Nothing to Congratulate Ourselves For

Notes from a dependable constituency

Photo by Vitalii Abakumov on Unsplash

On Tuesday, I voted for an almost entirely Democratic ticket. I declined to vote for two Democrats endorsed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In February, the director of our local CAIR chapter stood at the Ohio Statehouse and repeated an allegation that Israel possessed the world’s largest bank of human skin. That accusation belongs to a long tradition of blood libels, in which Jews are imagined as people who exploit, mutilate, or harvest the bodies of others.

As for the election itself, I felt strangely indifferent. I understood what was at stake, and for voters like me, this election had become an exercise in choosing the most tolerable of the intolerable. The calculation was defensible, but a person can muster only so much enthusiasm for a choice made primarily to prevent something worse.

On the morning after Barack Obama’s 2008 election, I drove to work with the feeling that the world would somehow be different and better. Politics rarely feels like a promise, but that morning it did. When he carried Ohio on his way to reelection in 2012, my brother and I took selfies in my living room, wearing Ohio T-shirts. But Wednesday morning, the indifference of the night before had given way to something closer to fear: that modern blood libels were becoming ordinary, and that the charge of genocide was becoming, for our century, what the charge of deicide was for earlier ones. Jews, about two percent of Americans, were the targets of nearly two-thirds of the religion-based hate crimes the FBI recorded last year.

While scrolling on Facebook, I saw a post about Abdul El-Sayed telling Donald Trump that he could now call him senator. Ordinarily, I would have welcomed the sentiment because nobody should be mocked, excluded, or degraded on the basis of their religion or ethnicity. That has always gone without saying for me. El-Sayed’s election as the first Muslim senator is a historic achievement. Yet I found myself unable to join the celebration because I remembered what he had said on the trail.

In July, El-Sayed told CNN that every definition of a Jewish state “ends up in some articulation of illiberal values” and that money is the only reason Democrats who “believe in human rights” would support Israel. He has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza a “genocide” and later he blamed Netanyahu for the war with Iran and for the rising costs Americans were facing at home, telling voters they were paying for it in gas and groceries and, as he put it, “in our souls.” In the campaign’s final days, an outside political action committee ran an ad in which a couple returned a carton of eggs to a grocery-store shelf; the ad suggested Americans couldn’t afford eggs because money was being spent on killing Palestinians. His campaign disavowed the ad, yet when reporters pressed him to condemn it, he told them they loved to “play the condemn game” before saying he disagreed with its contents.

The problem with this rhetoric is the explanatory power it ascribes to Israel. Criticizing military aid is a legitimate policy position, but claiming that only money could explain a Democrat’s support for Israel is something else: it assigns corrupt motives to political opponents and shuts down principled disagreement. The eggs ad, which El-Sayed did not authorize, went even further, turning American economic hardship into an indictment of spending on Israel. For centuries, Jews have faced versions of the accusation that their influence comes at everyone else’s expense. The circumstances change, but the suspicion remains disturbingly familiar.

The family text was a series of blue wave emojis, and a friend in Germany wrote, “Congratulations!” I understood the relief and shared some of it. Still, I kept returning to the same thought: we have nothing to congratulate ourselves for. Not yet.

Nowhere Else to Go

Every election season, Democrats who are not crazy about their nominee receive the same instruction: hold your nose and vote blue anyway. It is a matter of harm reduction, and coalitions routinely ask their members to compromise on policy. But treating a dependable bloc as expendable raises a different question about the obligations of political representation.

In Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America, political scientist Paul Frymer describes African American voters as a “captured” minority, bound to one party because the other is intolerably hostile, and consequently taken for granted by the party that can depend on their support. Persuadable voters are courted, dependable voters are handed obligations, and every increase in the opposing party’s extremism gives the party they support greater latitude to neglect their concerns. The histories of Black and Jewish Americans differ, as do their positions within the Democratic coalition, but the mechanism is recognizable: a captured constituency’s objections can be acknowledged sympathetically and then set aside for the sake of winning, until even the act of objecting comes to seem like a betrayal of the coalition.

Consider what happened in Michigan. After winning the primary, El-Sayed sought to expand his appeal beyond the party’s traditional base, and his campaign ran an ad featuring a clip of Tucker Carlson, whose public record includes hosting the Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. When Haley Stevens, his primary opponent, called on him in the campaign’s final days to condemn the eggs advertisement and take down the Carlson ad, he accused her of relitigating the primary, and his campaign asked her to stay away from its remaining events. A campaign willing to borrow Carlson’s voice to court conservative voters treated a fellow Democrat’s objection as a grudge, though it still needed the voters who had backed her in the primary.

Frymer’s account of a captured constituency describes a predicament a growing number of Jewish Democrats know firsthand. We are asked to weigh the danger the Republican Party poses, and many of us do; we are asked to vote for harm reduction, and many of us do that, too. In return, we are expected to absorb rhetoric we would call prejudice if it were aimed at any other minority, on the grounds that the alternative might be worse.

This election season brought me back to Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, a book I read in college that describes two fundamental responses available to members of a declining organization: voice, the effort to repair it from within, and exit, the withdrawal of support. Loyalty can give voice time to be heard, but voice draws much of its force from the possibility of exit, which Frymer’s captured voter largely lacks. My own exit amounted to withholding my vote from the Democrat in two races, a gesture too small for anyone to notice. Stevens went considerably further, endorsing Rogers two days before the election. But exit carries costs, particularly when the alternative is a Republican Party whose positions many Democratic voters find intolerable. Michigan’s Jewish Democrats raised their concerns throughout the campaign, and their requests for dialogue and repair deserved a serious response. How much attention does a party give to objections from voters it believes will ultimately remain loyal?

What Was Tolerated

Winning an election determines who holds power, but it does not determine how that power will be exercised or what the coalition responsible for the victory has permitted, excused, or overlooked along the way. Now that the familiar argument about the dangers of the alternative has served its immediate purpose, one would hope the party would take stock of those compromises.

What does a political coalition owe the people whose loyalty it expects? Will the Democratic Party apply its principles against bigotry consistently, or will it treat some prejudice as an accommodation it can afford, so long as it is aimed at the right people and costs the party nothing at the polls?

And what will El-Sayed do with the authority he sought? After a Lebanese American man attacked Temple Israel in West Bloomfield in March, El-Sayed condemned the attack and then added that “hurt people do hurt people”, linking an assault on a Michigan synagogue to events thousands of miles away. He later apologized to Michigan’s Jewish Democrats, acknowledging that his condemnation should have stood on its own. Will he carry that lesson into office and recognize that the language he uses to mobilize voters shapes the conditions under which his Jewish constituents live, or will the campaign rhetoric become the rhetoric of his office?

I stand by my vote, and a Jewish voter in Michigan who supported El-Sayed to keep Mike Rogers out of the Senate may have had equally compelling reasons. The objection survives the vote, however, along with an obligation to remember what was tolerated. A party that expects our votes should also expect to hear our objections, particularly when those objections concern the prejudices it claims to oppose.

I want to feel the same way as everyone who sent a blue wave emoji, and to believe that Tuesday’s victories mean more than the defeat of a common opponent. But before I can celebrate, I need to know what, beyond winning, we have decided is worth defending.

Sources

Frymer, Paul. Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Hirschman, Albert O. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Joanne Strasser is a PhD candidate in Antisemitism Studies at Gratz College whose work advances a dual-structure model of antisemitism as a durable interpretive system operating across academic, cultural and political domains. Her research examines how antisemitic meanings are stabilised prior to encounter, shaping institutional practice, scholarly discourse and Jewish experience in contemporary public life.