Oct. 28: Trump Leads in the Home Stretch, and Israel Strikes Back at Iran

The MSG rally; Democrats warn the party is leaning too hard on Hitler; Anti-Jewish terror in Chicago

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The Big Story

Welcome back. The Jewish holiday season is over, and The Scroll will be running continuously on its normal schedule from now until taking a few days off for Thanksgiving. As we’ve been off for the past few days, today’s Big Story will be formatted a bit differently, touching on two of the major stories that have emerged since our last update on Wednesday. 

In the Middle East, the major news was that on Saturday morning, the Israelis struck a series of military targets in Iran, apparently including Iran’s Russian-made S-300 missile defense systems and ballistic missile and drone factories. The attacks scrupulously observed the Biden administration’s red lines—no strikes on nuclear or oil infrastructure or against the Iranian political leadership—and the Iranians have said that they were warned ahead of time by unnamed “parties” about the impending strikes.

So what to make of them? Even among Tablet’s own Israel analysts, opinion was divided over whether the strikes could be considered a success. Some signs are encouraging: According to a weekend report in The Jerusalem Post, for instance, the Israeli mission involved more than 100 aircraft, among them F-35s that would have needed aerial refueling to make it to Iran and back, which suggests that Israel is capable of suppressing Iranian air defenses and operating in Iranian airspace at will. But the million-dollar question is whether Israel is punting on the best chance it will ever get to rewrite the strategic equation in the Middle East. You can watch Michael Doran and Gadi Taub, who take opposite views on the question, debate it here:

 

The second story, which is consuming nearly all news coverage in the United States, is the impending election. We don’t have a crystal ball, but thus far, we can say that both polling and early voting data are looking good for Donald Trump. As of today, Trump has an extremely strong position in the early voting in every Sun Belt swing state, including Georgia, which flipped to Biden in 2020, and Nevada, which most analysts agreed prior to the election was the most favorable swing state for Kamala Harris. There is less data available for Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and thus more partisan spin of the available numbers from both sides, but the map is shaping up favorably for the Republicans. Assuming no major surprises in the Sun Belt, Trump will only need to capture one of the three Rust Belt states to win, and he is currently leading all three in the RealClearPolitics polling average. As the election analyst Michael Pruser put it as he contextualized the latest Pennsylvania absentee ballot numbers from this morning:

Again, it’s not over until it’s over—and who knows when that will be. But the news has been good for Trump recently, and bad for Harris. We suspect that’s why we’re now hearing a lot about Hitler.  

IN THE BACK PAGES: Ari Gandsman argues that it’s moral absolutism, not postmodern relativism, that’s responsible for poisoning our politics

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The Rest

→Speaking of Hitler, who was also in the news last week, Trump held a major campaign rally last night in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, which the national media covered with its typical sangfroid. For instance, here was MSNBC, splicing footage of the crowded arena together with 85-year-old footage of a pro-Nazi rally held by the German American Bund in 1939 at the old Madison Square Garden, located about a mile away from the current venue:

The rally was fairly standard Trump fare, though a comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, did raise hackles by calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”—a joke that fell flat with the audience and forced the Trump campaign to issue an apology later in the evening. For a Nazi rally, however, there was a suspicious number of Israeli flags in the audience and an even more suspicious number of Jewish speakers, from aide Stephen Miller to transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick. But we’ve heard a lot from the left over the past year about how Zionism is racism is fascism, so maybe somehow it all makes sense.

→Harris surrogates flooded the zone on Sunday with accusations that the Madison Square Garden rally was a reenactment of, or otherwise channeled, the pro-Nazi rally. For instance, former National Security Council official and anti-Trump Ukraine “whistleblower” Alexander Vindman posted the following on X Sunday afternoon (we’re including friend of The Scroll David Reaboi’s response as a bonus):

Behind the scenes, however, Democratic strategists appear worried that the campaign’s messaging strategy is backfiring. The New York Times reported Sunday that Harris’ main political action committee, the Future Forward PAC, emailed Democrats last week to warn them that “attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive” to voters, according to the PAC’s internal message testing. Future Forward, which has raised nearly $400 million for Harris this cycle, instead urged Democrats to focus on Harris’ “plans to address the needs of everyday Americans.” It is unclear, however, whether the campaign will or even can listen. Democratic pollster and Harris adviser John Anzalone told Puck’s Tara Palmeri last week, “The campaign is now deliberately attempting to reactivate Trump PTSD” among voters—a strategy we’re skeptical will work, for the reasons explained here: 

→In Chicago on Saturday, an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue was shot several times in the shoulder by a Muslim assailant, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire on police officers when they arrived at the scene of the crime. After concealing details of the shooting for two days, allegedly due to political pressure from the city’s left-wing mayor, Brandon Johnson, the Chicago police on Monday named a suspect in the shooting: 22-year-old Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi, an illegal immigrant from “northwest Africa” who crossed the southern border a year and a half ago, according to an X post from columnist Karol Markowicz. He has not been charged with a hate crime. The Jerusalem Post reports that the victim survived and is recovering in stable condition.

→We know many of our readers were waiting to hear The Washington Post’s presidential endorsement before making up their minds in the election, but those readers are sadly out of luck. On Friday, NPR reported that the Post was declining to endorse Kamala Harris at the urging of its owner, and the second-richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos. Speculation abounds as to the billionaire’s motivation; Amazon is a federal contractor, and Bezos’ Blue Origin is the primary competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, so perhaps Bezos is making nice with the man he expects to be the next president. Some have suggested that he might have wanted to goad some of the paper’s progressive staff into resigning (he hasn’t had much luck so far), and we’ve heard rumors in the past that he was personally annoyed by some of the Post’s more hysterical coverage of American politics. According to The New York Times, Bezos has instructed the Post’s CEO, Will Lewis, to hire “more conservative writers on the opinion section” and attract a more conservative audience, but the paper now appears to be shedding its liberal readers at an even faster clip than usual. David Folkenflik, who broke the story of the non-endorsement, reported today that the Post had shed more than 200,000 subscribers—or 8% of its readership—between Friday and Monday.

→Disappearing the President, from Tablet’s Lee Smith, is available now for purchase. The book is an attempt to explain how former President Barack Obama’s “shadow network” has derailed American politics since the 2016 election, and we hope it will help readers make sense of some of the shorthand we routinely use over here at The Scroll. In a review posted to Legal Insurrection, Katya Sedgwick (who we believe is a Scroll reader), writes of Lee’s book:

Given the mental state of the individual currently occupying the White House, we have two potential answers to the question “who is in charge of the executive branch?” One is the Deep State, and the other is Barack Obama. Although he spent considerable time outlining how generational changes, bribery and coercion corrupted our institutions, Smith, citing the former California Congressman and the CEO of Truth Social Devin Nunes, believes that the number of decision makers surrounding Obama is small, just 20-30 people.

You can order the book at the link here: https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/disappearing-the-president/ 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Why Jews Are Voting for Kamala Harris

Why Jews Are Voting for Donald Trump

Abigail Pogrebin hosts Tablet roundtables with Jewish supporters of both presidential candidates

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Stop Blaming Foucault

It’s ontological absolutism, not the postmodern emphasis on deconstruction and contingency, that is turning the humanities into a race-obsessed, pro-genocidal wasteland

by Ari Gandsman

My doctoral adviser was a brilliant and intimidating scholar. Stern but often playful and mischievous, he emphasized an open-ended curiosity about the strangeness of our world. He was also a radical social constructivist who believed our academic mission was to interrogate our own taken-for-granted truths about the world and to show how our knowledge was a product of cultural and historical understandings. His magnum opus was a deconstruction of post-traumatic stress disorder that showed the diagnosis was neither timeless nor universal but had emerged out of specific developments.

Although his research speaks to the current fad of microaggressions and trigger warnings, he refused to editorialize and disdained moralizing. If pressed, the most he would grudgingly acknowledge is that if you held a mirror up to someone, they might not like what they saw. He was suspicious of the applications of academic work and allergic to academic activism. That is not our job, he would admonish. He believed that academic work should aspire to a quasi-Buddhist analytic detachment in which one’s own worldview, moral position, or ideological beliefs had no special privilege.

Sadly, the vision of academic pursuit in the social sciences and humanities being guided by disinterested inquiry is obsolete. Job descriptions, not just in the humanities but also in the empirical sciences, increasingly demand explicit ideological and activist orientations (e.g., decolonialism, environmental justice, anti-racism). Analytic distance and critical detachment are denounced as outmoded colonial vestiges of cisgendered white male supremacy. Meanwhile, a scholar’s identity and therefore their experience is privileged, especially if they are from underrepresented groups where a tacit and often condescending expectation often exists that their topics of research overlap with their identity. Academic pursuit guided by nondogmatic, open-ended inquiry hears its death knell.

A popular explanation for this larger shift blames the abandonment of the pursuit of truth as root cause and points the finger at social constructivists like my doctoral adviser. This argument is epitomized by public intellectual Yascha Mounk’s recent book The Identity Trap which names the usual suspects—the French philosopher Michel Foucault, critical theory, and the bogeyman known as “postmodernism”—as key culprits of the new dogmatism. With truth dead, everything is permitted.

Yet as someone who grew up intellectually in this milieu, I believe that today’s stridency and moral absolutism is less explained by social constructivism but by its rejection. While social constructivists emphasized doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty, academics now speak with absolutist, if imaginary, moral clarity on a host of issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A main explanation for this is “the ontological turn” that swept many disciplines, including my own, anthropology, in the first decade of the 21st century. While social constructivist approaches are associated with epistemology—questions of knowledge and how we know what we know—ontologists are concerned with questions of being, the essence of existence, and the nature of reality. To see all knowledge as socially constructed means seeing our own knowledge is too. This leads to a modesty of what we can claim to know about the world.

In a major article from my minor discipline of anthropology 40 years ago, my doctoral adviser argued against thinking we could pierce through our own cultural precepts to access “demystified reality.” He cautioned against uncritically believing our own beliefs were the true ones or that our own concepts and interpretations of the world were necessarily better than others. This required embracing what the late great philosopher Richard Rorty referred to as "contingencies.” Or as the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, lifting from the great sociologist Max Weber, we are “an animal suspended in webs of significance” that we ourselves spun.

Geertz cites an apocryphal Indian story in which the world was described to an Englishman as resting on the back of an elephant that rested on the back of a turtle. When the Englishman asked what the turtle rested on, he was told, “it is turtles all the way down.” We were trapped in our own representations and could never get to the essence of existence, yes—but we did not see this as a bad thing. We took seriously Nietzsche’s famous observation that believing in a “true world” was both myth and error.

Ontologists not only make broad and foundational claims about the world but also normative claims about how it should be. If knowledge-oriented social constructivists were focused on how our ways of seeing the world were filtered through our own cultural and historical lenses, ontologists attempt to break through the filters to get to absolutes. In other words, while epistemology was narrow and limited in its focus on human understanding, the new ontologists aimed to move “beyond the human,” forming part of a wave of “animal studies” that spread throughout the humanities. A key text of the “ontological turn” in anthropology argues “how forests think” (the short but confounding answer: in 19th-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory).

While tendencies toward these kinds of abstract mystifications would lead more politically radical academics to accuse the new ontologists of—what else?—not being politically radical enough, ontologists themselves made a key contribution to the new polarization, especially in how their work translated to wider popular readings, by embracing binary logics—most notably, between so-called Western and non-Western (usually indigenous) ontological realities. Invariably, these dichotomies take on a moralistic dynamic: Western ontologies are bad because they are colonialist, ableist, capitalist, racist, misogynist, and so on and so on, invariably leading to planetary destruction. Non-Western ontologies are not only good but necessary for our salvation, often from, in increasingly apocalyptical tones, the perils of climate change. It goes unmentioned that the archaeological record is dotted by the collapses of non-Western societies that somehow managed to destroy their own environments.

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On a more profound level, the ontological embrace reinforces differences between groups while social constructivists attempt to break down those differences. Earlier generations of more humanistic scholars emphasized our common humanity as the basis of making progressive universal claims. These scholars often end up reproducing what Edward Said famously accused Orientalists of doing—constructing a binary difference between “the West and the rest.” The only difference here is an ironic inversion. The moral superiority that the West once claimed for itself is now projected onto everyone else.

The resulting generalizations and stereotyping become tailor-made for social media caricature rather than critical thinking, albeit often dressed up in the obscure vocabulary of Martin Heidegger, whose notoriously opaque work inspires much of this scholarship. For example, seeing “white privilege” as “ontological expansiveness,” feminist philosopher of race Shannon Sullivan writes in broad strokes that “white people often manifest a way of being in the world (often nonconscious) in which they presume the right to occupy any and all geographical, moral, psychological, linguistic, and other spaces.” Do “white people” really do that? How? Who are “white people” anyway? These are the types of questions that today’s scholars generally evade or refuse to answer, preferring wild generalizations about “groups” that have been declared a priori to be bad.

“Postmodernism” notably rejected these kinds of blanket explanations; its sensibility was defined by what philosopher Jean-François Lyotard termed a “demise of metanarratives.” Today, broad and reductive formulations like “white supremacy” explain all social phenomena from geopolitics to how certain kinds of people sit in chairs. While purporting to be politically radical, these beliefs firmly entrench what they are ostensibly denouncing as pervasive systems impossible to reform. “Structures of white supremacy” (upward of 224,000 Google hits for that phrase) demand a broad commitment to “dismantling structures of white supremacy” (a mere 8,000 hits).

For epistemologists, knowledge could be “deconstructed” so we could free ourselves from bad ideas like race. Ontological reality operates more like a prison. Social constructivists may have been overly idealistic in the belief that accepting race as a historical category with no biological basis would undo its evils. Certainly, we have trouble addressing the persistence of racist inequalities. Yet the alternative is to see that despite demonstrable advances on race, gender, and sexuality over the past decades, all progress is myth. To even speak of progress is to be denounced as upholding the tenets of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.

If all this points to sloganistic interpretations of complex phenomena, that is precisely the point. The rejection of “critical theory” is a conscious rejection of complexity. A landmark work in feminist studies, queer theory, and what would come to be known as “affect theory,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative readings” famously criticized the “hermeneutics of suspicion” of male critical theorists like Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault. Such interpretive approaches endeavor to mine hidden knowledge or unstated assumptions of their subjects. Labeling this “paranoid,” Sedgwick contrasts it with a more empathetic and feminist “reparative” approach. In this binary, a feminist ethics of care is a curative foil to a toxic masculinity of suspicion. Their penetrative and highly Freudian pursuit of deep meaning anticipates what is colloquially now known as mansplaining in pop feminist circles, dismissible as pointless intellectual muscle-flexing for cred and status. Rather than complicating our understanding of the world, this approach focuses on an ethical imperative of what needs to be done, i.e., “reparative practices.”

While one can argue that one cannot repair anything without knowing what is broken, diagnosis here is in fact unnecessary. Violence is manifest. Oppression is obvious. Victimhood is visible. We do not need to understand the world because everything is already understood. After all, we live, as Sedgwick wrote, “in a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression.” Finding nuance, locating uncertainties, teasing out contradictions or ambivalences, even skepticism of received wisdom and truths, the heart of what was once academic pursuit, are anathema here. The lines are clearly drawn between who we should empathize with and whom we should not, often fetishizing a privileged understanding of experience centered around unnuanced victimhood categories. So when affect theorists argue that we need to be “cultivating a sensibility to the affective experiences of other corporealities,” it goes unstated that the popular text chosen is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and not , say, JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

Although the left denounces rage on the right as a dangerous new “age of anger,” feminist affect theorists like self-described “feminist killjoy” Sara Ahmed sees anger as a positive and virtue value, even “world-making.” For Ahmed, who popularized the slogan “feminist killjoy,” happiness is a colonial construct, and civility is a social norm used to silence marginalized people.

Often filed under postcritique, these reductive approaches have become increasingly popular. In a widely cited 2009 article in the influential interdisciplinary journal Representations, literary critics Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus similarly argue for “surface readings” as opposed to plummeting the interpretive depths to unearth buried meaning. Deep-seated meanings are “superfluous,” they argue, because of the overt moral outrages of that era. As examples, they cite the Iraq War and the racism in the response to Hurricane Katrina. It goes unstated as to why this approach would not have been more appropriate to the prior era that birthed critical theory, which also witnessed the Holocaust, colonialism, racial segregation, criminalized homosexuality, or the atomic bomb.

A more plausible interpretation for “surface reading” is linked to social media superficiality, with its constant outrage, public shamings, and call-outs. Needless to say, “surface readings” took off during the Trump era and the post-George Floyd racial reckoning. Caught in this increasingly frenetic rhetoric of perpetual crises, academics increasingly see their mission in “radical transformation” with a moral imperative to “remake the world.” A focus on material conditions becomes untethered from reality and splintered, like the narrative of a comic book film, into a multiverse of multiple and competing “futures,” which forms another offshoot of ontology broadly known as the “speculative turn.”

Rather than concrete analyses, the futurologists and speculatists offer vague and open-ended musings on emergences, openings, hope, and other hopelessly nebulous possibilities. Merging densely packed and impenetrable, jargon-laden verbiage with simplistic political sloganeering, such scholars cast themselves as doyens in a survivalist postapocalyptic horror film leading the search to a new Garden of Eden, albeit an Eden that is still committed to upholding academic institutional norms of university press publishing and peer-reviewed articles, at least for those willing to conform. This rhetoric is also amenable to the neoliberal university’s emphasis on “innovation,” “transformation,” and “futures.”

Conducting boring old vigorous and empirical research is no longer sufficient, though; one must engage in “research creation” to “open up” new and emerging possibilities as acts of repair for our “broken” world. Social constructivist approaches are therefore misguided, because they are too committed to understanding the world as it is.

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Inured from reality while focusing upon imagining alternative futures, the new academics are untethered from the consequences of what they advocate regardless of evidence that contradict their beliefs. For example, many COVID-19 interventions were not as robust as claimed, while the benefits of some restrictions may have been outweighed by disastrous social, educational, and economic consequences. Yet it is revealing to see how many of the figures associated with these new academic approaches advocated absolutist “zero-COVID” approaches at all costs, and even continue wearing masks as badges of virtue.

Hateful academic rhetoric about Israel also exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of these recent academic trends. The absolute moral certainty, the expressions of unabashed hatred, the lack of nuance, and the radical zealotry that views Israel as the embodiment of capitalist, colonial, and racist global evil are all logical consequences of current theoretical tendencies. For example, Texas Tech University professor Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, gained social media notoriety when he woke up to the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 and his immediate reaction was to justify Palestinian resistance writing, “Decolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories” and that “DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A METAPHOR.” Since then, he has become one of X’s more bombastic academic Israel-basher, whose social media interventions range from “Fuck Israel” to "Fuck the zionist settler colonial state and everyone who supports it or remains silently complicit!" Such public statements eventually got him suspended by his university, then reinstated in the name of academic freedom.

As to his academic credentials, Fúnez-Flores works in Latin America and has no academic expertise in the Middle East. He is a professor of curriculum studies and teacher education, ostensibly teaching teachers how to teach. However, his “real” expertise is in ontology; his notable academic publication is titled “Decolonial and ontological challenges in social and anthropological theory” in Theory, Culture & Society, one of the more influential journals in cultural studies. As to anyone attempting to understand the complexities of Israel, Fúnez-Flores characteristically offers, “everyone who has tried to offer ‘nuanced’ interpretations of Zionism is complicit with genocide.” 

If academic rage against Israel appears unhinged from what a sober academic analysis should offer, affect theory legitimizes Fúnez-Flores’ rantings as a viable academic position. Ghassan Hage, a well-known anthropology professor from the University of Melbourne, gained wider notoriety when the German Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology severed their association with him based on his public statements on the conflict. Yet Hage’s public statements were logical products of his academic work, which included a widely cited and anthologized article from 2009 taught in many undergraduate classes, “Hating Israel in the Field,” where he writes of his own process of coming to hate Israel with a passion that eventually surpasses that of his research participants during his field work in Lebanon. That an article like this would have no problem going through the peer review process is indicative of the larger state of academia.

We need not spend time imagining how an article titled “Hating Palestine in the Field” might fare with the editors of academic journals, for the same reason that we understand that experiences of antisemitism by Jewish students don’t matter. That’s because their affective experience is given no credence. This also explains why so many like-minded academics not only found Hamas’ atrocities “exhilarating” but felt emboldened to publicly proclaim their excitement and joy at mass murder. For them, the events of Oct. 7 were not a carefully planned genocidal horror but rather a concrete manifestation of alternative liberatory worlds. As a Palestinian “artist in residence” for the anti-Zionist periodical Jewish Currents tweeted, “‘from the river to the sea’ is merely a speculative act of imagining that holds a wide range of liberatory possibilities/promises within it.” Uh, sure.

In 1994, Michael Ignatieff asked Eric Hobsbawm if he would have rejected communism if he had known of Stalin’s atrocities during the 1930s. Hobsbawm infamously answered, “probably not” because such “sacrifices” could be justified and “the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing.” Our new academic radicals appear willing to embrace Hamas’ atrocities to create a new world in the service of a speculative fantasy that imagines that the region might erupt in peace and harmony if Israel magically or not-so-magically ceases to exist. If the world is the horror they consider it to be, one readily understands what horrors they will countenance in order to transform it. And while it is tempting to dismiss the thinkers of these obscure theories as deeply unserious and not worth taking seriously, it is a mistake to underestimate their influence throughout academe.