Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 245

Israel’s 10th President

…is Reuven Rivlin. The former Knesset speaker and Likud party stalwart was elected yesterday. Dimi Reider, writing before the election, called Rivlin “the best president for the Left, for whom the Left will never vote”:

As a staunch right-winger, Rivlin is opposed to partition but is emphatically opposed to racism, coupling his opposition to a Palestinian state with support for offering Israeli citizenship to all Palestinians. While this is a stance being taken up by a number of right-wing politicians in recent years, Rivlin, as a democrat, goes one step further. When I interviewed him for Foreign Policy four years ago, for instance, he spoke nostalgically of a rotation-based executive espoused by Revisionist Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky  - and held up by Belfast as one possible inspiration for a future of power-sharing. It’s a far cry from nationalist self-determination, or from the one state advocated by Palestinians and the pro-Palestinian Left. But it still offers infinitely more room for maneuver than anything ever plausibly offered or actually given to Palestinians by the centrist two-state Left.

What I take from this is that the two-state solution is dead and the project for Greater Israel continues apace. At some point, the Palestinian Arabs who would end the existence of a Jewish-majority state will be expelled, as they were in 1948. It’s hard to see any other outcome from the logic of one unitary Jewish state across the entire area that Israel has now controlled for the majority of its existence.  “But Rivlin is more than his opposition to a two-state solution,” Raphael Ahren stresses:

During his two terms as Knesset Speaker, he wasn’t afraid to confront the right wing — for example by opposing legislation he deemed as discriminatory and undemocratic, which won him many friends even among Israeli left-wingers. MKs Ilan Gilon (Meretz) and Shelly Yachimovich (Labor) voted for Rivlin, as did all four MKs from the Arab-Israeli Ra’am-Ta’al faction.

“He has an opinion on the two-state solution, but he is not widely seen as an ultra-nationalist,” said Mitchell Barak, a pollster and political analyst. “He’s one of voices of reason in Likud; he’s not a hothead like Danny Danon.” The president-elect’s views on the peace process are not born of hatred for Arabs, as his voting record and his statements as Knesset speaker attest, and the Arabs and the world at large know that, he said.

Comparing Rivlin to his predecessor Shimon Peres, Jonathan Tobin argues that his election indicates how Israeli public opinion on the peace process has shifted:

Rivlin’s win is one more demonstration that the center of Israeli politics is well to the right of where Americans would like it to be. While liberals and others who deride Netanyahu think the views of the popular Peres represent what most Israelis think, the experience of the last 20 years of the peace process have created a new political alignment that means Rivlin’s opinions don’t place him outside of the mainstream.

This is disconcerting for those who would like to believe that Peres, the architect of Oslo process, speaks for Israel in a way that Netanyahu cannot. But even if most Israelis think a two-state solution would be ideal, they know that in the absence of a true peace partner it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

A little background on the Rivlins: The new president comes from a large and influential family who were among the first Jews to settle in Ottoman Palestine in the 19th century, making them, as Eetta Prince-Gibson calls them, “the closest thing to a Jewish aristocracy Israel has ever had”:

On their website (www.rivlinfamily.com), the clan claims to number today more than 50,000, of whom more than 35,000 are thought to live in Israel. The website lists some 195 people of note, including Yosef Yoel Rivlin, the author of the first Hebrew edition of the Koran (and father of Rueven Rivlin); Eliezer Rivlin, the deputy president of the Supreme Court of Israel from 2006 to 2012; Ranan R. Lurie, an American-Israeli political cartoonist and journalist; Rivka Michaeli, the doyenne of Israeli comedy; Sefi Rivlin, a wild-cat comedian and admired satirist, who died last year; Lilly Rivlin, an American feminist filmmaker and left-wing peace activist; Leora Rivlin, an award-winning actress, and Muki Tzur, from Kibbutz Ein Gev, a well-regarded historian of the period of the Second Aliyah.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Now that the drive-by media, to borrow a term from Rush Limbaugh, has moved on, new documents that reveal the inner life of Bowe Bergdahl paint an utterly different picture of him than the traitor/deserter/Islamist/anti-American profile broadcast by Fox News. Instead, you find a deeply troubled and mentally unstable character, clearly prone to deep depression, and struggling to find a way to live in the world. We learn that he was discharged from the Coast Guard for psychological reasons, for example. And then there are simply painful passages of juvenile prose that reveal just a lost soul:

“I’m worried,” he wrote in one journal entry before he deployed. “The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are. I’m reverting. I’m getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness.” A few pages later, he wrote: “I will not lose this mind, this world I have deep inside. I will not lose this passion of beauty.”

At another point, using his often un­or­tho­dox spelling, he wrote: “Trying to keep my self togeather. I’m so tired of the blackness, but what will happen to me without it. Bloody hell why do I keep thinking of this over and over.”

As for his intellectual influences, he has this in common with Dave Brat and every other adolescent who cannot quite find a way to live in a complicated, social world: Ayn Rand. The one novel in his possession when he walked off the base was Atlas Shrugged. And scene.

Today, we grappled with the fallout from the Cantor earthquake – and I attempted to gauge the power of right-wing populism in this volatile political environment. We also tackled the inevitable , as the sectarian forces unleashed and only barely contained by the US invasion gradually resurfaced, aided and abetted by Maliki’s Shiite sectarianism. Plus: George Will’s blind spot; the Clintons’ fabulous Hamptons mansion; and the near-miraculous slowdown in Medicare costs – perhaps the most important factor for our future fiscal health, and what may well be another part of Obama’s broadening legacy.

The most popular post of the day was The Cantor Shocker: Blog Reax, our trademarked round-up of online commentary; followed by Engaging the T, Ctd., where I defend Dan Savage from the language police.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 30 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

The Nader-Chomsky Of The Right?

That’s Ryan Lizza’s take on Brat – and he largely shares my view that this new form of Republican populism is a lot more potent than the Romney campaign’s 47 percent message. Why? Because Brat is targeting the 1 percent. Money quote:

Instead of lecturing the most vulnerable about the moral beauty of the marketplace, Brat targets the most well off. “Free markets!” he declared in Hanover, like a teacher about to reveal the essence of the lesson. “In a nutshell, what does it mean? It means no one is shown favoritism. Everyone is treated equally. Every firm, every business, and you compete fairly. And no one, if you’re big or small, is shown special attention. And we’re losing that.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the kind of rhetoric that Ralph Nader, and even Noam Chomsky, have used for many years to pillory the government for protecting the rich and the well connected from the vagaries of the free market.

And that’s why, in my view, it is not to be under-estimated. The K Street-Wall Street nexus is a scandal; as is our absurdly complex tax code (largely devised for corporate welfare and for those with expensive tax lawyers). Put that together with a left-sounding defense of the American middle-class against millions of undocumented, low-wage immigrants, and you’re beginning to get somewhere.

Given where the country now is, I expected Obama’s likeliest successor to be to his populist left, someone able to corral anger at the one percent and Washington, someone urging radical change on behalf of the little guy. But the Clinton machine has managed to choke off that possibility – while the GOP is fast rushing into the gap.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty)

The Scientific Case For AA

Keith Humphreys traces how addiction scientists came around to the idea that Alcoholics Anonymous works:

A watershed in scientist’s views of the value of AA occurred in the 1990s with Project MATCH, the largest study of alcohol dependence treatment ever undertaken.  Two well-validated professionally-developed psychotherapies were evaluated head to head against “twelve-step facilitation counselling.”  This counselling approach adapted AA ideas and goals into a 3-month long psychotherapist-delivered outpatient treatment protocol and also strongly encouraged involvement in community-based AA groups.

AA skeptics were confident that by putting AA up against the best professional psychotherapies in a highly rigorous study, Project MATCH would prove beyond doubt that the 12-steps were mumbo jumbo.  The skeptics were humbled: Twelve-step facilitation was as effective as the best psychotherapies professionals had developed.

A subsequent randomized clinical trial eliminated the twelve-step counselling component and simply evaluated the effect of a brief, structured introduction to AA (as well as Narcotics Anonymous, if appropriate).  Those connected by researchers to 12-step groups had substantially lower rates of using alcohol and other drugs over time.  This proved that the groups themselves have a positive impact, even when they are not coupled with extended professionally-provided twelve-step facilitation counselling.

Previous Dish on the effectiveness of AA here, here, here, and here.

Assad The Invulnerable

That’s the sense one gets from international media coverage of the Syrian dictator:

Immediately visible is the sharp negative trajectory of global media tone towards Assad in the lead-up to the August 21, 2013, Ghouta chemical weapons attack, as Assad was rapidly losing global credibility.  In the days immediately following, as the world’s headlines were captivated both by the attack itself and the continued clashes over the following days, tone towards Assad continues to become sharply more negative. However, something extraordinary begins to happen on August 28 – the tone of news coverage across the world about Assad begins to turn sharply positive, containing a high density of language regarding invulnerability.

A review of news coverage from this time period reveals a world anticipating U.S. military action in the first few days after Ghouta, with substantial reference to President Barack Obama’s “red line” policy towards chemical weapons. But as the Obama administration wavered, and it became increasingly clear that not even a symbolic missile strike would occur, the discourse around Assad began to change dramatically — from a vanquished has-been in his last days, to a resurrected and invulnerable leader. … Of course, the world’s media wasn’t applauding Assad for gassing children to death, but it’s clear that, as a group, it contextualized the lack of response to those horrific actions as an indicator of new-found impunity.

Face Of The Day

Leila de Matos holds her cat, Yandu, as it wears a Brazilian flag hat as they visit Copacabana beach on June 11, 2014 while waiting for the start of the World Cup tournament in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The World Cup starts on June 12th and runs through July 13th. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Scarcity Breeds Racism

That’s what new research suggests:

David Amodio, a psychology professor at New York University and Amy Krosch, a graduate student, performed a series of experiments that showed that their predominantly white study subjects tended to view biracial people as “more black” when they were primed with economic scarcity, and that the subjects were stingier toward darker-complexioned people overall. …

Of course, past studies have also shown that scarcity and resource competition fosters distrust between groups. The ingroup/outgroup cognitive bias theory holds that we prefer people who resemble us. But this research suggests that financial strain can cause the very definition of the “out” group to change, as well, by nudging us to view people of other races as even more dissimilar to ourselves.

Maya Rhodan elaborates:

[P]articipants were asked to identify whether select images depicted black people or white people, while researchers manipulated select economic conditions. In one study, participants were first asked to express agreement or disagreement with “zero-sum” beliefs like “When blacks make economic gains, whites lose out economically,” and then asked to identify the race of the people featured in 110 images – people whose skin color varied greatly. The study’s results showed that those with stronger “zero sum” beliefs were more likely to consider the images of mixed-face subjects as “blacker” than they actually were.

[Krosch and Amodio] found similar results when participants were asked to identify whether someone was black or white after being shown words related to scarcity like “limited” and “resource.” The remaining studies threw economics into the mix – asking subjects how they would divide $15 between people represented by two images – and not only were images of darker-skinned people deemed “blacker” than they actually were relative to the average skin color, they were allocated fewer funds.

Jesse Singal adds:

The standard caveats apply: This was a lab setting; in real life people make these sorts of decisions differently; and so on. But given previous research on race, scarcity, and bias, it’s a useful data point, and a useful reminder that scarcity has a lot of negative effects on human behavior – some of them a bit surprising.

Did Democrats Put Him Over The Top?

A reader writes:

I live in the 7th District in Virginia, I am a Democrat and I voted for David Brat in the primary. It is an open primary. There has been a whisper campaign going on among the Democrats in the district for the last few weeks and it resulted in many democrats coming out to vote for Brat today. We felt especially encouraged after the 7th district committee nominated Jack Trammell to be the Democratic candidate for the seat last Sunday. We now feel we at least have a fair chance at winning it. By the way, Jack Trammell is a professor at the same small college as Brat, Randolph-Macon.

Well, not quite the Democrats of Mickey’s dreams, I guess.

Dick Morris Award Nominee

This time, it goes to a pollster:

A poll conducted late last month for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) shows him with a wide lead over challenger David Brat heading toward next Tuesday’s Republican primary election.

The poll, shared with Post Politics, shows Cantor with a 62 percent to 28 percent lead over Brat, an economics professor running to Cantor’s right. Eleven percent say they are undecided.

The internal survey of 400 likely Republican primary voters was conducted May 27 and 28 by John McLaughlin of McLaughlin & Associates. It carries a margin of error of +/-4.9 percentage points.

The Coulter-Kaus-Drudge-Ingraham Coup

Salon’s Jim Newell this morning noted the weird avalanche of headlines on the Drudge Report:

And gave us a roll-call of the writers, bloggers, and talk radio hosts who helped gin up the insurrection:

There’s Drudge, of course. And Ann Coulter. And radio/TV personality Laura Ingraham, who recently suggested that the United States should have traded Eric Cantor to the Taliban for Bowe Bergdahl. And the writings and tweets of Mickey Kaus, now of the Daily Caller, have been indistinguishable from those of a Brat staffer in recent months.

Here’s Mickey’s latest post:

Bottom-Up Bipartisanship? Yesterday Dave Brat, the conservative economics professor who is challenging Majority Leader Eric Cantor in today’s primary, sent out what I assume will be his final pitch to voters …

Notes: 1) This is a pitch — against a “low wage agenda” and “crony corporate lobby” — that can appeal to Democrats as well as Republicans. Maybe partisanship will eventually be transcended, not at the top, with David Brooks, Gloria Borger and Jon Huntsman imposing a Beltway consensus they hammer out at an Atlantic panel, but at the bottom, where less sleek figures like Brat, Phyllis Schlafly and Jeff Sessions, can make common cause with Democratic workers who’ve gotten the short end of previous top-down triumphs such as global trade and Reagan’s 1986 amnesty, as well as of ineluctable technological trends like automation. 2) Perhaps not coincidentally, Democrats can vote in the Cantor vs. Brat primary. …

Backfill: See also this earlier Brat release, which expands the potentially bipartisan anti-corporate agenda to “other issues – like spending, debt and insider trading” …

That’s what Brat seems to represent, so far as I’ve been able to glean in the past hour or so. And here’s part of Mickey’s previous post, mocking Cantor for backing “amnesty” for immigrant “kids”:

Little did Cantor know that this exquisitely calibrated stand would prove to be about the most embarrassing position he could take — when the “kids,” often unaccompanied, started surging across the southern border, causing a humanitarian and policy crisis just as he was facing a challenge in Tuesday’s Virginia primary. Even the New York Times couldn’t help but notice that the young illegal migrants said they were motivated, not just by conditions back home in Central America, but also by the prospect that they’d qualify for Cantoresque amnesty. ”Central Americans, [said a Salvadoran immigration official] were left with the sense that the United States had ‘opened its doors’ to women and children.”

Check out how many of his posts for the past two months have been obsessively about the Cantor race.

He won big tonight. Almost as big as Brat.