JOE HILDEBRAND: Baited by the bauble: How the outrage-obsessed left ended up backing Iran.
For an activist class famous obsessed with being “on the right side of history” and who love to condemn others for “the company you keep”, it is a masterclass in hypocrisy that would be ingenious if it wasn’t so dopily unwitting.
It is obvious to everybody – except them — where I am going with this. The activist left has been so consumed by its hatred of Israel and Donald Trump that it has ended up on the side of Iran.
And not even just Iran, but the Iranian regime who the Iranian people themselves despise for decades of brutal oppression.
This is a government that is almost cartoonishly evil and yet somehow the most self-declaredly politically astute minds on the internet have been effortlessly goaded into backing it or its interests simply on the basis that if Israel and Trump are against it then they must be for it.
This might come with disclaimers that they don’t support the regime – the old “I’m not a racist but …” — or be couched in some pretence of principle but it amounts to the same thing.
If forced to choose between Israel and Iran or Trump and Iran, these guys are going all the way with the Ayatollah.
Their embrace of Iran is a vestige of the Obama years, when Obama did everything he could to facilitate a nuclear-armed Iran as a counterweight to Israel in the Middle East. But this reactionary impulse in general among the left has been prevalent for a long time: Tevi Troy: Mastering data before Google: Remembering the legacy of Ben Wattenberg.
Wattenberg did not just complain. He tried to offer the Democrats a way out: Democrats “will serve their country and their party better if they acknowledge that their real problem — which is the issues they have come to represent — than they will by trumpeting a phony one, that television did them in. A wrong diagnosis yields a wrong remedy.” He also warned Democrats to avoid what he called “the Reagan trap”: “Reagan said, several million times, that government is not the solution — it’s the problem. Many Democrats took the bait. If Reagan said government was so very bad, and Reagan was such a silly fellow, then Democrats must therefore say government is so very good. Trap snaps! Republicans win the White House.” This dynamic sure sounds a lot like how Democrats deal with our current president — and Wattenberg would have liked the alliterative sound of “the Trump trap.”
As Glenn concluded his latest Substack: Five Takes on Bombing Iran.
I do think the Democrats attacking this action are once again on the 20% end of an 80/20 issue.
Iran, as I mentioned above, seems to be an example of the “irrational regime hypothesis,” in which the actions needed to achieve internal power in a regime are at odds with the actions needed to succeed in the outside world. (World War II Japan is a classic example.) But it looks as if the Democratic Party today is another such irrational regime, in which the actions needed to move up the ladder with internal activists and donors are counterproductive in the larger world.
It generally takes a big shock to overcome this dynamic once it’s in place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki did it for the Japanese. The Israeli/American air campaign may do it for Iran. I have no idea what might turn around the Democratic Party.
It’s going to take more than losing another election, though.
In the meantime though, their reactions this week will be astounding to watch:
