As May takes hold, the crisis brewing inside America’s political system shows no signs of abating; if anything, recent events have only confirmed how serious things have become. On May Day itself, the police moved in to quash the occupation at Columbia University in New York. Many miles from there, on the other side of the continent, their peers helplessly watched on as counter-protestors at UCLA set off fireworks and attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment.
Both incidents foreshadowed the looming crisis that awaits the Democratic Party, whose convention in August is ominously slated to be held in Chicago. In 1968, the jamboree was also held in the city, where, due to growing and intractable divisions over the Vietnam War, it became one of the most contentious political gatherings to take place in American history. The idea that anti-war sentiment, once inflamed and radicalised, can somehow be quashed by sending in riot cops is wishful thinking. On this reading, Chicago 2024 may very well be a repeat of Chicago 1968.
None of this, however, is good news for the Republican Party. Their crisis, though somewhat less commented on, is even more profound than that facing the Democratic Party. The Democrat coalition is splintering, and organisations, friendships and patronage structures are openly fracturing over the strain imposed by US support to Israel. But the Grand Old Party is absolutely in no position to capitalise on this — because it is now facing a collapse as well.
For months now, signs of dysfunction have been obvious inside the Republican coalition. Support for Israel had for a very long time been not just assumed but essentially required for anyone who wanted to hack it as a pundit or politician on the American Right; and those who thought otherwise did well to keep their own counsel. Since November 2023, however, that omertà has been slowly unravelling, with publications like The Daily Wire becoming flashpoints in a brewing intra-right conflict.
But questioning the utility of Israel as an ally was only the first crack in the dam, the foreshock before the real earthquake was to begin. For more than half a year now, US support to Ukraine had been held up by the GOP inside the House of Representatives; before that, the previous Republican speaker was toppled by his own comrades for related reasons. The argument for this obstructionism was quite simple: America cannot continue to send infinite sums of blood and treasure to other parts of the world while the homeland is falling apart, with the most bleeding ulcer believed to be the completely chaotic situation at the southern border. As a result, the political balance between the pro and anti-Ukraine factions inside the American Right came to rest on a straightforward maxim: no money for Kyiv until something is done about the border.
For half a year that compromise held, until the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, went against internal party rules to pass a number of bills with the help of the Democrats. The result was an orgy of foreign spending to the tune of $100 billion dollars, with money for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — but nothing for the border. To add even more insult to injury, the GOP also caved on warrantless wiretapping of Americans, something else its own base strongly opposes. The mood inside the Republican base as a result is now exceedingly bitter, hostile, and angry; people feel like they’ve been stabbed in the back by their own politicians, and that the entire political system is now openly hostile to them and their interests.
Unfortunately for those same voters, the self-inflicted wounds just keep on coming. With unrest breaking out on campuses all over America, the Republican Party could simply have left the Democrats to stew in their own juices, taking as little action as possible to impede the ongoing breakdown of the progressive coalition. Instead, they committed what could be a catastrophic political mistake: rushing through bipartisan (a word that is now becoming despised in America) legislation to address antisemitism in the country.
Whatever one thinks about the intentions of the Antisemitism Awareness Act passed last week, its requirement for the Department for Education to enforce a more expansive definition of antisemitism could easily backfire. It conveys an image of a panicked political class reaching for the nearest opportunity to do something — anything — to make all the discontent go away. By doing so, they are poised to make it all much, much worse.
The GOP — after spending years lambasting the Left for opposing free speech, wanting “safe spaces” and complaining about how other political opinions are somehow a physical threat to their safety — for some reason decided that March 2024 was the perfect time to take the plunge and out-Left the Left. As a result, saying that a person is more loyal to Israel than to America could be potentially now a criminal act of speech, while calling someone a “Putin stooge” or “Russia puppet” would be an admirable act of free speech. In the meantime, far from stopping angry or hateful talk about “the Jews” or “Jewish influence in America”, laws like this will likely encourage it.
There are two factors that make this bill so incredibly poisonous for the Right. The first point is that many people truly do care about constitutional rights (why anyone is shocked by this is an open question), and they didn’t vote for their politicians with the understanding they’d use their mandate to try to attack the constitution. The second is more delicate: one of the examples of “antisemitism” mentioned in the law consists of assigning blame to Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus. To say that this is a hot potato to many Christians — who interpret this the Republican Party trying to ban or at least suppress parts of the Bible itself — is an understatement. The bitterness, anger and hatred expressed by Republicans at their own politicians is starting to reach a breaking point.
As both parties in the US now face their own internal crises of delegitimation, they are, ironically, beginning to cling to each other for safety — inadvertently or otherwise. In an illustrative example, the more conservative wing of the House GOP, furious about Mike Johnson’s betrayal, are now talking about toppling him from his position, just as they did with his predecessor. In response, the House Democrats have signalled their intention to save Johnson from his own Republican colleagues, essentially confirming accusations that Johnson has betrayed his own party. This kind of “bipartisanship” is exactly the wrong medicine for the crisis America is now struggling with; all it does is confirm that voting doesn’t matter and that the system is rigged — that it is a theatre for political games rather than solutions.
If one turns to social media platforms, one can see this process play out in real time. For the longest while, commentators warned about how America was becoming dangerously “polarised”, dividing into separate tribes that no longer saw eye-to-eye on anything. But even polarisation and mutual hatred can be a stabilising force. In 2017, if one took to what was then called Twitter, a tweet by Trump would be inundated by Democrats calling him a monster and a fraud, as well as Republicans showing their support. The same dynamic applied to Democrats making controversial statements: the Republicans would come in to mock and insult them, and the Democrats would come in with words of support.
Today, the situation is far more perverse: when a Republican politician now makes a statement, his most furious critics are often Republicans. When a Democrat offers platitudes about how protests shouldn’t lead to disorder, the most furious responses tend to come from the anti-Israel Left. In modern America, then, even polarisation is beginning to collapse: and as a result, both parties are now bogged down in their respective civil wars that they have little vitriol to spare.
Meanwhile, as this circus reaches its denouement, news from afar hints at a deeper malaise. The USS Eisenhower has already left the Red Sea in disgrace — confirming that the mission to unblock the Suez was a failure, and Western states have more or less given up on it. The trade routes are no longer ours, and there seems to be little anyone can do about it. In a similar vein, towards the end of last week, it was revealed that American troops still stuck in Niger are now sharing their military base with the Russian military. The base itself was built only recently, intended to serve the central node in America’s power projection for the region. Soon, it will be handed over to the Russians, who will no doubt use it to fulfill their own growing ambitions in Africa. It wasn’t all that long ago that we were all busy laughing about Vladimir Putin’s “gas station masquerading as a country”. These days, there’s not much laughter left anymore.
In other words, as American unity at home collapses, the little soft power it still has left is draining away, and even its hard power is no longer what it was. The sharks have noticed the blood in the water, and they are moving in from all sides. More than half a year since October 7, as the roiling crisis of the American political system keeps going from bad to worse, one question emerges: was it really the Gaza security fence that Hamas drove through with their bulldozers, or was it the entire West’s own version of the Berlin Wall that they punched a hole in?
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/