Pro-Israel Lobby Helps Save Democrats, and U.S., from Far Left
Plus, Revel and Uber; “positive-sum society“
The pro-Israel lobby is “the biggest … force for moderation in politics right now,“ Josh Kraushaar writes for The Liberal Patriot, examining how, by effectively backing moderate Democrats against far-left anti-Israel candidates and also taking on Republican extremists, the Israel advocacy group is also strengthening more centrist candidates overall.
The flip side of this is the criticism by Senator Bernie Sanders that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and allied groups aren’t advocating for Israel but rather are, as Sanders put it, trying, “to create a two-party system, Democrats and Republicans, in which both parties are responsive to the needs of corporate America and the billionaire class.” Sanders thinks this is a problem. The rest of it might find it reassuring to have both major political parties in favor of free enterprise.
Whether you look at it the way Kraushaar does in “How the Pro-Israel Community Fights Extremism in Both Parties” or the way Sanders does, it’s hard to avoid the reality that, especially on the left, the candidates that are most hostile to Israel are also hostile to capitalism and to defense spending in general and tend to be the ones who want the highest taxes and the most government regulation and non-defense spending. Think of “The Squad,” or the Democratic Socialists of America.
One question is why it’s fallen to the pro-Israel lobby to do this political work rather than a lobby representing corporate America or the defense industry or more general common-sense centrism. The Democratic Leadership Council worked for a while to tug the Democrats toward the center, and it helped to get Bill Clinton nominated and elected.
Kraushaar doesn’t state it this way, but one way to summarize his point is that the pro-Israel lobby is, somewhat thanklessly, doing the work that the DLC used to do. Even the DLC at its peak rarely went so far as launching and winning primary challenges against incumbents, which is difficult to do successfully.
The pro-Israel people will say they are happy to have pro-Israel progressives and pro-Israel conservative Republicans, and that is true, up to a point, but the reality is also that if you are trying to unseat an anti-Israel extremist, having a candidate who isn’t extreme on other issues can also be practically useful in winning broad support from voters. Those voters may not be super-concerned about the Middle East or the U.S.-Israel relationship, but they don’t want a candidate who is against free enterprise and America, either.
David Brooks on the “positive sum society” and “elite overproduction”: The universities are influencing the culture in a destructive way by overproducing graduate students who then become alienated and by insulating students in progressive bubbles, David Brooks writes in a New York Times column that is worth a look:
Progressivism has practically become an entry ticket into the elite. A few years ago, a Yale admissions officer wrote, “For those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice.” Recently Tufts included an optional essay prompt that explicitly asked applicants what they were doing to advance social justice.
Over the years the share of progressive students and professors has steadily risen, and the share of conservatives has approached zero. Progressives have created places where they never have to encounter beliefs other than their own. At Harvard, 82 percent of progressives say that all or almost all of their close friends share their political beliefs.
A lot of us in the center left or the center right don’t want to live amid this much conformity. We don’t see history as a zero-sum war between oppressor and oppressed. We still believe in a positive-sum society where all people can see their lives improve together.
The second socially harmful dynamic is what you might call the cultural consequences of elite overproduction. Over the past few decades, elite universities have been churning out very smart graduates who are ready to use their minds and sensibilities to climb to the top of society and change the world. Unfortunately, the marketplace isn’t producing enough of the kinds of jobs these graduates think they deserve….Academics who had expected to hold a prestigious chair find themselves slaving away as adjunct professors….As a nonprogressive member of the educated class, I’d say that elite overproduction induces people on the left and the right to form their political views around their own sense of personal grievance and alienation. It launches unhappy progressives and their populist enemies into culture war battles that help them feel engaged, purposeful and good about themselves, but it seems to me that these battles are often more about performative self-validation than they are about practical policies that might serve the common good.
Revel pivots: Revel, which started as an electric moped sharing service and then moved to an all-Tesla, all-employee ride-hail service, is laying off its driver-employees and changing to an Uber-style gig economy, TechCrunch reports.
Bloomberg has more:
The change “came in response to an overwhelming majority of drivers asking for more flexibility, which is standard in the industry,” Keith Williams, vice president of rideshare operations, said in the email. This included “offering drivers more control over where and when they drive, the ability to take breaks when and for how long they want, and for more lucrative bonuses that are easier to achieve.”...
Revel hopes to attract drivers who are unable to earn money as Uber drivers, given that Uber has had a waitlist limiting new driver registrations since last April. The city has a surplus of more than 62,000 licensed drivers over vehicles available, according to 2023 data from the Taxi and Limousine Commission.
This desire for flexibility and control is a powerful cultural force that, I predict, is eventually going to affect a lot of industries other than driving. To a certain degree, it’s happening to journalism here on Substack, which in some ways is a kind of Uber for writers. It makes the Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll employment number that came out today less significant than perhaps it used to be; as BLS itself observed in a blog post, “Flexible Jobs Give Workers Choices.” Some people would rather think of themsleves as a small businessperson than as a jobnik. Businesses have long had to decide on whether to insource or outsource tasks or whether to employ or contract labor; such decisions may become more frequent, and more frequently tend toward relationships that give workers the flexibility and control many of them seem to increasingly desire.
And, secondarily, as much as workers want flexibility, the regulatory apparatus will act in a self-preserving way to try to prevent it. Twenty years ago at the New York Sun, I was writing editorials about taxi medallions. Now the city limits Uber drivers, creating a regulatory arbitrage opportunity for Revel. In Massachusetts, voters may face a ballot question over gig workers and employee status of the sort that California dispatched back in 2020 with an overwhelming majority in favor of flexibility.
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