#eric levitz

“Now, Bolsonaro himself has tested positive for coronavirus. Trump had even closer contact with his Brazillian counterpart than he did with Bolsonaro’s aid.”

The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder Published on Aug 25, 2018

Why Conservatives Can't Ignore Successful European Social Democracies

In sum, an openly anti-democratic political movement has secured control of the judiciary and is using it to abet flagrant violations of constitutional rights. It is simultaneously passing voter-restriction laws, and giving partisan actors greater control over election administration, in states across the country. Its most zealous recruits are joining county Republican parties in key battleground areas as part of a conscious plot to ensure that the 2024 election does not turn out the way the 2020 one did. Anti-democratic biases embedded within existing electoral maps give this movement a massive advantage in federal elections, such that it can rule in defiance of majority will, even if its voting restrictions and administrative chicanery prove impotent. In fact, if one simply projects existing electoral trends forward, one would expect the Democratic Party to lose its trifecta in 2022 and fail to regain one for a decade or more, a scenario that would give the most pro-carbon political party in the developed world veto power over climate legislation until the mid-2030s.

For now, congressional Democrats have the power to arrest the anti-democratic right’s momentum. They can pass voting-rights legislation that makes casting a ballot easier for all Americans, no matter where they live. They can ban partisan gerrymandering in congressional elections and mitigate the Senate’s overrepresentation of white Americans by granting statehood to D.C. and any U.S. territory that wants it. Such measures would not ensure “one-party government” (nor should they). Rather, they would bring the partisan composition of Congress into greater alignment with that of the electorate. As a result, the Republican Party would likely be forced to put greater distance between itself and its most reactionary wing.

Democrats can also pass a law codifying abortion rights. And they can reform the Supreme Court in a manner that would prevent the conservative movement from advancing its anti-majoritarian goals by judicial fiat.

Unlike Texas’s abortion ban, none of these measures would contravene constitutional law. Enacting them would, however, require abolishing the Senate filibuster. And for a critical mass of Senate Democrats, that is simply a bridge too far.

I’ve rehearsed the argument for the filibuster’s abolition many times over the past four years. Suffice to say, the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for the passage of major legislation is not actually a tradition (because it has existed for roughly two decades); it defies the Constitution’s intent (because the Framers considered mandating a supermajority threshold for the passage of bills in the Senate and decided against it); it is inherently conservative (because it biases the legislative process toward the status quo); and it is inherently anti-democratic (because it gives representatives accountable to a tiny fraction of the electorate veto power over all legislation).

The filibuster’s Democratic proponents never acknowledge these realities. Nor do they make any serious attempt to grapple with the nature of their opposition or our political moment. Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema has repeatedly argued that Democrats must not eliminate the legislative filibuster to pass democracy-enhancing reforms because doing so would enable a future Republican government to more easily impose voting restrictions nationwide. Yet we do not need to imagine a hypothetical future in which the GOP runs roughshod over democratic rights. That crisis is already upon us. The conservative movement is wielding power far in excess of its popular support. The second most populous state in the country has already effectively repealed Roe v. Wade. Regardless of what Democrats do today, a future Republican Senate majority could abolish the legislative filibuster any time it wished. Banning partisan gerrymandering and granting D.C. statehood — which is to say making House and Senate representation more equitable — would offer far better protection against the reactionary right than the filibuster ever could.

Joe Manchin, meanwhile, cites the January 6 insurrection as an argument against democracy reform. In the West Virginia senator’s view, the more radical the right becomes, the more acquiescent Democrats must be. In fact, it seems that Manchin may not even be willing to support a budget-reconciliation bill that makes meaningful investments in climate infrastructure.

This asymmetry between each major party’s appetite for hardball is a defining fact of our politics. One party is so committed to its ideological objectives that it is willing to violate the Constitution to achieve them. The other is so ambivalent about its own goals that it fetishizes procedural obstacles to their enactment.

Eric Levitz in an essay about recent events in Afghanistan, at New York Magazine – Intelligencer.

The media has been acting almost like the victory of the Taliban came out of nowhere (it was actually 18 years in the making) and that President Biden has omnipotent powers to do whatever he pleases there (no, he doesn’t).

A lot of the foreign policy and national security “experts” who news organizations have been flocking to over the past few weeks are the same bozos who were cheerleaders for the totally unjustified and disastrous invasion of Iraq which was perpetrated by the George W. Bush administration under false pretenses. Those folks should be shunned rather than embraced.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been going on at least in a nominal way since 1948. But it has notably flared up almost every single year since 1987.

Religious fanatics in Israel have been gradually pushing the country’s politics to the right since the 1970s. That has a ring of familiarity to Americans.

But unlike the United States, Israel has a dysfunctional system of proportional representation in its parliamentary form of government. Any plurality winner in an election who is right or even center-right needs to cater to the religious parties to form a viable governing coalition. And there are also parties which represent Israeli settlers who are seizing Palestinian land on the West Bank. These clout-heavy settlements remain an obstacle in any potential peace deal.

To add to this, Israeli politics has been in a state of gridlock. Since September of 2019 there have been four national elections. And there is an excellent chance of a fifth election in a few months. No party has won more than 36 seats in the 120 member Knesset (parliament) in any of those elections.

Leaders with a tenuous grip on power are not likely to take bold measures to pursue peace. If anything, weak leaders are more likely to play up dangers to the country which allow them to take military action to rally the country around them. That is exactly what happened with George W. Bush’s totally unnecessary Iraq War which was started under false pretenses.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never seriously tried to bridge the divide with the Palestinians. To do so would undermine the reasons he gets support from the settlers and the religious fanatics. For him, the Palestinians are just a prop he can use to keep from losing power.

Netanyahu had been able to play Donald Trump like a fiddle. Trump felt that kissing up to Netanyahu would get him the Jewish vote. So he got his sleazy son-in-law to pursue a series of diplomatic moves that would satisfy Netanyahu and make himself look good. The recent violence shows that it turned out to be yet another Trump failure.

Jared Kushner's Middle East fantasy explodes

Kushner's plan was predicated on a fantasy; that peace would be achieved by negotiating without the Palestinians and instead by creating warmer relations between the Arab states and Israel. In Kushner's analysis, the road to peace in Israel ran not through Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank, but through the United Arab Emirates.

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But the fantasy elements in Kushner's plan were that the Palestinians would essentially forget about their legitimate grievances because of large scale investments that Kushner would help secure for the Gaza and the West Bank, while the Arab states would put pressure on the Palestinians to make a lasting peace with Israel. The Arab nations would then, in turn, have more leverage on Israel to moderate its stance on the Palestinian issue.

But none of this happened.

There won’t be peace in the Middle East without a just deal for the Palestinians which is negotiated directly by the Palestinians. The Palestinians are the aggrieved party. You can’t just lump them in with other Arabs and think that if you establish treaties with distant Morocco and the UAE then everything will be fine in Gaza and the West Bank.

The United States has been on Israel’s side since President Truman recognized the Jewish state in 1948 when the Holocaust and World War II were fresh in everybody’s minds.

The problem is that Israel is no longer the underdog. This reality had not seriously caught up with Washington until the latest Gaza-centered conflict. 

Eric Levitz in the excellent linked article at the top makes reference to his own Jewish heritage and explains why the plight of the Palestinians may have been underplayed in the American consciousness.

[W]hatever U.S. policy’s contemporary relevance to the conflict, American support was integral to Israel’s founding and development. As a nation, we’re pretty darn implicated in what the state has become. So when Israel starts dropping bombs, it makes sense that we talk about it.

All of the polls seem to have Trump leading Biden both nationally and in swing states. How can that be? Does no one remember the debacle of the Trump years? Can their be some systematic error in the polling? Can science explain it? Yes, it can.

SUMMARY: Election 2024 presidential polling has Trump beating Biden nationwide and in swing states. Let’s take a closer look at that polling data and use social trust to decipher some of the more confounding results. Then, we’ll use protests and past voting behavior to predict who will turn out in 2024. The roll of cognitive dissonance and irrevocable actions will be used to analyze who is…