Stories to Watch: Politics in the Streets

Democracy dies in demonstrations

In a healthy political culture, an election is nothing but a way to achieve peaceful transition of leaders. In an unhealthy culture, an election is war by other means. In the unhealthy culture, the tribal hostility is too severe and the perceived stakes are too high.

I think that Israel recently tipped into an unhealthy political culture. A right-wing government took power, and the left-wing opposition took to the streets. I think that what is going on there currently is an augury of what could happen in the United States soon.

The Israeli Left Embraces Violence, and it Works

Caroline Glick, a conservative Israeli columnist, writes,

Campaigners against Israel’s Netanyahu government scored a notable victory on Aug. 4. After a six-month demonization, defamation and harassment campaign against the Kohelet Policy Forum and its chief donor, Arthur Dantchik, Dantchik, a Philadelphia businessman, announced that he was ending his support for the conservative Jerusalem think tank.

Moshe Koppel, a Bar-Ilan University professor, founded Kohelet a decade ago as a full-spectrum policy think tank.

Koppel is sensitive and scholarly. He is the opposite of violent or anti-democratic. But as Glick tells it, the left went after him.

In March, Kohelet became the target of a demonization campaign the likes of which Israel has never seen. Its offices were barricaded and vandalized. Its leaders were assaulted on the streets and in restaurants, and were subjected to noisy demonstrations at their homes in pre-dawn riots. Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (res.) Nehemia Dagan called for the military “neutralization” of Kohelet, describing its funders as “Jews of the kind upon which the antisemitic ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was based.”

One of the left’s key figures is

Eran Nissan, who leads a digital leftist outfit called “Strengthening.” Nissan initiated a campaign to demonize Kohelet three years ago and his operation was the basis for the left’s successful operation this year.

…Basking in the success of the campaign he spearheaded, Nissan bragged, “We shut off their funding, or to put it more bluntly, the brain of the right had a stroke because we cut off their oxygen.”

The left’s demonization campaign had done its job. “Kohelet has turned into a poisonous brand, in large part because of the protests, and very much owing to the media,” said Nissan.

The campaign against Dantchik was organized by Shany Granot Lubaton, who works for J Street, a Jewish political organization that is anti-Netanyahu (and many would say anti-Israel).

Granot Lubaton organized the anti-government demonstrations in New York in May that saw expatriate Israelis ambushing, harassing and at times assaulting government ministers and senior Knesset members, who were in New York to participate in the Celebrate Israel Parade on Fifth Avenue.

…She organized a group of leftist Israeli expatriates in Philadelphia, who demonstrated three times a week outside Dantchik’s home, synagogue and offices, and at an intersection near his house.

…Her group’s success in “breaking a billionaire’s soul” whet her appetite, and the next targets, she insisted, must be everyone associated with Kohelet—intellectuals and donors.

Another group, called Brothers in Arms,

used barbed wire and garbage to barricade Kohelet’s offices in March—a criminal act that received so much support in the media that it catapulted the campaign against the think tank onto the national stage.

What is chilling about Glick’s account concerning the demonization of Kohelet is that it differs from how the story was covered elsewhere. The campaign’s violent assault on free speech, rather than being condemned, was treated as a legitimate part of the Israeli protest movement. The mainstream media views Israeli politics through the eyes of the protestors, who lost the election to Netanyahu and now seek to bring down his government save democracy by other means.

Meanwhile, in American Politics. . .

On a CBS Face the Nation interview with Professor Robert Pape, reporter Margaret Brennan said,

In looking at some of the research you've shared with us, one of the things that stood out you are seeing this radicalization on both sides of the political spectrum. 30 million people, according to your numbers, think the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from being president. 18 million think it's justified to restore Trump to the presidency

I saw this report.

The Chicago Project on Security & Threats survey findings, some of which are available at The Guardian, indicate that eighteen million, or 6.9 percent of Americans, feel violence is justified to ensure Trump does become president again.

…[But] the percentage of Americans (11.6) who said violence would be ok to prevent Trump from again assuming the presidency.

Lorenzo Warby warns,

Remember, the decline in support for democracy is strongest among younger folk. This is the age-group most steeped in contemporary trends, and which has grown up with social media.

He writes,

There are at least four ways the politics of the transformational future—and its derivative and enabling social bodyguard of prestige opinions and luxury beliefs—are undermining democracy:

1.   Systematically undermining the ability of societies to talk to themselves.

2.   Via the non-electoral politics of institutional capture: pushing transformative policies—that have never been voted for—through institutions, so they persist regardless of which party is in power.

3.  Denigrating the citizenry, treating them either as human clay, catastrophically beholden to a flawed heritage—who must be moulded by their betters—or as deplorable, human dross resisting the transformative future, to be sidelined and silenced.

4.   Focusing on patterns of structural oppression—of democratic societies as social prisons—through notions of constraint-as-oppression. This implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—delegitimises what democracy has made.

Andrew Beck writes,

What divided Madison and Wilson’s approach to the federal government is not a matter of separate paths reaching the same goal, but a completely different set of objectives. Madison held the ideals of representative democracy and open debate between competing interests as government’s primary ends in themselves. Wilson, on the other hand, was a progressive theorist who viewed government as a means in the perpetual crusade for social change.

For militant progressives, the “transformational future” (Warby’s term) is what is right. This legitimates whatever means are needed to achieve it. Anything that is perceived as standing in the way of the transformational future is unacceptable, whether it is a Donald Trump Presidency, the Constitution, or a democracy in which voters fail to endorse progressive policies.

The illiberal form of progressivism is held by a minority, although as Warby and others have pointed out, the liberal left (think of Jonathan Haidt or Jonathan Rauch) is getting older. Instead of listening to the older liberals, young progressives are right-coding them.

Probably only a tiny percentage of individuals are willing to engage in political violence. But with so much latent support for violence, they can get away with it.

In 2017, we had “The Resistance” and the “Pussy Hat” protests, which were relatively peaceful. In 2021, we had the January 6 protests, which were relatively disorganized. By 2025, if Donald Trump were to win re-election, I predict that mass protests will be highly organized, and violence will be attempted.

If that scenario plays out, and the left is unwilling to delegitimize violence committed by extremists, then I predict that violent factions on the right will become more organized and more militant. This is the road to Weimar.

Substacks referenced above:

@

The Fourfold Attack on Democracy