The Iranian military has reportedly launched large-scale naval maneuvers in the Gulf of Oman, the northern part of the Indian Ocean, and in part of the Red Sea.
Is There a Future for American Jews?
By Bret Stephens
For decades, conversations about Jewish continuity in the United States have often revolved around numbers and definitions, all of them fuzzy.
How many Jewish Americans are there? That depends on who counts as a Jew. According to the 2020 Pew survey of American Jews, the headline number is 7.5 million, of whom 5.8 million are adults. That’s a half-million more Jewish adults than there were in Pew’s last survey, in 2013. Other estimates put the total Jewish population at somewhere between 7.15 million and 7.6 million. The percentage of Jewish adults as a total of the overall U.S. population actually rose somewhat, according to Pew, from 2.2 percent in 2013 to 2.4 percent last year.
This sounds like good news, particularly given the demographic doomsaying that prevailed only a few years ago. Dig a little deeper into the data, however, and the outlook dims. Of those 5.8 million adult Jews, 1.5 million, or just over a quarter, identify as “Jews of no religion.” More than 40 percent of married Jews have a non-Jewish spouse; that number rises to 61 percent of Jews who were married in the past decade. Outside of the Jewish population, there are 2.8 million American adults who had at least one Jewish parent, but who either identify with a different religion or with no religion at all.
Put another way, out of 8.6 million American adults of immediate Jewish descent, only about 4.3 million — half — remain firmly, faithfully, and unmistakably within the Jewish fold. A people that has produced such a disproportionate share of strikingly successful Americans has been strikingly unsuccessful in maintaining and reproducing itself.
There are, of course, more charitable ways of interpreting these figures. Jews first set foot in North America in 1654, just 34 years after the Mayflower’s arrival in Massachusetts. Where, compared with the Jews, are the Puritans now — or, for that matter, the Congregationalists, their distant and much-diminished religious progeny? Alternatively, consider an ethnic comparison: How does Jewish communal cohesion compare with, say, that of the once-tight-knit, culturally confident, religiously cohesive Swedish-American community?
It is one thing to be a people that dwells apart. The challenge for Jewish Americans, as for most other ethnic and religious groups in the United States, has been to remain a people slightly apart: socially assimilated yet culturally and religiously distinct; modern yet tradition-minded; celebrating the supreme value of human freedom while seeking a baseline conformity in deeply personal matters of marriage, child-rearing, and sometimes politics. Given the tightrope the Jewish community has tried to walk, perhaps the real miracle is that more Jews haven’t fallen off. At least not yet.
Yet the internal dilemmas faced by the Jewish community are only one side of the problem of continuity. The United States today is undergoing a cultural transformation as radical as the one last seen in the 1960s. It’s a transformation that threatens to alter the moral and philosophical character of America in ways that are profoundly inimical to the very possibility of vibrant, secure, desirable, and therefore sustainable Jewish life in America.
Four grave challenges stand out.
1) Race is replacing ethnicity as a defining marker of group and personal identification in the United States.
It wasn’t long ago that most Jewish Americans — like Irish Americans, Italian Americans, or Chinese Americans — were just another ethnic group whose cultural, linguistic, and religious heritage separated them from the WASP mainstream. As such, we were subjected to various forms of discrimination, from neighborhood redlining to university quotas to the not-so-secret no-hire policies of prestigious law firms and commercial banks.
The boundaries separating ethnic America from the WASP mainstream faded (though by no means disappeared) in the postwar years, mainly for good reasons: assimilation, upward mobility, and a growing intolerance of bigotry. Yet the fading of ethnic differences has had the paradoxical effect of highlighting racial ones. America no longer conceives of itself as either a melting pot or a salad bowl, to use the old metaphors for assimilation and cultural diversity. Instead, we are becoming a country of unyielding binaries, in which people are grouped as being either “of color” or “white.”
The result is that the vast majority of Jewish Americans — those who do not identify as “Jews of color” — are being shunted into a racial category with which few have consciously identified; which is alien to Jewish cultural, religious, and political traditions; and which, within living memory, was used as an ideological tool to slaughter Jews by the millions precisely because we weren’t “white.” If race is indeed a social construct, as the progressive Left insists, then surely the most obscene construct of all is one that lumps Jewish Americans with the sort of people who marched at Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
Elsewhere in the world, Jewish success usually stoked antisemitism. In America, historically, Jewish success usually extinguished it. Now this is changing.
Nor does the problem end there. The same antisemitic libel that has always applied to Jews — that, through a combination of congenital malice and unfathomable power, we seek to oppress the downtrodden — has now become, thanks to bestselling books such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, fashionable as an anti-white libel. As Sapir writer Pamela Paresky has observed, “Jews have become ‘white’ and whites have become ‘Jews.’”
2) Success is becoming “privilege,” and excellence is giving way to equity.
Among the principal reasons that Jews have thrived in the United States is that American culture has more often tended to admire success than to envy or deprecate it — even seeing in success a mark of divine favor, not evidence of a past injustice. The archetypal American hero, from Alexander Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln to George Washington Carver, is the restless upstart who uses his wits and perseverance to make, and do, good.
These attitudes, born from the Calvinist convictions of the Puritans, did more to help Jews than any formal declarations of religious tolerance or personal liberty. For once in our long history of exile, Jews did not have to fear that our achievements would be held against us, or that the fruits of our ingenuity would be taken from us. We could finally rise as far as our talents would reach.
Elsewhere in the world, Jewish success usually stoked antisemitism. In America, historically, Jewish success usually extinguished it.
Now this is changing. Success in America is coming to be seen as a function not of individual merit but of a deeply rigged system that calls itself a meritocracy but is actually a self-serving plutocracy. And just who, according to this view, has rigged this system? Precisely the people who have most benefited from it and now have the “privilege” of standing atop it. By any empirical metric, in nearly every major institution, a disproportionate percentage of the meritocracy is Jewish. And the goal of nearly every social justice movement in the United States today is to tear that system down.
The great battering ram in this effort is “equity” — the “E” in that now-ubiquitous initialism D.E.I. In ordinary English, equity means fair play. In modern practice, it means a continuous process of legal or managerial interventions to achieve equality of outcomes based on considerations such as color or gender. Excellence might still matter in our institutions, but only after demands for this kind of equity have first been met.
To say this is damaging to the interests of Jewish Americans, or any other minority whose achievements outstrip their demographic representation, ought to be obvious, but a thought experiment might help: If equity were achieved at an institution such as Yale, a maximum of 2.4 percent of its student body would be Jewish. The figure is roughly 16 percent today. Which of these students should be told that they earned their place inequitably — and required to go elsewhere?
3) Independent thinkers are being treated as heretics.
It is not a secret that Americans are becoming more secretive about their personal and political views: A 2018 study by the group More in Common found that a broad majority of Americans were afraid to express themselves openly on subjects such as race, Islam, gay rights, and immigration. Some of this may be because their private views really are disreputable. Much more of it is because views considered mainstream a few years ago are now deemed hateful by the sort of people who might be in a position to bestow — or deny — a job, a promotion, or a good review.
The consequences of the new censoriousness, often verging into a kind of Jacobinism, are being felt throughout the country. Yet here again, there’s reason to fear the effects will be felt most heavily by Jews.
Why? Because of an ancient Jewish tradition of argument for the sake of heaven. Because of long Jewish experience, dating from the days of Joseph, of having one foot in, and one foot outside of, the dominant political and ethical culture. Because Jewish culture in America has a rich history of impishness, irreverence, skepticism, activism, and dissent. Because we are theologically and culturally predisposed to doubt sweeping promises of redemption. Because we have found that consensus-seeking is a poor road to truth, and that intelligent contrarians usually deserve a close hearing.
In a 1919 essay, “The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe,” the American economist Thorstein Veblen suggested that it was the hybrid, hyphenated nature of Jewish identity that made Jewish thinkers so original and important. For “the intellectually gifted Jew,” Veblen wrote,
the skepticism that goes to make him an effectual factor in the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men involves a loss of that peace of mind that is the birthright of the safe and sane quietist. He becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace, but only at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in the intellectual no-man’s-land, seeking another place of rest, farther along the road, somewhere over the horizon.
Today, the intellectual “no-man’s-land” that was once the place for expanding the frontiers of knowledge has become a kill zone to anyone who rashly ventures into it. The list of subjects now deemed strictly off-limits to skeptical, iconoclastic, or merely curious thinking has grown disturbingly long: climate, intelligence, the role of cultural patterns in influencing social outcomes, biological determinism in matters of gender differences, gender differences in matters of intellectual aptitudes. And so on. Merely to list these all-but-unmentionable topics risks inviting accusations of climate denialism, racism, transphobia, and sexism — any one of which could trash a reputation or end a career.
A nation that can bring itself to believe anything about anything will, sooner or later, have little trouble believing the worst about Jews.
From this it doesn’t necessarily follow that Jews will be forced out of universities, publishing houses, media outlets, and other organs of mainstream American culture. But as Thane Rosenbaum noted in the previous issue of Sapir, “the ground rules of liberalism have disappeared, and with them, the qualities that made Jews so vital to American culture are vanishing as well.” An arid intellectual climate may not be deadly to Jews, but neither is it one in which they are likely to flourish.
4) Conspiracy thinking has gone mainstream.
From 9/11 trutherism to the myth of the stolen 2020 presidential election, we have become a country frighteningly disposed to believe conspiracy theories simply because they suit our ideological predilections, and to keep believing them even after they’ve been comprehensively disproven.
Then there is anti-Zionism, another political program married to a conspiracy theory claiming that Israeli Jews are imposters and swindlers — European imposters who feigned ancestral ties to the Holy Land in order to swindle Palestinians out of their land. In this, anti-Zionism is a mirror image of the political program-cum–conspiracy theory known as antisemitism, which held that Jews were Middle Eastern imposters who feigned a European identity in order to cheat authentic Europeans out of their financial wealth and cultural inheritance.
What makes today’s fast-spreading anti-Zionism so dangerous, however, isn’t merely that it is wrong on its merits, malicious in its intent, and antisemitic in its foundation. It is that it is a symptom of a much larger disease of the American mind, a willful irrationalism, an inability to accept inconvenient facts and to process reasoned arguments. As Liel Leibovitz notes in these pages, it is bringing the long era of American Enlightenment to an abrupt and frightening end.
A nation that can bring itself to believe anything about anything will, sooner or later, have little trouble believing the worst about Jews.
The antisemitic outbursts during the Gaza War in May 2021 were not, in themselves, murderously violent. Yet the fact that they were expressed in the open, by people who plainly felt no fear in showing their faces, and who were met with weak and equivocating condemnations from so many quarters of the American establishment, gave them the quality of an omen, like the shattering of a single pane of glass. A few months later, House Democrats were briefly forced to capitulate to their most radical members by voting to remove $1 billion in funding for Iron Dome, a system whose sole purpose is to protect Israelis from lethal terrorist rockets.
Any sentient American Jew with an instinct for danger has to know that things won’t simply right themselves on their own. To adapt Isaac Newton, social trends in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force.
What will that force be?
Many of the essays in the current volume of Sapir make the case for Jewish fortification from the inside. Richer and deeper content in Jewish education. More effective management of Jewish organizations. Smarter outreach to potential converts. And so on.
The intellectual battle against critical social justice theory (often called ‘woke’ ideology) is one no true Jewish leader can shirk. That isn’t merely because a spirit of liberal-mindedness matters to Jewish well-being.
These are necessary and important conditions for Jewish survival and renewal in America. But they aren’t quite sufficient. Jewish Americans live most of their lives outside the gates of their Jewish homes, synagogues, and communities. That is where the battle for the future of Jewish America will have to be waged. A few thoughts on how to fight it.
The intellectual battle against critical social justice theory (often called “woke” ideology) is one no true Jewish leader can shirk. That isn’t merely because a spirit of liberal-mindedness matters to Jewish well-being. It’s because woke ideology invariably combines three features that ought to terrify Jews: a belief that racial characteristics define individual moral worth, a habit of descending into antisemitism, and a quasi-totalitarian mindset that insists not only on regulating behavior but also on monitoring people’s thoughts and punishing those who think the wrong ones.
There are a few nonprofit groups that are rising to tackle this challenge, including the newly formed Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (on whose board I sit). But woke ideology needs to be seen as an acute threat and become a key item in the Jewish organizational agenda.
Prominent Jewish Americans need to use all the political influence, social capital, and institutional muscle they have to defend baseline Jewish interests in ostensibly liberal institutions. That hasn’t happened. Instead, in one institution after another, Jewish leaders — trustees and major donors, university presidents and academic deans, senators and representatives, CEOs and board directors — have, to paraphrase Lenin, sold the rope from which their enemies will hang them.
Nobody today would imagine, say, a female university president sitting still while a culture of misogyny and sexual harassment prevailed in faculty lounges or student dorms. Yet Jewish leaders and donors will often bite their tongues when the institutions they oversee or support become saturated with anti-Jewish animus. They would do better to stop writing checks; start speaking up boldly at board and faculty meetings; and, if they conclude they cannot rescue an institution, publicly and vocally resign to take their talent and money elsewhere.
For too long, Jewish Americans have sought the friendship of those who didn’t want us as friends and looked askance at the friendship of those who did. Jewish “allyship” in multiple civil-rights movements usually began early and often proved itself in the darkest hours. Has that allyship been reciprocated at a time of skyrocketing antisemitism?
Jews will not come out well from this series of unrequited love affairs, just as we didn’t come out well from our unrequited love affairs with German, Austrian, or French culture. There is broad support in the United States for Jewish Americans, demonstrated by the fact that Jews remain the most admired religious group in America and by the widespread support that Israel enjoys outside the progressive bubble (within which so many Jews live). But our non-Jewish friends need to be far more deeply engaged by Jewish communities, not held at arm’s length out of religious differences, political disdain, or simple ignorance.
In a sparkling recent essay in Commentary, the German-Jewish writer Josef Joffe observes that, where Jews are concerned, America’s better angels have been getting the better of its baser impulses from the very beginning — ever since Peter Stuyvesant’s colonial masters overruled his desire to expel his Jewish immigrants. Predictions that American Jewry would gradually disappear thanks to intermarriage, conversion, and the march of progress date back to the 19th century, but never came true. Similar predictions that a decline in religious beliefs — the “death of God” — portended the demise of Judaism ran afoul of the extraordinary cultural resilience and fecundity of Orthodox Jewry.
Jews have always had a capacity to find unexpected sources of renewal and to surprise themselves on the upside. My Kishinev-born paternal grandfather changed his name from Ehrlich to Stephens out of a desire to submerge his Jewishness in the broad American mainstream. Yet it was thanks to that same bland surname that, decades later, I learned what certain people in my social circles were willing to say about Jews when they didn’t realize a Jew was listening. The name that my grandfather thought was his ticket out of his roots became my ticket back into them.
Jewish history is filled with such serendipitous twists of fate, and some of them have good outcomes. But in the current fight for a Jewish-American future, we’d do better, as the old adage has it, to hope for the best and plan for the worst.
And:
Israel’s leaders need to listen to the music of the latest US election results
Just as support for Israel was tainted by association with Trump, so, too, could the pressure on and condemnation of Israel become tainted by association with all things progressive.
By Douglas Altabef
Israel’s new something-for-everyone coalition government prides itself on its emphasis on restoring bilateral political support for Israel in the United States.
Of course, this is a not-so-subtle slap at former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom they perceive to have unduly favored the Republicans—meaning former U.S. President Donald Trump—thereby “endangering” longstanding bipartisan American support.
In this regard, they are half-right. Clearly, any leader who was seen to be even civil to, let alone appreciative of, Trump, was regarded with suspicion by progressives. Thus, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s explicit posture of not being in the mold of Netanyahu was a start in clearing the air for Israel among Democrats.
But going in a different direction from Netanyahu fails to address what it is that Israel would have to do in order to win Democratic support.
It now gets tricky, because while there is still a significant amount of support coming from the Democratic rank and file, the headline-grabbing and seemingly agenda-setting group among the Democrats has been the hard-left bloc, guru-ed by Bernie Sanders and spearheaded by the Squad, with “amen” echoes from much of the media.
This is a group that believes in intersectionality, which holds that there are good victims and bad oppressors. The good victims are all in common cause, intersecting in their virtue and victimization against the wiles of the oppressors.
Take a wild guess where Israel falls out in this landscape. It is right up there with the most nefarious oppressors (and the Jews, as a people of privilege, are trailing not far behind).
Given this state of affairs, it seems hard to imagine what Israel could do to curry favor with the progressives, short of abandoning its principles, values and most sacred tenets, not to mention strategic policies and priorities.
In other words, Israel’s leaders have been looking for love in all the wrong places. This quest might seem to come naturally to Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who seems capable of singing by heart all the lyrics of the progressive hymnal.
But it has been an acquired taste for Bennett, who must, in the still of the night, worry that he is betraying everything that he told his constituents, and the rest of the Israeli public, that he stood for.
Having invested in talking the progressive talk and walking the Western walk, Israel’s leaders need to know that they might be on the verge of chasing yesterday’s fashion.
The results of Virginia’s gubernatorial election last week—giving Republican Glenn Youngkin a win over Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe—were of tectonic significance, showing the widespread disinterest, and in many cases disgust, with the progressive agenda. When given the chance, critical race theory, defunding the police and marginalizing parents of school children were all roundly rejected.
What Israel’s leaders need to see is that even though Trump was not reelected, the American public is not at all interested in endorsing his progressive nemesis. U.S. President Joe Biden might be having buyer’s remorse for ceding the policy field to the hard-left, as the outcome in Virginia showed the Democrats to be in significant danger of losing both houses of Congress come next November.
How does this impact Israel?
For one thing, there might be shifts and moves that could have an indirect, yet nevertheless profound, impact on the administration’s attitudes towards Israel. If the Squad is discredited as the moving ideological force at the White House, it could take the wind out of some of the diplomatic sails that are currently blowing against Israel.
Such issues as knee-jerk condemnation of building in Judea and Samaria, the questioning of Israel’s designation of six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations and, of course, the intention to open a consulate in downtown Jerusalem to service Palestinians might all be sidelined if the administration comes to believe that it is only adding to the perceived toxicity of the progressive agenda.
In other words, just as support for Israel was tainted by association with Trump, so, too, could the pressure on and condemnation of Israel become tainted by association with all things progressive.
The possibility of this occurring should encourage Bennett to recognize that he should not charge into an embrace of the American wish list; quite the opposite.
It behooves Bennett, Lapid and all those engaging with American decision-makers to be politely noncommittal. Above all, now is the wrong time to consider compromising Israel’s vital interests in the name of currying favor with a point of view that might be reassessed.
Another aspect of the Virginia election that should be informative to Israeli leaders relates to their possible interest in regarding Israeli voters as if they were Americans.
While an anecdotal and non-scientific observation, my sense is that Israeli leaders have been wondering if they should be introducing certain issues in the country to mirror the priorities that they have been seeing in many Western societies.
Climate change is an example of such an issue. Simply stated, there is virtually nothing that Israel can do or refrain from doing that will move the needle ever so slightly in terms of global warming. Israel probably pollutes less in a month than China does in half an hour.
It was one thing for Israel to engage in virtue-signaling by wringing its hands with other Western countries at the 26th U.N. Climate Change Convention (COP26) in Glasgow last week. It would be quite another to actually stop pumping natural gas, as Israeli Environment Minister Tamar Zandberg, former chair of the left-wing Meretz Party, suggested.
American voters have just shown the common sense—the pragmatism and realism—for which Americans have been famous. This description also applies to the majority of Israelis, and Israel’s leaders would be well advised to use the Virginia election as a parallel.
A lot of skilled dancing is required to maintain Israel’s interests while simultaneously seeking to appear cooperative, or at least not antagonistic, to the interests of its allies.
Part and parcel of this dancing is to understand when the music has changed—both abroad and at home.
Douglas Altabef is chairman of the board of Im Tirtzu and a director of the Israel Independence Fund. He can be reached at dougaltabef@gmail.com.
Finally"
Nikki Haley Attacks AIPAC for Taking Bipartisanship Too Far
By David Israel
Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who is considered a top runner for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, on Saturday night told the crowd at the Republican Jewish Coalition annual leadership conference in Las Vegas that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is taking its outreach to Democrats too far.
“There’s one thing I don’t get about AIPAC, and I’m not saying anything to you that I haven’t said to their leadership,” Haley told the RJC crowd, after saying that she loved AIPAC: “Why do they invite politicians to their conference who strongly support the Iran nuclear deal? Stop rewarding bad behavior. It only gets you more bad behavior,” she said.
Standing ovation for Ambassador @NikkiHaley at Day 2 of the @RJC as she and other notable Republicans spread optimism for the 2022 midterm elections and show support for Israel and the Jewish community
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It is always Trump's fault. Biden sounds like a bratty brother always blaming his sister for everything.
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When you spend your entire life contemplating your navel it is hard to hear what other's are saying about you.
VA Voters sent a message no Democrat or the Press was listening to: it was about them not Trump
By Salena Zito
+WINCHESTER, Virginia — In the first post-pandemic election, voters here showed their dissatisfaction with the Democrats, handing victories to GOP candidates running for the top two jobs in the state. In his victorious race for governor, businessman Glenn Allen Youngkin became the first Republican to win statewide in a dozen years, proving Virginia isn’t so true blue, after all.
The reckoning happened in a state Joe Biden won in a comfortable landslide less than a year ago, in a place where Republicans have lost their majority in the state chamber over the past four years.
While the Democratic nominee for governor, Terry McAuliffe, insisted the election was all about Donald J. Trump and patted his party on the back for its COVID policies, voters here gave him a wake-up call. Virginians voted on what they think the next problems are: the economy, their children’s education, crime, and definitely not COVID.
McAuliffe’s strategy of focusing on COVID, Trump, Trump and Trump was wildly out of touch. He and his fellow Democrats missed the most fundamental thing about human behavior, which is that people always vote looking forward. What matters is their lives, their children’s lives, their grandchildren’s lives and their community — not what happened yesterday.
Click here for the full story.
And:
Democrats Deny Political Reality at Their Own Peril
Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
Tuesday’s election result trend lines were a political nightmare for the Democratic Party, and no Democrat who cares about winning elections in 2022 and the presidential race in 2024 should see them as anything less.
Familiar takeaways like “wake-up call” and “warning shot” don’t do justice here because the danger of ignoring those trends is too great. What would do justice, and what is badly needed, is an honest conversation in the Democratic Party about how to return to the moderate policies and values that fueled the blue-wave victories in 2018 and won Joe Biden the presidency in 2020.
Given the stakes for the country, from urgent climate and social spending needs to the future of democracy, Americans badly need a rolling conversation today and in the coming weeks and months about how moderate voters of all affiliations can coalesce behind and guide the only party right now that shows an interest in governing and preserving democratic norms.
The results in Virginia are a grave marker of political peril. Virginia is a blue state; it hasn’t been a battleground in years. Mr. Biden won there in 2020 by 10 points; a year later, the Democratic nominee for governor just lost by 2.5 percentage points, and Republicans flipped two other statewide offices — lieutenant governor and attorney general — that they have not won in 12 years.
Virginia is a cross-section of suburbs, education levels and racial diversity that is a mirror of what a winning, coalition-driven Democratic Party should be. Democrats lost there — even with a longtime moderate as their candidate for governor — because the party has become distracted from crucial issues like the economy, inflation, ending the coronavirus pandemic and restoring normalcy in schools and isn’t offering moderate, unifying solutions to them. Republicans now have a playbook for future elections, based on ways their nominee for governor, Glenn Youngkin, overperformed with independents and cut into Democrats’ support in the suburbs and among women.
In true-blue New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy barely held onto his seat, while the powerful State Senate leader, Steve Sweeney, lost to a Republican truck driver whose campaign worked with a shoestring budget. Republicans flipped a House seat in a traditionally Democratic area of San Antonio. In Seattle, voters appear to have chosen a Republican for city attorney over a police abolitionist running on the Democratic line.
Bill Clinton’s mantra from 1992 of “it’s the economy, stupid” is rarely out of vogue, and it certainly isn’t now. But Democrats, looking left on so many priorities and so much messaging, have lost sight of what can unite the largest number of Americans. A national Democratic Party that talks up progressive policies at the expense of bipartisan ideas, and that dwells on Donald Trump at the expense of forward-looking ideas, is at risk of becoming a marginal Democratic Party appealing only to the left.
Broader trends were also working against the Democrats. Perhaps chief among these: When voters are feeling surly and unhappy about the direction of the country — as polls show that a majority of them are — they tend to blame the party in power. President Biden’s poll numbers have been on the slide for months, for a blend of reasons ranging from the ugly withdrawal from Afghanistan to the seemingly endless burdens of the pandemic. In an era of nationalized elections, that exerts a drag on his entire party.
Many in the president’s party point to Tuesday as proof that congressional Democrats need to stop their left-center squabbling and clock some legislative wins ASAP by passing both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and a robust version of the Build Back Better plan, the larger social spending and environmental proposal. They believe this will give their candidates concrete achievements to run on next year and help re-energize their base.
But Tuesday’s results are a sign that significant parts of the electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push in the party, including on priorities like Build Back Better, which have some strong provisions and some discretionary ones driving up the price tag. The concerns of more centrist Americans about a rush to spend taxpayer money, a rush to grow the government, should not be dismissed.
Tuesday was not just about Republicans reclaiming electoral ground from Democrats. Even in many blue enclaves, voters showed an interest in moving toward the center. In Buffalo, N.Y., the democratic socialist who bested the current mayor, Byron Brown, in the Democratic primary appears to be losing to Mr. Brown’s write-in campaign. In Minneapolis, a referendum to replace the police department with a Department of Public Safety went down in flames. In the New York mayoral race, voters went with Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat who ran with a focus on law and order. “Progressives on the ropes?” asked The Seattle Times, in a postelection piece noting that “the more moderate, business-backed candidates in the city’s three most watched races surged to huge and likely insurmountable leads.”
Progressives notched some notable wins for mayor in Boston, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. But progressive wins in deep-blue cities aren’t evidence of broad, national support.
Many Americans, across party lines, are concerned about crime and border security and inflation. The high price of gas is causing particular pain. More than 60 percent of voters hold the Biden administration responsible for inflation. Polls show that many independents already think that the government is trying to do too much to deal with the nation’s problems.
For many voters — especially those who don’t vote regularly — the 2020 election was about removing Mr. Trump from the White House. It was less about policy or ideology. Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination — and the presidency — because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence. “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,” Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, told The Times after Tuesday’s drubbing. “They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
Democrats should work to implement policies to help the American people. Congress should focus on what is possible, not what would be possible if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and — frankly — a host of lesser-known Democratic moderates who haven’t had to vote on policies they might oppose were not in office.
Democrats agree about far more than they disagree about. But it doesn’t look that way to voters after months and months of intraparty squabbling. Time to focus on — and pass — policies with broad support. Or risk getting run out of office.
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Why does the worker always gets ensnared?
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