Commentator

Kamala, Free Speech, Kursk, Hezbollah

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a ‘Commentator’ post. I do this every few weeks — it’s a roundup of politics (mostly international) and an attempt to single out articles that I’ve found to be particularly strong.

Best,

Sam

WHO IS KAMALA?

God help me, I watched all four days of the Democratic National Convention. I heard the word ‘freedom’ how many times? A hundred? Two hundred? And the words ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’ not much less than that. I felt waves of shivering pity for everybody I saw on screen and their overworked smiling muscles. But, platitudes and banalities aside, I finished the week feeling relieved. This does strike me as a winning ticket.

My fear had been that Kamala and Walz would be like so many of the speakers before them and like so many of their Democratic predecessors — bad actors. That they would be sawing the air as they spoke, that everything they said would be jargon-y alphabet soup. But they were both good. Walz, incidentally, was much better than Josh Shapiro, which validates that choice. And Kamala was much better than Kamala has been — she smoke smoothly, she feigned sincerity well, and I have no real worries about her either in a debate with Donald Trump or running a disciplined campaign for the two remaining months of the election.

Part of me wishes that they had said anything at all about what they would do when actually elected, but I understand the calculus in keeping it vague. The name of the game from here to November is for the two sides to just hurl mud at each other and whoever ends up dirtier will lose. The Dems will throw January 6, reproductive rights, Project 2025, and Stormy Daniels at the Republicans. The Republicans will fire back with immigration, inflation, the radical left, and the less-than-democratic means by which Kamala Harris took the nomination, and it won’t really be more subtle than that. The election will likely turn, as 2020 and 2022 did, on middle-of-the-road suburban voters — the kinds of people who go into paroxysms of anxiety every four years but can also be reassured by a calm, guiding hand. Trump may well have already shot his wad with these people; and the Harris/Walz projection of stultifying normalcy may be effective. The more interesting swing group are the wing-nuts. As Rory Stewart put it in an interview for Persuasion, “Social media destroyed the consensus and turned the [body politic] into a kind of U-shape with the votes at the extremes and nothing left in the middle.” In practical terms, that’s the 10% of the population who at one point expressed an interest in Bobby Kennedy. They’re on the radical wings of both parties, are concerned about free speech, government overreach, US foreign policy, and have become a loose bloc in contemporary elections — swinging somewhere between Bernie Sanders and libertarianism and Kennedy. Kamala, and the current configuration of the Democratic Party, has nothing to offer any of these people — who are largely young and male — and, as a default, they will fall to Trump. The hope of the Dems is that, ultimately, there just aren’t that many of them, and normalcy, the median voter theorem, the usual race to the center will prevail.

What went completely unanswered in the convention is any clue to the question of who Kamala Harris is really. We skip from Kamala standing up to the bully in kindergarten — which is impressive, yes, but let’s face it, not exactly John McCain having his arms ripped out of their shoulder sockets in North Vietnam — to Kamala as the California AG to Kamala putting the screws on Jeff Sessions to Kamala Harris as the appointed heir to the Democratic Party without knowing a thing about her. I did a bunch of reading this week of old coverage of Kamala and the takeaway is…uh….pretty worrying.

What does have to be set aside is a certain amount of insider reportage from the Biden White House decrying Kamala’s disorganization. It seems that the Biden team actively tried to sabotage Kamala — Biden aides described it to CNN as “putting a blanket” around Kamala — in an effort to damage her standing and ensure that there was no effort to have her replace Biden. But, in every campaign she has ever run and office she has held, the same patterns emerge. She seems to have some fundamental insecurity or lack of confidence. She tends to compensate by relying on a stable of advisors — consultants and family members. The result is a lack of vertical integration in organizations she manages. No one knows who’s in charge, messaging gets diluted, money is squandered (most notably her $35 million war chest for the 2020 campaign), staff start to bolt, and Kamala has a tendency to rip into subordinates as things go sideways. “People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” one source close to the vice president’s office told Politico. “It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like shit.” And — in the quote that really got to me — a former staffer told The Washington Post, “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”

Kamala (bottom center) with family, 1972

We have to throw in all the usual caveats. Some of the critiques are sour grapes from the failing 2020 campaign. It’s possible that she’s grown since then. And politicians can be abusive to their staff, and chaotic in their operations, and still be effective leaders. But all of this does make me really nervous. I’ve been particularly affected by some interviews I’ve seen recently with Tulsi Gabbard where Gabbard, who ran against Harris in the 2020 cycle, describes the ascendance of an entrenched establishment within the Democratic Party. “She is easily manipulated and controlled by those unelected powers that be,” Gabbard said, and what that means, I imagine, is that we can absolutely expect a toe-the-line Kamala Harris presidency. No real shifts in foreign policy. No attempt to rein in Big Tech or to rectify the Democrats’ growing aversion to free speech. No meaningful effort to win back the heartland, which deserted to Trump in the 2010s.

And, so, as relieved as I am by Kamala’s ascension to the top of the ticket and the smoothly-run convention, I can’t help but feel that a major opportunity has been lost — to rescue the Democrats from their gerontocracy problem, to lay out a fresh look for the party, to try to work towards an actual governing vision as opposed to simply reacting to Trump.

THE FREE SPEECH POLYCRISIS

The ascendance of Kamala and her corporate, establishment-minded wing of the Democratic Party occurs against a backdrop of really startling incursions against free speech. Just to name a few events that have been going on around the world. The British arrest a woman, Bernadette Spofforth, for a tweet in which she started a rumor that was a contributing factor in UK riots. A former Labour Party director of communications tries to turn conservative commentator Douglas Murray in to the police. The FBI raids the homes of Americans with connections to Russian state media in an alleged attempt to head off Russian election interference. And France detains Pavel Durov, the Telegram CEO.

I’ve been writing about free speech in many different fora. The basic gist is — as Politico Europe succinctly put it — “The transition of ‘free speech’ from a liberal cause to a conservative one has defined the past decade in politics.” I still don’t quite understand how this happened. In the liberal tradition that I grew up in, free speech was the absolute cause célèbre, the hill to die on. The very short answer is Trump and liberals’ reaction to Trump. But the more nuanced answer has to do with a sense that those on the left have of being on the right side of history and having to close off debate that counteracted the march of progress. This was happening while the right jettisoned some of its religious and traditional values — the motivating factor for its censorship — and became the party of a sort of let-it-all-hang-out nationalist anarchy.

A hill to die on

There are really two primary battlefields for this dispute. One is in the legal system where doctrines of ‘hate crime’ and ‘hate speech’ have been crowding out the more permissive doctrines of ‘free speech.’ This is happening in particular in the zone of sort of international discourse where cosmopolitan-type liberals have allowed themselves to believe that other nations, especially the Commonwealth, are a step ahead of the US in regulating speech and that US free speech jurisprudence is outmoded.

And the other battlefield is in content moderation on social media, where the tech platforms gave up their earlier libertarianism amidst recriminations that they had facilitated the rise of Trump — and then found, basically, that they were in much safer position working on the side of government as opposed to the public and accordingly ratcheted up their moderation policies.

In the same week as Durov’s arrest, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a very revealing letter to the House of Representatives in which he expressed remorse for how abjectly Facebook/Meta had caved to governmental pressure during the pandemic. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

Protest supporting Pavel Durov

I’ve just finished working on an article about the Murthy v. Missouri decision, which ruled on the pressure that Zuckerberg is discussing, and, yes, Zuckerberg is right — there is much for him to regret. The Biden administration — as the discovery for Murthy very much revealed — put pressure on Facebook to roll over on content moderation, and Facebook’s only questions, really, were how many times to roll over and in what direction. Facebook executives replied to White House badgering by writing that they would “work to gain your trust,” that “we thought we were doing a better job,” and at a particular craven moment asked how it was possible “to get back to a good place with the White House.” Justice Samuel Alito, scarcely able to restrain his disgust, commented that “Facebook’s responses resembled that of a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster.”

If brave, brave, brave Mark Zuckerberg is now coming to grips with the ramifications of yielding too much power over content moderation to government control, Pavel Durov is dealing with the same thorny questions from the inside of a French detention cell. And — to be fair to Zuckerberg and Durov — these are difficult questions about the role of platforms and need to be settled ultimately by the courts. My contention is that where we’re going wrong — and why, ultimately, Durov is in the trouble that he’s in — is that social media companies do need to be treated as platforms rather than publications. That was the core holding of Section 230, the 1996 legislation that ‘created the internet as we know it.’ Ultimately, however, the social media companies wanted to have it both ways and drifted from that standard. They didn’t want to be held legally accountable for content, as a publication would be, but they also wanted the ability to curate content, to run algorithms and institute robust content moderation programs that placated governmental taskmasters and kept everybody happy. In Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court majority, led by the liberal wing, ruled that there continued to be no problem in maintaining this balance. But the Supreme Court was wrong — and even Zuckerberg has seen the error of his ways in following this approach.

Brave brave brave Mark Zuckerberg

If the publication model continues in its ascendance, it does follow that somebody like Durov is accountable for child pornography and for the ‘ugly content’ that would inevitably occur on a platform the size of Telegram. If, on the other hand, societies — starting with the courts — revert back to the platform model, there is an understanding that the companies are there fundamentally as technicians, supporting the users who, in the end, are the ones producing the content. A switch like that would immediately make things easier for people like Zuckerberg and Durov, who would no longer have to be worried about getting arrested every time they take a flight, and it would encourage tech companies to take their hands off the throttle of politically-controversial content and to just let people talk to each other.

What struck me most in reading the Murthy ruling and some of the academic literature related to the topic is that all of this is a philosophical question more than anything else. The social media platforms are a new and confusing entity. The case law is not very deep. There really is a moment now for Western societies to take a deep breath and ask whether their values are, on the one hand, frictionless, inoffensive discourse (which would require a heavy dose of moderation as conducted by the tech companies and overseen by governments) or, on the other hand, freewheeling, largely unregulated exchange.

It’s a profound question and it should be up to us to decide. I already know where I stand on this issue, and it’s a great sorrow to me to see liberals — whom I regard as my tribe — drifting reflexively over to the camp of moderation and censorship. That was the case for Murthy and it’s the case for the SOP of the Democratic Party. I worry about the implications of that for civil discourse in the long-term. I also worry about it in the very near-term. Bobby Kennedy, in his speech suspending his campaign, excoriated the Democratic Party for its dirty tactics in excluding him from ballots and from media appearances. Whatever you think of Bobby Kennedy, he’s right about that, and the Democrats’ hardball may well have backfired. Instead of his support melting away and then largely returning to the Democratic Party, Kennedy has proven to be a siphon leading a restive group of Democrats over to Trump. It’s only a few percentage points and it may not matter, but, then again, in a close election that might make the difference. If it does, the Democrats will have only themselves to blame.

WAR UP NORTH

So, yes, yes, there are two major wars going on out in the far reaches of the world. In an article for Tablet Magazine, Vladislav Davidzon seems to have the scoop on the Kursk offensive.

What happened, basically, is that the deposition of Biden and the chaos within the Democratic Party created an opening for America’s allies to evade their national security minders. When the cat’s away, the mice do play — which, in this case, means Netanyahu launching a wave of assassinations across the Middle East; and Ukraine attacking Russia, as it’s wanted to do for two years.

“With this emergent power vacuum at the White House, the Ukrainians decided to bypass both the deposed occupant of the White House as well as the staff of his hypercautious National Security Council, instead of slowly bleeding to death under rules guaranteed to produce slow-motion defeat,” Davidzon writes. He quotes Roman Kostenko of Ukraine’s Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense who, on television, explicated Ukraine’s debt to Israel’s approach. “So Israel announced that they would take the advice of their partners very seriously but would afterward make their own decisions in the best interest of their own national security. I think that we can simply mirror that approach in our own case,” Kostenko said.

The Kursk offensive occurred in absolute operational secrecy — so much so that Ukraine didn’t get around to telling the United States in advance, obviously because they knew the Americans would say no. It seems to have accomplished what was hoped for. It was demoralizing for Russians, who saw social media videos of their soldiers and guards being smoothly taken prisoner; it set up the possibility of territory-for-territory swaps as a prospective end to the war (“Putin seems to understand the Ukrainian offensive as a negotiating ploy,” Davidzon wrote); and it revives Ukrainian morale at a low moment. “We will see how it will all turn out in the long run,” a member of Zelensky’s team told Tablet. “But for now we really needed this victory. People were really starting to lose their nerve.”

Ukrainian tank crew

What the offensive exposes is the extent of the fissure between Ukraine and America. “The United States government currently has no strategy for Ukraine. Zero. None at all,” a former Ukrainian official told Davidzon. The Americans were clearly content for the war to drag on indefinitely — so long as Ukraine didn’t completely collapse on Biden’s watch and nothing happened to unduly provoke Putin. As has often been the case in this war, the Ukrainians seem to understand their defensive needs better than the Americans do. The invasion of Kursk didn’t lead to Putin hitting the button any more than the unlicensed assassinations of Russian military bloggers did earlier in the war. The sense is that Ukraine really is being ground down and bled out — that the current strategy is not sustainable. In that context, what Ukraine has done makes perfect sense — to flip the script a little; to remind Russia that, in war, both parties have to suffer; and to enter the post-election negotiating table with a slightly stronger hand.

WAR IN THE EAST

And, as for the other, long-running, unremitting war, Israel once again flirted with a regional escalation that seemed then to dial itself down — preemptively striking at 40 Hezbollah launch sites and prompting a flurry of missiles but no further response. “The fact that Hezbollah's response on Sunday resulted in a localized escalation that ended within hours and did not result in an all-out war revived optimism among top U.S. administration officials on the chances of accelerating the negotiations on a deal,” Haaretz reported.

The impression at the moment is of Israel continuing to be in the driver’s seat. Israel has managed to carry out brazen assassinations against Haniyeh in Iran and against Fuad Shukr in Lebanon. Iran contented itself with vague threats in retaliation and Hezbollah with a similarly weak showing. The speculation is that Yahya Sinwar had strongly pushed Hezbollah towards war and Hezbollah’s unwillingness to take the plunge means that Hamas is left with little other option than to hammer their way towards a deal. Meanwhile, Netanyahu seems unassailably in power, and Israel can sort of wait out the clock until the U.S. elections when everybody takes a breath and resettles — although the results of the election are unlikely to affect US policy towards Israel all that much.

I was taken, though, by a blistering op-ed in Haaretz in which General Itzhak Brik argues that the situation is completely unsustainable. “The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss,” Brik writes. “If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.” What does that mean? Brik contends that Israel is becoming a pariah state, with the economy crashing, domestic terror multiplying, and enemies proliferating. That’s a dramatic way of putting it, but there may be something in that. Israel for the past year has been playing whac-a-mole with the Houthis, Iran, and Hezbollah. This situation of trying to stamp out each regional rival before it can organize for a coordinated assault is unpleasantly reminiscent of Israel’s situation in the period from 1948-1978, and it says something about Netanayhu’s militaristic mindset that he seems to like it this way. Meanwhile, the war aims in Gaza remain almost completely unclear. “Total victory” is just rhetoric, as even Yoav Gallant recently acknowledged. All the factors do seem to be moving towards a negotiated deal of ceasefire in exchange for hostage release — as has been the case for many months. All that stands in the way, most likely, is Sinwar and Netanyahu, the two people who have the most to gain from the war and who also happen to have the most power. What I imagine we’re dealing with, essentially, is how long the two of them think that they can drag it out.