America’s Hollow Man

Nothing so possesses the American imagination as presidential elections. Straightforward materialist explanations  —  the absence of laws limiting the length of campaign seasons; millionaires and billionaires increasingly unbound by campaign finance legislation; a vapid media class fixated on the horse race above all else  —  can’t quite account for our misplaced obsession. Has any other national literature produced a text as deliriously election-pilled as Richard Ben Cramer’s “What It Takes,” which devotes a thousand pages to the emotional lives of the 1988 primary contenders? (“Michael [Dukakis] was a man who was never depressed  —  not for one day in his forty-five years. He never took more than one aspirin!”) In other countries, the great writers have better things to focus on.

In this context, the role Joe Biden occupied during the 2020 presidential election was unusual. Campaigning from his basement, the oldest major party nominee in history wasn’t going to inspire overwhelming passion among the electorate. But his strange nonpresence would be framed as an upside. Throughout the race, the arguments Biden and his surrogates invoked in his favor were paradoxically the most minimizing: if he was maybe a little visionless, Biden would at least take up less space than his predecessor. He would turn down the temperature. He would restore to the White House the minimal chaos and comparative normalcy associated with an avuncular lifelong politician in his late 70s (rather than a TV-addled sociopath in his mid-70s). He would only seek a single term and then make room for a new generation of Democratic leaders. Biden would hold the party together by virtue of his age, his whiteness and his fundamentally reactive orientation; as a veteran Senate operator disposed toward negotiation, he would mediate between the party’s various factions, not dogmatically hew to any one agenda  —  more vessel than steamroller.

In their recent book “The Hollow Parties,” Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld describe the Republicans and Democrats as lacking in the internal organization that could, respectively, moderate extremist tendencies and mitigate elite capture. The two parties, they write, are “hard shells, marked with the scars of interparty electoral conflict, [which] cover disordered cores, devoid of concerted action and positive loyalties.  . . . For all their array of activities, [they] demonstrate fundamental incapacities in organizing democracy.”

What we had in Biden was a hollow president, a figurehead with fundamental incapacity issues and little substance inside the shell. At best, Biden’s hollowness contrasted powerfully with the great-man theory of the presidency embodied by Donald Trump, and his reactivity made space for a resurgent electoral left. At worst, these qualities devolved into impotence, and Biden was revealed as a leader who simply couldn’t lead.

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This time last year, halfway between the surprisingly undisastrous 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election, the upsides and dangers of a hollow president were already apparent. Biden  — never in his 36 years in the Senate an ally for the left and backed to the hilt by the Democratic donor class  —  nevertheless came into office buoyed by a wave of left-wing organizing. The Bernie Sanders campaign helped catalyze a progressive resurgence, and a remarkable number of socialists took office in 2020 alongside Biden. The upheavals of the pandemic and the George Floyd rebellion contributed to a collective sense that change on a societal scale was necessary, and, thanks to Biden’s lack of vision and tide-drifting passivity, Congress was able to harness the anything-is-possible energy of unprecedented times to pass major legislation. Signed by Biden, the American Rescue Plan temporarily increased the child tax credit, extended unemployment insurance, delivered stimulus checks to families and raised SNAP benefits , amounting to the largest expansion of U.S. welfare programs in 50 years. There was no nipping and tucking at the behest of Larry Summers, as in Barack Obama’s big crisis-mitigating legislation. To Democratic allies across a constellation of think tanks, grassroots organizations and political advocacy groups, the left-liberal war of position seemed suddenly winnable.

Biden also presided over a series of significant agency appointments early on that bore the left’s imprimatur, particularly on labor and antitrust. Writing in the American Prospect about LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman’s campaign to oust FTC chair Lina Khan, who has waged an aggressive antimonopoly effort against giants like Kroger, Nvidia and Microsoft (where Hoffman is on the board), David Dayen recently argued that Hoffman’s agita

is about more than one competent chair of the Federal Trade Commission. There’s [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit] Chopra and [DOJ Antitrust Division head Jonathan] Kanter and Jennifer Abruzzo at the National Labor Relations Board and Julie Su at the Department of Labor and even Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is holding Delta accountable for failing to compensate passengers after the CrowdStrike meltdown. Over the past four years, the fight against corporate power has been embedded into the architecture of Democratic policy.

Biden’s openness to the left made itself felt beyond Washington D.C.’s hearing rooms. Franklin Foer’s account of the administration’s first two years, “The Last Politician,” offers a reminder that even before Biden walked the picket line with UAW workers last year, he recorded a video in support of the RWDSU’s unionization campaign at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. “The White House counsel’s office,” writes Foer, “with its corporate lawyers and technical objections, questioned the legality of the President using his power to influence a union election.” Biden did it anyway. The union lost that drive, but still, here was something new: a transgression against the natural order of things, in which presidents gesture at labor while inevitably siding with capital.

Within a few months of the American Rescue Plan’s passage, however, the activity and energy of the administration’s first few months gave way to a new balance of forces  —  or perhaps an old one. Though Biden continued to advance various redistributive priorities via executive action  —  on student debt, ACA expansion, prescription drug costs, junk fees and airline fees  —  the stimulus marked the legislative high point. “The Last Politician” rightly spends a lot of time on the steady erosion of Build Back Better and on its nemesis, the deficit-fearing and inequality-loving shadow president, Joe Manchin. Named for the economic specter that had cramped its horizons, the Inflation Reduction Act that resulted from the torturous negotiations with Manchin (and his shiftier, less effectual ally Kyrsten Sinema) took no action on universal pre-K or the care economy more generally. Left behind was the PRO Act  —  labor’s big ask  —  as well as paid leave. Instead of green jobs, let alone a Green New Deal, we got energy-permitting reform and tax subsidies for American green industry: nipping and tucking. Did the IRA and the related CHIPS Act represent a revival of industrial policy, or did all this constitute little more than what the economist Daniela Gabor has called “derisking,” creating more favorable conditions for climate-conscious corporate investment? The robust arguments on the left about this suite of policies suggest that there is at least something here worth arguing about, which hasn’t been true of major Democratic legislation in a long time. Even so, the left got less than it wanted and less than the country needed.

After the slow collapse of Build Back Better, the reactivity that had briefly made Biden a useful ally rendered him a constraint, as he took pains to accommodate the center  —  defaulting to the Democrats’ reflexive move. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” Chuck Schumer said in July 2016, a statement almost sublime in its multivalent wrongheadedness and still somehow an article of faith for Democrats. For the left  —  whose national program depends on a rural-urban working-class coalition  —  the party’s ongoing suburbanization poses an enormous challenge. Electorally, it leads to the defeat of younger progressives like congressman Jamaal Bowman, whose lavishly funded opponent beat him in a district remapped in favor of the wealthier suburbs, and fellow Squad member Cori Bush, whom AIPAC spent $9 million to take down. On policy, it points to a return to the punitive mean on immigration and policing after the hollow promises of criminal justice reform — a mean very much in keeping with Biden’s own voting record over the past fifty years. The fragile left-liberal alliance that held early in Biden’s term now feels like a lifetime ago.

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As Biden began to make his case for reelection last year, he faced difficult headwinds. Though inflation across most sectors had cooled, grocery prices had risen permanently. Housing costs and mortgage rates had soared. Wage growth was strong, especially at the lower end, but how much did this matter when the wages (and the jobs) were so shitty to begin with? The effects of most of the administration’s executive actions and much of its legislation won’t be felt for years  —  if they aren’t clawed back altogether by a reactionary Supreme Court, as with student debt relief.

Any Democratic opponent would have struggled to land a message of accomplishment against Trump, who takes credit for others’ successes, real or unreal, and spins any accountability for his misdeeds as persecution. But Biden was far more vulnerable than the average Democrat. Reading Foer’s generally sympathetic book  —  its reverent and unwittingly ironic final line is “He was a man for his age”  —  one is struck by the mismatch between activity and rhetoric, between real accomplishments and a story to give them shape. “Biden believes that narrative is the foundation of good politics,” Foer writes, with the platitudinous solemnity of the Beltway journalist. But was Biden even capable of spinning his own narrative?

For years his greatest weakness had been visible to millions of Americans, even if they were urged not to believe what they saw, or at least not to care. (After the June debate, MSNBC commentator Joy Reid vowed to vote for Biden even if he was “in a coma.”) In poll after poll, across all demographics, every kind of voter (registered, likely, independent) expressed deep concern about Biden’s age and fitness  —  what physician Rachael Bedard, in a recent New York Times op-ed, identified as his “frailty.” This, Bedard wrote,

is the most important, all-encompassing geriatric syndrome: it’s the framework we use to describe what others sometimes understand as the accumulating burdens of old age.  . . . A shifting ratio of good days and bad days is often how clinical frailty appears. The pattern of decline in frailty is a gradual dwindling of a person’s health, a line sloping slowly downward.

Voters may not have diagnosed the problem with such sensitivity, but they knew the difference between a president who was supposed to take up less space and one who was unambiguously diminished.

A Wall Street Journal report in early June amplified the sotto voce chatter among Democratic voters and the many stakeholders and insiders unwilling or unable to speak their minds. While loyalists insisted that the Joe Biden whom people saw in meetings was sharper and quicker than the halting, increasingly gaffe-prone public Biden, Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes chronicled numerous previously unreported incidents of confusion and slippage. “What you see on TV is what you get,” Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, told Linskey and Hughes. “These people who keep talking about what a dynamo he is behind closed doors  —  they need to get him out from behind closed doors, because I didn’t see it.”

After the cataclysmic debate later that month, the news media turned up its scrutiny of Biden’s frailty  —  his dropped sentences and flubbed remarks, his vacant squint and shuffling gait  —  and a strong, clear narrative, the kind that had eluded Biden for 3 ¹/₂ years, took hold: the president was in terminal decline. As the clamor rose for Biden to step aside and let a younger candidate take his place, as he had once promised, a vocal group of professional and amateur pundits tried, with impressive ingenuity, to paint these demands as an “elite” revolt by millionaire donors, or even a capital strike. The rapid closing of checkbooks in Hollywood and the Hamptons was no doubt crucial to Biden’s decision. But to any intellectually honest observer, it was clear, then as now, that the push for Biden to withdraw from the race was a rare example of Democratic near-unanimity. The big tent Biden was supposed to support had been assembled at last  —  against Biden himself. Calls to drop out came from a cross section of swing-district centrists and progressive insurgents, D.C. bloggers and socialist activists. For all the concern-trolling about the antidemocratic nature of the process, Biden was probably never closer to the will of the people than when he finally, belatedly, bowed out.

Between the debate and Biden’s announcement that he would not seek a second term were three agonizing weeks of indecision, bluster and inescapable discussion of Biden’s fitness for office. How long had this been going on? What did the president not know, and when did he not know it? Published only a few hours after Biden’s announcement  —  but obviously in the works for weeks beforehand  —  a follow-up article by Linskey, Hughes and three other Journal reporters deepened the impression of a code of silence. Full of sobering quotes from White House officials and European diplomats, the article opens with a meeting between Biden and congressional Democrats in which the president “had spoken disjointedly and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers.” Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., who ran a quixotic primary campaign against Biden, told the Journal that “it was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen.” The big reveal is that this meeting took place in October 2021.

If this wasn’t a conspiracy to obscure reality as such, it was at least an act of radical recklessness.¹ For three long weeks, and for months and maybe years before that, numerous pundits, politicians and sycophants argued that what we saw was not, in fact, what we had seen. Conspiracy or recklessness? Biden and his entourage should be forever grateful that in the end, events moved too fast for Americans to definitively determine the difference. The institutional omertà around the president’s condition was the consummation of Democrats’ and Biden’s hollowness: Biden the symbol had to be protected, at more and more dire costs, from Biden the man. The increasing emptiness of the Democratic Party itself  —  its big tent long since frayed by class dealignment, deunionization and plutocratic capture  —  likewise needed to be shielded from view.

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Part three of “The Last Politician” is devoted to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Here, Foer’s book, which otherwise delivers the expected pleasures and frustrations of a well-sourced insider report, acquires more momentum and urgency. The descriptions of White House officials’ anguish and the heartbreaking scenes at Hamid Karzai International Airport, along with Foer’s breathless blow-by-blow narration, are meant to underscore the tragedy of the withdrawal that, Foer writes, “scarred [Biden’s] legacy.”

For a small but influential coterie of neoconservatives and hawkish liberals, the exit from Afghanistan was a profound national dereliction, in which the U.S. gave up on its mission, its allies and its responsibilities to the people of a country it helped destroy. (For the eternal cold warrior Anne Applebaum, “the events in Afghanistan” were a blow to “liberal internationalism.”) The withdrawal was indeed a defining moment of the Biden presidency, though not in the way neocon saber-rattlers think. It was that rarest accomplishment in modern U.S. politics: a concerted reduction in the footprint of American empire. For a military hegemon whose sprawl and bloat are unequaled in history, it was a modest yet momentous step. (That the withdrawal also fed another cycle of disaster in Afghanistan  —  with the disintegration of the U.S.-trained army, and the Taliban’s near-instant consolidation of its brutal rule over the country  —  is a terrible irony, but one inseparable from the violence of the American occupation itself.)

For Biden, the administration’s greatest triumph abroad was U.S. support for Ukraine. There, Biden believed, American military might was deployed in service of democracy and stability; the moral stakes were clear and the cause was just. Foer describes the president’s meeting with Ukrainian refugees during a March 2022 trip to Warsaw. “It was overwhelming for Biden,” he writes. “The visit with the refugees had put him in a passionate frame of mind.” So passionate that, a few hours later, Biden remarked in a speech in Warsaw that Vladimir Putin could not be allowed to “remain in power”  —  an inflammatory off-script blunder that the White House press team spent days trying to walk back.

It’s not surprising that Biden  —  longtime member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, interlocutor with world leaders, international legacy burnisher  —  would leave his biggest mark in foreign rather than domestic policy. His greatest impact will be felt not in Afghanistan or in Ukraine, however, but in Gaza. Any assessment of Biden’s presidency is stained by Gaza, where for almost a year he has supported, defended, armed and funded Israel’s genocide. It is in Gaza that Biden has abandoned his passivity, where he has been least reactive and most active.

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In the days after Oct. 7, 2023, it was clear that Israel would respond to Hamas’ horrific attacks with unprecedented cruelty, and that unspeakable numbers of civilians would pay the price. Less immediately clear was how much cruelty the U.S. would tolerate, let alone actively sponsor.

“I’ve been a strong, strong supporter of Israel from the time I’ve entered the United States Senate back in 1973,” Biden said at a campaign event late last year. “I am a Zionist.” As Branko Marcetic, Jeremy Scahill and others have documented, Biden’s backing of Israel was indeed unwavering during his years in the Senate and in the White House. Writing in the Intercept last fall, Scahill described a 1982 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations meeting with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Then-Sen. Biden defended Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and its right to self-defense in such stark terms (“If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed’”) that even Begin was taken aback. “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid,” Begin told reporters at the time. “This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.”

The intensity of Biden’s passion for Israel has been the great constant of his career  —  perhaps the only one. When George W. Bush condemned Israel’s “targeted killings” of Palestinians in 2001, Biden criticized Bush and defended the policy. During the 2021 Gaza war  —  the first test of Biden’s orientation toward Israel as president  —  he never wavered. “In [Biden’s] view,” Foer writes, “the quickest way to end the conflict was to stand squarely with Israel, to smother [Prime Minister Banjamin] Netanyahu with love. Then, at the right moment, Biden said that he would take advantage of the trust he had deposited in the bank.”

At various points during Biden’s term, it was tempting to look back at the primaries and imagine another Democratic president as a superior alternative. Perhaps a President Pete Buttigieg might have pushed Manchin further on Build Back Better. Even a President Amy Klobuchar likely would have communicated her administration’s accomplishments more effectively. President Bernie Sanders  —  well, that goes without saying. Almost any other candidate would have been more principled; literally anyone would have been more dynamic. But in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, it was evident that Biden, already unpopular and diminished, wasn’t merely a suboptimal choice whose rapprochement with the left dissipated not long after it began. He was, in fact, the very worst option. The hollow president had a single issue on which he was resolute, on which he would entertain no entreaties or counterarguments from members of his party. On Israel, Biden would be more than a vessel. He would steamroll ahead, no matter where the path took him.

Not that the Democrats were in any position to restrain him. The U.S.-Israel alliance is all-powerful: its roots lie too deep for any one politician, administration or party to extract. Within the Pentagon, among self-styled “single-issue” donors like Miriam Adelson and Haim Saban, and in the offices of AIPAC and other Zionist lobbying powerhouses, support for Israel is the sine qua non of U.S. politics. Most elected Democrats are seduced, to varying degrees, by the Israel lobby. Even those who avoid complete seduction fall prey to the hegemonic view of Israel as an ally and “her” (always that disturbing feminine possessive pronoun) antagonists as uncivilized hordes and terrorists. Very few Democrats have expressed meaningful criticism of Israel’s actions since Oct. 7, and perhaps only one congresswoman, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, has been a consistent voice of opposition. (For this she has been targeted relentlessly by members of her own party and, it goes without saying, Republican opponents.)

And still, with his calcified commitment to Israel as an emotional beacon rather than a nation-state, his reflexive rejection of all differing perspectives, and his permanent deference to Israeli leadership, Biden was uniquely unsuited for the moment. Even if the differences between him and a more agile median Democrat would have amounted to a slightly longer pause in bomb shipments, or more vocal determination to keep aid flowing, many thousands of lives might have been spared. Not that this would have been anywhere near enough.

In the time between Oct. 7 and Oct. 18, when Biden gave Netanyahu a bear hug on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, at least 3,000 people were killed and 12,500 injured. That day, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared that the situation in Gaza was “spiraling out of control.” By Oct. 25, at least 7,000 people had been killed and the health-care system in Gaza was in “complete collapse,” according to the Gaza Health Ministry, with another 7,000 sick and wounded patients in the territory’s hospitals facing death. That day, at a press conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Biden said, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.  . . . But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” In October alone, the Israel Defense Forces bombed the Jabalia refugee camp five times and would bomb the camp again on Nov. 1. The estimated death toll from these strikes was over 300.

By January, Israel had destroyed or damaged at least half of all buildings in Gaza. A week after authorizing airstrikes on Yemen against the Houthis, Biden was asked outside the White House about the efficacy of those strikes. “Are they stopping the Houthis? No,” he said. “Are they going to continue? Yes.” In April, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza. “There are no half measures,” he said.

On July 25, 45 American doctors and nurses who had volunteered in Gaza since Oct. 7 published an open letter to Joe Biden, Jill Biden and Kamala Harris. Their report was a rare firsthand glimpse into the near impossibility of life under the Israeli assault. “With only marginal exceptions,” they wrote, “everyone in Gaza is sick, injured or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman and child.” They wrote that they had all “treated children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.” “We cannot believe,” they wrote, “that anyone would continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children after seeing what we have seen.” But Biden wouldn’t  —  perhaps couldn’t  —  see it.

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Even for a nation obsessed with presidential politics, the past summer has furnished a shocking density of spectacle. The calamitous debate; the torpor over Biden’s decision-making and the internecine drama in the Democratic Party; the surreal assassination attempt against Trump; the Republican National Convention that began two days later, where the hateful and punitive conservative project put itself on full display and coronated its new geriatric-millennial standard-bearer, JD Vance; Trump’s endless, soul-sucking RNC acceptance speech; Biden’s unassuming announcement-via-PDF of his decision to withdraw; the impossibly rapid rise of Harris in his place.

In the United States, this was a season of unprecedented political dynamism. In Gaza, it was the 10th month of horror. More than 1,200 people were killed in the tense and hectic weeks between the debate and Harris’ ascent, and nearly 4,000 people were injured. On the day of the debate, Congress voted to ban the State Department from citing statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry. By that point, nine of every 10 people across the Gaza Strip had been internally displaced, some up to 10 times. At long last, the United Kingdom decided to start funding UNRWA again after a coordinated — and subsequently debunked — Israeli PR campaign that crippled the main humanitarian operation in Gaza, introducing the explicit threat of famine and marking a new phase in the genocide. The Knesset gave preliminary approval to a bill that would declare UNRWA a terrorist organization, while the United States, its most important funder, continued to withhold support. The United States’s much-hyped temporary shipping port on the Gaza coast, which delivered a fraction of the humanitarian aid that could have traveled through the Rafah crossing if Israel hadn’t insisted on its closure, was disassembled, and tons of goods were left to rot in the sun. The International Court of Justice declared that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal. The Lancet estimated that, accounting for famine and disease, the death toll in Gaza could exceed 186,000.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” Biden said on Oct. 11. “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.” But as a White House official soon confirmed to CNN, Biden hadn’t seen those pictures — allegedly from Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks — because their existence has never been verified. Did he think he had seen them? Did he refuse to believe that he hadn’t? The Washington Post reported that Biden had overruled his staffers’ suggestion that he cut a reference to beheaded children from his remarks. He mentioned them again in November.

The consideration of Biden’s frailty alongside the war he has championed is an uneasy one. There is still much we don’t know about both the nature of Biden’s condition and the way U.S. support for the war has been conducted. Are National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken chiefly responsible for the morally and strategically disastrous regional war they claim is only a possibility (but which has already enfolded Lebanon, Yemen and Iran)? Or has Biden  —  increasingly isolated and dependent on prejudice and instinct  —  continued to call the shots? Has his ability to assimilate new information faltered in recent months? Is life on the ground in Gaza simply unimaginable to him, or does he not care that much? If he encountered a group of Palestinian refugees, would he be capable of the “passion” he felt when he met those Ukrainian kids in Poland? Was he capable once, but no longer? Which answer is worse?

It is safest to remain in the interrogative mode, because nearly any speculation feels obscene. But it is hard not to observe, however tentatively, that Biden’s diminishment coincides with his overseeing of the genocide, as if the unceasing violence were an expression of an altogether different kind of hollow president. “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” Biden said during an Oval Office address a few days after he announced his withdrawal from the race. Was this cynicism? Or a sign of Biden’s deeper estrangement from the world he has made?

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After its early promise, Biden’s only term as president ends with a blood-choked whimper. The president who entered office on a wave of rage and energy and possibility is now the target of such a wave: more than 700,000 people voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries to protest Biden’s support for Israel. If Biden was a political shell in 2020, he was at least capable of carrying collective potential; now he is merely empty.

The appearance of a new candidate in the presidential race is welcome because Harris is not Biden. She can campaign with vigor, communicate with relative clarity and potentially energize an electorate Biden would have left out in the cold. She can win. After a long period in which Trump’s return to the White House seemed inevitable, this is novel territory. On Gaza, Harris will be a better president than Trump because the Republican Party operates with total bloodlust, no matter what credulous commentators say about Trump and Vance’s “isolationism.” But being better than Trump is nowhere near enough.

The incredible upsurge of pro-Palestine protest since Oct. 7 has been a bright spot in the darkness of the past year, a crucial reminder that a real internationalist politics is possible, that new forms of organization can be improvised at breakneck speed, that America’s young people see the United States’ role in the world far more clearly than do their parents or grandparents. But the condemnation of last spring’s encampments by many elected Democrats, and their repression by many Democratic mayors, confirms that for all the tentative points of convergence between the left and the Democrats during the Biden presidency, Gaza has marked a fundamental rupture in the party. Behind closed doors  —  most notably in her recent meeting with Netanyahu  —  Harris has reportedly voiced more concern for the plight of Gaza’s civilians than has her boss; a top vice presidential prospect for her ticket, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, was allegedly passed over in part for his staunchly pro-Israel, anti-encampment record. Yet hours after Harris spoke to Uncommitted activists in Dearborn, Mich., she responded to pro-Palestine protesters at a rally with the snideness of Democrats past: “If you want Donald Trump to win, say that. Otherwise I’m speaking.” As if she weren’t addressing a core group of constituents  —  in Michigan, no less  —  desperate for a belated shift to American policy that would end the war and end the genocide. The Uncommitted movement doesn’t want Trump to win, and neither did the students in the encampments. For her part, Harris will have to face what Trump never will, and Biden never could: that American policy is immoral and unsustainable, and the war in Gaza is the Democrats’ war.

1. A Politico article published after Biden withdrew revealed that the campaign had done no polling in battleground states for months, as if the entire operation had chosen to stick its head in the sand. This squares with Foer’s account of Biden’s response to Dobbs v. Jackson. Though Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion had leaked weeks earlier, “Biden still felt gobsmacked by the moment. . . . He was supposed to have a raft of policies and executive orders ready to unveil in [his] speech. But he hadn’t agreed to them yet.” ︎

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