The Profound Nihilism of Gaza Voter-Scolding

Shifting the burden from the specific and powerful to the abstract and powerless has blinkered our moral—and political—thinking.

A brief thought experiment if the reader will indulge me. Biden wakes up every day at exactly 8:00 a.m., walks over to the Rose Garden, and takes a live cat and strangles it to death before a horrified press corp. He does this every day, at the same time on the dot, without fail, ignoring pro-cat voters and pro-cat nonprofits telling him it’s wrong and obscene, and insists on his daily feline sacrifice. Day 5 comes and goes. Day 20, day 76, day 100 all come and go. And rather than trying to talk sense into the president, or having the media pressure and criticize the White House to stop its cat murder policy, messaging organs of the Democratic party insist repeatedly that the pointless and cruel cat murder is something which he cannot stop, and even if he could, he wouldn’t want to. The cat killing is a fait accompli; the 8:00 a.m. Rose Garden sacrifice is simply inevitable, and voters must learn to live with it, no matter how vulgar they may find it. Anti-cat-murder voters are sought out, mocked for their “purity politics,” and told that Trump would probably kill more cats in any event. Such a scenario would be absurd. “Certainly,” a morally healthy person would intervene, “it’s easier for the President to simply stop the cat killing every morning, rather than demand voters accept the daily cat killing as inevitable.”

The analogy is obvious so I won’t belabor it further, except to say ritually killing a cat everyday in the Rose Garden is, clearly, billions of orders of magnitude less cruel and obscene that what Biden backs every day in Gaza. And yet anti-murder voters are told to Simply Accept The Horrible Thing. We are told he is helpless. Or it’s all worth it because something something Hamas. Or Biden is secretly playing 17-dimensional chess behind the scenes—the justifications change by the hour and, at this point, hardly matter. The point is one is not allowed to be outraged. Whatever you do, don’t be outraged, angry, indignant, or disgusted. And if you are, remember that Trump Will Be Worse. 

This segment on Face the Nation started off another round of Voter Scolding discourse that I think is worth dissecting so this debate can be finally end once and for all (it won’t, but one can dream).

There are two key targets of Voter Scolders: those who make normative arguments, and those who offer descriptive, process arguments. The latter argument still solicits unhinged outrage from blue partisans. This is despite the fact that many of those making the case that Gaza is manifestly harming Biden, an objective empirical reality regardless of how one feels about it, are doing so precisely because they want him to defeat Trump. The majority of people in the United States, including 70 percent of Democrats, support a ceasefire, and there is a strong case being made by some Biden supporters that his unconditional support for Israel’s onslaught is a major threat to his reelection. “I’ve had the same conversations with all my Muslims friends and family members over Thanksgiving,” former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan tweeted on November 25, 2023. “Not a single one says they will vote for Biden again, having voted for him in 2020. Every single one says it’s because of Gaza. Dems need to understand that the anger is very real.” But airing such observations out of concern for the fate of Democrats doesn’t matter. To VoteBlueNoMatterWho types, any dissent—even sober, measured, loyal dissent—is suspect and must be snuffed out. Our leaders don’t serve us, we serve them. They cannot fail, they can only be failed. 

The normative argument, that voters have an obligation to withhold their vote for Biden until he stops the mass killing Gaza he uniformly supports and sponsors, is not a position I wish to endorse or denounce in this column. I would never dare tell a Palestinian American watching their family be starved and killed how to wield the one small bit of leverage they have. I will say, to the extent the normative debate is worth litigating here, it's important to understand that it’s ultimately a desperate decision by actors who, by definition, have no significant power. Voting is inherently moral, and it’s inherently irrational. The odds of any one vote being dispositive in any given election is one in the several trillions. As such, personally withholding a vote in protest, or organizing with other relatively powerless people to do the same in a semi-systematic way, by definition entails desperation. And that desperation has an author, and it’s not random talking heads on CBS or Twitter. It’s a handful of people located at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue. 

The substance of the protest matters as well, of course. The demand for a ceasefire, backed by the vast majority of countries on Earth, all of Palestinian civil society, the Pope, virtually every human rights organization and medical professional association, from OxFam to Amnesty International to Doctors Without Borders to 18 different UN agencies, is a bare minimum demand. Over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed, over 14,000 of whom are children. Over 13 children a day need an arm or leg amputated, 70 percent of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, over 90 percent of the population is homeless. More than 200 people are dying a day still. For What? Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, effectively admitted the carnage is pointless. “Blinken told Netanyahu,” Mitchel reports, “that ultimately there is no military solution to Hamas.”  

So what, exactly, is the point of continuing to back the military solution that’s causing unspeaking horror and carnage? Even the US acknowledges Hamas will not be “removed” or “eliminated”—something that’s long been obvious. Even by the Biden White House’s own logic, all the killing is pointless, only explained by a desire for revenge for the October 7 attack that killed over 1,100. And this substance matters. The fact that a ceasefire is a universally supported baseline demand, and that Biden’s lockstep support for Netanyahu is, in fact, a fringe position, is extremely relevant. This isn’t a vote withholding protest over some boutique pet issue like capital gains taxes or zoning laws—it’s a moral no-brainer for which Biden is on the far-right edge of global opinion. Like the ritual cat strangling, the obviously cruel and gratuitous nature of the horror matters when assessing moral responsibility. Despite partisan media hacks doing their best to paint the ceasefire demand as far left and “unrealistic,” it is indeed the overwhelming global consensus from France to Sweden to virtually the whole of the Global South. This reality is central to making the case that the cause of voter discontent isn’t irrational and recalcitrant Muslim voters, disinformation agents, or Russian conspiracies, but squarely that of the president himself, who continues to double and triple and quadruple down on a ruinous policy. 

One interesting dynamic is the usual anti-Bernie-Bro playbook doesn’t work in this scenario. Trying to pass off vote-withholding-campaigns over Gaza cannot be indexed as an act of detached “privilege” by those who won’t suffer under Trump. Clearly Arab and Muslim Americans leading the effort to pressure Biden over Gaza are not “privileged,” and one cannot even credibly attempt to paint them as such. Indeed, a new bloc has emerged in both polling a reporting as willing to punish Biden in 2024 over Gaza: African-American voters. The New York Times’ Maya King reported Saturday that “more than 1,000 Black pastors representing hundreds of thousands of congregants nationwide have issued [a demand for a ceasefire]. In sit-down meetings with White House officials, and through open letters and advertisements, ministers have made a moral case for President Biden and his administration to press Israel to stop its offensive operations in Gaza”

So a new tactic has emerged: painting disillusioned Black, Muslim and Arab voters as confused, irrational victims suffering from false consciousness, who simply don’t know what’s best for themselves. “Enjoy Trump’s Muslims ban” is a common refrain, as if the Muslim voters angry at Biden are not aware of the stakes. As if they haven’t literally lived the stakes. Indeed, as one of the most impacted communities targeted by Trump’s far-right administration, the fact that they’re willing to risk sustaining this again to pressure Biden shows how desperate and horrific the situation is. How desperate and horrific Biden has made the situation. 

And indeed, this is the central problem in all these back and forths—the subtle burden shift that pits two fairly powerless groups against each other while ignoring those who actually have meaningful agency. As offensive as their scolding can be sometimes, I actually think everyday people making Voter Scolding arguments (one would be remiss to not acknowledge their populist appeal) have good intentions. The problem is not with their desire for better outcomes, but the faulty premise buried in their reasoning: that the only moral actors here are a faceless cohort of voters, rather than the most powerful man on Earth. They can’t even envision a politics where Biden would change his position. Now, of course, many Voter Scolds either don’t care about the mass carnage in Gaza, or actually support it. But a significant percentage actually agree, in some abstract sense at least, that Biden should support a ceasefire, but don’t think it’s going to happen. They’re resigned to this fact and feel trying to appeal to him outside of the normal channels of Asking Nicely is out of bounds. 

Again, the most elegant, efficient way to win over Arab, Muslim, Black, young voters disgusted with Biden’s support of ethnic cleansing is for Biden to simply stop supporting ethnic cleansing. The choice to alienate voters is, and will remain, solely his responsibility. In the modern history of activist demands, no demand has been more clear, more morally sound, more universally popular, and more clearly actionable than the call for a ceasefire in Gaza. That Biden refuses to acquiesce is on him and only him.

Obviously, given the horrific body count and destruction of Gaza, for many it will be too late to win their vote. But for a significant percentage of those refusing to sanction a man responsible for this level of death, it will meaningfully alter their equation in the face of Trump. Yet, such an idea, that the powerful serve us rather than the other way around, is so exotic and confusing to so many. We’ve given up on the idea that our electeds have obligations beyond simply being marginally less evil than the other guy. In this sense, voter-scolding discourse—and the tedious, circular pissing match back-and-forth it entails—is a symptom not a disease. It’s evidence of powerlessness and resignation that better things aren’t possible. It’s evidence that for most people, the idea that we can expect anything better from those in charge is like asking for the sun to rise in the West or time to reverse itself. It’s evidence most of us have simply given up.