The Biggest Tent: The Bigots’ Tent

After its traumatic collapse in the 2024 elections, the Democrat Party, doing some serious soul-searching, announced that it would conduct and publish a “post-mortem” analyzing the reasons for its defeat and providing suggestions for reversing the result in the future. The analysis was completed but never published, likely because it was determined that its publication would cause more harm and division than benefit.

Not surprisingly, given the nature of politics and politicians, the substance of the report leaked and was published by Axios and others. A significant portion of the blame was attributed to the inexcusable delay in replacing the obviously diminished, possibly demented, President, the failure to acknowledge the problem timely, and the imperious, undemocratic manner in which Vice-President Harris was designated to head the ticket.

But the Democrats remained befuddled by the loss; after all, they had all the most progressive and popular policies: open borders, defunding the police, DEI, antagonism to fossil fuels in favor of costly and inefficient technologies, including electric vehicles, relaxation of criminal laws and sentencing, opposition to climate change, coddling illegal aliens, failing to respond to the homeless problem. They were running against Donald Trump. How could they have lost?

Perhaps Biden and Harris were too soft on Israel? Yup. The report suggests that support for Israel was a key factor, focusing extensively on the Middle East and the failure of Biden and Harris to oppose Israel and get behind the beleaguered Palestinians in Gaza. This, suggested the authors of the report, alienated core and young voters. They reached this conclusion after consulting with, among others, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, the IMEU Policy Project.

I have not seen the report. However, by virtue of some hard-nosed reporting and a good measure of imagination, I have been able to reconstruct a wholly fabricated transcript, not of the post-mortem itself, but of the deliberations concerning the strategy the party plans to adopt going forward, to avoid a recurrence of the 2024 disaster. Events have made these deliberations easy to visualize.  

For ease of reference, I am consolidating the arguments into those made by younger democrats (YD) and those made by older democrats (OF).

YD: As you know, we’ve been examining the appeal of certain policies to a constituency that will comprise a winning coalition, and we’ve come up with two sure fire winners, either one of which would guarantee a victory, but which, combined, will provide us with popular and electoral landslides as well as a mandate to gut the Supreme Court, eighty-six the filibuster, eliminate fossil fuels, and restore DEI and BLM to their former prominence.

OF:  Not so sure about the filibuster, but that sounds terrific. What are they?

YD: We want a stripped down Party platform with as few planks as possible. To build a winning coalition, we need to espouse only those policies supported by a significant majority of Democrats. We have distilled it down to two planks: we hate Zionism and we hate Jews.

OF: Oh, my! Isn’t that antisemitic?

YD:  Not exactly. Because we hate Zionism also. Once you say that you hate Zionism, because it is racist, sexist, genocidal, and Islamophobic, anything else you say is made permissible by association. That’s how Hamas gets away with war crimes, kidnaping, rape, homophobia, etc. Anti-Zionism launders them.

OF: But what about the hating Jews part?

YD: Get real. Once anti-Zionism makes it kosher, so to speak, who do you think doesn’t hate Jews? You need to get over your antiquated thinking. We are striving to populate the biggest tent possible. What policy other than the antisemitic anti-Zionist agenda will unite supporters of Hasan Piker (who believes America deserved 9/11), Tucker Carlson (who believes Trump is the antichrist), Bernie Sanders (who believes the US should not support Israel), Zohran Mamdani (who opposes protection for synagogues), Graham Platner (who sports an SS Totenkampf tattoo on his chest), Nick Fuentes (an avowed racist and antisemite), AOC (who opposes defensive weapons for Israel), Marjorie Taylor Greene (who avers that no one can be elected President of the US without pledging allegiance to Israel), Candace Owens (who refers to Zionists as satanic), and Abdul El-Sayed (who thinks Israel embodies evil)?  

OF: You think the followers of all those people will support us if we just adopt a policy of unmitigated Jew-hatred?

YD: Absolutely. Can’t miss. We even have slogans that have proven themselves effective in past electoral contests: “The Jews are the eternal archenemy of the human race. They manipulate, corrupt, and destroy societies.” That’s right out of an international best seller called “Mein Kampf.” Or this one, from the same book: “The Jew’s existence is a crime against humanity, and the only solution is his removal from our midst.” You don’t think that will get us votes at Harvard, Columbia, and Michigan? “From the river to the sea” and “Intifada forever” are so last year.

OF:  I see your point. But won’t we lose the Jewish vote and Jewish support?

YD: Wow! You really are behind the times. On the contrary. The most influential newspapers in Israel (both Hebrew and Anglo) detest and revile the Israeli government, and abhor Netanyahu. Jews supported Mamdani in significant numbers, and he froths at the mouth whenever he talks about Jews and Israel; it appears not to bother the Jews. There are Reform congregations throughout the US that are so fearful of being associated with Jewish causes that they seize every opportunity to shout their progressive distaste for all things related to the Jewish religion. Rabbis who will go to jail opposing ICE won’t say a single word against Iran, Hamas, or Hezbollah. We will have fifty Rabbis named Jill and Sally leading our marches and tikkuning the olam, whatever that means. We’ll get funding from Soros. We’ll have Jewish pundits like Beinart and Friedman applauding our brave new posture, taking on the hierarchy of Jewish supremacy. And we will have Ezra Klein, Taylor Lorenz, and the New York Times.

OF: I see your point. Hating Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Zionism seems to be in vogue. But I don’t feel completely comfortable abandoning the only democracy in the Middle East. We have a long history of supporting Israel.

ND: You mean the Zionist entity that occupies stolen land, commits genocide, and starves children?

OF: That is such crap. We all know that Israel inside the 1948 boundaries is completely legitimate by any legal analysis, and the other areas are disputed. From whom was it stolen? Jordan? Jordan abandoned the land. Egypt? Egypt abandoned the land. And there has never been an Arab Palestine. The only people who want to commit genocide or kill children are Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah. This other stuff is propaganda for the ignorant.

ND: Listen. We aren’t dealing with truth, accuracy, or history here. We want to win elections. Just listen to Jamie Raskin saying that the Supreme Court is illegitimate and gerrymandered, whatever that means. Listen to Coons and Murphy trying to deny the Zionist entity arms to defend itself. Listen to all the old Obama employees defending their idiotic failed policies towards Iran. Truth does not matter to our voters. We want the biggest tent possible. We want to win. Attacking Jews is a time-honored and proven strategy. We are going with it. Get on board or get lost.

OF: I am feeling really uncomfortable with this whole thing. It sounds so . . . Nazi.

ND: Listen, half our voters don’t remember Nazis or think that the Jews are Nazis.  Half of them don’t acknowledge that there was a holocaust or that there were atrocities committed on October 7. The world is sick of Jews. They are everywhere and they make everything worse. That is why this strategy is so great.

OF: But there are only 15 million Jews in the entire world, 0.2% of the population.  There are 2.3 billion Christians and 2 billion Muslims. Israel occupies less than 0.15% of the world’s land mass. Why can’t we just leave them alone? Isn’t there any way that we can win the election without spewing these awful lies? Can’t we just reject the podcast haters and educate our constituencies to the truth, the case for a Jewish homeland, the right of Israel to survive and defend itself, the injustice implicit in Jew hatred?

ND:  No. Because we want to win the election.

OF: And what happens if we are successful and there are no more Jews?

ND: We’ll try Kamala Harris again. We will still have the biggest tent, full of the biggest bigots.