The Center Will Save Us
Imagine a democracy where a wildly narcissistic leader comes to power in a free and fair election, then takes the country sharply to the right largely due to the power of social media and a media mogul who provides non-stop positive coverage through his “news” outlets to advance his own right-wing agenda. After years of allowing ultra-religious forces to control educational and social institutions, he is defeated by an avowed centrist. Now, he is facing trial on a wide variety of charges from his years of graft, grift, and self-enrichment.
No, I’m not talking about TFG and the U.S. I’m talking about Israel, where Nancy and I just spent some time celebrating my mother’s 100th birthday. Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was that leader for 13 long years. He was propped up by far-right moguls who, among other things, publish two daily newspapers that are distributed for free, swaying public opinion and putting economic pressure on the legitimate newspapers.
Benjamin Netanyahu (l) & Yair Lapid
(Photo Credit: YNET composition/Ohad Zwigenberg & Gil Yohanan)
Israel has a parliamentary system of government that is different from our form of democracy, but it’s close enough to make it very worthwhile to study and learn from what has happened there over the past year. After a series of inconclusive elections, Yair Lapid, a handsome former news anchor relatively new to politics, engineered the formation of a coalition government made up of widely diverse political parties. His party, Yesh Atid (“there is a future”), is solidly left of center, grounded in liberalism, secularism, and support of a two-state solution. He is joined by three other left-center parties and one strongly progressive party, two right-wing parties that share his commitment to secularism in government (but little else), and a party representing Israeli Arabs.
Let’s look at how he managed to unseat Bibi, and along the way, maybe we can learn a few lessons that will turn around our fortunes in the midterms and in 2024. First, Lapid leveraged the anger and frustration of the centrist majority that didn’t want a small, corrupt (I can’t count how many chief rabbis who have resigned or are in jail) ultra-Orthodox minority to dictate social policy including marriage, divorce, and education. I think we can relate!
TFG and Joe Biden
(Composition by TeenVogue/Joe Raedle & Scott Eisen)
Next, he brought together a coalition of the similar. Under their system, there are separate parties representing different points on the scale that runs from most progressive to center-left. He convinced them that uniting under his government would increase each of their chances to have a greater impact on Israeli politics and policy.
Then he reached out to the right. While the Yamina, or New Right Party, under Naftali Bennet had some fundamentally different policy goals, he convinced
them that stemming the threat of autocracy should unite them. Similarly, he cajoled the right-wing party that represents the large faction of immigrants from the former Soviet Union that stopping the religious minority from dictating how their constituents lived their lives was more important than any of their other political priorities.
Finally, he broke tradition by reaching out to one of the two parties that represent Israeli Arabs -Palestinian citizens of Israel- by assuring them that this new government would work to end the disparate treatment they had received in terms of funding for infrastructure, policing, and education.
While everyone said it couldn’t be done, it worked. In June, 2021, the 36th Israeli government was sworn in, and it has held against all odds and against the constant attacks of the far-right minority, led by Netanyahu.
There is a lot more to unpack, but the bottom line is very important to Democrats in America. We need to bring our friends -progressives and centrists alike- together for the greater good. We need to appeal to the many independents who value actual freedom rather than using that word as a cudgel and a thinly disguised appeal to racism. And we have to bring in our friends on the right who are appalled at what has happened to their party, even if it means sharing some power with them. They may not want to support us in public, but they can quietly use their judgment in the privacy of the voting booth to do what’s correct for American democracy. We can do this.