and poor people, but that didn’t mean that the rich were better than anyone else.

Successful Americans stubbornly refused to accept the mantle of an upper class, typically presenting themselves to their fellow countrymen as regular guys. And they usually were, in the sense that most of them had grown up in modest circumstances, or even in poverty, and carried the habits and standards of their youths into their successful later lives.

America also retained a high degree of social and cultural heterogeneity in its communities. Tocqueville wrote of America in the 1830s as a place where “the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.” That continued well into the 20th century, even in America’s elite neighborhoods. In the 1960 census, the median income along Philadelphia’s Main Line was just $90,000 in today’s dollars. In Boston’s Brookline, it was $75,000; on New York’s Upper East Side, just $60,000. At a typical dinner party in those neighborhoods, many guests would have had no more than a high-school diploma.

In the years since, the new upper class has evolved a distinctive culture. For a half-century, America’s elite universities have drawn the most talented people from all over the country, socialized them and often married them off to each other. Brains have become radically more valuable in the marketplace. In 2016, a dinner party in those same elite neighborhoods consists almost wholly of people with college degrees, even advanced degrees. They are much more uniformly affluent. The current median family incomes for the Main Line, Brookline and the Upper East Side are about $150,000, $151,000 and $203,000, respectively.

And the conversation at that dinner party is likely to be completely unlike the conversations at get-togethers in mainstream America. The members of the new upper class are seldom attracted to the films, TV shows and music that are most popular in mainstream America. They have a distinctive culture in the food they eat, the way they take care of their health, their child-rearing practices, the vacations they take, the books they read, the websites they visit and their taste in beer. You name it, the new upper class has its own way of doing it.

Another characteristic of the new upper class—and something new under the American sun—is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans. Try using “redneck” in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs. Refer to “flyover country” and consider the implications when no one asks, “What does that mean?” Or I can send you to chat with a friend in Washington, D.C., who bought a weekend place in West Virginia. He will tell you about the contempt for his new neighbors that he has encountered in the elite precincts of the nation’s capital.

For its part, mainstream America is fully aware of this condescension and contempt and is understandably irritated by it. American egalitarianism is on its last legs.

While the new upper class was seceding from the mainstream, a new lower class was emerging from within the white working class, and it has played a key role in creating the environment in which Trumpism has flourished.

Work and marriage have been central to American civic culture since the founding, and this held true for the white working class into the 1960s. Almost all of the adult men were working or looking for work, and almost all of them were married.

Then things started to change. For white working-class men in their 30s and 40s—what should be the prime decades for working and raising a family—participation in the labor force dropped from 96% in 1968 to 79% in 2015. Over that same period, the portion of these men who were married dropped from 86% to 52%. (The numbers for nonwhite working-class males show declines as well, though not as steep and not as continuous.)

These are stunning changes, and they are visible across the country. In today’s average white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income. Almost half aren’t married, with all the collateral social problems that go with large numbers of unattached males.

In these communities, about half the children are born to unmarried women, with all the problems that go with growing up without fathers, especially for boys. Drugs also have become a major problem, in small towns as well as in urban areas.

Consider how these trends have affected life in working-class communities for everyone, including those who are still playing by the old rules. They find themselves working and raising their families in neighborhoods where the old civic culture is gone—neighborhoods that are no longer friendly or pleasant or even safe.

These major changes in American class structure were taking place alongside another sea change: large-scale ideological defection from the principles of liberty and individualism, two of the pillars of the American creed. This came about in large measure because of the civil rights and feminist movements, both of which began as classic invocations of the creed, rightly demanding that America make good on its ideals for blacks and women.

But the success of both movements soon produced policies that directly contradicted the creed. Affirmative action demanded that people be treated as groups. Equality of outcome trumped equality before the law. Group-based policies continued to multiply, with ever more policies embracing ever more groups.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Democratic elites overwhelmingly subscribed to an ideology in open conflict with liberty and individualism as traditionally understood. This consolidated the Democratic Party’s longtime popularity with ethnic minorities, single women and low-income women, but it alienated another key Democratic constituency: the white working class.

White working-class males were the archetypal “Reagan Democrats” in the early 1980s and are often described as the core of support for Mr. Trump. But the grievances of this group are often misunderstood. It is a mistake to suggest that they are lashing out irrationally against people who don’t look like themselves. There are certainly elements of racism and xenophobia in Trumpism, as I myself have discovered on Twitter and Facebook after writing critically about Mr. Trump.

But the central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class. During the past half-century of economic growth, virtually none of the rewards have gone to the working class. The economists can supply caveats and refinements to that statement, but the bottom line is stark: The real family income of people in the bottom half of the income distribution hasn’t increased since the late 1960s.

During the same half-century, American corporations exported millions of manufacturing jobs, which were among the best-paying working-class jobs. They were and are predominantly men’s jobs. In both 1968 and 2015, 70% of manufacturing jobs were held by males.

During the same half-century, the federal government allowed the immigration, legal and illegal, of tens of millions of competitors for the remaining working-class jobs. Apart from agriculture, many of those jobs involve the construction trades or crafts. They too were and are predominantly men’s jobs: 77% in 1968 and 84% in 2015.

Economists still argue about the net effect of these events on the American job market. But for someone living in a town where the big company has shut the factory and moved the jobs to China, or for a roofer who has watched a contractor hire illegal immigrants because they are cheaper, anger and frustration are rational.

Add to this the fact that white working-class men are looked down upon by the elites and get little validation in their own communities for being good providers, fathers and spouses—and that life in their communities is falling apart. To top it off, the party they have voted for in recent decades, the Republicans, hasn’t done a damn thing to help them. Who wouldn’t be angry?

There is nothing conservative about how they want to fix things. They want a now indifferent government to act on their behalf, big time. If Bernie Sanders were passionate about immigration, the rest of his ideology would have a lot more in common with Trumpism than conservatism does.

As a political matter, it is not a problem that Mr. Sanders doesn’t share the traditional American meanings of liberty and individualism. Neither does Mr. Trump. Neither, any longer, do many in the white working class. They have joined the other defectors from the American creed.

Who continues to embrace this creed in its entirety? Large portions of the middle class and upper middle class (especially those who run small businesses), many people in the corporate and financial worlds and much of the senior leadership of the Republican Party. They remain principled upholders of the ideals of egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.

And let’s not forget moderate Democrats, the spiritual legatees of the New Deal. They may advocate social democracy, but they are also unhappy about policies that treat Americans as members of groups and staunch in their support of freedom of speech, individual moral responsibility and the kind of egalitarianism that Tocqueville was talking about. They still exist in large numbers, though mostly in the political closet.

But these are fragments of the population, not the national consensus that bound the U.S. together for the first 175 years of the nation’s existence. And just as support for the American creed has shrunk, so has its correspondence to daily life. Our vaunted liberty is now constrained by thousands of petty restrictions that touch almost anything we want to do, individualism is routinely ignored in favor of group rights, and we have acquired an arrogant upper class. Operationally as well as ideologically, the American creed is shattered.

Our national identity is not altogether lost. Americans still have a vivid, distinctive national character in the eyes of the world. Historically, America has done a far better job than any other country of socializing people of many different ethnicities into displaying our national character. We will still be identifiably American for some time to come.

There’s irony in that. Much of the passion of Trumpism is directed against the threat to America’s national identity from an influx of immigrants. But the immigrants I actually encounter, of all ethnicities, typically come across as classically American—cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, ambitious. Keeping our national character seems to be the least of our problems.

Still, even that character is ultimately rooted in the American creed. When faith in that secular religion is held only by fragments of the American people, we will soon be just another nation—a very powerful one, a very rich one, still called the United States of America. But we will have detached ourselves from the bedrock that has made us unique in the history of the world.

Is Trump a Realist? By Leon Hadar.

Is Trump a Realist? By Leon Hadar. The American Conservative, February 3, 2016.

Hadar:

The Year of the Islamists. By Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven.

The Year of the Islamists. By Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven. National Review Online, February 3, 2016.

Habeeb and Leven:

Why I Am a Member of Peace When. By Richard Landes.

Why I am a member of Peace When. By Richard Landes. The Augean Stables, February 2, 2016.

Landes:

Two State Solution, yes, just not now; or, Why I am a member of Peace When.

Almost everyone in the positive-sum world of “getting to win-win” agrees that the most equitable resolution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, is a two-state solution. Land for peace, reciprocal compromise, give a little, get a lot. This positive-sum thinking lies at the heart of what makes modern democracy possible, and has enabled the Europeans to replace millennia of wars between tribes and nations (in medieval times, an annual activity) with a cooperative and productive Union. To progressives, it’s so obvious that, as one BBC analyst put it: you could work it out with an email.

And yet, the conflict has proven amazingly enduring, and resistant to the best intentioned efforts of Western outsiders for the last twenty years. Indeed, not only did it ruin the final year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, but it made fools of both of Obama’s Secretaries of State, who confidently predicted that they would resolve this in less than a year(!). Like a Sisyphus with Alzheimers, doomed to repeat the same motions without registering the repetition, Western “conflict resolution” experts repeatedly attempt to implement the same “positive-sum” solutions, with predictably the same results: not just no success, but actual failure. The situation is worse after than before.

What escapes many who, like me, accept the idea of a two state solution, is the unmentioned now that accompanies all current efforts. This notion that this solution can and should be implemented right away, has good reasons behind it. In addition to its concern for a putting an end to the suffering caused by the conflict as soon as possible, the haste acknowledges the demographic problems in the next generation: can Israel be both Jewish and democratic?

Both are good reasons to want to move quickly, but not good reasons to ignore the obstacles in the way. The reality on the ground, the combination of “strong horse” political culture, and tribal, apocalyptic Jihadi religious culture, makes it impossible to close one’s eyes and hope that both sides are ready for it, and it’s just a matter of finding the right formula of compromise to hit the jackpot.

The majority of voices in the public sphere blame the lack of progress on the Israelis. This is a main theme of European diplomacy and post-colonial scholarship since the mid-1970s, Western mainstream news media (BBC and NYT leading the charge) especially since 2000, and has now moved into policy circles even in the US. This tendency makes sense only in that the Israelis, being at once more flexible and more self-critical, are easier to blame, even when it’s not their fault. How much the easier to take this path when, on the one hand, the Palestinians greet criticism with great hostility, and on the other hand, one finds strong support from self-critical Israelis and Jews.

These “Jews against themselves” provide the arguments for politicians and pundits, not particularly eager to criticize the Palestinians or actually make demands on them, to redouble the load on the Israelis. After all, there are few Palestinians clamoring for criticism and harsh denunciations of their people the way there are Jews and Israelis whod so. On the contrary, there are no Palestinian mainstream journalists, no policy-makers, no politicians ready to take any responsibility for any error, fault, or misstep on their side. It is an object of faith among them, which, increasingly, many in the West share: Israel is to blame; the Palestinians are innocent victims.

And yet, if we look at what Palestinian leaders say in Arabic to their people, we find an entire culture of intransigence, irredentism, and incitement. Here is a zero-sum culture, not only in its attitude towards its neighbor Israel – From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free – but towards its own people. Like the elite in every other Arab country, the Palestinian leadership, whether religious (Hamas) or “secular” (PLO), lives in luxury while its people live in misery.

If one takes Dennis Ross’ mordant reflections on why Oslo failed as a guide, the PA continues to replicate Arafat’s “one greatest failing”: not preparing their people for peace. On the contrary, it continuously and systematically brainwashes them with war propaganda. Indeed, the very insistence that Israel is entirely to blame is part of that war propaganda. It identifies the problem: they are not looking for compromise, which involves recognizing at least some of the other side’s complaints, they are looking for the zero-sum solution. Israel is to blame and must pay, so that Palestinians win big and Israel loses big.

The most moderate position one finds in the Arabic discourse of the Palestinians, is the notion not of a two-state solution (which only appears in Western op-ed pages), but the two stage solution, namely take what the Israelis offer and use it as a staging area for further attacks, until Israel is destroyed. And even that appears to be too great a compromise with Arab honor, because even when offered large tracts of land, including Jerusalem, the “moderates” consistently say no.

Despite the reluctance of the media to cover it at the time, we now know that in 2007, Abbas turned down Olmert’s offer, the most generous so far. Today, even Gershon Baskin, one of the most determined and dedicated advocates of peace now, someone who has in the past always insisted that the Palestinian leadership has and is willing to make the necessary compromises for peace, has given up on the current (“moderate”) Palestinian leadership .

Europeans have systematically avoided paying attention to this “internal” Palestinian discourse. Either desperate to believe that peace is possible now, or eager to blame Israel for Palestinian intransigence, they prefer the version of events in which Israel is the obstacle to peace, and continue to believe that pushing Israel to make further concessions is the fastest way to get there. Today, France makes the ludicrously self-fulfilling threat that if peace negotiations fail, they will recognize a Palestinian State: who could ask for better motivation for the Palestinians to have the talks fail?

Were they correct in their assessment – Palestinians are ready for compromise, Israelis not – then pressuring Israel might work. Of course it hasn’t, doesn’t, and won’t, because the assessment is based on an inversion of the actual situation here. Instead of moving towards the positive-sum goal that benefits “both sides”, it just pushes Israel towards greater vulnerability, and the Palestinians towards greater intransigence.

The latest threat by French Foreign Minister Fabius that if the next round of talks fail, France will unilaterally recognize Palestine illustrates the folly perfectly: It tells the Palestinians that if they remain intransigent they’ll win, and threatens the Israelis with sanctions for refusing to commit suicide. And the French side boosts Palestinian Jihadis even as they know not what to do with their own. The more Palestinians resist making compromises, the more support they get, the more outsiders adopt their belligerent narrative: Eliminate Israel for World Peace.

Trafalgar Square, London, August 21, 2011.

Nor is this a simple matter of Palestinian political will (what the West thought Arafat had during Oslo), but rather a cultural problem about which most of us do not want to think. Some political scientists speculate that Palestinians are one of the more likely Arab nations to become a democracy (often explained by their proximity to Israeli democracy). But from both the behavior of the elites (Strong Horse politics) and the patriarchal males (shame-murders), suggests the Palestinians are far from the kind of institutional and social commitments necessary for launching and sustaining that experiment in freedom.

The existence of these cultural blocks to peace on the Palestinian side, places liberal Jews and Israelis, committed to the compromises they feel are worth making to achieve a two-state solution (including dividing Jerusalem), in great difficulty. On the one hand, bringing up these issues explicitly will predictably elicit offense among Palestinians and their supporters (like Saïd). On the other hand, by pressing Israel to push forward with a two-state solution now, they actually, if unintentionally, weaken Israel and strengthen the enemies of peace, especially among the Palestinians. Every failure of peace now, based on positive-sum resolutions, weakens the positive-sum players and strengthens the zero-sum players on both sides. In this dynamic, that means reinforcing political players among Palestinians whose attitudes towards Israel share a great deal with those of apocalyptic Jihadis.

This dilemma becomes more toxic when a sense of urgency leads well-meaning Jews to grow impatient with Israeli reluctance to make moves that its electorate, up close with incitement-fueled, Palestinian violence, considers suicidal. It’s so much easier for liberals to denounce Netanuyahu as a right-winger, intransigent and unyielding, and praise Abbas as a moderate, ready to make peace. But if it turns out it’s the opposite (which it is), then every move the peace camp pushes for leads to war; and the harder they push, the worse the war they unwittingly prepare.

On the other hand, if the problem is Palestinian resistance, and the radical unreadiness of Palestinian political culture for peace with Israel, then a rather different set of policies are likely to improve the prospects for the eventual, but not imminent, two-state solution. Here, instead of the (easy but unproductive) pressure on Israelis for more concessions, we find the (difficult but much more productive) pressure on Palestinians to do what Dennis Ross faulted Arafat for not doing, “prepare their people for peace.”

The attitude of Palestinian power holders towards Israel currently reveals the gamut of Palestinian intolerance: no Jews living in a Palestinian state, no Jews among any foreign force stationed in Palestine. Not even Palestinian refugees from camps around the Arab world in the Palestinian state (they have to go to Israel). This of course is what one calls ethnic cleansing, and is the kind of thing that belligerent, authoritarian regimes do as a matter of course.

It’s what the Ottomans did in the 1910s and 20s, to both the Armenians and the Greeks, whom they massacred and expelled. There is no perceptible difference between Ottoman political and religious culture, and the kind operating among Palestinian elites (“secular” and religious). Indeed, today’s Palestinians are a definite regression from Ataturk’s magnanimity towards the Greeks.

And yet the very same people who rejoice in accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing (despite her 20% Arab population who enjoy freedoms and privileges they have nowhere else in the Middle East), seem to have no objection (or knowledge of) this Palestinian, openly intended, ethnic cleansing, often accompanied by the kind of genocidal incitement that, under the right circumstances, can produce the terrible deed. A sober observer (i.e., one not besotted by Saïd, or worried about offending Muslim honor), would note plainly: Palestinians have yet to undergo the kind of moral revolution in their “honor group” that permits greater tolerance of the “other,” and thus lays the grounds for both democracy and peaceful relations with “others.” And until they have, any concessions made to them constitute a recipe for war.

Peace When.

The two-state solution is indeed the most equitable resolution to this tragic fight between two peoples who could well be productive friends. But in order to reach that kind of justice, it will take some time before Palestinian culture has developed the ability to move from the zero-sum world of dispute settlement through violence (upon which, despite always losing so far, Palestinian leaders insist) to dispute settlement through a discourse of fairness that includes reciprocity. Until then, pushing Israel to make concessions to players who reject reciprocity and view concessions as signs of weakness, merely plays to the hand of war.

All of the following suggestions are demands that are perfectly reasonable if the Palestinians are planning to make peace with Israel; they’re unacceptable if the Palestinians are planning to destroy Israel. Seems like the least that well-intentioned outsiders, who say they believe in a two-state solution now, could ask from the Palestinian leadership:

·         Show of good faith about compromising on the refugees by beginning to move refugees out of camps and into decent, permanent housing.

·         Show of respect for women, by seriously tackling the problem of honor-killings, including cases where father or brother raped the victim.

·         Stop persecuting Palestinians who get along with Israelis for being spies and traitors.

These items are chosen because they attack the cultural issues making peace so hard. Obviously any effort for peace would also include asking that the Palestinian officials stop broadcasting the ugliest kind of war propaganda: incitement to genocide, irredentist claims and promises, glorification of people who kill innocent civilians. But that’s almost too obvious to mention… or is it?

How Both Parties Lost the White Middle Class. By R.R. Reno.

How Both Parties Lost the White Middle Class. By R.R. Reno. New York Times, February 1, 2016.

Reno:

LONG after the dust settles in Iowa — and New Hampshire, and even the 2016 campaign itself — one question will remain: Why, after decades of supporting the liberal and conservative establishments, did the white middle-class abandon them? Wherever Donald J. Trump and Bernie Sanders end up, their candidacies represent a major shift in American politics. Since World War II our political culture has been organized around the needs, fears and aspirations of white middle-class voters in ways that also satisfied the interests of the rich and powerful. That’s no longer true.

As we know, the rich are now quite a bit richer. In itself, this need not disrupt the old political consensus. More decisive is the fact that the white middle class is in decline, both economically and culturally.

This story of decline is often told in racial and ethnic terms: White America is being displaced by a multicultural America, and especially on the right, voters are retreating to racist posturing. There may be some truth to this story, but for the most part it’s a huge distraction.

In fact, the real cleavage is not interracial, but intra-racial: The populism we’re seeing stems entirely from the collision of whites who flourish in the global economy — and amid the cultural changes of the last 50 years — with those who don’t.

And while we’ve heard a lot about the economic decline of the middle class, the cultural decline of the white middle class isn’t discussed nearly as often. It should be.

First, there are the consequences of the great success of the upper middle class, which today lives in a separate world of well-manicured neighborhoods with good schools, intact families and cultural confidence. We compliment ourselves that a generally meritocratic system is open to far more people than was true 50 years ago. And it has been — but the resulting culture of ambition paradoxically erodes middle-class confidence. Today, the vast middle of the middle fears that unless you’re on the way up, you’re on the way down.

And it’s not just competitiveness that is eroding the white middle class. When I was coming of age in the 1970s, drug use was already undermining the white middle class. Since then marriage rates among high school-educated whites have declined and illegitimacy has increased. A priest I know serves three small-town parishes in rural, white Pennsylvania. I asked about his pastoral challenges. The biggest: Grandparents parenting their grandchildren, as their own children are too messed up to raise them.

Cultural instability compounds economic instability. A person near the median in our society is on shaky ground. He feels that what was once reliable is now eroding. This is as much a source of today’s middle-class anxiety as stagnant household incomes.

What’s striking — and crucial for understanding our populist moment — is the fact that the leadership cadres of both parties aren’t just unresponsive to this anxiety. They add to it.

The intelligentsia on the left rarely lets a moment pass without reminding us of the demographic eclipse of white middle-class voters. Sometimes, those voters are described as racists, or derided as dull suburbanites who lack the élan of the new urban “creative class.” The message: White middle-class Americans aren’t just irrelevant to America’s future, they’re in the way.

Conservatives are no less harsh. Pundits ominously predict that the “innovators” are about to be overwhelmed by a locust blight of “takers.” The message: If it weren’t for successful people like us, middle-class people like you would be doomed. And if you’re not an entrepreneurial “producer,” you’re in the way.

Is it any surprise that white middle-class voters are in rebellion?

Democratic and Republican Party establishments appeal to the interests of these voters, promising to protect them (Democrats) or spur growth that will renew economic opportunity (Republicans). But these appeals miss the point.

Our political history since the end of World War II has turned on the willingness of white middle-class voters to rally behind great causes in league with the wealthy and political elite: Resist Communism! Send a man to the moon! Overcome racism! Protect the environment! Today, white middle-class voters want to be reassured that they can play an active role in politics. They want someone to appeal to their sense of political self-worth, not just their interests.

This is precisely what Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders offer. Mr. Trump speaks about restoring American greatness, rhetorical gestures akin to Barack Obama’s vague 2008 slogan, “Yes, we can.” We can mock both as empty. But voters who feel disempowered and marginalized latch on to this promise. They want to be partners with the rich and powerful in defining our future as a country, not recipients of their benevolent ministrations, which explains why they’re untroubled by Mr. Trump’s great wealth.

Mr. Sanders also appeals to the strong desire that the white middle class has to recover its central role in the national project. While he attracts support from a wealthier stratum of the middle class than Mr. Trump, the appeal is the same. He asks them to join him in fundamentally remaking our political economy. We can dismiss his socialism as an unworkable throwback, but he’s doing something our political establishment can’t or won’t: asking middle-class voters to undertake a nation-defining transformation.

If these candidates have traction, it’s because over the last two decades our political elites, themselves almost entirely white, have decided, for different reasons, that the white middle class has no role to play in the multicultural, globalized future they envision, a future that they believe they will run. This primary season will show us whether or not they’re right.

The Unsexy Truth About Why the Arab Spring Failed. By Amanda Taub.

The unsexy truth about why the Arab Spring failed. By Amanda Taub. Vox, January 27, 2016.

Taub:

Tarek Masoud of Harvard on the Failure of the Arab Spring.

Tarek Masoud (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government) on the Failure of the Arab Spring. Transcript excerpt. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, January 31, 2016. Video clip at Internet Archive. Also here.


MASOUD: This question that you asked Leila about, sort of, where the revolutions are and where the revolutionaries are, it’s really difficult for me to think about Egypt’s revolution without alternatively feeling either really stupid or really callous.

Because, you know, I remember back – being on your show in January of 2011 and totally believing with every cell in my body that Egypt could and would move from Mubarak to a liberal democracy. And now, of course, that that dream has really come apart, we can come up with multiple reasons why the dream was never a rational one to begin with. And everything that I was taught in graduate school should have caused me to not be optimistic about the chances of democracy.

So I feel really, sometimes, stupid when I think about how optimistic I was. But then, when you think that, look, democracy could never have succeeded and really all they can hope for in those places is some kind of stability, you feel really callous and you feel really – you feel really brutal, because, as Leila pointed out, many of these young people who were at the forefront of trying to agitate for a more hopeful Egypt, or more hopeful countries throughout the region, are now behind bars. And it is a very sad fact of life that today everybody is excluded, not just Islamists but liberals and secularist – they’re also excluded from governance. And you have to ask yourself not just if Islamists are going to be radicalized but if this entire population is going to be alienated and atomized, and what kind of politics is going to result from that? It can’t be pretty.

Hillary’s “Blame-Men-First” Feminism May Prove Costly In 2016. By Camille Paglia.

Hillary’s “blame-men-first” feminism may prove costly in 2016. By Camille Paglia. Salon, January 27, 2016.

Paglia:

It’s Not Just the Settlements, the Palestinians Reject All of Israel. By David Horovitz.

Family and friends of Dafna Meir at her funeral in Jerusalem on January 18, 2106. Meir was stabbed to death at the entrance to her home in the settlement of Otniel on January 17. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Stop the incitement, stop the killing. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, January 26, 2016.

Horovitz:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has taken to giving press conferences to Israeli journalists of late. A picture of wounded innocence and goodwill, he has been using the opportunities to berate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for refusing to meet and talk peace with him, highlighting his forces’ ongoing security cooperation with Israel in the territories, and trying to wriggle out of his own personal role in fostering the vicious incitement against Israel that lies at the root of this ongoing Palestinian terror wave.

About to turn 81, Abbas may not be in politics that much longer, and there are plenty of Israelis who argue that we are missing an opportunity to make progress with him when it is clear that any successor is likely to be still more impossible to deal with.

His successor may indeed well be worse, but Abbas is impossible. His duplicitous terrorism-fostering predecessor Yasser Arafat assured the Palestinians that they had no reason or need to compromise with the Jews because we were colonial invaders, an unrooted and temporary presence that his people’s stubbornness and terrorism would eventually see off. Abbas chose not to counter that narrative, not to acknowledge to his people the Jews’ history of sovereignty in the Holy Land, and more recently intensified the strategic campaign of misrepresentation — telling Palestinians that the Jews have no business at the Temple Mount.

Meanwhile, the Fatah hierarchy he heads has been openly encouraging attacks on Israelis, and the Hamas terror group with which he seeks to partner in government is again plotting suicide bombings, developing more sophisticated rockets, and digging tunnels under the Gaza-Israel border ahead of its next planned war.

Abbas may well be deploying his forces to keep a lid on clashes in the West Bank, but he’s presiding over an ongoing, strategic demonizing of Israel and Israelis — via his education system, political and spiritual leadership and mainstream and social media — that positively guarantees Palestinian violence and terrorism. So effective is this process that, nowadays, when a young Palestinian has a row at home, feels depressed, or wants to make a name for him or herself, the default response is to grab a knife and go kill the nearest vulnerable Jew.

Dafna Meir

And so, last week, we buried Dafna Meir.

Shlomit Krigman

And today, we buried Shlomit Krigman.

Israel paid for Abbas’s last ostensible readiness for peace talks, in 2013-14, with the release of dozens of killers and other Palestinian terrorists from our jails. Prior to that, in 2008, Abbas spurned Ehud Olmert’s extraordinary readiness to give him everything he purportedly sought: We were gone from Gaza, and Olmert offered to leave the West Bank — with one-for-one land swaps — and to divide Jerusalem, including relinquishing sovereignty in the Old City. If that wasn’t good enough for Abbas, then obviously nothing we can offer will be.

While the United States and much of the international community refuse to internalize this, the simple, bleak fact is that everything Arafat, Abbas and Hamas have done since the collapse of the Bill Clinton-hosted Camp David 2000 attempt at forging a deal has persuaded Israelis that they dare not relinquish territory to the Palestinians, despite the imperative to separate in order to maintain a Jewish, democratic Israel.

Arafat returned from the United States and fostered the Second Intifada’s onslaught of suicide bombings — attacks throughout Israel that murderously demonstrated that it was not merely the territories that the Palestinians sought. That it’s not just the settlements, it’s all of Israel that is rejected.

In the years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the rocket fire intensified, the Palestinians gave Hamas a parliamentary majority in elections, and Hamas ousted Abbas’s forces from the Strip in hours — underlining to Israelis the dangers of leaving adjacent territory, and the ease with which Islamist forces could seize power in any vacuum. The latest Israel-Hamas conflict, in 2014, only re-emphasized the danger: If a single rocket fired by Hamas that got through the Iron Dome defenses and landed a mile from Ben-Gurion Airport could send two-thirds of foreign airlines fleeing from Israel, including all the American carriers, how could Israel possibly entertain the idea of leaving the West Bank? Hamas would be running the show within days, and our entire country would be paralyzed and isolated.

The irony, of course, is that if the Palestinians had been capable of hiding their hatred for just a short period after we left Gaza, if they had managed to pretend for even a brief time that their hearts were set on peaceful coexistence, we probably would have withdrawn unilaterally from much of the West Bank as well.

Instead, Palestinian words and deeds have persuaded mainstream Israelis — those who don’t want to rule the Palestinians, don’t want to expand settlements in areas we do not envisage retaining under any permanent accord, don’t want to have to live by the sword forever — that no partnership is viable at present. They’ve even managed to kill off the optimism of the leader of the Israeli opposition, Isaac Herzog, who sadly concluded last week that a two-state solution is simply unrealistic: He “yearns” for it, said Herzog in a radio interview. But it’s “not possible” right now.

A grassroots approach

So, how, then, to break out of this awful new reality — of more Palestinian generations strategically brainwashed to hate, and a bleeding Israel unable to advance its own interest in a safe separation to guarantee the maintenance of our Jewish democracy?

Self-evidently, there will no accord with Mahmoud Abbas. But one thing that Abbas has been saying at his recent press conferences is worth picking up on. Previous peace efforts created a joint mechanism intended to combat incitement on both sides, and Abbas has pronounced himself ready to revive that mechanism. Israel should take him up on that right away.

Netanyahu has rightly focused on incitement as a root cause of the current terror wave. We all have an interest in utilizing any and every tool that just might help alleviate some of the hostility.

It was lousy politics of Herzog to publicly give up for now on the two-state solution. If peace is not on the horizon, after all, why would Israelis elect a leader who is now acknowledging that his whole prior strategy was misguided? But Herzog’s sad and sober conclusion underlines that there can and will be no quick fixes.

What’s needed, what has always been needed, to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is a grassroots approach to peacemaking. An approach focused on education. An approach under which international resources and leverage are utilized to rewrite educational curricula, to marginalize extremist political and spiritual leaders, to promote moderation and peaceful interaction.

The Arafat-Abbas-Hamas strategy of hostility to Israel achieves the precise opposite of what the Palestinians purport to seek — independent statehood. It has now even managed to persuade the center-left opposition, the peacemaking Labor Party, that Israeli readiness for compromise is insufficient.

Perhaps the international community — so insistently led by US President Barack Obama in seeking to persuade Israelis that they can afford to take risks for peace when the bloody evidence all around them shows the contrary — will learn Herzog’s lesson.

Perhaps it will move to adopt the grassroots approach.

Perhaps it will use its immense leverage to gradually help create a climate in which it is not the most natural thing in the world for teenage Palestinians to set out with knives and kill Israeli mothers of six and 23-year-old industrial design graduates.

Democrats Will Hold Their Noses and Nominate Hillary. By Dana Milbank.

Hillary Clinton, former U.S. secretary of state, speaks during the Clinton Global Initiative CGI America meeting in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Thursday, June 13, 2013. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Democrats would be insane to nominate Bernie Sanders. By Dana Milbank. Washington Post, January 26, 2016.

Milbank:

I adore Bernie Sanders.

I agree with his message of fairness and I share his outrage over inequality and corporate abuses. I think his righteous populism has captured the moment perfectly. I respect the uplifting campaign he has run. I admire his authenticity.

And I am convinced Democrats would be insane to nominate him.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is a dreary candidate. She has, again, failed to connect with voters. Her policy positions are cautious and uninspiring. Her reflexive secrecy causes a whiff of scandal to follow her everywhere. She seems calculating and phony.

And yet if Democrats hope to hold the presidency in November, they’ll need to hold their noses and nominate Clinton.

Ultimately, I expect that’s what Democrats will do — because as much as they love Sanders , they loathe Donald Trump more. It seems more evident each day that Republicans have lost their collective reason and are beginning to accept the notion that Trump will be their nominee. And I doubt Democrats will make an anti-immigrant bigot the president by nominating a socialist to run against him.

Sanders and his supporters boast of polls showing him, on average, matching up slightly better against Trump than Clinton does. But those matchups are misleading: Opponents have been attacking and defining Clinton for a quarter- century, but nobody has really gone to work yet on demonizing Sanders.

Watching Sanders at Monday night’s Democratic presidential forum in Des Moines, I imagined how Trump — or another Republican nominee — would disembowel the relatively unknown Vermonter.

The first questioner from the audience asked Sanders to explain why he embraces the “socialist” label and requested that Sanders define it “so that it doesn’t concern the rest of us citizens.”

Sanders, explaining that much of what he proposes is happening in Scandinavia and Germany (a concept that itself alarms Americans who don’t want to be like socialized Europe), answered vaguely: “Creating a government that works for all of us, not just a handful of people on the top — that’s my definition of democratic socialism.”

But that’s not how Republicans will define socialism — and they’ll have the dictionary on their side. They’ll portray Sanders as one who wants the government to own and control major industries and the means of production and distribution of goods. They’ll say he wants to take away private property. That wouldn’t be fair, but it would be easy. Socialists don’t win national elections in the United States .

Sanders on Monday night also admitted he would seek massive tax increases — “one of the biggest tax hikes in history,” as moderator Chris Cuomo put it — to expand Medicare to all. Sanders, this time making a comparison with Britain and France, allowed that “hypothetically, you’re going to pay $5,000 more in taxes,” and declared, “We will raise taxes, yes we will.” He said this would be offset by lower health-insurance premiums and protested that “it’s demagogic to say, oh, you’re paying more in taxes.”

Well, yes — and Trump is a demagogue.

Sanders also made clear he would be happy to identify Democrats as the party of big government and of wealth redistribution. When Cuomo said Sanders seemed to be saying he would grow government “bigger than ever,” Sanders didn’t quarrel, saying, “P eople want to criticize me, okay,” and “F ine, if that’s the criticism, I accept it.”

Sanders accepts it, but are Democrats ready to accept ownership of socialism, massive tax increases and a dramatic expansion of government? If so, they will lose.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York mayor who floated a trial balloon over the weekend about an independent run, knows this. As the New York Times reported: “If Republicans were to nominate Mr. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz, a hard-line conservative, and Democrats chose Mr. Sanders, Mr. Bloomberg . . . has told allies he would be likely to run.”

President Obama seems to know this, too — which would explain why he tiptoed beyond his official neutrality to praise Clinton in an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush. “I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics,” he said. He portrayed Sanders as “the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before.”

It doesn’t speak well of Clinton that, next to her, a 74-year-old guy who has been in politics for four decades is a bright and shiny object. The #feelthebern phenomenon has at least as much to do with Clinton as with Sanders: Democrats are eager for an alternative to her inauthentic politics and cautious policies.

I share their frustration with Clinton. But that doesn’t make Sanders a rational choice.