TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. In the battleground state of Michigan, the Uncommitted, a pro-Palestinian group made up of Muslim, Arab American, and college-age voters confirmed last week that they are not endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, out of concern for how the U.S. is handling the Israel-Hamas war. But they also said, they're not in support of former President Donald Trump or any other third-party candidate. My guest today, New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, recently spent time in Michigan to understand the scope and size of the Uncommitted movement and its potential impact on the November presidential election. The group first launched in Michigan before expanding to other states, and it made the decision not to back Harris after the Vice President did not respond to their request to meet with the loved ones of Palestinians who were killed in Gaza. The group also wanted to meet directly with Harris to talk about an arms embargo on Israel.
Vice President Harris has held steady on her views and policy, expressing sympathy for both Israelis and Palestinians, while also repeating her stance that Israel has the right to defend itself and the need for a two-state solution, much to the dismay of the Uncommitted, who feel Harris has not strayed far from President Joe Biden's policy so far. Marantz's article, "Among The Gaza Protest Voters," appears in the current copy of The New Yorker. He writes about technology, social media, politics, and the press. He's also the author of "Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians And The Hijacking Of The American Conversation." Andrew Marantz, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
ANDREW MARANTZ: Thank you, Tonya. Thanks so much for having me.
MOSLEY: Andrew, I think it would be a good idea to first ground our listeners in the size and influence of the Uncommitted movement. How large is it, and what is its electoral impact?
MARANTZ: It's a great question because I went there first in February ahead of the primary, and there was no real suspense that Joe Biden, then the nominee, was going to lose the primary, right? He was essentially running unopposed. The only question was how many votes Uncommitted would get and whether that would sort of capture the attention of the country and of the White House. And it seems like they crossed that threshold. So they ended up getting 100,000 votes, a little more than that, which was about 13% of the total Democratic primary electorate. It wasn't enough to, you know, single-handedly make Biden drop out of the race, although, of course, he later did. But it was more than the margin of the difference in 2016, for example, when Hillary Clinton lost in Michigan by 10,000 votes. So that was enough to raise some eyebrows. And then when Biden won the state in 2020, he won it by about 150,000 votes. So that's also sort of within striking distance.
So what they were then able to claim was you might not like if you're the Democratic Party that you have to win us over. You might think we be in the bag for you and that we shouldn't be causing trouble for you. But the fact is we have some influence here, and Michigan is one of a few states that could really matter and if it's close enough to matter, you know, you need to come deal with us, and that was sort of their strategy going in.
MOSLEY: Right. And also, just to set the scene here for people, Michigan, particularly metro Detroit - the city of Dearborn has a sizable Arab American population. When you visited and spoke with people there, how top of mind was the war in Gaza for them? And I just want to set this up because you also point out in your piece that there was this survey in May that actually asked voters to assess how the current administration handled a variety of issues. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed to rank really low in their responses.
MARANTZ: Yeah. In that survey it ranked the lowest of any - you know, the economy, crime, any other issue. And that was a national survey. Certainly in places like Dearborn and Hamtramck, it was very top of mind for people. Now, not every voter is going to be, you know, a single-issue voter based on foreign policy, much less this particular issue. But certainly for Arab voters, for Muslim voters, for young voters, for progressive voters, this was and is a major issue. And there's also a kind of compounding effect that happened with other issues, right? You would hear people talking about Biden's age, for example, when he was the nominee, and they would compound that issue with the war and say, he's too old and feeble, you know, to stop this war.
So these issues have a way of kind of bleeding into one another, the economy and the war. If we weren't sending so much aid to other countries, maybe we could, you know, fix things here. So, you know, even for voters for whom this wasn't the single issue, it seemed to paint a picture of the world spinning out of control on the Democrats' watch.
And you know, I would ask them, but haven't the Democrats done all these other things that you approve of and wouldn't Trump be worse? I got a range of answers, but one answer, for example, from the mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, he just said, I'm a Democrat. The Democrats have done great things. Biden has passed historic legislation, but none of that will outweigh on the scales of justice a genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. And so, you know, obviously, not everyone agrees with his word that this is a genocide, but that was what he said and that was what I heard from a lot of people, and then they sort of said, well, how could that not be top of mind?
MOSLEY: Let's talk a little bit about the goals of the Uncommitted movement. They're pressuring the Democratic Party to change its stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Can you remind us what they're asking for from the Biden administration and VP Harris, should she become president?
MARANTZ: Well, the main ask all along has been a permanent cease-fire and to stop sending weapons. I think when some of the organizers would talk sort of in more realistic moments, I think they would kind of grasp, they're probably not going to get that, at least not overnight. You know, I spent a lot of time with Andy Levin, who's a former congressman from the area who was working with the movement. He didn't start it, but he was speaking at their rallies and helping them. And he was pretty realistic, you know - we're not going to wake up tomorrow and have the Vice President just announce, OK, I'm not sending one more bomb to Israel because Israel has been one of the major recipients of U.S. aid for decades, and they didn't anticipate that just changing on a dime. And so partly, they were willing to set that as a kind of North Star for their activism, but then accept concessions short of that. Will you have a meeting with us to discuss an arms embargo? Will you say in your speeches that you will follow U.S. law when it comes to arms shipments? You know, these would have been intermediate demands that I think would have gone a long way, which they ultimately did not get.
But also, someone like Andy Levin, who, you know, has been in Congress and who has been to the region and who sort of knows how this stuff works, he basically said, look, from a pure realpolitik point of view, I understand why they don't want to, you know, completely change U.S. foreign policy, but I also understand that I'm here on the ground in Michigan. If they do nothing, if they say nothing, there really are voters who might not move in their direction. And his view was that the Democratic bigwigs in D.C., as he called them, were just in denial about this, that they basically had a theory of the case either under Biden or under Harris, that, well, when it comes down to it, you know, and the choice is between us and Trump, these voters will come back home. And Levin just didn't see it that way, and the voters I spoke to didn't see it that way. They didn't think, you know, these are all just partisan Democrats who are making some noise and making some demands, and in November, they'll come back home. That was not at all taken for granted among the people I spoke to.
MOSLEY: I want to talk with you for a moment about how Harris appears to be walking this very fine line. You actually referenced this in your piece. She's navigating between appealing to pro-Israel voters and donors while also addressing those concerns that pro-Palestinian and anti-war voters have. You know, last week, I actually heard directly from VP Harris when I interviewed her as part of this panel for the National Association of Black Journalists. And I want to play a little bit of what she said when asked about her stance and what her policies would be. Let's listen.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Well, we are doing the work of putting the pressure on all parties involved to get the deal done. But let me be very clear also. I support Israel's ability to defend itself, and I support the need for Palestinians to have dignity, self-determination, and security as we move forward and get a two-state deal done. But right now the thing we need to get done is this hostage deal and this cease-fire deal. We need a cease-fire. We need the hostage deal.
MOSLEY: So it sounds like VP Harris is really speaking to the Uncommitteds' concerns. Can you delve more into the reasoning for their announcement last week that they would not endorse her? And of course, they want her to end this war, but what else are they specifically asking for?
MARANTZ: Yeah. So she definitely is walking a very fine line here. And not only on this issue, right? I mean, you've heard her say, you know, we want common-sense gun control, but also, you know, if you walk into my house, you're getting shot, you know? So she's sort of trying to split the difference on a number of issues, and this is very much one of them. And some people who are anti-war, pro-Palestine kind of organizers have heard a difference in tone between Biden and Harris. They see her as more open, more amenable, more less instinctively kind of Zionist in my bones, as Joe Biden was fond of saying. That said, she hasn't said, I will change policy. She has said, I want this deal. We're working to get a deal.
And there are many voters or potential voters, people who may or may not vote, for whom that's not enough. You have to say how you will change policy. And I think it's clear at this point that Harris just doesn't think she can do that or doesn't think it's worth it. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has been all over the place on this issue and doesn't seem to feel the need to be consistent or careful in his statements.
MOSLEY: Well, I want to though delve a little bit deeper into what you heard regarding their thoughts on Trump and how he might take on this issue, this war, if he were to become president again, because yes, we've heard him suggest that he could quickly end the conflict if elected, but he hasn't given much detail on how. We know that during his presidency, he gave, like, this near-absolute unconditional support of Israel, and he's been very dismissive of a two-state solution and Palestinian statehood aspirations. This all makes him pretty popular among right-wing Israelis.
We heard just this week that the mayor of Hamtramck, which is a small city outside of Detroit - it's also a majority Muslim city - endorsed Trump. I would love to know based on your reporting, how influential is a leader like Mayor Amer Ghalib. And I should note that he's also a registered Democrat. How influential is someone like him in swaying the Uncommitted or undecided voters?
MARANTZ: Yeah. I mean, this - as I say, American politics is a very weird and unpredictable thing. I believe Dearborn is another Arab-majority city in the area, and the mayor of Dearborn...
MOSLEY: Yup.
MARANTZ: ...Has certainly not endorsed Trump. So there are, I think, voters who are looking to local leaders for guidance might be very confused right now. I mean, yes, Donald Trump is not very big on specific details on foreign policy or anything else, frankly. He tends to do a lot of handwaving and, you know, tends to make pretty vague statements, and this is no exception. But just to be clear, I mean, in his debate with Biden, he criticized Biden - first of all, he called Biden, like a Palestinian, just plainly just using that word as a slur, as an insult, which is just kind of wild on its own, if you think about it. And his reason for insultingly calling Biden, like a Palestinian, was, you know, he's been so weak on this conflict. He hasn't allowed Israelis to, quote, "finish the job." Now, that's incredibly dark and scary language. And like a lot of things Trump says, it has some amount of plausible deniability.
You know, he could, I guess, turn around and say, you know, by finish the job, I mean, surgically take out Hamas' leaders in very careful military strikes. But I think a lot of people hear that language and hear eliminationist language, you know - turn Gaza into a parking lot. And you certainly hear that language on the Israeli right as well. And many voters I spoke to were well aware of this and were well aware of the differences, you know. You talk about the non- endorsement that the uncommitted movement put out.
They were clear that Trump would be opposed to what they stand for in that regard, and also with regard to American civil liberties, you know. So Michigan will be hard to predict. I think people are looking for guidance, and they're not getting clear guidance. And I think a lot of people like the Mayor of Hamtramck, you know, what he said was, Trump sat me down and spoke to me and said, I want to end the war, and that was good enough for me.
MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, my guest is Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker. We're talking about his latest article, "Among The Gaza Protest Voters," which explores why progressives in the swing state of Michigan say they won't support Vice President Kamala Harris unless she changes her policy on Israel. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, we're talking to Andrew Marantz, a staff writer with The New Yorker, about his latest article, "Among The Gaza Protest Voters," which explores why progressives in the swing state of Michigan say they won't support Vice President Kamala Harris unless she changes her policy on Israel.
Andrew, I want to get into the ramifications for politicians who support the Uncommitted and embrace their stance. And in your piece, as you mentioned, you follow Andy Levin, who's a former Democratic congressman from Michigan. Andy Levin comes from a well-known political family in the state, and for those who don't know, who are the Levins, and what is the scope of their influence?
MARANTZ: Yeah. This is I think one of the only Jewish American political dynasties. So Theodore Levin was a federal judge. The courthouse is named after him. Then Carl Levin and Sandy Levin, who are brothers. Carl was a senator from Michigan. Sandy was in the House. And then Sandy's son, Andy - he was elected to replace his father to represent Michigan in the House of Representatives. So yeah, it's a multigenerational arc, and like a lot of multigenerational families, there have always been disagreements within the umbrella of all being Democrats and all being somewhat progressive Democrats. So, broadly speaking, you could say that Andy was to Sandy's left on a lot of issues, and Israel policy was one of them.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
MARANTZ: And when Andy got to Congress, he wasn't a single-issue, you know, Israel guy. I mean, he cofounded the Haiti Caucus. He was a labor lawyer. You know, he did a lot of other things. But one thing he did was he wrote the Two-State Solution Act, which he told me was - he thought of just as a kind of restatement of U.S. policy, but clearly it was not received that way because APAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee took umbrage to this piece of legislation. It described the occupation as illegal and a few other things that they took exception to. And essentially, they raised money to drive him out. They and other groups raised millions of dollars for his opponent to win in a Democratic primary against him, and he was voted out after two terms. So he's well acquainted with how this can be a third-rail issue.
MOSLEY: Right. As you mentioned, they put up millions of dollars to help his opponent. He lost reelection in 2021. We saw this with the defeat of New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush from Missouri. Can you give us a visual of this, of how much money APAC invested in Andy Levin's opponent, what it looked like in the campaign to defeat Levin?
MARANTZ: Yeah, I think if I remember correctly, they raised about $4 million against him, which was a lot for a congressional election primary, and, you know, it's - those numbers have only gone up since then in the Bowman race, the Bush race, trying to get rid of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, and - which were not successful. But one thing, you know, that Levin noted to me is that AIPAC was not in the business of doing - funding congressional primaries before his race. They tried to stay out of it. They always fashioned themselves a kind of bipartisan organization, and they still do - they really tout, you know, that they have support on both sides of the aisle. And for many years, it's been drifting. But October 7, I think, really crystallized that AIPAC has started to really feel its center of gravity more strongly on the Republican side of the aisle. And so this was them intervening in a Democratic race. But it was later reported that a lot of that money came from Republican donors.
A lot of - I don't know if this was true in Andy Levin's race, but a lot of the money that was funneled into the races subsequently came from donors like Paul Singer, Bernie Marcus. These are top Trump super donors. So the point Levin made to me was, set aside how you feel about this issue or whether you agree with my Two-State Solution Act. Shouldn't people be concerned that Republican donors are using dark money to intervene in Democratic primaries and decide who the next Democratic nominee for Congress will be from this district in southern Michigan. And I think his view was that AIPAC was trying to send a message. Andy Levin is Jewish, former synagogue president. I think he thought that they were trying to send the message that, you know, if we can do this to him, we can do this to anyone. And as you say with Bowman and Bush, AIPAC has shown that they really can flex a lot of political muscle in ways that a few years ago, they weren't even trying to do.
MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, my guest is Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker. And we're talking about his latest article, "Among The Gaza Protest Voters," which explores why progressives in the swing state of Michigan say they won't support Vice President Kamala Harris unless she changes her policy on Israel. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest piece, "Among The Gaza Protest Voters," takes us to Michigan, where some progressives have said they won't support Vice President Kamala Harris unless she changes her policy on Israel. Marantz explores whether their tactics will persuade her or risk throwing the election to Trump. Marantz writes about technology, social media, politics and the press for The New Yorker.
You wrote a book called "Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians And The Hijacking Of The American Conversation," which explores how fringe political groups and online trolls exploited social media to influence the discourse around the 2016 election. And to do that, you spent several years basically immersing yourself in the world of the far-right internet. This time around, in 2024, what are you seeing? How is the alt-right using the algorithms and memes and everything to inject ideas about the war in Gaza into the mainstream discourse?
MARANTZ: Yeah. It's so interesting, Tonya, because you know, we used to use terms like alt-right, and, you know, you don't hear that term so much anymore. You could say that that's just because, you know, internet fashions change very quickly. Or, you know, you can make the case, as some people have, that there is no alternative right in that sense anymore because it has effectively taken over the right. And I think, you know, honestly, if I were to go looking for the fringe far-right internet right now, I kind of just have to open Twitter, and there it is. I mean, the stuff that I had to go searching for in 2015, 2016 and that I found so novel and so shocking, that's just like Elon Musk's Twitter, both the company he owns and his personal page.
MOSLEY: How expansive is a platform like Truth Social?
MARANTZ: I think Truth Social is basically a glorified press release machine for Donald Trump. I mean, you know, in 2016, what was really striking about social media, Twitter, Periscope, sort of video streaming, these felt like giant rooms that a lot of people were in together. And social media doesn't feel like that anymore. You know, it's - a lot of things have migrated to individual platforms, where X is kind of a kind of right-wing sludge machine, for the most part. You have Threads and Bluesky and things for people who, you know, don't want that, and they want their own sort of discourse. You have TikTok, which is, youknow, just a lot of people dancing and not a lot of politics, unless you go looking for it. So it's all kind of fractured, and then you have a lot of group chats.
So you don't have that effect anymore of everyone kind of has to influence and respond to everyone else. And I think it's hard for Trump to thrive in that environment. I mean, Donald Trump's entire career has been about inserting himself into discursive communities where he doesn't really belong and then kind of taking them over through sheer force of will and shamelessness.
MOSLEY: Right.
MARANTZ: And right now he doesn't have that.
MOSLEY: Andrew, I want to switch gears to talk for a moment about another issue that you've written extensively about in the past - Donald Trump's relationship and his views on Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. You were actually on the show in 2022 talking about how Trump sees Orban as an ideological ally. Just to lay the groundwork here, Orban is known for curtailing press freedom, weakening judicial independence, undermining multiparty democracy. Just the other week during the presidential debate, Trump praised Orban, calling him, quote, "a tough person, smart" and one of the most esteemed figures. What do you make of those statements and what it could signal should Trump become president?
MARANTZ: Yeah. When I heard Trump saying that in the debate, I was like, is someone trolling me right now? Like, did Trump just...
MOSLEY: (Laughter) Right? Yes.
MARANTZ: I saw someone on Twitter saying, oh, Trump is going after the crucial Orban mom vote here, which is - obviously doesn't really exist.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
MARANTZ: So one thing to say about Viktor Orban and Hungary and that whole thing - you know, Hungary is a relatively small country. In a sense, it's just kind of bizarre that Trump would bring that up, and, you know, it's sort of like Trump loves people who love him, right? So it might have just been a thing where he was like, and Hulk Hogan likes me, and Larry Kudlow likes me. And, you know, also this guy does, and he's a head of state. You know, it could have just been that. But I think there's another way of looking at it, which is, look, we throw around terms like democratic and antidemocratic, and it becomes just an empty signifier sometimes, you know? It becomes like democracy is just whatever we like and, you know, non-democracy is whatever we don't like.
And I think the case of Hungary is a useful - it's a useful antidote to that because there are many countries around the world where there are curtailed freedoms, curtailed press freedoms, curtailed individual liberties. You know, China doesn't have a lot of press freedom, Saudi Arabia - you know, you can go down the list. But there's a small club of countries like Hungary, like Turkey, like India, like Brazil under Bolsonaro, where they were really robust, consolidated liberal democracies, liberal with a small L, and that started to erode. It started to backslide. You know, the kind of political science term of art is democratic erosion or democratic backsliding.
And Hungary is really a quintessential case of that. And Viktor Orban used to be a liberal Democrat who would, you know, meet with Bill Clinton in the White House and talk about, you know, rebuilding from, you know, behind the Iron Curtain, and then slowly over time, he got more and more power. He had a bigger and bigger majority in the legislature. He started chipping away at the Hungarian equivalent of the Constitution, chipping away at judicial independence, doing things that are kind of equivalent to gerrymandering, kind of equivalent to tampering with the vote such that elections in Hungary are what experts call free but not fair. So these are very subtle law fair things that you can't put a stamp on it and say, this is the moment when Hungarian democracy died. You know, this is the moment when the tanks rolled out in the streets and the people were all jailed.
It's done in this very subtle, wonky way that's almost done not so much under cover of darkness, but under cover of boredom. Like, it's just boring to lay out all the ways in which this has happened over decades. But the end result is this incredibly weakened democratic system that can still masquerade as a democracy. And I think it's obvious that the reason Americans are so attuned to this, and should be, is that that's what people talk about when they talk about the risk to democracy here. You know? We're not...
MOSLEY: With Trump.
MARANTZ: With Trump.
MOSLEY: With Trump as a potential president again.
MARANTZ: With Trump and with his sort of MAGA faction, which has sort of taken over the Republican Party, that it's not that they will immediately come out tomorrow and say, everyone we don't like is jailed, but that over years, through these things that people might not even notice at the time, the water gets hotter and hotter, and eventually the frog boils. That's what people are worried about.
MOSLEY: Right. Like the tweet that you read where someone said, you know, is he going after the Orban mom vote. I mean, it does feel that he might be talking specifically to someone. This is maybe more than just him throwing out the people who like him, like Hulk Hogan. I mean, there is a line to be drawn, potentially, to what we could see in our future should he become president.
MARANTZ: Yeah. Well, and there's, you know, what Trump did with Project 2025, for example, saying, I don't even know what that is. I've never seen that before. You know, I personally believe him when he says he's never read it, but that doesn't mean that the people around him haven't read it or written it or plan to institute it if he becomes president. So something like, you know, referring to what happens in Hungary, it is indicative of something. I don't know that it means that Trump himself is such a diligent student that he, you know, stays up late at night reviewing game tape of exactly everything Viktor Orban does. I don't think of him as such a diligent student of anything, quite frankly. But I think that the forces around him, and they've been pretty clear about this in various ways, have seen an opportunity in how to use the levers of the administrative state to get what you want.
And we don't have to use hypotheticals for this. I mean, you know, if you refuse to vote on a Supreme Court nominee when it's proposed by your opposition party and then force through a vote on a Supreme Court nominee when it's the one your party wants, that is pushing the bounds of democracy, I would argue, beyond their limits. You know, if you were to change the rules of the Electoral College in Nebraska or in North Carolina or with gerrymandering or any of these cases, it wouldn't be, OK, this is instantly the death knell of American democracy. But taken as a whole, they result in these things like winning the popular vote, but losing the election, like, you know, winning a majority of congressional votes, but losing the Congress - like, all these things that if we saw them happening in another country, we would say, well, that hardly seems fair, you know? So - but then you can come back and have plausible deniability and say, well, this is just politics, and, you know, if you can't handle it, you know, get out of the kitchen.
MOSLEY: Andrew Marantz, thank you so much for your reporting.
MARANTZ: I really appreciate it. This has been really fun.
MOSLEY: New Yorker staff writer, Andrew Marantz. His latest article is called "Among The Gaza Protest Voters."
Coming up, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead, has an appreciation of Bud Powell, who he says set the style for jazz piano after World War II. This is FRESH AIR.
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