Elephant in the echo chamber

Since Donald Trump won a second term as US president last year and, with the help of Elon Musk, set about slashing the American federal government and sacking officials on the basis of personal enmity, I have seen columnists and social media personalities associated with the Democrats pick over why Kamala Harris, the former vice president, failed so spectacularly in her bid to succeed Joe Biden last year. One of the people I follow on X (Twitter) is Brianna Wu, previously best known for her contribution to the “GamerGate” controversy of the mid-2010s, who has distinguished herself by cheering on Israel during its genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, stridently denying that the onslaught is genocide, insisting it’s all Hamas’s fault, parroting any atrocity propaganda she finds being spewed out by pro-Israel fanatics while studiously ignoring ample evidence of actual atrocities by violent fanatics both in the West Bank and in Gaza, and accusing anyone who protests against the genocide of being an antisemite, a Hamas supporter or both. The other day she shared a Substack piece by Matthew Yglesias which tore into Biden’s record and his decision-making, including his decisions up until he stepped aside, opining that “Biden alienated an entire cohort of young people, along with many of the leaders of the most important companies in America” while failing to mention Gaza, Israel or Palestine anywhere.

Wu, who is a trans woman, puts Harris’s loss squarely down to the liberal entanglement with the transgender community. Until fairly recently, Americans knew about transsexuals, people who went through a medical and surgical process to change from one sex to a semblance of the other, and for the most part were OK with them. The new transgender movement requires people to accept novel claims, such as that the sex binary is a “social construct”; moreover, it requires them to accept that someone’s gender is however they identify, regardless of physical facts. Someone who “identifies as a woman” is a woman, even if they are in fact an intact male; anyone who denies this is accused of transphobia. Somebody can be ‘transgender’ and have no intention of changing their body surgically, and the new “free gender” ideology holds that this person is no less a woman than one who was born female and has gone through the normal life experiences of a woman. These notions have become the accepted doctrine of much of the Left in the UK since about 2010, even though they were unheard of outside of a few small communities before then — in other words, the last time we had a semblance of progressive government in the UK. This has certainly turned many people away from the Left, but they were also issues in the US in past elections where Democrats won.

The numbers aren’t as stark as they appeared in the weeks following the election, where it seemed that Trump’s vote tally had fallen compared to 2020 (when he lost) and Kamala Harris had polled tens of millions of votes fewer than Biden had. Trump’s tally increased by just over 3 million; Harris’s fell, compared to Biden’s, by well over 6.2 million. This was not against a run-of-the mill Republican but a convicted felon whose presidency was chaotic, marked by continual changes in his cabinet as he fell out with one appointee after another, and who allowed a cult to be built up around him (which arose out of the flattery that was needed to make him look presidential when in fact he is graceless, incompetent and out of his depth) and whose followers attempted a violent coup when they lost the previous election. People were elated when Biden won, and when this coup was defeated and he was confirmed as president, and believed they had put the Trump nightmare behind them. How, then, did he manage to return to the White House just four years later?

What no mainstream white Democrat seems to be admitting is that the complicity of their party with the Gaza genocide is a large part of what alienated those young voters Matthew Yglesias referred to. The party has always relied on persuading a large number of idealistic, often young, left-wing voters to “hold their nose” while voting for a less than ideal (in their view) Democratic candidate: Biden or Clinton as opposed to Bernie Sanders, say. By and large, these voters are often pro-Palestinian, regardless of their religion (or lack thereof), and have become more so as they have become more and more aware of the increasingly oppressive nature of the occupation. There are also, of course, Arab and Muslim voters who largely switched to the Democrats after being kicked in the teeth by the Bush administration after 9/11. When Israel responded to the October 2023 attacks (which they claimed, and the western media accepted without question, as a massacre of 1,200 civilians and supposedly the biggest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, though the death toll is disputed, as are the numbers of casualties who were civilians as opposed to soldiers, and the details of how some of the deaths occurred) with an onslaught against Gaza’s civilian population, Democratic politicians at federal, state and local levels proclaimed that these actions were self-defence, that this was war and the casualties were “collateral damage”, regardless of both Israeli rhetoric that clearly indicated that the intent was genocide and the very obvious targeting of hospitals, schools, homes and actual civilians. Congress continued to approve billions of dollars of military aid to Israel while protests on campus were branded antisemitic and participants sometimes suspended or expelled.

The party, in short, threw its moral compass into the ocean, and did so eagerly. Two wrongs don’t make a right and one atrocity does not justify another; “but 7th October” ceased to be an excuse after a while. When faced with a choice of voting between two candidates who both supported whatever Israel would do and would write them a blank cheque, millions of voters could not justify voting for either, hence the 2.7% drop in turnout compared to 2020. The fact that Harris is a woman, or Biden’s senility and poor decisions, or the intransigence of sections of the trans community do not account for Harris losing so badly against such a dreadful opponent; the Biden administration’s decision to stand four-square behind one of the most viciously racist regimes in the world as it pummelled a long-suffering civilian population for more than a year, at the time of the election, better accounts for the drastic drop in both turnout and the Democrats’ share of it. It remains to be seen whether party strategists and their allied blogs and media will ever face up to their failure.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Drumlanrig jolly
• Why people are deserting the BBC
• Reflections on the fall of Bashar al-Assad
• The benefits of learning Jewish history
• There’s a genocide going on