First they came for...then they came for...and now the universities; Timothy Snyder has missed the moment until it is too late

I guess this video from now former Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder is okay. But note how Snyder never connects the dots to how come there were so many Jewish college students who took part in the protests. There were and are a whole lot, Professor Synder. Where were YOU during the encampments? Where was YOUR voice on what Revisionist Zionism in Israel has done over so many decades of power? There is an element of Pastor Niemoller here as the right-wing part of the establishment and elite powers finally came for the universities themselves--and only now he is speaking up on the topic of antisemitism relating to but still not touching the very essence of the problems of Zionism as practiced in Israel against an indigenous people.

 

As far as I saw, Snyder never spoke up about the wrongful conflation of Zionism and antisemitism. And despite his learning and knowledge, he missed how a belief in Zionist causes can go hand-in-hand with antisemitism. It is not the opposite of antisemitsm. See this critique of a book Snyder wrote over a decade ago where the reviewer shows how Snyder missed how Revisionist Zionism in Poland was a vehicle for Polish Christian antisemitism--not a philo-semitism.* Worse, in an October 2022 lecture, Snyder was expressly willing to designate Putin's war crimes in Ukraine as genocide. But somehow, Snyder has been missing in action regarding what is actually a more obvious case of Israeli genocide against Palestinians under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of genocide.

When I watched Synder's new video and read the transcript, I was struck by how ultimately how hollow it is because of his continued inability to understand how politically-oriented Zionists, not only Jabotinsky and the Revisionists, sold Zionism to European and British leaders as a colonial project--and were adamant against those relatively few cultural Zionists who envisioned a multi-cultural or binational state for Palestine (Rabbi Judah Magnes, philosopher Martin Buber, Jewish Biblical scholar Morris Jastrow, among more than a few others).

Yes, Timothy Snyder. You've been great at sounding the alarm regarding Trump. But, really, man, get your ass out of Hebrew school mythology about Zionism and the State of Israel. It ain't our religion. It's a political ideology attempting to respond to 19th and 20th-Century European Christian-based antisemitism, at best. At worst, even the "good guys" like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann have been exposed as bad guys when Israeli historians began going through their review of the archives.

The only one I will defend is Herzl because, while he may have written The Jewish State in the late 1890s and was the leading founder of the Zionist movement, his novel, published around the time of his early death, New Old Land, posited a binational state where Arabs and Jews from Europe and elsewhere lived in harmony, equality, and peace. Herzl was a true visionary who sensed that building Zionism as a colonial project could lead to precisely what we see today. I wish American pro-Zionist Jews in particular would read the then-hopeful book from the mid-1990s by the now late Israeli Labour Party leader, Shimon Peres, The Imaginary Voyage: With Theodore Herzl in Israel.  Peres went deep into the Herzl novel and why it needed to be resurrected from the dusty shelves of a privileged few who knew it.

* It is stunning to me that such a renowned historian as Snyder missed how Zionist ideology is premised on the immutability of antisemitism, and helps explain why at various points, early Zionists through the end of the 1930s, tried to forge agreements with antisemites, including the German Nazi leadership. Wikipedia is actually very good on the idea of the overlap between Zionist ideology and its acceptance of the assumptions that drive antisemitism. Joseph Massad's polemical essay is, notwithstanding the polemicism, worth reading to take us through today, particularly why it is not odd for Israel to cultivate relationships with far-right and antisemitic politicians throughout what used to be called "Eastern" Europe (at one time "Central" Europe). Most sadly, based upon this series of tweets, I am not sure Snyder is still getting what is wrong with his perspective. He is cogent in recognizing how Trump is following a playbook that overlaps with Hitler and Mussolini. However, he seems oblivious in how Zionist ideology and Israel's leadership are ultimately in league with the thinking and policies that undergird right-wing, nationalist, and antisemitic ideologies. 

The PDA leader's proposal for an outside-inside strategy to transform the Democratic Party leaves me more convinced of my proposal

I read this important proposal, set forth in the LA Progressive online magazine, from PDAer Alan Minsky and hoped to be convinced why I am wrong about progressive leaders simply leading by leaving the Democratic Party altogether as did the brave Whig politicians in the mid-1850s, starting in 1854. After reading Minsky's article, I am more convinced than ever that this is asking progressive activists to do twice the work. He also refuses to acknowledge just how entrenched the money interests are in the Democratic Party, including many state parties. Multiple times, he acknowledges the Democratic Party leadership is hopeless and, worse, refuses to accommodate progressives in the party.

Worse, he doesn't talk about what happened with when his outside-inside strategy in Nevada was already successfully applied. Four years ago, progressives won the chair, vice-chair, and other statewide positions. The establishment Dems, on the way out, took out most of the money from the party and inserted it into a party within a party from those who were previously handpicked before by the by-then Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), who was awful in his lifetime for the most part. Nevada still has two conservative Dems as senators--both women, and one a Latina--who continue to enable Trumpism and the Republican agenda as they claim to oppose it. In short, they bled the money from the party and showed how the money power still controlled the politics in the Democratic Party. This article from the Hill shows the establishment, backed by money power, eventually won back formal power in the Nevada State Democratic Party.

I urge anyone who cares about the future of the Democratic Party to read this if any thinks this proposal is really viable considering the Nevada progressive experience, the way Dem politicians routinely ignore party platforms--I saw this in CA and see this in NM--and how much hatred there really remains behind closed doors of Dem officeholders of Dem progressive activists. I've seen it, I've heard it, and it is beyond ridiculous. The phrasing these people use is classic projection--as if we are the bad guys, when it is clear our point about losing the working classes is now verbally acknowledged.

My proposal remains much more sound, but requires progressive leaders to act. If they did, one sees how much more effective the time progressives are being asked to spend under Minsky's proposal would be. There is nobody to fight under my proposal. It is a straight shot with progressive candidates, hundreds of millions of dollars donated to a party that one may want to actually and fully support, and candidates who would know their candidacy was BECAUSE of the people who donated, and following a platform they are in agreement with. In the past decades, Dem politicians only care about the money they raise from big donors, run as independent fiefdoms, don't care about party platforms, and find activists a pain in the neck. A replacement party doesn't have those barriers to have to work to get around.

Minsky is letting off the hook the progressive leaders already in Congress. The fact that hardly anyone besides AOC joined Bernie tells you pretty much all you need to know why they are failures, no different than the establishment/corporate Dems.

Tariffs, infrastructure, taxes, religion, ideology, and, at long last, smart policy-making. Too bad we won't get to smart policy-making in the current discourse.

Up into the 2010s and perhaps even into the 2016 campaign, I was either pro-tariff or neutral on the topic of tariffs. In the 1990s, I strongly opposed the NAFTA and the WTO. At the dawn of the 2000s, I strongly opposed the gift of favored trade status to China. Why? Because I wanted to protect US industry and US manufacturing jobs, even as I knew automation was starting to rise in ways that made Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano" and Daniel Bell's "Post-industrial society" finally start to look prescient. But alas. It didn't matter who among the two corporate-dominated parties were elected. The US workers and the world were getting corporate-dominated global trade--and damn the US workers and US industrial capacity.

In the 2010s, as I saw how interdependent consumers in the economically advanced US and other nations were on goods shipped from China and elsewhere, I realized the US could only get its middle and lower classes back to New Deal type success levels would be through (a) significant increases in the MARGINAL income and capital gains tax rates on the truly rich and corporations and (b) a massive infrastructure program to rebuild our infrastructure, hopefully with greener technologies (yeah, I supported a New Deal that was Green before AOC).

Also, as I saw the US birth rate was dropping so much, any massive infrastructure program would invariably lead to us putting up "Help Wanted" signs at the physical land borders and sea/air ports. That's a little hint why Trump 1.0 never came through on infrastructure: It would expose that our nation didn't have enough even trainable people to do the infrastructure work. We would also have too many infrastructure jobs chasing too few workers, and that would mean employers would have to pay more to workers. This is STILL TRUE. But the fact remains, fans of Trump and anti-anti-Trump people: Trump never wants to economically help workers or, ahem, bring in more immigrants who would be line workers. And neolibs in both parties don't want massive infrastructure because it would help workers over employers (It is why I was so surprised by neolib Biden's NLRB policies, as it was a break from Clinton and Obama, not just Republicans, including Trump).

The worst part of all this, for me at least, is most Americans receive pro-corporate economics lessons in both high school and college. Most Americans don't realize how corporate media propaganda continually supports a right wing corporate capitalist (known as neoclassical economics) narrative that even Pete Buttigieg, the Clintons, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barry Obama buy into. This seeps into social media as I see even people on my FB feed keep posting the scene in "Ferris Bueller" where Ben Stein plays the economics high school teacher talking about tariffs. Stein, whose Dad (Herbert Stein) was a respected conservative economist who ALWAYS hated the New Deal, repeats the tired and incorrect nostrum that the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930 was what really sent us into the Depression. Sorry, Ben, Herb, and even John Kenneth Galbraith, you are all WRONG.

I wish I could post online the old labor-side economics guy, Gus Tyler, and his great essay in the late 1980s that put that to the lie it is.* It was published in the now defunct (?) "New Leader," an old labor oriented magazine. To summarize its points: The Great Depression was initially caused by people buying stock on loans from banks, and, banks, when collecting the collateral for those loans, as most never had the money to pay back the loans, started to go under more and more as the value of the collateral declined more and more. Second, there was a larger drop in the GNP (now GDP) BEFORE the S-H Tariff went into effect than after. Third, only 10% of our economy relied on imports. Fourth, the S-H Tariff was, for the most part, only a marginal increase in the tariffs that already existed. Therefore, to think this one tariff passed in 1930 was a primary cause of the Depression getting worse is, well, dumb. It is why I consider most econ high school and college econ teachers to be, well, morons.

Thus, in the last decade or more, I've been more against tariffs than for tariffs. And Atrios, a rare smart economist, is absolutely correct to say we shouldn't buy into the current liberal and business-conservative chatter that says tariffs are always and elementarily bad on principle. They are not. They are situational. They definitely played a positive role in building up our nation's industrial capacity throughout the 19th Century. Tariffs also played a hugely positive role in China, Japan, and South Korea in building up their economies in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Today, though, for the US at least, tariffs are not such a great idea. Atrios also states, most insightfully:

(a) Ahem, liberals: Biden kept most of Trump 1.0's tariffs and added more in the late part of his one term; and

(b) It is well past time for regular Americans to reject the pro-free trade assumptions we have bought into since the early 1990s. The only valid question is a practical one: What policies help workers and consumers, and, as a sub-part, what polices will help workers more than consumers or vice versa? The answer to the question and sub-question reveals why we should not be pro- or anti-tariff as if we are standing on some principle. It is why I merely call myself a socialist-oriented person as it is simply an aesthetic or philosophical feeling. You know, the way someone may even think of their religion, though I find the idea that socialism is a religion to be an invitation to confusion and worse. The only thing an ideology shares with religion is that both carry a philosophical default mechanism and generality of a set of principles. However, when it comes to political-economy, and public policy, the policy-making should override, when reasonably necessary, the political-economy principle. Why? Because the best public policy making is empirically-based, situational, and relative. At some point, every public policy should be tweaked or significantly reformed, again depending upon the circumstances. Smart religious and smart ideological thinking requires this recognition--or else we get the excesses that cause religions and ideologies to amass a bunch of dead bodies.

God, I hope this is clear to at least some of us.

*If only Dissent would take another article he wrote for the magazine in the Spring of 1988 from behind the subscription wall.