In simple terms, Netanyahu's biggest problem is one faced by all Rightist governments in the Western world - one that disingenuously never gets reported in the MSM. In our time (and for many years past) the civil administration of all Western-style democracies - including its legal profession - is permanently left-leaning. So the agenda of conservative governments (whether good or bad) is constantly undermined by its permanent judiciary (with sometimes slight exception of SCOTUS) and (without exception) its administrative bureaucracy. Left-leaning governments on the other hand, do not face this problem. This is the great elephant in the room of Western democratic pluralism.
What we call judicial review in the US is unusual in the west. The controversy in Israel is also about American-style judicial review. The role of the attorney is quite different in civil law countries and in countries without US-style judicial review (like the UK). As I understand it, the Israeli controversy concerns whether or not the country should continue to have American Marbury v. Madison style judicial review. This analysis can't be generalized to the whole West because it doesn't apply to France, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, or the other little countries.
Sure, the bureaucracies are nominally leftist everywhere, because leftism is just "bureaucracy is good, centralization is good." Their ideology is just "people like us deserve more power and more money and have the right to rule everyone else."
Your comment about Israel's American-style judicial review is doubtless accurate.
My comment was of a much more general nature; the entire professional and managerial classes in the Western world (including lawyers) have for decades now either willingly embraced (most) or unwillingly run-the-gauntlet-of (a minority) a university leftist sheep-dip. Further than this I would just be reiterating my original point (about elephants-in-rooms etc).
My recollection of the reportage was that the phrase "mostly peaceful" saw a lot of use in the media: indicating, presumably, that although liquor stores were looted and cars torched, the parties doing the looting and torching represented only a fraction of the protesters.
Oddly, I don't recall the phrase being used much in describing Trumpist rallies, though I suspect that a similarly small fraction of the participants were involved in any violence that occurred.
Wasn't the Jan 6 protest mostly peaceful? Okay there were some windows broken, and mace sprayed, and Nancy Pelosi's laptop taken. But as I recall the protestors didn't set any fires, fire any shots, or do any large-scale looting . . . much more peaceful than the BLM riots I would say.
They will be protesting the fact that a criminal was elected to the presidency. Hopefully, they won’t try to make up extenuating excuses, a la the Russia collusion narrative.
They prefer "bad boys" when they are the only males who are sufficiently masculine. Take a class of 10th graders. If the 16 year-old boys are mostly skinny, wussy, adolescent Mama's boys, then the girls will go for the boys who at least have a masculine, independent, more adult, rebellious edge to them. But say you have a room full of masculine firefighters? Then there will be enough masculinity in the room in general. The women won't have to look for the "criminal" in group--say the arsonist and embezzler. The mainstream firefighters will be sufficiently masculine and attractive.
I honestly think this explains much of Trump's appeal. Conservatives are so afraid of women's rise (Hillary), and the decline of masculinity that they prefer the exaggerated, cartoon-style of Trump's masculinity.
The trouble in Israel is not due to the participation of the religious conservative parties in the government, although the Israeli Left doesn't like that fact. Rather, it is due to the government's proposals for judicial reform. Israel has never adopted a constitution defining the powers of the Supreme Court, so it has arrogated excessive power to itself, impinging on legislative and executive functions. For example, it has declared laws invalid based on "unreasonableness," without any established legal standard for such determinations. As Israel moved rightward due to the fiascos of the Oslo Accords and the Gaza evacuation, the Left has lost its position in the legislature (the Knesset), but continues dominant in culture, the universities, the press, etc. and fears that judicial reform will impinge on their power. Netanyahu's party, the Likud, appeals to the majority of Sephardim and Mizrahim, which are more conservative, while the Left's base is among the more liberal Ashkenazim, or European Jews.
So yes, the likely reaction to a re-election of President Trump would be unconstrained rioting by Democrats in the cities where they control law enforcement, just as in 2020 before the election. Riots would not be put down by authorities in those places. But the situation is not really comparable to that in Israel.
The left in Israel correctly recognizes this as a nearly existential threat to their overall capacity to wield power and influence the law. Imagine you've been playing chess with the advantage of having an extra queen (judiciary as a superlegislative ally) while your opponent is stuck with the usual one more or less evenly matched with your #1 queen (electoral popularity). Well, for 20 or so years his #1 queen has been getting stronger than yours, and now it looks like your opponent is seriously threatening that extra queen too. You are naturally gonna pull out all the stops and mount a last ditch defense. The logic of the situation points to a "by any means necessary" attitude, but one can hope they acquiescence rather than escalate to serious violence.
The fact is that even some kind of theoretically ideal right leader simply cannot implement or achieve anything substantial without a plan to neutralize the systemic threat posed by incumbent judges and other officials determined to overstep their authorities and abuse their power to thwart such actions.
And part of that plan simply has to include an assumption of all kinds of ugliness, dirty tricks, and nasty fighting, and the courage to fight back and see it through anyway, a determination born of the extreme height of the stakes involved.
Really, as this has become one of the central political and governance problems in practically every western style democracy, anyone who seriously opposes the left - that is, who actually cares about results and not content with being a perpetually 'beautiful loser' - ought to wish that someone in their own country was capable and willing to do something similar.
There will always be some “lowest risk” asset. If not US bonds, something else, and that something must be known and used, before taking that coveted lowest risk spot. (One many economists falsely claim as “risk free” since their unrealistic theory require such an asset for tractable math, rather than truth.)
Gold, bitcoin, euro, yuan/renminbi, some BRICS new thing? None are close. US instability will cause more trials of others. We need smaller US deficits and more Econ growth.
The only thing that will shake US financial dominance is losing a bunch of aircraft carriers in the south china sea, and even then it depends on the follow through.
China lost a lot of credibility as an alternative the last few years.
Mass protests are a thing of the past in the US. Compare the teeny-tiny groups, right and left, that took to the streets over the past ten years, to the half-million person turnouts you used to see in the Vietnam War years. In those days, a demonstration was a place to bask in your generational zeitgeist, cause trouble for the heck of it, and meet members of the opposite sex. Today's young people, or at least the males, are not likely to haul their overweight rear ends out of their gaming chairs and head out into the streets and cause trouble in any great numbers. Women, as the "pussy hat" demonstrations early in the Trump administration showed, can whip up a huge crowd, but make barely a ripple in the national consciousness.
There was violence at Trump’s inauguration and rallies in 2016/2017, though it wasn’t covered much because of the same reasons you mention in your post -- media didn’t want to draw too much sympathy to Trump or his supporters. I suspect it won’t be much worse this time, and that fatigue will dominate. But we’ll see.
The forced decisiveness of the US 2-party electoral system gives it an advantage over Israel’s parliamentary system, in this particular case.
Election timing certainty, every 2 & 4 & 6 years, is widely undiscussed. Israel & Italy & Slovakia, with uncertain terms of government control, leads to more uncertainty and thus sub-optimal planning. The two party US reality also reduces uncertainty. Less political uncertainty is better. When I lived in the US, as a Libertarian, I supported proportional representation, but now believe the small added representation advantage is far less than the inevitable post election coalition agreements that can give so much power to radicals.
Israelis may talk liberal but they walk arpathied. They voted bibi aka baba.
Here in the States: a trump presidency is a stretch. But cluck away. Protests if he's elected? Most folks zombies to numb to react even to another trump win.
The ultimate problem of leadership as a popularity contest with the masses. You can unseat such a leader simply by threatening their popularity. To lead, one needs someone who will follow despite fear and distaste for the job at hand. Popularity contests are unstable against these situations.
None of what you say is exactly false, but by far and away the most important dynamic in Israeli politics is racial and the relevant comparison is recent history of Latin America. The central question is whether the dwindling White Ashkenazi professional middle class and up still get to run everything even as demographics make it progressively more impossible to launder their rule through democratic forms. The only difference between this and the typical Latin American political struggle is that what there was coded 'Left' and 'Right' is in Israel coded the opposite.
Haaretz readers may claim they are worried about not being able to drive cars on the Sabbath or not being able to engage in deviant sex acts or some such, but what they are really worried about - and with good reason - is that they turn on their tap one day and no water comes out because Aryeh Deri embezzled the money that was supposed to be spent on infrastructure in exchange for giving his voters shiny trinkets.
Honestly, yes, if, like Israel, the US could conceivably become conservative dominated, it might be something to worry about. But even Trump winning didn't make that happen, quite the opposite.
There is a problem with strabismus in our “supposedly” democratic states. When someone you don’t like wins then you try to make your own rules. When someone you like wins he can break any rule, attempt at breaching the Constitution, Etc...but then they all claim for the lack of rules...
Long way to go until 2024 election and DT being the candidate might be an over estimation of probabilities; things can change as we move in to 2024. No Biden, no Trump would be much preferred by a great many.
In simple terms, Netanyahu's biggest problem is one faced by all Rightist governments in the Western world - one that disingenuously never gets reported in the MSM. In our time (and for many years past) the civil administration of all Western-style democracies - including its legal profession - is permanently left-leaning. So the agenda of conservative governments (whether good or bad) is constantly undermined by its permanent judiciary (with sometimes slight exception of SCOTUS) and (without exception) its administrative bureaucracy. Left-leaning governments on the other hand, do not face this problem. This is the great elephant in the room of Western democratic pluralism.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Once again America is well served by the dying hand if tradition.
In Israel the judiciary is part of the left-wing permanent ruling class, so the government wants to completely whip the branch into submission.
American Republicans have less dire options, and both sides are representated in the "politicized" supreme court.
What we call judicial review in the US is unusual in the west. The controversy in Israel is also about American-style judicial review. The role of the attorney is quite different in civil law countries and in countries without US-style judicial review (like the UK). As I understand it, the Israeli controversy concerns whether or not the country should continue to have American Marbury v. Madison style judicial review. This analysis can't be generalized to the whole West because it doesn't apply to France, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, or the other little countries.
Sure, the bureaucracies are nominally leftist everywhere, because leftism is just "bureaucracy is good, centralization is good." Their ideology is just "people like us deserve more power and more money and have the right to rule everyone else."
Your comment about Israel's American-style judicial review is doubtless accurate.
My comment was of a much more general nature; the entire professional and managerial classes in the Western world (including lawyers) have for decades now either willingly embraced (most) or unwillingly run-the-gauntlet-of (a minority) a university leftist sheep-dip. Further than this I would just be reiterating my original point (about elephants-in-rooms etc).
"they usually stopped short of approving of vandalism and violence"
That's not how I remember it. I remember "give people room to destroy if that is what they want to do."
What exactly would the left be protesting if Trump won? Will the left claim the election was stolen? Voter intimidation, etc.
My recollection of the reportage was that the phrase "mostly peaceful" saw a lot of use in the media: indicating, presumably, that although liquor stores were looted and cars torched, the parties doing the looting and torching represented only a fraction of the protesters.
Oddly, I don't recall the phrase being used much in describing Trumpist rallies, though I suspect that a similarly small fraction of the participants were involved in any violence that occurred.
Wasn't the Jan 6 protest mostly peaceful? Okay there were some windows broken, and mace sprayed, and Nancy Pelosi's laptop taken. But as I recall the protestors didn't set any fires, fire any shots, or do any large-scale looting . . . much more peaceful than the BLM riots I would say.
They will be protesting the fact that a criminal was elected to the presidency. Hopefully, they won’t try to make up extenuating excuses, a la the Russia collusion narrative.
I got some news for them.
Anyway, the self reflective answer is to ask why people preferred the criminal.
Instead of "preferred", think "felt safer with". Why do women, in practice, seem to prefer bad boys in some situations?
They prefer "bad boys" when they are the only males who are sufficiently masculine. Take a class of 10th graders. If the 16 year-old boys are mostly skinny, wussy, adolescent Mama's boys, then the girls will go for the boys who at least have a masculine, independent, more adult, rebellious edge to them. But say you have a room full of masculine firefighters? Then there will be enough masculinity in the room in general. The women won't have to look for the "criminal" in group--say the arsonist and embezzler. The mainstream firefighters will be sufficiently masculine and attractive.
I honestly think this explains much of Trump's appeal. Conservatives are so afraid of women's rise (Hillary), and the decline of masculinity that they prefer the exaggerated, cartoon-style of Trump's masculinity.
People often weigh other concerns higher than criminality. Anyway, I don’t think it’s a real concern because I don’t think he’ll win in 2024.
Remember because of the way the electoral college works, Biden has to win the popular vote by at least 4% to win the electoral college.
I don't why they would protest the voting of a criminal to the presidency, Jim- they elected one in 2020.
I don’t know what crimes you’re talking about. Trump is being indicted for multiple ones. His only hope is to get elected and pardon himself.
Of course you don't, Jim, of course you don't.
The trouble in Israel is not due to the participation of the religious conservative parties in the government, although the Israeli Left doesn't like that fact. Rather, it is due to the government's proposals for judicial reform. Israel has never adopted a constitution defining the powers of the Supreme Court, so it has arrogated excessive power to itself, impinging on legislative and executive functions. For example, it has declared laws invalid based on "unreasonableness," without any established legal standard for such determinations. As Israel moved rightward due to the fiascos of the Oslo Accords and the Gaza evacuation, the Left has lost its position in the legislature (the Knesset), but continues dominant in culture, the universities, the press, etc. and fears that judicial reform will impinge on their power. Netanyahu's party, the Likud, appeals to the majority of Sephardim and Mizrahim, which are more conservative, while the Left's base is among the more liberal Ashkenazim, or European Jews.
So yes, the likely reaction to a re-election of President Trump would be unconstrained rioting by Democrats in the cities where they control law enforcement, just as in 2020 before the election. Riots would not be put down by authorities in those places. But the situation is not really comparable to that in Israel.
The left in Israel correctly recognizes this as a nearly existential threat to their overall capacity to wield power and influence the law. Imagine you've been playing chess with the advantage of having an extra queen (judiciary as a superlegislative ally) while your opponent is stuck with the usual one more or less evenly matched with your #1 queen (electoral popularity). Well, for 20 or so years his #1 queen has been getting stronger than yours, and now it looks like your opponent is seriously threatening that extra queen too. You are naturally gonna pull out all the stops and mount a last ditch defense. The logic of the situation points to a "by any means necessary" attitude, but one can hope they acquiescence rather than escalate to serious violence.
The fact is that even some kind of theoretically ideal right leader simply cannot implement or achieve anything substantial without a plan to neutralize the systemic threat posed by incumbent judges and other officials determined to overstep their authorities and abuse their power to thwart such actions.
And part of that plan simply has to include an assumption of all kinds of ugliness, dirty tricks, and nasty fighting, and the courage to fight back and see it through anyway, a determination born of the extreme height of the stakes involved.
Really, as this has become one of the central political and governance problems in practically every western style democracy, anyone who seriously opposes the left - that is, who actually cares about results and not content with being a perpetually 'beautiful loser' - ought to wish that someone in their own country was capable and willing to do something similar.
Judicial review isn't in the American constitution, either. It was read into it by Chief Justice Marshall.
There will always be some “lowest risk” asset. If not US bonds, something else, and that something must be known and used, before taking that coveted lowest risk spot. (One many economists falsely claim as “risk free” since their unrealistic theory require such an asset for tractable math, rather than truth.)
Gold, bitcoin, euro, yuan/renminbi, some BRICS new thing? None are close. US instability will cause more trials of others. We need smaller US deficits and more Econ growth.
The only thing that will shake US financial dominance is losing a bunch of aircraft carriers in the south china sea, and even then it depends on the follow through.
China lost a lot of credibility as an alternative the last few years.
Following, because if anything, the hot air balloon story indicates the opposite to me.
Mass protests are a thing of the past in the US. Compare the teeny-tiny groups, right and left, that took to the streets over the past ten years, to the half-million person turnouts you used to see in the Vietnam War years. In those days, a demonstration was a place to bask in your generational zeitgeist, cause trouble for the heck of it, and meet members of the opposite sex. Today's young people, or at least the males, are not likely to haul their overweight rear ends out of their gaming chairs and head out into the streets and cause trouble in any great numbers. Women, as the "pussy hat" demonstrations early in the Trump administration showed, can whip up a huge crowd, but make barely a ripple in the national consciousness.
There was violence at Trump’s inauguration and rallies in 2016/2017, though it wasn’t covered much because of the same reasons you mention in your post -- media didn’t want to draw too much sympathy to Trump or his supporters. I suspect it won’t be much worse this time, and that fatigue will dominate. But we’ll see.
The forced decisiveness of the US 2-party electoral system gives it an advantage over Israel’s parliamentary system, in this particular case.
Election timing certainty, every 2 & 4 & 6 years, is widely undiscussed. Israel & Italy & Slovakia, with uncertain terms of government control, leads to more uncertainty and thus sub-optimal planning. The two party US reality also reduces uncertainty. Less political uncertainty is better. When I lived in the US, as a Libertarian, I supported proportional representation, but now believe the small added representation advantage is far less than the inevitable post election coalition agreements that can give so much power to radicals.
This sounds disturbingly possible.
Israelis may talk liberal but they walk arpathied. They voted bibi aka baba.
Here in the States: a trump presidency is a stretch. But cluck away. Protests if he's elected? Most folks zombies to numb to react even to another trump win.
Thankfully, the way the economy is going, Trump will probably be defeated decisively, so we won’t have to worry about this.
Um, I'd argue the economy was quite a bit better four years ago. How'd that work out for Trump?
It was slightly better, and Trump was on course for re-election, but then Covid happened.
The ultimate problem of leadership as a popularity contest with the masses. You can unseat such a leader simply by threatening their popularity. To lead, one needs someone who will follow despite fear and distaste for the job at hand. Popularity contests are unstable against these situations.
None of what you say is exactly false, but by far and away the most important dynamic in Israeli politics is racial and the relevant comparison is recent history of Latin America. The central question is whether the dwindling White Ashkenazi professional middle class and up still get to run everything even as demographics make it progressively more impossible to launder their rule through democratic forms. The only difference between this and the typical Latin American political struggle is that what there was coded 'Left' and 'Right' is in Israel coded the opposite.
Haaretz readers may claim they are worried about not being able to drive cars on the Sabbath or not being able to engage in deviant sex acts or some such, but what they are really worried about - and with good reason - is that they turn on their tap one day and no water comes out because Aryeh Deri embezzled the money that was supposed to be spent on infrastructure in exchange for giving his voters shiny trinkets.
Honestly, yes, if, like Israel, the US could conceivably become conservative dominated, it might be something to worry about. But even Trump winning didn't make that happen, quite the opposite.
There is a problem with strabismus in our “supposedly” democratic states. When someone you don’t like wins then you try to make your own rules. When someone you like wins he can break any rule, attempt at breaching the Constitution, Etc...but then they all claim for the lack of rules...
"If the Palestinians would just sit on their hands and watch, they might see Israel collapse."
-- this is true for most issues but people are wired to "don't just stand there, do something!"
If Rupert Murdoch formed a political party, it would sound just like you.
Long way to go until 2024 election and DT being the candidate might be an over estimation of probabilities; things can change as we move in to 2024. No Biden, no Trump would be much preferred by a great many.