Cutting Through: November 3, 2020,
Election Day Edition
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest edition of the Cutting Through Newsletter. First let me apologize for the delay in getting this edition out. It was just one of those things where there was always one more thing I wanted to make sure to include in my next newsletter, coupled with the election getting closer. The newsletter will now resume its more or less weekly distribution. Thanks for hanging in with me.
I’d like to take a minute to let you know that my friend and colleague, Peter Beinart, whom I’m sure most of you are very familiar with, has also decided to create a newsletter here on Substack. It’s called the Beinart Notebook and you can subscribe to it at https://peterbeinart.substack.com/ Peter’s insight and analysis is always valuable, and I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter!
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And as always, for my latest hot takes, including some I occasionally need to walk back, you can follow me on Twitter, @MJPlitnick.
PS, don’t forget to pre-order Except for Palestine, my first book, co-authored with Prof. Marc Lamont Hill.
THE LATEST FROM MITCHELL
I’ve tried to stay busy since the last newsletter. In my latest piece for Responsible Statecraft, I examined the decision by the U.S. to revise agreements with Israel that governed three research foundations that the two countries jointly run. It seems like a small, bureaucratic move, but in fact it is a major step toward U.S. recognition of the West Bank as part of Israel, erasing the “Green Line.” It’s understandable that little attention was paid to this right now, but it’s really important, so check out my piece, “The US quietly makes major shift on Israel-Palestine policy” at Responsible Statecraft.
In a piece I did for +972 Magazine, I looked at voter suppression strategies employed by right wing forces in both Israel and the United States. Many of the tactics are similar, and that seems unsurprising given the relationships some key players in developing voter suppression techniques have with both the Trump and Netanyahu campaigns. Indeed, as I point out in my piece, “In the US and Israel, voter suppression is the ruling parties’ game plan,” there’s a good deal of overlap not only in the thinking of those two campaigns, but among other right wing leaders as well.
Over at The New Arab, I look into the recent story, which also understandably went under the radar, about the State Department considering labeling numerous human rights groups—including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, and others—as antisemitic. It’s unclear what the implications of that might be, but that is a very heavily loaded term, so they should not be underestimated. I explore the increasing weaponization of the charge of antisemitism in a piece entitled “Trump takes leaf out of Netanyahu's book to label rights groups 'anti-Semitic.'”
Finally, also at Responsible Statecraft, I examined the effects of the agreement the Trump administration pushed onto Sudan, one which could very well jeopardize the African nation’s struggling move toward democracy. Not only did the Trump administration use the State Department’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism List” as a political tool and extort hundreds of millions of dollars from a collapsed economy, but the pressure to normalize relations with Israel quickly so Trump could get a pre-election win was one of the most destructive, self-interested moves of even Trump’s career, and that is saying something. I elaborate in a piece called “Why Trump’s recent move on Sudan could backfire.”
Podcasts
There have been two podcasts released since the last newsletter. In the most recent one, I decided to turn away from discussion of the election, but dive in to two issues I think are tremendously important, no matter how things come out this week (or however long it takes).
In the most recent podcast, I talked first about the Director of National Intelligence accusing Iran of interference in the election. He offered no evidence of any significant interference, and it seems that what Iran did was gather publicly available information. He accused them of spoofing the Proud Boys and sending emails in their name, but offered no evidence that Iran was behind that scam. The implications of this act by the DNI are extremely troubling, and his use of the FBI to lend credibility to his case served as a reminder of why we need to avoid looking to the FBI for reliable information.
In the second part of the podcast, I dive into the antisemitism scandal in the United Kingdom, which hit a new low last week with the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party. While I find fault with much in Corbyn’s leadership of Labour and his handling of the antisemitism issue in particular, this case is the most troubling example of the weaponization of antisemitism and its use as a political tool to stifle progressive politics. Sadly, it’s a trick many progressives have been falling for, and it’s therefore well on its way to being replicated here in the United States.
In my prior podcast from October 21, I discuss Trump’s indifference to the damage his pre-election maneuvers are causing, focusing primarily on Sudan. You can also hear my hot take on the DNI accusation against Iran, which came out just as I was recording this pod. I next discussed Joe Biden’s courting of Republicans and the dangers of replicating all the same mistakes that brought us Trump in the first place.
You can listen to all my podcasts on your platform of choice by searching for ReThinking Foreign Policy.
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Thoughts on some current events
As I write these words, it is late morning on Election Day, November 3. Like many of you, I’m incredibly nervous about this election, on numerous levels. By the time you read this, the picture will probably be a little clearer than it is to me right now, but the ultimate outcome may still be in doubt, whether that is the outcome of the vote or the response from Trump and his followers.
So let me talk a bit about the “Day After,” whenever that turns out to be. I usually try to do at least two issues in this section, but given the gravity of this election, I’ll just discuss this.
There are many possible outcomes of this election. Donald Trump could win, but Democrats could take the Senate. Or Trump could lose, and Congress could remain divided. But whatever the outcome is, one thing is certain: progressives have a LOT of work to do.
If Trump is still president when the smoke clears, it will be a tall task to fight off exhaustion and despair. We’ve already seen that Democratic centrist leadership is not up to the task of opposing him. That has been clear since the Democrats took back the House. Even if they do win the Senate, if Trump remains in power Democrats will only take a strong stand against Trump if we push them hard to do so.
In that circumstance, it’s going to be absolutely essential that centrist Democrats and faux-liberals like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries, or dedicated and unabashed conservative Democrats like Steny Hoyer, Richard Neal, Amy Klobuchar or Jim Clyburn know they will be challenged by progressives if they don’t act to forcefully and effectively oppose and obstruct the Republican agenda. We can’t tolerate performances like that of Dianne Feinstein after the hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, where she congratulated Lindsey Graham for the scam he perpetrated on Americans and even hugged him.
If Joe Biden wins, and especially if the Democrats take the Senate, we will have even more work to do. As warm as people’s feelings are for Barack Obama—especially his dignity and steady hand, given what we have all been through the past four years—we cannot forget that, in many ways, it was his administration that was the culmination of decades of Democratic resistance to change that brought Donald Trump to the White House.
Far from bringing the “change you can believe in” that Obama promised, he started his time in office by refusing to hold to account those who, in the previous administration, had perpetrated a deception on the American people and brought us into a disastrous war that threw the Middle East into chaos, devastating Iraq, sparking a conflict that spread to neighboring Syria, birthed ISIS, and shattered the policy of dual containment, which led Iran to work to increase its own reach in the region, a development we then blamed them for when we caused it.
Obama brought a very modest, but still very important, reform to healthcare, but even he considered it only a first step, one that needed a lot more built upon it than the meager improvements Biden is suggesting.
Obama crucially presided over an incredibly weak recovery from a devastating economic catastrophe. He spent enormous resources bailing out big corporations and financial centers while largely leaving people to fend for themselves. The result was a massive increase in the already tremendously skewed disparity of wealth in the U.S. and the continued, marked decline for American workers and middle class professionals, while billionaires hoarded significantly more wealth than they ever had before.
Why did Obama do that? There are many explanations, from his essentially centrist, neoliberal orientation, to the advice of people who had his ear like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, to the corporate leadership in Congress of Democrats like Barney Frank.
But he couldn’t have done it at all if progressives were pushing him. Instead, too many of us were willing to “find common ground” with conservative Democrats or even Republicans, or, worse, to simply go home as if winning the election and ending eight years of a Republican administration that seemed, at the time, unimaginably awful, was all we needed to do.
That’s a mistake we cannot afford to make again, and we need not. We have a far more significant voice in Washington now. Bernie Sanders is a senator that his colleagues feel they must listen to, because they’ve seen, in two consecutive elections, how many voters he can mobilize and the consequences of alienating those voters.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Ro Khanna, and Pramila Jayapal, among others have been joined by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, plus, one hopes, Marie Newman and maybe a few more like Kara Eastman and Georgette Eastman. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is getting stronger, and we must sustain that momentum.
The way to victory is not only in primarying old guard Democrats. Look at someone like Ed Markey, who has moved distinctly leftward in recent years. That’s another way we win. These people know how to read the political trends. But if we back off, they will too, because corporate and conservative forces NEVER take time off.
Either way, we’ve seen a political reinvigoration during the Trump years.
Some radicals have historically espoused the belief that things have to get really bad before change can happen. I disagree with the strategy of trying to make things worse so we can make them better. But we have seen, in the past four years, a sharp degradation in this country of rights, of freedoms, of justice, and of equality. It’s gotten many of us off our asses and into the streets.
We can’t afford to squander that energy now. I know people are exhausted form four years of Trump. But win or lose, he and the cult he spawned are not going away. The Trumpian right has tasted power and they will try to get it back. But many of those people are there because liberals have lied to them, told them they were working for them when they were really working for corporate power.
Senator Joe Biden (D-MBNA) was one of the leading purveyors of that lie. Democrats broadly have become identified with it. It’s time to abandon it and make the Democratic party into a people’s party. It’s not too radical—for every fan of the status quo we lose by doing that, we’ll gain two independents, and we’ll win back those Obama voters who didn’t get the change they wanted and voted for Trump.
But we can only do it if we continue to press our case. Take a few days or weeks if you need them, but we must stay in this fight. Trump will keep doing what he does. So will Mitch McConnell. So will Charles Koch. So will Walmart, Google, Amazon, and everyone who hoards wealth while working people struggle to scrape rent together every month.
No rest for the weary, but if Biden wins, we can say we have something to build on at least.
Recommended Articles
Remembering Reuven Kaminer, the godfather of Israel’s radical left
By Joel Beinin, +972 Magazine, November 2, 2020
Saudi Arabia’s human rights record casts a long shadow on this year’s G20
By Sunjeev Bery, Responsible Statecraft, November 2, 2020
Israel’s Self-centered Trump-worship Warrants an Apology to American Jews
By Chemi Shalev, Haaretz, November 3, 2020
By Peter Beinart, Jewish Currents, October 26, 2020
Trump Is Counting on His White Nationalist Base & Supreme Court to Win Reelection
Interview With Marc Lamont Hill, Democracy Now!, October 28, 2020
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