Released Palestinians allege abuse in Israeli jails
Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails say that guards carried out abuse and collective punishment in the weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October.
They have described being hit with sticks, having muzzled dogs set on them, and their clothes, food and blankets taken away.
One female prisoner has said she was threatened with rape, and that guards twice tear-gassed inmates inside the cells.
The BBC spoke to six people in total, all of whom said they were beaten before leaving jail.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society says some guards are alleged to have urinated on handcuffed prisoners. And that six prisoners have died in Israeli custody in the past seven weeks.
Israel says all its prisoners are detained according to the law.
Eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal was one of those released by Israel this week, in exchange for Israeli women and children held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.
He had been held in custody in Nafha Prison without charge since August, and says he does not know why he was arrested.
Mohammed invited me to his home, down a winding alley in the village of Qabatiya near Jenin, in the north of the occupied West Bank.
The family reception room at the top of the old house was fogged by the smoke of a dozen cigarettes - a cousin circled the visitors with a flask of coffee and a tall tower of tiny paper cups.
Mohammed sat flanked by rows of male relatives, both his hands heavily bandaged, held up in front of him stiffly like a boxer, the tip of his thumbs peeking out.
Ten days ago, he says, Israeli prison guards came into his cell with a microphone and speaker, and tried to provoke the prisoners by clapping and screaming their names.
"When they saw we weren't reacting," he says, "they started to beat us."
"They arranged us so that the elderly prisoners were put in the back and the young in front. They took me and started beating me. I was trying to protect my head, and they were trying to break my legs and my hands."
The family showed us medical reports and X-rays from Palestinian doctors in Ramallah who examined Mohammed after he was released on Monday.
We showed the X-ray pictures to two doctors in the UK, who confirmed that they showed fractures in both hands. It was no surprise to Mohammed.
"In the beginning, I was in a lot of pain," he tells me. "Then after a while, I knew that they were broken, so I stopped using them. I only used them when I went to the toilet."
He says the other prisoners helped him eat, drink and use the bathroom, and that he did not ask the guards for medical help out of fear that he would be beaten again.
The Israel Prison Service has disputed Mohammed's story, saying that he had been examined by a medic before leaving prison, with no medical problem diagnosed.
The prison service also released a video of the teenager leaving prison and boarding a Red Cross bus before his release, which it says proves that his claims are false.
In the footage, the teenager's hands are unbandaged, and appear to be hanging by his sides - including as he climbs onto the bus - but are out of shot for most of the video.
Mohammed told us that the first medical treatment he received was on that Red Cross bus.
A medical report from a hospital in Ramallah the day he arrived back home advised that a plate might have to be fitted, if his fractures did not heal by themselves.
We asked the Red Cross to confirm Mohammed's story. They said in a statement: "We speak directly with the detaining authorities if we have any concerns about the medical condition of detainees. Due to this dialogue, we do not speak publicly about individual cases."
Mohammed says the behaviour of guards inside Israeli jails changed after the Hamas attacks on 7 October.
He says guards kicked them, and used sticks to hit them, and describes one guard stepping on his face.
"They came in with their dogs," he continues. "They let the dogs attack us and then they started beating us."
"They took out mattresses, our clothes, our pillows, and they threw our food on the floor. People were terrified."
He shows me the marks on his back and shoulder that he says were the result of these beatings.
"The dog attacking me wore a muzzle with very sharp edges - his muzzle and claws left marks all over my body," he tells me.
Beatings like this happened twice at Megiddo Prison, he says, and more times than he could count at Nafha Prison.
Other Palestinian prisoners we have spoken to have described a similar shift inside Israel's jails after the Hamas attacks, saying they understood it as "revenge" against Palestinian prisoners for the actions of Hamas.
The head of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, Abdullah al-Zaghary, told us that many prisoners had witnessed cellmates being violently beaten on their faces and bodies, and that he had heard allegations of guards urinating on handcuffed prisoners.
We asked the Israel Prison Service for a response to these allegations. They said all prisoners were detained according to the law and had all the basic rights legally required.
"We are not aware of the claims you described," the statement said. "Nonetheless, prisoners and detainees have the right to file a complaint that will be fully examined by official authorities."
Lama Khater, released from prison earlier this week, published a video on social media alleging that an intelligence officer had "explicitly threatened her with rape" immediately after her arrest in late October.
"I was handcuffed and blindfolded," she told an interviewer in the video. "They threatened to rape me... It was clear the goal was to intimidate me."
Israel said these claims were made by her lawyer and had been denied by the prisoner herself. The prison service had filed a complaint for incitement, it said.
But Lama Khater told us by telephone that women prisoners - including herself - had indeed been threatened with rape, and that tear gas had been used against prisoners in their dormitory at Damon Prison.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society says there has been a sharp rise in the number of Palestinian deaths in custody since the 7 October attacks, with six people dying in jail since that date.
Israel did not address our question about this directly, but said that four prisoners had died on four different dates over the past weeks, and that the prison service had no knowledge of the causes of death.
In Qabatiya village, Mohammed Nazzal says his hands still give him pain, especially at night.
His brother Mutaz told me the teenager he knew before had not returned from jail.
"This is not the Mohammed we know," he said. "He was brave, courageous. Now his heart is broken and filled with terror."
The previous night, he said, the Israeli army had carried out an operation in the city of Jenin, 4km (2.5 miles) away: "You could see how scared he was."
Not so long ago, we used to speak of the Age of the Idiot. Remember those days? Today, I fear a Rubicon’s been crossed. Now, we’re in the Age of Stupid. Brain-melting, heartstopping, face-numbing stupid. What do I mean by that?
I used to say “Age of the Idiot” in a precise sense. For the Greeks, who invented the word idiot, it came with a precise meaning. An idiot was someone who was obsessed, singularly, with private gain, advantage, life. To the exclusion of all else. Our modern variant of this ancient idea, “narcissist,” doesn’t quite do it justice, because to the Greeks, virtue was the foundation of civilization, and virtue was public. That is, it was allocentric, other-focused, and so the idiot, fixated on private gain, was the antithesis of civilization.
It’s a complex and beautiful theory, which we’d do well to remember.
Stupid, though, is different. It’s what happens when idiocy hardens, ossifies, turns to stone, becomes immovable, and bellows, fumes, and crackles with the sheer fiery rage of molten lava.
Welcome to the Age of Stupid. Let me now be more precise. What do you see when you look around the world today? What theme strikes you? We’re not just making foolish mistakes—that’s the purview of mere idiocy. No, now we’re repeating them.
Take a hard look at America. It’s poised to re-elect Trump. Level One Stupid. But this is like a Russian doll of stupid—it contains almost endless multitudes within it. Level Two? America's poised to re-elect Trump because people trust him more on the economy. Level Three: they’re willing to “elect” a figure who wants to openly end democracy.
Whew. You see how painful the stupid is when I begin to point it out? Ah, but we’ve barely begun. Let me put it even sharper ways, to really prick home the point.
Americans are about to elect a figure who’s currently on trial for fraud multiple times over as a businessman because they trust him more on…the economy. Go ahead and howl with the mind-melting irony therein. They’re about to use the Great Lever of democracy to…take a swan dive into the abyss. Go right and join me staggered disbelief. They’re about to…
Make the same mistake all over again. Only this time’s going to be not just “worse,” but terminal. Final. Irrevocable. There’s a 900 page plan to literally shred democracy and replace it with autocracy, and Trump plans to use it from day one. Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine someone you should trust less with the economy than a businessman indicted for fraud several times over. It’s a little bit like asking a serial killer to be your plastic surgeon. And yet here we are.
The same mistakes. All over again. There’s no clearer example of it in the world today than Trump winning the election if it were held today, which begs all the questions sane people around the world have in surreal horror. Didn’t Americans learn anything the first time around?
And there’s the rub. In this age? We’re not just not learning. We’re trapped in a weird, nightmarish cycle of repeating the same mistakes. And when you do that enough, you race from mere folly past calamity to self-destruction at light speed.
Let me give you another example. The Netherlands just put its own Trump in power, a far right demagogue. And yet it’s different. Could there be a part of the world which should remember the warnings more than a mature European social democracy? Should there be a nation that forgets what such figures did to it last time? After all, it was the far right that invaded, conquered, and laid waste. And yet here such a nation is, repeating history’s greatest mistake.
Now, that’s not to say that this particular demagogue “is Hitler.” Don’t be absurd, and let’s talk like grown-ups. The lessons of history are what they are. And for Europe, the crucial and most powerful one, by a very long way, concerns fanaticism, hate, rage, and where such roads lead. Straight to self-destruction. And so it’s haunting to see nations in Europe embracing the very same kinds of movements that not so long ago destroyed Europe right down to ashes. I’m sure there are those who’ll object to me saying that, but they shouldn’t, unless history never existed.
So. There are American about to return power to Trump. There’s Europe, embracing the far right. See the pattern? Repeating mistakes. History’s greatest. Most critical. The ones that should never be repeated. This is the great…trend…in the world right now.
Let’s take a smaller example, a funnier one. Elon Musk bought Twitter, and a stampede of advertisers larger than the great herds which once used roam the American West fled in terror. You’d think he would’ve learned that, hey, maybe hate isn’t What People Really Want. But no. After his latest hateful comment, the NYT just reported that Twitter’s stampede of fleeing advertisers has turned into something more like a Great Exodus, and it’s about to lose $75 million. Making the same mistakes. Over and over again. This example’s funny, of course, because it’s so painfully obtuse, and yet the theme’s clear here, too.
The difference between idiocy and stupid. Way back in the Age of the Idiot, which was, oh, last decade, nations began to make mistakes. America elected Trump, various European nations like Britain went into bizarre, delusional, nationalistic far-right manias. It happens. But what’s happening now is different. Re-electing Trump? Embracing your own demagogues when it’s crystal clear what happened to those who did less than a decade ago? That’s…the sort of vainglorious, self-deceitful, deliberately wishful stupid history’s going to shudder at. You can also think about all this in the context of climate change, inequality, wealth extraction, and much more.
You see, one of the fundamental tasks of a civilization is to learn. We don’t think of it that way often, but we should. If I say to you that people must learn to mature and grow, you’ll accept it. Even if I say companies learn, organizations learn, teams learn, you get what I mean, and there’s no objection. But civilization, too, must learn. It’s one of their vital and basic functions. And if it goes haywire, then…
Learning for civilizations, though, is no easy task. A person can learn from textbooks. Can a civilization? An organization can learn from rivals. But what about a civilization, at least one like ours, that doesn’t have any?
A civilization like ours can only really learn in one painful, clumsy and difficult way. From its own mistakes. Nations must learn from the mistakes of others. Social groups must learn from the mistakes of similar ones, in other places. People must learn, too, from mistakes others have made. There’s no textbook, no class, no lecture hall in which a civilization can learn—rather, it’s learning can only be mimetic, step-wise, and through this process of trial and error.
And yet if that much can be gotten right, then of course, learning can happen. It is possible for nations to look at others, and say to themselves, “look at how it turned for them—we’d better not repeat that mistake.” It’s possible, too, for nations to look at themselves, and vow not to make the same mistakes, at least recent ones. And it’s possible for social groups and people to witness how others like them are led, and carefully reflect on whether they’ve ended up anywhere worth going.
But none of that’s happening right now. What is happening is this.
Our learning function appears to be breaking down at a civilizational level. And so we see this surreal pattern of events. The Dutch would be baffled that Americans are about to re-elect Trump…while having just chosen their own. Americans, meanwhile, are baffled at Europe’s turning, while unable to forge a future of their own. On and on it goes.
Nowhere do we see the process of civilizational learning now working. Nations repeat each others’ mistakes. Nations repeat their own mistakes. Social groups and people ignore how foolish choices have turned out for others. Around the world, demagoguery rises, despite history’s warnings of it deepening stagnation, division, despair, leading nowhere constructive, positive, transformative. Worse, they choose the same demagogues all over again, like America and Trump.
You can see the breakdown in civilizational learning in other ways, too—I don’t want to say “smaller,” so let’s say, at another level. Witness the way that people don’t “believe in science” anymore, as if it’s some kind of…personal choice…like what brand you “like” on Facebook. See the way that people flock to lunatics who offer them conspiracy theories to soothe their by now manic paranoia about their worlds crumbling around them. What do demagogues do, anyways? They point the finger at innocent scapegoats, and there’s no learning at all yet, that that’s all a lie, and solves less than nothing for the poor average fool who desperately wants to believe it’s really all true.
The human mind is being broken in this day and age. You know that, and you feel it everywhere around you. You can see visibly how people have stopped thinking rationally, in even the most basic senses of the word. We say they make “self-defeating choices,” sometimes, but I think it’s more accurate to say: they’re repeating the same mistakes, over and over again.
Rationality’s a big, difficult thing to ask of people. People are almost never rational, and expecting them to be is precisely why American-style liberalism failed. People want more, need more, ask for more, from life, from leaders, from society, than mere cold, anodyne rationality. They want to feel as if their lives have meaning. As if they have a purpose. That there’s safety and security and stability in something. That something nobler and truer is the point of this strange, bewildering thing called life.
Who offers them any of that anymore? There’s the center and left, begging for them to be “rational.” Meanwhile, demagogues and fanatics have learned to prey on these higher order needs for meaning, transcendence, worth, purpose—and only ask that the price is…
Ignorance? Self-deceit? What’s a more polite, polished way to put “stupidity,” anyways? Shall we call it “ignoring the stuff you should be learning?” Shall we say “it’s about deceiving yourself?” Is it a kind of willful blindness? Is there an element of mania that sucks the thinking from the mind, and replaces it with the turgid sentimentality of the way that Trumpists look at Trump, their eyes glistening with pharaonic awe? There’s probably all that in it, and more, too. Stupid is hard to put limits on precisely because what we’re learning right about now is that it can be limitless.
So maybe our journey back to civilizational learning begins there. By remembering how powerful stupid can be. Even the devil himself might have been tempted, because after all, in stupidity, what there really is is a kind of forgetting. A narcotic bliss of it. And in that forgetting is a kind of hubris, just the like the Devil, too had. That hubris—the laws don’t apply to me, I’m above the rest, it can’t happen here—is what the Greeks called hamartia, the fatal flaw. The one that led to the downfall.
This is where we are, too, my friends. We face the hamartia of a civilization. Remember, older civilizations had rivals to learn from. We don’t, and we’re the first one who doesn’t. Our hegemony is also becoming our undoing. With nobody to learn from, we’re going in circles now, wandering further and further into the desert, trembling right on the edge of the abyss. Who do you learn from, if you’re alone, lost, staring up at the stars? Ah, my friends. That’s the question, isn’t it? You can curse fate, and pound the sand—or you kiss the soil, and take a step, and then another one, and find your way home.
Whatever your view of the Israel-Hamas war, rape is rape. To trivialise it is to diminish ourselves
Gaby Hinsliff
This isn’t some ghoulish competition, where any empathy shown to dead Israelis leaves less available for Palestinians
There is no such thing as a perfect victim, but a million ways to be an imperfect one. She was drinking. Her skirt was too short. She went willingly back to the footballer’s mansion, or up to Harvey Weinstein’s hotel suite, so what did she think was going to happen? Maybe she was a teenage runaway, or a sex worker; he was a good boy, or a much-loved celebrity. There is a long list of reasons rapists get away with it, but it all too often starts with a jury’s refusal to listen to a woman they have already decided for some stubborn reason not to like. Remember that, as we come to the distressing picture now emerging of alleged multiple rapes and sexual assaults by Hamas fighters amid the atrocities of 7 October.
This week, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, finally called for what he described as “numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas” to be “vigorously investigated”.
Harrowing stories had begun emerging within days from the desert rave where traumatised young women, who survived only by hiding from the gunmen, described watching in silent horror as other women were gang raped, mutilated and shot. Israeli women’s rights groups, worried that chances to collect forensic evidence were missed in the initial chaos of a country under attack, swiftly mobilised – and last week, Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the lawyer chairing a civil commission hastily created to document crimes against women and children during the massacre, flew to meet UN officials to discuss the testimony collated. Look away now if you would rather not read about women and young girls found dead with their pants pulled down, and telltale evidence of bleeding, bruises and scratches; about smashed pelvises, semen samples, and graphic details I wouldn’t normally go into on these pages except that otherwise it seems people don’t believe it. Though some won’t, even then.
Rape is a war crime as old as war itself, and yet still often invisible thanks to the stigma surrounding survivors, the practical challenges of gathering evidence under fire, and bleakly, sometimes also the lack of survivors. But in recent years we have at least got better at recognising a pattern deserving of investigation. So when tales of Islamic State fighters raping and enslaving Yazidi women began to surface, or when horrific stories started filtering out from women in occupied Ukraine last year, I don’t remember too many sceptics demanding to see video proof. Nor do I recall many victim support workers responding as the director of the Sexual Assault Centre at the University of Alberta in Canada did after 7 October, by signing an open letter condemning genocide in Gaza that criticised a Canadian politician for repeating “the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence”. Only in this conflict have some normally proud progressives seemingly gone out of their way to show they don’t always #BelieveWomen, after all.
The response to Jews posting about the issue on X this week has ranged from casual whataboutery to a gruesome variant of the “pics or it didn’t happen” school of online scepticism, questioning why there aren’t any actual live rapes visible on that grisly compilation of atrocities the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are currently screening to select opinion formers. (The film, compiled from security camera footage and terrorists’ GoPros, includes only material that survivors’ families have expressly consented to publishing – not everyone wants their child’s last moments made public – and the IDF says some scenes judged too distressing or intrusive were excluded.) Evidently the stomach-turning images millions have already seen online – a dead woman, lying with her skirt pulled above her waist and no underwear on; the young woman bundled out of a truck in the Gaza Strip, the crotch of her jogging bottoms soaked in blood – aren’t enough for some.
Why do people who would probably happily judge an allegedly predatory actor or MP based on little more than hearsay seemingly struggle to entertain doubts about the sexual conduct of a terrorist, as if to do so would somehow be a betrayal of the Palestinian cause? For those who still conceive of Hamas gunmen as freedom fighters engaged in glorious resistance, it’s perhaps easier to rationalise away dead women than raped ones. It’s a war, they might tell themselves, and people die in war; anyway, look how many thousands more innocent women and children have died in Gaza. But a crime so obviously born of misogyny, revenge and exploitative power is not so easily explained away. For those who can’t deal with the troubling cognitive dissonance, the easiest thing is to decide that it just didn’t happen. The survivors must be liars, along with the first responders who reported finding half-naked bodies with injuries I won’t describe here, and the pathologists and women’s rights activists and news agencies claiming to have been shown supporting photographs and ambassadors saying they believe what they’ve heard from morgue workers; liars, the lot of them. Because if they aren’t, what are you?
Almost two months have now elapsed since 7 October, and in that short time, the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry says that more than 15,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza. The current truce may not hold much longer, and the consequences if the fighting spreads to the impossibly overcrowded south don’t bear thinking about. The war crimes allegedly committed by Israel against Palestinians during this conflict obviously require investigation every bit as urgently as the ones that triggered it, and the UN’s ability to investigate rape claims has doubtless not been helped by the Netanyahu government’s reluctance to engage with a body that has been repeatedly and justifiably critical of Israel’s past actions in the occupied territories.
But all that said, this isn’t some ghoulish competition, nor a zero-sum game where any empathy shown to dead Israelis somehow leaves less available for Palestinians. Collectively, our international institutions must be capable of keeping more than one wrong in mind at once. And individually, we should expect of ourselves what we ask of juries, judges and police every time they hear a rape case, which is not to unquestioningly believe every word, but to listen with compassion and an open mind. A war crime is a war crime, regardless of who committed it. And rape is rape, even when perpetrated against someone you secretly don’t want to think of as a victim.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Abstract
Populism at the country level is at an all-time high, with more than 25 percent of nations currently governed by populists. How do economies perform under populist leaders? We build a new long-run cross-country database to study the macroeconomic history of populism. We identify 51 populist presidents and prime ministers from 1900 to 2020 and show that the economic cost of populism is high. After 15 years, GDP per capita is 10 percent lower compared to a plausible nonpopulist counterfactual. Economic disintegration, decreasing macroeconomic stability, and the erosion of institutions typically go hand in hand with populist rule.
Albanese is prioritising governing over spectacle – but in an era of zero-sum politics, is it enough?
Katharine Murphy
The writer even draws the parallel with Biden's situation of being boringly competent (sans Gaza).
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/02/albanese-is-prioritising-governing-over-spectacle-but-in-an-era-of-zero-sum-politics-is-it-enough
In a significant shift from previous trends, recent research has uncovered a sharp rise in negative language use by politicians in the United States, particularly aligning with Donald Trump’s entry into the political scene in 2015. The new study is unprecedented in its comprehensive analysis of millions of quotes from politicians over 12 years, using advanced linguistic tools to assess the escalation of negative language.
The findings, published in Scientific Reports, provide evidence that this shift towards negativity has persisted beyond election campaigns, indicating a lasting change in the tone of political conversation in the United States.
In recent years, many Americans have felt that the language of politics has grown increasingly negative. This perception has been especially prominent since Trump’s foray into the political arena. Previous studies have suggested growing political polarization and negativity, but until now, concrete evidence showing the evolution of political language over time was lacking. This gap in knowledge spurred researchers to investigate whether the perceived negativity aligns with actual changes in political discourse.
“In 2016, when Trump was elected president, everyone had the impression that the tone of politics had become rougher, uglier, and more negative,” said study author Robert West, an assistant professor and head of the Data Science Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne.
“As data scientists, we were curious to see whether people’s hunch was right. But we didn’t have data for it yet, since there was no public corpus of news quotations linked to the people who had uttered them. So we went on a four-year journey to compile such a corpus, Quotebank, and by the time we were done collecting the data, Trump’s term was done, too. So by the time we could analyze the tone of politics, we had Obama’s as well as Trump’s presidencies to study.”
Quotebank comprises nearly a quarter-billion quotes extracted from over 127 million online news articles spanning 12 years, from September 2008 to April 2020. To focus specifically on U.S. politics, the researchers extracted 24 million quotes from 18,627 politicians, ensuring a comprehensive and representative sample for the current study.
To objectively measure the tone of political language over time, the research team employed a tool called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which analyzes text for various psychological and emotional content. Each quote was scored based on the percentage of words reflecting negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, and sadness, as well as the use of swear words. The researchers then averaged these scores monthly, creating a timeline of political language tone over 12 years.
The researchers found a substantial spike in the use of negative language starting in June 2015, aligning with the beginning of Donald Trump’s primary campaign. This wasn’t just a small uptick; the frequency of negative emotion words surged by 1.6 standard deviations, an 8% increase from the pre-campaign average. The increase wasn’t limited to general negativity but spanned across specific categories like anger, anxiety, sadness, and swear words.
Interestingly, while there was a significant jump in negative language in 2015, the study also found that the overall tone of political language had actually been decreasing in negativity during Barack Obama’s presidency before this point. This suggests a notable shift in the political climate with Trump’s entry into politics.
One of the most revealing aspects of the study was the influence of prominent speakers, particularly Donald Trump, on this trend. When Trump’s quotes were removed from the analysis, the jump in negative language in June 2015 dropped by 40%, indicating his significant impact. However, the increase in negativity was not solely due to Trump. The trend persisted even when his quotes were excluded, indicating a broader shift in the political landscape. The negative tone persisted throughout Trump’s term, indicating a lasting change in the political discourse.
“People’s hunch is true: during Trump’s presidency, the tone of U.S. politics became significantly more negative, and it happened as a sudden jump at the time when Trump’s primary campaign started,” West told PsyPost.
Additionally, the researchers found systematic differences in the use of negative language based on party affiliation and the party’s role at the federal level. Notably, the increase in negative language from June 2015 onwards was more pronounced among Republican politicians compared to their Democrat counterparts.
While the findings are robust, the study is not without its limitations. One key consideration is the role of media in shaping the dataset. Since the quotes were sourced from online news articles, it’s possible that the observed increase in negativity could be influenced by the media’s reporting preferences or biases. Additionally, the study focused on digital news sources, which might not fully represent the wider media landscape, including traditional news outlets and television.
Is the Democratic Party making a mistake by renominating President Biden to face the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in 2024? A nontrivial number of voices in and outside the party seem to think so.
But it’s already a mostly moot point. The system Americans use to nominate presidential candidates is not well equipped to make swift strategic adjustments. Voters choose candidates in a sequence of state-level primaries and caucuses. Those contests select delegates and instruct them on how to vote at a nominating convention. It’s an ungainly and convoluted process, and politicians begin positioning themselves a year in advance to succeed in it.
It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be. Political parties in most democracies have the power to choose their leaders without going through a monthslong gantlet.
The best way for a party to choose its leader is for that party to convene, confer and compromise on a candidate who serves its agenda and appeals to voters. The conventions of the mid-20th century, deeply flawed as they were, were designed for that purpose. If those flaws were fixed, they would be far better than what we use today.
Should Mr. Biden run again or step aside? On the one hand, he has stubbornly low approval ratings, and a number of polls show him trailing Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polling a year out is often misleading, and so are job approval ratings in a polarized age. Mr. Biden is old, but so is Mr. Trump, and Mr. Biden defeated him last time.
Replacing an incumbent president with another nominee is very rare and probably should be. But a convention could do it if necessary. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson stepped down at the beginning of the year, and Democrats could realistically expect to find a nominee before Election Day.
The system was different then. When Mr. Johnson decided not to run for re-election, he declared, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
The “and I will not accept” matters. Mr. Johnson was acknowledging that the party might nominate him even if he didn’t run. In 1968, when the decision was made at the national convention, the party could do that. That’s not something it can easily do today.
Only a small fraction of states held primaries that year, and most of those didn’t commit delegates. Primaries were a tool to gauge public support, not make the final decision. Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee, won no primaries or caucuses. Instead, he won with support of unpledged delegates selected through state conventions — delegates who represented an older, more establishment part of the party.
The apparent injustice of Mr. Humphrey winning the nomination without winning primaries was a big part of how we got to our current system. Many members of the Democratic Party felt that their perspectives weren’t well represented by those establishment delegates; their voices were being heard in the primaries and caucuses.
The party set out to create a national convention that was more representative of the party, but what evolved was something else, the system we use today — the one that has all but locked us into a candidate almost a year out from Election Day.
Early states winnow the field. The next states largely determine who the nominee is. States that vote late in the process often have little effect. Success depends on the ability to stand up a campaign in state after state in the first few months of the year, which in turn depends on the ability to raise money and attract media attention. It’s a process, not a simple decision.
This system could produce a candidate who is battle tested by the primaries and otherwise broadly popular. It might also select a candidate who appeals narrowly to a group of dedicated followers, especially in early states, where a close victory can be leveraged into later success. (Think of Mr. Trump in 2016.)
In no way does it let party leaders take stock of an awkward situation, such as what Democrats face now (low approval ratings for an incumbent) or, for that matter, what Republicans face (a front-runner facing multiple indictments).
Party leaders are not completely helpless. In “The Party Decides,” the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller and I argued that party activists and leaders could exert a lot of influence on their party’s choice — so much so that they typically get their way. When they can agree on a satisfactory candidate, they can help direct resources to that candidate and help that person stay in the race if he or she stumbles. (Think of Mr. Biden in 2020.)
But that takes time. It is, at best, a blunt instrument (hence its failure among Republicans in 2016). The nomination is still won in the primaries, and an incumbent is especially hard to replace.
Most democracies give far less power than that to a single political leader, even an incumbent or influential former leader. Healthy parties can limit their leaders.
Empowering the Democrats to replace Mr. Biden or the Republicans to move on from Mr. Trump would come with costs. A party that could persuade a sitting president to stand down would also have the power to persuade outsiders, like Bernie Sanders and Mr. Trump, to not run at all.
For some, giving party leaders this kind of influence is unsettling. It shouldn’t be. The job of choosing a nominee is complicated. It involves the strategic trade-off between what kind of candidate can win in November and what kind of candidate represents what the party wants in a leader.
Letting the party make these decisions is not inherently undemocratic. Just as voters select members of Congress, who then gain expertise, forge compromises and bargain to make policy, so too could voters select party delegates, who would then choose nominees and shape their party’s platform.
Polling and even primaries could continue to play a role. In many years, the voice of the party’s voters might speak loudly, and party leaders would simply heed it. In other years, such as for Democrats in 2008, voter preferences might be more mixed. It’s worth noting that in 2008, Democratic superdelegates (those not bound by the results of any primary) switched their support from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama after seeing his appeal in the primaries. If all of the delegates had been free to switch, would the outcome have been the same? We don’t know, but in a representative democracy, elected representatives do often listen to voters.
In other words, the development of a more active, empowered party convention would not have to be a return to the past. The nomination of Mr. Humphrey in 1968 was a problem, but it wasn’t because the decision was made at a convention. It was because the delegates at that convention didn’t represent the party’s voters.
Moving the decision back to the convention would not be a trivial matter. Even if voters and politicians could adjust to the change — a big if — each party would need to select representative and competent delegates. Our experience with representative democracy should tell us that this is possible but far from inevitable.
But such a convention would still be superior to the current system, in which a small number of voters in a handful of states choose from a pool of self-selected candidates who have been tested mostly by their ability to raise money and get attention in debates.
Both of these systems have a claim to being democratic. But only the first would give the party the kind of agency implied by claims that it is making a mistake by renominating the incumbent.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjwQUEb8L-A[/youtube]
In the Washington Post today, Marianne LeVine, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Josh Dawsey reported that the Trump camp is eager to get people to stop focusing on Trump’s authoritarian talk, noting that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says the presidential candidate was just joking when he said he would be a dictator on the first day of a return to the White House. While the Republican base appears to like Trump’s threats against the people they have come to hate, two Trump advisers told the reporters that “recent stories about his plans for a second term are not viewed as helpful for the general election.”
Republicans have also moved quickly to cut ties with Florida Republican Party chair Christian Ziegler, who is under police investigation for rape. Ziegler’s wife, Bridget Ziegler, co-founded Moms for Liberty, an organization that has focused on removing from schools books that they find objectionable, generally books by or about racial or ethnic minorities or LGBTQ+ people. Often Moms for Liberty members have implied, or even claimed, that those trying to protect school libraries are sexual predators or “groomers.” Ziegler herself has been active in shaping anti-LGBTQ+ policies in the state.
But the police and court documents about the case revealed that the Zieglers and the woman Ziegler allegedly raped had participated in a three-way sexual relationship in the past. The rape allegedly occurred after they had set up another encounter that Bridget could not make. The woman then canceled, telling Ziegler “I was mainly in it for her.” He went to her home anyway.
The story of a key anti-LGBTQ+ activist engaging in same-sex activity as part of a threesome sent Moms for Liberty hurrying to say that Bridget Ziegler was no longer on their board (although both Zieglers were still on their advisory board) and purge her name from their website. And though no charges have yet been filed, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has called on Christian Ziegler to resign from his position at the head of the state Republican Party.
The Zieglers helped to tie the Republican Party to Moms for Liberty shortly after the organization formed in January 2021, and DeSantis was very much on board, apparently seeing their message of taking the war against “woke” to the schools as a political winner. But, as Amanda Marcotte pointed out in Salon, the 2022 midterms revealed that most voters did not like the extremism of that group and that it was a political liability.
The fact that DeSantis is dropping his former ally Ziegler so fast suggests that DeSantis is eager to divorce himself from both the story and from the extremism of Moms for Liberty.
The Trump Republicans took another hit today as well, when a grand jury in the state of Nevada charged six people who falsely posed as electors in 2020 in order to file fake electoral votes for Trump to replace the state’s real votes for now-President Joe Biden. The six Republicans charged with filing false documents include the chair and the vice chair of the Nevada Republican Party. If convicted, they face up to nine years in prison and $15,000 in fines.
Nevada is the third state to charge the fake electors with crimes. Georgia and Michigan have also done so.
Ten fake electors in Wisconsin today settled a civil lawsuit over their own participation in Trump’s false-elector scheme. The settlement involved correcting the historical record. The ten agreed to withdraw their paperwork with the false information, explain in writing to the federal offices that the filings had been “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results,” and acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election. Going forward, they agreed never again to serve as presidential electors in an election in which Trump is running.
But while there are signs that even leading Republicans recognize that the extremism of the Trump Republicans is unpopular in the country, Trump Republicans are tightening their hold on Congress. Today former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced that he will resign from Congress at the end of this month. Far-right MAGA Republicans ousted McCarthy from the speaker’s chair in October.
Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC), a McCarthy ally who took over as acting House speaker after McCarthy’s removal, announced yesterday that he had changed his plans from earlier this year and will not run for reelection.
While hardly moderates—both refused to work with Democrats either to pass legislation or to elect a speaker—they appear to be ceding ground to the MAGA Republicans.
Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone reported today that one of those MAGA Republicans, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), spoke freely Tuesday night at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., at a celebration for the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. Although the address was being livestreamed, Johnson apparently believed he was speaking privately. He told the audience that the Lord called him to be “a new Moses.”
Johnson, an evangelical Christian, told the audience that the U.S. is “engaged in a battle between worldviews” and “a great struggle for the future of the Republic.” He said he believed far-right Christians would prevail.
The influence of Trump is also evident in the Senate, where there is broad, bipartisan support for supplemental funding for Ukraine, but where Republicans are refusing to pass such a measure without attaching to it an immigration package that overrides current law, replacing it with Trump’s immigration plans. Such plans could not pass on their own, as Democrats would stop them in the Senate. But by attaching them to a bill that is imperative for national security, Republicans hope to force Biden into it.
Democrats have repeatedly called for new immigration legislation, but their refusal to remake immigration policy as the hard-right wants has made Republicans balk. Now Democrats are still offering to negotiate a reasonable package, but as Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said earlier this week: “I think there’s a misunderstanding on the part of Senator Schumer and some of our Democratic friends…. This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.”
In a speech this afternoon—just a day after Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) finally permitted the Senate to fill 425 senior positions in the U.S. military and while he is still preventing 11 top-level positions from being filled—President Biden called it “stunning that we’ve gotten to this point…. Republicans in Congress…are willing to give [Russian president Vladimir] Putin the greatest gift he could hope for and abandon our global leadership not just to Ukraine, but beyond that.”
“If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden warned. “It’s important to see the long run here. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear. If Putin attacks a NATO Ally—if he keeps going and then he attacks a NATO Ally—well, we’ve committed as a NATO member that we’d defend every inch of NATO territory. Then we’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops—American troops fighting Russian troops if he moves into other parts of NATO.
“Make no mistake: Today’s vote is going to be long remembered. And history is going to judge harshly those who turn their back on freedom’s cause.”
“Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine’s funding hostage to their extreme partisan border policies,” he said.
Biden reiterated that he and the Democrats are eager to pass new immigration legislation, but “Republicans think they can get everything they want without any bipartisan compromise. That’s not the answer.... And now they’re willing to literally kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield and damage our national security in the process.” He begged Republicans to get past partisan divisions and step up to “our responsibilities as a leading nation in the world.”
Hours later, Senate Republicans voted against the supplemental aid package.
