On What We Are Permitted to Notice
The Atlantic has a piece this week about Zohran Mamdani and his views on Israel. I must confess something before we proceed.
I have almost no space in my mind for that question right now.
Not because it is unimportant in the abstract. Not because Mamdani’s views are beyond scrutiny. But because I have been forced — by the evidence available to me, through the application of ordinary reason — to downgrade Israel’s moral standing as a subject of my civic attention. And I want to be precise about why.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt, post-truth populist demagogue, currently under criminal indictment in his own country, who has literally attempted to seize control of his nation’s Supreme Court in order to keep himself out of jail. He is a man who, by the documented accounts of his own former intelligence officials, channeled money to Hamas in Gaza to pursue a divide-and-rule strategy against the Palestinian Authority. He is a man who has made himself politically dependent on the Israeli far-right — men whose views on Arab life would not be out of place in the literature of the 1930s.
This man has manipulated the machinery of the United States federal government, operating under color of Article II of the Constitution, to bring us head-first into a war that Congress has not authorized and the American people did not choose.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed.
Most of you have not yet begun to feel what that means. You will. The price of everything that moves by ship — which is most things — is about to change in ways that will take years to fully register. This is not a foreign policy abstraction. This is your grocery bill, your heating bill, the cost of the goods your children need. It is a global energy catastrophe, detonated without a declaration of war, without a vote, without the consent of the legislature that the Constitution designates as the sole authority to commit this nation to armed conflict.
This is the emergency. This is what I cannot look away from.
And so when a publication of The Atlantic‘s stature asks me to direct my attention toward whether Mamdani’s views on the moral architecture of the Israel-Palestine conflict represent a political liability — I notice something. I notice that I am being asked to look somewhere else. Whether by intention or by the ordinary gravitational pull of the news cycle, I am being invited to examine the opinions of the Mayor of New York City about a foreign policy dispute, rather than the constitutional crisis unfolding in front of us.
I decline the invitation.
I am aware that there exists, in certain elite networks, a Pollyanna of a different kind. Its milieu is the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the podcasts of the post-Trump respectable right, the parlors of people who regard The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project as projects not worth being taken seriously. Grifters, they say of Tim Miller, Jonathan V. Last, Bill Kristol, and Sarah Longwell—I think they’re patriots personally. But in this milieu, a story is being told about Marco Rubio.
The story goes like this: Rubio, in his Florsheim shoes, is the steadying force. The adult in the room. The man who will repair the damage, reassure the allies, restore the norms — and ride, eventually, to the relief of suburban soccer moms everywhere. Bari Weiss and the crowd around her have not quite abandoned this hope. It is the last respectable off-ramp before the destination becomes undeniable.
I say this with as much precision as I can manage: this is a story you can only believe if you have placed your head completely inside your own ass and left it there.
The most reliable method by which power sustains itself is not censorship. It is redirection. It is the management of attention. It is the gentle, persistent suggestion that the proper object of your civic concern is somewhere other than where the actual emergency is located.
The Rubio story and the Mamdani story are the same story, told from opposite ends of the same editorial impulse. Both redirect. Both manage. Both suggest that the proper object of your attention is somewhere other than the Strait of Hormuz, closed to the safe transit of oil, and the Article I violation that put it there.
Marco Rubio will never win an election to high office in this country again.
I too have been offered proposals that Rubio will be the saviour. Apparently he’s written some seriously dense and well-researched papers on China, for instance. I respect that. I don’t think he’s dumb. But so far I haven’t been convinced that there’s much daylight between him and the goals set by Project 25. I remember him sitting there mute, while trump, vance and various WH freeloaders humiliated Zelenskyy last year. Was he once an honourable man? If so, that man is gone.
Call me captain obvious over her but it appears that the world is moving faster than the Atlantic’s editorial decisions.