Don't vote for Your City Council based on Gaza

The case against centering intractable issues in local politics

Before elections in Los Angeles, I make it a habit to look into the voter guides created by various political groups in Los Angeles to help mentally map out what is going on. In the last few cycles, one of the voter guides I regularly read is put out by Knock LA, a progressive group closely associated with Democratic Socialists of America ("DSA") in LA. They have worked to help get a rising generation of very progressive city council members elected, as I have written about before. I disagree with them on many issues, but their endorsements are a helpful guide to their thinking and political strategy.

This year, however, their voter guide was very strange. Rather than emphasizing the numerous local issues that impact Los Angeles, there was an outsized emphasis on the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. Clearly, the subtext was that candidates had to call for a ceasefire in the Middle East to receive an endorsement. A word search through the Knock LA voter guide may be an imperfect metric, but it at least illustrates with some data the lopsided nature of this concern. "Gaza" is mentioned 21 times and "ceasefire" 22 times, which is far more than the number of times "homelessness" (14 mentions), "unhoused" (9 times), "education" (9 times) and "crime" (4 times) are mentioned. Thankfully, "police" and "housing" are talked about more, but only slightly more (30 and 28 mentions, respectively).

Why do the folks creating this voter guide feel this question is so central to local politics that it becomes a purity test for candidates? I suspect two distinct errors are being made here.

The problem of extreme moral clarity

I will start this with a caveat - I am no expert on the Israel/Palestine conflict. But I read history and care about understanding the world - so in the wake of the conflict's outbreak, I spent a lot of time paying attention to the debate that spilled out into American politics. And in that debate, one constant source of frustration has been the extreme moral clarity that so many actors have on the issue. 

I define moral clarity as an attitude towards a complex social conflict that seeks to explain the conflict in simple moral terms, with one side representing moral good and the other moral evil. The appeal of moral clarity is that it eliminates the need for extended discussion of the nuances or complexities - instead, the goal is to take a stand on the side of good and then ask everyone else to agree. Of course, almost all activism requires some level of invoking moral sensibilities. For instance, the effort to eliminate homelessness requires promoting the idea that being forced to live on the street offends human dignity. But a drive for extreme moral clarity is not merely willing to stop with this idea - it blames the tragedy of homelessness as the simple result of the action of villains - like, say, greedy landlords.

In this voter guide, the Progressive Left has gone beyond what would be a reasonable sense of moral clarity - saying, for instance, that ongoing violence in the Middle East is an awful tragedy that violates human dignity - and is making an effort to portray the conflict in terms of victims and villains. This mindset led many on the left to unequivocal support for the Hamas cause, even in the wake of the original October 7th attack. The national DSA’s immediate reaction to the attack was to blame Israel, while some California chapter’s endorsed the goals of the attacks. Even more extreme, others celebrated the hang gliders who massacred young people at a music festival, glibly describing the deaths as simply "taking out a few hipsters." 

On its face value, celebrating an attack that involved killing and kidnapping children would seem opposite to most people's common sense moral intuitions. But this strange morality starts to make sense in the context of a historical story where Israel is an illegitimate "settler-colonial" regime. Thus, resistance to the government, even violence against civilians, is a legitimate part of an anti-colonial liberation struggle. Not all who believe in this moral story tried to justify the attacks on October 7th, but all who justified the attacks did so because of this moral story.

Now, settler colonialism is a valid historical narrative to be aware of - and has explanatory power (in part) in telling the history of places like the US, South Africa, and Australia. A settler colonial pattern involves the displacement of native people from their land by foreign settlers and then using political institutions to assert further control over the native population. The problem is that settler colonialism does not explain the actual complexity of the history of Israel and Palestine. For instance, this compelling and nuanced history by Tomas Pueyo illustrates how several conflicting things can be true at once:

1. The region's demographics were fundamentally changed by a wave of Jewish Settlers who came into Palestine from 1860 to 1950.

2. This migration was mainly achieved by buying land under the laws of the ruling Ottoman and later British empires. 

3. Those Jewish settlers had a legitimate historical and genetic ancestry claim in the region for at least 3000 years.

4. The Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, can also trace their history and ancestry in the region back almost as long (if not longer).

Furthermore, when one examines the roughly 2000 years leading up to the 1948 creation of the dual states of Israel and Palestine, it becomes clear that none of these people groups had anything like a kind of autonomous self-rule at almost any point. They have been oppressed minorities in a land that was repeatedly conquered by foreign empires ranging from the Romans to the Islamic caliphate to the Crusades to the Ottomans.

But even if one can slant the historical narrative enough to make it morally simple, one must also make a case that morally simple injustice can be remedied justly by morally simple actions. After all, one could tell a simple history where modern-day Los Angeles county is sitting on land taken by the US from Mexico in war, and Mexico had taken it from indigenous tribes in war (who relatively possibly displaced other people in war at some point before that). To further complicate the calculus, most of the modern-day 10 million residents of Los Angeles are descended from immigrants who came to the US long after California had been incorporated into the US. Few modern-day Angelinos, including millions of Mexican-American descent, had any direct descendants of the land owners when California became a US territory.

Almost every significant power in the modern world includes disputed territory with a history of displacement and injustice, from Tibet and Xinjiang in China to Kashmir in India to Kaliningrad, Russia. Most of these cases are more clear-cut examples of injustice than the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (though they are far less salient to modern politics). It is telling that most international advocacy stops well short of "returning the land" in some form - and instead focuses on the more workable policy of fair treatment and equal protection of the minority ethnic or sub-national group who continue to live in the region. 

And none of this is to reckon with the fact that Hamas does not simply see itself as seeking to reclaim Palestinian rights or some lost land but explicitly portrays itself, in its own words, as an anti-semitic organization. Hamas explicitly believes the Jews are manipulating global history and rejects any political settlement of the conflict. Instead, its aims are the complete eradication of not just Israel but all Jews in the Middle East.

Now, some readers may think I'm being unfair here. After all, many of those who are now calling for a ceasefire in the conflict, progressive or not, would not have gone as far as those who justified the October 7th attacks: many are disturbed by the way that Israel's government has handled its campaign against Hamas in the Gaza strip. And I do believe there is plenty of legitimate room to question or condemn actions taken by Israel's government. However, my point is to illustrate that the Israel/Palestine conflict is a morally complex conflict without easy solutions or moral heroes - which makes it all the more frustrating when people try to take an absolutist stance.

And this is not happening in a vacuum - progressive politics in Los Angeles has long been engaging in extreme moral clarity. There has been a longstanding trend of seeking to find clear delineations between "good" people and "bad" people, thereby also creating a permission structure to discard the ordinary rules of political engagement because of a moral struggle at hand. For example:  

• In 2020, the progressive left pushed a morally absolutist narrative that defunding/abolishing the police was the only understandable response to the ongoing viral cases of police brutality. Policing was considered illegitimate, and any acts as part of the protest were morally righteous (even if they harmed innocent bystanders). They refuse to grant any moral standing to those (like me) who argued that policing played a vital role in low-income communities and that the answer was police accountability paired with better policing tactics.

• Regarding housing, the most influential progressive organizations have pushed a morally absolutist policy platform that would crystalize renter's rights and neighborhood stability above all. Renters are good, landlords are bad. Rather than engaging in the work of examining LA's housing shortage and acknowledging that economic growth and development could have an upside, there is a widespread sentiment that any solution that doesn't involve dismantling capitalism is foolish.

• In public education, the progressive left has argued that teachers' unions are fundamentally righteous agencies fighting for kids' well-being, while those seeking to reform the educational system are trying to undermine that cause. Even in cases where teachers' interests conflict with students' interests (such as school re-openings during the pandemic or the mounting evidence that charter schools are a net good for low-income kids), those who questioned the tactics of teachers' unions were seen as on the wrong side of a moral struggle.

Now, to be clear, many progressives (some of whom are dear friends and are probably reading this blog!) do not think in these terms, and many non-progressives also manifest this kind of extreme moral clarity. My critique here is not of progressive politics per se - the problem is that when any movement is infected with this moral absolutist approach, it compromises its ability to do the work of finding pragmatic solutions in a complex world.¹

That failure also means that moral clarity often indirectly harms those activists see themselves advocating for rather than aiding justice. Activists do not help actual Palestinians when their desire for moral clarity is so strong that they refuse to condemn terror and the killing and kidnapping of innocent children. Instead, it makes it harder to find any kind of peace in the region by convincing Israel that its continued existence as a country will never be valued on an international stage.

Soviet Dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously wrote:

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained."

Politics is not amoral - moral language can change hearts and minds that might otherwise be beholden to individual self-interest. But the language of morality ALSO has a dark side - that of self-righteousness and blindness to the complexity of an issue. I suspect that part of the reason that the DSA left has been far less morally absolutist in its support of Ukraine than of Hamas is the deeper moral intuition that those pushing back on American imperialism are naturally fighting the good fight.²

Politics needs a morality that is humble enough to acknowledge complexity. It must admit that actions taken with good intentions can and often do harm. Without this humility, the trap of extreme clarity is too tempting for most activists. 

The problem of tractability

“An Intractable Social Problem” - Generated on Canva

A second problem with this approach to politics is that it fails to reckon with what issues are solvable in the actors' context. I have recently found this notion well described by the notion of "tractability” - which argues that working on a cause only makes sense for an individual when:

1. You see clear steps and solutions you reasonably believe will make a difference or solve the problem.

2. You, as an individual, have the ability and control to take concrete actions to be a part of achieving those solutions.

Stepping back from politics, some of the most tractable places to do good can be on a one-on-one relational level, like building relationships with motivated and under-resourced students and tutoring them through challenging subjects. Political issues are inherently larger, more complex, and more difficult to achieve traction in solving. There is the potential for greater impact, but to succeed, you need to work for specific, concrete legislative actions with a track record of making a difference on a particular issue. Unfortunately, many moral issues are entirely not tractable for most people. And specifically,  there is absolutely nothing realistic that an LA City Council member can do to alter the trajectory of the conflict in Gaza.

If activists wanted to change the trajectory of the conflict, they would have to work exclusively on federal policymaking. More precisely, they would have to lobby on the presidential level, where foreign policy decisions have been increasingly centralized in the past decades. Sadly, most ordinary individuals outside of 5-10 swing states (California being as far as you can get from one) have nearly zero leverage in the vote for president. Even those with leverage have to reckon that most of their fellow voters in swing districts would not see foreign policy as one of their top five reasons for picking a president, so persuading others to adopt a specific activist strategy is likely to fail.

You can take this argument further by asking: could an American president truly solve this conflict? Is it solvable? After all, the primary actors who stand in the way of peace are not Americans but the Israelis and Palestinians. Both believe they have a fundamentally reasonable claim to the land in question. For decades, the US invested significant resources in trying to broker peace - and while one can certainly criticize the American approach - the fact is that the process has repeatedly failed because the parties on the ground have such a hard time finding common ground. Many activists, even ones with a less morally absolute vision, struggle to articulate a concrete and realistic vision for lasting peace.

I am not arguing the conflict is forever hopeless or not worth your time and care. But you should not waste your limited resources analyzing where local candidates stand. Trying to organize to elect progressive LA city council members - thinking it will be a first step in solving the problems of Israelis and Palestinians -  is absurd. Whether or not a particular City Council member is committed to calling for a ceasefire does nothing to help the conflict and is of no practical importance to the work of local politics. That’s a shame because the local politics is full of issues that are tractable for everyday people. 

In 2022, I helped organize a 30-minute meeting on Zoom with my local California Assembly representative’s office. We had eight people from our district who cared about housing policy and wanted to discuss specific bills. The meeting was uneventful in that the staff couldn’t promise anything, but they appreciated that we took the time to share our perspective. The staff in the meeting shared the shocking (to us) fact that we were the largest group of constituents they had met with that year to date. And the meeting was successful in the sense that the critical bills we discussed passed, and our local representative voted for them. These bills are already meaningfully impacting housing production - I know from research on a forthcoming article that many affordable housing projects in the 5 miles around my house would not be financially viable if it were not for these bills.

I share this not to call attention to myself but to illustrate that while local politics is hard, it is far from impossible. Many genuine problems in our neighborhoods are tractable if you know how to leverage your voice locally, even with all the dysfunctions in our political system. Crime and policing, housing and homelessness, education and opportunity, transit, and the impact of pollution - these are all issues that have real moral stakes, and we can see real change from sustained engagement. 

Of course, all of these issues are subject to moral complexity, and progress is likely to be incremental - it is hard to imagine the crime problem can be genuinely “solved.” But there are clear policy solutions and institutional investments that could be implemented tomorrow and which would improve the lives of your friends and neighbors. This would be light years more impactful a way to spend your local political energy than activism over the conflict in the Middle East.

Toward a morally humble, pragmatic politics

I don’t have time to lay out a full constructive vision for a humble politics that is both pragmatic in its focus on tractable issues, and honest about moral complexity. I hope to sketch my thoughts out more in the future. But I do think returning to homelessness is a useful counter-example.

Homelessness is an issue well served by acknowledging moral complexity. By this I mean that while it is a moral tragedy that people are forced to live on the street, it is a moral travesty that is not served by trying to figure out who is the villain. On an individual level, many people who become homeless do so because of the direct actions of others (domestic violence, eviction). In contrast, others become homeless primarily through unexpected circumstances, like natural disasters, the death of a spouse or parent, or job loss. Some become homeless because of things within their control (addictions or failure to manage mental illness proactively). 

And as I have written before, how expensive housing is in that area is a huge determining factor in whether the precipitating event makes one homeless or can be coped with while staying housed. The housing conditions of a city are not totally accidental or amoral - those who oppose new housing in their neighborhood should think about the indirect impacts of their actions as denying housing to others. But this moral sense shouldn’t give advocates the license to label all of their opponents as “NIMBY villains'' (or worse, themselves as “heroes”) since, in my experience, the vast majority of people who oppose housing in their neighborhood see themselves as “defenders” of something worthwhile. And NIMBYs are not alone - after all, many metros like Los Angeles with escalating rates of homelessness are full of actors who share the blame. Our homeless agency has consistently failed to do its job well, many nonprofits fail to care for those in their charge, and public utilities fail to service housing projects promptly.

Homelessness is an issue that is actually quite tractable. This is especially true if one defines the goal as having a homeless response system that keeps bouts of homelessness short enough that they do not become chronic, and do not make a person's underlying vulnerabilities worse. Cities like Houston and Bakersfield have, in their own way, seen tremendous progress toward this goal in recent years. On a national level, concerted efforts by the Veterans Administration (VA) have made real inroads in reducing veteran homelessness (even if rising housing costs in much of the US have slowed that progress in recent years).

And while you may not be a member of Congress or a city council member, as a resident of Los Angeles, you will vote for these people in the next week or two. You can decide whether these people have real plans that align with what works - which should start with addressing the broader housing crisis in the city. Don’t support candidates who don’t care - or whose platforms are filled with a rhetoric of moral clarity that does not concretely address the issue. And beyond voting - you can simply help solve the problem by being engaged in your neighborhood. Support organizations that care for folks in vulnerable situations. If you own a house, consider building an ADU on your property or taking a spare room and renting it out to those who need affordable housing. Show up to support housing projects that would add to the housing supply, allowing existing affordable housing to stay affordable, especially when housing is being built to directly house people transitioning out of homelessness. 

There is much good that can be done in local work - but we must resist the allure of extreme moral clarity and problems that are not tractable and focus our energy on places where change could realistically happen. It is that simple.

1. And before I get an objection that I am being too hard on the left - I could and have written a whole lot more on the rot in the California GOP, which has responded to their becoming a minority party by nominating less and less serious candidates to higher office - see my writing in the wake of the 2021 Gubernatorial recall: https://thomaspontifications.substack.com/p/contra-cowen-ca-recall

2. Ironically, you see the same moral intuition appearing stronger and stronger in right-wing skeptics of Ukraine - that Ukraine is somehow enmeshed in a Left-wing cultural movement, and thus, the Russian aggressors must be the "good guys" in the conflict