A short post today, as I’m in what, please God, will be one of the last production stretches on The Legend of Skokie. Speaking of which, the book is available for pre-order, and you should pre-order it now! Rick Perlstein agrees:

Pre-orders are key to a book’s success. It doesn’t really matter where you order it, but calling your local independent bookstore to request it helps a lot.

Two elections a week apart are putting strongly held beliefs to the test. The first is, of course, the U.S. midterms, voting for which ends Tuesday. (If you haven’t yet, you may be able to vote today or this weekend, depending on your state.) The second is the election in Israel, voting for which ended two days ago, though who will govern as a result is still very much in doubt.

In Israel, voters rejected wanted war criminal, indicted fraudster, and alleged October 7 enabler Benjamin Netanyahu’s bid for a seventh term as prime minister in parliament, giving parties opposed to him 67 seats in the Knesset to his bloc’s 53. The trouble is that opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot and much of his would-be governing coalition have so far refused to count 19 seats that went to anti-Netanyahu parties, and are therefore poised to fall short of the 61-seat threshold needed to form a government. Why would any self-proclaimed democrat reject a resounding victory? Because most of the voters for the parties in question were Palestinian.

I made a video about the state of play yesterday for the visually inclined:

Some commenters questioned what I meant when I said, more or less, that failing to form a governing coalition with Palestinian citizens of Israel would be the death knell to claims that Israel is a democracy. If many Jewish voters in the Eisenkot bloc don’t want to form a coalition with the Arab-majority Joint List and Ra’am, isn’t that just respecting the voters' will? Others said that, of course, Israel isn’t a democracy and never has been.

Both camps have a point. But I think they both miss the bigger picture. For the former, it’s important to understand the difference between electoralism and democracy. Democracy isn’t just, as the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot once wrote, “a matter of procedures of access to political power.” Hitler famously came to power through constitutional coalition politics after Germany’s November 1932 election; that didn’t make him a democrat. Democracy also requires respect for people’s rights and the rule of law as determined by the people, pluralism, and the opportunity for new constituencies to form and choose new leaders.

If nearly all of a country’s political parties are built along exclusively ethnic lines, and if voters for the parties of a disadvantaged minority cannot even hope to be allowed to help choose a country’s leader—even after said parties nearly doubled their previous representation, and placed fourth and six, respectively, out of 38 total parties on the ballot—then how do you have a democracy in any real sense? If the Eisenkot bloc is willing to give up power and consign Israelis to two or more years of the leadership they rejected just so it doesn’t have to accede to requests for crime prevention, community investment, and a “genuine Jewish-Arab partnership” in government, then they aren’t democrats. They’re just ethno-nationalists, functionally no different from the far right they claim to despise.

As for the other camp, no political philosophy has ever been fully realized or existed in a vacuum. (Mussolini never achieved his plans for the “Fascist corporate state,” and the Nazis barely tried. The Soviet Union insisted throughout its existence that it had not yet actually achieved communism.) Some political philosophers argue that the United States could not even claim to be a democracy until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made the Fifteenth Amendment a reality. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s also important to understand how ground-level democracy—the Democratic Party's internal reformation throughout the 20th century, the sacrifices of civil-rights protesters, and other bottom-up pressures on Congress and the Johnson White House—made the VRA possible. And the backsliding on all those principles has unraveled many of its protections.

Which brings us back to the United States. Just like Bibi, who is going on an Arab demonization tour aimed at discrediting the election he lost, Trump is furiously sowing doubts ahead of Tuesday night’s results, which polls suggest could be a historic wipeout for the Republicans. Much of our opposition party, meanwhile, like the Eisenkot bloc, can’t decide whether it would rather win power or leave it in fascist hands if it means elevating left-wing candidates or, in Michigan at least, a charismatic Muslim. We’ll see soon enough.