Target Selection

I started listening to The Rest is Politics out of the United Kingdom a few months ago, at the suggestion of a British coworker, and have been really enjoying it. Mainly because politics here in the United States can be a drag, and it's nice to hear about what's going on elsewhere for a change. TRiP, however, had other ideas, and has spun up a third weekly episode, hosted by Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci, to talk about American politics in the run-up to the presidential election in November.

During their first episode, one of the points that Ms. Kay made concerned political cynicism. She noted that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had gone to the Columbia University campus to excoriate the administration there on their handling to anti-Israel protests over the current war in Gaza, but, back in 2017 (when the Speaker was still a freshman Representative) he'd had nothing to say on the matter. (Google appears to back her up on this.)

I don't know if I'd term it political cynicism so much as political expediency. Parties don't garner very many votes by criticizing their voters. President Trump made his infamous statement: "They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides," not because he was attempting to praise neo-Nazis and White nationalists, but because he understood that Republican voters are considered part of the American Right, and a blanket condemnation of the politically Right activists at the rally would have hurt him. Likewise, Speaker Johnson has a lot to say about real and imagined antisemitism on college campuses specifically because Republican voters have come to see universities as bastions of the Left, so "Standing With Israel," has no political cost. Neither does turning on the very college president who passed muster when they were summoned to Capitol Hill to be grilled on how they would handle protests.

As the American political landscape drifts further and further into two camps made up of people who believe that the other hates them, the real and imagined mutual hostility between them becomes fertile ground for politicians (who are partisan more or less by definition) to play up those feelings as a means of displaying their own loyalties and (genuine or expedient) hostilities. Right now, college campuses where there are demonstrations, and the administrators are unready, unwilling or unable to put an end to them are target-rich environments for Republican lawmakers looking to prove that they have little tolerance for anyone further to the political Left than themselves. It's the nature of the game.