Dec. 2: What Is Happening in Syria?

Joe Biden pardons Hunter; Trump calls for hostage release; Kash Patel gets FBI nod

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The Big Story

Late last week and over the weekend, Syrian opposition forces under the leadership of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), operating with the de facto backing of Turkey, launched an offensive against Syrian government positions in the country’s northern Idlib province. In a separate but presumably coordinated action, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army attacked positions held by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Kurdish terror group loosely aligned with Russia and Iran. What was initially intended as a limited tactical offensive to capture the highway linking Aleppo and Damascus quickly turned into a rout, as Assad regime forces, internally weakened by corruption and low morale, and deprived of external support by Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah and Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine, fled in the face of the rebel advance. As of Monday morning, the rebels had seized wide swathes of the Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo provinces and most of the city of Aleppo. Assad’s forces, backed by Russian airstrikes and the promise of reinforcements from Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite militias, have in turn begun launching limited counterattacks.

As Tablet’s Tony Badran explains in a Sunday X thread, what we saw over the weekend was not, as some hotheads have speculated on social media, the beginning of the collapse of the Assad regime, nor was it a stab at “regime change” by “neocons” or “the CIA.” Rather, it was a limited tactical play by the Turks to increase their leverage vis-à-vis Assad’s Russian and Iranian patrons before the Trump administration takes office, following months of deteriorating relations between Ankara and Damascus. More to the point, it comes on top of nearly a decade of the Obama faction helping to box the Turks in along their southern border by not only tacitly backing the Iranian-Russian presence in Syria (and thus the survival of the Assad regime) but also directly funding and partnering with the PKK under the guise of the “Syrian Democratic Forces,” the PKK-led militia that became a key player in Obama’s “counter-ISIS” partnership with the Iranian axis. With the Iranians devastated by more than a year of war with Israel and the Russians tied up in Ukraine, the Turks seized the opportunity to reset the table.

In a normal world, this would all be mildly good news for the United States: An allied state, Turkey, is making tactical gains against an axis of hostile states (Iran and Russia) in an anarchic buffer region (Syria) nominally controlled by an enemy proxy (Assad). But only mildly positive, given that HTS is, at the end of the day, a Salafi-jihadist group with questionable loyalties to external backers such as Turkey (Alberto M. Fernandez provides an overview of the group’s history and ideological evolution in an excellent essay for the Middle East Media Research Institute). In our world, however, it was the catalyst for a fire hose of hysteria and what Badran aptly referred to as “retardation,” both from Obama-faction mouthpieces desperate to preserve their Mahdi’s regional realignment scheme and from elements of the right who either endorse Obamaism for their own reasons or don’t know what they’re talking about. For example:

The working theory here apparently being that Obama and his CIA director, John Brennan, were attempting to foment “regime change” in Iranian ally Syria, despite the entire thrust of Obama’s regional policy being to protect Iranian assets or “equities” in pursuit of the nuclear deal with Iran. Indeed, while Obama did approve a covert CIA program, operation Timber Sycamore, to placate U.S. allies by providing arms and training to small groups of anti-Assad rebels beginning in 2013, he simultaneously undermined this program by courting Russian involvement in the conflict and providing back-channel guarantees to the Iranians that the United States would not allow Assad to come to harm. When, in 2015, anti-Assad forces made unexpected gains, Obama koshered Russia’s military intervention on behalf of Assad and shifted U.S. resources toward the “counter-ISIS” and “counter-jihad” campaigns, in which Iran, Russia, and Assad served as explicit or implicit partners.

In other words, if it doesn’t make sense to you that Team Obama-Biden would be seeking to overthrow Assad, that’s because it doesn’t, and they’re not. Indeed, right on cue, Reuters reported on Monday that White House officials, in consultation with the United Arab Emirates, were considering “lifting sanctions on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if he peels himself away from Iran and cuts off weapons routes to Lebanon's Hezbollah.” Assad will not and cannot do that, because his regime is existentially dependent on Iranian support, meaning that the actual proposal is simply to lift sanctions on Assad in exchange for nothing. In other words, it is to throw an additional lifeline to the Iranian alliance system during Biden’s lame-duck period, on top of the one that the White House secured last week in Lebanon.

So that’s the background. To end, we’ll quote at length from Tony’s thread, which offers some guideposts for how to think about what will no doubt be a deeply stupid, and often intentionally misleading, foreign-policy “discourse” in the months ahead.

What [the Obama realignment] means is that we’re now directly involved in backing Russia, Iran, and Assad. That’s the key thing that Obama did: He turned the United States into Iran’s patron and protector across the Middle East. That’s the policy in Lebanon with the Lebanese Armed Forces, and in Iraq. And here’s the kicker:

Everyone, from the CT/DoD [Bureau of Counterterrorism and Department of Defense] bros to neocons and to the Tucker/Bannon faction, is in one way or another behind Obama's vision, each for their own reasons. Only Trump has stood apart from this retardation. But he couldn’t escape it in his first term. It’s unclear if he will now.

The discourse on Syria is retarded on all sides. The Obama faction is pro-Iran psychopaths. The CT/DoD bros are corrupt, and Obama simps. The neocons, such as they are, are retards—and Obama simps. The pro-Israel types are mainly dumb hysterics. And MAGA is drowning in noise.

Both pro-Israel types and MAGA have also been infected by Obama’s most toxic innovation: Third World sectarianism. Hence, even as MAGA decries “neocon” foreign policy—i.e., divorced from the national interest and preoccupied with social engineering—theirs is too.

U.S. foreign policy is not sectarian, preoccupied with subnational groups or transnational communitarian commitments. That’s the opposite of how states work. Nor is the U.S. interest to “rebuild Syria” (any more than it is to back a “state” project in fictional places like Lebanon). Historically, Syria has been more often a series of buffer states separating greater regional powers. Hence Turkey carving its own buffer zone and Israel imposing it with air power to cut off Iran from Hezbollah (precisely what Obama sought to safeguard for Iran).

America’s problem, however, is that its allies are often at cross purposes. In certain cases you can mitigate that with a general framework, but that requires clarity that is completely absent in D.C. as a result of the alignment mentioned above. Instead, D.C. is preoccupied with idiotic things having nothing or little to do with the national interest (“Kurds,” “Middle East Christians,” etc.) or with mistaking tactical challenges and strategic ones. Not to mention, corruption—D.C. literally makes a living off this.

So, you’ll now find our regional allies mirroring our chaos and each mouthing off some stupid position on Syria, ranging from pro-Assad to anti-Turkish to pro-Kurdish to all kinds of stuff about “jihad” and other forms of retardation. In the end, as a result of the shift that has taken place in D.C. first since 2001 and then more catastrophically since Obama, we will continue to be treated to much stupidity and disappointment.

The Turks will eventually leverage their gains to make a deal with the Russians, even as they try to partner with us, provided we cut ties with the PKK. And it will all be nowhere near optimal. But the key for us is to try to free ourselves from two intertwined disasters:

1. The counterterrorism lens (and its freedom agenda compendium), and

2. Obama’s realignment and third-world sectarianism.

The full thread can be found here.

And for background on Syria, read here, here, and here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Blacks, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics are all moving right. Charles Fain Lehman explains why—and the answer isn’t “inflation.”

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The Rest

→On Sunday, President Joe Biden issued a “full and unconditional” pardon for his son Hunter for all crimes committed between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024—despite the president and his surrogates pledging repeatedly that he would not do so. In a statement accompanying the pardon, Biden wrote that he had studied the facts of Hunter’s convictions—three for falsely claiming on a federal gun application form that he was not a drug user, and another three for failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019—and concluded that they were a “miscarriage of justice.” “No reasonable person,” the president wrote, “can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.” That’s one way of looking at it, although, as we’ve written here, IRS whistleblowers claimed that IRS and Department of Justice officials repeatedly interfered in the case to protect the elder Biden, including by allowing the statute of limitations to lapse for crimes Hunter committed while Biden was vice president. Still, our feeling is that the pardon is the least Joe could do to repay his troubled son. As Hunter wrote in a 2019 text message to his daughter, reported by Miranda Devine in the New York Post, “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop [Joe], I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

→In a Monday afternoon post on Truth Social, released only hours after Israel confirmed the death of Israeli American hostage Omer Neutra, President-Elect Donald Trump promised severe consequences for Hamas if it does not free the remaining hostages by Inauguration Day. “If the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025,” Trump wrote, “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!”

→Some pro-Israel defenders of last week’s cease-fire with Hezbollah claimed that Israel’s apparently idiotic decision to cede sovereignty over national-security decision-making in Lebanon to a U.S.-French “monitoring committee” was not as stupid as it looked, since Hezbollah would doubtless violate the cease-fire’s terms, thus giving the United States and France no choice but to approve Israeli military actions. As the president-elect might say: Wrong! On Monday, YNet News reported, citing “sources familiar with the details,” that U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein had already accused Israel of violating the terms of the cease-fire by flying drones over Beirut, echoing similar accusations from the French on Sunday. According to the same report, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told his French counterpart that Israel was not violating the agreement but rather “enforcing it amid Hezbollah’s violations.” The French, who apparently understand the deal much better than Sa’ar, claimed that “Israel had failed to report Hezbollah's violations to the international commission.”

Read Tablet’s write-up of the deal from last week here.

→In our Quote of the Day, The Washington Post cites an “individual close to Hezbollah” who makes the subtext of the Lebanon cease-fire explicit:

“Iran is prepared to allocate funds for reconstruction and to ensure Hezbollah’s survival, as well as to maintain support within the Shiite community. … However, this support is now more directly under Iranian influence,” he added, saying the group expects Iran to send advisers to supervise funding and retrain Hezbollah’s military ranks.

The reconstruction project will be aided by about $1 billion a year in U.S. funding to various Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese state institutions, while the U.S.-French monitoring committee will protect the terror group from unduly harsh Israeli reprisals. The deal came just in the nick of time, per the Post. While Iranian officials have publicly proclaimed victory in Lebanon, “behind the scenes, they worked quietly for a cease-fire, diplomats said, a tacit admission of the damage Israel inflicted on an organization essential to Tehran’s strategy of deterrence.”

→Donald Trump has nominated Kashyap “Kash” Patel, a former federal prosecutor and deputy director of National Intelligence from Trump’s first term, to replace Christopher Wray as FBI director. In the extended Tablet/Scroll universe, Patel is perhaps best known as the primary author of the February 2018 “Nunes memo”—written for his then boss, Congressman Devin Nunes—which blew the whistle on the FBI’s serial abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Courts to spy on the Trump campaign in the early stages of the “Russiagate” scandal. (Patel also served as a prominent named source for Lee Smith’s book on Russiagate, The Plot Against the President, and as a talking head in the film adaptation by Amanda Milius.)

Patel’s nomination has led to no small amount of garment-rending from the MSNBC set, perhaps for fear that he knows where the bodies are buried; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, himself implicated in Russiagate, told CNN over the weekend that the nomination was a “terrible development” that “can only possibly be a plan to disrupt, to dismantle, and to distract the FBI.” Former federal prosecutor William Shipley, however, offered a more optimistic take on what we can expect from Patel’s tenure, should he be confirmed.

Note:
ADIC = Assistant Director in Charge
SAC = Special Agent in Charge
ASAC = Assistant Special Agent in Charge
SSA = Supervisory Special Agent

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Minorities Moving Right

What’s behind the simultaneous shift in voting patterns of Jews, Blacks, Hispanic Americans, and Asians?

by Charles Fain Lehman

President Donald Trump’s return to power earlier this month was remarkable—among other reasons—for the breadth of the coalition that powered it. As Armin Rosen has documented for Tablet, by many measures Jews swung toward Trump, particularly in pivotal precincts. But they were just part of a minority-group wave: Exit polling and precinct analysis suggest large increases in the Black, Hispanic, and Asian vote for Trump.

Although Trump did not win outright majorities of any of these groups, Harris’ underperformance still marks a remarkable shift. The president slandered as a racist and antisemite outperformed prior Republicans among minorities of all types: Why?

One easy answer, of course, is the uniform rightward swing of the electorate, fueled by anger over inflation, an uncontrolled border, and Harris’ barely hidden far-left views. And future elections will probably see some bounce back.

But this argument misses the longer trend: Minority voters, once Democratic stalwarts, have been inching toward the GOP for decades. As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has showed, the GOP share of the nonwhite vote has been rising on and off since the 2000s. That mirrors trends among Jews: Over the past several elections, the Democratic share of the Jewish vote has shrunk, from around 80% in the 1990s and 2000s to around 70% in the 2010s and 2020s.

As the Jewish demographer Milton Himmelfarb famously wrote, Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans. If Puerto Ricans and Jews are both moving right, though, then maybe they’re moving right for similar reasons. Explanations that rely on Democratic antisemitism or affection for socialism are special pleading. The neater explanation is that the same social forces are pushing Black, Hispanic, Jewish, and other minority voters toward the Republicans.

Why are minority groups moving right? As a body of political science argues, the answer is the breakdown of the social institutions that kept them voting for group over ideology. Among Jews, a similar, albeit reversed, phenomenon might be happening: The collapse of Jewish communal life might be giving Jews permission to break from the old ideological consensus.

If that’s true, though, it has profound implications for the political future—of the Jews and everyone else.

In a sense, the question is not why minority voters are moving right, but why they have stayed left for so long. After all, Black and Hispanic Democrats are more moderate ideologically than their white Democrat peers. And the ideological gap between white and nonwhite Democrats has only grown in recent years—implying Black and Hispanic voters should be more willing to swing between parties. Yet in 2020, for example, 60% of Black voters who identified as conservative voted for Joe Biden, compared to 9% of white conservatives. Why?

The conventional explanation for this phenomenon is what political scientists call “linked fate,” the tendency of group members to see their individual well-being as linked to the overall well-being of the group, and so to consider group interest in making electoral decisions. Even if a Hispanic voter would prefer conservative policies, for example, she may still vote for the Democrats under the theory that Hispanic group interest is served by doing so. Such thinking is most common among Black Americans, but has been shown to explain Latino voting behavior as well.

The sense of linked fate, though, is in part socially constructed. Minority voters don’t consider their fates to be linked in a vacuum—they reach that conclusion thanks, in part, to the work of social institutions. In their recent book Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird look specifically at Black political identification, including with the Democratic Party. They argue that Blacks’ lopsided support for Democrats is driven by social pressure from the broader Black community.

“The steady reality that Black Americans’ kinship and social networks tend to be populated by other Blacks,” White and Laird write, “means they persistently anticipate social costs for failing to choose Democratic politics and social benefits for compliance with these group expectations.” They show in survey evidence and experiments that Black voters change their behavior when around other Black people—a proxy for the effect of social pressure in general. This “social constraint” strategy helps ensure that Black voters vote their racial identity, even when doing so is apparently at odds with their ideology.

Though it may sound unusual, this is a perfectly rational political strategy for minority groups in a large, pluralistic democracy. Being able to deliver lopsided group margins is one way a minority group’s leaders can curry favor with a party. Indeed, White and Laird identify tendencies toward social constraint among “Southern whites, white evangelical Christians, trade union members, and certain localized racial and ethnic groups.” Social constraint is not necessarily an exception—to the extent that any group has its own political interests, it has a reason to suppress dissent in the ranks.

Can the “social constraint” model explain Jewish voting patterns? As I’ve argued previously, one way to understand Jews’ strong support of Democrats is our unusually strong ideological commitments. Since at least the 19th century, Jews in America have been more left wing than the general public. And they associate those values with their identity. When asked by Pew what things were most essential to being Jewish, a majority of respondents listed “working for justice/equality” as a key component of their identity, with an even larger majority among the non-Orthodox.

But ideology, like partisanship, can be socially constructed. Jews have a strong sense of in-group identity, with 85% saying they have “a great deal” or “some” sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Most Jews have at least some close friends who are Jewish; 29% say all or most of their close friends are Jewish. And Jews are highly concentrated geographically, with roughly half of American Jews living in the New York, Los Angeles, Miami, or Philadelphia metropolitan areas alone.

Collectively, those facts suggest that—like Blacks, and other ethnic minorities—Jews’ “kinship and social networks tend be populated by” other Jews. Even in the non-Orthodox world, a Jewish person’s interactions with both fellow Jews and Jewish institutions may serve to reinforce his ideological commitments. After all, what right-leaning Jew has not been once or twice told his views are a shanda?

If social pressures produce in-group conformity among minority voters, then it stands to reason that they produce ideological conformity among Jews, too. But what happens to that conformity when the social pressures start to break down?

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If you wanted to pack the history of the 21st century thus far into a single sentence, you could do worse than “20th-century social institutions collapsed.” As political scientist Robert Putnam has repeatedly argued, Americans have seen a steady decline in “social capital,” the network of interpersonal relationships that provide them informal means of individual security and advancement. The families, churches, and community groups which sustained that capital are in more or less continuous decline. That decline, though, has meant not just a reduction in the available stock of social capital, but also in those institutions’ ability to shape behavior—in their ability to impose social constraint.

A number of forces have reduced the power of social institutions. One is rising wealth. As individuals become richer, their need to depend on others for informal aid declines. Decades ago, the political scientist Ronald Inglehart identified a transition across Western democracies to a “post-material” politics that puts greater emphasis on ideological interests as material needs become less salient. Such post-materialism is represented in much of today’s “culture war,” for example. And it helps explain why groups historically less well-off—Blacks and Hispanics—might be willing to shed their sense of shared fate as they grow richer.

A second reason, particularly relevant to the fate of political coalitions, is the declining power of the parties. Between the Jackson administration and the mid-1950s, American political life was dominated by loose coalitions of local machines that collectively negotiated the direction of the country—and brought voters into line with their direction. But beginning with the Democratic Party’s reforms after 1968, both the Republicans and Democrats have yielded power directly to voters, in turn reducing the ability of those local machines to tell voters what to do.

A third, of course, is the downward spiral of mainline religion. As churches have shuttered, their ability to act as venues for the enforcement of community norms has also declined. Among Jews, that’s taken the form of the slow but steady bifurcation of the population into Orthodox and irreligious, with the large Reform/Conservative mainline in the middle slowly dwindling.

Lastly, historical distance may explain a drop in the sense of linked fate which undergirds social capital. For Black Americans, the shared memory of the civil rights era has helped to encourage political solidarity. For Jews, the equivalent is probably the Holocaust. But as these events recede into the past, a greater and greater share of these groups will not remember them, yielding a decline in their power to produce social constraint.

All of these, though, are long-run trends, while declining minority support for Democrats is more recent. Falling social capital may have been the primer, but the actual trigger was almost undoubtedly the rise of the internet and social media.

Rates of internet access and social media use have increased steadily over the past decade. With them have come alternative venues for the formation of social capital. Once forced to sort geographically and ethnically, Americans now can engage in a technologically mediated search for the peer group most in line with their preferences, rather than having their preferences determined by their peer group.

This sorting can have second-order effects, too. The increasing ideological capture of the Democratic Party by a minority of far-left activists is likely downstream of these activists’ formative experiences in online communities like Tumblr. At the same time, this group’s domination of the party helps drive away moderate and conservative voters previously aligned on identity—who can now turn, instead, to their own communities of ideology.

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Writing just before the election, Tablet Editor-in-Chief Alana Newhouse sketched a picture of the shifting lines in the Jewish community. As Newhouse writes, American Jews used to be organized by a set of overlapping affiliations, including denomination, subethnicity, and geography. “As a system, it was layered and messy, but it had internal logic.”

However, Newhouse writes, “this entire world, and all of its categories, is in the process of disappearing.” In its place, she identifies a new, fundamental split, between those uncomfortable with their Jewish identity—at odds as it is with new demands from other identities—and those who have, particularly in the wake of Oct. 7, seized more firmly upon their Jewishness in all its messy complexity.

These categories do not perfectly overlap with the 70% of Jews who preferred Harris and the 30% who backed Trump. And it would be wrong to call the realignment Newhouse identifies merely a political realignment. But the split does seem like a 70/30 divide. And if the foregoing analysis is accurate, that divide mirrors the growing divide within other once politically uniform communities. After all, as the world of “layered and messy” institutions has withered away, it stands to reasons that Jews, like other groups, have replaced it with one where the lines are drawn far more starkly.

This phenomenon does not seem to be restricted to Jews. Young Black and Latino men appear, in particular, to be selecting their ideological commitments over their ethnic identities—identities which have since at least the New Deal been forced by social constraint into a certain politics. And more broadly, political identity has for many groups become more important than ethnic identity, creating within-group divides along ideological lines.

Jews, by contrast, were once socially constrained into a uniform ideological composition. But the decay of Jewish social institutions, and the rise of alternatives thanks in no small part to the internet, has forced an inversion: Jews of all stripes are forgoing socially imposed ideological commitments so they can adhere to their ethnic identity.

There are, of course, both positive and negative implications of this development. The steady decline of community since the middle of the 20th century has been rightly identified as a source of major social ills. So has the rise of social media. Liberal Jews of all stripes routinely bemoan the decline of mainline Judaism—although nobody can seem to really say what to do about it. The world of ethnic affinity, for all of its problems, was a less polarized world for a reason.

At the same time, insofar as these phenomena are freeing Jews and Blacks and Latinos and everyone else to think differently, there is some palpable upside. If voters are more up for grabs because their groups have less control over them, politicians may need to move closer to the median view to compete with them, forcing a degree of moderation in the process.

The big picture, though, is that no matter which group we are talking about—Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and so on—there are no more guaranteed partisan voters. The “coalition of the ascendant” is no more; a very different politics will have to replace it.