Progressives’ Revealing Inconsistency When Elections Don’t Go Their Way

T he liberal press is claiming that Jewish money brought down two black House members, Cori Bush (D., Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), who lost their primaries this year. The New York Times front-page story was titled “In Congresswoman’s Defeat, Israel Lobby Shows Its Clout.” But such money has at most a minor influence. Far more interesting is the Left’s inconsistency when it comes to what it gets angry at.

A FiveThirtyEight-sponsored poll of the Democratic primary race between Bowman and challenger George Latimer, a long-time Westchester County executive, found that, in late March, Bowman trailed Latimer by 17 percentage points. This was three months before the election and before any significant amount of money was spent on the race by AIPAC and other Jewish organizations. And it was the exact margin of Latimer’s eventual victory. As a result, it is hard to see how the support of Latimer’s candidacy (or opposition to Bowman) from groups that promote Jewish interests had any material impact on the result. And the reason should be obvious: Both candidates were well known, so advertising could not create distorted images of unfamiliar candidates.

Rather than acknowledging the serious weaknesses of their candidacies, both Bowman and Bush, along with their supporters, seized on Jewish-interest-group money as the decisive factor in their defeats. Bush and her followers did this by deploying an antisemitic stereotype: the notion that money from Jewish sources spent on political advocacy can manipulate politics to victimize black constituents. Supposedly, advertising paid for by such sources changed the minds of a significant share of black voters — who already, according to Cori Bush herself, had a wealth of knowledge about her. “My community knows who I am,” Bush told CBS News just before the election. “This district has seen me for the last ten years going from the activist to the ‘politivist,’ which is what I call myself. They know that about me.”

For Bush to believe that her constituents could be so easily manipulated is to deny the ability of black Americans to make their own reasoned choices. It is similar to the claim that a very modest adjustment in Georgia voting rules would affect black voting behavior so negatively as to be tantamount to “Jim Crow 2.0.” As the social scientist Glenn Loury observed, the notion that black Americans are prevented from full participation in the American way of life “robs [them] of agency and self-determination. It is a patronizing lie that betrays a profound lack of faith in the capacities of black Americans to rise to the challenges, face the responsibilities, and bear the burdens of freedom.”

Interestingly, a clear case of money’s role in election results is the funding by billionaire businessman George Soros of more than 20 district-attorney races during the last decade, with $17 million in funding between 2015 and 2019. They were the classic sort of races where a modest amount of funding can be decisive: low-turnout elections with candidates little known to the electorate. This is the opposite of the Bush and Bowman races. Soros’s funding was able to transform DA offices nationally, electing progressive public prosecutors who immediately decriminalized supposedly minor, quality-of-life crimes and dramatically reduced bail requirements even for those accused of felonies.

Progressives have seized on the fact that Soros is Jewish to stifle questions about the influence his funding exerts on the way the justice system operates. Typical was a discussion between NPR host Mary Louise Kelly and writer Emily Tamkin:

Kelly: You mentioned George Soros is Jewish, which is prompting questions as to whether the attacks on him are anti-Semitic. How do you understand this?

Tamkin: The idea of a Jewish person being all-controlling and all-powerful and using that control and power to denigrate and degrade and corrupt society is a very, very old one. It does not matter if the word Jewish was not actually said. This is trying to use anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic tropes in order to stir something up within the hearts and minds of those hearing it.

Notice the claim of antisemitism is made even if Soros’s Jewishness is not mentioned by his critics. (One can reasonably speculate that his critics are not even aware of his background.) It is apparently impossible for progressives to believe that any criticism of Soros on the grounds of his actions, having nothing to do with the fact that he happens to be Jewish, is sound.

What we see is a selective concern about antisemitism that depends on the Left’s ideological goals. On the one hand, when elections don’t go their way, progressives are very comfortable overstating the power of funding from Jewish sources such that it reinforces antisemitic tropes. On the other hand, they are so uncomfortable with conservatives’ criticism of Soros’s successful funding of progressive DAs that they baselessly accuse those critics of antisemitism. The resort to the antisemitic trope of “Jewish money” is all the more reprehensible when its effect is to reinforce anti-black stereotypes of powerless, easily manipulated marks.