Biden’s base rebels over Gaza

Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is a multifront war. Unfortunately for him, the youngest soldiers in his coalition would rather fight Israel than Donald Trump.

Biden was elected in the first place as the anti-Trump. In 2020 Democrats were desperate, and the ex-vice president was the most prestigious figure they had to field. He didn’t have to be inspiring or energetic — Trump would provide all the inspiration and energy Biden voters needed.

What inspires the voting-age activists on America’s campuses today, though, isn’t aversion to Trump, and it certainly isn’t love for Joe Biden: it’s outrage at Israel. Four years ago, George Floyd became a symbol of injustice that spurred progressives to take to the streets and take back the country at the ballot box. Biden and Kamala Harris did everything they could to identify themselves with the civil rights movement and the right side of history.

In 2024 the injustice that pricks the conscience of progressives, and drives them to risk arrest protesting it, is the war in Gaza. Yet this time, which side of history is Biden on? Whether or not student demonstrators see Biden as bloodstained by his support for Israel, they evidently don’t think that Donald Trump or January 6 is the most important thing in politics right now. For them the face of fascism is Benjamin Netanyahu’s.

Biden has lost control of the storyline. Trump looked uncertain and ineffective amid the George Floyd protests. (He was hardly the Pattonesque authoritarian that either the Chicken-Little left or the sycophantic right imagined.) Now it’s Biden’s turn to preside over a crisis he cannot calm. By trying to be cautious and middle-of-the-road, he has only incensed both sides: friends of Israel take offense at his criticisms of Netanyahu, while the antiwar protesters aren’t propitiated in the slightest so long as the administration is sending arms and dollars to the Israelis.

Biden is an anti-leader, and the voters who rejected him all the other times he ran for president have proved to be right to doubt his abilities. He facilitates Israel’s war but lectures the Israelis about how they conduct it; meanwhile, he puts US troops in harm’s way with a humanitarian pier — of all things — on the edge of the warzone. This self-contradictory, reckless policy mirrors Biden’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine. There, too, he’s somehow both all-in yet half-hearted, sending billions in aid to Kyiv but hesitating to supply the Ukrainians with the weapons they request. By the time he’s changed his mind, Kyiv’s situation has deteriorated. In both wars, Biden negates the leadership of the very states he furnishes with American aid, without supplying any leadership — or endgame — of his own. This is no way to run a superpower.

Yet Biden is conflicted not just because he’s a weak leader. He doesn’t know which way to lead. Democrats have a tradition of support for Israel dating back to Harry S. Truman’s recognition of the Jewish state in May 1948. The progressives who supply the party with its ideological backbone today, however, consider not philo-semitism but opposition to colonialism the mark of enlightenment. Their outlook on foreign policy, particularly regarding Israel and Palestine, springs from the same source as their views on race and identity politics at home. For them the world is divided between oppressors and innocent victims, who do not forfeit their innocence even if they resort to crime or terrorism. Their innocence derives from their victim status, which is the core of their identity. George Floyd’s record as a violent offender and his attempt to fight off the officers who were arresting him did not make him any less sympathetic in the eyes of the Democrats’ ideological base. Biden capitalized on that base and its worldview in 2020. Now, however, he finds himself confused by the application of the same outlook to the Gaza war. It sees the Israelis as the cops — and if Hamas’s atrocities were far bloodier than any violence in America’s cities, Israel’s response has been much heavier than anything seen at home, too.

Students and left-wing activists are not the only Biden voters who today see Trump as a less pressing problem than the plight of Gaza. American Muslims, including in the battleground state of Michigan, are also rethinking their place in the Biden coalition. Trump may not offer them anything more than Biden does, but he doesn’t have to: negative partisanship is a powerful motive in American politics, and if voters no longer see one candidate as substantially worse than the other, they won’t turn out to defeat him. Biden needs his base to believe that nothing is worse than Trump, and nothing more important than beating him. But now that message must compete with the feelings students, progressive voters and Muslim and Arab Americans have about Gaza.

Trump doesn’t have any similar difficulties. Although Trump has disappointed pro-lifers by criticizing strong anti-abortion laws, they remain as anti-Biden as they have ever been, and for good reason. Trump has also let down many on the right who want to stop funding the Ukraine war effort, perhaps making a cold-blooded calculation to win back Nikki Haley voters who might otherwise see him as a worse choice than Biden. Trump is broadening his coalition by softening his commitments to his own ideological base. Yet nothing comparable to the Israel-Gaza war competes with the right’s interest in beating Biden.

Progressives, especially the youngest and most ardent among them, are at war with a system, not just a presidential nominee. They hate Trump. But they hate Israel’s war more. It’s the greater symbol of the colonial oppression in opposition to which they define their politics.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2024 World edition.