Iran attack is extraordinarily unpopular among Americans
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You almost always get a rally around the flag effect in the immediate aftermath of an attack by the US military, even something as obviously reckless and immoral as the second Iraq war. By contrast:
The number among Republicans is even more striking than the almost total lack of support among Democrats. I would have thought there was almost literally nothing that Trump could do that would produce this level of semi-open dissent on the part of his cult.
The number among Democrats is partially a product of polarization, but even more so the complete lack of effort on the part of the Trump administration to even pretend to provide any actual justification for the attack. The second Bush administration spent months doing nothing but mounting a massive propaganda and public relations campaign for its Middle East military adventure, but characteristically, Trump and the astonishing collection of sycophants, grifters, sociopaths, utterly unqualified ex-Fox News chat show hosts and Wrestlemania impresarios, etc. that now make up his inner circle couldn’t be bothered. (Trump is certain to be enraged when the Iran campaign does nothing for his abysmal approval numbers, or perhaps even hurts them).
This is all the more striking, given that the highly unstable coalition of Likudniks and fundie fans of John the Revelator ‘s greatest literary hits that now makes up the knee-jerk “support for Israel” contingent in American politics is very much smaller than the previously existing coalition, that the various depredations of the Netanyahu government has thoroughly destroyed. Michelle Goldberg:
Netanyahu and his government deserve this growing bipartisan opprobrium. Unfortunately, ordinary Jews are experiencing it as well. I’ve long argued that anti-Zionism and antisemitism aren’t the same thing. Yet as antisemitism rises in the United States, contempt for Israel sometimes gives way to anti-Jewish paranoia and hostility. Carlson doesn’t just disparage Israel; he also hosts white nationalists and Holocaust deniers. And just this week, Uygur’s “Young Turks” colleague Ana Kasparian indulged in an antisemitic outburst on X, writing, “The goyim are waking up. Deal with it.” (She used an obscenity I’m not allowed to repeat here.) Kasparian refused to apologize, insisting that she was merely deploring Israel, even though “goyim” is a Yiddish word for non-Jews, not non-Zionists.
No one is to blame for Kasparian’s bigotry but herself. But Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters. As Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, told me, “When you end up using antisemitism as a pretext for kicking kids out of universities and out of the country, and you use it as a pretext for ending cancer research and use it as a pretext for undercutting the First Amendment, you’re going to get some blowback against the people doing that.”
The blowback will almost certainly get much worse now that Trump, working in concert with Israel, has bombed Iran, just as Netanyahu long hoped. Americans don’t want a war, and Trump hasn’t bothered to explain why he might wage one. In this murk, conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because there will be a grain of truth to them. Friday’s Gallup poll marks a low point in American sentiments toward Israel, but they could still have much further to fall.
The characteristically limp response of the, to use the word very loosely, Democratic party leadership to this fiasco illustrates as well as anything could the need for new people at the top of the party hierarchy:
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) pledged that House Democrats will force a vote on limiting President Trump’s war powers in Iran as he criticized the president for striking the country without explicit congressional authorization.
“The framers of the United States Constitution gave Congress the sole power to declare war as the branch of government closest to the American people,” Jeffries said in a statement Saturday in response to the strikes.
“Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region. However, absent exigent circumstances, the Trump administration must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war,” Jeffries said.
In regard to what sort of effect this type of “Iran Axis of Evil That Must Be Attacked by our Heroic Warriors But On the Other Hand Muh Procedures” response is likely to have among the ever-engaged and keenly informed American marginal voters who decide elections, I’m reminded of a certain Far Side cartoon:
