20th Century Liberals Need a Software Update
Reagan Republicans aren't the only ones who are obsolete
It’s been a long time since I’ve written. Not that you’re lacking in analysts to mansplain the world to your in-box, but in the spirit of the Days of Awe, I atone for not communicating more what it’s in my heart as we wrench to a new school year, a new Jewish year, as a new fall season shadows us, as the complex, always violent intersectionality between Sunni and Shia Arabs and their Iranian benefactors explodes across the Middle East, as concatenating storms ravage the South, and as an upcoming presidential election remains a toss-up — despite Trump’s parade of incoherencies; and due in part to Harris’s media-trained guardedness that maintains her status as cypher, but now with billions and ineluctability, which hopefully doesn’t manifest in rhyme.
I get it. It’s a lot to process. Let me add one more thought: 20th Century liberalism can’t tackle any of these challenges. It’s as obsolete as a landline. Sure, a few still use them, but good luck reaching someone.
The 20th Century liberal worldview is as relevant to today’s politics as 1980s conservatives are to the modern Republican party, now dominated by Trump, his grasping family, Russia obsequiousness, election denial and, yes, the same identity-based grievances shared by the 21st Century Left, where both movements seek division to divide and conquer.
If you have cargo pants in your closet, listen to NPR for news, if your favorite tote bag is from The New Yorker and you find yourself frequently changing vocabulary terms to avoid offending a group that may not be considered a group in a few years, if you add the word “lived” in front of experience because you think it’s necessary to define that you’re not dead, then it’s time to update your OS.
Your software version is no longer supported.
Let’s go back, way back. Picture a teenage Zachary in his suburban kitchen in Massachusetts while his single, working mom fixes dinner for her three sons. Earlier in her life with free time and no kids, she had protested the Vietnam War, protested racial segregation and, as she remains to this day, a keen follower of current events. (Her ex-husband is a non-Jewish Vietnam veteran with a bronze star, purple heart and other medals earned in two-tours of active jungle combat. It was a complicated childhood.)
“The military is always fighting the last war,” she says to me. “They take the lessons from their last war and use them again. It’s the wrong way of doing things. That’s why we lost Vietnam.”
She explains generals from World War II didn’t have a winning strategy for guerrilla warfare in a place that couldn’t be bombed back into the stone age, because it had never been industrialized to begin with.
Decades later, I think about her lesson when I see angry pro-Palestine stickers around my neighborhood that never mention peace, so by omission they call for war. Or when I see a young Black, Latina or Asian woman wearing a keffiyeh in solidarity with a Palestinian state she would never want citizenship in, since it would violate her clearly-shared tenet for free expression as a minority woman.
(The irony to the cosplay crowd is that there’s only one country in the Middle East a future Palestine should model itself after, which proves the point that it will never happen. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s hard to take Palestinian sovereignty seriously after observing the region for so long. Think I’m cynical? Ask Noah Feldman about the relevancy of his Iraqi constitution to Iraqis. Life in Arab countries remains nasty, brutish and short.)
My mother taught me well, but the liberalism of her generation that I was so steeped in isn’t useful anymore. Israel fans have observed, and I went through this epiphany at my mother’s table during a contentious Thanksgiving years ago, that using the lens of the Civil Rights Movement to see Israel, or frankly anywhere else in the world with the one exception, possibly, of pre-Mandela South Africa, isn’t intellectually clear. But it persists.
Listen to a podcast of David Remnick and Ezra Klein as a recent example. It’s a nuanced, sensitive takedown of Israel, with no mention of Arab agency.
They seem blind to their own binding of one-arm behind their backs. How do such intelligent, worldly, cultured, wealthy, educated people miss something — not also questioning actual, on-the-ground Palestinian motivations — that’s so obvious if you want to understand the region? Yes, you can spend hours analyzing and lamenting Knesset coalitions, but shouldn't you spend time asking what Palestinian politicians demand?
The 1967 Summer of Love can’t make sense of Gen Z students who demand sovereignty for Palestinians by targeting Jewish American students in a kosher restaurant. That’s not the Age of Aquarius, it's simply bigotry.
Peace movements of yore are not in play anymore.
Take the liberals who fawn over, fund, publish and promote Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, which contains an extended screed against Israel with no mention of 100 years of Palestinian terrorism, released near the anniversary of the October 7th brutalities.
How do the (partial) successes of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Acts in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination — and after decades of advocacy by Black and mostly Jewish activists — help anyone understand the serial failures of the mid-90s Oslo Accords that led to the Second Intifada with its thousands of targeted civilian murders, which then led to security measures that dictate a separation of two peoples instead of a two state solution?
Coates grew up in the shadows of Jim Crow which are terrible and profound. That has nothing to do with irredentism in Israel and Palestine. His experience is valid and vital to his critique of America, but it gives him no special purchase on how the Arab worlds wrestles with modernity after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Israelis are white and Palestinians are black only if you’re color blind.
Judging by Coates’ media hustle, which I admire writ large, I’d say color is at the forefront of his vision. What other explanation is there if that’s not the useful filter to see the Middle East?
Are he and his enablers outmoded narcissists projecting the failures of the Voting Rights Act to a country 7,000 miles away that has nothing to do with American slavery, or do they have problems with something else?
Someone else?
Black Americans were the clear victims of southern segregation, it’s one of those moments of literal black and white injustice, but tell me how that relates to violent Islamic extremists hiding weapons in children’s bedrooms in the West Bank?
Does anyone really think Israel seeks to impose Jim Crow on Palestinians to satisfy, I don’t know, some ancient bloodlust, or do they seek physical security from murderous zealots who rule their people like a mafia and won’t ever agree to two-states?
Yes, Israel imposes harsh security measures in the West Bank that lead to awful consequences for Palestinians that I’m sure all too often pass from mere security into abject, illegal violence, but isn’t that less bad than suicide bombings in pizza parlors full of children? This shouldn’t excuse settler violence and intimidation, that’s just wrong. Better Israeli leadership should punish not abet it, but it does contextualize the excruciating math of life in Tulkarm.
This is the calculus of Israeli military control of parts of the West Bank that no American news outlets mention. Occupation is morally toxic, terrible for Palestinians, corrosive for IDF soldiers and a huge drain on the Israeli economy, but if the other option is mass rape, death, hostage-taking and missile attacks by fanatics funded by Iran, anyone would choose the least worst option.
(If you say, well, there is another option, Israelis can leave Israel, I’ll counter with, “you first.”) (See where that gets us.)
More close to home, why is that I, and so many millions, feel alienated by the politically liberal worldview we grew up with and always assumed was based in morals, not sectarianism and it’s faithful companion, antisemitism?
I don’t think peace loving, Civil Rights demanding liberals started as antisemites, but the evolution of their movement in the current day has become exactly that. Why else would someone publish Coates book around 10/7? How else can you understand rallies in NYC’s Union Square where a man is beaten bloody for waving an Israeli flag? That propaganda and attack doesn’t come from the right.
Why can't well funded, well read news organizations report about life in Israel and Palestine with the context of at least the most recent refusals by Palestinians for their own state?
The first Palestinian refusal for two states was in 1937, followed by 1947, all of the mid 90s/early 2000s and stunningly, last fall with a popularly-elected Hamas attack that the popularly-elected Palestinian Authority hasn’t condemned. The fact that khaki liberals continue to wish for a two-state solution after 10/7 should tell you everything you need to know about their daydreams, I mean, policies.
Many friends tell me they’re frustrated to the point of paralysis with the liberal orthodoxies governing our conversations, curricula and conventional wisdoms.
They wonder where they should send their kids to school since they want practical pedagogy in the classroom, not activist propaganda that says “I’m right about gender, the Middle East, racial privilege, and anyone who disagrees is immoral.”
They ask where they should live so they can form affirming bonds with neighbors rather than engaging in virtue-signaling conversations we’re told are rooted in inclusion - but only if you never ask who’s excluded.
Why does the relentless emphasis of a single person’s genetic ancestry create movements of resistance rather than communal, literally wholesome narratives of belonging?
To me, this is the teleology - the natural conclusion - of 20th Century Liberalism when it's applied in the 2020s. It takes you to bad places. They’re bad in different ways from the Trump transformation of the Republican party into an anti-democratic cult of personality that is one huge grift for his family, but as of today, the difference in dangers are so minute as to lack meaning.
(And wasn’t the presidency also a huge grift for the Clintons and Obamas, now fabulously wealthy people who were never in the private sector?)
I wasn’t at this parallel point a few year ago. Trump and the extreme right were far worse than their analogues on the left, but the opposition has learned their lesson.
They’re now all caught up.
It’s a neck-in-neck race for America in more ways than one.
The solution is a reboot. We need 21st Century software.
Last thoughts. If you think I’ve fallen into the trap of making false equivalencies, which dominates conventional journalism and the moral myth-making of the left and the right, then I’ll ask you this:
If Jews aren’t safe on college campuses where ballooning administrative bureaucracies profess fidelity to civil rights but can’t distinguish protected free speech from persistent, ongoing, ethnically targeted discrimination, then what’s the utility of preserving academic freedom from Project 2025?
What good is a $320,000 Ivy+ degree that spends four years teaching a young adult about intersectional settler-colonialism in choose-your-own-identity (ethnic, gender, race) studies departments — which demonstrably leads both students and faculty to attack fellow students at social clubs and places of worship?
Is this an institution that needs saving from the far right, or does it need a clean wipe?
What other institutions are worth saving? If NPR, the New York Times, fashionable publishing imprints and large swaths of academic administrations collapse, are we really worse off, or will we find simply new ways to inform and educate ourselves?
Maybe we have already.
I'm older and sentimental. Hopefully these platforms can be saved with software patches to fix gaping vulnerabilities, but it’s hard to say that will be enough.
If you’re nostalgic for the peace rallies of the left with whiffs of marijuana and classic rock vibes, if you miss the clarity and audacious bravery of Freedom Riders and lunch-counter boycotters, then you’re paying attention to this essay.
They should be missed — because they are no longer at play.
There are no more peace rallies.
There are no lunch-counters, or academic investment portfolios, to boycott if you want positive outcomes.
The necessary tools of the past are by definition currently useless.
Let’s make new ones.
To a successful and easy fast for my Jewish readers, and a happy Friday and lovely fall for all.
— Zachary