weve been moots for a while and its interesting, i feel like you have gotten a little more "radicalized" ans turned slightly more rightwing than when you first started posting abt i/p
I wouldn't say more right wing. On domestic policy, I still align pretty well with the Bernie Sanders end of the liberal spectrum.
I still think that Trump is the most dangerous President in US history. I think he's our Hitler/Mussolini/Franco. I think his support of Israel and his supposed opposition to antisemtism are products of political convenience, not principle/values/solidarity. I think he'll turn on both when the political winds change. I think his party's base includes a massive number of white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and antisemites to whom he and his allies dogwhistle often.
I still think the GOP is completing its transition to fascism.
I continue to despise Netanyahu. I still loathe Otzma Yehudit. I still think that Israel was wrong to continue to invest in West Bank settlements for decades. I still think that the situation in the West Bank is unsustainable.
- I still think there hasn't been an honest partner working towards peace in leadership on either side for decades.
Some views have definitely changed, though, as I've read more broadly on the latest war which Israel did not want and did not choose...but must fight and win anyway.
- I am no longer able extend the benefit of the doubt to antisemites on the right or on the left, domestically or internationally, because I've come to see them as either nakedly hateful or wilfully ignorant. There aren't any other plausible explanations for their words and deeds.
- I no longer believe there's any principled, informed antizionism which isn't antisemitic.
- I'm out of sympathy for people who are brainwashed by the far right or the far left because they find it easier than thinking for themselves.
- I continue to find the suffering of the non-combatants of Gaza appalling, but I think the responsibility for that suffering rests mostly with Hamas and a popular sentiment among Palestinians which prioritizes Israel's destruction over building a Palestinian state.
- I think that real, awful suffering has been exaggerated by Hamas' propoganda war (which I think Hamas is winning, with Qatar's help).
- I think that while no war has ever been free of war crimes and it would not surprise me if members of the IDF have commited war crimes, I don't believe that Israel has conducted this war in an immoral manner. I think that if a Labor Prime Minister had been in power on 10/7/23, the war would not have gone much differently.
- I no longer believe that there's ever been any significant movement for Palestinian statehood. I believe now that the goal has always been Israel's destruction, and never the "liberation" of the Arabs of the Levant. If a state had ever been the goal, there would be a Palestinian state.
- I no longer believe that institutions like the UN, Amnesty International, or the BBC can be assumed to be acting in good faith and merely incompetent. The lies are too frequent, too blatant, and too obvious to have benign explanations.
- I still think that many US Jews are so freaked out by leftist antisemitism that they're failing to understand the very real danger of the Christian Nationalist, White Supremacist, xenophobic, misogynistic administration which weilds levels of power unparalleled in US history. I think that US Jews who ally with Trump or his movement will eventually regret it.
- I have come to believe that no lasting peace is possible until Hamas is destroyed and the people who elected them are deradicalized. For Israel to walk away from this conflict without destroying Hamas is just an invitation to continue this war in a handful of years in what appears to be a never-ending cycle.
Another round of this cycle benefits nobody.
- I understand better now what happened to the Labor party, why and how the second intifada changed Israel's electorate.
- I have become angry that my 14yo feels safe as an LGBTQ person in Jewish spaces, but not at all safe as a Jew in LGBTQ spaces.
- I have become angry at the way the far left (and much of what I once thought was the center-left) has revealed itself to be just as intellectually lazy and as morally bankrupt as the far right.
- I've come to reject the cultural relativism which says the lack of rights for women, LGBTQ people, and ethnic/religious minorities in all of Israel's neighbors is anything but appalling.
- While I continue to criticize the many profound failings of the Western world, I would not under any circumstances trade the Western world and its deeply flawed nature for the world promoted by its enemies. Classical liberalism is the force behind not just the liberation and enfranchisement of Jews in the West, but most of the forward progress the world has made lifting humanity out of sickness and poverty at record rates in recent decades.
- I have come to see the hypocrisy of Israel's detractors as historically unique, despite my affection for learning new and exciting ways to criticize Israel...by reading Israelis.
- There's no longer any political leader or pundit with whom I consistently agree.
At best, there are a handful who I think are genuinely knowledgeable and intellectually honest (like Haviv Rettig Gur or maybe Ezra Klein) and I cringe inwardly when people like Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, or Dennis Prager present a rational, fair, honest, historically accurate defense of Israel...because I find a number of their positions on other matters repulsive.
- While I think it's wrong that many DEI programs have not recognized Jews as a persecuted minority, I just haven't been able to buy the argument that DEI programs are innately antisemitic. I think they need reform, not destruction.
So yes, my views have changed. I aim to be open about that because they'll change again as I continue to read and learn.
More conservative, though? I don't think so.
I think we need more and better models for understanding political alignment now than this single unidimensional spectrum from Left to Right.
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