President Biden and some of his supporters face a Differ We Must problem.
Some voters in a swing state think he is on the wrong side of a fundamental moral issue. The state is Michigan, which narrowly voted for Donald Trump in 2016, voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and has a large Arab-American population—including many who are outraged by Biden’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas.
Arab-Americans form a significant part of the Democratic Party’s coalition in Michigan. Republicans once cultivated this voter group, who include many cultural conservatives and businesspeople. But a decisive majority swung to Democrats after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Despite public statements of support from Republican President George W. Bush, many felt that Bush’s counterterrorism policies targeted them, their families, their countries of origin, and the Muslim faith. Donald Trump later solidified this trend by explicitly promising to ban Muslims from entering the United States, and later enacting as much of this ban as the Supreme Court would allow.
Now many Arab-Americans are dismayed with President Biden over his support for Israel in its war against Hamas. Biden has cautioned Israel’s military against killing civilians as it responds to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, but the U.S. did not prevent thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza or the displacement of most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.
Mary Bruce of ABC News reported on Lexi Zeidan, a Palestinian-American activist in Dearborn who said Biden has lost her vote and nothing can recover it. “Maybe Trump will win, maybe Trump will get in office—and that's to open the eyes and the ears of the rest of the public to say listen, it's going to be short term pain for these next four years. But Democrats will not win Michigan until Democrats are ready to back Palestine.”
From the perspective of left-leaning voters, this raises questions! From an immigrant perspective it may raise even more.
Is another four years of Donald Trump just a little “short-term pain”? Trump has promised to rule as a dictator on his first day, to seek retribution against his enemies, and to stop illegal immigration that he claims is “poisoning the blood” of the country. My colleague Danielle Kurtzleben noted on NPR that the phrase “echoes language Adolf Hitler once used.”
Trump has promised to reinstate and expand his travel ban that was originally intended to target Muslims, and has even promised to extend the ban to Gaza. Given that, as well as the former president’s previous support for Israel, it’s hard to imagine he would be more friendly to Palestinians than Biden has been.
Still Palestinian health authorities have reported more than 18,000 people killed in Gaza, vast numbers of whom were children. My colleague Asma Khalid, on PBS, notes that “survey after survey” finds “a large percentage of his Democratic base, particularly younger voters, but also large swaths of people of color who make up a key part of the Democratic Party, showing that they have reservations about what Israel is doing, and they don't necessarily approve of how President Biden has been handling the situation.”
So this is the Differ We Must problem. In the 1850’s, Abraham Lincoln worked to build a coalition against slavery by working with people who held views he found appalling, but at least agreed with him about slavery. As president in the 1860’s, Lincoln worked to build a majority to support the Union in the Civil War, working even with people who disagreed with him about slavery.
If voters are concerned about Trump, they will need to decide if they consider the threat so grave that they will ally with a president who has followed a policy they consider to be wrong. And as Biden seeks a second term, he may need to appeal to those same voters where possible. Asma Khalid sees some recognition of “domestic political reality” in Biden’s recent remarks critiquing Israel for “indiscriminate bombing.” Biden’s remark at a fundraiser appears to mirror the U.S. policy approach: it has been pressing Israeli forces to take a more targeted approach to the war.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to the book of the same name, which is on sale in this holiday season. I’ve been grateful for the chance to talk with you across most of 2023, and will continue on this platform and elsewhere. Thanks to many of you for your support.
Links:
Danielle Kurtzleben on NPR
Asma Khalid on PBS
Mary Bruce on ABC
One of the things that I found shocking about the Hamas/Israel situation is that much of the divide on the left has come from where individuals are getting their news. The people who spend a lot of time on TikTok get a steady stream of pro-Palestinian news, and as a result (or so it seems to me) are much more pro-Palestinian (and even pro-Hamas) themselves, questioning the authenticity of any news reports that seem favorable to the Israelis. People who consume more mainstream media seem to be more pro-Israeli and/or balanced on the issue. I am used to seeing this divide between the political right and left and their separate news ecosystems, but the same dynamic split progressives has been eye-opening. And it brings up the same question that I have about bridging the right/left divide--how do you differ rationally with someone when you can't agree on the underlying facts of the issue?