Vox: All Posts by Zack Beauchamphttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2024-03-28T13:20:47-04:00https://www.vox.com/authors/zack-beauchamp/rss2024-03-28T13:20:47-04:002024-03-28T13:20:47-04:00How MAGA broke the media
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<img alt="Candace Owens, a Black woman in a black square-necked sleeveless dress with her hair pulled back, sits at a glass desk with a mug reading “Candace” in front of her, and a window behind her." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IkZV87asTuVaFp1FNKcdpqsma84=/397x0:3744x2510/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73239314/1391116058.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Candace Owens on the set of her show <em>Candace</em> on April 12, 2022. | Jason Davis/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Recent controversies surrounding Ronna McDaniel and Candace Owens show how the media struggles to handle the increasingly extreme right.</p> <p id="sI15VP">Two of the biggest stories in the American media at this moment are about staffing choices: former Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel’s hiring and swift firing from NBC, and popular commentator Candace Owens’s departure from the conservative Daily Wire (best known as the home for Ben Shapiro’s mega-popular podcast).</p>
<p id="nc8UH7">While different in details, both stories are essentially about the same question: How can <a href="https://www.vox.com/media">media organizations</a> responsibly handle an increasingly radical conservative movement?</p>
<p id="O5UbGW">In McDaniel’s case, the issue was election denial. After her hiring was announced, NBC staff revolted — noting her vocal defense of <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump" data-source="encore">Donald Trump</a>’s lies about the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election" data-source="encore">2020 election</a> while running the RNC. Some top talent, like <em>Meet the Press</em> host Chuck Todd, <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/25/ronna-mcdaniel-firestorm-nbc-00148799">revolted on air</a> — leading NBC to part ways with McDaniel before she really got started.</p>
<p id="iCcVzL">At the Daily Wire, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnYWx2Ozahk">mainstreaming election denial</a> is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/election-fraud">hardly a firing offense</a>. But over the past months, Owens has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/03/22/candace-owens-antisemitism-daily-wire-shapiro/">outed herself as an antisemite</a> — recently liking a social media post claiming that a prominent rabbi was “<a href="https://www.mediaite.com/media/candace-owens-endorses-wild-anti-semitic-conspiracy-theory-about-jews-being-drunk-on-christian-blood/">drunk on Christian blood</a>.” Eventually this became too much for the Shapiro-founded website; last week, CEO Jeremy Boreing announced that Owens and the site have “<a href="https://twitter.com/JeremyDBoreing/status/1771165501160411423">ended their relationship</a>.”</p>
<p id="dIzfbf">In both cases, the media organization has received significant blowback. Republican sources are <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/03/26/2024/nbc-braces-for-the-backlash-to-the-backlash-after-hiring-and-firing-ronna-mcdaniel">threatening to cut off NBC journalists</a> in retaliation for McDaniel’s defenestration. Right-wing trolls, led by <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23484314/trump-fuentes-ye-dinner-white-nationalism-supremacy">Hitler-admiring self-described incel Nick Fuentes</a>, have led <a href="https://twitter.com/jeremiahdjohns/status/1772465334445899811?s=46">a campaign of antisemitic social media incitement</a> against the Daily Wire in support of Owens.</p>
<p id="vkITA4">Objectively, this is all absurd: No news organization should have to face consequences for taking a stand against anti-democratic lies or antisemitic bigotry. But it’s important to understand why it’s happening: The conservative movement, the backbone of one of our two major political parties, is off the rails. </p>
<p id="Oy3qlv">That brute reality has thrown American media out of whack. Mainstream outlets are forced to choose between traditional notions of objectivity and platforming obscenity; right-wing outlets have lost whatever ability they once had to keep their followers onside.</p>
<h3 id="2WYdBR">Journalism faces a right that has lost its bearings</h3>
<p id="dHq5Sj">Imagine you’re the editor of an op-ed section at a major newspaper. You’ve got two main objectives: to both represent a broad spectrum of views and publish high-quality writing that makes your readers better informed.</p>
<p id="5etDLN">Clearly, you need to have conservative writers. But what kind?</p>
<p id="ZECidv">The ones who best represent where the Republican Party is at, hardline Trumpists, tend to be prone to lying and bigotry; they have to be in order to defend Trump and his core positions. Obviously, you don’t want to publish outright lies and apologias for racism.</p>
<p id="OEUefU">The best and smartest conservative writers, by contrast, reject election denial and oppose Trump’s racial demagoguery. But doing so puts them at odds with where the actual existing Republican Party is. By publishing them as spokespeople for conservatism, you risk misleading your readers about the true nature of the American right.</p>
<p id="VpxHWV">This is a difficult dilemma, and hardly a hypothetical one. Every day in American media, editors and journalists have to make similar choices. Questions like “How do I accurately report what Republican sources say without publishing lies?” and “How can I describe a racist Trump comment without coming off as a Democratic hack?” are the everyday stuff of mainstream American media.</p>
<p id="hxmu4S">For institutions that pride themselves on objectivity and fairness to all sides, these practical questions raise more philosophical ones. What does “objectivity” mean if not simply treating the positions of the two major parties as reasonable disputes between reasonable people? What is “fairness” in a world where a major party leader is opposed to basic principles of democratic fairness? How do we cover a party that has entirely lost its way?</p>
<p id="kdjGW5">Conservative outlets face a somewhat different kind of calibration problem. Because their audience is made up of a radicalizing base, their own instincts about where to draw the line might be to the left of their customers’ — even at a place as solidly right-wing as the Daily Wire. Candace Owens was, by all accounts, a very popular podcast host. Losing her is no small thing.</p>
<p id="mVnPUf">Reflecting on the Owens mishegoss, <a href="https://www.vox.com/23811277/christopher-rufo-culture-wars-ron-desantis-florida-critical-race-theory-anti-wokeness">leading conservative activist Chris Rufo</a> concluded that “<a href="https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1772358867541692711">we have a problem on the right</a>.” Per Rufo, “the economics of online discourse are increasingly at odds with forming and mobilizing a successful political movement.”</p>
<p id="HW9kTD">This is an oblique acknowledgment that Owens’s schtick is popular among conservatives. Much like Trump, she has succeeded by openly telling people things they quietly believe but few others are willing to say (because they’re horrible). Being offensive isn’t incidental to her rise; it’s at the heart of it.</p>
<p id="4a8RVk">This is not a new feature of conservative media: it’s part of what fueled Rush Limbaugh’s rise to prominence in 1990s talk radio. But elite conservatives like the Daily Wire’s editorial leadership <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/7/6/23144343/end-of-conservatism-roe">long thought they could keep a lid on it</a>, to draw lines and make the audiences play within them. Trump, Owens, and their ilk have proved that to be impossible.</p>
<p id="l7QAhY">Both mainstream and right-wing media are thus grappling with the same dilemma: The conservative movement is a self-radicalizing perpetual motion machine. The more extreme it gets, the more awkward their own choices become.</p>
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/3/28/24114506/ronna-mcdaniel-candace-owens-maga-right-mediaZack Beauchamp2024-03-13T06:00:00-04:002024-03-13T06:00:00-04:00Are men and women growing apart politically? Not so fast.
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<p>The idea that young men and women inhabit different political realities is going viral. But is it true?</p> <p id="Si6gDZ">When I was growing up in the 1990s, couples counselor John Gray penned a book on gender relations with an instantly memorable title: <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus-john-gray/18673473?ean=9780060574215&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw17qvBhBrEiwA1rU9w5iVQ-FbWzmeXGSNusyxUdllhLtZJhWpebextHeL86BidGHPopTNFhoCPf8QAvD_BwE"><em>Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus</em></a>. The book argued that men and women have fundamentally different communication styles, which can be major sources of tension in heterosexual relationships. To call it a hit is a massive understatement: Gray’s book has sold <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Men-Mars-Women-Venus-Relationships/dp/0007152590#:~:text=Since%20its%20first%20publication%2C%20over,where%20it%20all%20went%20wrong.">15 million copies worldwide</a>, and was even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/26/style/taking-the-stage-to-help-mars-and-venus-kiss-and-make-up.html">adapted into a Broadway show</a> (starring Gray) in the late 1990s.</p>
<p id="NMzvuJ">Yet <em>Men Are From Mars’s</em> broad generalizations — “Men are motivated when they feel needed while women are motivated when they feel cherished” — haven’t held up. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Male_Body/mf2_AaVBIEsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=mars">Feminist critics</a> who challenged the book’s simplistic narrative at the time have <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-11133-001">largely</a> <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/01/26/511734926/the-science-of-gender-no-men-arent-from-mars-and-women-from-venus">been</a> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03782-6">validated</a> by subsequent scientific research, which finds that men and women don’t act nearly as differently as stereotypes suggest.</p>
<p id="HIAUFV">The lesson here is that gender-divide stories are intuitively appealing but awfully easy to overstate. Any new claims that men and women are behaving differently should be approached with caution — a maxim that’s as true in the political world as anywhere else.</p>
<p id="axoCuo">In the past weeks and months, a narrative has emerged that young men and women are moving to politically different planets. In countries as diverse as the United States, Germany, and South Korea, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998">some data suggests</a> that 18- to 29-year-old men are becoming increasingly conservative while their female peers are tilting to the left. The tone of this coverage can be dire: The Washington Post’s editorial board recently fretted that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/22/marriage-polarization-dating-trump/">the gender political divide would soon imperil the institution of marriage itself</a>.</p>
<p id="FkWVPW">But political scientists who study gender and politics generally tell a different story. There has been a longstanding political gender gap between men and women in advanced democracies. But the gap is often small, its causes unclear, and the effects typically overstated. While it’s possible that this gap is widening among young people, the evidence is hardly cut-and-dry. </p>
<p id="W1zur2">“There’s just not really enough data to be able to answer the question,” says Dawn Teele, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. </p>
<p id="B4mjm7">These data problems don’t rule out a widening gender gap among young people. But just because something remains possible doesn’t mean we should believe it’s definitely happening. And right now, the evidence on the ground is too thin to make any confident predictions. </p>
<p id="VXvVhX">The narrative is galloping well ahead of the facts.</p>
<h3 id="a2pSao">What we know — and don’t know — about the gender political divide</h3>
<p id="D6UJVd">Men and women have long voted differently. But for many years, women around the world were more likely to vote for conservative parties than men. The gap began narrowing around 1970, rapidly closed in the 1980s, and flipped altogether in the 1990s. By 2000, women had clearly become the more left-leaning group across industrialized democracies.</p>
<p id="lZw5Wj">This pattern, first established in a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1601598">landmark paper</a> by University of Michigan’s Ronald Inglehart and Harvard’s Pippa Norris, is the foundation of modern research into the gendered gap in political participation. But interestingly, scholars don’t really know why it happened. </p>
<p id="MIfikY">Inglehart and Norris argue that the change is the result of “structural and cultural trends [that] have transformed the values of women and men” — that is to say, the feminist revolution. As women entered the workplace and attended university in higher numbers, the foundations of their political engagement began to shift. The more that women started to believe feminist ideas about equality, the more attracted they became to left-wing parties that held equality as a fundamental value.</p>
<p id="SbBbd1">There’s good reason to think this explanation is a major part of the story. The countries that saw the biggest changes in cultural values and women’s socioeconomic roles — North American and European democracies — saw the most rapid political shifts. But we can’t say for sure that it’s the whole story. For that, we’d need fine-grained research, including individual and local-level data, that could causally link shifts in women’s political attitudes to something like labor force participation or educational attainment.</p>
<p id="3vwBgg">Moreover, Inglehart and Norris’s theory implies that “the process of generational turnover will probably continue to move women leftwards.” As older generations die out, replaced by younger women raised in a more feminist culture, women should continue to march leftward and widen the gender gap.</p>
<p id="6fBBIu">Except that’s not what happened.</p>
<p id="IJfk0h">In a 2020 paper, Université de Montréal political scientist Ruth Dassonneville examined data on 36 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (<a href="https://www.oecd.org">OECD</a>) — the major cross-national grouping of wealthy democracies. Looking at how women identified themselves politically, she found that “the ideological gender gap has been largely stable since the middle of the 1990s.” </p>
<p id="4MBA0N">There were two big reasons for this finding. </p>
<p id="FOuUTv">First, younger women (Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z) were not displaying markedly more progressive political views overall than their baby boomer mothers and grandmothers. Most of the change was the product of a sharp break in older generations, consistent with the Norris-Inglehart theory that the post-1960s surge in feminist activity was a key inflection point.</p>
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<img alt="Black-and-white photo of a group of young American women protesting in the rain for women’s rights as police look on along the street near a government building during Richard Nixon’s presidential inauguration weekend, Washington, DC, January 18-21, 1969." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HkukKv82tCmrZSoFC8hoxDA8qqA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25332891/GettyImages_72150253.jpg">
<cite>David Fenton/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A group of young American women protest for women’s rights during Richard Nixon’s presidential inauguration weekend in Washington, DC, in 1969.</figcaption>
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<p id="7YLuBz">Second, the nature of the gender gap varied massively from country to country. In some countries, men shifted their politics alongside women; in others, they didn’t. In some countries, men and women both shifted to the left, while in others, they both shifted right. In roughly half of all countries in Dassonneville’s sample, she writes, there was “very little evidence of change in the ideological gender gap over time.” </p>
<p id="sy9sAH">The closer you look at the data, it seems, the harder it is to say anything definitively about what’s happening across OECD countries.</p>
<p id="Qck9Hx">When I spoke to Dassonneville, she told me that “not a whole lot” was known about why there’s such a sharp divergence among wealthy countries. One theory is religious context: In Europe, majority-Protestant countries seem to have larger gender gaps than majority-Catholic ones. But the religiosity theory has yet to be proven, and is still best seen as a conjecture rather than a well-supported theory.</p>
<p id="8aqtMa">All this suggests that there simply might not be any consistent patterns in the gender divide around the world. After the clearly rapid changes of the latter 20th century, it could be that factors other than gender — both cross-nationally and in specific countries — are playing major roles in determining men’s and women’s political views. </p>
<h3 id="h4zzXg">Is this generation different?</h3>
<p id="3nX10S">It’s been three years since Dassoneville published her canonical paper, and obviously the world has changed. Her data stopped in 2018, meaning that it may not have fully captured the impact of seismic events like <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump" data-source="encore">Donald Trump</a>’s victory and the subsequent rise of the Me Too movement around the world. </p>
<p id="AF5FBp">In theory, these events could disrupt the well-established pattern — especially among young people, who are at a crucial time in their political socialization. Typically, the political identities we develop as young people tend to stick for much of our adult lives. Patterns of ideology and partisanship, once set by contemporary events, are hard to disrupt. It is theoretically possible that the events of the past decade are similar in some ways to the feminist revolution that created the modern gender gap in the late 20th century.</p>
<p id="02TBbU">The best evidence that this is happening came in <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998">a January piece in the Financial Times</a>. Its author, John Burn-Murdoch, charted data on 18- to 29-year-olds from four countries — the US, UK, Germany, and South Korea — and found significant gulfs in political ideology. This, he concluded, was the sign of a new global gender divide.</p>
<p id="sZlWuS">“It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing.” Burn-Murdoch concludes. “This shift could leave ripples for generations to come, impacting far more than vote counts.”</p>
<p id="7yFBea">When I spoke to Burn-Murdoch, he told me that after his column published, he looked at data from several other countries — including Spain, Japan, and Sweden — that pointed to similar conclusions. There are also some other sources pointing to a widening youth political gap: Data from <a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/millennials-and-gen-z-less-favour-gender-equality-older-generations#:~:text=On%20average%20across%20the%20countries,equality%20between%20genders%20(64%25).">an Ipsos survey released in March</a> showed that, across 22 countries, Gen Z men and women were further apart on the question of whether feminism had gone too far than men and women of prior generations.</p>
<p id="dAegcl">This is all compelling enough, scholars say, to render the notion of a rising youth gender gap a plausible theory — one that could very well turn out to be true as more data comes in. But as of right now, it’s also quite far from a proven theory.</p>
<p id="WGwtmZ">“I’m not quite sure we’re really at a place where we can say there’s been dramatic change,” Dassonneville says.</p>
<p id="QIQBrV">The problem starts with the data itself. A typical political poll will only survey enough people to get a representative sample of the entire country — say, 1,100 people in the United States. This is enough to give us a snapshot of the electorate as a whole, but can make it tricky to sample people from particular subgroups, such as young women. Even then, sometimes different data sources come to different conclusions (a problem currently evident in <a href="https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2024/01/28/is-the-ideology-gap-growing/">American data on the gender divide</a>).</p>
<p id="rM1Zmn">Even when you’ve got good data, it’s very hard to interpret it properly. There is, for example, a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Todd-Donovan-2/publication/359467917_Measuring_and_predicting_the_radical-right_gender_gap/links/647111d66a3c4c6efbe206bc/Measuring-and-predicting-the-radical-right-gender-gap.pdf">large body of evidence</a> that men in Europe’s multiparty democracies are more likely to vote for far-right parties than women are. But we don’t know if this pattern is more pronounced among younger generations than older ones. Moreover, it’s not necessarily evidence of a huge left-right gender gulf: It could be that women are more likely than men to vote for <em>center-right</em> parties, but no more likely to vote for left-wing parties. </p>
<p id="9x0ZCZ">And then there are questions about whether gender issues — Burn-Murdoch points to Me Too as a key moment — are really driving the change. To test any theory of why the political gender divide might be widening, you need rigorous social scientific research that establishes meaningful gender correlations among young people after accounting for confounding variables. At present, that research doesn’t exist.</p>
<p id="x5nmpF">Again, it could be that the theory of a growing gender ideological gap passes this test when all’s said and done. Some scholars believe it’s even likely: Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford writing a book about sexism around the globe, told me a widening youth gender gap would make all the sense in the world.</p>
<p id="ASAuf6">Many young men are growing up in a world where they feel like they’re losing social status (see: <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/28/young-women-are-out-earning-young-men-in-several-u-s-cities/">young women outperforming young men professionally</a>). Evans’s field research suggests that this shift is breeding a sense of resentment among the “mediocre men” (her term) who are having a rough time either professionally or <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-state-of-our-unions/202305/the-harsh-reality-men-face-on-dating-apps">romantically</a>. She cites South Korea, a country where young male resentment <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/02/will-incels-decide-koreas-election/">may well have swung the 2022 presidential election</a>, as a clear example. </p>
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<cite>Jung Yeon-Je/AFP via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A man walks past posters of South Korea’s presidential candidates in Seoul on March 6, 2022, ahead of the presidential election.</figcaption>
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<p id="CHFaJ5">But Evans also points out that South Korea might be unique. It is a country with <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/12/03/1135162927/women-feminism-south-korea-sexism-protest-haeil-yoon">historically high levels of open sexism</a>, an <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/east-asia-pacific_south-koreas-metoo-movement-challenges-workplace-sexual-harassment/6179152.html">unusually potent</a> Me Too movement, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/south-korea-fertility-rate-misogyny-feminism/673435/">the world’s lowest </a><a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1163341684/south-korea-fertility-rate">birthrate</a>, and universal military service for <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/south-korea-party-urges-mandatory-military-service-for-women/a-68204041#:~:text=At%20present%2C%20all%20able%2Dbodied,of%20the%20military%20are%20volunteers.">men only</a>. Whether South Korea is an isolated case or <a href="https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/argentinas-new-conservative-coalition/">a window into the democratic world’s future</a> is, at present, extremely difficult to say. </p>
<p id="WKZFmE">The information we have right now is suggestive of a rising youth gender gap globally, but it just isn’t conclusive. The truth is that we need more evidence. </p>
<p id="76LOnA">“There seems to be something. But how widespread is it, and what’s driving it?” Burn-Murdoch says. “I totally consider this a question rather than an answer.” </p>
<h3 id="5VcwfU">How the United States illustrates the limits of gender divide analysis</h3>
<p id="EiRjtc">To see why it’s premature to herald a new era of gender politics, it’s helpful to look at the United States — a country where there’s both ample high-quality data and a dedicated cadre of political scientists using it to study gender politics. </p>
<p id="HrMTpJ">Research in the United States has demonstrated that gender matters in all sorts of ways, from sexism playing <a href="https://mirror.explodie.org/schaffner_et_al_trump.pdf">a decisive role in the 2016 election</a> to determining <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/running-for-office-is-still-for-men-some-data-on-the-ambition-gap/">who runs for political office</a> in the first place. There’s also a very well-documented and long-running gender gap. </p>
<p id="PKUuqr">“In every presidential election since 1980, and in all congressional elections since 1986, women have been more likely than men to support the Democratic candidate and more likely to identify as liberal,” says Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.</p>
<p id="gVs6Xg">But Lawless and the other American scholars I spoke to emphasized that there’s less to this gender gap than meets the eye. While women are more liberal than men on average, the size of the gap just isn’t all that big. </p>
<p id="qh6v4d">“The differences between women and men are not, in any way, the biggest differences we have in American politics,” says Kathleen Dolan, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.</p>
<p id="h8IGLd">Generally speaking, Dolan says, women are more different from each other politically than they are from men. Non-white women are very Democratic, while <a href="https://cawp.rutgers.edu/gender-gap-voting-choices-presidential-elections">Trump won a majority of white women</a> in both 2016 and 2020; <a href="https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/elections-and-demography-the-marriage-gap/">unmarried women are far more Democratic</a>, on the whole, than their married peers; evangelical women <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1065912919889681">vote more conservatively</a> than other Christian women, who are in turn more conservative than <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-political-views/">Jewish</a> or <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1065912919889681">unaffiliated</a> women. </p>
<p id="1mJkEX">Age is another internal divide between both men and women — young people have almost always been more liberal than their older peers. But this follows a persistent life cycle pattern: Typically, both women and men get more conservative as they age. Baby boomers, once known for Vietnam-era campus radicalism, <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/trump-old-voters-support-biden.html">grew up to become Donald Trump’s base</a>. </p>
<p id="it9miq">For these reasons, scholars approach the claims of a widening and increasingly significant youth gender gap with some skepticism. “It’s so new that I’m reluctant to say it’s definitely a thing,” Lawless explains.</p>
<p id="Y2G8Fo">A close look at the data bears out her caution. </p>
<p id="w5r6QK">In the Financial Times, Burn-Murdoch used data on ideological self-identification — primarily the Gallup Social Series, supplemented by the General Social Survey (GSS) — to show that young women were considerably more likely than young men to identify as liberal.</p>
<p id="xXYpqH">The problem, though, is that the GSS data directly contradicts the Gallup data. An <a href="https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2024/01/28/is-the-ideology-gap-growing/">analysis by data scientist Allen Downey</a> found that, after accounting for what looked like a statistical error in the 2022 GSS result, “there is no evidence that the ideology gap is growing.”</p>
<p id="yE06VL">Ryan Burge, an expert on political demography at Eastern Illinois University, looked at the same question in a different dataset (the Cooperative Election Study). He <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1751615375408521623">found the same thing</a>: The gap wasn’t any larger among young people than older ones. Burge also looked at partisanship — whether there’s a larger gap among young people identifying as Republicans or Democrats — and found “<a href="https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1751680896984285677">no huge shifts</a>” between Gen Z and their predecessors. Data from Pew and the Democratic firm Catalist, published by <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/gen-z-gender-divide-2024-election/677723/">the Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch</a>, came to similar conclusions.</p>
<p id="8kYg5B">Vanderbilt University’s John Sides examined polling on <a href="https://goodauthority.org/news/maybe-young-men-and-women-arent-so-ideologically-different/">a battery of specific policy issues</a>, like <a href="https://www.vox.com/marijuana-legalization" data-source="encore">marijuana legalization</a> and assault rifle bans, and found no meaningful difference between younger and older generations. In a second analysis he sent me via email, Sides looked at the critical question of whether young generations differed in their views of how much discrimination women faced — data that speaks directly to whether young men and women are dividing along gender lines.</p>
<p id="yGFGSZ">He found that young women and young men are both more likely to perceive high levels of discrimination than their older peers. This is consistent with the general claim that young people are more liberal than older ones, but not with Evans’s argument that young men see women as unfairly advantaged relative to young men. The gap in perceived discrimination between young women and young men is larger than in older generations, but only marginally.</p>
<p id="YMrBSt">Sides’s data suggests young American women are a lot more liberal than older women — and that young men are <em>also</em> more liberal than older men, just to a somewhat lesser degree. So there is a difference, but it’s hardly the stuff of a massive emerging gender divide reshaping American politics.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HuGGNn_7XOAgoqaxtlEHOCzCKVk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25332905/GettyImages_1244921358.jpg">
<cite>Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Paris to demand a new law and 2 billion euros per year to fight against violence against women on November 19, 2022.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="70kVsr">So what conclusions to draw from all of this?</p>
<p id="d4DJ3S">In a phone call, Sides told me that the data is simply too inconsistent to be sure about anything. A handful of indicators show a rising gender gap in the youngest generation of American voters, but many others do not. We need more fine-grained analysis to be sure about anything.</p>
<p id="bgpP0d">What goes for the United States also may go for much of the world. Every country has its own political complexities and divides; any definitive analysis of youth gender divides would need to take them into account. The research on the United States might be an outlier, a function of its two-party system limiting opportunities for a gender divide to emerge. But the American results may also be representative, a reflection of the high volume and quality of datasets on US politics. </p>
<p id="ZDJAX5">It’s frustrating to say “we don’t know” about something as important as the future of gender politics. But sometimes, “we don’t know” is the only honest answer.</p>
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/3/13/24098780/politics-gender-divide-generation-z-youth-men-womenZack Beauchamp2024-03-08T07:15:00-05:002024-03-08T07:15:00-05:00Are Biden and the Democrats finally turning on Israel?
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<img alt="US President Joe Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv in October 2023." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ueRkBtVjbxHvtlPmuod1BXguwrE=/92x0:1148x792/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73191138/1730842169.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>“It’s not you, it’s me.” | GPO/Handout/Anadolu/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Biden’s new plan to build a pier on the Gaza coast seems to say yes. The continued military aid to Israel says otherwise.</p> <p id="c5xjQS">For years, there <a href="https://www.vox.com/22440197/us-israel-democrats-alliance-partisanship-gaza">have been signs</a> that the Democratic Party’s historic support for <a href="https://www.vox.com/israel" data-source="encore">Israel</a> might be wavering. <a href="https://www.vox.com/joe-biden" data-source="encore">Joe Biden</a>’s staunch support for Israel after October 7 seemed to suggest that this theory was overblown — that when push came to shove, Democrats would always revert to the centrist pro-Israel position they had taken for decades.</p>
<p id="Bh1eQl">But in the past few days, it’s started to feel like the winds might be shifting again. </p>
<p id="qdKKK0">Both in <a href="https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1765053398636752934">public</a> and <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/03/05/israel-gaza-aid-benny-gantz-white-house">private</a>, Biden and his deputies have fumed about Israel blocking aid from entering the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080046/gaza-palestine-israel" data-source="encore">Gaza Strip</a>. Administration officials told reporter Barak Ravid that last week, when over 100 people were killed <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/2/29/24087031/gaza-humanitarian-aid-israel">outside an aid convoy,</a> was (in his words) <a href="https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1765052806417748013">a “turning point</a>.”</p>
<p id="Da8rPc">Of course, the White House can complain all it wants (and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/biden-disparages-netanyahu-private-hasnt-changed-us-policy-israel-rcna138282">has done so before</a>): It’s meaningless unless accompanied by actions to push Israel toward changing course. </p>
<p id="jurY3i">They started down that road earlier this year by imposing serious sanctions on violent Israeli settlers <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/03/israel-sanctions-settlers-biden-netanyahu/677647/">in the West Bank</a>. Then during last night’s State of the Union, President Biden ordered the US military to establish a port in Gaza that would bypass Israeli-controlled land crossings and thus allow humanitarian aid to flow more freely into the Strip.</p>
<p id="KzUbMO">And it’s not just the administration — or even just the party’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/us/politics/uncommitted-biden-washington-state.html">clearly furious left flank</a>. </p>
<p id="koXfp4">A recent letter <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/03/06/biden-israel-rafah-house-democrats">signed by 37 Congressional Democrats</a>, including prominent and mainstream figures like Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD), argued that the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-rcna139428">planned Israeli assault</a> on the overcrowded city of Rafah would likely violate international law. This, they argue, should trigger a cutoff of military aid to Israel — a threat that has yet to be proven credible, but one that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/06/biden-rafah-attack-israel-hamas-gaza-war/">knowledgeable observers take seriously</a>.</p>
<p id="B1JABP">It does seem like something is starting to change in the Democratic Party’s approach to the Gaza war, and maybe Israel more broadly. </p>
<p id="6FKIsn">But nothing is real until it actually happens, and there are still plenty of good reasons for skepticism.</p>
<h3 id="y4T1dP">A crisis between Democrats and Israel has been long in the making</h3>
<p id="eIZUJc">The tension between Israel and the Democrats really started emerging in 2009. </p>
<p id="EI3aLx">That year, President Barack Obama pushed Israeli Prime Minister <a href="https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-gaza-war-history" data-source="encore">Benjamin Netanyahu</a> to freeze <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080034/west-bank-israel-palestinians" data-source="encore">West Bank</a> settlement construction as part of a push toward a peace agreement. Netanyahu dragged his feet and even outright thumbed his nose at the administration. During a 2010 visit from then-Vice President Biden, Israel announced the construction of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/world/middleeast/10biden.html">1,600 new housing units</a> in contested East Jerusalem.</p>
<p id="a9wxG7">The conflict between Obama and Netanyahu only intensified after that, as Netanyahu began acting as if Israel’s future would be best secured by allying itself with the Republican Party specifically rather than the US writ large. </p>
<p id="ZT7gnv">He all-but-openly campaigned against Obama in 2012, worked with Republicans to coordinate opposition to the <a href="https://www.vox.com/iran" data-source="encore">Iran</a> deal in <a href="https://www.vox.com/congress" data-source="encore">Congress</a> in 2015, and then hugged Trump as tightly as possible from 2016 onward.</p>
<p id="hqFHxW">From the outside, this strategy seems nuts: Why would you intentionally stoke conflict with one of the two major parties in your most important ally? The answer is that Netanyahu has — correctly! — identified <a href="https://www.vox.com/22440197/us-israel-democrats-alliance-partisanship-gaza">fundamental ideological tension</a> between Democrats and his right-wing vision for Israel.</p>
<aside id="VGjENG"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"vox_sentences"}'></div></aside><p id="l17F0V">As a party that counts young people and racial minorities as key constituencies, Democrats were not likely (in the long run) to countenance indefinite Israeli occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. Netanyahu saw bolstering Republicans as the best way to protect American support without having to make concessions to <a href="https://www.vox.com/palestine" data-source="encore">Palestinians</a>. </p>
<p id="zzyQGq">Netanyahu’s theory may have become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p id="PlG972">By aligning with Republicans, he turned both <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/10/29/7089853/obama-netanyahu-chickenshit-us-israel">elite</a> and <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/472070/democrats-sympathies-middle-east-shift-palestinians.aspx">rank-and-file</a> Democrats against his government far more rapidly than they might have otherwise. After Netanyahu traveled to Washington to give a speech to Congress opposing the Iran deal in 2015, his approval rating among Democrats <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/181916/americans-views-netanyahu-less-positive-post-visit.aspx">fell from 32 percent to 17 percent</a>. </p>
<p id="zPaa0k">The divergence between Democrats and Israel has been on increasingly sharp display during the Gaza war. Biden’s “unconditional” support for Israel after October 7 has given way to open feuding about the postwar plan for Gaza. The US has called for Palestinian Authority rule over the Strip and a two-state solution; Netanyahu has unveiled a <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/2/23/24081543/israel-postwar-plan-gaza-two-state-netanyahu">pseudo-plan that basically amounts to indefinite Israeli occupation</a>.</p>
<p id="tS6jsV">This is hardly the only example. In a column titled “<a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-05/ty-article/.premium/the-u-s-finally-realized-netanyahu-broke-an-unbreakable-alliance/0000018e-0df1-dc37-a9ae-dffba1cf0000">The US finally realized: Netanyahu broke an unbreakable alliance</a>,” former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas lists off points of conflict between the allies — which, he concludes, are producing a fundamental rethink on the American side. </p>
<p id="cgfS4E">“Once the United States became convinced that Netanyahu was not being cooperative, not being a considerate ally, behaving like a crude ingrate and has been focused only on his political survival after the October 7 debacle, the time was ripe to try a new political course,” he writes.</p>
<h3 id="zeoKxZ">But is anything <em>really </em>changing? </h3>
<p id="EndiWl">By all accounts, President Biden still holds <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/i-am-zionist-how-joe-bidens-lifelong-bond-with-israel-shapes-war-policy-2023-10-21/">a relatively old-school Democratic view of Israel</a> — one that’s deeply sympathetic to the country and its security interests.</p>
<p id="JuCOu5">As frustrated as he may be with Netanyahu’s brutish <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy" data-source="encore">policies</a> and rank partisanship, it’s far from obvious that he is willing to start putting real pressure on Israel. </p>
<p id="RR046y">Most of Biden’s actual policies have involved giving Israel what it wants, like <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/20/us-vetoes-another-un-security-council-resolution-urging-gaza-war-ceasefire">vetoing two UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire</a>. Perhaps most importantly, the US has made <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/06/us-weapons-israel-gaza/">over 100 arms sales to Israel since the war began</a>, many of which were structured in such a way that they could escape congressional and public oversight.</p>
<p id="HXbhfP">For this reason, hearing about the administration’s frustration with Israel can feel a bit like hearing about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/republicans-anonymous-private-concerns-media/2020/12/10/301e98a6-2e75-11eb-bae0-50bb17126614_story.html">Republican frustration with Trump</a>. They’re perfectly happy to complain to reporters in private so long as they don’t have to actually do anything about it.</p>
<p id="MyMxgJ">Yet at the same time, events appear to be moving toward a breaking point. Biden’s personal views on Israel are crashing on the shoals of <a href="https://www.vox.com/24055522/israel-hamas-gaza-war-strategy-netanyahu-strategy-morality">Israel’s terrible war policy</a> and long-brewing tension within his own political coalition. </p>
<p id="YRQZbo">We may soon find out whether the long-predicted crisis in US-Israel relations is truly here — or once again delayed.</p>
<p id="yH5b6A"><em>This story appeared originally in </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast"><em><strong>Today, Explained</strong></em></a><em>, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/today-explained-newsletter-signup"><em><strong>Sign up here for future editions</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/3/8/24093748/biden-israel-democrats-state-of-the-union-gaza-portZack Beauchamp2024-03-08T01:30:00-05:002024-03-08T01:30:00-05:00Biden’s State of the Union got one big thing right
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WXU1DGuCfdB-MgxeJ_fX2o3y4IY=/0x0:5333x4000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73190904/2059264750.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 7, 2024. | Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The president dodged the “norms trap” by going straight after Trump on democracy.</p> <p id="yU27uU">During Thursday night’s State of the Union address, <a href="https://www.vox.com/joe-biden" data-source="encore">President Joe Biden</a> issued an unmistakable warning about the threat <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump" data-source="encore">Donald Trump</a> poses to American democracy. The speech also implicitly made a more subtle point about democracy: that defending it can require uncomfortably blunt talk.</p>
<p id="Mk2QxB">One of democracy’s core premises is that elections are not like armed conflict, where either you win or you die. Since all parties accept the basic rules of the game, like competitive elections and free speech, the stakes of elections are not existential. Political opponents are less enemies than rivals; disagreement isn’t disaster.</p>
<p id="ZEcNEz">Authoritarian populists like Donald Trump win by attacking this foundational democratic norm. </p>
<p id="tHTWY4">They demonize their opponents, arguing repeatedly that their opponents are not rivals but rather monsters bent on the country’s destruction. They claim that the system is in the enemy’s corrupt hands and not to be trusted, that their faction and our leader deserve absolute power (“<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/trump-rnc-speech-alone-fix-it/492557/">I alone can fix it</a>,” as Trump said in 2016). The nefarious plans of the domestic enemy must be resisted by any means necessary, even ones that might seem extreme.</p>
<p id="LducNa">“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said, infamously, in his <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial">speech on the morning of the January 6 attack</a>.</p>
<p id="1T8pew">For those committed to democracy, this kind of radical attack might seem to pose a dilemma. If you ignore or downplay your opponents’ rhetoric, you fail to alert the public to the danger. But if you correctly point out that it threatens democracy, you risk coming across as a hypocrite: demonizing your opponents in the same way they’re demonizing you.</p>
<p id="dT3WkT">But this supposed dilemma is no dilemma at all.<strong> </strong>The reason is deceptively simple: There is no hypocrisy in defending truth against lies.</p>
<p id="i8JNPT">When Trump says the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election" data-source="encore">2020 election</a> was stolen, he is lying to create a pretext to overthrow a legitimate election. When Biden calls Trump’s behavior a threat to democracy, warning that the former president seeks “to bury the truth of January 6,” he is telling the truth about Trump’s lies and the dangers they pose to American democracy.</p>
<p id="hafxOq">Fail to appreciate this distinction and you risk falling into what I call the “norms trap:” prioritizing the appearance of respecting democracy’s principles over acting in those principles’ defense.</p>
<p id="tziWCv">At the State of the Union, Biden recognized this trap and avoided it. </p>
<p id="CEm7Xb">When he warned of the ongoing threat to American democracy, saying, “My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6th,” he did indeed sound an unusually partisan note for the typically staid affair. This might seem like a violation of democratic norms, and some <a href="https://twitter.com/marcthiessen/status/1765931302140723376">conservatives</a> attempted to <a href="https://twitter.com/bdomenech/status/1765934660909928710">cast</a> it as such. This was the theme of <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bidens-sotu-blasted-nakedly-partisan-campaign-speech-utter-disgrace?intcmp=tw_fnc">one of Fox News’ top stories after the speech</a>.</p>
<p id="3Y5hov">This is hard to take seriously as a good faith objection, especially given <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21123597/rush-limbaugh-medal-of-freedom-trump-racist-sexist">Trump’s State of the Union track record</a>. As a rhetorical tactic, though, it’s a powerful distraction: an attempt to shift focus away from the substance of Biden’s warning about the rising threat to democracy, onto a disingenuous debate over whether Biden himself is behaving undemocratically.</p>
<p id="Ovvx8U">Yes, it’s rare for a president to in essence campaign during the State of the Union. But it’s also unusual for the president’s opponent to be someone who has a stated desire to be a “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX0iAmz9iLM">dictator on day one</a>,” with<a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/92714/american-autocracy-threat-tracker/"> a host of policies</a> that could bring that vision frighteningly close to fruition. The State of the Union is supposed to highlight grave national concerns; this is clearly one of them.</p>
<p id="1Xy5lk">This is not to say that Biden can do or say whatever he wants to fight Trump. He should not break the law or take actions that meaningfully weaken American democracy (which Democrats are <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/14/18140773/new-jersey-democrats-gerrymandering-2018">entirely capable of doing</a>).</p>
<p id="DhJYjU">But in a world where American democracy is facing an unprecedented threat from one of two major political parties, it’s reasonable to risk a too-partisan speech in order to safeguard it. It’s good that Biden recognized this and devoted a good chunk of the State of the Union to telling the truth.</p>
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/3/8/24094021/bidens-state-of-the-union-2024-trump-democracyZack Beauchamp2024-03-06T10:22:53-05:002024-03-06T10:22:53-05:00The Republican primary was a joke. It tells us something deadly serious.
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<img alt="Donald Trump, wearing a black suit and a red MAGA hat, spreads his arms out as he speaks at a podium on stage with large US flags behind him. " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/8V_9EBh9GJ_NGfTV_CM-3EH342k=/227x0:3160x2200/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73161261/2011424610.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Trump speaks at a campaign rally. | Nic Antaya/Bloomberg via Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trump’s inevitable romp to victory revealed how strong his hold on the GOP is — and how dangerous he remains to democracy.</p> <p id="766p1G">With <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/2/14/23599194/nikki-haley-donald-trump-2024-presidential-campaign" data-source="encore">Nikki Haley’</a>s withdrawal from the Republican primary after getting crushed on Super Tuesday, it’s official: <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump" data-source="encore">Donald Trump</a> will be the party’s nominee for the presidency. </p>
<p id="tb0Wdi">At this point, this should be a surprise to exactly no one: the 2024 race <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-r/2024/south-carolina/">never was a competitive primary</a>. Trump simply wasn’t going to lose a contest for the hearts and minds of the Republican base. <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/05/18/donald-trump-paradox-gop-00097458">Ideologically</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trump-dominance-business-republicans-congress/677391/">psychologically</a>, even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/books/review/the-kingdom-the-power-and-the-glory-tim-alberta.html">spiritually</a> — it’s the Trump party through and through. I <a href="https://damonlinker.substack.com/p/the-unfolding-of-the-inevitable1?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=865987&post_id=140927756&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=7ttw&open=false">and</a> others <a href="https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/the-ballad-of-ron-and-nikki?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=87281&post_id=140925445&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=7jgsk&utm_medium=email">have</a> been <a href="https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/2023/9/27/23890683/second-republican-debate-gop-fake-rnc-trump">arguing</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/23979441/nikki-haley-afp-koch-republican-billionaire-trump">this</a> for <a href="https://www.vox.com/23287527/trump-gop-control-august-gop-primary-2022">years</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts">now</a>. </p>
<p id="NKHJ0m">Yet during those same years, many prominent people in politics and the media deluded themselves into thinking he might be dethroned. They have been wrong every time and continued to be wrong long after the strength of Trump’s grip on the GOP could not be denied.</p>
<p id="rDSLic">There’s a lesson to be learned from all this, one deeper than just “Republicans really like Donald Trump” and “Trump critics are prone to wishful thinking.” The former president’s dominance tells us something critical about the <em>nature</em> of the current Republican party — and why it’s become <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts">such a danger to American democracy</a>.</p>
<h3 id="k30Wck">How Trump keeps wiggling his way out of jams</h3>
<p id="Zdx19M">Ever since the early stages of the 2016 GOP primary, the same pattern has repeated itself over and over again: Some new development that looked politically dangerous for Trump ends up not mattering at all. This happened so many times in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/presidential-election" data-source="encore">2016 election</a> cycle <em>alone</em> that it became a running joke during the campaign.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Tweet that says “Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam! Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily. Ah! Well. Nevertheless.”" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rsb7vL6f7GqW4XF_BzqIPKkAFWE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25300718/2bc.jpg">
<cite>@BronzeHammer</cite>
</figure>
<p id="iDYeFg">The pattern continued through Trump’s presidency, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/6/8/23156442/january-6-committee-trump-polarization-fatigue">most strikingly after January 6</a> — when Trump managed to maintain majority support in the Republican Party after inciting an honest-to-god insurrection. At that point, you’d think it would be obvious that Trump would cruise to renomination in 2024. Yet somehow, the delusions of a Trump collapse persisted.</p>
<p id="Rzyx5c">During the House January 6 committee meetings in summer 2022, there was widespread speculation that <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/07/30/1114578872/trump-desantis-pence-president-2024?utm_term=nprnews&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=politics&utm_medium=social">the dramatic public hearings had weakened Trump’s hold on the GOP</a>. Republican primary voters proceeded to <a href="https://www.vox.com/23287527/trump-gop-control-august-gop-primary-2022">disprove this theory</a> by booting the House members who voted for his impeachment and nominating full-MAGA election deniers, like Arizona’s Kari Lake, to contest key swing races around the country.</p>
<p id="BEDWNm">These candidates performed poorly in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23357154/2022-midterm-elections-guide" data-source="encore">2022 midterms</a>, while <a href="https://www.vox.com/ron-desantis" data-source="encore">Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis</a> cruised to reelection. This led many observers to see DeSantis as a possible Trump killer, with some going so far as to <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/why-desantis-is-on-track-to-beat-trump.html">anoint DeSantis the frontrunner in early 2023</a>. Soon after that, <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/24034491/iowa-caucus-results-polls-desantis-trump-haley-ramaswamy-republican-party">DeSantis’s poll numbers collapsed</a>.</p>
<p id="eCab0S">After the DeSantis train crashed, Trump skeptics crowned Haley <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/12/06/debate-tests-nikki-haley-momentum-2024-gop-president">the next anti-Trump Republican hope</a>. She secured <a href="https://afpaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/AFPA-Endorsement-Memo-.pdf">critical funding from Americans for Prosperity Action</a>, the political arm of the Koch empire, in November — raising the Haley hype to surprising heights going into 2024. In mid-January, prominent pundit Jonathan Rauch gave Haley <a href="https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/nikki-haley-has-a-shot-at-beating?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=461280&post_id=140530753&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=7ttw">roughly a 40 percent chance</a> to win the primary, adding that “the odds might shift in her favor quickly.” </p>
<p id="iCL85j">Then she lost by double digits in her supposed stronghold of New Hampshire, and the writing was on the wall in great big bold letters.</p>
<p id="2XUVso">None of this speculation tracked Trump’s poll numbers. The former president <a href="https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/republican-primary/2024/national">consistently led in the polling averages</a>, generally by wide margins. So why did so many get this so wrong?</p>
<p id="0IbAOU">Sometimes, it was simple wishcasting: centrist or anti-Trump Republicans desperately wishing to avoid a choice between a threat to democracy and a Democrat. But in some cases, there’s a more interesting explanation — that even some of the GOP’s critics didn’t fully appreciate what it had become.</p>
<p id="2P9ZOM">New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, one of the more perceptive of these critics, was an early booster of DeSantis’s chances. In August of last year, he admitted that he had gotten it wrong — and wrote <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/what-i-got-wrong-about-ron-desantis-vs-donald-trump.html">an thoughtful column</a> trying to explain why he erred. Chait’s basic argument is that Trump’s cult of personality was far more powerful than he had appreciated.</p>
<p id="rvW1Va">“Defeating Trump in a contest determining who can most effectively advance ideological or party goals is difficult but attainable. It is obviously impossible to defeat Trump in a contest of who is most loyal to Trump,” Chait concluded.</p>
<p id="OzkqVZ">This is surely a key part of the story. But it also raises a more fundamental question that Chait doesn’t attempt to answer: <em>Why</em> does the Republican base have such unwavering faith in the man? </p>
<p id="E5TCRW">Trump’s celebrity charisma alone isn’t enough of an explanation. Otherwise, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would bestride the GOP like a colossus. Nor is Trump’s fawning coverage in the conservative media. Fox News has repeatedly tried to turn the Republican base away from Trump and toward figures like DeSantis, only to have to kiss the ring when the voters didn’t follow their lead.</p>
<p id="pgeXpj">The answer, at least as far as I can tell, is that Trump’s cult is the product of his unique ability to channel the cultural grievances at the heart of the current Republican Party. </p>
<p id="N2ZAPa"><a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/8/4/23818817/trump-support-david-brooks-economic-anxiety">Again and again</a>, social scientists found that the best predictor of Trump support among Republican voters is the degree to which they feel discomfort with the changing nature of American demographics and social norms. Trump has sold himself as the only person capable of fighting back against the alleged elite conspiracy behind these changes, saying things like “I alone can fix it” and “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/05/i-am-your-retribution-trump-rules-supreme-at-cpac-as-he-relaunches-bid-for-white-house">I am your retribution</a>.” From these building blocks, he has created a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/05/18/donald-trump-paradox-gop-00097458">full-scale political movement</a> dedicated to reconquering America.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="A crowd of people in Trump merch, many of whom are holding up smartphones to film." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ft-QlL72tOtf_uSMDJHAQOE4qyo=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25300722/2018990694.jpg">
<cite>Scott Olson/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>The crowd as former President Donald Trump arrives at a rally on February 17, 2024, in Waterford, Michigan.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="59AZx3">Trump’s appeal isn’t premised on delivering concrete policy goals, nor even “owning the libs” with high-profile stunts. It is about assuaging the sense of <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629822000725">fear and resentment</a> at their America being replaced: about achieving victories that assuage the sense of psychological assault created by things like mass immigration, a Black president, shifting gender roles, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/money/2023/4/12/23680135/bud-light-boycott-dylan-mulvaney-travis-tritt-trans">a beloved beer brand</a> cutting an ad with a <a href="https://www.vox.com/lgbtq" data-source="encore">trans</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/influencers" data-source="encore">influencer</a>. Donald Trump, as a figure, represents the America they know and love. His victories are their victories, his defeats their defeats.</p>
<p id="2I9kYc">This frame helps us understand why Trump can’t be beaten inside Republican politics. It also clarifies why Trump has been able to steer the Republican Party so harshly against democracy.</p>
<p id="Vk8cX5">By making his very person into a stand-in for the existential struggle for America’s soul, he has created a world where any loss represents an intolerable blow against everything good about the country. Such a setback can only come from a place of deep corruption — from “the Swamp” and “Democrat-controlled cities.” And if American democracy has truly been subverted this thoroughly, the logical conclusion is clear: We have to “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial">fight like hell</a>” to save it.</p>
<p id="w8IKa2">The GOP primary’s end points to this deeper and darker story. It is one we must wrestle with in order to truly appreciate the stakes in the coming general election.</p>
<p id="ib37wb"><em><strong>Update, March 6, 10:20 am:</strong></em><em> This article was first published on February 24, 2024, and has been updated with Nikki Haley’s withdrawal from the race.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/2/24/24080974/south-carolina-gop-primary-results-2024-trump-haley-trumpismZack Beauchamp2024-02-27T08:00:00-05:002024-02-27T08:00:00-05:00Biden has been bad for Palestinians. Trump would be worse.
<figure>
<img alt="People take photos of a large sign with “Trump Heights” written in English underneath Hebrew writing and the US and Israel flags at the top." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/87OJPOys6nAkBfIeTtlPWNtbz4I=/640x0:5760x3840/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73167301/1150365011.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A sign outside an Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights named “Trump Heights,” photographed in 2019. | Amir Levy/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On Israel, the two are not the same.</p> <p id="ocGHlI">During the war in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080046/gaza-palestine-israel" data-source="encore">Gaza</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/joe-biden" data-source="encore">President Joe Biden</a> has taken a consistently pro-<a href="https://www.vox.com/israel" data-source="encore">Israel</a> line. He traveled to Israel after the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907683/israel-hamas-war-news-updates-october-2023" data-source="encore">October 7 attack</a>, provided the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/27/gaza-war-puts-us-extensive-weapons-stockpile-in-israel-under-scrutiny">huge quantities of munitions</a>, refused to publicly call for <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/rafah-braces-israeli-ground-assault-biden-says-ceasefire-more-often-2024-02-21/">an indefinite ceasefire</a>, and vetoed <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144562">UN resolutions it opposed</a>. This all reflects the president’s strongly held personal beliefs on <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-13/biden-s-israel-support-shows-personal-beliefs-helps-2024-campaign?embedded-checkout=true">the need to support the Jewish state</a> and the idea that <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/biden-obama-divide-closely-support-israel-rcna127107">public support for Israel</a> gives America greater behind-the-scenes leverage.</p>
<p id="lCN12I">For <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/14/biden-middle-east-plan-gaza-hamas-israel-netanyahu/">those who wish Washington</a> would put more pressure on Jerusalem to stop the killing, this raises a fundamental question: Would <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump" data-source="encore">President Donald Trump</a> have done anything differently?</p>
<p id="9sUFIx">The answer is almost certainly yes. Biden has put only inconsistent pressure on Israel; Trump would have put none.</p>
<p id="ZILkmF">Everything we know about the former president, from his extensive policy record on the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18079996/israel-palestine-conflict-guide-explainer" data-source="encore">Israeli-Palestinian conflict</a> to his top advisers’ statements on the war, suggests he would have no qualms about aligning himself completely with Israel’s far-right government. While Biden has pushed Israel behind the scenes on issues like food and medical aid to civilians — with some limited success — it’s hard to imagine Trump even lifting a finger in defense of Gazan civilians whom he wants to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/16/us/politics/trump-gaza-refugees-travel-ban.html">ban from entering the United States</a>.</p>
<p id="AqC8GD">The Israeli right understands this and pines for Trump. In <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/the-israeli-firebrand-driving-netanyahu-further-to-the-right-dd9e8113">an early February interview</a> with the Wall Street Journal, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made his views quite clear.</p>
<p id="UKRCn1">“Instead of giving us his full backing, Biden is busy with giving humanitarian aid and fuel [to Gaza], which goes to <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/10/10/23911661/hamas-israel-war-gaza-palestine-explainer" data-source="encore">Hamas</a>,” Ben-Gvir said. “If Trump was in power, the U.S. conduct would be completely different.”</p>
<p id="vbqcUV">Expert observers have a similar take. In a recent New Republic essay <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/179129/biden-netanyahu-foreign-policy-error?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter">lambasting Biden’s Gaza policy</a>, two former high-level officials — American David Rothkopf and Israeli Alon Pinkas — argue that the difference between him and Trump is still massive.</p>
<p id="DOzIFX">“Whatever our critique of the Biden administration’s Israel-Gaza policy to date, the only hope of undoing recent mistakes and achieving positive results lies with maintaining America’s current leadership,” they argue. “Donald Trump, as we have both written elsewhere, would be many times worse, many times more accommodating to the extremist elements in <a href="https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-gaza-war-history" data-source="encore">Netanyahu</a>’s government.”</p>
<p id="4qUgBC">This is not meant as a bank-shot defense of Biden. The current president should not be judged by the standards of his predecessor; there’s far more he could have done, and could still do, to help pull Israel’s government off its <a href="https://www.vox.com/24055522/israel-hamas-gaza-war-strategy-netanyahu-strategy-morality">deadly and self-destructive path</a>.</p>
<p id="4K7Pbt">But with one of these two men almost certain to be inaugurated next January, it’s worth being clear-eyed about their actual policy differences. And the truth is this: Biden is a traditional pro-Israel American centrist, while Trump has openly and publicly aligned himself with the Israeli right wing. Those are two very different worldviews that would yield very different <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy" data-source="encore">policies</a>.</p>
<p id="OeHqvZ">In fact, they already have.</p>
<h3 id="qPedXk">“The most pro-Israel president ever”</h3>
<p id="UbLrKV">Donald Trump loves deals — and an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement would be “the deal of the century,” as he’s fond of saying. <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/28/15074816/trump-israel-policy-obama">Early in his administration</a>, it seemed like that might cause him to climb down from the hardline pro-Israel positions he had outlined on the campaign trail. After all, you can’t get to a deal if you’re only talking to one side.</p>
<p id="Gjdo8E">But getting Palestinians to the table would have required a more even-handed policy than what Trump — the self-described <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/isreal-new-ambassador-united-states/2021/01/23/a9d76aec-5d0a-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html">most pro-Israel president ever</a> — pursued. There is a reason Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/29/israeli-zeal-for-second-trump-term-matched-by-palestinian-enmity">all-but-openly campaigned for Trump against Biden in 2020</a>. American policy in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/trump-administration" data-source="encore">Trump administration</a> was a laundry list of gifts to the Israeli right: </p>
<ul>
<li id="l806GZ">Drafting a “peace plan” with zero Palestinian input that would have, if implemented, actually ended the possibility <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2020/1/28/21111890/trump-israel-palestine-peace-plan-deal-century-apartheid">for a real Palestinian state</a>.</li>
<li id="mRl2Px">
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/world/middleeast/palestinians-israel-uae-annexation-peace.html">Cutting Palestinians out of the negotiations</a> over the so-called Abraham Accords, realizing the longstanding Israeli goal of severing diplomatic progress with Arab states from progress towards a sovereign Palestine. </li>
<li id="erl5dM">Recognizing Israeli sovereignty <a href="https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-recognizing-golan-heights-part-state-israel/">over the Golan Heights</a>, disputed territory with Syria taken during the 1967 Six-Day War.</li>
<li id="Ioarr6">Shutting off funding <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/10/unrwa-limps-forward-after-years-of-trump-administration-pressure">for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees</a> (which <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/world/middleeast/biden-aid-palestinians.html">Biden almost immediately restored</a> and then <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-wont-restart-unrwa-aid-until-investigation-completed-officials-2024-02-09/">temporarily suspended</a> again amid a scandal about its employees <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/16/middleeast/israel-allegations-unrwa-october-7-intl/index.html">participating in October 7</a>).</li>
<li id="ZuVzgr">Abandoning the decades-old US position that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-administration-says-israels-west-bank-settlements-do-not-violate-international-law/2019/11/18/38cdbb96-0a39-11ea-bd9d-c628fd48b3a0_story.html">West Bank settlements are a key barrier to a peace agreement</a> and eliminating <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN27D23W/#:~:text=The%20Trump%20administration%20last%20year,%22inconsistent%20with%20international%20law%22.">longstanding restrictions</a> on spending US taxpayer dollars in them.</li>
<li id="1tAmiu">Moving <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/5/14/17340798/jerusalem-embassy-israel-palestinians-us-trump">the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem</a> while closing the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/biden-promised-reopen-jerusalem-consulate-trump-closed-can-rcna4539">US mission to Palestine in the same city</a>. </li>
</ul>
<p id="JimiRt">These are not “normal” positions, the sort you expect any president to take given the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in American politics. Many of them were directly at odds with the longstanding bipartisan consensus in US policymaking, one which attempted to balance support for Israel with trying to maintain the US position as a potential mediator in credible peace talks. The Biden team has <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0163660X.2021.1934999">largely tried to return to this traditional position</a> where it could, even as it worked to <a href="https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/us-vs-china-tensions-indo-pacific-alliance-asia-security/">deprioritize Middle East diplomacy</a> prior to October 7.</p>
<p id="ziRaEA">This track record gives us suggests that Trump does not approach Israel like other issues. Neither his dealmaker bravado nor his transactional approach to other alliances like NATO tempered his hardline support for Netanyahu and the Israeli right while in office. To make the case that he would have handled the Gaza war differently, one would need to show some reason to believe Trump would break with his established pattern.</p>
<p id="gS9vXQ">And there isn’t one.</p>
<h3 id="bSBd6Z">Why Trump’s Gaza policy would (still) be more hawkish than Biden’s</h3>
<p id="TQ0Usv">Trump’s Israel-Palestine policy, per accounts like <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/10/trump-israel-gaza-war/">this one from the Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker</a>, was largely the product of delegation. Uninterested in the details, he outsourced policy formulation to aides. While Trump has said relatively little about the Gaza war since October 7, these influential aides have been quite vocal. And they have attacked Biden from the right.</p>
<p id="3bE3UA">Chief among these deputies was son-in-law Jared Kushner. In a public appearance at Harvard in February, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/10/trump-israel-gaza-war/">he expressed outright opposition</a> to Biden’s current push for a Palestinian state as part of any postwar settlement.</p>
<p id="c3jDxR">“Giving them a Palestinian state is basically a reinforcement of, ‘We’re going to reward you for bad actions,’” Kushner said. “You have to show terrorists that they will not be tolerated, that we will take strong action.”</p>
<p id="wX3Ikf">Trump’s ambassador to Israel, noted hardliner David Friedman, went even further — accusing the Biden team of “<a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/trumps-ex-ambassador-to-israel-biden-hampering-israel-war-effort-against-hamas/">hampering the war effort</a>” by pressuring Israel to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/12/07/1217979401/israel-pushes-back-as-the-biden-administration-pressures-it-to-spare-gaza-civili">limit the civilian casualty toll of its bombing campaign</a>. “At no time [while I was ambassador] did the United States put any handcuffs or limitations on Israel’s ability to respond,” he added in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news station.</p>
<p id="vc9hcW">And Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s special envoy for Middle East policy, <a href="https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/385035">blasted the Biden administration's decision</a> to impose sanctions on violent <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080034/west-bank-israel-palestinians" data-source="encore">West Bank</a> settlers as “wrong and deceptive.” He also claimed to be “shocked that the State Department was investigating the possibility of declaring an independent Palestinian state,” a decision he termed “terribly harmful and dangerous.”</p>
<p id="sw2Vgp">The key decision-makers in the last Trump administration have repudiated the handful of Biden decisions that peace advocates can actually approve of: his quiet pressure on Israel to limit harm to civilians, his diplomacy aimed at improving the postwar future, and his willingness to put sanctions on Israeli settlers. </p>
<p id="tOI8Cn">By contrast, Trump’s advisers have praised the elements of Biden’s policy that his left-wing critics most reject: the president’s public and full-throated support for the Israeli war effort.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yAn6ndzXWwEDe-eBF29HkzHYUfg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25306549/1241895585.jpg">
<cite>Maya Alleruzzo/Pool/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>US President Joe Biden and Israeli President Isaac Herzog pose for a picture with children waving the American and Israeli flags upon his arrival to the presidential residence in Jerusalem on July 14, 2022.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="31dw76">“While I have been, and remain, deeply critical of the Biden Administration, the moral, tactical, diplomatic and military support that it has provided Israel over the past few days has been exceptional,” <a href="https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1712439204284637296">Friedman wrote on October 12</a>. “As one living in Jerusalem with children who are Israeli citizens, I am deeply grateful. I pray that American support continues in the difficult days ahead.”</p>
<p id="KRtREF">There is no sign that Trump plans to pick a different kind of adviser or reject his previous positions. When Trump made one stray negative comment about Netanyahu in October, seemingly a product of sour grapes about the Israeli prime minister recognizing Biden’s 2020 victory, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-netanyahu-israel-2024-primary-criticism-7fb4181b664bb28408ff92b8e5565ced">the former president walked back his criticism the next day</a>.</p>
<p id="2uwq01">Again: Biden’s position over the course of this war is entirely fair game for criticism. Palestinians feel betrayed by him, as do many Arab and Muslim American voters, and it’s hard to fault them for that.</p>
<p id="HDY5n3">Biden has, for example, built up a huge reservoir of goodwill among Israelis, to the point where he’s actually <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-major-shift-survey-finds-israelis-prefer-biden-to-trump-as-next-us-president/">more popular there than both Trump and Netanyahu</a>. Yet several experts have told me that he’s bafflingly unwilling to cash in this support, to tell Israelis the truth about <a href="https://www.vox.com/24055522/israel-hamas-gaza-war-strategy-netanyahu-strategy-morality">their government’s horrific mismanagement of the war</a> and to put pressure for a just and swift resolution.</p>
<p id="dW7DVQ">But it’s one thing to say Biden is falling short, and another thing entirely to say he’s not meaningfully different than Trump would have been. Every piece of evidence we have suggests he would be — and that this difference could matter a great deal to the future of America’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</p>
https://www.vox.com/policy/24072983/biden-trump-palestinians-israel-gaza-policy-differentZack Beauchamp2024-02-20T06:00:00-05:002024-02-20T06:00:00-05:00How Israel’s war went wrong
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Y3-olHxV_noOPrFH1DyyY6ugS2M=/240x0:1680x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73151087/AP24042387102851.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Israeli soldiers drive a tank on the border with the Gaza Strip on February 11, 2024. | Ariel Schalit/AP Photo</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The conflict in Gaza has become “an era-defining catastrophe.” It’s increasingly clear what — and who — is to blame.</p> <p id="aD7ihF">At the end of November, Israeli reporter Yuval Abraham broke one of the most important stories of the war in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080046/gaza-palestine-israel" data-source="encore">Gaza</a> to date — <a href="https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/">an inside look at the disturbing reasoning that has led the Israeli military</a> to kill so many civilians. </p>
<p id="Ip2FIj">Citing conversations with “seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community,” Abraham reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had changed its doctrine to permit far greater civilian casualties than it would have tolerated in previous wars. IDF leadership was greenlighting strikes on civilian targets like apartment buildings and public infrastructure that they knew would kill scores of innocent Gazans.</p>
<p id="SHqoII">“In one case,” Abraham reported, “the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.”</p>
<p id="z4mIje">Abraham’s reporting showed, in granular detail, the ways that this war would not be like others: that Israel, so grievously wounded by Hamas on October 7, would go to extraordinarily violent lengths to destroy the group responsible for that day’s atrocities. In doing so, it would commit atrocities of its own. </p>
<p id="M5JIbN">At least <a href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-02-12-2024-4ade5edf47711c6b0c13d1380980de2b">28,000 Palestinians</a> are already confirmed dead, with more likely lying in the rubble. Around <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-destruction-bombing-israel-aa528542">70 percent of Gaza’s homes</a> have been damaged or destroyed; at least <a href="https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15564.doc.htm#:~:text=A%20staggering%2085%20per%20cent,proposing%20that%20Palestinians%20should%20be">85 percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced</a>. The indirect death toll from starvation and disease will likely be higher. One academic estimate suggested <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/29/health-organisations-disease-gaza-population-outbreaks-conflict">that nearly 500,000 Palestinians will die within a year</a> unless the war is brought to a halt, reflecting both the physical damage to Gaza’s infrastructure and the consequences of Israel’s decision to besiege Gaza on day three of the war. (While the siege has been relaxed somewhat, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/11/middleeast/why-only-a-trickle-of-aid-is-getting-into-gaza-mime-intl/index.html">limitations on aid flow remain strict</a>.)</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"><div class="c-image-grid">
<div class="c-image-grid__item"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MZCfD_0mUDOT_LHsZxv3R87JzxU=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25289630/GettyImages_2001849490.jpg">
<cite>Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A girl pushes a cart loaded with a jerrycan while walking past the rubble of a building that was destroyed during Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on February 14, 2024.</figcaption>
</figure>
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<div class="c-image-grid__item"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Yeds1PnVezz7CjNEwS__Siic1c0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25289634/GettyImages_2002936349.jpg">
<cite>Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Displaced Palestinians stand outside their tents in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on February 14, 2024.</figcaption>
</figure>
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</div></div>
<p id="E3Osi3">The Israeli government describes civilian death as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of waging a war to eliminate Hamas. But as of right now, that goal is still very far away — and may ultimately prove to be impossible.</p>
<p id="F8w0kb">There’s no doubt that the IDF has done significant damage to Hamas's infrastructure. Israel has killed or captured somewhere around <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-rcna132421">one-third of Hamas’s fighting force</a>, destroyed<a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-28/ty-article/.premium/ahead-of-hostage-summit-idf-presses-in-khan-yunis-and-engages-in-tunnel-warfare/0000018d-4c91-d35c-a39f-eedb64220000"> at least half of its rocket stockpile</a>, and demolished somewhere between <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-28/ty-article/report-80-percent-of-gaza-strips-tunnel-network-still-intact/0000018d-4fab-d35c-a39f-effbcb0a0000">20 and 40 percent of its tunnel network under Gaza</a>. The more the war goes on, the higher those numbers will become.</p>
<p id="sNJXIA">But as significant as these achievements are, “none of them come close to eliminating Hamas,” says <a href="https://www.csis.org/people/daniel-byman">Dan Byman</a>, a professor at Georgetown who studies Israeli counterterrorism policy. </p>
<p id="LWC4n2">The group, he explains, has “very deep roots in Gaza” — ones that could only be permanently removed if Israel had a good plan for a postwar political arrangement in Gaza. Yet at present, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-puts-political-survival-ahead-of-tough-decisions-on-gaza-783cb8e6?mod=world_feat2_middle-east_pos3">Israel still has no plan at all</a>. With <a href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-palestinians-opinion-poll-wartime-views-a0baade915619cd070b5393844bc4514#:~:text=Despite%20the%20devastation%2C%2057%25%20of,October%20attack%2C%20the%20poll%20indicated.">support for Hamas rising</a> in reaction to Israeli brutality, Israel runs a real risk of actually <em>strengthening</em> the terrorist group’s political position in the long run.</p>
<p id="L7jcy3">A world where hundreds of thousands of Gazans suffer and only Hamas benefits is the worst of all possible worlds. Yet it is increasingly looking like a likely one. </p>
<p id="F0zzkl">How did we get here?</p>
<p id="kdgtWs">The truth is that this nightmare was depressingly predictable. When I surveyed <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/10/20/23919946/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-ground-invasion-strategy">over a dozen experts about the war back in October</a>, they warned that Israel had a dangerously loose understanding of what the war was about. The stated aim of “destroying Hamas” was at once maximalist and open-ended: It wasn’t clear how it could be accomplished or what limit there might be on the means used in its pursuit.</p>
<p id="jhK2o3">Israel’s conduct in the war so far has vindicated these fears. The embrace of an objective at once so massive and vague has dragged Israel down the moral nadir documented in Abraham’s reporting, with unclear and perhaps even self-defeating ends. It is a situation that <a href="https://internationalpolicy.org/about/#staff__meet_our_team">Matt Duss</a>, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, terms “an era-defining catastrophe.” </p>
<p id="wwyqAL">Things did not have to be this way. After the horrific events of October 7, Israel had an obviously just claim to wage a defensive war against Hamas — and the tactical and strategic capabilities to execute <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/10/20/23919946/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-ground-invasion-strategy">a smarter, more limited, and more humane war plan</a>. </p>
<p id="OTcLyQ">The blame for this failure lies with Israel’s terrible wartime leadership: an extremist government headed by <a href="https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-gaza-war-history">Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu</a>, a venal prime minister <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/4/netanyahu-corruption-trial-to-resume">currently on trial for corruption</a> who has placed his personal interests over his country’s even during wartime.</p>
<p id="utGn0g">“You couldn’t have had a worse government to respond to a worse moment,” says <a href="https://polisci.ucla.edu/person/dov-waxman/">Dov Waxman</a>, the director of UCLA’s Center for Israel Studies. “People like to separate the war from the government that’s running it, but I think you can’t.”</p>
<p id="SZuHcA">It’s not too late for Israel to try something different.</p>
<p id="iBs9YC">While Netanyahu won’t change course voluntarily, both Israeli voters and the <a href="https://www.vox.com/joe-biden" data-source="encore">Biden administration</a> have significant leverage over their policies. Their combined pressure might produce either a change in policy or a change in government, pulling Israel away from the abyss.</p>
<p id="lF7XKB">And in the longer run, a postwar Israel might <a href="https://www.vox.com/23954323/return-of-liberal-zionism-israel">begin reckoning with the deeply mistaken assumptions</a> behind its terrible policy — and, in doing so, transform the future of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18079996/israel-palestine-conflict-guide-explainer" data-source="encore">Israel-Palestine conflict</a>.</p>
<h3 id="36LICL">The inevitability of atrocity</h3>
<p id="df3Kts">Michael Walzer is the world’s greatest living military ethicist. His 1977 book <em>Just and Unjust Wars</em> is <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/">the seminal modern text</a> in what’s called “just war theory,” the branch of political philosophy dedicated to examining when and how war can be waged ethically. Whether one agrees with it or not, his work is the baseline by which all other work in the field is judged and has influenced law and policy around the world.</p>
<p id="OIFuMo">On the American left, Walzer is also known as one of Israel’s most famous defenders. In <a href="https://fathomjournal.org/1967-remembering-the-six-day-war/">a 2017 essay</a>, he describes <em>Just and Unjust Wars </em>as<em> </em>the outgrowth of his <a href="https://fathomjournal.org/1967-remembering-the-six-day-war/">attempt to reconcile</a> his opposition to the Vietnam War with his support for Israel’s 1967 war against its Arab neighbors. After October 7, he has repeatedly defended Israel’s right to defend itself and put the majority of the moral blame for human suffering on Hamas. “Israel’s military response to the atrocities of October 7th is a just and necessary war,” <a href="https://quillette.com/2023/12/01/gaza-and-the-asymmetry-trap/">he wrote in December</a>.</p>
<p id="yb8YCH">Yet when we spoke in early February, Walzer was far more critical of Israel’s war effort than I expected. </p>
<p id="suG7yr">“Israel has created new conditions on the ground [that] made it virtually impossible to continue the war” ethically, he told me. “I am hoping for a kind of ceasefire.”</p>
<p id="LlnVm6">Walzer is referring to the geography of the fighting. When Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza, it concentrated the fighting in the northern Gaza Strip — instructing Palestinian civilians to flee to the south to stay out of harm’s way. But today, Israel is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/11/world/middleeast/netanyahu-rafah-gaza-israel-hamas.html">threatening a major ground offensive</a> in the southern city of Rafah, where huge numbers of Palestinian civilians have fled with nowhere else to go. For Walzer, Israel cannot wage war justly when Gazan civilians truly cannot escape.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Palestinians inspect the damage to residential buildings in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZOqiJ2LmQX7htuxfHDqfBGV334Q=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25289604/AP24043351816479.jpg">
<cite>Fatima Shbair/AP Photo</cite>
<figcaption>Palestinians inspect the damage to residential buildings in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on February 12, 2024.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="s6yLsb">But Walzer also pointed to a deeper moral problem with Israel’s seemingly impossible objective of destroying Hamas.</p>
<p id="vAKBTi">Generally, just war theorists believe that war cannot be ethically waged without having “reasonable prospects for success.” The logic is intuitive: War inevitably involves a lot of killing, and killing can only be justified if it accomplishes a greater good. If the objective behind the killing is impossible (or extremely implausible), then there is no greater good to be won from the bloodshed.</p>
<p id="GvD99Q">Walzer believes that many Israelis, traumatized by the events of October 7, did not fully appreciate how intermingled Hamas — the de facto government of Gaza — was with Gazan society. It’s an organization made up of not only tens of thousands of fighters, but also many civilian functionaries and a vast physical infrastructure. Truly destroying such an entity cannot reasonably be accomplished through force of arms alone — at least not without a yearslong military campaign and an unthinkable amount of civilian death. </p>
<p id="5hp2a0">Some Israelis are beginning to acknowledge this reality. In January, Gadi Eisenkot — a senior minister in Israel’s wartime Cabinet — <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/19/israeli-minister-says-only-ceasefire-can-free-hostages-as-cabinet-rift-deepens">declared that</a> “whoever speaks of absolute defeat [of Hamas] is not speaking the truth,” and that Israeli hostages in Gaza could only be brought home as part of a ceasefire deal. A <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-idf-intel-assesses-that-hamas-will-survive-as-terror-group-post-war/">classified Israeli military intelligence assessment</a>, reported by Israel’s Channel 12 news station, predicts that Hamas will persist as a terrorist organization even if Israel destroys much of its more conventional military capabilities.</p>
<p id="pde6wo">“It was when they grasped the extent of the embeddedness and the tunnel city that they realized that was not a possible goal and therefore not a just goal,” Walzer says, speaking of his contacts in Israel. “The goal as stated on October 8 wasn’t wrong because we [outside Gaza] were so ignorant of what Hamas had become.”</p>
<p id="AQuTyV">Walzer may be judging Israel’s leadership a bit too leniently. Hamas’s deep entrenchment in Gaza was well-known prior to the war and was part of the reason previous Israeli governments had opted not to destroy the militant group. But Walzer is correct that the nature of the objective shapes the war’s morality — even down to the kinds of tactics Israel was willing to employ.</p>
<p id="fs7xxb">In previous wars with Hamas, Israel’s primary objective had been degrading Hamas’s military capabilities and deterring it from attacking Israel in the near future. These are relatively limited aims that can be accomplished through more discriminate military means. Israel didn’t need to destroy every Hamas rocket launcher or kill every commander — but rather do just enough damage to buy itself some safety.</p>
<p id="fmVjLm">“If your war aim is complete destruction of your adversary, then the military advantage of every strike increases because it’s a greater contribution to that aim,” says <a href="https://law.rutgers.edu/directory/view/adhaque">Adil Haque</a>, a professor who studies the law and ethics of war at Rutgers University. “Given the physical layout of Gaza, you’re already setting yourself on a path toward killing tens of thousands of civilians.” </p>
<p id="vVnX94">A significant level of civilian death is inevitable in urban warfare, and especially in Gaza given Hamas’s despicable tactic of stationing military assets in and around <a href="https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-road-to-october-7-hamas-long-game-clarified/">schools</a> and <a href="https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/10/23/the-real-gaza-hospital-crisis/">hospitals</a>. The IDF is facing a profoundly challenging operating environment with few true historical parallels.</p>
<p id="ezzOQo">Yet this does not absolve Israel of its decision to adopt a maximalist war aim or the unusually brutal tactics that followed from it. These were choices Israeli leaders made — and they were the wrong ones.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/j1tutZUkpGcOxmGdLl0mad_35Tc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25289650/GettyImages_2001841269.jpg">
<cite>Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Men walk through the rubble of a mosque that was destroyed during Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on February 14, 2024.</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<h3 id="UjOGbw">The damning failure to plan for war’s end</h3>
<p id="pJsnOf"><a href="https://www.rand.org/about/people/c/cohen_raphael_s.html">Lt. Col. Raphael Cohen</a> is no one’s idea of a dove. As a US Army military intelligence officer, Cohen served two tours of combat duty in Iraq at the height of the anti-American insurgency. Now a reserve officer, he spends his days running a program on military strategy and doctrine at the RAND Institute. He has publicly argued that the reality on the ground in Gaza left Israel <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/13/israel-hamas-war-gaza-idf-palestinians-civilians-hostages-tunnels-human-shields/">with little choice</a> but to engage in the kind of war that it’s currently waging.</p>
<p id="ouzmvW">Yet there’s one area where Cohen’s review of Israel’s conduct is quite harsh: its lack of planning for the day after the war.</p>
<p id="sqe8k1">“They need to take the non-lethal side of the operation seriously,” he told me in late January. “If you don’t get the postwar planning right, whatever tactical gains you get are going to be fleeting.”</p>
<p id="61kFVS">In the outlines offered by Israeli leadership early in the war, “destroying Hamas” could only be accomplished by replacing its regime in Gaza with something new and durable. In October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/gallant-says-after-hamas-vanquished-israel-will-seek-new-security-regime-in-gaza/">said this explicitly</a> — that the war must end with the “creation of a new security regime in the Gaza Strip [and] the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip.”</p>
<p id="HDVtDH">Regime change is the <em>only</em> conceivable way Israel could deliver on its long-shot objective of destroying Hamas. Yet, shockingly, Israel has no clear plan for what comes next. Every source I spoke to with knowledge of Israeli planning confirmed this; so <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-gaza-strip-settlers-1.7098854">does</a> a <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/podcasts/2024-02-06/ty-article-podcast/if-we-dont-offer-an-alternative-to-chaos-in-gaza-well-end-up-with-hamas-rule-again/0000018d-7eaa-d6dc-ab9f-7fff5ee50000">volume</a> of <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-idf-intel-assesses-that-hamas-will-survive-as-terror-group-post-war/">publicly</a> available <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-02-16/ty-article/.premium/netanyahus-total-victory-is-a-political-slogan-not-a-realistic-goal/0000018d-adae-d070-a7fd-ffae37c80000">reporting</a> and some recent comments from <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-02-15/ty-article/u-s-arab-countries-to-present-timeline-to-palestinian-state-and-plan-for-post-war-gaza/0000018d-ac49-d221-af9f-efe94e450000">Netanyahu spokesperson Avi Hyman</a>.</p>
<p id="LICkht">“All discussions about the day after Hamas will be had the day after Hamas,” Hyman said during a press briefing.</p>
<p id="0wYHH0">For quite some time after the war began, Israel refused to even conceive of a postwar plan. Some sources told me that preparations are getting underway, but there are still no firm conclusions nor any clear route to them. Netanyahu has publicly rejected an American proposal to place the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by the moderate Fatah faction based in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080034/west-bank-israel-palestinians" data-source="encore">West Bank</a>, in charge of Gaza after the war. He has offered no alternative in its place.</p>
<p id="886ZSB">Without a postwar plan, Israel risks something worse than failing to defeat Hamas: bolstering it.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="LEBANON-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-PROTEST" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3flCR-QPoSq4tqDqz_DHLvZ3e4I=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25289975/1734759384.jpg">
<cite>Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Masked men wearing Hamas headgear at a demonstration in Beirut on October 20, 2023.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="IHUllT">According to <a href="https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/devorah-margolin">Devorah Margolin</a>, an expert on Hamas at the center-right Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the entire point of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907683/israel-hamas-war-news-updates-october-2023" data-source="encore">October 7 attack</a> was to provoke a massive Israeli response. Handbooks and guidance sheets discovered on killed and captured Hamas fighters revealed instructions to be graphically, sadistically violent — instructions we know <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html">were fully carried out</a>.</p>
<p id="mRm3xp">“The goal of that [ultraviolence] was to create a visceral response from Israel that would be seen as so disproportionate that the violence it carried out on October 7 was pushed to the side, and that Israel would be seen as the irrational actor,” she tells me. “In that sense, I think they actually succeeded.”</p>
<p id="1uCldD">In the long run, making Israel look like the depraved side serves two strategic goals for Hamas. First, it puts the Palestinian issue back at the top of the Arab and international political agenda. Second, it convinces Palestinians that Israel must be fought with arms — and that Hamas, rather than the more peace-oriented Fatah, should be leading their struggle. Polling data both <a href="https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/961">in Palestine</a> and <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/how-israel-hamas-war-gaza-changing-arab-views">elsewhere</a> suggest that they have made inroads on both fronts since October 7.</p>
<p id="I29KRn">By inflicting mass suffering on Palestinians without a long-term plan for addressing the political consequences of their misery, Israel is playing right into Hamas’s hands. The current Israeli approach is less likely to destroy the militant group than to strengthen it.</p>
<h3 id="RdYLva">Blame Bibi</h3>
<p id="01Dz4w"><a href="https://www.brookings.edu/people/natan-sachs/">Natan Sachs</a> is the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution — making him, more or less, the leading Israel expert at one of Washington’s leading nonpartisan think tanks. Few people outside of Israel know the country’s politics better than he does.</p>
<p id="PoaBV3">When I spoke with Sachs in February, he told me that the mood in Israel “remains extremely grim and extremely vulnerable.” Israel’s war reflects a public that remains traumatized by October 7 and is convinced that they can only be protected by inflicting maximum destruction on Israel’s enemies.</p>
<p id="76D2Z4">Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is intentionally stoking the fury. “Responsible leadership would not only channel the anger and the need for prevention in the future,” he says. “It would also try to shape public expectations about what the future might be.”</p>
<p id="GLOGI0">This behavior is even worse than it sounds. Netanyahu is stoking war fervor without engaging in any serious planning for the postwar environment. It’s clear, both from speaking with knowledgeable observers and reading the Israeli press, that Netanyahu’s government is at the heart of this essential gap.</p>
<p id="RAiRZG">“When you talk to the IDF folks, their issue is like any military’s — they follow the guidance they’re given from politicians, and there is no clear guidance,” Cohen tells me. “They feel hamstrung because they can’t get out too far ahead of where the government is.”</p>
<p id="1AvdJH">Discontent with Netanyahu from inside the military is starting to go public. In late January, Defense Minister Gallant <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-puts-political-survival-ahead-of-tough-decisions-on-gaza-783cb8e6?mod=world_feat2_middle-east_pos3">warned that</a> “political indecision may harm the progress of the military operation” — suggesting that the government is shirking its duty to “discuss the plan … and determine the goal.” </p>
<p id="G6ShBf">Why is Netanyahu refusing to do his job? The most likely explanation is crass politics.</p>
<p id="s2TT5j">The prime minister’s ongoing corruption trial is very serious, with a conviction potentially leading to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/world/middleeast/netanyahu-corruption-charges-israel.html">an extended stay behind bars</a>. His primary <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-puts-political-survival-ahead-of-tough-decisions-on-gaza-783cb8e6?mod=world_feat2_middle-east_pos3">motivation</a> is staying in office and using that power to keep out of prison, which requires keeping his government together. As a result, his far-right coalition partners in the Religious Zionism faction — who oppose any Palestinian political control over Gaza and want to rebuild Israeli settlements there — have extraordinary influence over his decision-making.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="ISRAEL-POLITICS-ECONOMY" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gLKmjyV6lBJQlGQiotSuyD83Iy8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25289973/1257512457.jpg">
<cite>Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Benjamin Netanyahu with far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir last May.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="SLfqjb">To avoid crossing the far right, Netanyahu won’t allow for any serious planning for the war’s end. The necessary parts of any plan — adopting a concrete and achievable vision for victory and a realistic vision for a postwar order — would necessarily infuriate Religious Zionists and likely cause them to quit the coalition, thus throwing the country to new elections that Netanyahu will likely lose. The prime minister is very literally putting his own interests above the nation’s — something that Sachs says “wouldn’t be the case with many other [Israeli] leaders.”</p>
<p id="H1zw7p">“This specific individual,” he adds, “is a constant politician — even in the worst of times.”</p>
<p id="XEkoSP">Of course, pinpointing the roots of Israeli failures isn’t quite that simple. Israelis across the political spectrum immediately called for “destroying” Hamas in the wake of October 7, an understandable response to the day’s horror. Polling shows that the public is deeply divided on what the postwar political order in Gaza should look like, with <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/majority-of-israelis-oppose-annexation-resettlement-of-gaza-poll/">no single option commanding majority support</a>. Israelis are still traumatized and adrift, confident only that a return to the prewar status quo isn’t an option.</p>
<p id="3nZPBX">But, as Sachs pointed out, it’s not a leader’s job to follow public opinion but rather to mold it. A moment when people are scared and uncertain, where the old security paradigm seems broken and no new one has emerged to replace it, is exactly the kind of time where leaders with vision can convince the public to follow them toward a better future.</p>
<p id="veudGa">“Every question about Israel’s response has to be considered in light of the members of this government, and particularly Netanyahu’s dependence on the far right,” says Waxman, the UCLA professor.</p>
<p id="jW5be9">So if “Blame Bibi” is an oversimplification, it’s not much of one. At its heart, the war has gone badly because the man leading it is not up to the task. So long as his government remains in power, the odds of Israel climbing out of its moral and strategic nadir are negligible.</p>
<h3 id="2wdTiK">Can things get better?</h3>
<p id="DuHqOl"><a href="https://arabcenterdc.org/team/dana-el-kurd/">Dana El Kurd</a> is a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington and a leading expert on Palestinian politics. When we talked about the scale of suffering in Gaza, the pain in her voice was palpable. “There’s not even words I can put to it,” she told me.</p>
<p id="Y7gquY">Despite this, she managed to have some empathy for Israelis — and warn that their current approach isn’t going to make anything better for them. Based on everything she knows about the internal political dynamics of Palestine, continued mass killing will only empower its violent radicals in the long run.</p>
<p id="YqjXvF">“I totally understand the shock of the October 7 moment, and what it might have meant to Israelis who thought they were immune,” she tells me. But making [Gaza] uninhabitable...is not going to resolve the conflict.”</p>
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<cite>Fatima Shbair/AP Photo</cite>
<figcaption>Palestinian children are silhouetted on a damaged tent following an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on February 12, 2024.</figcaption>
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<figcaption>Palestinians inspect damage to residential buildings in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on February 12, 2024.</figcaption>
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<p id="NNLUzL">The first step for things getting better is for Israel to take what El Kurd is saying seriously — and fundamentally revise its war aims accordingly.</p>
<p id="csonWy">Israel could do this by committing to a version of the American proposal for the PA to take over Gaza, reorienting its strategy around laying the groundwork for PA entry. The PA has its flaws — it is both demonstrably <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/palestinian-authority-gaza-hamas/675695/">corrupt</a> and <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/abbas-is-americas-man">authoritarian</a> — but it is at least credibly committed to peace. And there is no real alternative: An international occupation of Gaza is <em>extremely </em>unlikely, and an indefinite Israeli occupation would be <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/10/20/23919946/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-ground-invasion-strategy">a disaster for Israelis and Palestinians alike</a>.</p>
<p id="XNFTl0">“The big thing is that something needs to replace Hamas in Gaza, and I think the Biden administration pushing the PA is appropriate,” Byman says. “God help us all, but this is the best we got.”</p>
<p id="QZnRg4">An alternative option is Israel abandoning its current hope for regime change in Gaza, instead seeking an indefinite ceasefire with Hamas in exchange for full release of the remaining Israeli hostages. This outcome would almost certainly leave Hamas in power. But it would stop a war that’s currently helping no one, allow for a flood of humanitarian aid to help Gazan civilians, and accomplish what <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/slim-majority-believes-return-of-hostages-should-be-primary-war-aim-in-gaza-poll/">a majority of Israelis now see as the primary war aim</a>, bringing the hostages home. </p>
<p id="j7vwxe">These approaches have their problems, but both are much better than the status quo. Yet Netanyahu has ruled them out, believing that his right flank would abandon him were he to take either option. This means one of two things has to happen: Netanyahu needs to be forced to hold elections or somehow pressured into changing policy.</p>
<p id="iUq3O4">Part of the pressure will inevitably come domestically. Israeli frustration with the government’s handling of the war, especially its inability to bring the hostages home, is rising. 2024 has seen <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/protesters-tel-aviv-call-change-netanyahu-government-2024-01-20/">some return to anti-government protests</a> that were common before the war (though currently at a much smaller scale).</p>
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<img alt="People hold signs saying “mothers cry stop the war bring them home” and “how many more lives.”" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/63vUbfB9rtZcrB_mbZNqkig1cbM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25289685/GettyImages_1993693379.jpg">
<cite>Saeed Qaq/Anadolu via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Relatives of Israeli hostages protest against Netanyahu’s government’s refusal to call a ceasefire and exchange hostages with Gaza, in Jerusalem on February 10, 2024.</figcaption>
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<p id="CqJ9Yu">Other forms of pressure should come from foreign powers — which is also already happening. A group of Arab states are drafting a proposal in which <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/11890426-0250-4a3c-ba48-d8523924eb9c">they offer to normalize diplomatic relations</a> with Israel in exchange for a ceasefire and “irreversible” moves toward a Palestinian state. The United States has issued a first-ever <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-02-07/ty-article/.premium/u-s-sanctions-on-extremist-settlers-put-israels-far-right-finance-minister-in-a-bind/0000018d-801b-d6dc-ab9f-cf7f01d60000">executive order sanctioning violent settlers in the West Bank</a> — an economic weapon that could easily be directed against the extremist ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet.</p>
<p id="9uRpoE">These efforts can and should be expanded, especially on the American side. President Biden’s early and loud support for Israel after October 7 has bought him extraordinary goodwill inside Israel, where he has <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-biden-more-popular-in-israel-than-almost-anywhere-else-poll-shows/">a roughly 68 percent approval rating</a>. His popularity vastly outstrips Netanyahu’s, which means that the prime minister’s current <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/01/19/biden-netanyahu-phone-frustration-gaza-war">antagonistic approach toward the White House</a> may be a political miscalculation.</p>
<p id="G4j7qC">But even if Netanyahu can be forced to change course — or simply forced out of power — the underlying problem will not be resolved. What is needed is not just a temporary peace, but a means to start addressing the roots of the conflict to ensure that the fighting doesn’t start up again.</p>
<p id="A8yMqk">“The main thing is that people aren’t trying to solve the conflict,” el-Kurd insists. “That’s why the conflict is ongoing.”</p>
<p id="d3R4jh">Any kind of real solution, then, aims at not just a temporary end to the fighting but resetting the fundamental dynamics of the conflict that brought us to such a terrible place.</p>
<p id="r5yWYS">“Out of a deal to secure the release of the hostages could become a lasting ceasefire. And out of a lasting ceasefire could become a political process leading to the creation of a Palestinian state,” says Waxman.</p>
<p id="Q35NTr">This is hard to imagine in the midst of war, with Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians surging and the two-state solution polling poorly among Israelis. But what’s true now may not continue to be true after the shooting stops. Aluf Benn, the editor of leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz, calls the period after October 7 “<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israels-netanyahu-self-destruction?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=pre_release&utm_campaign=&utm_content=20240207&utm_term=PressCFR%20and%20Member%20Press">a turning point</a>”: a moment where the traditional contours of politics have been called into question and it’s possible for things to go differently.</p>
<p id="mnpMGK">“It is up to Israelis to decide what kind of turning point it will be,” he writes in <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israels-netanyahu-self-destruction?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=pre_release&utm_campaign=&utm_content=20240207&utm_term=PressCFR%20and%20Member%20Press">Foreign Affairs</a>.</p>
<p id="GkRuQC">Benn is pessimistic that Israelis will take the opportunity to turn toward peace on their own. But there are also signs that <a href="https://www.vox.com/23954323/return-of-liberal-zionism-israel">the far right’s star is fading in Israel</a>. And with the rest of the world renewing its attention to the conflict, new ideas are starting to emerge. The Arab states’ decision to tie future normalization to a Palestinian state, together with at least some American willingness to put pressure on Israel to change course, are signs that fundamental assumptions are being challenged.</p>
<p id="FB9HQa">“The only silver lining of things being what they are is that, when they are so bad, people are actively thinking about making it better,” says <a href="https://carleton.ca/polisci/people/sucharov-mira/">Mira Sucharov</a>, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa.</p>
<p id="pWdpy0">That this passes for optimism is a testament to the grim reality on the ground. So many innocent people have already died, and more will die every day until the war ends. Nothing can bring them back to life. </p>
<p id="1v8nNm">But holding out some hope, even amid the darkness, is better than a descent into nihilism: a belief that Palestinians are defined by Hamas or Israelis by Netanyahu. They are not. We outsiders owe them faith that their basic decency can triumph.</p>
https://www.vox.com/24055522/israel-hamas-gaza-war-strategy-netanyahu-strategy-moralityZack Beauchamp2024-02-13T07:10:00-05:002024-02-13T07:10:00-05:00The moral and strategic case for arming Ukraine
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<img alt="Ukrainian border guards training in snow gear." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PQ7mgB616TXiDuSPU6UPzj3wL7M=/810x0:7622x5109/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73135409/1996774240.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Ukrainian border guards conduct training on patrolling the borderline in February. | Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Anadolu via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Congress should have approved Ukraine aid yesterday.</p> <p id="lq8hRo">As the Senate considered approving $61 billion to Ukraine this weekend, <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump" data-source="encore">Donald Trump</a> published an all-caps rant making his opposition clear.</p>
<p id="fKSEZ0">“FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, ARE YOU LISTENING U.S. SENATE(?), NO MONEY IN THE FORM OF FOREIGN AID SHOULD BE GIVEN TO ANY COUNTRY UNLESS IT IS DONE AS A LOAN,” he wrote <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/111908663705756439">on his Truth Social</a> platform on Friday.</p>
<p id="RPfUXR">The Senate rejected Trump’s order, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/us/politics/senate-ukraine-aid.html">passing the bill Tuesday morning 70-29</a>. But the bill still needs to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/11/us/republican-senators-ukraine-israel-bill.html">clear the Republican-controlled House</a>, where the former president’s influence has proven powerful in the past. Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson has <a href="https://twitter.com/SpeakerJohnson/status/1757210505570087039">already stated opposition to the Senate aid bill</a>.</p>
<p id="hquusX">Which makes now a good time to remind ourselves that the objections to Ukraine aid are absurd. </p>
<p id="Qq1Vxm">Supporting Ukraine’s defense is one of the single easiest foreign policy calls of my lifetime, a policy that has both protected Ukrainians from Russian slaughter and advanced America’s geopolitical interests in Europe. It has done so at a relatively low cost in dollars and zero cost in American lives. There is nothing to gain by abandoning it, and everything to lose.</p>
<p id="SI2MQT">Let’s start with the most basic point: <a href="https://www.vox.com/russia" data-source="encore">Russia</a>’s invasion of Ukraine was an act of evil. Since the war’s beginning, the Russian government and its propaganda outlets have openly announced that their war aim is to seize Ukrainian territory and subjugate its government to the Kremlin.</p>
<p id="YbwkYl">This was evident not just in words, like <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/08/tucker-carlson-putin-interview-released/">President Vladimir Putin’s recent interview with Tucker Carlson</a>, but also in deeds. The war began with a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/3/18/22977801/russia-ukraine-war-losing-map-kyiv-kharkiv-odessa-week-three">failed</a> lightning thrust targeting the Ukrainian capital in Kyiv, during which Russian forces engaged in horrific atrocities: <a href="https://www.vox.com/23020696/ukraine-russia-genocide-allegations">executing entire families</a> and <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/civilian-attacks-russia-ukraine-1.6958649">indiscriminately bombing populated areas</a>. </p>
<aside id="gaoVEA"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"vox_sentences"}'></div></aside><p id="r0adfD">There are many problems with the Ukrainian government. It is <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/politics-and-elections-on-pause-in-ukraine-for-war-298f0eb8">an imperfect democracy</a> whose <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/world/europe/zelensky-general-valery-zaluzhny-ukraine-military.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesworld">battlefield performance has worsened</a> as the war degenerated into a kind of stalemate. Its maximalist stated objective of winning all its territory back through force may very well be impossible. </p>
<p id="QiMJAZ">But the justice of its basic cause is unimpeachable. Ukraine is fighting a classic war of self-defense, a country protecting its people and its sovereignty from a large neighboring dictatorship that wishes to crush it.</p>
<p id="FuhGM2">And the success of Ukraine’s war hinges crucially on American support.</p>
<h3 id="6zpfZP">Why American aid is so important</h3>
<p id="3VpMFw">The United States, labeled “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, is playing that role again today. America is providing Ukraine with advanced weapons systems, like <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/6/4/23150697/how-ukraines-new-weapons-different-battlefield-russia-himars-nato">HIMARS mobile artillery</a>, and ammunition that neither the Ukrainians nor European allies can get to the field on their own in sufficient numbers.</p>
<p id="TWaSER">Currently, American funding has been effectively suspended due to the holdup in <a href="https://www.vox.com/congress" data-source="encore">Congress</a>. We can already see the consequences: Ukrainian fighters, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6594e548-8b2e-4c95-a589-7d9e358062d2">working with a third of the ammunition they need to fight</a>, being forced to retreat.</p>
<p id="nQKhTH">What happens if the aid dries up indefinitely? Vox’s Josh Keating <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/24002840/ukraine-russia-war-united-states-aid-volodymyr-zelensky-vladimir-putin-europe-congress-border">reported on this extensively</a>, and his sources painted a grim picture: </p>
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<p id="heaMRh">“A failure to supply military aid to Ukraine isn’t going to cause an immediate Russian victory, but it is going to change the character of the war,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a defense analyst with the Center for a New American Security who has made multiple research trips to the front lines in Ukraine. Gady said that while Ukraine’s military has traditionally been an “artillery dominant military force,” without shells for those guns, “they would likely start pursuing more asymmetric strategies. That is, withdrawing from certain sectors of the front lines into urban settlements, trying to draw Russian forces into urban combat.”</p>
<p id="jCdvRu">This scenario is … a grim prospect for Ukraine’s civilians. Urban combat always has an extremely high civilian death toll and given the heavy-handed tactics employed by the Russian military, the list of Ukrainian cities and towns entirely decimated by war — Mariupol, Bakhmut — would likely grow.</p>
</blockquote>
<p id="hr88Uq">Even if you see <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/173752/what-happened-biden-human-rights-agenda-modi">the US government as human rights hypocrites</a> or don’t believe protecting Ukrainian lives is America’s concern, the outcome of this war directly affects US interests.</p>
<p id="y6Y6R2">Currently, the fighting is mostly in Ukraine’s more rural eastern half. If it moves west, into the heart of Ukraine’s largest cities, it moves closer to nearby NATO treaty allies. The odds of a scary spillover incident — of a miscalculation that could trigger a wider war between Russia and the American-led alliance — would rise accordingly. </p>
<p id="ZguzZI">At present, the best way to limit the risk of war between nuclear-armed powers is to help Ukraine keep Russia physically further away from NATO borders. Continuing aid, by contrast, is unlikely to trigger a direct escalation between Russia and the United States — <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA2807-1.html">as the past two years of fighting have shown</a>.</p>
<h3 id="2UazGS">Global security is worth a lot more than $61 billion</h3>
<p id="aBJhXX">Again, it is unlikely that Ukraine will simply defeat Russia and win back all of its territories. The most likely scenario for the war’s end is — like most wars — negotiation.</p>
<p id="GdfuVk">But as in any negotiation, leverage matters. Political scientists often describe war as itself a process of bargaining, one in which it’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/War-Punishment-Causes-Termination-First/dp/0691049440">rational for states to continue fighting</a> until the balance of power between the two sides is clear. To bring about a settlement in which Russia’s aggression is punished rather than rewarded, Ukraine needs to be strong on the battlefield. </p>
<p id="L8y2KR">And if Russia is rewarded, it has an incentive to engage in more provocations on NATO’s frontier. A world where Ukraine is forced to the table by American abandonment is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/02/if-russia-wins/677398/">a vastly more dangerous one</a>.</p>
<p id="qijoNw">Sixty-one billion dollars sure sounds like a lot of money. But the amount it purchases — sovereignty for an embattled democracy, civilian safety from Russian massacres, and decreasing the odds of a terrifying wider war — is easily worth the price. For Congress to do anything but rush it through would be an appalling betrayal not just of Ukraine, but of America.</p>
<p id="VCmOJL"><em>This story appeared originally in </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast" data-source="encore"><em>Today, Explained</em></a><em>, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/today-explained-newsletter-signup"><em><strong>Sign up here for future editions</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/24070998/ukraine-war-russia-us-foreign-aid-trump-congressZack Beauchamp2024-01-27T07:00:29-05:002024-01-27T07:00:29-05:00Narendra Modi is celebrating his scary vision for India’s future
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<img alt="A silhouetted figure watches a tv screen. " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RPYdc82YPrTeEYhvKyJm8WywUn0=/342x0:5707x4024/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73089424/1943615522.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>People in Ayodhya watch Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Ram Mandir consecration ceremony on January 22, 2024. | Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>National festivities this week danced on Indian secularism’s grave — and pointed to an existential threat to Indian democracy.</p> <p id="KWZz8C">On Monday, tens of millions across <a href="https://www.vox.com/india" data-source="encore">India</a> celebrated the opening of the Ram Mandir — a huge new temple to Ram, one of Hinduism’s holiest figures, built in the city of Ayodhya, where many Hindus believe he was born.</p>
<p id="gFzEgH">The celebration in Ayodhya, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attracted some of India’s richest and most famous citizens. But in the pomp and circumstance, few dwelled explicitly on the grim origins of Ram Mandir: It was built on the site of an ancient mosque torn down by a Hindu mob in 1992.</p>
<p id="3ac9IA">Many of the rioters <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/711412924/nearly-27-years-after-hindu-mob-destroyed-a-mosque-the-scars-in-india-remain-dee">belonged to the RSS</a>, a militant Hindu supremacist group to which Modi has belonged since he was 8 years old. Since ascending to power in 2014, Modi has worked tirelessly to replace India’s secular democracy with a Hindu sectarian state. </p>
<p id="JMYGwl">The construction of a temple in Ayodhya is the exclamation point on an agenda that has also included revoking the autonomy <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/8/5/20754813/india-kashmir-article-370-modi-hindu-muslim">long provided to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir</a>, creating new citizenship and immigration rules <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50670393">biased against Muslims</a>, and rewritten textbooks to whitewash Hindu violence against Muslims from Indian history.</p>
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<p id="YPgPKc">Modi has also <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/6/21/23683842/india-democracy-narendra-modi-us-biden-china">waged war on the basic institutions of Indian democracy</a>. He and his allies have consolidated control over much of <a href="https://www.vox.com/media" data-source="encore">the media</a>, suppressed critical speech on social media, imprisoned protesters, suborned independent government agencies, and even <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/3/24/23654832/rahul-gandhi-expelled-lok-sabha-narendra-modi">prosecuted Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi on dubious charges</a>.</p>
<p id="zKLPC8">For many Hindus, the inauguration of the Ram Mandir was a meaningful religious event. But viewed from a political point of view, the event looks like a grim portrait of Modi’s India in miniature: a monument to an exclusive vision of Hinduism built on the ruins of one of the world’s most remarkable secular democracies. </p>
<p id="wjAcZi">Understanding the temple’s story is thus essential to understanding one of the most important issues of our time: how democracy has come under existential threat in its largest stronghold.</p>
<h3 id="YKQSeT">How the Ayodhya temple dispute gave rise to Modi’s India</h3>
<p id="2Wys1X">The dispute over Ayodhya has become a flashpoint in modern Indian politics because it speaks to a fundamental ideological question: Who is India for?</p>
<p id="vH6BW5">The relevant history here starts in the early 16th century, when a Muslim descendant of Genghis Khan named Babur invaded the Indian subcontinent from his small base in central Asia. Babur’s conquests inaugurated the Mughal Empire, a dynasty that would reign in what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh for generations. At least a remnant of the Mughal state survived until the British seized India in the 19th century.</p>
<p id="1d1SGr">The mosque in Ayodhya was a product of the early Mughal Empire, with some evidence suggesting it was built almost immediately after Babur’s forces conquered Ayodhya in 1529. Called the Babri Masjid — literally “Babur’s Mosque” — it was a testament to the impact the Mughal dynasty and its Muslim rulers had on Indian history and culture.</p>
<p id="UeLiaG">During the British colonial period, different Indian factions diverged sharply on how to remember the Mughal Empire.</p>
<p id="yBuEXV">For Mahatma Gandhi, who led the mainstream independence movement, the Moghul Empire was <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2348448919834791">a testament to India’s history of religious diversity and pluralism</a>. Gandhi praised the Moghul dynasty, especially its early leadership, for <a href="http://rarre.org/documents/sen/Sen-%20Human%20Rights%20and%20Asian%20Values.pdf">adopting religious toleration</a> as a central state policy. “In those days, they [Hindus and Muslims] were not known to quarrel at all,” he said in 1931, blaming current sectarian tensions on British colonial policy.</p>
<p id="bx9Sl7">But the leadership of the Hindu nationalist RSS organization saw things differently. Focusing in particular on the late Mughal emperor Aurangzeb — who <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61519088">imposed a special tax on non-Muslims and tore down Hindu temples</a> — they argued that the Mughals were more like the British than Gandhi allowed. The Muslim dynasty was not, in their mind, an authentic Indian regime at all; it was just another colonial conquest of an essentially Hindu nation. Muslims could not, and should not, be seen as full and equal members of the polity.</p>
<p id="l625CY">The Babri Masjid swiftly became a major flashpoint for this historical and political dispute. Because Ayodhya was widely seen by Hindus as Ram’s birthplace, the presence of a prominent Mughal mosque there was <a href="https://time.com/6564148/ayodhya-ram-temple-modi-india/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20230202&itm_source=taboola.&itm_version:control">seen as an affront by Hindu nationalists</a>. In 1949, shortly after independence, a statue of Ram was discovered inside the mosque itself. Hindu nationalists claimed that this was a divine manifestation, proof that the mosque itself was the site where Ram was born.</p>
<p id="ewojeU">But according to Hartosh Singh Bal, executive editor of the Indian news magazine The Caravan, the historical record tells a different story.</p>
<p id="6vgdkU">“Members of a Hindu right-wing organization clambered over the walls, took the idol, [and] placed it there,” Bal told Vox’s <em>Today, Explained</em>. “This was the first supposed proof that this [site] was in any way connected to a Hindu monument.”</p>
<p id="FtHJrs">For years, this manufactured conflict over <a href="https://www.vox.com/religion" data-source="encore">religion</a> and the Mughal legacy didn’t play a major role in Indian politics. The <a href="https://www.vox.com/congress" data-source="encore">Congress</a> party, the political descendant of Gandhi’s secular liberal vision for India, dominated Indian politics — winning every single national election for the first 30 years of Indian independence.</p>
<p id="YFMfMg">But in the 1980s, as the public tired of the Congress party’s domination, Hindu nationalist efforts to stoke tension surrounding the mosque intensified — and caught political fire. The BJP, the political arm of the RSS, made the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri Masjid a central part of its political agenda. The party, which won just two seats in India’s parliament in 1984’s election, won 85 seats in the 1989 contest.</p>
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<img alt="mosque on a hill guarded by fence." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LwlN4BLbjS5sLprrr1ASuXAdEOc=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25249919/742040.jpg">
<cite>Robert Nickelsberg/Liaison</cite>
<figcaption>Indian police guard the Babri Masjid in 1990.</figcaption>
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<p id="M5oYh0">The RSS and BJP kept pressing on the issue, helping organize a series of yatras (pilgrimages) to Ayodhya calling for the mosque’s demolition. These grew huge, unruly, and even violent. In 1992, an out-of-control Hindu nationalist mob armed with hammers and pickaxes stormed the Babri Masjid. They tore it down by hand, horrifying many Indians and setting off religious riots across India that killed thousands. </p>
<p id="ZBqmpg">Andrea Malji, a scholar of Indian religious nationalism at Hawaii Pacific University, describes the Babri Masjid movement as creating a kind of “feedback loop.” By bringing widespread attention to a source of Hindu-Muslim conflict, the movement actually made Hindus and Muslims more afraid of each other — leading to more conflict between the groups and, thus, increasing support among Hindus for Hindu nationalism. This was very good for the BJP’s political fortunes.</p>
<p id="EilKc3">“Mobilizing around identity — especially when you’re 80 percent of the country [as Hindus are] is an effective political strategy,” she tells me.</p>
<p id="2otbZa">The Ayodhya dispute was not the only reason that, in the coming years, the BJP would displace Congress as the dominant party in Indian politics. Modi’s first national victory, in the 2014 election, owed more to economic issues and Congress’s many corruption scandals than anything else. </p>
<p id="eB0zme">But Ayodhya was the crucible in which the BJP’s modern political approach was formed. Modi’s political innovation has been refining this approach, developing a brand of Hindu identity politics with greater appeal to the lower castes than the historically upper-caste BJP had previously managed. As time has gone on, he has only gotten more aggressive in pushing his ideological agenda. </p>
<p id="s5nifA">Through it all, the Ayodhya issue remained a major priority for both Modi and the BJP. In 2019, just months after Modi’s reelection, India’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus" data-source="encore">Supreme Court</a> ruled that the construction of Ram Mandir on the former site of the Babri Masjid could begin. Its inauguration this week is a declaration of victory for Modi and the BJP on one of their signature issues — one of the most visible in a long line of successes.</p>
<h3 id="JEuAOU">Hindu nationalism versus democracy</h3>
<p id="ueXvHo">The Ayodhya dispute helps us understand a deeper connection between the rise of Modi-style populism and the erosion of Indian democracy — that anti-democratic politics is not some kind of bug in BJP rule, but an essential feature.</p>
<p id="jqSrvl">India’s constitution and founding documents unambiguously declare the country a secular nation of all its citizens. This universalistic vision permeates Indian law and government; it lies at the heart of the Indian state. India’s founders believed this was essential to making the Indian state a viable democracy: There is no world in which the citizens of such a large and staggeringly diverse country could cooperate together if they weren’t guaranteed certain basic equal rights.</p>
<p id="d6PoGg">“We must have it clearly in our minds and in the mind of the country that the alliance of religion and politics in the shape of communalism is a most dangerous alliance,” Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, <a href="https://library.bjp.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/347/1/On-Independence%20-%20Speeches%20-%20Nehru.pdf">said in a 1948 speech</a>. “The only right way for us to act is to do away with communalism in its political aspect in every shape and form.”</p>
<p id="i0J0PG">Modi’s Hindu nationalism, by contrast, posits that legitimacy flows not from consent of all the citizens but consent of true people of India. That means Hindus in general, and Hindu nationalists in particular. Because they believe they represent the true nation, Modi and the BJP have no problem steamrolling on the rights of those who disagree with them — including not just Muslims but also Hindu critics in the press and checks and balances in the Indian state. </p>
<p id="i3RCRn">“It’s very difficult for me to find compatibility between Hindu nationalism and democracy,” says <a href="https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/political-science/faculty/aditi_malik">Aditi Malik</a>, a political scientist at the College of the Holy Cross who studies Indian politics.</p>
<p id="rmyzSG">There is nothing in theory undemocratic about the construction of a Hindu temple on a recognized holy site, especially when the construction is duly authorized by the legal authorities. But when it’s built on the ruins of a mosque torn down by a Hindu nationalist mob aligned with the ruling government, it sends a signal not just of Hindu joy but of Muslim subordination by any means necessary. Notably, Modi did not, <a href="https://www.onmanorama.com/news/kerala/2024/01/22/ram-temple-cpi-mp-binoy-viswam-asks-if-pm-modi-will-apologise-for-babri-masjid-demolition.html">at any point during the ceremony</a>, apologize to India’s Muslims for the violent way in which the road to Ram Mandir was paved.</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/J1HkFZSaajv5SWjKbYZZ5otdAG8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25249923/1956609527.jpg">
<cite>Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Devotees queue to get a glimpse of a statue of Ram one day after the consecration ceremony of the Ram Mandir on January 23, 2024, in Ayodhya, India.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="LnjQK7">Milan Vaishnav, an India expert at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, sees this as exemplary of the BJP’s general approach to wielding power. In his view, the party has presided over a gradual breakdown of norms of restraint governing Indian politics — adopting an “ends justify the means” approach to imposing the Hindu nationalist agenda because they believe they speak for the true majority.</p>
<p id="KPWw1H">“There is this feeling that, because this government is democratically elected, whatever they do has a democratic imprimatur,” he says.</p>
<p id="33j8Pb">Modi’s <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/focus/20231102-india-s-declining-press-freedom-journalists-face-increasing-threats">war on the free press</a> — which has included friendly oligarchs buying up independent media outlets, siccing auditors on critical media outlets, and even imprisoning reporters on terrorism charges — is a case in point. </p>
<p id="UpBf8B">Seeking to force the media to tow a friendly line is undemocratic under any definition, even if the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy" data-source="encore">policies</a> are authorized by a legislative majority. But the BJP believes that it, and it alone, speaks on behalf of the Hindu nation — and that critics in the press have no more right to challenge them than Muslims do.</p>
<p id="VmZYFV">There is every reason to believe that India will continue following this anti-democratic path in the years to come.</p>
<p id="6aL670">Across India, Ram Mandir’s inauguration was widely seen as the beginning of Modi’s reelection campaign. With elections scheduled to begin sometime in the mid- to late spring, Modi is previewing a campaign focused on his appeal <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/world/asia/modi-india-ram-temple.html">as an almost godlike</a> champion for Hindus.</p>
<p id="q30bsZ">The temple inauguration “bolsters an image of Mr. Modi as the champion of Indians abroad and Hindus at home; as someone who keeps his promises,” <a href="https://www.cfr.org/expert/manjari-chatterjee-miller">Manjari Chatterjee Miller</a>, a senior fellow studying South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells me. “Expect much much more of this as election season gets underway.”</p>
<p id="ob8ty0">The consensus among India watchers is that Modi will win comfortably. The BJP is coming off three victories <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/31/bjp-modi-india-general-election-2024">in December local elections</a>, and the prime minister himself has an approval rating <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/with-approval-rating-of-76-narendra-modi-most-popular-global-leader-morning-consult/articleshow/105849567.cms?from=mdr">somewhere in the 70s</a>. Whatever one’s opinion of Modi’s Hindu nationalism, there’s no doubt that it has support from hundreds of millions of Indians.</p>
<p id="g5ksVX">In evaluating India, we have to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. First, Modi and his agenda is genuinely popular with the Hindu majority. Second, this popularity has given him room to pursue an ideological agenda that imperils the long-term viability of Indian democracy.</p>
<p id="zaJlX2">When Modi said in his speech at Ayodhya that the day marks “the beginning of a new era,” this might very well be true. India could be at the beginning of a long illiberal night — one its democracy may not be able to survive.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2024/1/27/24049025/india-ayodhya-ram-mandir-narendra-modi-bjp-babri-masjidZack Beauchamp2024-01-22T07:00:00-05:002024-01-22T07:00:00-05:00Is Nikki Haley a moderate or a conservative? Yes.
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<img alt="A sign that reads “independents for Nikki” is stuck in the New Hampshire snow." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/H7xe08JLl4swj84dTyX4OmPsiBs=/25x0:2692x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73075024/1943353567.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>A campaign sign in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, urging independents to vote for Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>She’s a down-the-line conservative on almost every issue — except for one really important one.</p> <p id="YU8Bzj">People often refer to <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/2/14/23599194/nikki-haley-donald-trump-2024-presidential-campaign" data-source="encore">Nikki Haley</a> as a “moderate.” But what<a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/12/nikki-haley-republican-anti-worker-conservative-presidential-candidate-union-busting"> does that really mean</a>?</p>
<p id="StSbSB">In the traditional three main policy areas in <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics" data-source="encore">US politics</a> — economic, social, and foreign policy — the former South Carolina governor’s platform is deeply conservative. Haley has endorsed<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nikki-haley-doubles-down-promise-send-special-ops-eliminate-drug-cartels-mexico-border"> invading Mexico</a> and<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4402756-trump-campaign-hits-haley-social-security-new-ad/"> increasing the age</a> at which Americans can receive Social Security benefits. She has called herself a proud “<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/20/scott-and-haley-attack-unions-as-uaw-strike-threatens-to-escalate.html">union buster</a>” and said that Florida’s infamous “don’t say gay” law<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/17/nikki-haley-ron-desantis-dont-say-gay-law"> doesn’t go far enough</a>. She wants to<a href="https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/what-nikki-haleys-tax-and-budget-platform"> cut taxes for the wealthy and hike them on green energy companies</a>. Those positions are not extreme enough to be out of step with the MAGAfied modern GOP, but they are not “moderate” by any reasonable definition of the word.</p>
<p id="INbu06">But since the rise of <a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump" data-source="encore">Donald Trump</a>, a fourth policy area has become central to American politics in the past few years: democracy. And in this area, Haley really does break with the GOP’s extremists. She has said Biden won<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/11/nikki-haley-january-6-republican-debate/"> the 2020 election and attacked Trump for denying it</a>. She called January 6 a “<a href="https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2024/01/06/january-6-anniversary-nikki-haley-ron-desantis-vivek-ramaswamy-donald-trump-lessons-learned/72133439007/">terrible day</a>,” supported prosecutions of rioters, and even suggested Trump should be held responsible.</p>
<p id="X8Ozmz">Haley hasn’t made her campaign <em>about</em> these issues. But it’s very clear that, if elected, she wouldn’t wage war on the American political system<a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/5/13/23708595/trump-second-term-cnn-town-hall"> in the way Trump would</a>.</p>
<p id="WrwdeG">This kind of basic support for free elections and the rule of law would not, prior to Trump, have been remotely controversial. But in today’s Republican Party, where a large majority of voters believe that Biden did not legitimately win the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election" data-source="encore">2020 election</a>, it requires a certain kind of political courage.</p>
<p id="Y6ysri">These stances are what truly earn the otherwise-conservative Haley the moniker “moderate.” But the very fact that she qualifies shows how far American politics has strayed from normal. </p>
<h3 id="nNbMVs">Democracy, moderation, and the right</h3>
<p id="QhHe1n">Prior to Trump, the term “moderate Republican” was typically used to refer to Republicans who advocated that the party take a more conciliatory approach in specific policy areas like<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/624581-rnc-autopsy"> immigration</a>,<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/how-politicians-came-support-criminal-justice-reform-n309966"> criminal justice</a>, and<a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2012/01/post-huntsman-climate-may-pose-perils-for-gop-071555"> climate change</a>. These kinds of moderates understood “moderation” in terms of traditional policy issues — arguing that, for some combination of substantive and political reasons, the Republican Party would be better off softening its rough edges. Such Republicans have generally conservative views but are willing to compromise with Democrats and sometimes embrace relatively liberal policy ideas.</p>
<p id="aJpGnK">When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts in the 1990s, he passed<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/23/mitt-romney-admits-romneycare-had-to-precede-obamacare.html"> a state health care program that worked a lot like Obamacare</a>. In the late 2010s, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan signed<a href="https://goccp.maryland.gov/governor-larry-hogan-announces-implementation-justice-reinvestment-act/"> bills eliminating mandatory minimums for drug convictions</a> and requiring a<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/hogan-signs-environmental-bills-and-a-benefits-bill-for-surviving-children-of-police-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty/2016/04/04/ae686530-fa6c-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html"> 40 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030</a>. After the <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus" data-source="encore">Supreme Court</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/5/3/23055125/roe-v-wade-abortion-rights-supreme-court-dobbs-v-jackson" data-source="encore">overturned <em>Roe v. Wade</em></a>, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Susan Collins (ME) proposed legislation<a href="https://www.collins.senate.gov/newsroom/senators-collins-and-murkowski-introduce-bill-to-codify-supreme-court-decisions-on-reproductive-rights_roe-v-wade-and-planned-parenthood-v-casey#:~:text=Washington%2C%20D.C.%20%E2%80%93%20U.S.%20Senators%20Susan,Casey%20(1992)."> codifying <em>Roe</em>’s abortion protections into federal law</a>.</p>
<p id="jq325l">This is what moderation looks like within a stable democracy: a willingness to compromise with the other side in specific policy areas. But when democracy itself is at risk of collapse, it makes sense to think of “moderate” in a somewhat different fashion: referring not to stances on the issues of the day, but to a more fundamental view on the proper relationship between conservatives and democratic institutions. When people call Haley a “moderate” today, this other meaning — or something like it — is what they have in mind.</p>
<p id="gP7Bm7">To clarify this alternative understanding of moderation, it’s helpful to turn to<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Democracy-Cambridge-Comparative-Politics/dp/0521172993"> <em>Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy</em></a>, Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt’s treatment of 19th- and early-20th-century Europe — the period during which democracy dethroned monarchy as the continent’s dominant governing ideology. Ziblatt shows how conservative parties (meaning those factions representing the interests of the elite classes and others hostile to social change) worked to accommodate their supporters to democracy. They would not have been called “moderate,” but they did play a moderating role.</p>
<p id="Ty9btk">Ziblatt’s research shows that countries with strong conservative parties tended to have relatively straightforward and stable paths to democracy. By contrast, those with weak conservative parties tended to democratize more erratically, often involving bloodshed and right-wing counter-coups.</p>
<p id="ZJIzv4">This, he argues, is a result of the conservative parties’ role in changing their backers’ attitudes toward democracy. In countries with strong conservative parties, elites felt as though they could get enough of what they wanted through elections to be comfortable with democracy. In countries with weak conservative parties, by contrast, these classes felt as though democracy itself posed a danger to their wealth and status — and felt a need to strike at the system to protect their positions of privilege.</p>
<p id="rALkSV">“Well-organized and highly institutionalized partisan old regime interests provided a way of ‘lowering the costs of toleration,’ and thus making democracy safe for key segments of old regime elites,” Ziblatt wrote.</p>
<p id="J0RT6E">Nikki Haley is a “moderate” in a related sense. With American democracy under threat from Trump and his MAGA movement, there’s a desperate need for a faction to play the role of 19th-century English Tories: convincing the right-wing sectors of American society that they can advance their policy aims through the system, without resorting to Trump-style radicalism.</p>
<p id="ohtDXY">The best case for Haley is that her victory could theoretically turn the GOP into such a party.</p>
<h3 id="RkgxrB">Why Haley-style moderation isn’t working — for her or democracy</h3>
<p id="kdAb9e">But there’s a fundamental difference between the 19th century and today. Back then, the parties served to domesticate a threat to democracy emanating from the social elite. Today, the Republican Party is the source of the threat. The party has been <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts">institutionally captured by its extreme faction</a>, to the point where<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/7/6/23144343/end-of-conservatism-roe"> many moderates in the pre-Trump sense have been driven out</a>. </p>
<p id="BltqsX">In such a radical environment, Haley obviously couldn’t run as an old-school moderate. She couldn’t flee to Trump’s right: That strategy has been tried repeatedly (<a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/24034491/iowa-caucus-results-polls-desantis-trump-haley-ramaswamy-republican-party">most recently by Ron DeSantis</a>) and found wanting. And she couldn’t wage a frontal assault on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies in a party where large majorities believe the 2020 election was stolen; <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/01/christie-drops-out-blasts-other-trump-rivals-as-cowards.html">that’s why Chris Christie flamed out</a>. </p>
<p id="BaV0gR">So Haley tried to thread a very difficult needle: campaigning as a true conservative on policy, while adopting a sunny affect and distancing herself from Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. </p>
<p id="b5UBrY">This looks, in hindsight, like a better tack than the ones taken by her rivals. In New Hampshire, an open-primary state with a tradition of moderation, it may yield some limited dividends.</p>
<p id="9LOPmg">But in her home state of South Carolina, she’s down by 30 points in the <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2024/president/2024gop.html">RealClearPolitics poll average</a>. Nationally, she’s down by about 50. Haley’s brand of “moderation,” limited as it is, is out of touch with the Republican electorate and Party as a whole.</p>
<p id="p32G0x">Once she loses, the rubber will hit the road for Nikki Haley’s moderate bona fides. Will she choose to endorse Trump and campaign for him, maximizing her relevance in the Republican Party? Or will she choose to put her commitment to democracy first and oppose him?</p>
<p id="zXyBah">On this, her track record is not very promising. You may recall she served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, standing by him through the first two and a half tumultuous years of his presidency. And she has already said she would vote for Trump if he won the party’s nomination — <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nikki-haley-vote-donald-trump-convicted/story?id=102524719">even in the event that he was found guilty of a felony</a>. </p>
<p id="RWESlG">Perhaps Haley will surprise us. But I have a nagging feeling that her commitment to democracy is subordinate to her commitment to her party and to her future success within it. If that proves correct, then her brand of moderation will be exposed to be something worse than limited: fake.</p>
https://www.vox.com/policy/24042053/nikki-haley-moderate-conservative-democracyZack Beauchamp