Weekly Grounding #26
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds”
This New York Times poll finds that Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump in five out of the six swing states that he won in 2020. The economy, immigration, and foreign policy emerged as key issues for voters. Even more noteworthy than the overall poll numbers are the finer details, some of which confirm earlier realignments and some of which appear to be newer phenomena: “Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years.” While this week’s state election results suggest that the hot button issue of abortion may serve as a political counterweight in favor of the Democrats, Biden’s striking unpopularity seems difficult to overcome.
“As Black Voters Drift to Trump, Biden’s Allies Say They Have Work to Do”
Building on the results of this poll, The New York Times focuses specifically on black voters, 22 percent of whom stated that they would vote for Trump in 2024: “The drift in support is striking, given that Mr. Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters nationally in 2020 and 6 percent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. A Republican presidential candidate has not won more than 12 percent of the Black vote in nearly half a century.” Rather than propose policies that would help black communities trapped in poverty and violence across the country, “Biden campaign officials now say they recognize they have work to do with Black voters, and they and their allies have begun multimillion-dollar engagement campaigns targeting them.” It doesn’t seem to occur to these campaign officials that this kind of “targeting” is one of the reasons for the mass exodus of black voters from the Democratic Party fold. For more on this topic, see Weekly Grounding #14 and Weekly Grounding #17.
“The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape Western Politics”
Also at The New York Times,
analyzes the political realignments that have produced such fierce domestic division in the United States in response to the violence and Israel and Palestine. While I think he underestimates the older alignments at play on the American scene, this is still a useful piece. Douthat’s analysis of the “alienated right” was particularly interesting: “Among my fellow conservative Catholics, for instance, there’s a longstanding anger at George W. Bush for invading Iraq and letting Middle Eastern Christianity be devastated by the ensuing wars and a sense that Israel was that foolhardy project’s accomplice. Among the would-be vitalists and Nietzscheans of the post-Christian right and certain other far-right influencers, there’s plenty of conspiracy theorizing and anti-Semitism. And then the Trump-era Republican coalition writ large includes a lot of nonreligious, disaffected, working-class Americans, for whom pro-Israel sentiments may come to feel, or feel already, like a luxury belief, a province of the elites whom they disdain.” The salience of religious and other highly specific worldviews in shaping responses to the conflict is one of the reasons I wrote an article on the topic of Jewish theology this week on Handful of Earth: “The World Is Built by Gratuitous Kindness.”
“The New (& Old) Cold War: When Conflict Is Collusion”
- provides a compelling analysis of today’s “new cold war” rhetoric: “The conventional narrative of the Cold War fails to describe the structural function of a cold war as a geopolitical maneuver. A cold war is one means by which an interstate system structures great power rivalry within its domain. A cold war is a form of order, one that cajoles lesser powers and subjugated peoples to uphold the existing hierarchy by compelling them to take sides within it. A cold war does not threaten the order, it sustains it. There are, of course, genuine conflicts between the rivals. However, the mutual denunciation between cold war rivals obscures and enables their systemic collusion, ultimately guaranteeing the status quo.” The article continues: “When we understand that the 20th century Cold War served a stabilizing and legitimizing function for the liberal international order, then a strange truth becomes apparent: the United States lost the Cold War. Major sections of the U.S. ruling class desperately want it back.”
“Intensified Israeli Surveillance Has Put the West Bank on Lockdown”
In “The ‘Free Speech’ Right Embraces Cancel Culture,” I discussed “new conservative” hypocrisy on the question of free speech in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza. But it is not only attitudes toward free speech in the United States and Europe that deserve scrutiny; the broader question of civil liberties is also paramount. In this article for Wired, Tom Bennett reports on the massive Israeli surveillance program in the West Bank: “The flagship component of the West Bank’s surveillance infrastructure is known as ‘Wolf Pack.’ According to Amnesty International, its purpose is to create a database featuring profiles of every Palestinian in the region. One strand of this software, known as Red Wolf, uses facial recognition cameras placed at checkpoints to inform Israeli soldiers via a color-coded system whether to arrest, detain, or allow through Palestinians who approach.” With reports like this, it’s remarkable that some of the most courageous critics of the pandemic response have dutifully lined up behind Israel in the past month despite its leading role in the global bio-surveillance regime. In case the “Wolf Pack” doesn’t sound enough like a model for covid technocracy, here’s a quote from one resident, Ahmed Azza, describing the predicament of Palestinians in the West Bank: “‘We’re rats in a lab,’ says Azza, over a cup of tea at his workplace in Hebron [my emphasis]. ‘I want to go to the beach, I want to see the sea, I want to taste the water. Here, we don't have this freedom.’”
- offers some thought-provoking reflections on the “re-moralisation of governance, education, and science” against the mechanistic logic of modernity. She makes the fascinating observation that “we are — at least compared with recent predecessors — simply ever less interested in the world of atoms, and physics, and cause and effect. Instead, leaders today are fixated on moral or symbolic dimensions. Evidence of this shift in priorities is everywhere, but perhaps its starkest instance might be what’s sometimes denounced as a ‘woke takeover of science’ — but which could just as accurately be described as the re-subordination of empiricism to moral doctrine.” Harrington continues: “I suspect the future belongs not to the sedate, polite mindset of logic and science to which Britain gave birth, and which by and large we still prefer, but the far more slippery, immanent, and enchanted one of millenarian religious narratives and wild forest beings.”
- explores the meanings of “hot” and “cool” at the : “Cool is more enduring than hotness, since it’s based more on personal style in movement, dress, or language. Anybody can get hot, but not everyone is gonna be cool. People who become hot are often labeled cool, but it’s a short-term designation. Those who are perceptive about the difference and know how fleeting their link to ‘cool’ is, can become obsessed with staying ‘hot’ to the point they become parodies of themselves (overdoing it until they become a joke) or attaching themselves to whatever the latest ‘hot’ thing is – be it a cultural trend or a particular woman or man – trying to maintain their coolness by association.” George continues: “Chasing hotness to remain cool is a loser’s game. The beauty of being a grown ass man is that you’ve seen innumerable waves of hotness come and go and you’ve seen people of undeniable cool become as uncool as last season’s flip flops. I’ve observed the more you escape from the pursuit of cool, the cooler you become.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.