Yeah, no. That would go over about as well as calling for 35% tariffs on Canada. The year is 2014, remember? There’s a reason Pat Buchanan didn’t get an invite to the event, and the staunchly isolationist libertarian Ron Paul was mocked as a crank during the keynote. You’d probably already be in the parking lot — or a shouting match — by the time your tablemates tucked into their slices of mediocre cheesecake.

The quips you made at the table are real quotes, however. They come directly from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s X account this summer, as the Gaza war approaches its two-year mark and “food supplies in Gaza have dwindled,” per a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Greene, one of President Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress, shattered another GOP taboo last week by describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a “genocide.”

A similar trend is afoot on the Left, meaning that Israel now faces a bipartisan pincer movement of disapproval and alienation.

Greene is far from alone on the Right. Steve Bannon, the former Trump political consigliere and one of the most popular Right-wing podcast hosts in America, recently argued, “Netanyahu’s government is out of control.” On Bannon’s show, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince accused the Israeli military of intentionally targeting a Catholic church in Gaza and declared: “The time of subsidizing the IDF as the American taxpayer must end.”

After that church was hit, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles addressed the Israelis in lament: “You’re losing me. You’re losing me, when you strike churches, the only church in Gaza, even if accidentally, but especially if not accidentally, you’re losing me.” At Turning Point USA’s summer student conference, the group hosted a debate on the subject between comedian Dave Smith and columnist Josh Hammer that exposed the movement’s divide. Smith, who’s called Ron Paul “the greatest living American hero,” was greeted with cheers from many attendees for criticisms of the Jewish state that would have fallen on deaf ears — if not hostile ears — before Oct. 7. 

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Florida’s Rep. Randy Fine — perhaps Israel’s most vociferous defender in the House of Representatives, who even earned a rebuke from the American Jewish Committee over his enthusiasm for starving Gaza — has a GOP primary challenger in Aaron Baker. “I do NOT support starving children,” Baker posted recently, adding: “I do NOT support punishing [Gazan] citizens for having the worst government in existence.” 

Tucker Carlson, another of the country’s most popular broadcasters, released an episode of his podcast on Wednesday with University of Chicago scholar John Mearsheimer, titled “The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It.” Carlson and his guests have been consistently critical of Netanyahu’s government for months. That isn’t even to address the outright anti-Semitism of other fringe voices with significant social-media followings. 

Of course, the horror in Gaza now is not an apples-to-apples comparison with the 2014 clash between Israel and Hamas. But that’s kind of the point. The war since Oct. 7 has claimed the lives of at least 18,500 children, according to a new Washington Post analysis of the Gaza Health Ministry figures. According to the Post, that means “Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one child per hour during the war.” The deaths included 953 babies who never made it to their first birthday; another 943 never made it to their second; 972 never made it to their third.

The sheer scale of the misery, as Israel now controls a wide swath of Gaza and starvation mounts, challenges modern definitions of proportionality — even as Americans are horrified by the evil tactics of Hamas and continue to sympathize deeply with hostage families. Recent attacks on Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank are further incensing many in the United States.

Speaking of 2014, the Obama administration veterans at Pod Save America are issuing their own mea culpas from the Left. “Barack Obama signed a 10-year [Memorandum of Understanding] for $3.3 billion a year. So we are part of the problem here. Let’s correct it,” said co-host Tommy Vietor this week. Vietor, who served under Obama as a spokesman for the National Security Council, added, “When the war ends, we are not going back to the pre-October 7 status quo.”

Challenged on X by a critic who accused him of exacting a grudge against Netanyahu from the Obama years, Vietor replied, “Or … stay with me here … the entire world is horrified by what we’re witnessing in Gaza, which is why this conversation is happening now and not back in 2015.”

There’s little insight about the Right to be gleaned from Pod Save America. But in this case, Vietor is correct that revulsion at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is no longer limited to progressives. This nationwide movement is so sweeping that it’s dragging people on the Right away from Israel, even as some conservatives triple down on support for the war. 

What’s eroded on the Right, above all, is the stigma that used to surround criticism of Israel. Gallup has been tracking public opinion on the Gaza war since its earliest weeks. On Tuesday, the firm released stark new findings. “American approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza has fallen 10 percentage points since the prior measurement in September, and it is now at 32%, the lowest reading since Gallup first asked the question in November 2023,” read the report. “Disapproval of the military action has now reached 60%.”

To be sure, Gallup’s survey found a stunning gulf between Democrats and Independents on one side and Republicans on the other. 71% of Republicans still approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza, but that number is only 25% among Independents and 8% among Democrats. For what it’s worth, that same poll found Trump’s approval rating has declined 17 points among Independents since the start of his second term, and only 27% approve of his handling of the conflict.

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While that number means less to Republicans in red states and primary elections, in swing districts, battleground states, and nationwide races, it’s enormously significant. Independents split evenly between Trump and Kamala Harris last November, but that was itself a gain for Trump, because he erased Democrats’ nine-point advantage from the 2020 election. Back in 2022, before the war, Independents fell at 71% when it came to favorability for Israel, squarely between Republicans at 81% and Democrats at 63%.

It’s true that even in 2024, Israel ranked low among voters’ priorities when choosing between candidates, but it’s also true that Republicans counted for years on reflexive support for the Israeli government from moderates and the party faithful. Now the incentive structure has been transformed. 

And for the GOP, that fissure looks poised to get much worse. A Pew survey this spring found that “Republicans under 50 are now about as likely to have a negative view of Israel as a positive one (50% versus 48%). In 2022, they were much more likely to see Israel positively than negatively (63% and 35%, respectively).” That’s a shocking change, especially as younger generations begin to comprise more of the electorate. 

Bannon himself put it best when he told Politico this week, “It seems that for the under-30-year-old MAGA base, Israel has almost no support.” Bannon further believes it’s not just Young MAGA but that “Netanyahu’s attempt to save himself politically by dragging America in deeper to another Middle East war has turned off a large swath of older MAGA diehards.” It’s precisely the Israeli hard-liners’ awareness of this generational problem that impels them to act in a maximalist fashion in Gaza and beyond. Better to strike big now, the thinking goes, before the generational turnover empowers Israel-skeptics on both sides.

The problem for Jerusalem is that the harder they go, the more they intensify the sense of alienation in America, the one country whose public sentiments are downright existential for the Jewish state.

Yet as far as presidents go, it’s been a while since a majority of Texans voted for a Democrat — nearly half a century, in fact. The last time it happened was 1976, when residents of the state opted for Jimmy Carter over the Nixon-pardoning Gerald Ford. Back then, Emmanuel Macron was still two years away from being born and Joe Biden was but a bonnie wee laddie of 34, serving out the first of his seven terms in the Senate. We hadn’t yet hit peak disco, let alone gone through the backlash and subsequent revival, and nobody knew who Darth Vader was. Needless to say, things didn’t exactly end well for Carter and since then, Texans have steered well clear of Democratic candidates for president.

Until now, perhaps. With less than a week to go before the election, and at least one poll showing that Biden might be slightly ahead in Texas, the question of whether the Democrats could finally break a decades-long losing streak and score electoral victory in the Lone Star State is filling the party (and pundits) with a sense of nervous excitement.

A Biden victory in Texas is regarded as a prelude to flipping the entire state, reversing the Republicans’ vice-like grip on Lone Star politics, from the presidency downwards. In this scenario, the prophecy of The Emerging Democratic Majority will at long last be fulfilled: the Republicans will be reduced to a rump of elderly trailer-dwelling deplorables clinging to their guns and scratched Duck Dynasty DVDs, while the youthful, diverse, progressive Democrats shall enjoy political hegemony forever and ever, amen.

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Is their hope misplaced? Recently, it seemed that reports of the demise of the Republican Party in Texas were greatly exaggerated, to say the least. Consider, for instance, the lightning fast rise-and-fall of Democrat Wendy Davis, the Harvard-trained lawyer and Texas state senator who in 2013 became briefly famous for filibustering a bill that would have placed numerous restrictions on abortion in the state.

Davis not only made headlines on CNN and in the pages of the NYT but some parts of the British media also did that weird self-colonising thing where they reported on US regional politics with far more interest than they do their own. The Guardian in particular dedicated lots of column inches to Davis, including a particularly hard-hitting piece of reporting on how the trainers she wore during her filibuster had become the bestselling shoe on Amazon and an “unlikely feminist symbol”.

The attention went to Davis’s head: she published a memoir (17 copies going used on Amazon, from $0.08) and then, in 2014, ran for governor against the Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, only to lose by over 20 percentage points. Davis promptly vanished from the scene (although she is having a stab at entering the House of Representatives this year).

Yet despite Davis’s failure, her campaign for governor was significant in at least one respect: having achieved fame as an abortion rights campaigner she did not feel the need to represent herself as a “blue dog” or conservative Democrat. She was, essentially, very similar to the “progressive” type of Democrat you might find on the ballot elsewhere in America, except for her shameless pandering on guns (during her campaign Davis claimed to support the open carry of handguns, a position she denounced almost immediately upon losing.)

Because Davis’s campaign was so obviously a hallucinatory byproduct of Democrat wishful thinking and national media fantasising, I was initially equally dismissive of the “Beto” phenomenon. When the representative from El Paso announced he would challenge Ted Cruz for his Senate seat in 2018, nobody knew much about him; I read that he was from El Paso, spoke fluent Spanish and campaigned where other Democrats feared to tread, and that was about it. It was some time before I saw a photograph of him and was surprised to discover that, despite the Spanish nickname, “Beto” was actually Robert O’Rourke, an Irish-American almost as pale as myself — a Scotsman who didn’t see the sun until he was about 20 years old.

However, despite the fact that O’Rourke was the subject of giddy national media coverage just as Wendy Davis had been, his sudden rise to prominence seemed different. Despite the flood of endorsements from such incisive political thinkers as Beyoncé, Jim Carrey and Willie Nelson, there was also a genuine grassroots excitement around O’Rourke. “Beto for Senate” signs were proliferating on lawns like an invasive species and lots of people I knew were talking about him with cautious optimism. Texas Democrats, after decades of tilting at windmills, were allowing themselves to believe that it might finally happen this time. Betomania was certainly not at Obama ’08 levels, but the stakes were also lower — whereas Obama was running for leader of the free world, O’Rourke had merely set his sights on unseating Ted “No Mates” Cruz, a Tea Party obstructionist widely reviled even by fellow Republicans.

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But there was another significant difference. Where Obama’s rise represented something new and genuinely progressive in American politics and culture, so O’Rourke’s was a variation on a very old theme. The wunderkind from nowhere was actually the pampered scion of the establishment; not only was he the son of Pat O’Rourke, an El Paso judge and Democrat Party apparatchik, he was also the step-grandson of Fred Korth, JFK’s secretary of the navy. After receiving the obligatory Ivy League education, he worked for his family or ran businesses where members of his family were either financial backers or significant clients, and along the way married the daughter of a real estate billionaire.

He then ran for the El Paso city council, where he distinguished himself by supporting a plan to redevelop a Hispanic neighbourhood in which his real estate mogul father-in-law was an investor. Then, when this horny-handed son of toil decided he’d like a seat in congress, one of his father-in-law’s companies contributed $37,500 to a $240,000 campaign against the incumbent, farmer’s son Silvestre Reyes. Inspiring!

Of course, most people weren’t looking all that closely at O’Rourke’s bona fides and in the end he couldn’t quite get it over the line. He did, however, spend a ton of money and set a new record for the most votes ever cast for a Democrat in Texas, finishing a mere two percentage points behind a very nervous Cruz. Like Davis, O’Rourke had not disguised his progressive leanings, but unlike Davis he managed to inspire hope among Texas Democrats that victory was within reach. In Williamson County, where I live — traditionally a conservative stronghold — O’Rourke beat Cruz by almost three points in 2018. The Democrats did not get the “blue wave” they had hoped for, but they made Republicans anxious in a way they hadn’t been for decades. O’Rourke had put them on notice.

Which brings us to 2020. Things are changing so rapidly it is difficult to keep up. O’Rourke, of course, jumped the shark in the eyes of many following his spectacularly unsuccessful campaign to win the Democratic nomination for president, but he still has believers in Texas. The Democratic candidate for my district touts his endorsement. His portrait is bigger than hers on her own posters. With the exception of Fort Worth, all the major cities in Texas — Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and El Paso — have Democrat mayors, and as Texas attracts more and more emigrants from California to the cities and suburbs, it is common to hear complaints that these new arrivals are changing the political culture by voting for the very same high tax, regulation-heavy progressive policies that would turn Texas into the type of place they just left. Meanwhile, polling indicates that white, college-educated voters in the hitherto reliably red-voting suburbs are shifting towards the Democrats and that up to a third of Texas’s Republican congressional seats may be up for grabs.

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If Texas turns blue, or even a shade of purple, it could have a major impact on national politics long-term. Today, Texas is second only to California for electoral votes (38 to 55) and thanks to its growing population, it will have 41 by the next election (while California might actually lose influence). Meanwhile, not only is the population of Texas growing, but its demographics are changing; it is already a majority-minority state.

That the Republican establishment will now have to contend with a more competitive state seems undeniable. The extent to which they are willing or able to adapt to a changing Texas without alienating their base will be key to their fortunes. Yet the overall picture may be more ambiguous than it seems.

One of the most striking things about O’Rourke’s Senate campaign was that he actually polled higher among native born Texans in his Senate race than he did among those who have moved to the state. Therefore, rather than turning the state blue, it may well be that some of those new arrivals, having fled progressive strongholds, are aligning with rural voters with Trump flags flying over their properties and actively resisting the drift towards the Democrats. It also remains to be seen whether the shift in the suburbs represents an epochal turn towards the Democrats or simply disgust at the hi-jinks of this particular president and his enablers. Trump, meanwhile, has made gains among black and Latino voters. Could a less obnoxious populist a few years from now build on those gains and chip away further at the Democrats’ lead among minority voters?

As for whether Texas will finally elect a Democrat for president, well — even Biden seems doubtful. Having splurged a lot of cash earlier in the campaign he is resisting pleas to spend more money in the state,  so that well-known billionaire of the people, Michael Bloomberg, a man with no fear of setting fire to his own money, has chipped in to make up the shortfall. And yet regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, I think the Democrats can be sure of at least one thing: they will not have to wait the century the Republicans did before they start winning elections in Texas again.

Cruz is, in many ways, the embodiment of his native state. Like many of his fellow Texans, Cruz strikes most people as brash, aggressive, fiercely nationalistic, unapologetically religious, and protective of his liberties. For native Texans, that’s just fine. There’s a reason the state adopted “Don’t Mess With Texas” as its motto for an anti-litter campaign. The swagger and not-so-subtle underlying threat fit the state’s traditional mentality to a T.

These sensibilities run deep; they stem from Texas’ origins as an independent republic with its own War for Independence. Every Texan learns in school about the defenders of the Alamo, a church mission in San Antonio whose 200 Texan soldiers were slaughtered by Mexican President and general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. “Victory or Death”, the doomed men’s commander William Travis had written in a call for aid, a statement Texans revere in the manner the ancients honoured Leonidas and the stand of his Spartans at Thermopylae. The inscription on the monument commemorating the battle in which Texas won its independence also aptly summarises that mindset: “The slaughter was appalling, victory complete, and Texas free!”

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Like much of the American South, these sentiments found their original political expression in the Democratic Party. That, however, was when the Democrats were the party of the farmer and the less-educated – and of the defeated, former slaveholding Confederate States of America. As Democrats have moved in the past 25 years towards becoming the party of the very poor, the non-White, and the secular White urbanite, these values now find their expression in an unyielding and pugnacious support for the Republican Party.

But Texas, like America, is changing. The state has always been home to a large black population: it was once a slave-holding state and had joined the Confederacy during the American Civil War. More recently, though, its robust economic growth has attracted millions of migrants.

Many come from other parts of the United States – and bring with them their non-Texan upbringing and values. Millions more come from Mexico, attracted by economic opportunity and freedom. The result is that native Texans are increasingly declining in power and influence in their own state.

These demographic changes are slowly making Texas more open to electing a Democrat. The state is already projected to have a majority of ethnic minorities in the eligible voter pool by 2020. Since non-whites typically vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates, Cruz’s path to victory will require winning large majorities among native Texans and smaller, but still substantial, majorities among the non-Texan whites who now live there.

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Cruz is in trouble. Both his own past acts and his present attitude towards President Trump anger many in the that latter group of settlers. He started his young Senate career by viciously attacking the more centrist Republicans, going so far as to call the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, a liar. He also took aim at Trump during the 2016 campaign, attacking Trump’s character and calling his foe a “pathological liar” and a “narcissist”.

He pointedly refused to endorse Trump at first, even after he lost the nomination, telling the Republican delegates at the national convention to “vote your conscience” in November. He soon changed course, however, endorsing Trump by late September. He now suffers among both anti-Trump Republicans who hate his current stance, and early Trump backers who haven’t forgotten.

There are a lot of anti-Trump Republicans in Texas, in part because of the legacy of the two presidents Bush. Both men were and remain popular among the non-native Texan whites. Like elsewhere in America, they tend to be highly-educated, affluent, and live in suburbs. While similar voters across America abandoned Trump’s Republicans for Hillary Clinton, the shift was particularly strong in Texas, and especially in the neighbourhoods where the Bushes lived or had made their careers. These people remain openly hostile to Trump Republicanism and intend to cast out his GOP allies even if that means electing a (gasp) Democrat for the first time in more than a quarter of a century.

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Cruz’s Democratic opponent, El Paso-area Congressman Beto O’Rourke, is tailor-made to attract these voters and add them to the growing Democratic ranks. He is young, only 45 years old, and graduated from an elite university. He has positioned himself as a centrist and has worked with Republicans in Congress. He is also fluent in Spanish and his Congressional district has one of the highest number of Hispanics in the nation. Pro-choice on abortion and pro-LGBT rights, he also shares the views of the Democratic Party’s identity politics wing. The combination of these attributes makes him a formidable opponent.

Texas’ demographic shifts are visible in the polls. While they differ in whether Cruz is ahead by nine points, four points, or is essentially tied with O’Rourke, the underlying breakdowns are remarkably similar. O’Rouke wins 90% or so among Democrats and carries the young and non-white voters, while Cruz runs well with voters who still call themselves Republicans and among non-college-educated whites.

College-educated whites are more evenly split, and two polls sponsored by The New York Times show O’Rourke ahead in the two most affluent and best-educated Congressional Districts in the state, the 7^thand the 32d, seats that Republican nominee Mitt Romney carried by between 15% and 21% just six years ago.

The shifts in Texas, then, are very similar to those Britain experienced in its 2017 general election. In that race, the Labour Party received enthusiastic support from non-whites and the young, and were the beneficiaries of large swings in support among educated, affluent anti-Brexit Tories. It rode these trends to unexpected and historic victories in British constituencies similar to the 7^thand 32^nd districts, such as Canterbury and Kensington. Even in Texas, politics is increasingly less about Left versus Right than In versus Out.

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Cruz will probably still prevail. Just as the Tories still carried extremely Conservative seats such as Richmond Park, despite the strong upper-income swing against them, so too Texas remains so Republican that even a candidate like O’Rourke will need the stars to align even for a narrow win. Cruz will also benefit from the type of increased support among less-educated whites that Teresa May’s party obtained outside the affluent south of England in places like Stoke-on-Trent.

While the peculiarities of Britain’s political demography meant that the Tories lost seats in 2017, they won the popular vote with this working-class backing despite the surge in Labour voting among the young, the non-white, and the rich. Texas’s Senate seat is a first-past-the-post election, and accordingly Cruz, like May, should also narrowly prevail in a statewide ballot.

The fact that these divisions are now present even in the very distinctive culture of Texas – which has not elected a Democrat in either senate seat or as governor since the early 1990s – demonstrates how global in scope our political divisions are. Educated and non-educated white Texans may both wear big hats, hunt, and attend church more frequently than their counterparts in London or Newcastle, but they are moving politically in similar directions and for similar reasons.

And just as Brexit has divided Britain down the middle, with both sides engaged in an increasingly bitter battle to achieve what we at UnHerd call “hegemonia”, so too are Americans divided against themselves in a rancorous battle for supremacy.

Quoting the Gospel of Mark, the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”. Texas – like America, like Britain, like much of the West – is a house divided. Ted Cruz may emerge from his own Alamo bloodied but alive, but the same may not be said of his nation unless these divisions are resolved.