June 20: ‘Hamas Is an Idea’

White House expresses 'bafflement' at Bibi; Goonan goes gorillas; The Al Jazeera to Washington Post pipeline

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The Big Story

For the past week, there have been mixed signals coming out of Israel about the state of the war and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to lead it. Following a U.S.-Israeli spat earlier this week, prompted by Bibi’s release of an English-language video in which he criticized Washington’s slow-rolling of military aid, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari told Israel’s Kan broadcaster on Wednesday evening that “the idea that we can destroy Hamas or make Hamas disappear is misleading to the public”—a not-so-thinly veiled attack on Netanyahu and a hint of the military’s strained relationship with the prime minister. Hagari added, echoing U.S. rhetoric, that “Hamas is an idea” that “lives in the hearts of the people.” 

Hamas is also, of course, a political party and a military organization, with members, fighters, commanders, battalions, infrastructure, and weapons, all of which can, in theory, be destroyed. But is the IDF accomplishing that destruction? A Wednesday report from the Institute for the Study of War was bearish, at least if one is to go by its assessment of Hamas’ thinking (emphasis ours):

Hamas is preserving its forces in Rafah rather than engaging the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), likely because Hamas does not believe Israel’s Rafah operation will be decisive. Israeli journalists traveling with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Rafah reported that Hamas fighters are avoiding becoming decisively engaged, and that Hamas’ fighters have instead remotely detonated houses that were rigged to explode prior to the arrival of Israeli forces in the area. The IDF has found few Palestinian fighters above ground, with the majority of Hamas fighters remaining in Hamas’ tunnel system underneath Rafah. Israeli journalists added that an unspecified number of Hamas fighters fled north to Khan Younis and Mawasiresence. Israeli forces have killed 550 Palestinian fighters out of an estimated 2,000 fighters, a low number compared to fighting in other areas of the Gaza Strip. Hamas’ leaders have believed since at least February 2024 that a Rafah operation would fail to destroy its military forces and assess that Hamas is winning the war. Hamas aims to preserve its military capabilities by relocating to safer areas, which maintains the group’s long-term viability and avoids committing to a decisive battle with the IDF in Rafah.

On the other hand, a Wednesday report from Times of Israel military correspondent Emmanuel Fabian noted that the IDF assesses that it has destroyed two of four of Hamas’ Rafah battalions, and it quoted the commander of the Givati Brigade to the effect that it’s “only a matter of time” before the IDF can “demolish [Hamas] entirely.” 

Reached by email, Lee Smith was inclined to be dismissive of reports that Israel is failing to achieve its objectives in Gaza. He wrote in an email to The Scroll:

Israel is winning, is the bottom line. We know because, first, they’ve managed enough room to operate so that they’re still taking down large numbers of Hamas fighters. It strikes me that if you’ve killed more than a quarter of an adversary’s forces on its ground, forces that are deeply dug in, in fact secreted away in tunnels, you are winning. Also, by targeting the White House with his video about Biden withholding arms, Bibi took the initiative away from the admin and put them on the defensive—in an election year. It’s another front that the admin has to fight on, meaning it saps resources from the war the White House really wants to fight, which is its war to save Hamas. 

Reports of Israel’s “failures” should remind us of how we’ve learned to understand and read Obama-faction propaganda, from the Iran deal and Russiagate through Jan. 6 and now the Gaza war: The actual facts are the bricks used to build a narrative, but the mortar, what holds the narrative together, is simply political spin. So if we want to know what’s really happening, it’s the bricks, not the mortar. In this case, what we see is not only that Israel is winning its too-long war against Hamas, but also that Bibi, fending off Israel’s superpower patron and the domestic rivals sponsored by the United States while destroying an Iranian proxy, is pulling off one of the most spectacular political and military victories in recent memory.

How, then, to make sense of Hagari and the escalating wave of anti-Bibi sniping emerging from the IDF brass? Tablet News Editor Tony Badran reads it as a product of Israeli security establishment alignment with Washington. As he writes to The Scroll:

I think the IDF brass has been pushing to end the Gaza operation in line with U.S. preferences. They sometimes spin it by saying that they need to do so in order to fully turn their attention to the northern front, which I think is just cover. The terminology also allows for weaseling, since destroy and defeat are military terms that mean different things. (See the Andrew Fox piece in Tablet from a few weeks back.)

That said, do I think there are still Hamas guys who are just waiting out until the United States ends the war for them? I’m sure that’s the case. Does the IDF still need time to destroy all these tunnels and kill X number of cadres so as to achieve the threshold for the technical definition of “defeat” (e.g., neutralizing up to 50% of the fighting force) or “destroying” (50% plus)? Most likely, given how they’ve been forced to go a lot slower than they normally would have. 

Either way, just as Hagari’s comments are likely part of the security establishment’s desire to maintain their ties to the United States, they will also be used down the line as the “security establishment assessment,” which agrees with Washington’s view that you can’t get rid of Hamas, which will have to be part of the postwar governance, etc.

That postwar governance arrangement is for a “deradicalized” Hamas—i.e., Hamas minus Sinwar—sponsored by Iran to rule in concert with the Palestinian Authority, sponsored by the United States. As with Obama-faction messaging on Syria or the Iran deal, the tactic is to present the desired outcome as an inevitability while casting efforts to avoid that outcome—for instance, by destroying Hamas—as delusional, insane, warmongering, etc. (Sample of the genre: U.S. officials told Axios on Wednesday, of Bibi’s video, that the PM’s “new feud with the Biden administration is hampering U.S.-Israeli diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions on the Lebanese border and avoid war with Hezbollah.”)

As we’ve said here before, though, with an ascendant Iran and a White House committed to enabling it, war with Hezbollah may now, for Israel, be a strategic necessity. As Tablet’s geopolitical analyst wrote in an email to The Scroll: 

The Israeli choice to attack Hamas in Gaza first and then turn their attention to Lebanon once they were done may or may not have been good diplomatic PR or “one front at a time military tactics,” but it was certainly delusional. Israel cannot afford to continue to accept U.S. dictates about the security of its own population and borders. That means that it must finish killing another 500 Hamas men in Rafah and then launch the regional war that U.S. policy is openly directed to avoiding.

The IDF’s northern commanders approved operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon on Tuesday.  

IN THE BACK PAGES: Michael Lind on the multiracial working class neo-Nazi coalition scaring the pants off the Morning Joe set

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The Rest

→On that the Bibi-Biden spat… the White House has responded with public “bafflement” (Axios again) to Netanyahu’s claim in the Tuesday video that the United States has been withholding weapons from Israel. “We genuinely don’t know what [Netanyahu] is talking about,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday. “We just don’t.” In a Thursday letter to Biden, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) explains how the White House is lying without, technically, lying:

Your administration is engaged in a bureaucratic sleight-of-hand to withhold this crucial aid to Israel during a shooting war. As you are aware, the Arms Export Control Act requires the administration to notify Congress before sending weapons to a foreign country. Your administration has manipulated this requirement by withholding this formal notification to Congress of approved weapons sales, including F-15s, tactical vehicles, 120-mm mortars, 120-mm tank rounds, joint direct attack munitions, and small diameter bombs. Your administration can then claim that the weapons are “in process” while never delivering them.

On the other hand, we have no reason to doubt that Jean-Pierre didn’t know what Netanyahu was talking about.

→And here’s another morbidly amusing window into the Obama-Biden messaging apparatus, courtesy of a Thursday headline in CNN:

US concerned Israel’s Iron Dome could be overwhelmed in war with Hezbollah, officials say

According to “three U.S. officials,” there are “serious concerns” in Washington that “the Iran-backed militant group could overwhelm Israel’s air defenses in the north” in the event of a “full-blown war.” That is, indeed, a concern—one known as “overmatch,” which we’ve covered extensively at Tablet and The Scroll to explain why the Obama-Biden policy of forbidding Israeli offensive action against Iran and its proxies in favor of high-tech defense makes zero sense from a strategic perspective. But this latest bout of concern trolling does mark a shift in the administration’s rhetoric. In October, Biden promised that the United States would ensure that the Iron Dome “continues to guard the skies over Israel.” In April, following the Iranian drone and missile attack, U.S. officials were quick to tout the effectiveness of the Iron Dome as a reason Israel should “take the win” and avoid retaliation. But now that Jerusalem is getting serious about threatening Iran’s proxy in Lebanon? The message is, “Nice country you’ve got there—we’d hate to see something happen to it.”

→On Monday, Berkeley police arrested a suspect in a string of June arson attacks at UC Berkeley, including the torching of a cop car. Terrorist sleeper agent? Antifa radical? Crazed vagrant? How about all three? The suspect was identified as Casey Goonan, a white, 34-year-old “scholar-activist” and “abolitionist” with a Ph.D. in African American studies from Northwestern University. Goonan, who is already the suspect in another felony vandalism case—for smashing a Hilton Hotel sign with a hammer at a transgender rights protest in September—lives with his parents and does not appear to be employed. A post on IndyBay.org, attributed to pro-Palestinian group Marilyn’s Daughters, claimed some of Goonan’s attacks as a “retaliation arson attack on construction site at university of kkkalifornia berkeley.” 

→Stat of the Day: 6

That’s how many reporters on The Washington Post’s foreign desk previously worked at Al Jazeera, according to a Wednesday report from Joseph Simonson of The Washington Free Beacon. WaPo alumni of the Qatari-sponsored news network, which promotes sympathetic coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood to a global audience in line with the Qatari state’s foreign-policy goals, include Middle East editor Jesse Mesner-Hage, London correspondent Louisa Loveluck, investigative reporter Ryan Hill, visual enterprise editor Reem Akkad, WaPo live host Libby Casey, and breaking news reporter Adela Suliman. 

Read the rest here. 

→But at least you can still trust Yale University, right? With a $40.7 billion endowment and a four-year cost of attendance at about $340,000, there’s no way that America’s second-most prestigious university needs to be pocketing Qatari cash. Just kidding. The Beacon’s Adam Kredo reported Tuesday, citing assessments from the Institute for Global Antisemitism and Policy, that Yale had received about $15 million in contributions from Qatar since 2012—and only publicly disclosed one grant worth $284,668. The unreported money, according to Kredo: 

includes Qatari-funded joint projects involving Yale employees, in-kind gifts, projects financed by Qatari subsidiaries, various seminars and conferences, the publication of books distributed by the Qatar Foundation, and fellowships, among other projects, according to the report.

At least three Yale schools have been awarded Qatari money, including its school of medicine, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

Hey, we get it. We at The Scroll also get tens of millions of dollars in cash from terror-sponsoring emirates every year. At some point, you just lose track of it!

→Have you ever heard of the Civic Involvement Fund? We hadn’t either. That’s likely because the group has no website, no employees, and no reported expenses, and it appears to operate out of an apartment building in Brooklyn. And yet, as Andrew Kerr reports at The Washington Free Beacon, the Civic Involvement Fund has routed more than $35 million in anonymous cash to pro-Democratic groups since 2020. As Kerr writes, the fund appears to represent an innovation within the world of progressive dark money:

During off-election years, the 501(c)(4) group does nothing but rake in huge sums of cash from one or two anonymous donors. Those funds collect dust until election years, when the Civic Involvement Fund dumps its entire bankroll into groups dedicated to defeating Republicans at the ballot box.

The only publicly listed affiliates of the Civic Involvement Fund are three board members: Kathleen Welch, William Roberts, and Shelley Hearne. Welch and Roberts are the principals of Corridor Partners, a green energy for-profit consulting firm, while Hearne is Welch’s spouse. The Civic Involvement Fund’s books are listed on its 2020 tax return as being in the care of Corridor Partners. Collectively, Kerr reports, the fund’s three board members have visited the White House 60 times since October 2021, including a dozen meetings with White House climate envoy John Podesta. 

Read the story here.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Salman Rushdie’s Beautiful Revenge, by Liel Leibovitz

A hideous attack is transformed into a statement of bloodied but unbowed humanism

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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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Attack of the Crypto-Nazis!

Working-class Americans say they’re voting for their interests. NPR apostles say they suffer from ‘white rage’ and ‘precarious manhood.’ Who’s right?

By Michael Lind

Are working-class men of all races, along with rural Americans in general, the greatest threats to the American republic today? According to Harold Meyerson, writing in the progressive journal he co-founded, The American Prospect, “[y]ounger working-class men of all races” who support Trump instead of Biden are emotionally disturbed individuals obsessed with their “precarious manhood” who “lash out: blaming their problems on outsiders and anti-macho ideology, on feminized work rules, on capitalists and communists so long as they were Jewish, on novelty, on empiricism.”

If the thought of millions of young Hispanic, Black and white men whose manhood is precarious and who hate “empiricism” isn’t scary enough, we should be even more terrified by the 16% of Americans who dwell in the rural wastelands that lie between big Democratic cities. This is the claim of professor Tom Schaller and professor Paul Waldman, whose election-season campaign tract White Rural Rage is the flavor of the month on NPR and MSNBC. On Morning Joe, Schaller duly declared that white rural Americans are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country. ”This one-sixth of the American population," according to White Rural Rage, is a “threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

No need to be polite; tell us what you really think of your fellow Americans, gentlemen.

The idea that the barbaric masses are a menace to civilization is as old as the American republic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, well-to-do Yankees in the Federalist, Whig, and Republican parties who considered themselves America’s natural governing class often depicted both Catholic immigrants and the rural white poor as threats to their supremacy. Many Progressives of the 1900s favored eugenic sterilization of “inferior” poor whites and European immigrants. Henry Adams, the descendant of two presidents from whom he inherited his rich snobbery, spoke for his patrician class when he wrote of the largely rural and working-class Democratic Party of his day that “nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and concentrated a machine [as the American industrial economy] by Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers.”

In the 1930s many high-toned East Coast Progressives—now renamed “liberals”—joined the Democratic Party. Even so, from FDR to LBJ, the Democrats essentially remained the old Jacksonian coalition of “deplorables”—farmers and workers. The fact that both these groups were overwhelmingly white is not at all surprising in a country that was 87.4% non-Hispanic white as recently as 1970, when 11.1% of Americans were Black and other “races” amounted to only 1.4%.

The liberal “eggheads” of the New Deal era tended to view the workers and farmers who voted for the Democrats with unease. In New York, liberals like Roosevelt brain truster Adolf Berle supported the Liberal Party as an alternative to a Democratic machine controlled by political bosses who represented working-class, largely Catholic voters. Roosevelt’s well-born secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, disliked the union leaders she worked with and remarked that she would rather pass a law than organize a union. After World War II, the urban and academic liberals made no secret of their disgust for “sprawling,” unaesthetic suburbs inhabited by lower-class vulgarians—whose home ownership was made possible by New Deal policies like the GI Bill, government-guaranteed home loans, highway spending, and rural electrification.

Like their Progressive forebears, Northeastern liberals held their noses in the presence of the lower orders for whose benefit they ostensibly acted. Their real goal was not the happiness of workers and farmers, but the more refined pleasures of science-based technocratic governance by a wise, disinterested elite, dominated if possible by patrician graduates of Ivy League universities. Accordingly, they preferred relatively conservative Harvard men like Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy to populist politicians from the provinces like Harry Truman (no college degree) and Lyndon Johnson (a graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers College).

Sidelined during the long New Deal era between Roosevelt and Reagan by Democratic urban machines in the North and by Southern Democratic courthouse gangs, this elite liberal-progressive subculture—today often called “gentry liberals”—began to capture the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton (a Southern boy who went to Yale Law School). They consolidated their control of the party under Obama, a well-toned product of Harvard Law School and the billionaire NGO complex whose ego-ideal was Spock from Star Trek (as President, Obama personally wrote a White House eulogy for the actor Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock).

Gentry liberals today control the Democratic Party under Biden, in alliance with billionaires in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Because they are few in number, the gentry liberals need alliances with blocs of non-college-educated voters who are promised the spoils of new, enlightened forms of grievance-based ethnic politics just like old fashioned Tammany Hall bosses. By licensing the new identity-based spoils system, progressive leaders hope that Democratic voting by “people of color,” both native and imported, can allow them to create a permanent one-party regime based on enlightened technocracy. Needless to say, progressive Democrats do not seek votes from icky white Catholics, white Southerners and white rural Americans who have been driven out of the party, and whose desires for full-time jobs at decent wages and an end to destructive corporate offshoring might lead to higher taxes and lower corporate profits.

While contempt for the white working class and rural whites has been a constant among America’s coastal elites for more than two centuries, the particular dangers that the laboring masses are said to pose have changed over time. In the 1800s some Federalists feared that rural rebels or Irish immigrants might drown American democracy in a French Jacobin-style bloodbath or a papist takeover of Protestant America. In the second half of the 20th century, anti-populist propaganda adopted a new theme: Working-class Americans are dangerous proto-fascists like the members of the German working class which supposedly brought Hitler to power. At any moment American farmers and construction workers and maids, on orders from this or that American wannabe Hitler, might round up Fresh Air listeners and Rachel Maddow fans and put them all in concentration camps.

The contemporary Democratic pundits and professors who toss around phrases like “the authoritarian personality” and “status anxiety” to support such fantasies belong to a tradition going back to The Authoritarian Personality, a book published by the German Marxist émigré Theodor Adorno and his several co-authors in 1950. The book sought to explain the rise of Nazism and other forms of fascism in terms of the psychological maladjustment of working-class individuals. Adorno and his co-authors claimed that their “F-scale” could measure how fascist an individual was. Among the factors that were supposed to identify fascist Americans in Truman’s America were these: “Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conservative, middle-class values … Exaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings on.’”

The F-scale was nonsense—as was the idea that Hitler rose to power with the support of the German working class. The Nazi Party never got more than a minority of the working-class vote. Most working-class Germans opposed the Nazis and preferred socialists, communists, or the Catholic Center Party. Once the Nazis seized power, many trade unionists along with socialists and communists wound up in concentration camps. Nor, with some exceptions prior to 1933, was big business on the side of the Nazis. Scholars have shown that the most pro-Nazi constituencies were small business owners and members of the military and civil services nostalgic for the authoritarianism of Imperial Germany, and who helped to undemocratically install Hitler as chancellor even though most Germans voted against the Nazis.

Adorno’s theory about German politics, then, was as comprehensively wrong as his view that many working-class Americans are potential Nazis. Indeed, in the International Journal of Political Psychology in 2001, John Levi Martin wrote that “The Authoritarian Personality is probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology.”

Nevertheless, today’s gentry liberal social scientists carry on the discredited tradition of Adorno by redefining values that are widely shared not only by conservatives but also by centrists and even moderate liberals as “authoritarian” and contrasting them with “liberal” values, which just happen to be the values of those of the one-fifth or so of the population that defines itself as “very liberal” or “progressive.” According to Harvard’s Pippa Norris: “Authoritarian values are those which uphold belief in strong leaders, in a strong state, and in robust law and order. These are traditional values like family, home, religion …”

Yet support for “family, home, religion” is far from being “authoritarian.” In fact, it is shared by most people from the center right to the center left in the U.S. and other democracies. The attempt to redefine the beliefs of the broad political center as harbingers of fascism isn’t political science; it’s the politics of gentry liberal technocrats, who seek to claim the title of centrism even as they stigmatize the actual political center and polarize the country in order to facilitate their own power and influence.

In the 1960s, liberals painted the toothbrush mustache on the libertarian Barry Goldwater. Since then, despite their differences, Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have all been potential American Hitlers, according to many of their Democratic contemporaries in American journalism and the universities and political life.

Today, the theory that many or most working-class and rural Americans are crypto-Nazis comes in several versions, depending on what exactly it is that is supposed to have triggered lower-class lowbrows to vote Republican instead of voting for Democrats who supposedly represent their “interests”—which now apparently include DEI, transgender surgeries for minors, unlimited immigration, and abolishing the police. In one version, rural and working-class voters were turned into democracy-wrecking monsters by economic disappointment. This was the theme of Barack Obama’s famous leaked 2008 comments from a confidential talk to wealthy Democratic donors in San Francisco:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The economic deprivation thesis, patronizing as it is, at least holds out the hope that if benevolent technocrats provide the moronic rabble with good jobs and benefits, they won’t turn angry and mutate, Hulk-like, into American-style Nazis.

More insulting to Republican working-class voters and therefore more appealing to snobbish gentry liberals is the noneconomic status-anxiety theory. If working-class and rural voters do not support the Democrats, the party of the people (the people of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and much of Wall Street, that is), then these voters must be motivated by deeply rooted irrational bigotry, not mere economic distress. While Obama provided the classic statement of the economic deprivation theory in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016 did the same for the working-class bigotry theory, in a statement which, like Obama’s, was intended to be for the ears of rich Democratic donors in an invitation-only fundraiser in New York:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.

In a New York Times essay of Feb. 9, 2022, titled “Status Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump’s Sails,” the journalist Thomas B. Edsall quotes Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish academic, who claims that the increase in the “status in society” of “racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities” has pushed “those with lower education or those who feel challenged by the new emerging groups towards the right.” Agreeing with Petersen, Edsall concludes that many working-class whites are therefore not only emotionally disturbed but also un-American: “The data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition … That this is dangerous does not need repeating.”

Ezra Klein, another gentry liberal New York Times columnist, has aggressively pushed the claim that white resentment of nonwhite progress explains votes against the Democratic Party that he supports. Klein made the racial status anxiety thesis central to his book Why We’re Polarized in 2020, which the billionaire Bill Gates, the Harvard dropout son of a wealthy lawyer, touted as one of “5 books to read this summer.”

The thesis that racism explains the preference for Republicans of non-college-educated white working-class Americans confirms the biases of the average New York Times reader—a 42-year-old Democrat with a college degree who makes more than $75,000 a year, in a country in which most people have no education beyond high school or some college and a median income of $48,060.

The paying subscribers of The New York Times are even more partisan than readers in general, according to former New York Times editorial-page editor James Bennet, who wrote in The Economist: “More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal. A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become ‘a selling point,’ reported one internal marketing memo.”

But there’s a major problem with ascribing Republican votes to a longing for white supremacy. In 2020, after years in which Democratic pundits asserted that hatred of Hispanics was the essence of Trump’s appeal, Hispanic voters shifted toward Trump in numbers that almost permitted him to defeat Joe Biden—with a shift of 26 points from 2016 for Cuban Americans, an 18-point shift among Puerto Rican Americans, and a 12-point shift among Mexican Americans.

The Democratic advantage among nonwhite working-class voters in general has shifted from 67 points for Obama to 48 points for Biden in 2020 to a mere 17 points for Biden today, according to a New York Times/Siena poll in December 2023.

And if I may be permitted an exercise in Tom Friedman-style anecdata, the last two Uber drivers I hired, one a recent Nigerian immigrant and a Venezuelan who immigrated to the U.S. under Biden, both told me that if they could vote they would vote for Trump.

If racism and white nationalism are motivating voters who prefer Republicans to Democrats, how can progressives explain the fact that the Democratic Party is getting whiter and richer, while the Republican Party is getting browner and more working class? One option is to define Blacks and Hispanics who refuse to vote for Democrats as self-hating. Another is to claim that Blacks and Hispanics and Asian Americans are not authentic members of their groups. Candidate Joe Biden in May 2020 chose the latter strategy during an interview with the popular Black drive-time radio host Charlamagne. When the host said he had more questions, Biden snapped, “You’ve got more questions, but I tell you … if you’ve got a problem whether or not you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”—compounding the damage of his patronizing remark with his use of the faux-Black dialect that white Democratic politicians of a certain age often employ when addressing Black Americans.

Fortunately for gentry liberals, there is now a third alternative to the discredited white nationalist and economic deprivation theories of why working-class Americans vote for Republicans—the “precarious manhood” theory of Harold Meyerson and others. If “[y]ounger working-class men of all races” increasingly vote for Republicans, then the reason must be sexual frustration.

It’s not nonwhites whom the multiracial working class resents; it’s women! The Republican Party is not the Ku Klux Klan after all; it’s the He Man Woman Haters Club from The Little Rascals (NO GURLZ ALLOWED).

The partisan gender gap between young men and young women, and men and women of all races in general, is an interesting political phenomenon. But the data suggest that the greatest emotional maladjustment is not on the side of “younger working-class men of all races.” According to a recent study by epidemiologists at Columbia University, depression rates have risen the most for young progressive women. A March 2020 Pew study reported that 56% of young white liberal women, said they had been diagnosed with a mental health condition, compared to only 28% of young white moderates and a mere 27% of young white conservatives.

Although Donald Trump will eventually be gone from the scene, elite center-left fear and loathing of the multiracial working class seems unlikely to change. Today’s heirs of anti-populist and anti-egalitarian Progressives, Mugwumps, Whigs, and Federalists will continue to insist that working-class Americans and rural Americans are dangerous cretins who threaten to destroy democracy by putting their grubby fingers on the voting levers and committing an unforgivable crime: voting against gentry liberal candidates.