The Donald and the Demagogues. By Bret Stephens.

The Donald and the Demagogues. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2015.

Stephens:

Democracies that trade substance for charisma don’t last. Trump is America’s answer to Hugo Chávez.

If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.

If you have reached physical maturity and still chuckle at Mr. Trump’s pubescent jokes about Rosie O’Donnell or Heidi Klum, you will never reach mental maturity. If you watched Mr. Trump mock fellow candidate Lindsey Graham’s low poll numbers and didn’t cringe at the lack of class, you are incapable of class. If you think we need to build new airports in Queens the way they build them in Qatar, you should be sent to join the millions of forced laborers who do construction in the Persian Gulf. It would serve you right.

Since Mr. Trump joined the GOP presidential field and leaped to the top of the polls, several views have been offered to explain his popularity. He conveys a can-do image. He is the bluntest of the candidates in addressing public fears of cultural and economic dislocation. He toes no line, serves no PAC, abides no ideology, is beholden to no man. He addresses the broad disgust of everyday Americans with their failed political establishment.

And so forth and so on—a parade of semi-sophisticated theories that act as bathroom deodorizer to mask the stench of this candidacy. Mr. Trump is a loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians. These vulgarians comprise a significant percentage of the GOP base. The leader isn’t the problem. The people are. It takes the demos to make the demagogue.

There will be other opportunities to write about the radical affinities and moralizing conceits of Democrats and liberals. For now let’s speak plainly about what the Trump ascendancy says about the potential future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

It says that we may soon have a conservative movement in which the American creed of “give us your tired, your poor” could yield to the Trumpian creed that America must not become a “dumping ground” to poor immigrants from Latin America, as if these millions of hardworking and God-fearing people are a specimen of garbage.

It says that a party that carries on about the importance of e pluribus unum and rails against the identity politics of assorted minorities is increasingly tempted to indulge the paranoid (and losing) identity politics of a dwindling white majority.

It says that a sizable constituency in a party that is supposed to favor a plain reading of the Constitution objects to a plain reading of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

It says that a movement that is supposed to believe in defending old-fashioned values and traditions against the assorted degradations of the postmodern left might allow itself to be led by a reality-TV star whose meretricious tastes in trophies, architectural and otherwise, mainly remind me of the aesthetics of Bob Guccione.

It says that a party that is supposed to believe in the incomparable awesomeness of America thinks we are losing the economic hunger games to the brilliant political leadership of . . . Mexico. It says that a movement that is supposed to believe in economic freedom doesn’t believe in the essence of economic freedom: to wit, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labor.

It says that many of the same people who have bellyached nonstop for the past seven years about the cult-of-personality president currently in the Oval Office are seriously willing to consider another cult-of-personality figure on the off-chance he’s peddling the cure America needs. Focus group testing by pollster Frank Luntz suggests that Mr. Trump’s fans could care less about his flip-flopping political views but responded almost rapturously to his apparently magnetic persona.

When people become indifferent to the ideas of their would-be leaders, those leaders become prone to dangerous ideas. Democracies that trade policy substance for personal charisma tend not to last as democracies. They become Bolivarian republics. Donald Trump may be America’s Hugo Chávez, minus the political consistency.

***

Because the Republican Party has not lost its mind—at least not yet—I doubt that Mr. Trump will be its presidential nominee. A single bad poll could break him. The summer before an election-year summer tends to be a political clown-time. Voters, like diners in a fancy restaurant, may entertain the idea of ordering the pigeon, but they’ll probably wind up with the chicken.

Still, Mr. Trump’s political star is rising in a period when fringe politics, both on the right and the left, are making a comeback in the West. Marine Le Pen in France. Beppe Grillo in Italy. Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party. Every now and then some of these characters get into office. Look at Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Alexis Tsipras in Greece.

Republicans like to think of America as an exceptional nation. And it is, not least in its distaste for demagogues. Donald Trump’s candidacy puts the strength of that distaste to the test.

Donald Trump and Jacksonian Populism.

The Trump Virus and Its Symptoms. By Charles C.W. Cooke. National Review Online, August 10, 2015.

The Nihilistic Populism of Donald Trump. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, August 11, 2015.

Donald Trump, the Hipster Candidate. By Tom Nichols. The Federalist, August 11, 2015.

Donald Trump: The Golden Haired Sun Eater Who Says “Go America.” By Ben Domenech. The Federalist, August 12, 2015.

Angry Taxpayers, Not Stupid People, Are Backing Trump. By D.C. McAllister. The Federalist, August 12, 2015.

Trump Derangement Syndrome. By Esther Goldberg. The American Spectator, August 17, 2015.

America Needs Better, Classier Immigration Reformers. By Nicholas M. Gallagher. The American Interest, August 20, 2015.

Of Nationalists and Cosmopolitans. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, August 21, 2015.

Le Donald, and Western Democracy’s Populism Problem. By Benjamin Haddad and Neil Rogachevsky. Foreign Policy, August 21, 2015.

Are Republicans for Freedom or White Identity Politics? By Ben Domenech. The Federalist, August 21, 2015.

The Secret to Donald Trump’s Massive Rise in the Polls. By Matt Purple. The National Interest, August 22, 2015.

Saving America from a European Future. The American Interest, August 23, 2015.

Donald Trump Is Not a Populist. He’s the Voice of Aggrieved Privilege. By Jeet Heer. The New Republic, August 24, 2015.

Donald Trump’s Secret Weapon: The Silent Majority? By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, August 27, 2015.

America Is So in Play. By Peggy Noonan. Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2015.

Noonan:

America is so in play.

And: “the base” isn’t the limited, clichéd thing it once was, it’s becoming a big, broad jumble that few understand.

***

On the subject of elites, I spoke to Scott Miller, co-founder of the Sawyer Miller political-consulting firm, who is now a corporate consultant. He worked on the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 and knows something about outside challenges. He views the key political fact of our time as this: “Over 80% of the American people, across the board, believe an elite group of political incumbents, plus big business, big media, big banks, big unions and big special interests—the whole Washington political class—have rigged the system for the wealthy and connected.” It is “a remarkable moment,” he said. More than half of the American people believe “something has changed, our democracy is not like it used to be, people feel they no longer have a voice.”

Mr. Miller added: “People who work for a living are thinking this thing is broken, and that economic inequality is the result of the elite rigging the system for themselves. We’re seeing something big.”

Support for Mr. Trump is not, he said, limited to the GOP base: “The molecules are in motion.” I asked what he meant. He said bars of support are not solid, things are in motion as molecules are “before combustion, or before a branch breaks.”

I end with this. An odd thing, in my observation, is that deep down the elite themselves also think the game is rigged. They don’t disagree, and they don’t like what they see—corruption, shallowness and selfishness in the systems all around them. Their odd anguish is that they have no faith the American people can—or will—do anything to turn it around. They see the American voter as distracted, poorly educated, subject to emotional and personality-driven political adventures. They sometimes refer to “Jaywalking,” the old Jay Leno “Tonight Show” staple in which he walked outside the studio and asked the man on the street about history. What caused the American Civil War? Um, Hitler? When did it take place, roughly? Uh, 1958?

Both sides, the elites and the non-elites, sense that things are stuck.

The people hate the elites, which is not new, and very American. The elites have no faith in the people, which, actually, is new. Everything is stasis. Then Donald Trump comes, like a rock thrown through a showroom window, and the molecules start to move.

Donald Trump, Traitor to His Class. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, August 29, 2015.

The Donald and the Demagogues. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2015.

Bret Stephens and Trump. By Mark Bauerlein. First Things, September 2, 2015.

The Trump Movement Isn’t About Conservatism – It’s About Americanism. By Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh.com, September 2, 2015.

Limbaugh: Trump Movement Exposes Low Regard Conservative Intellectuals Have for Ordinary Americans. By Jeff Poor. Breitbart, Sept 2, 2015.

Is Trumpism supplanting Reaganism? By David Freddoso. Conservative Intel, September 7, 2015.

Obama and the Downsizing of the American Dream. By Joel Kotkin.

Obama, the Left downsizing the American Dream. By Joel Kotkin. Orange County Register, August 16, 2015.

Kotkin:

Barack Obama has always wanted to be a transformational president, and in this, at least, he has been true to his word. The question is what kind of America is being created, and what future does it offer the next generation.

President Obama’s great accomplishment, arguably, has been to spur the evolution of a society that formerly rested on individual and familial aspiration, and turn it into a more regulated and centralized regime focused on broader social and environmental concerns. This tendency has been made much stronger as the number of Americans, according to Gallup, who feel there is “plenty of opportunity ahead” has dropped precipitously – from 80 percent in 1997 to barely 52 percent today.

The shift away from the entrepreneurial model can also be seen in the constriction of loans to the small-business sector. Rates of business start-ups have fallen well below historical levels, and, for young people in particular, have hit the lowest levels in a quarter century. At the same time, the welfare state has expanded dramatically, to the point that nearly half of all Americans now get payments from the federal government.

In sharp contrast to the Bill Clinton White House, which accepted limits on government largesse, the newly emboldened progressives, citing inequality, are calling for more wealth transfers to the poorer parts of society, often eschewing the notion that the recipients work to actually improve their lives. The ever-expanding regulatory state has powerful backing in the media, on campuses and among some corporations. There is even a role model: to become like Europe. As the New York Times’ Roger Cohen suggests, we reject our traditional individualist “excess” and embrace, instead, Continental levels of material modesty, social control and, of course, ever-higher taxes.

Progressive Advances

Three ideas prevail in shaping today’s new politics: sexual liberation, racial redress and environmental determinism. The first notion has made rapid progress, in that gay marriage now is, rightfully, legal, and women are making steady gains across the employment spectrum. No matter how much Republicans fulminate in debates or on the campaign trail, this aspect of the basic progressive agenda has been largely accomplished, and is particularly accepted among the young.

The second major thrust of the reconstituted American Dream is the imposition of a regime of permanent racial redress. In contrast to assuring equal rights, the new drive is to guarantee similar results. In every aspect of life, from immigration and housing to school and work, “people of color,” which increasingly excludes Asians, will be categorized by race. This includes the call for “reparations” for African Americans and essentially open borders for undocumented immigrants.

This logic carried to extremes can be seen in the “disparate impact” rules promulgated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and now blessed by the Supreme Court. Under this concept, any town can have its zoning and planning upended if the bureaucracy, or some plaintiffs, decide the town is too white, too Asian or too affluent to meet the standards of “social justice.” This could be extended down the line to every institution, from the workplace to the university. The new approach could be accurately characterized as affirmative action on steroids.

The Green Dilemma

When the United States took big steps in the 1960s to open its society, the economy was basically very strong, with lots of jobs, making initial accommodations to new entrants, minorities or women, much easier. But economic growth in the current “recovery” has been somewhat meager and wage gains all but nonexistent. Any attempt to extend the new version of “civil rights” protections – essentially taking opportunity away from the majority – would be far riskier at a time of economic torpor.

Worse still, the third major lodestone of current reigning ideology – environmentalism – increasingly tends to tilt against broad-based economic growth. Environmentalism, defined as a movement of conserving resources, extending parks and improving environmental quality could co-exist with an expanding economy, generating the funds to finance such improvements.

But today’s climate-change-focused environmentalism increasingly opposes economic growth per se, seeing in it a threat to the planet. For some people, the solution for the planet lies in depressing living standards by such steps as ratcheting up the cost of basic necessities, from energy to housing. Environmental advocates often work in concert with those who benefit from subsidies for everything from solar energy to transit lines, but the goal remains to constrain consumption and raise prices for such basics as housing and energy.

Yet these negative impacts don’t mean much to many green activists who, notes the Guardian’s George Monbiot, see the climate struggle as a way to “redefine humanity.” The target here is the economy itself, which remains driven largely by the desire for material wealth, upward mobility and support of families. Monbiot envisions a war against what he calls the “expanders” by the rational legions of green “restrainers” who will seek to curb their foes’ economic activities.

The celebration of economic stagnation is accepted openly among European greens who support an agenda of “degrowth.” It is also reflected in American calls for “de-development,” a phrase employed by President Obama’s Science Adviser John Holdren. The agenda, particularly in high-income countries, seeks to limit fossil fuels, raise energy prices, stem suburban development and replace the competive capitalism system with a highly regulated economy that favors designated “green’ energy industries over others.

What of future generations?

Constantly expanding pressures to accommodate both the environmentalist credo and the demands of protected identity groups may continue to shift older Americans to the political right. Forced to pick up the bills while enduring insults about their unconscionable “privilege,” it’s hard to see how they, for the most part, can become anything but more alienated by the progressive credo.

One worry for the older generation is their kids and, particularly, their grandchildren. Parents today generally see things getting worse for their offspring and grandchildren, with only 21 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, expecting things to get better for the new generation, compared with 49 percent in 2001. These sentiments may make older folks more solicitous about helping their own, but one doubts how much they desire to pour out their retirement savings to save someone else’s kids.

The biggest impact of the new politics, however, will be felt by the new generation. Some of their attitudes are certainly congenial to the progressive positions in such areas as interracial and gay marriage, and a certain commitment to greater social justice. Yet they might find they, too, need a little “justice” themselves, since their incomes, adjusted for inflation, are actually lower than those of their counterparts in 2000, or even 1980. They may be better educated than their predecessors, but it’s not quite paying off.

Take, for example, that more millennials are living with their parents than in predecessor generations. Many also are burdened with enormous student debt, which makes moving forward, for example, by starting a business or buying a house, more difficult. Most disturbingly, pessimism about the future is greatest among the youngest millennials, those still in high school.

This decline in prospects – as evidenced by consistently weak income and growth numbers – could, ultimately, reshape politics. Millennials may have different social attitudes than their parents, but that doesn’t mean they reject their parents’ aspirational dream, most notably to buy a house, preferably with some decent space. Although they have been far less able to achieve homeownership, surveys consistently show that most millennials want to own a house, get more space and seem increasingly willing to move to the suburbs, even the exurbs, to get it.

This will no doubt prove a disappointment for the highly influential cadre of generally wealthier, environmentally focused baby boomers, who celebrate millennials being satisfied as apartment renters – for life. Perhaps this is one reason that, in recent surveys, young people have been less likely to identify as “environmentalist” than previous generations.

Similarly, millennials may be very tolerant and welcoming of diversity, but one has to wonder how many – particularly those outside the protected classes – are likely to chafe at a regime that disfavors their own prospects. The fact that white millennials have been trending Republican should be seen by Democrats as something of a warning sign.

Ultimately, the future of American politics will not be determined by those mostly graying legions rallying to Donald Trump. It will be largely forged by young people seeking some way to transcend a weak, and largely unpromising, economy. They will be the ones to decide whether the aspirational model still fits America, or how far they want to embrace a new, more Europeanized version imposed from above.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Is Dead and Both Sides Killed It. By Carlo Strenger.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Is Dead and Both Sides Killed It. By Carlo Strenger. The Huffington Post, August 14, 2015. Also at Haaretz.

In Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a two-state solution is dead. By Padraig O’Malley. Boston Globe, August 11, 2015.

With His Head In the Sand. By Matti Friedman. Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2015.

The Left’s Cognitive Dissonance on the Palestinian Authority. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, August 14, 2015.

Review of  Padraig O’Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine. By Peter Beinart. New York Times, August 18, 2015.

Peace Between Israel And Palestine: Is It a Delusion? Padraig O’Malley Explores. By Annie Shreffler. WGBH News, August 18, 2015.

Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine. By Padraig O’Malley. Video. WGBH Forum Network, August 5, 2015. YouTube.

The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives (w/ Padraig O’Malley). Interview by Michael Brooks. Video. Majority Report. Sam Seder, August 25, 2015. YouTube.

Strenger:

Irish conflict researcher Padraig O’Malley says that neither side has the will to reach the two-state solution, and he is probably right.

The world has grown tired of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Twenty-two years after the historic signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, the very term “peace” is fraught with despair, ridicule and anger both among Israelis and Palestinians, and with tiredness of those who have spent much time and energy to reach this elusive goal.

Many accounts have been written about the failure of the peace process, often by those who have played a role in it like Shlomo Ben-Ami, the foreign minister under Ehud Barak, Dennis Ross, who was senior negotiator for the United States, as was David Aaron Miller. These books appeared between 2006 and 2008, and none of them exuded optimism.

As time went by, the accounts and analyses became more bitter and desperate. Benny Morris, the left-wing doyen of the so-called New Historians, who unearthed Israel’s role in the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, has made a radical right-turn and no longer believes that Palestinians want peace. And Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University and long-time peace activist wrote his depressing What Is a Palestinian State Worth? in which he calls on fellow Palestinians to cease fighting for two states: Israeli Jews, he believes, are too traumatized to give up control over the West Bank, and Palestinians should just insist on civil rights and a life with dignity.

Both Morris and Nusseibeh buried the two-state solution, each thinking the other side was responsible for its demise.

It is therefore of great interest, even though depressing, to read an account written by someone who is not part of the conflict, and who comes to the same conclusion – but without blaming either side exclusively. Padraig O’Malley’s life has been about peace. Born in Dublin, educated there, then at Tufts, Yale and Harvard, he has spent decades involved in the Northern Irish peace process that ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement. In parallel he spent thousands of hours documenting South Africa’s transition to democracy, and serves as Professor of International Peace and Reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

He has been an observer of and involved in intractable conflicts for more than 40 years, and has been trying to bring his vast experience to the Middle East as well; first to Iraq, and from 2010 to 2014 he travelled Israel, the West Bank and Gaza to get an in-depth understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict, interviewing more than 100 people on both sides.

The result is his book The Two-State Delusion, a detailed analysis of the conflict, and particularly of the demise of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The book is extensively documented, including a huge bibliography and the detailed and very impressive list of Israeli and Palestinian interviewees on both sides; he has spoken to many of the central players in the various stages of peace negotiations, but also to many of the peace process’s implacable enemies, like the leadership of Hamas.

O'Malley’s conclusion is obvious from the book’s title: He thinks that neither side has the will to reach the two-state solution, and that the Israel-Palestine conflict is there to stay indefinitely. Toward the end of the book he relates that friends who had read the manuscript told him that he couldn’t simply publish the book without any indication of hope and advice. In response he writes:

“But why should I be so presumptuous as to dare to provide a vision for people who refuse to provide one for themselves, not just in the here and now, but in the future, too? For people who have no faith in the possible? Who themselves believe the conflict will take generations to resolve? Who are content to live their hatreds? Who are so resolutely opposed to the slightest gesture of accommodation? Who revel in their mutual pettiness? Why delude you into thinking that there is a magical bullet?”

Of course, such a conclusion will lead readers from both sides to seek bias, but they are bound to come up empty-handed: O’Malley is remarkably balanced in his analysis of the reasons that make him so pessimistic, and his diagnosis is as interesting as it is depressing. He believes that both Israelis and Palestinians are so addicted to their respective narratives that they are both incapable and unwilling to do what it would take to reach the two-state solution.

The Jewish-Israeli narrative is dominated by the fear of annihilation. Israeli Jews’ collective memory is shaped by the history of persecution and suffering culminating in the genocide that largely destroyed European Jewry in the Holocaust; the memory of three wars from 1948 to 1973 in which Israel’s existence was indeed at stake; the memory of terror attacks from the early Fedayeen to the second intifada; and most lately the various wars with Hamas in Gaza. Israelis, O’Malley concludes, are deeply convinced that the Palestinians’ ultimate goal is to erase the State of Israel.

The Palestinian narrative is one of humiliation and dispossession, and O’Malley’s Palestinian interviewees return to the same refrain of “humiliation, indignity, dispossession and disrespect, leaving little room for other issues to become part of the dialogue. So while the Palestinian national narrative is invariably cast in terms of the Nakba and the occupation, a subnarrative is daily life in occupied territory.” O’Malley comes to the conclusion that Palestinians cannot really accept Israel’s existence, because the Nakba and the question of refugees is central to their narrative and their identity.

O’Malley’s book is a refreshing departure from the blame game in which Israelis and Palestinians and their respective international champions try to make the other side responsible for the peace process’s failure. And it diverges from the tendency to find the trick that will do the job, and comes to a conclusion as intellectually compelling as it is dismaying: “. . .on a deeper level it seems that the impasse relates to human nature and the nature of social structures that have been the source of the two people’s habits/addictions, not the least of which is an impenetrable adherence to national narrative.”

Reading O’Malley, I am divided between two of my identities and roles. As an Israeli who believes that anything but the two-state solution is bound to have a catastrophic outcome for Israel, and who has written this endlessly and ad nauseam, I cannot but recoil from his conclusion.

When I try to take analytical distance and look at the facts and at O’Malley’s arguments from an academic point of view, I am afraid that he is right. In the past I have argued that the human need for meaning can be so strong, that it often overrides reason and pragmatism, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

The idea of the two-state solution is based on the model of sovereign nation-states and based on the value of self-determination of national groups. It is not a religion, but the only pragmatically workable model that has so far been offered – and it has the advantage that the 1967 borders are recognized by international law, which means that they can serve as a reasonable basis for a final-status agreement.

But the Middle East is not governed by the logic of modern international law, nor by political pragmatism, but is disintegrating into a war of cultures, religions and meaning-systems rather than moving toward pragmatism. One state after another disintegrates into warfare between religious and ethnic groups. Organizations like Al-Qaida and Islamic State dream of the reestablishment of the caliphate, Saudi Arabia and Iran are theocracies, and most other Middle Eastern states that have not disintegrated are autocracies of some form – and the Israel-Palestine conflict reflects this wider reality.

Palestinians are deeply divided: While Fatah seems to aim for a liberal democracy, Hamas is committed to Sharia as the law of the future Palestine (which for them includes Israel, whose legitimacy they deny). Israel is, despite all criticisms, a functioning liberal democracy within the 1967 borders – but we must not forget that even here there are substantial groups seriously calling for Israel to become a Jewish theocracy.

O’Malley’s The Two-State Delusion provides an impartial, empathic but relentlessly objective look at our reality. His idea that both Israelis and Palestinians are so addicted to their meaning-systems (“narratives”) that they are willing to slide into a chaotic abyss is chilling, but seems strongly supported by recent history and current facts.

Like O’Malley, I wonder whether I should not end on a rousing battle cry for political will, prudence and the need for a vision for the future. But then again, such calls are coming to sound more and more hollow. There may be moments where only chilling clarity can liberate us from the cacophony of political rhetoric and allow us to fully face our situation.

O’Malley:

One year has passed since the Gaza war between Hamas and Israel came to an end. An uneasy peace prevails. The 2014 war, however, changed the calculus of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In retrospect, it was the final nail in the coffin of a two-state solution.

During the war, the Israeli public called for the demilitarization of Hamas — for the IDF to destroy Hamas’s military brigades and force it to decommission its arms. That didn’t happen. If the IDF had tried, it would have been met with pitiless person-to-person combat and house-to-house searches, making the actual 2014 conflict look like children playing a toy war.

But even if the IDF had, as a result of some remarkable phenomenon, demilitarized Hamas, at best Israel would have bought itself a respite before it would face a rearmed Hamas, which has undergone a rapprochement with Iran in the face of the threat ISIS presents to both.

Given the unfathomable levels of distrust that exist on both sides, Israel will never sign off on a two-state solution, because in a Palestinian state there would be free movement between Gaza and the West Bank, giving Hamas unrestricted access to the latter.

Retired General Michael Herzog, a veteran Israeli negotiator, told me that “no government would ever contemplate leaving the West Bank until that threat of Hamas or any other militant group to launch rocket attacks was removed.” Otherwise, all of Israel would be exposed to attack.

Confinement to Gaza limits Hamas’s offensive capacity to wage war; the strategic question it faces is how to “break out” of Gaza. The only obvious way is to acquiesce to a two-state solution that would give it freedom to move between a united Gaza and West Bank. The contiguity of such a Palestinian state would require a corridor, under Palestinian sovereignty, connecting the two parts of its sovereign territory.

Hamas would then be free to solidify its presence in the West Bank and find routes for smuggling sophisticated mobile missiles, fitted with launchers and timers, into the territory. Given the West Bank’s topography, such missiles could be fired from numerous sites toward Israel’s population centers and infrastructure, including Ben Gurion Airport. This would leave Israel vulnerable to missile attacks from any number of places. Thus Hamas running loose in the West Bank would be a much more elusive and lethal enemy for Israel.

A crushing response against rocket attacks from tiny Gaza is not all that difficult, but a crushing response against both Gaza and the much larger West Bank would be another challenge entirely. Israel would face a highly mobile Hamas, more difficult to pin down and more adept at asymmetric warfare.

Further, a “demilitarized” Palestinian state — i.e., a state without a standing army — could not guarantee that Hamas would not remilitarize. Given the prospect of Hamas rearming, a two-state solution acceptable to Hamas would never assuage Israel’s fears. Israel is more comfortable with the status quo: recurring bouts of violence between itself and Hamas.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say Hamas and other militant groups pledge to demilitarize. Who would believe them? How would Hamas get unanimity among its own factions, let alone bring other militant groups on board? Surely Israel would insist on having an international body monitor the process. Would Hamas agree to that? Would Islamic Jihad, or the ISIS-affiliated Salafi groups that are an increasing presence in Gaza?

And since nobody beyond Hamas has an exact account of its arms inventory, how would the monitoring body know whether it was being given accurate numbers? How would it actually verify demilitarization? Or preclude Hamas from rearming in due time?

Those realities frame Israel’s choice. One option is a militarized Hamas confined to Gaza, a threat Israel can deal with. The other is a two-state solution with no ironclad guarantee of a demilitarized Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or other jihadist groups — and with those groups having access to the West Bank. The former is unsustainable in the long run, but the latter is out of the question.

Given these realities, what’s next? Last week, in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s most influential newspaper, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin proposed a “borderless” Palestinian-Israeli “confederation” as a solution. The fact that any president of Israel, particularly one who is a former member of Likud, would make such a breathtaking statement is an indication that fresh thinking is catching wind. Unfortunately, however, even a confederation would not negate the concerns I have outlined. Perhaps nothing short of a catastrophic war will be necessary to bring about the attitudinal changes a confederation would require.

Another sad, but unforgiving reality.

Camille Paglia: The Salon Interview with David Daley.

Camille Paglia: How Bill Clinton is like Bill Cosby. Interview with David Daley. Part 1. Salon, July 28, 2015.

Camille Paglia takes on Jon Stewart, Trump, Sanders: “Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true!” Interview with David Daley. Part 2. Salon, July 29, 2015.

“Ted Cruz gives me the willies”: Camille Paglia analyzes the GOP field — and takes on Hillary Clinton. Interview with David Daley. Part 3. Salon, July 30, 2015.

Camille Paglia Nails It on Clinton and Cosby. By Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh.com, July 28, 2015.

Paglia, Part 3:

I think that liberals are dangerously complacent about Scott Walker. They’ve tried to portray him as a madman, an uneducated rube, a tool of the Koch brothers. Right now, Walker seems to be the true GOP frontrunner, but I also feel he lacks gravitas.  He’s not ready for his close-up. What is this oddity about so many of the GOP candidates–their excessive boyishness, as if their maturation stalled? But Walker is a very talented and combative politician, with far more substance than liberals are allowing for.

The union issue is huge–because as governor of Wisconsin, Walker went to war with unions and won. Liberals are caught in the past right now in their rosy view of unions, which were heroically established during the progressive era that reformed the abuses of the industrial revolution. But the union battle in Wisconsin had nothing to do with exploited working-class miners or factory workers. In his push to balance the state budget, Walker took action against the middle-class public sector unions, whose negotiations with municipal and state governments outside the arena of private competition have become an enormous drain on local budgets as the economy has worsened. There has been a history of rampant corruption in the public sector unions, coming from their cozy quid pro quo relationships with politicians. Liberals need to wake up about this! All they have to do is read the obituaries of the smaller newspapers in metropolitan New York to see how the early retirement and lavish pensions of the public sector unions have grotesquely drained taxpayer dollars. Obituary after obituary–so-and-so, aged 75, worked for fifteen or twenty years as a policeman or city sanitation worker, retired in his late 40s, and spent the rest of his life on the taxpayer’s dime, pursuing his hobbies of fishing, boating, and golfing. Great work if you can get it!

And then the teachers’ unions! What a colossal tactical error American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten (a longtime Clinton friend and donor) made several weeks ago in unilaterally declaring her union’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton right in the middle of the Bernie Sanders surge. Probably for the first time ever, American liberals woke up to the corrupt practices that have become way too common in the political maneuverings of the big unions. The point here is that Scott Walker, in his defeat of the public sector unions, drew the roadmap for struggling municipal and state governments everywhere to balance their budgets, as he did in Wisconsin. Because who ends up suffering the most? It’s the kids. All that money outrageously pouring into inflated pension plans has been gutting public education and community arts programs.

Exactly how have the teachers unions improved the quality of education in our big cities? Look at the dilapidated public schools in Philadelphia or in many other cities run by Democrats. The rigid and antiquated seniority system imposed by the teachers unions has been a disaster–“last hired, first fired.” So many young and vital teachers have been terminated during budget cuts–the entire future of the profession. The unions value seniority over quality, and it’s inner-city children who have paid the price.

In my opinion, Scott Walker still lacks seasoning, presidential temper, and a working knowledge of international affairs. But if Democrats try to use the union issue to take him down, they’re simply empowering him–and we’re going to end up with President Walker.

Would Economic Populism Turn the White Working Class Democratic? By Jason Willick.

Would Economic Populism Turn the White Working Class Democratic? By Jason Willick. The American Interest, July 29, 2015.

What is the matter with America? By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya News, July 26, 2015.

Revenge of the Radical Middle. By Matthew Continetti. Washington Free Beacon, July 24, 2015. Also at National Review.

Yes I said it: Donald Trump supporters are living a childlike fantasy land. By Joan Walsh. Salon, July 31, 2015.

This is how the clowns took over: The sad history of the spectacle of a Fox News debate starring front-runner Donald Trump. By Heather Cox Richardson. Salon, August 2, 2015.


Willick:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered a sharp critique of the state of the Democratic Party in an extensive interview, released yesterday, with Vox’s Ezra Klein:

I think it would be hard to imagine if you walked out of here or walked down the street or went a few miles away from here and you stopped somebody on the street and you said, “Do you think that the Democratic Party is the party of the American working class?” People would look at you and say, “What are you talking about?”

There was a time — I think under Roosevelt, maybe even under Truman — where it was perceived that working people were part of the Democratic Party. I think for a variety of reasons, a lot having to do with money and politics, that is no longer the case. In my view that is exactly what shouldn’t be happening. Instead of spending all of our time raising money, I think we should go out organizing people and getting them to unite around a progressive agenda which expands the middle class which tells the billionaire class that they cannot have it all, which says to corporate America, “You’re going to have to start paying your fair share of taxes,” which says we’re going to raise the minimum wage, we’re going to make college available to all regardless of their income, that we are going to have pay equity for women workers, that we are going to create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. You need a progressive agenda, then you need the ability to go out and organize people.

Sanders’ central insight—that the New Deal Democrats were a working class party, but the modern Democrats are not—is clearly correct, even if the party doesn’t like to acknowledge it. Blue collar workers were at the center of the New Deal coalition, while today’s white working class voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for the GOP.

Why the shift? Sanders suggests that it has to do with “money and politics.” He doesn’t spell out what that means, exactly, but it seems to points to his belief that the Democrats have abandoned robust social welfare programs in favor of a more centrist, pro-corporate economic program. This contrasts with the rather more self-satisfied explanation that some on the elite left have offered—namely, that whites without a college education are a lost cause because conservatives trick them into voting Republican by exploiting their latent prejudices and resentments.

Sanders’ proposed solution to the Democrats’ poor showing among the white working class is well known: a hard-left economic populist agenda, complete with dramatic minimum wage increases, high-end tax hikes, massive government spending on and infrastructure and education, and invective against the superrich—in other words, a restoration of the blue model and then some. He’s not alone; the rest of the party is signing on to some of these economic proposals as well.

But would an economic populist program actually wrest the white working class from the GOP? Perhaps it will move the needle temporarily, but the genuinely working class party of Truman and Roosevelt simply cannot be resurrected in the foreseeable future. The economic model that existed in the New Deal era, and that the New Deal political coalition relied upon, is deteriorating—not only because of policy choices, as Sanders suggests, but also because of irreversible trends in technology, globalization, and demography. Private sector unions will never reattain the level economic and political might they wielded in the 1950s no matter how the Supreme Court rules on right-to-work statutes. And shoring up the public benefits system devised in the New Deal would require large tax increases—not only upper-end tax hikes, but middle-class tax hikes as well—that would risk splintering the Democratic coalition.

Then, of course, there is culture. As the white working class began to slip away from the Democrats in the 1960s, the party drifted leftward culturally—a process that is once again picking up steam today. In important (though qualified) ways, upper class liberals are further to the left culturally than working class voters. So in addition to economic populism, winning back blue collar whites would probably require adopting a softer tone on cultural questions—something that would not please culturally liberal constituencies (like Silicon Valley tycoons) that provide the Democratic party with critical support.

Matthew Continetti has perceptively written that “there are two Republican parties, an elite party of the corporate upper crust and meritocratic winners that sits atop a mass party of whites without college degrees whose worldviews and experiences and ambitions could not be more different from their social and economic betters.” In the same way, there are two Democratic parties; an elite party of affluent white urban cultural liberals that sits atop a coalition of identity groups—blacks, hispanics, LGBT people, single women, and young people. Bernie Sanders wants to win back some of the disaffected whites who currently find themselves in the Republican camp, and re-constitute the singular New Deal Democratic Party of yore. But given existing economic and social trends, we may be stuck with two Democratic parties—and two Republican parties—for the foreseeable future.

Mayor “Know-It-All” Could Use a Lesson in Humility. By Michael Goodwin.

Mayor “know-it-all” could use a lesson in humility. By Michael Goodwin. New York Post, July 22, 2015.

Goodwin:

The lefty mayor traveled to the Vatican to meet the lefty pope yesterday, but failed to learn anything new. Count that as another missed opportunity to be a better mayor.

Had Bill de Blasio done his homework, he would have copied Pope Francis’ recent confession that he, the pontiff, was wrong to ignore the middle class.

Asked during his down-with-capitalism trip to Latin America why he rarely speaks about the “working, tax-paying” middle class, the pope reflected a humility that would be shocking if it came from Mayor Know-It-All.

“You’re right,” Francis admitted. “It’s an error of mine not to think about this.”

Bill de Blasio, pay attention!

Instead, the mayor is so hellbent on beating to death the income-inequality, climate-change spiel that he forgets the middle class is in the middle for a reason — it’s the largest segment of the population. The pope noticed the middle is shrinking, and perhaps one day, he’ll also come to realize that the progressive policies he and de Blasio push are a big reason why.

Soak-the-rich nostrums, coupled with invitations for the poor to sign up for permanent government dependency, hurt everyone except the ruling class. As Willie Sutton might have said, the middle class is where the money is, so it always gets stuck with the bill.

Now, the middle class is as much a state of mind as it is an income group. The term defines the broad mass of people who live an ordered, responsible life in the expectation they are creating a better future by sacrificing now.

They are aspirational investors who believe life’s compounded benefits are produced by hard work and delayed gratification. Whatever their race or ethnicity, they practice the Protestant work ethic, which formed the backbone of American capitalism.

The middle class works for a living, pays its own way and raises children to be good students and law-abiding citizens. They make good neighbors and stable communities, and struggle up life’s hills without undue complaints or demands for the fruit of others’ labor.

Naturally, de Blasio ignores them when he isn’t undermining them. They are irrelevant to his vision of New York, where government commands the heights and presides over redistribution schemes that, despite good intentions, never lift the poor.

As historian Fred Siegel says, liberals want to deregulate morals and regulate everything else. True to form, de Blasio demonizes cops and orders them to cut down on aggressive policing and forces schools to stop suspending disruptive students.

In both instances, bad behavior is endorsed as normal, while those who behave properly wonder why they bother playing by the rules. The lack of clear incentives and disincentives corrodes the quality of life for everyone.

The de Blasio ilk also undermine social norms by accusing the nation of being unfair, unjust and in need of sweeping change. They treat as shnooks those who believe America is still the land of opportunity, while rewarding those who burn, riot and loot. Illegal immigrants are welcomed with open arms and handouts, while taxpayers struggling to make ends meet are deemed bigots if they object.

Their policies help create the problems progressives rail against. By grabbing ever more power, socialist-style planners sap private initiative and curb the liberty necessary for the pursuit of individual happiness. Government then promises to solve resulting unhappiness with even more government.

Their failure is proven repeatedly throughout history, but arrogant progressives can’t resist the temptation to spend other people’s money, so history repeats itself.

Any excuse for more power will do, though few are as flimsy as the Vatican meeting on “Modern Slavery and Climate Change.”

It sounds like an old Flip Wilson joke — “the devil made me do it.” Yet there they were, the pope and about 60 mayors, promising to shackle entrepreneurs and save the middle class from freedom.

“Is it not the definition of insanity to propagate corporate policies and consumer habits that hasten the destruction of the Earth?” Rev. de Blasio asked.

There’s no chance our moralizing mayor will lead by example, so walking to work and giving up air conditioning are out. The most we can hope for is that, upon his return, his day job leaves him no time for preaching about the evils of progress.