What Happened Today: April 24, 2023
Hakeem Jeffries in hot water; Sudan descends into civil war; Israeli tech teens keep the faith
The Big Story
A new CNN report has led some Jewish lawmakers to question the long-standing claim from Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that he had only “a vague recollection” of the media dustup that ensnared his uncle Leonard Jeffries in 1991, when Leonard claimed that “rich Jews” had been involved in the slave trade, Jews were “dogs,” and that Jewish executives in Hollywood were creating movies that denigrated Black people. In college at the time, Rep. Jeffries had previously said his parents protected him from the controversy that would eventually force his uncle to resign his post running the African American Studies Department at CUNY.
But digging into the matter, CNN found that the younger Jeffries had used his perch as a student board member of the Black Student Union at Binghamton University to invite his uncle to make his case at a campus event, and penned a college editorial defending “his uncle along with Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan” for being maligned by the “White media” for calling out the “longstanding distortion of history.”
The House’s Republican Jewish Coalition has called on him to explain why he previously downplayed his involvement, while his office has sidestepped the discrepancy, saying in a statement that he’s “consistently been clear that he does not share the controversial views espoused by his uncle.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday welcomed Rep. Jeffries and a delegation of lawmakers at a Jerusalem summit celebrating 75 years of independence.
In The Back Pages: Roe and the Fable of Progressive Neoliberalism
The Rest
→ A 7-2 decision on Friday from the Supreme Court will allow Americans to continue to access the abortion pill mifepristone, but the legal battle over the drug continues just as the GOP struggles to find its footing on the abortion issue ahead of the 2024 election. The case being waged—which features the pill maker and Biden administration attorneys on one side and an anti-abortion coalition on the other—had been taken up by the Supreme Court on its so-called shadow docket, which allows justices to dissent without writing an opinion.
It would have been an unusual precedent for the Supreme Court to interfere in the FDA’s regulatory power over drug approvals, especially of an approval first granted more than two decades ago; yet Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the lone written dissent, made a point in his brief remarks to say the Biden administration was acting in bad faith, failing to dispel “legitimate doubts that it would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases.”
Alito’s dissent was curious insofar as he’d previously championed fewer court interventions in the abortion issue, writing a majority opinion last year in Dobbs v Jackson, the case that overturned Roe v Wade, that included at least seven instances in which he said abolishing the right to an abortion was an act of judicial modesty. “The authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives,” he wrote then.
Over the weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tussled with CNN’s Dana Bash on whether mifepristone regulation was a federal or state issue, with Graham conceding it should be a federal concern because “it’s a human rights issue.” Though Graham has long supported a 15-week nationwide ban on abortion, his reluctance to say plainly that he seeks a federal intervention underscores his party’s ongoing confusion over how to treat abortion ever since GOP candidates took a beating in the midterms—seemingly because of the Roe v Wade decision.
Officials within the Republican National Committee already see abortion as 2024’s “trickiest political issue and a divisive one internally for the party,” The Washington Post reported last week. With the mifepristone case headed back to the fifth circuit, it’s possible the appeal to that eventual decision would land back on the Supreme Court’s actual docket, with arguments set to play out during the peak of the 2024 election cycle.
→ A wild 48 hours in the media sphere began on Sunday when Comcast confirmed that Jeff Shell was stepping down as the top executive of its subsidiary NBC Universal as the company looks into Shell’s possible inappropriate relationship with a female colleague. That C-suite bombshell quickly became old news on Monday after Tucker Carlson, the marquee Fox News talking head, abruptly left the organization after more than a decade. It remains unclear if Carlson’s departure was simply the result of his role in the historic $787 million settlement Fox cut with Dominion Voting Systems last week. Similarly unclear is what led CNN to fire longtime star anchor Don Lemon on Monday, though that might just be the shoe finally dropping following Lemon’s sexist remarks in February about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, 51, no longer being “in her prime” because of her age.
→ Almost two weeks of intense gunfire and shelling between rival militant groups in Sudan has prompted foreign embassies to evacuate their diplomats over the weekend just as thousands of Sudanese residents stream over the border to neighboring nations. At least 400 people have been killed and nearly 4,000 injured, according to recent World Health Organization tallies, though the fighting has affected scores more as swaths of the nation struggle to maintain access to food, water, and electricity. As Sudan is a home to at least 1.1 million refugees and asylum seekers, some from South Sudan and others from Ethiopia and Syria, its current violence will send many of those settled in refugee housing back on the road into nearby countries, where aid workers in places like Chad are already strained by humanitarian challenges.
→ Quote of the Day:
It is time for the literary community at large to reject a creative segregation that reflects the ills of a society too often riven by fear, anger and polarization. The way forward is by fostering understanding across the lines of identity, not by subordinating capaciousness of spirit to the defensive crouch of tribalism. Literature should expand our humanity, not shrink it.
That’s Richard North Patterson, author of 22 novels, 16 of which have been NYT bestsellers, writing about how his latest novel, his first in nine years, was resoundingly rejected by major publishers that previously sold his work because “as a white author I chose to write about some of our most vexing racial problems—voter suppression, unequal law-enforcement—through the prism of three major characters, two of them Black.” Patterson found an independent publisher and will be serializing part of the novel for free on his Substack. “This preemptive censorship reflects the new but militant insistence that authors of fiction should ‘stay in their lane,’” he told The Bulwark. “Therefore … the identity of the author overrides all the other elements indispensable to good fiction.”
Read More: https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/identity-politics-comes-for-a-best
→ Video of the Day:
An Israeli team of teens at an international robotics contest in Houston made it to the final weekend round but had to bow out because of Shabbat. In the video here, organizers read the letter from the team members, who left Shabbos candles and challah in their empty booth as they congratulated the other teams for an inspiring event. “Our faith is an integral part of who we are,” the members wrote, explaining that they couldn’t compete on Shabbat, “a time when we disconnect and focus on our spiritual well being, families, God, and communities.”
→ Two of the top marketing executives at Anheuser-Busch are taking an involuntary leave of absence amid the blowback to their March Madness marketing campaign that involved sending Bud Light cans to the trans activist influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Celebrating the first anniversary of her gender transition, Mulvaney created a social media campaign with the can of Bud Light that featured an illustration of Mulvaney’s face, which didn’t sit well with all Bud Light aficionados: Some led a counter-campaign to boycott the beverage, and Kid Rock decided to pick up some cheap points by making videos of himself shooting Bud cases with a rifle. Struggling to walk the tightrope of appealing to Mulvaney’s constituency without further inflaming the boycott, “the company said it supported the partnership with Ms. Mulvaney, [adding that] it works with hundreds of influencers to help its brands connect with different demographics,” as The Wall Street Journal put it.
→ Some of the world’s largest energy producers are in talks with Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state energy company, as Kyiv starts to negotiate with foreign businesses in an effort to revamp its energy market. The move comes as Ukrainian officials attempt to build out a natural gas export business that they say could help supplant Russia’s grip on the natural gas support to Europe. Beyond just the difficulty in starting up a new business in the middle of a war, the country also faces the challenge of doing so with an energy infrastructure that has taken a beating from Russian forces that have made a point to target Ukraine’s refineries and other production outposts. Ukraine, however, does seem to be pulling in support from friendly places, with Oleksiy Chernyshov, chief executive of Naftogaz, already drumming up support from White House officials and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, the Financial Times reported this weekend.
→ Altria, the largest U.S. cigarette company, sat for its first day of a San Francisco federal court trial as representatives of the city’s unified school district argued the tobacco giant collaborated with e-cigarette maker Juul Labs to create what’s become a vaping addiction “crisis” for American teens. Juul had already settled a lawsuit with the school last year, but lawyers argue that Altria, which was Juul’s largest financial backer between 2018 and 2022, had been “at the heart” of the e-cigarette campaign to hook young adults with various flavors targeted to their demographic. Already, Juul has yanked most of its e-cigarette products from the market while paying out more than $2.7 billion in settlements to 48 states and dozens of individuals, though teenage e-cigarette use remains a serious public health concern, the head of the FDA’s division for tobacco products said in 2022.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Reb Shayala’s Free Lunch by Chaya Sara Oppenheim
Orthodox eateries open their kitchens to mark the yahrzeit of a Hasidic rebbe known for feeding the hungry
Jews Are Not Israel’s Only Mourners on Yom Hazikaron by Hillel Kuttler
Hundreds of others who died in battle—Druze, Bedouins, Christians, Circassians—will be remembered on the country’s Memorial Day
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.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, June 2022
Roe and the Fable of Progressive Neoliberalism
The coming Supreme Court decision will extend the culture wars long enough to keep real economic reforms off the table forever
Last month, in what some are calling “the scoop of the century,” Politico obtained a copy of a Supreme Court draft decision that revealed a majority plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. Very soon, it seems, women in at least 13 U.S. states will have to drive hundreds of miles to make an independent choice about their own pregnancies.
There’s a bright side, though. During their lifetimes, baby boomer leftists and progressive neoliberals of all ages have never had to compromise with social conservatives or learn how to talk to Middle Americans and Southerners—and they still won’t. Ever since the country began sorting itself into politically like-minded neighborhoods in the 1980s, many progressive neoliberals have enjoyed living in wealthy archipelagos filled with gluten-, dairy-, and conservative-free living—places in which Middle America is seen as an anthropological curiosity that can be shamed into submission. In these often highly credentialed and pompous enclaves, progressive neoliberals have convinced themselves that all the country’s problems are someone else’s fault.
Whether their experience has been urban or suburban, progressive neoliberals—together with the professional managerial class they employ—have enjoyed living in their own version of the United States for over half a century: an abundance of technology jobs and sexual freedom; reasonable real estate and local representatives who keep the riffraff out of their neighborhoods (while publicly calling for affordable housing construction somewhere else); expensive health care, but still within their reach (though increasingly no one else’s); and elite college degrees that guarantee jobs, often regardless of skills.
Sure, rebuilding social safety nets, rethinking failing public schools, and redesigning college to actually help place ordinary people in the job market were laudable goals—but not pressing enough to require policy compromises with any political enemies. Winning culture wars over guns and abortion, not economic solidarity, has been seen as the most important goal. And so here we are.
The potential end of guaranteed nationwide abortion access has been the Damoclean sword hanging over the American left ever since George McGovern’s 49-state trouncing in 1972. Since then, the ’60s radicals who drove the McGovern defeat gained control of the Democratic Party establishment and academia. By the mid-2000s, they and their students had taken over national media and the entertainment industry, turning them into propaganda services for a progressive neoliberalism nearly as rigid and restrictive as any communist politburo. Progressive neoliberals have maintained power throughout all the cultural centers that “matter” by lording a very specific threat over all populist and social democratic critics: Their right-wing opponents are so trapped in the past, so disrespectful toward women and modernity, that—if given the chance—they’d do it: They would overturn Roe.
In progressive neoliberalism’s standard apologue, Middle American and Southern conservatives—and the white working class they “dog whistle”—are the “enemies of progress,” intellectual philistines that neoliberal progressives and the fantastically wealthy oligarchs who fund them must bravely fend off by any means necessary: keeping individual and corporate taxes low, for example, and offshoring as many jobs as possible to low-wage countries. Those who waste their time with economic or labor-organizing concerns at home are simply missing the point.
If Richard Nixon initiated the culture wars, and Reagan Republicans refined them, it didn’t take Democratic neoliberals very long to see how endless posturing about guns and abortion could energize the party’s foot soldiers happy for pennies on the dollars paid out by party grandees shilling for China, JP Morgan, and Merck.
For 30 years now, the Democratic Party and its allies inside the culture industry have promised to help labor unions, erect greater social safety nets, and increase social spending for the country’s poor and working classes—while in fact delivering next to nothing on any of these fronts. Expecting tangible policy accomplishments on issues like inequality, livable wages, and the affordability of American cities is often denigrated as a form of privilege. While such a conclusion might seem upside down at first, activists focused more on labor or economic justice are presented by the neoliberal oligarchy as people who don’t understand the more basic and fundamental challenge of human rights.
Now, the denouement appears imminent. When the abortion issue returns to its pre-1973 status, it will close the book on the fable that’s dominated the American national story since baby boomer elites moved into national power centers after Roe. The ending will be dramatic and unexpected.
While progressive neoliberal Democrats have had several opportunities to shore up the abortion issue through federal action, each time they’ve chosen different priorities—or to sit on their hands. Holding majorities in the House and Senate and in control of the executive branch, Democrats could have passed federal laws guaranteeing the legality of abortion in 1993-94 or 2009-10. President Barack Obama promised to do so repeatedly during his first presidential campaign. Instead, we got a "beer summit" on race and discussions of the veracity of his birth certificate, which lowered the nation’s already struggling intelligence quotient by several integers.
President Joe Biden also could have tried to codify abortion access into federal law over the last 18 months. Unsurprisingly, like his two Democratic predecessors, he hasn’t mustered any concerted effort in that regard. And now, the jig is up. One good measure of Democrats’ absolute political failure on this issue is that even as many South American countries are loosening legal restrictions on abortion, very soon half of American states will likely move toward banning, or at least harshly restricting, women’s ability to decide their own reproductive options.
Make no mistake: This is the outcome that the progressive neoliberal class has desired all along—a permanent culture war to justify the subordination or disappearance of all economic concerns while simultaneously failing to actually protect the reproductive rights of women.
Rather than diligently examine what makes American culture so different from Western Europe and work within that reality-based framework, baby boomers have demanded that every succeeding generation adhere to a fantasy concept of multiculturalism they define in the most shallow of terms (literally, skin deep)—which in turn is yoked to untrammeled capitalist greed at the expense of working-class populations that are conveniently condemned as deplorables or untouchables, a gun-toting, Jesus-loving, white supremacist, disease-spreading caste of trans-hating, woman-hating insurrectionists, whose moral claim on the rest of the country is therefore zero. Let them starve.
Despite all the progressive neoliberal talk of representational equity and constructing national power centers that “look like America,” the country’s never-ending abortion saga illustrates that the United States remains, at its core, an Anglophone and Protestant-ish monoculture: a superficial, business-dominated society dotted not just by cookie-cutter strip malls and a saccharine pop culture industry, but by an enduring Puritan obsession with sex as backward as it is pornographic. Both the archetypical “Florida Man” redneck and the nonbinary, “body positive” online keyboard warrior maintain a bluenosed fixation on sex. One reacts to it as titillating but shameful sin; the other embraces its modern inversion.
Except for small subsegments of the population—like tiny outposts of the Amish, fundamentalist Mormons, Hasidic Jews, and a few other communalist groups—nearly everything in American society looks from the air like some derivative of (or reaction to) the country’s competing Anglo-Protestant founding generations. The partisan coalitions have shifted, but the United States remains trapped in an internecine Protestant war between the political descendants of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats—or, to take it back even further, a battle between the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Virginia Colony: the two dominant factions of the country’s prevailing Anglo-Saxon Protestant order.
One was a narcissistic and self-obsessed but also self-hating urban order whose Unitarian lineage can be traced directly back to New England and the second-generation Puritans; the other, the evangelical Southern line that derives from the servant-class Christian rebellions of the First Great Awakening who believed that Christianity rightly understood means trusting the “heart rather than the head”—a culture resentful of the Yankees who look down on them for their poverty and provincialism. Unlike the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Virginia Colony did not arrive in North America to create John Winthrop’s “city on a hill.” They came to make money, shoot things, and have a good time.
In a country eternally at war with its working people since the days of slavery and indentured servitude, wealthy employers truly “don’t see color.” Rather, they see compliance and anything that encourages it. Saddled with more children than he can handle, Florida Man must play the game of life eternally behind the economic eight ball. There are too many mouths to feed back home, not to mention the balloon payments he owes on the mini monster truck parked in his driveway.
There can be no shock when your enemies enter through the gate you leave open. There’s nothing democratic about the Supreme Court—neither its design during the constitutional negotiations of 1787, nor its overblown role in contemporary American governance. It was through the courts, however, that progressive neoliberals chose to pursue so many of their chief aims in the last 50 years. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education taught the progressive neoliberal class that it could attain social freedoms by circumventing the people’s representatives in Congress and appealing to the highest court in the land instead. It’s not by coincidence that nearly every one of progressive neoliberalism’s major successes since has had a “v” in its moniker: Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (gay rights), Obergefell v. Hodges (same sex marriage).
The United States has in many ways become a more inclusive society in the last six decades, but the only political lesson that progressive neoliberals seem to have drawn is that building consensus with benighted Middle Americans and racist Southerners is hopelessly beneath them. Ironing out a federal legislative compromise in which access to abortion would be guaranteed under some circumstances but not others is a task the baby boomer left has always seen as unworthy of their station as America’s designated savior class. To them, conservatives—or even just apolitical normies in flyover land—are pigs, fools, and torch-bearing fascists in waiting.
The moral they read into McGovern’s titanic defeat was never that they share a country with lots of people who disagree with them; it was that there’s no point in ever trying to engage with the Rust Belt’s Germanic, class-oriented political culture, or the unrefined traditionalism of the evangelical South. Better to hire armies of highly educated attorneys to work their magic through the justice system and avoid the difficulties of the legislative process entirely than to reach out to the hicks. Southern and Middle American plebs would complain, of course, but the supposedly favorable demographic changes brought on by immigration would provide an out in the not so distant future. All progressives needed to do was run out the clock while awaiting their final victory.
While baby boomer progressive neoliberals have always believed themselves to be cultural rebels, in the real world they have long been members of the country’s cultural and financial elite who care little for the working poor. Frankfurt School Marxism and Foucauldian postmodernism slot perfectly into the university setting to provide an aura of (unnecessarily confusing) sophistication for the simple dismissal of working people. Proletarian disgust with the corruption of Washington and the ivory tower can be reframed not as the legitimate identification of real problems but as a disclosure of unconscious racism and sexism. Similarly, working-class contempt for the Democrats and the infotainment industry can be reinterpreted as mere resentment over the strides made by women and minorities, and nothing more.
The fall of Roe will signal the end of an era, but not the end of the road for progressive neoliberalism. With the current structure of the Senate and Supreme Court, one estimate has it that the Democrats would have to win three straight national elections by 19 points to make abortion legal nationally again. That prospect, while of course unrealistic, will still be held as the new benchmark. Any election that fails to meet this bar will be used to shame all fence-sitters into supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, or someone equally vapid, in 2024, 2028, and beyond. Not only must the progressive neoliberal elite’s hand-picked figurehead win out against internal challengers; he or she must also vanquish their right-wing “populist” enemies. Anything less will demonstrate a lack of faith—and further evidence of the uncooperative cultural backwardness of the American voter.
The fall of Roe is a guarantee of nonstop intra-Protestantoid culture war within the American elite. Meanwhile, the vast majority of middle-class millennials and Gen Z Americans will have less wealth than their parents, fewer stable jobs, worse prospects for homeownership, far more debt, and more deaths of despair. This is the country these people have wrought, and the coming Roe reversal will enable the country’s progressive neoliberal class to ignore their own failings for decades more while lecturing the rest of us about whatever new moral failing for which they’ve decided we must repent.
More than that, the overturning of Roe will reanimate progressive neoliberalism and its central artifice: So long as we don’t have abortion rights for everyone, everywhere, there’s simply no time to focus on luxury concerns like economic reforms that might benefit working families.
Thanks for reporting on the Israeli robotics team. My daughter's U.S. robotics team just missed making it to the World championships and she's been following the Israeli team and their decision not to compete on Shabbat.
Somebody has been channeling the political voice of Samuel Clemens ... and doing a very good job of it, too