Biden’s Vexed Support of Netanyahu’s War

War Damage in Gaza, October 2023. (Photo credit: Naaman Omar, Palestinian News and Information Agency, Wikimedia Commons)

Gaza’s ruin is appalling. The public’s growing disenchantment with Israel’s scorched-earth retaliation for Hamas’s deadly attack is evident. Yet President Biden has stood firmly behind Netanyahu. Biden’s reticence to stop the slaughter is troubling, but it is also a source of morbid curiosity. How can he abide the carnage and for how long? What are his motives?

Motives are difficult to discern. They must be inferred from what is done and what is said. They are complex and intermixed rather than separate and distinct. They can be inhibited in some degree by countervailing circumstances, and they can be modified over time. Biden’s evident motives for supporting Netanyahu’s war are no exception. They are a troubled intermixture of a long-term commitment and competing concerns, and they are subject to revision.

Profile #5: Speaking Hopefully for Democracy’s Future

Elzbieta Matynia (with her permission)

It is tempting to despair when politics are torn with acrimony and polarized to dysfunction—when democracy itself is menaced by an authoritarian force from within the body politic. Despair runs deeper than pessimism. Pessimism expects the worst of possible outcomes, yes, but without giving up entirely. Despair is a loss of all hope for the future.

Hope prompts and sustains action through dark times. It gives meaning to life lived under the cloud of adversity.

Should we abandon all hope of repairing our politics? Is democracy doomed? Elzbieta Matynia says no to despair and yes to hope, at least for now. It is up to us to use our imagination to overcome indifference, bridge our differences, and revive democracy.

Turning War Rhetoric on its Head

Fighting in Bakhmut, Donetsk Region of Ukraine, April 5, 2023. (Photo by State Border Guard of Ukraine / Wikimedia Commons)

Two wars are burning intensely before our eyes, each engaging the US as an ally, arms supplier, and global power. The war in Gaza has drawn attention away from the war in Ukraine momentarily, but we have witnessed in both places appalling loss of life and staggering destruction in cities large and small.

The Continuous Loop of Belligerence

These are different wars under different circumstances, but they share a similar fate: each is caught in a recurring cycle of violence, a continuous loop without a terminating condition and with the potential of escalation. Chronic fighting reflects and compounds historical hostilities constituting a “cycle of unresolved conflict that makes military force the strongest currency on both sides,” writes Israeli political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin (Time, 1/22/2024, p. 60).

Profile #4: A Citizen’s Dissent from War

Wendell Berry speaking in Frankfort, Indiana July 27, 2007. (Photo by David Marshall / Wikimedia Commons)

Wendell Berry, cultural critic and political activist, advanced an argument at the beginning of the 21^st century against industrial warfare. His warning speaks to the carnage we are witnessing in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine today.

These present-day wars implicate the United States, the interests it advances and those it overlooks, and the undemocratic investment of unchecked power in the US presidency. How we rationalize such carnage is a carryover of the rationale advanced in the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy, a doctrine that institutionalized a global war on terrorism.

Profile #3: Dissenting for Democracy

(Photo by Jason Wilson / Wikimedia Commons)

What does it mean to say dissent develops democracy, especially when we are menaced by homegrown authoritarianism?

Bolstering democracy against authoritarianism surely requires more than dissent. Needed reforms of our political institutions and procedures already have been discussed here in Profile #1 and Profile #2. But the ways and means of dissent also are key to resisting tyranny. Just as demagoguery usurps deliberation, dissent revitalizes political discussion and debate.

Democracy is a politics of contesting differences of perspective. Agreements, when reached, are provisional. Unity is partial and impermanent and is more a matter of bridging differences than dissolving them. The process is vulnerable to frustration and thus to the authoritarian undertow of demagoguery.

Profile #2: Danielle Allen on Renovating Democracy

South Wing of the U.S. Capitol – House of the People. (Credit: USCapitol / Wikimedia Commons)

Danielle Allen, a political philosophy professor at Harvard University, is actively advocating for an overhaul of democracy to meet the challenges of the 21^st century, specifically to share power more broadly. Her premise is that a political system cannot serve the good of all without power being shared by all.

The country is pulling apart and needs to find ways of pulling together, Allen insists. Polarization, toxicity, and governmental dysfunction reflect the problem at hand. More democracy, not authoritarianism, is the solution to our predicament.