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On compromised "leaders"


This bit of news came across my feed yesterday:
Before Benny Gantz joined Binyamin Netanyahu's government after the October 7 pogrom, the coalition had 64 seats in the Knesset. One must assume that some of his own pre-attack coalition, as well as Gantz's party, signed onto this petition.

However, the war cabinet seems bent on ignoring their own cease-fire proposal. Certainly Netanyahu is. His concern with the "day after" isn't what kind of political regime takes the reins in Gaza; no, it's for his own skin, on whether he will spend years in prison due to corruption. His only chance to avoid that fate is to continue the war and placate his rabid right-wing coalition members, led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who not only want to expel all Palestinians from Gaza, but also declare war on Hezbollah in Lebanon. (To bring you up to speed: Hezbollah isn't Hamas. Their rockets can reach deep into Israel from the north. And Israel has not had much success in its Levantine wars.)

We can argue until we're blue in the face about the possibility of eradicating an ideology by force of arms. We certainly failed in 1865 and 1945. Such ideologies, really, can only be smashed by constant care and education. Arms only work in defeating the states which espouse those ideologies. Uprooting them and consigning them to the dustbin cannot be done by guns and tanks. (It's no surprise that the far-right has its base in East Germany, a country which accepted no responsibility for the horrors of the concentration camps, unlike its western counterpart. If you don't teach a thing, you don't learn a thing.)

Compare Netanyahu to Donald Trump. Like Netanyahu, Trump is exclusively concerned with his own fate, and keeping himself out of prison. He's not running for election with a positive program for the country. His only manifesto is to stay out of jail. And he will sell himself to whomever he needs to to keep that hope alive. 

The fact of the matter is that leadership attracts people who are not fit for it. They gravitate to it because of hubris and wanton self-regard. They want power not to effect good, but for its own sake. Power is its own end, divorced from broader policy concerns. Donald Trump is the closest we've come to in this country to The Party from Nineteen Eighty-Four. As the Inner Party member O'Brien tells poor, tortured Winston Smith: the purpose of power is power. It has no other function for men and women like him. Power is a thing unto itself, its own justification. Power's rewards are worth condemning most of humanity to slavery. It is, quite frankly, an addiction.

Men like Trump and Netanyahu care nothing for the people they ostensibly represent. In the oft-quoted metaphor, they wouldn't stop to piss on you if you were on fire. They see their followers as rubes and gullible patsies, perfect to maintain their grip on office. Fools and morons, they siphon off the energy their followers give them. They screw them over, and make them glad to be screwed over, because in some ancillary fashion they will also screw over the people their followers hate. They stoke hatred, and then use that hatred to keep themselves on top, or attempt to. And their followers are too blinkered to realize they're being used.

Of course, this works for only so long. Another of the hate-mongering world leaders, Narendra Modi of India, was expecting to be returned to Parliament with a massive majority. His docile media released early exit polls forecasting his coalition of gaining four hundred seats. Instead? His coalition cobbled together a bare majority in the election, with the long-dormant Congress Party, the party of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, surging back to life and becoming an actual opposition after years of Modi's dominance. Yes, Modi will return to power. But he will be much diminished. And his fall in fortune is due to the marginalized communities which he has oppressed during his administration. They turned out and denied him a supermajority. They cut him down to size. 

That is how you defeat autocrats. You stare them down and you don't blink. You may not win outright, but you lay the groundwork for future victory. It's really the only way.

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