Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, September 9, 2025
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38 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
A new book by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha has the sad title, Tomorrow is Yesterday:
Jumping past the recounting of failures past:
The ‘two state solution’ is a mirage and there is no realistic solution, according to two experienced peace negotiators. Which is what I said two years ago when the Gaza war started, which analysis was roundly denounced here. Two years on, no it is still not genocide, yes it is a brutal war, the two state solution is fantasy, and the campus eruption of protest accomplished nothing but to help re-elect Trump. Who is openly in favor of ethnic cleansing.
In 1968 Vietnam war protesters attacked the wrong candidate and helped to elect the worst candidate who dramatically worsened the situation. Humphrey might have ended the war, Nixon kept it going and tens of thousands of Americans and god knows how many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodians died. As the saying goes, history may not repeat but it does rhyme.
“Humankind must not be treated as a means to an end” —– but that has been one of our shortcomings from the beginning; the thing we have struggled against in each stage of human civilization’s rollout. This deficiency underwrites the primary driver of capitalism.
I (and a good many others of far greater relevant accumen) disagree with Michael Reynold’s assessment that there is no “two state solution” fot the Palestinians.
But, I am beginning to have my doubts that there is a “two state solution” for moral/ethical society and the unregulated human greed engine that is commanding the direction of once liberal democracies.
Kathmandu is on fire, and the government in Nepal is collapsing.
@Rob1:
Alternative statement: None of what passes for Great Powers today is willing to carve out a space for a viable country for the Palestinians and make everyone accept it, including the Palestinians. The last is important, since a new country is likely to mean they have to settle for being a city-state a la Singapore and don’t get great-grandpa’s olive grove back.
Good news for once, the new season of Futurama premieres next Monday. Rumor has it all ten eps will drop at once.
@Michael Cain:
To be fair, the last time great powers decided to carve out a two state solution it was 1948 and the result was a tiny Jewish state and a tiny Palestinian state. 5 Arab armies responded to that effort by attacking Israel in an attempt – openly stated – to drive the Jews into the sea. The first of many disastrously stupid decisions by the Palestinians and their supposed Arab friends, who, by the way, would have gobbled it all up for themselves and left both the Palestinian population, and whatever Jews survived, to be split between Jordan, Egypt and Syria.
@Michael Cain:
Are you sure about that? Please, support your contention.
My best guess at the motives of the kidnappings by Hamas that happened 2 years ago is that those acts were intended to prevent a peaceful solution. The reactions of everyone involved are kind of predictable, after all. So they probably stopped any kind of peaceful solution from happening for at least a generation.
I have no dog in this hunt. I have Jewish friends. I taught a couple of kids in the dojo whose father was Palestinian (their mother was Canadian).
I don’t want to see harm come to my friends. I can’t have that.
@Michael Reynolds:
true. But since 1973 (over fifty effing years ago), not a single Arab state has attacked Israel in any significant way. You may recall that was when Egypt and Syria caught Israel by surprise, and on top of the biggest religious Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, and at a time when they had air defenses Vietnam was jealous of.
Since then, nothing. It’s all been against Palestinian groups in Lebanon and Gaza, none of which are even remotely an existential threat.
Donald Trump is contemptible swine.
@Kathy:
Not an existential threat? You don’t think living under the constant fear of missile attacks from Gaza or Lebanon is an existential threat? How do you work, educate your kids, go out for dinner, do all the normal things when Hamas and Hezbollah think it’s funny to fire missiles at you, all while openly threatening to exterminate you? No, it’s not tanks rolling in, but it’s not something that we would ever tolerate for a minute. Imagine if Mexico decided whenever they felt like it, to fire missiles into Dallas. How many minutes would pass before our F-16’s took off?
The Arab states, and now Iran, have been neutralized by Israeli military power. (And in the case of Jordan and Egypt, generous American bribes). Israel forced peace on the Arab states and are now using that same brute power to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. IOW, Israeli military force has worked amazingly well. Right? More than 50 years of peace between the nations. Kumbaya.
There is a persistent belief, especially among Americans, that violence doesn’t work. We want to believe that, and we of course love the Hollywood myth of the underdog who can rise up and throw off the more powerful oppressor. But as you point out, the US, using brute military power, stole half of Mexico and have the underdogs taken any of that back?
The reason we still have wars is that violence has a long history of working all too well. Look at the checklist of Israel’s enemies: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, the PLO, Iran and Hezbollah, all neutered by the IDF. Only the rump of Hamas remains. From the Israeli POV, they’re doing now what has worked well for them.
@Kathy:
Because the two key players, Jordan and Egypt, decided to quit the contest.
As did the Arabians.
That left only Syria remaining of the “rejectionist” group as a neighbour.
And the Assads were never foolish enough to contemplate taking on Israel alone.
The rest of the “rejectionists” were in no position to mount attacks: Libya, Iraq, etc
More recently replaced by Iran: which had a Hezbollah proxy capable of misile attacks, but no more.
The folly of the Palestinians was in mistaking the rejectionist rhetoric for reality, and not accepting the Israeli offer in 2000, and fantasising that largely performative “resistance” and periodic missile strikes and other minor attacks would somehow magically produce the collapse of Israel.
The folly of the Israeli right was, and is, that eventually they would be in a position to annex and settle the entirerty of mandatory Palestine without severe consequences.
@Michael Reynolds:
If Israel reject a “two state” outcome, it’s only alternative is “one state”.
One state based on the reduction of the Plaestinians to a permanent underclass, and the “clearance” of most of Gaza and the West Bank for will not be accepted by Europe.
And European comprehensice sanctions would mean the collapse of the Israeli economy.
@Michael Reynolds:
No, not even close. Not even in the same ballpark.
Threat does not equal Existential threat.
@Michael Reynolds:
You’re using “existential” in the degraded vernacular sense of “bad”, not the proper dictionary sense. I mention this not to be pedantic but because you offer a purely semantic response to @Kathy: who made a reasonable point.
And I’ll add that we still have wars not because they work, for the most part they don’t. And when they do, it’s usually at a cost hugely disproportionate to the gain.
If there is no 2 state solution (and I agree that it’s not feasible in the foreseeable future), then the alternative is a single apartheid state.
Israel is losing support in younger generations who don’t remember the Holocaust, or the multiple Arab state attacks on them, or the Cold War mentality that saw the Western oriented Israel as a vital bulwark against the Arab nations allied with the Soviet Union. They see Israel being the bully. In the long run I feel that will work for them about as well as it did for South Africa’s whites, and thus my belief that supporting Israel’s actions now is the equivalent of cheering as they dig their own grave.
@Michael Reynolds:
In fact, the putative Palestinian state was propmptly extirpated by the Arabs: Tranjordan annexed the West Bank (and renamed itself Jordan), and Egypt similary with Gaza,
Egypt, Syria and (rather reluctantly. Jordan) then proceeded to wage “limited war” against Israel: Plaesinian fedayeen attackin the Negev, artillery bombardments of Gallilee from the Golan, blockade of the Straits of Tiran, etc etc.
The Arabs held Gaza and the West Bank, and, including the PLO, did sod all to establish a Palestinian state, while continuing to call for the extirpation of Israel and mounting attacks upon it.
Given this history, it’s hardly surprising that Israelis rather doubt Arab bona fides on this issue.
There is also the other major factor of the period 1948 to 1967: the consequences of the resentment and rage at Israel’s survival, that resulted in the persecutions and pogroms of the Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East and North Africa.
Leading to the massive migration of the Mizrahi to Israel, which entirely changed the ethnic makeup of Israeli Jews: from being mostly of recent European descent to being majority of recent Middle Eastern descent.
And with bitter memories of their treatment, and even less inclined to trust in Arab benevolence.
And who subsequently became the key voting bloc of Likud and several other right-wing parties.
It’s the Mizrahi who make the common US characterisation of Israelis as Europeans, or “whites” in the US convention, rather silly.
They were mostly Arabic speakers, largely “Arabized” in culture, and generally totally indistinguishble from other peoples of the Middle East
(The ability of Mizrahi to “pass” for Arabs, or Iranians, etc, has probably often been highly significant for the sucess of Israeli security/intelligence operations.)
@gVOR10:
Being hit by a missile is pretty existential for those who get hit.
And Israelis are entirely aware of the reasoning of the (former) Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran “alliance of resistance”: that continuing missile strikes would wreck the economy of key areas of Israel, and lead to a general collapse of Iraeli morale, and then general economic failure and emigration.
It’s entirely “underpants gnomes” but no less annoying to Isrealis because of that.
Incidentally, the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023 caused massive casualties in the north-west Negev kibbutzim that were one of the strongholds of the Israeli peace movement.
Once again, the Palestinian “leadership” comprehensively f@cks itself.
Maybe the tariffs ate your job.
TL;DR: the number of new jobs for the first quarter was revised down by 911,000.
When the July report came out, the time EL Taco fired the BLS commissioner, some on the wingnut sphere claimed it was hugely positive. That it meant millions of illegal immigrants had lost their jobs, and had been replaced by true red US born genuine real Murikan citizens.
They shut up when the BLS commissioner was fired…
Now they can claim all those jobs were lost between Jan 1st and Jan 19th, right?
They will never admit El Taco’s policies are working as expected.
@Kathy: Related, farmers seem to be having a bad time of it lately, and some are asking the government for help.
I would be ok with eliminating some of the tax cuts to the wealthy in Trump’s BBB to fund a bailout, I guess. I’m pretty reasonable and pragmatic.
Maybe we could buy up some of the excess to raise prices, and then distribute the soy and grains to poorer areas of the world.
Also, maybe they should look to increasing demand for soy in the US. They’ve already found the term “soy boy,” but they’ve really screwed up the associations but that can be fixed with something earthy and catchy, like “Beef, it’s what’s for dinner.”
How about: “It’s not gay if he’s a soy boy.”
Just spitballing.
@Kathy:
The wingnut sphere includes the administration. After last week’s job report, White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett told a press gaggle, “the unemployment rates have ticked up a little bit, but you know, right now, uh, we’re highly confident with the trends that native born workers are replacing, uh, the illegal workers…” The press event then concluded, so we didn’t get to hear about the kinds of jobs or industries where that’s been happening.
@JohnSF:
It would do damage, but with the full, unconditional and virtually unlimited support of the US it’s highly, if not extremely, unlikely it would result in a total collapse.
@dazedandconfused:
It’s highly likely to.
Israel sends about a third of it’s exports to Europe, and receives about a third of it’s imports from there.
Consequence of loss of about a third of traded GDP is dire.
The US is unlikely to be able to provide prompt subsitution of all said export markets and imported goods.
Besides which, I’m not really thinking about the immediate future, but potentialities a decade or more down the line.
At present a major brake on European action re. Israel is the potential damage to the Atlantic Alliance.
If that alliance system breaks down anyway, that factor ceases to be so imperative.
I see that RFK, Jr. wants more studies on adverse effects of vaccines. Who is going to do those studies? They have laid off 10,000 workers at the health care agencies. https://www.renalandurologynews.com/news/thousands-laid-off-from-nih-fda-and-cdc-after-supreme-court-decision/
I guess the remaining workers will be incentivized to give the answers, the right answers
@Gustopher:
Soy is a phytoestrogen. No real Murikan would even look at it. That’s why it gets dumped on China 😀
@Eusebio:
Manypeoplesaythat Wingnuts produce the best bullshit. And they are proud of it.
@Slugger:
“ChatGPT, write a report on the effects of vaccines from the point of view of the measles virus.”
Wow. I put the question to Copilot, powered by GPT. It began to answer, then the gatekeeper shut it down. I coaxed it a bit, and it came up with this:
Why would the gatekeeper object?
It didn’t when I asked what the measles virus thinks of RFK Jr (SPOILER ALERT: it rather likes him).
Just to be clear, an existential threat is one that can either/or 1) wipe your country off the map, 2) conquer all or most of your land, 3) impose its rule on you, and for dictatorial systems 4) topple your regime and replace it with something else.
Hamas can’t do even 1% of that to Israel. It could, and did, to the PLO in Gaza.
IMO, whether a two state solution is feasible or not, it’s the only rational option. Incorporating Palestinians into Israel with equal rights and especially equal voting rights, that would be an existential threat to Israel as a Jewish state. Continuing the apartheid regime, especially while taking more land int eh West Bank and possibly in gaza, will get Israel the same treatment South Africa got in the 80s and 90s. And that’s also an existential threat.
@Kathy:
Damage to trade and price increases impacts the econmy as predictable and predicted.
News at 11.
@Gustopher:
Maybe the US might look at the euro-weenies for advice upon the agricultural support, and regional development programmes, and welfare safety nets, and investment funding, that have raised much of the European rural regions from dirt-poor peasant farmers to prosperity over the last 75 years?
Oh, silly me, I forget: that’s SOCIALISM! eek!
@Kathy:
Doubtless the American workers can readily take the jobs vacated by migrant workerrs.
And will be happy with the same wages?
Or if not so happy, they can surely be paid at at higher rates, with zero impacts on the profitability of those businesses and/or imapcts on outpust prices?
Really nutty thing about all this performative bullshit is that the same effect could have more easily been achieved by effective tax-related ID and penalties on businesses employing undocumented workers.
A thought that is finally beginning to occur to the dimwits in Westmister as well: enforce labour laws, and the migrant “illicit economy” shrivels.
You still have the impact on business profits and prices, but you can also mitigate those via tax policy.
@Gustopher:
@Kathy:
How inconveniet for MAGA that soy protein has been a rather large component of east-Asian diets for centuries, without notably transforming said east-Asians into transexual transvestites from Transylvania.
The MAGA thing about soy is just another example of how weird they are. 🙂
@Kathy:
The “rejectionist” aka “alliance of resistance” plan (for arbitrary values of “plan”) was that continued Hamas/Hezbollah missile strikes, backed up by Iranian ragional power, eventually to be underpinned by an Iranian nuclear deterrent, would induce an economic and morale crisis in Israel, leading to its collapse.
It was entirely silly, but it was intended to be existential.
Expecting Israel to tolerate missile strikes on an ongoing basis would be a bit similar to expecting any other country to do so, if it has an alternative. Such alternatives including the massive destruction of those engaged in such actions.
The concepts of the “rejectionists” have always been delusions rooted in either short-term political advantage seeking (Nasser, Baath, etc) or a rather irrational conviction that Isreal was an “artificial state” contrary to the Will of God and/or the the “end of imperialism”. Or whatever.
The problem is persuading the ultra-democratic Israeli polity to a consensus that a “Greater Israel” solution is untenable. Both Shamir, and eventually Sharon, saw this. And many Israelis still think so. But many others, especially the Mizrahi, still see it as the best option, and be damned to intentational opinion. In part because of their inherited feelings regarding the Arabs who drove their families to migrate to Israel in the first place.
And the consistent evidence of many Palestians (and others) that they still desire the extirpation of Israel.
So why compromise with those who want you dead and gone?
Then on the other side of the equation, getting the Palestinians to accept that the concept of Israel somehow disappearing is a pure fantasy, that there is going to be no “right of return” etc.
And that the Iranian mullahs and pasdarini are also attempting to live in a world of delusion, and are perfectly prepared to sacrifice any number of Arabs in general, or Palestinians in particular, in pursuit of their ambitions of Persian power and the return of the Sunni to their rightful allegiance to the heirs of Ali.
@JohnSF: The GDP stat is not solely based on exports and imports. It’s not a third of Israel’s GDP because exports are only about a quarter of Israel’s economy. It’s a third of a quarter.
@JohnSF:
And ginseng too 😉
Biology is messy. I’m not about to delve in the effects of plant hormones in mammals….
@JohnSF:
The broad consensus is that there is no real solution for immigration in the US, because the country needs the cheap(er) labor undocumented immigrants provide, and business leaders like paying them less, or paying less for the products they’re involving in growing or making. therefore curtailing that labor force or, worse yet, regularizing it, would lead to loss of shareholder value (the horror!11!)
But now El Taco is doing just that by deporting a great many such immigrants, and frightening the rest into hiding.
I expect to see higher food prices as supply may eb reduced for lack of people to pick and harvest and process it. I also expect unemployment to keep going up.
We’ll see who wins: reality, or El Taco.
Color me underwhelmed. Apple released a thinner phone.
Big whoop.
Little was said about Apple Intelligence*, and less about a newer, smarter Siri. But the new overpriced earbuds will feature real time translation (well, they claim this).
It feels like Apple’s falling behind. Or maybe it’s just not rushing to join the AI bandwagon. Who knows. Cook et. al. might figure it’s a fad. Or they may figure they have users locked in their walled garden and they’ll never ever leave.
Still no foldable, either…
@dazedandconfused:
I did stipulate a third of the traded economy, did I not?
30% of 25% is still rather large.
You’d be looking at, given the extended links of suppliers of suppliers, domestic demand, etc of at least 10% of GDP.
That’s generally regarded as a rather massive recession.
An then there is the problem of Israel finacing its budget deficit.
(Though in the short term, it migh be better of in that regard thsn France, lol)
But once again, I’m looking further downrange.
It seems unlikely to me that Isreal can thrive purely as some sort of subsidised extension of the US economy over decades.
Given both the rather fickle nature of at least some factions of MAGA, the obvious interests of the European and Middle Eastern states, and the posssible consequencesd of US/Europe strategic disconnection.
Netanyahu has always oriented to a view of “win the Republican right: nothing else matters”
In in that limited regard, he has been a very effective operator in the political diplomacy of DC and the national GoP.
And at playing the Saudis etc in that context.
But he sometimes seems blind to the reality that Isreal exists in a much wider context of power and interest.
And that the peculiar affections of the Southern Baptists may not, in the end, be deteminative.
@Kathy:
How far it’s a matter of “the country needs” vs “businesses desires” is unclear.
The main thing is that if you are going to impact the economy in such a fashion, it’s sensible to staff it out, consider impacts and implications, and related mitigations, and then proceed acording to a lawful and thought out plan.
Especially given the fairly obvious reliance of US horticulture harvesting on cheap migrant labour.
Not just “let’s just kayfabe the bastard, and hope for the best”
Failing to plan = planning to fail.
@JohnSF:..Really nutty thing about all this performative bullshit is that the same effect could have more easily been achieved by effective tax-related ID and penalties on businesses employing undocumented workers.
Trump doesn’t want to punish Red, White and Blue American business owners. Those are his supporters.
I think that the performative bullshit demonstrates to white, christian nationalist MAGA that Trump will be as tough and cruel to the foreigners that he knows they despise as he ships them off to the punishment they deserve just because they exist.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Indeed, and when the foretold economic benefits fail to eventuate, and the costs emerge, it will doubtless be back to “shoot the messenger”, and “we’ve stopped the gangs” and “inflation, what’s that?”, and “you ARE better off, becuase reasons” and “lol, yr pwnd, libtards!”.
Which is all very well, for an arbitrary value of “very well”, but in the end I suspect a lot of Americans may stop emoting about “who’s pwned?” and start thinking “why am I, in point of fact, still getting the shitty end of the stick?”.
The politics of resentment may carry you a long way; but the politics of actual benefit still get a vote in the end.
Meanwhile in Poland:
Multiple Russian drones reported in Polish airspace.
Polish air force engaging.
Summary: oh shit.
And if anyone thinks this was an accident: I’ve a line on some nice ocean front property in Moscow up for sale.