The kids are running the classroom

The Democratic Party is in a state of rhetorical paralysis. This weekend, as Palestinian terrorists streamed across the Israeli border, the White House maintained hours of thunderous silence. On Saturday, the Biden administration released a few limp paragraphs to the effect that “terrorism is never justified” and “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.” This, after an uninterrupted outpouring of financial and oratorical support for Ukraine, is weak tea. But as the head of a party that is being overrun in not-so-slow motion by a vigorous young coterie of anti-Israel extremists, what more could Joe Biden say? 

What he should have said — what any decent person, irrespective of his more nuanced views on Middle Eastern politics, should be able at a bare minimum to muster — is that Hamas has exhibited a kind of savagery and cowardice more befitting of beasts than men. Charging into civilian territory, executing women and children at point-blank range, brandishing mutilated bodies like ghoulish trophies to the hooting and bawling of gore-hungry crowds: these twisted acts of barbarism should be unstintingly condemned — and quickly. That ought to be the easy part. 

Amazingly, Democrats now find themselves constrained to tread lightly around the feelings of cold-blooded murderers so as to avoid offending their deranged apologists — many of whom represent the future of the party. Biden — who is already contending with the awkward fact of having recently bestowed a cool $6 billion on the eliminationist Iranian regime, thus making it indirectly into Hamas’s acknowledgments section — can’t even run effective damage control. His loudest supporters are also the ones whose views are most likely to alienate the country at large. His own people can barely get on message. On Saturday, the State Department scrambled to erase not one, but two statements calling for “all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks.” With bright-eyed young staffers popping off tweets like that, who needs enemies? Disingenuous conciliatory pablum — usually Biden’s stock-in-trade — will now be harder and harder to come by as the genocide stans run roughshod over their senescent babysitter. 

This is, in other words, a hostage situation. It mirrors the predicament of complacent liberals in positions of power across the country, from board rooms to newsrooms. All of them are now at the mercy of their radical young wards as a generation of impassioned maniacs comes of age. Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, was horrified to learn that more than twenty of the university’s student groups co-signed a blithering rationalization of Hamas’s actions while the administration held its peace. But what else did he expect from an institution whose student newspaper formally endorsed Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions just last year?  

Ivy League faculty and fashionable editorial boards, no less than the Democratic Party, have trafficked for decades in the unhinged maunderings of lunatic Marxists as if they were the nectar of purest wisdom. Now they find themselves hemmed in on all sides by fanatical young Bolsheviks who, horror of horrors, were taking them seriously that whole time. If it isn’t the consequences of their own actions.  

Representative Ilhan Omar is notorious for equivocating between Hamas, Israel and the Taliban. Her Squadmate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called inconceivably for “ceasefire and de-escalation” (which would amount, of course, to surrender) in Israel. Their colleague Rashida Tlaib has taken the opportunity to demand that the US stop funding the Jewish nation, which she regards as an “apartheid” state. Venomous delusion of this caliber might be unsurprising if it were found scratched on a bathroom stall somewhere at a sleazy meet-up for skinheads. Issuing forth as it does in the form of press releases from high-profile young congresswomen, it represents a serious problem for the Democrats’ old guard. In a Gallup poll taken before the latest attack, significantly more Democrats supported Palestine (49 percent) than Israel (38 percent). Elder statesmen such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton have typically courted Jewish support and at least equivocally defended Israel. But their voters increasingly wish they wouldn’t. Perhaps that’s why former president Obama, ever the careful reader of trends, has taken so long to say anything at all about the latest war.  

In In the Loop, satirist Armando Iannucci’s send-up of hapless government officialdom, parliamentary advisor Judy Molloy observes that “they’re all kids in Washington. It’s like Bugsy Malone but with real guns.” By recklessly indulging the childish arrogance and flattering the confident ignorance of their drastically miseducated base, the American left has created a situation in which the kids really might soon be running the roost. That is what the Biden presidency has revealed. Aren’t you glad the adults are back in charge?