How polarizing leaders are really followers and other notable comments
Conservative Take: Our Leaders Are Really Just Followers
Political violence from both sides of the aisle seems to be growing, says National Review’s David French. But it’s wrong to blame elected officials or influential pundits. We’re seeing “the day-to-day radicalization of otherwise ordinary folks, transmitted through social media, and amplified through overblown political rhetoric.” Take, for example, the Democrats’ elevation of Rep. Maxine Waters as a hero of the “resistance.” Waters has long held a reputation as a deeply corrupt supporter of leftist violence. Then there’s Steve Bannon, under whose leadership Brietbart.com became the platform for the alt-right, who has a White House office. Says French: “Our politicians and personalities aren’t leading the people. They’re following, and they’re following the people straight into the kind of polarized nightmare that we haven’t seen since the bad days of the late 1960s and early 1970s.”
The View from Israel: When Palestinians Get Honest
Israeli journalist Zvi Barel went to Greece looking for Syrian refugees and found thousands of Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Now safe in the West, they gave Barel a uniform, honest explanation of why they left Gaza: Hamas. Not Israel, but their own Palestinian government. This illustrates a weakness in Western reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Evelyn Gordon points out at Commentary: “a failure to understand the way fear affects what people say in nondemocratic societies.” That is, for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, “blaming anyone other than Israel for their problems risks serious repercussions from either their own governments or vigilante groups affiliated with both” Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. “Responsible journalists, NGOs, and diplomats” should “take this fear factor into account and try to dig a little deeper to try to get at the truth.”
British PM: Enough Is Enough
In the wake of this weekend’s London terror attacks, four things must change, British Prime Minister Theresa May declared in remarks Sunday. First, Islamist extremism must be defeated not only through military means but by turning “people’s minds away from this violence and make them understand that our values — pluralistic British values — are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.” Second, the Internet’s “safe spaces” for this extremism must be punctured. Third, terrorists’ real-world safe spaces must be combated as well: “Yes, that means taking military action to destroy ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But it also means taking action here at home.” Fourth, “we need to review Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy to make sure the police and security services have all the powers they need.”
Libertarian: Why Dems Failed on Climate Change
The Federalist’s David Harsanyi points to an interesting dynamic on climate change: “When it comes to perfunctorily treating global warming as an evil, Democrats have won.” Yet with regard to policy, they keep losing, mostly “because they’ve hijacked ‘science’ in pursuit of ideologically driven economic policies.” The Paris climate accord, for example, is “substantively a joke.” And the public notices when politicians and activists talk a big game on the risk but then live lifestyles that suggest they don’t take it too seriously. Plus, former President Barack Obama didn’t work toward a public consensus on the need to make tangible sacrifices for the sake of cutting carbon emissions, instead trying “to shift American policy with his pen.” The result is a public inured to Dems’ apocalyptic rhetoric: “No amount of hysteria is going to reverse this dynamic.”
From the Left: Hillary Must Stop Relitigating Her Loss
Hillary Clinton needs to smash her rearview mirror, advises Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post. Clinton blames the media, misogyny, Jim Comey, the DNC — yet it’s time to move forward. It’s not that “she should stay silent. Speaking out against the actions of the Trump administration is warranted, even imperative.” But “enough, already, with the seemingly never-ending, ever-expanding postmortem.” If not for her own sake, than for her party’s: “What Democrats crave most is not wallowing in theories about the defeat; it’s a template for resisting Trump now, and a vision for 2018 and 2020. Clinton’s obsessive summoning of 2016 gives Trump an excuse to change the subject from his missteps.”
Compiled by Seth Mandel