The Democrats Are Irrelevant, Forever?
Israel's powerful left wing party has nearly vanished. That's happening here.
Over thirty years ago, the 1993 Oslo Accords ushered in a new era. The Labor Party — the party that created the State of Israel and had held power off-and-on since it’s inception — took the bold initiative to make peace with Israel’s nearest and most confounding enemy. Not only would diplomacy create safe borders for Israel and birth a new nation for stateless Palestinians, it would also catalyze a wider, bigger, more dramatic peace process that would ultimately manifest with Saudi Arabia and all Arab states acknowledging Israel.
The massive land wars of the past would be in the rearview. The future would be free trade, economic growth and peaceful coexistence between a tiny Jewish state and a vast Arab region stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. The center left party delivered the goods and would continue dominating Israeli politics for many decades to come.
Prominent American journalists like Thomas Friedman promised us this was the case: Israel making peace with Palestinians would act as a lynchpin for peace across the region. (Later he would tell us that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 would make it a new Singapore and the Iraq war was a good idea.)
But, the experts and senior journalists warned, if peace didn’t happen with Israelis and Palestinians, then nothing good would follow for the entire Middle East.
Labor party leaders, the quasi-mythic founding fathers like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, told us that they had found a partner in peace and however hard and reluctant and impossible it all seemed, one handshake on the White House lawn between Rabin and PLO founder Yasser Arafat meant that Palestinian militias and revolutionary organizations would soon became a peaceful national government. A democracy even!
You know the rest.
In a sequence of monumental diplomatic events between Palestinians and top tier of global power himself, the American president, Arafat then denied all deals. Instead of developing a viable counter offer, he launched the second intifada. Thousands died. Diplomacy seemed like a cruel joke to the parents of children blown up in terror attacks and for Palestinians crushed by the Israeli military machine.
Books on the Oslo Accords now gather dust while wars have continued ever since - in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and beyond. Peace has also come fitfully via the Abraham Accords despite the experts telling us that couldn’t happen without Palestinian statehood. Meanwhile, the Palestinians popularly and fairly elected Hamas, a violent Islamic extremist group ideologically related to Al Qaeda, as their legislative leaders. The Palestinian Authority learned its lesson and never held elections again, because they knew they would lose to the terror group.
What also collapsed was the Labor Party — the Israeli equivalent of the Democratic Party.
Labor (sort of like Democrats) is out and Likud (sort of like Republicans) is in. For decades. And decades. Perhaps forever.
After the attacks on October 7th 2023 which seemingly changed everything, there is still no viable Labor Party. Out of 120 possible Knesset seats, they have four, held with the equivalent of the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
The giant of history has become a footnote.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history. Say what you will, he has survived and thrived in a way that could only make Thomas Friedman nod in mutual appreciation. Politics being a zero sum game, means the future is his for as long as he is healthy.
The same thing is happening here at home with the Democratic party. It’s different, we only have two parties, but the party is diminishing by the hour. The klieg lights grow dim.
I like you so I’m not going to walk you through each and every self-inflicted disaster of the Democratic party in recent years. I’ll stick to three items that help spell their doom:
Barack Obama left no party infrastructure at the federal or state level after he left office. Instead, he turned him and his wife into global celebrities with immense wealth and… that’s it! It’s all about him and his family. Michelle Obama can wax poetic about her working class parents, but remind me the last time she or Barack mowed their lawn or their children had to keep a job.
Trump, while grossly incompetent as a manager, passed important Republican legislation, stacked the Supreme Court, breezed through two impeachments and if it wasn’t for Covid, could very well have won the majority vote in 2020. He was in no way hindered by Obama’s successors. At most, AOC posted on social media and Bernie Sanders garnered attention - not very threatening.
Joe Biden appointed Merrick Garland as Attorney General. He will go down in history as the single worst law enforcement chief. Trump was so obviously guilty of so many charges — sedition, incitement, stealing government documents, campaign fraud, business fraud and on and on. None of it went anywhere. Don’t blame one rogue judge in Florida, blame the AG for slow walking his way (and ours) off a short pier.
Appointing incompetent people guarantees incompetent results.
Biden didn’t step down by Christmas 2023. The party lied about his physical ability to do the job, and for some reason the most august, well funded, and prestigious investigative journalists at every liberal news organization in America couldn’t ferret out his true status. But we all saw what they couldn’t report in a nationally-televised meltdown.
Then came the Harris selection — which I think was a combination of Democratic identitarian ideology (privileging racial and gender identity over political ability) mixed with the legacy of the brilliant political craftsmanship of James Clyburn. Too bad it was so short lived. Harris can’t do much for Black South Carolinians when she’s licking her wounds in a California mansion.
Now we’re told by the news organizations, those same ones didn’t report the news about Biden’s health and often predicted Harris’s win, that the Democratic party is rudderless.
But you don’t have to read the news to know that. You just have to walk outside.
You also don’t need a PhD in Political Science to know that perseverating on gender and skin color, and accepting mass antisemitism on college campuses and cultural institutions isn’t perhaps as wise as focusing on making American affordable again.
Because it once was, and now it’s not.
My mother, a daughter of immigrants that we would now call refugees or asylum seekers, went from kindergarten to college for absolutely zero dollars in New York City in the post war period. My father, a Vietnam War combat veteran born into extreme rural poverty, went to college thanks to the GI Bill. Those public subsidies along with generally affordable housing costs enabled them to build a middle class family in the early 1970s — despite huge inflation and over 11% mortgage rates.
I myself went to public school up through college and incurred relatively affordable fees that now seem like a fantasy. UC Santa Cruz cost a quarter of what it does now, and that’s only thirty years ago. Did textbooks, dorm rooms and whiteboards change that much since Nirvana blasted in the quad? Or did universities become a grift with zero oversight from any political party?
To take one small example of affordability, why does no Democrat talk about tuition extortion?
Yes, the blame for much of this is Reaganomics. But you never met a more ardent Reaganite than the Democrats under Clinton and Obama.
I don’t know the magical political formula that will make the Democratic party a better choice for Americans. Right now, Dems continue to offer terms like “people of color” and “transphobia” which more and more sounds like “let them eat cake.” Their cohort in the cultural, academic and journalist institutions do the same, only more so. You can even get a degree in advanced antisemitism just by walking through Harvard Yard.
But what I, and I suspect Black people, Native Americans and the 0.0001% of people born with multiple genitals want to hear is, “I can afford rent” and “this is so awesome, my health insurance costs are going down and I get better care.”
The Labor Party in Israel is history. For the millions of Israel lovers out there who follow Knesset intrigues with the rabid focus of sports fans, not a single one predicts a fall of Likud and a rise of Labor. There are many reasons, but the simple explanation is that Labor told Israel they will make peace with a people who won’t make peace, which means many thousands of people will die.
If that sounds stupid, now you know why Labor is out of power.
Democrats, in a very different milieu, are telling a similarly stupid story. They’re saying niche identity ranking, where a bisexual person with Nigerian ancestry deserves more policy benefits than a heterosexual person with Greek ancestry — and Jews naturally should get worse than nothing and stop complaining already.
Also, preferably, people who don’t share one of the two genders necessary for the survival of the species deserve special accommodations even if it means permanent medical interventions that aren’t proven to help anyone or prohibits girls from achieving in sports.
Oh and by the way, that coffee will cost you $12 and you need to earn over $500,000 a year to buy a house. Too bad you were just laid off.
If you as a politician can’t devise policy that people need — like security in Israel, or affordability in America — then there is only one person to blame for your obsolescence.
Fetterman, Newsom, Whitmer, Walz, Cortez, Sanders, Schumer - they’re twisting in the wind. Soon, like Biden and Harris, those names will drift away.