Why are lesser-evil voters scolding Biden for adopting their logic?
Democratic loyalists are making the exact same moral calculation in Israel that the president is.
The president is engaged in a ruthless campaign of genocide against the people of Palestine. And he will only conceivably stop if people like you oppose him — but opposing him brings with it a real risk of a second Trump presidency. So do you take that risk? Or do you continue to substantively support him, while continuing to criticize the genocide and hoping that he’ll see reason?
It’s a dilemma that has become all too familiar to left voters weighing their voting options for 2024. But it’s also, The New Yorker reports in a new interview by Isaac Chotiner, the exact dilemma facing President Joe Biden.
Former State Department official David Miller explains Biden’s thinking:
Then, there is the politics. And, yes, the President is hemorrhaging support among progressives and more than a few mainstream Democrats, but pressing Israel, using this leverage, particularly on military systems, is going to stir up a hornet’s nest among Republicans, conservatives, and the presumptive Republican nominee, who fashions himself as the most pro-Israel President in history. The Republican Party has emerged as the Israel-Can-Do-No-Wrong Party… If Biden wants to change the picture, he can’t completely renounce the Israeli government.
The implication is direct: Biden thinks that he cannot risk real opposition to Israel’s government without risking a Trump win, so his strategy has deteriorated to a pathetic exercise in leaking private expressions of frustration and voicing completely toothless “concern”. This strategy has been met with ferocious critism on the left, and even among Biden’s most loyal liberal supporters. Just earlier today, Jon Favreau complained:
The President doesn't get credit for being "privately enraged" when he still refuses to use leverage to stop the IDF from killing and starving innocent people. These stories only make him look weak.
This criticism is exactly right, but I don’t see how one could possibly miss the parallel: isn’t Favreau doing the exact same thing? Just one tweet later he goes out of his way to let everyone know that he’s still voting for Biden. Both disapprove of Israel’s genocide, but both refuse to use the leverage they have to stop it because they’re worried about a Trump win, so both have resigned themselves to meaningless expressions of criticism.
But if the polls are any indication, Favreau isn’t the exception here — he’s the rule.
If Biden’s handling of Israel had significantly damaged his support since October, one would expect to see more demographics in this chart falling in the lower-left quadrant. The only groups we see in that quadrant, however, are conservatives and Hispanics — groups who are more sympathetic to Israel. Everyone else has only increased their support for Biden in the last half year. Even young voters, who have expressed more sympathy for Palestine than any demographic, have expanded their support for Biden by a few points.
Let’s look even closer at a state that’s in the news today: Wisconsin, where nearly 48,000 Democrats voted “uninstructed” in the primaries, a choice meant to convey their frustration with Biden on Palestine. But Emerson College polling shows that in Wisconsin, too, Biden’s overall vote share has gone up from 40% in October to 43% last month.
So while leftists and liberals may shake their fists at Biden, all of the evidence suggests that they are making the exact same moral calculation. To me, it seems telling how folks like Jon Favreau respond to this kind of lesser-evil logic when they see someone else engaged in it. At an intuitive level, I think most people seem to get that the ad absurdum logic of lesser evil is completely unacceptable when you’ve reached the point of lending your support to a genocide in progress. They see that, at least, when Joe Biden does it.