Americans from the left, or center-left, tried to console each other last week around the Thanksgiving table: the pendulum will surely swing back. Although all is lost, maybe not.
We have already seen quite a few changes of government in America. We saw the supporters of the defeated parties drowning in black bile, eulogizing themselves and their chances. We’ve heard Democrats and Republicans question their chances of seeing a president from their party in their lifetime. The Republicans were once in power for 16 consecutive years (1896-1912) and twice in power for 12 years (in the 20th century). The Democrats were once in power for 20 consecutive years (1932-1952).
To the critics of the parties, it seemed that the defeats revealed an irreversible demographic, or cultural, or social tendency. In 2004, for example, George Bush Jr. won by a small margin, just over 2%, but the Democrats thought they had hit a wall, and from now on they could only bang their heads against it. It was a wall of religious faith. They then drew a map of America, where the republican area was marked as Jesusland, the land of Jesus, which is out of their reach.
Four years later, Barack Obama was elected president, and was re-elected. Obama’s second victory, in 2012, was less than half of his first victory. But Republicans thought they had hit a demographic wall. They did not have a reasonable formula to reach the hearts of the non-white minorities, whose share of the population is growing. Four years later Donald Trump came, and 12 years later Trump won 42% of the Hispanic vote and a fifth of the black vote.
Indeed, the irreversible tendencies were definitely reversed. what does that mean That commentators are wrong, and need a greater degree of humility? Yes, of course. But it would be foolish to draw unequivocal conclusions from a collection of dates and numbers. Important from statistics and chronology is the question of what gives irreversible validity to the results of elections.
attack the fundamentals of the method
This is a question intended, of course, not only for American ears, but also for Israeli ears. Trump’s clear and stated intention is to attack the foundations of the political, administrative and cultural system to the extent that it can no longer get back on its feet. To learn the lessons of his first presidency, he no longer intends to hire people for his administration, who will put his feet up, or throw hoops at him.
The plans are breathtakingly dramatic. It is doubtful that they have been examples of any winning party in America in the last 150 years.
An article in the Wall Street Journal last week by two right-wing intellectuals presented a road map to Trump on how to eliminate Woke, which is the radical trend to establish racial, social and cultural equality in America at the expense of “white privilege”. Most Americans have had enough of Walk’s wild excesses, but Walk herself has become a scarecrow in a political and ideological war against liberal principles.
The authors of this article advise Trump not only to cancel President Biden’s executive orders in favor of greater equality in America, but also to remove the left from cultural and academic institutions and to dismantle public broadcasting. How good it is to hear these words in an American accent in Washington instead of hearing them in an American accent in Jerusalem.
In America there is no public broadcasting in the European or Israeli sense. That is to say, there is no radio or television channel whose establishment was financed by the taxpayers. But in 1967, by order of Congress, the Public Broadcasting Authority (CPB) was established, providing modest subsidies to public broadcasting networks and larger subsidies to individual broadcasting stations. There are approximately 2,500 non-commercial radio stations and 350 public television stations in the US.
The authors of the article call on Trump to disband the Broadcasting Authority. The public stations it helps fund “are responsible for spreading the mind virus of Wook… Congress should repeal the 1967 law… It’s time to close CPB.”
vote, and empty the oxygen
Paraphrasing Karl Marx, one could perhaps write that “a spirit of terror hovers over both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the spirit of Trumpism”.
Cancel, dismiss, delete, disperse, deny funding, ban, silence, censor. The enemy pollutes the mind of the nation, his ideas are dangerous viruses that need healing and purification.
The extent to which the vocabulary of the American radical right has infiltrated the discourse of the Israeli right needs no evidence. The percolation started slowly back in the eighties of the last century, and became a strong current in the last generation.
The American radicals are the source of inspiration for the war in Israel against the independence of the judicial and enforcement system. Now they are inspiring the growing fight against pluralism on the airwaves. It is possible to assume that soon the patterns of the struggle for cultural takeover will also be copied, including the one proposed in the USA to purge leftists from the management of public museums.
All this has one clear goal: ensuring the irreversibility of the political change. “We are allowed to change the regime,” says the communications minister. He means the change made by Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Narendra Modi in India. The first will soon celebrate 22 years of his reign. The second has been in power for almost 15 years. The third – a little over ten years. Their hands are tilted. They set up ‘electoral autocracies’, which allow them to hide behind electoral facades while they drain the oxygen from the city square.
Benjamin Netanyahu is jealous of them. In the 2009 elections, which returned him to power, he claimed to be Israel’s Barack Obama. In 2025 he will be like the above, the birth of the Israeli electoral autocracy. He is the man who managed to get rid of the pigments, which make it easier for a person to blush with shame.