Resolution drafted by Arab states passes by margin of 120 to 14, with 45 abstentions at the UN General Assembly.

Peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state.

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.  

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.   

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.    

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.  

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.  

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.  

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.  

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”   

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.  

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.   

[Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology]

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.   

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that.

But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a Vietnam War that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a sharpened pencil—to defend himself against the violent masses who were sacking the U.S. Capitol. I can see it in his eyes when Phillips, who is Jewish, remarks that some of his Democratic colleagues have recently spread falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others in the party have refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism.

Deception is a part of politics. Phillips acknowledges that. But some deceptions are more insidious than others. On the third Saturday of October, as we sat inside the small, sun-drenched living room of his rural-Virginia farmhouse, Phillips told me he was about to do something out of character: He was going to upset some people. He was going to upset some people because he was going to run for president. And he was going to run for president, Phillips explained, because there is one deception he can no longer perpetuate.

“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”

This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.

What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.

“We don’t have time to make this about any one individual. This is about a mission to stop Donald Trump,” Phillips, who is 54, told me. “I’m just so frustrated—I’m growing appalled—by the silence from people whose job it is to be loud.”

Phillips tried to make peace with this. As recently as eight weeks ago, he had quietly resigned himself to Biden’s nomination. The difference now, he said—the reason for his own buzzer-beating run for the presidency—is that Biden’s numbers have gone from bad to awful. Surveys taken since late summer show the president’s approval ratings hovering at or below 40 percent, Trump pulling ahead in the horse race, and sizable majorities of voters, including Democratic voters, wishing the president would step aside. These findings are apparent in district-level survey data collected by Phillips’s colleagues in the House, and have been the source of frenzied intraparty discussion since the August recess. And yet Democrats’ reaction to them, Phillips said, has been to grimace, shrug, and say it’s too late for anything to be done.

“There’s no such thing as too late,” Phillips told me, “until Donald Trump is in the White House again.”

In recent weeks, Phillips has reached out to a wide assortment of party elders. He did this, in part, as a check on his own sanity. He was becoming panicked at the prospect of Trump’s probable return to office. He halfway hoped to be told that he was losing his grip on reality, that Trump Derangement Syndrome had gotten to him. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to be fine. Instead, in phone call after phone call, his fears were only exacerbated.

“I’m looking at polling data, and I’m looking at all of it. The president’s numbers are just not good—and they’re not getting any better,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told me, summarizing his recent conversations with Phillips. “I talk to a lot of people who do a lot of congressional-level polling and state polling, and they’re all saying the same thing. There’s not an outlier; there’s not another opinion … The question is, has the country made up its mind?”

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told me the answer is no. “This is exactly where we were at this stage of that election cycle,” Messina said. He pointed to the November 6, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the cover of which read, “So, Is Obama Toast?” Messina called the current situation just another case of bedwetting. “If there was real concern, then you’d have real politicians running,” he said. “I’d never heard of Dean Phillips until a few weeks ago.”

The bottom line, Messina said, is that “Biden’s already beaten Trump once. He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”

Carville struggles with this logic. The White House, he said, “operates with what I call this doctrine of strategic certainty,” arguing that Biden is on the same slow-but-steady trajectory he followed in 2020. “Joe Biden has been counted out by the Beltway insiders, pundits, DC media, and anonymous Washington sources time and time again,” the Biden campaign wrote in a statement. “Time and time again, they have been wrong.” The problem is that 2024 bears little resemblance to 2020: Biden is even older, there is a proliferation of third-party and independent candidates, and the Democratic base, which turned out in record numbers in the last presidential election, appears deflated. (“The most under-covered story in contemporary American politics,” Carville said, “is that Black turnout has been miserable everywhere since 2020.”) Carville added that in his own discussions with leading Democrats, when he argues that Biden’s prospects for reelection have grown bleak, “Nobody is saying, ‘James, you’re wrong,’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘James, you can’t say that.’”

Hence his fondness for Phillips. “Remember when the Roman Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy for saying that the Earth moves around the sun? He said, ‘And yet, it still moves,’” Carville told me, cackling in his Cajun drawl. The truth is, Carville said, Biden’s numbers aren’t moving—and whoever points that out is bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles.

Phillips knows that he’s making a permanent enemy of the party establishment. He realizes that he’s likely throwing away a promising career in Congress; already, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota has announced a primary challenge and enlisted the help of leading firms in the St. Paul area to take Phillips out. He told me how, after the news of his impending launch leaked to the press, “a colleague from New Hampshire”—the congressman grinned, as that description narrowed it down to just two people—told him that his candidacy was “not serious” and “offensive” to the state’s voters. In the run-up to his launch, Phillips tried to speak with the president—to convey his respect before entering the race. On Thursday night, he said, the White House got back to him: Biden would not be talking to Phillips.

Cedric Richmond, the onetime Louisiana congressman who is now co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, told me Phillips doesn’t “give a crap” about the party and is pursuing “a vanity project” that could result in another Trump presidency. “History tells us when the sitting president faces a primary challenge, it weakens him for the general election,” Richmond said. “No party has ever survived that.”

But Phillips insists—and his friends, even those who think he’s making a crushing mistake, attest—that he is doing this out of genuine conviction. Standing up and leaning across a coffee table inside his living room, Phillips pulled out his phone and recited data from recent surveys. One showed 70 percent of Democrats under 35 wanting a different nominee; another showed swing-state voters siding with Trump over Biden on a majority of policy issues, and independents roundly rejecting “Bidenomics,” the White House branding for the president’s handling of the economy. “These are not numbers that you can massage,” Phillips said. “Look, just because he’s old, that’s not a disqualifier. But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.”

Phillips sat back down. “Someone had to do this,” the congressman told me. “It just was so self-evident.”

If the need to challenge the president is so self-evident, I asked, then why is a third-term congressman from Minnesota the only one willing to do it?

“I think about that every day,” Phillips replied, shaking his head. “If the data is correct, over 50 percent of Democrats want a different nominee—and yet there’s only one out of 260 Democrats in the Congress saying the same thing?”

Phillips no longer wonders if there’s something wrong with him. He believes there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party—a “disease” that discourages competition and shuts down dialogue and crushes dissent. Phillips said his campaign for president won’t simply be about the “generational schism” that pits clinging-to-power Baby Boomers against the rest of the country.  If he’s running, the congressman said, he’s running on all the schisms that divide the Democrats: cultural and ideological, economic and geographic. He intends to tell some “hard truths” about a party that, in its attempt to turn the page on Trump, he argued, has done things to help move him back into the Oval Office. He sounded at times less like a man who wants to win the presidency, and more like someone who wants to draw attention to the decaying state of our body politic.

Over the course of a weekend with Phillips on his farm, we spent hours discussing the twisted incentive structures of America’s governing institutions. He talked about loyalties and blind spots, about how truth takes a back seat to narrative, about how we tell ourselves stories to ignore uncomfortable realities. Time and again, I pressed Phillips on the most uncomfortable reality of all: By running against Biden—by litigating the president’s age and fitness for office in months of town-hall meetings across New Hampshire—isn’t he likely to make a weak incumbent that much weaker, thereby making another Trump presidency all the more likely?

“I want to strengthen him. If it’s not me, I want to strengthen him. I won’t quit until I strengthen him. I mean it,” Phillips said of Biden. “I do not intend to undermine him, demean him, diminish him, attack him, or embarrass him.”

Phillips’s friends tell me his intentions are pure. But they fear that what makes him special—his guileless, romantic approach to politics—could in this case be ruinous for the country. They have warned him about the primary campaigns against George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, both of whom lost in the general election.

Phillips insisted to me that he wouldn’t be running against Biden. Rather, he would be campaigning for the future of the Democratic Party. There was no scenario, he said, in which his candidacy would result in Trump winning back the White House.

And in that moment, it was Dean Phillips who was telling himself a story.

He didn’t see the question coming—but he didn’t try to duck it, either.

It was July of last year. Phillips was doing a regular spot on WCCO radio, a news-talk station in his district, when host Chad Hartman asked the congressman if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No. I don’t,” Phillips replied, while making sure to voice his admiration for the president. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

Phillips didn’t think much about the comment. After all, he’d run for Congress in 2018 promising not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House (though he ultimately did support her as part of a deal that codified the end of her time in leadership). While he has been a reliable vote in the Democratic caucus—almost always siding with Biden on the House floor—Phillips has simultaneously been a squeaky wheel. He’s a centrist unhappy with what he sees as the party’s coddling of the far left. He’s a Gen Xer convinced that the party’s aging leadership is out of step with the country. He’s an industrialist worried about the party’s hostility toward Big Business. (When he was 3 years old, his mother married the heir of a distilling empire; Phillips took it over in his early 30s, then made his own fortune with the gelato company Talenti.)

When the blowback to the radio interview arrived—with party donors, activists, and officials in both Minnesota and Washington rebuking him as disloyal—Phillips was puzzled. Hadn’t Biden himself said, while campaigning in 2020, that he would be a “bridge” to the future of the Democratic Party? Hadn’t he made that remark flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one side and future Vice President Kamala Harris on the other? Hadn’t he all but promised that his campaign was about removing Trump from power, not staying in power himself?

[Read: So much for Biden the bridge president]

Phillips had never seriously entertained the notion that Biden would seek reelection. Neither had many of his Democratic colleagues. In fact, several House Democrats told me—on the condition of anonymity, as not one of them would speak on the record for this article—that in their conversations with Biden’s inner circle throughout the summer and fall of 2022, the question was never if the president would announce his decision to forgo a second term, but when he would make that announcement.

Figuring that he’d dealt with the worst of the recoil—and still very much certain that Biden would ultimately step aside—Phillips grew more vocal. He spent the balance of 2022, while campaigning for his own reelection, arguing that both Biden and Pelosi should make way for younger Democratic leaders to emerge. He was relieved when, after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that fall, Pelosi allowed Hakeem Jeffries, a friend of Phillips’s, to succeed her atop the caucus.

But that relief soon gave way to worry: As the calendar turned to 2023, there were rumblings coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Biden might run for reelection after all. In February, Phillips irked his colleagues on Capitol Hill when he gave an extensive interview to the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin shaming Democrats for suppressing their concerns about Biden. At that point, his friends in the caucus still believed that Phillips was picking a fight for no reason. When Biden announced his candidacy two months later, several people recalled to me, some congressional Democrats were stunned.

“Many actually felt, I think, personally offended,” Phillips said. “They felt he had made a promise—either implicitly, if not explicitly.”

Around the time Biden was launching his reelection campaign, Phillips was returning to the United States from an emotional journey to Vietnam. He had traveled to the country, for the first time, in search of the place where his father and seven other Americans died in a 1969 helicopter crash. (Military officials initially told his mother that the Huey was shot down; only later, Phillips says, did they admit that the accident was weather related.) After a local man volunteered to lead Phillips to the crash site, the congressman broke down in tears, running his hands over the ground where his father perished, reflecting, he told me, on “the magnificence and the consequence of the power of the American presidency.”

Phillips left Vietnam with renewed certainty of his mission—not to seek the White House himself, but to recruit a Democrat who stood a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.

Back in Washington, Phillips began asking House Democratic colleagues for the personal phone numbers of governors in their states. Some obliged him; others ignored the request or refused it. Phillips tried repeatedly to get in touch with these governors. Only two got back to him—Whitmer in Michigan, and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois—but neither one would speak to the congressman directly. “They had their staff take the call,” Phillips told me. “They wouldn’t take the call.”

With a wry grin, he added: “Gretchen Whitmer’s aide was very thoughtful … J. B. Pritzker’s delegate was somewhat unfriendly.”

[Read: Why not Whitmer?]

By this point, Phillips was getting impatient. Trump’s numbers were improving. One third-party candidate, Cornel West, was already siphoning support away from Biden, and Phillips suspected that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had declared his candidacy as a Democrat, would eventually switch to run as an independent. (That suspicion proved correct earlier this month.) As a member of the elected House Democratic leadership, Phillips could sense the anxiety mounting within the upper echelons of the party. He and other Democratic officials wondered what, exactly, the White House would do to counter the obvious loss of momentum. The answer: Biden’s super PAC dropped eight figures on an advertising blitz around Bidenomics, a branding exercise that Phillips told me was viewed as “a joke” within the House Democratic caucus.  

“Completely disconnected from what we were hearing,” Phillips said of the slogan, “which is people getting frustrated that the administration was telling them that everything is great.”

Everything was not great—but it didn’t seem terrible, either. The RealClearPolitics average of polls, as of late spring, showed Biden and Trump running virtually even. As the summer wore on, however, there were signs of trouble. When Phillips and certain purple-district colleagues would compare notes on happenings back home, the readouts were the same. Polling indicated that more and more independents were drifting from the Democratic ranks. Field operations confirmed that young people and minorities were dangerously disengaged. Town-hall questions and donor meetings began and ended with questions about Biden’s fitness to run against Trump.

Phillips decided that he needed to push even harder. Before embarking on a new, more aggressive phase of his mission—he began booking national-TV appearances with the explicit purpose of lobbying a contender to join the Democratic race—he spoke to Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to share his plans. He also said he called the White House and spoke to Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, to offer a heads-up. Phillips wanted both men to know that he would be proceeding with respect—but proceeding all the same.

In August, as Phillips dialed up the pressure, he suddenly began to feel the pressure himself. He had spent portions of the previous year cultivating relationships with powerful donors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, who had offered their assistance in recruiting a challenger to Biden. Now, with those efforts seemingly doomed, the donors began asking Phillips if he would consider running. He laughed off the question at first. Phillips knew that it would take someone with greater name identification, and a far larger campaign infrastructure, to vie for the party’s presidential nomination. Besides, the folks he met with wanted someone like Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, not a barely known congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs.

In fact, Phillips had already considered—and rejected—the idea of running. After speaking to a packed D.C.-area ballroom of Gold Star families earlier this year, and receiving an ovation for his appeals to brotherhood and bipartisanship, he talked with his wife and his mother about the prospect of doing what no other Democrat was willing to do. But he concluded, quickly, that it was a nonstarter. He didn’t have the experience to run a national campaign, let alone a strategy of any sort.

Phillips told his suitors he wasn’t their guy. Flying back to Washington after the summer recess, he resolved to keep his head down. The congressman didn’t regret his efforts, but he knew they had estranged him from the party. Now, with primary filing deadlines approaching and no serious challengers to the president in sight, he would fall in line and do everything possible to help Biden keep Trump from reclaiming the White House.

No sooner had Phillips taken this vow than two things happened. First, as Congress reconvened during the first week of September, Phillips was blitzed by Democratic colleagues who shared the grim tidings from their districts around the country. He had long been viewed as the caucus outcast for his public defiance of the White House; now he was the party’s unofficial release valve, the member whom everyone sought out to vent their fears and frustrations. That same week, several major polls dropped, the collective upshot of which proved more worrisome than anything Phillips had witnessed to date. One survey, from The Wall Street Journal, showed Trump and Biden essentially tied, but reported that 73 percent of registered voters considered Biden “too old” to run for president, with only 47 percent saying the same about Trump, who is just three and a half years younger. Another poll, conducted for CNN, showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters wanted someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee.

Phillips felt helpless. He made a few last-ditch phone calls, pleading and praying that someone might step forward. No one did. After a weekend of nail-biting, Phillips logged on to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, September 11, to write a remembrance on the anniversary of America coming under attack. That’s when he noticed a direct message. It was from a man he’d never met but whose name he knew well: Steve Schmidt.

“Some of the greatest acts of cowardice in the history of this country have played out in the last 10 years,” Schmidt told me, picking at a piece of coconut cream pie.

“Agreed,” Phillips said, nodding his head. “Agreed.”

The three of us, plus the congressman’s wife, Annalise, were talking late into the night around a long, rustic table in the farmhouse dining room. Never, not even in the juicy, adapted-to-TV novels about presidential campaigns, has there been a stranger pairing than Dean Phillips and Steve Schmidt. One is a genteel, carefully groomed midwesterner who trafficks in dad jokes and neighborly aphorisms, the other a swaggering, bald-headed, battle-hardened product of New Jersey who specializes in ad hominem takedowns. What unites them is a near-manic obsession with keeping Trump out of the White House—and a conviction that Biden cannot beat him next November.

“The modern era of political campaigning began in 1896,” Schmidt told us, holding forth a bit on William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan. “There has never been a bigger off-the-line mistake by any presidential campaign—ever—than labeling this economy ‘Bidenomics.’ The result of that is going to be to reelect Donald Trump, which will be catastrophic.”

Schmidt added: “A fair reading of the polls is that if the election were tomorrow, Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States.”

Schmidt, who is perhaps most famous for his work leading John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—and, specifically, for recommending Sarah Palin as a surprise vice-presidential pick—likes to claim some credit for stopping Trump in the last election. The super PAC he co-founded in 2019, the Lincoln Project, combined quick-twitch instincts with devastating viral content, hounding Trump with over-the-top ads about everything from his business acumen to his mental stability. Schmidt became something of a cult hero to the left, a onetime conservative brawler who had mastered the art and science of exposing Republican duplicity in the Trump era. Before long, however, the Lincoln Project imploded due to cascading scandals. Schmidt resigned, apologizing for his missteps and swearing to himself that he was done with politics for good.

[Andrew Ferguson: Leave Lincoln out of it]

He couldn’t have imagined that inviting Phillips onto his podcast, via direct message, would result in the near-overnight upending of both of their lives. After taping the podcast on September 22, Schmidt told Phillips how impressed he was by his sincerity and conviction. Two days later, Schmidt called Phillips to tell him that he’d shared the audio of their conversation with some trusted political friends, and the response was unanimous: This guy needs to run for president. Before Phillips could respond, Schmidt advised the congressman to talk with his family about it. It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur: Phillips spent the next several days with his wife and his adult daughters, who expressed enthusiasm about the idea. Phillips called Schmidt back and told him that, despite his family’s support, he had no idea how to run a presidential campaign—much less one that would have to launch within weeks, given filing deadlines in key states.

“Listen,” Schmidt told him, “if you’re willing to jump in, then I’m willing to jump in with you.”

Phillips needed some time to think—and to assess Schmidt. Politics is a tough business, but even by that standard his would-be partner had made lots of enemies. The more the two men talked, however, the more Phillips came to view Schmidt as a kindred spirit. They shared not just a singular adversary in Trump but also a common revulsion at the conformist tactics of a political class that refuses to level with the public. (“People talk about misinformation on Twitter, misinformation in the media,” Schmidt told me. “But how is it not misinformation when our political leaders have one conversation with each other, then turn around and tell the American people exactly the opposite?”) Schmidt had relished working for heterodox dissenters like McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Listening to Schmidt narrate his struggles to prevent the Republican Party’s demise, Phillips felt a strange parallel to his own situation.

Back on January 6, 2021, as he’d crawled for cover inside the House gallery—listening to the sounds of broken glass and the gunshot that killed the Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, overhearing his weeping colleagues make good-bye calls to loved ones—Phillips believed he was going to die. Later that night, reflecting on his survival, the congressman vowed that he would give every last measure to the cause of opposing Trump. And now, just a couple of years later, with Trump’s recapturing of power appearing more likely by the day, he was supposed to do nothing—just to keep the Democratic Party honchos happy?

“My colleagues, we all endured that, and you’d think that we would be very intentional and objective and resolute about the singular objective to ensure he does not return to the White House,” Phillips said. “We need to recognize the consequences of this silence.”

On the first weekend of October, Phillips welcomed Schmidt to his D.C. townhome. They were joined by six others: the congressman’s wife and sister; his campaign manager and one of her daughters; Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based consultant; and a Democratic strategist whom I later met at the Virginia farm—one whose identity I agreed to keep off the record because he said his career would be over if he was found to be helping Phillips. Commanding the room with a whiteboard and marker, Schmidt outlined his approach. There would be no org chart, no job titles—only three groups with overlapping responsibilities. The first group, “Headquarters,” would deal with day-to-day operations. The second, “Maneuver,” would handle the mobile logistics of the campaign. The third, “Content,” would be prolific in its production of advertisements, web videos, and social-media posts. This last group would be essential to Phillips’s effort, Schmidt explained: They would contract talent to work across six time zones, from Manhattan to Honolulu, seizing on every opening in the news cycle and putting Biden’s campaign on the defensive all day, every day.

When the weekend wrapped, Phillips sat alone with his thoughts. The idea of challenging his party’s leader suddenly felt real. He knew the arguments being made by his Democratic friends and did his best to consider them without prejudice. Was it likely, Phillips asked himself, that his candidacy might achieve exactly the outcome he wanted to avoid—electing Trump president?

Phillips decided the answer was no.

Running in the Democratic primary carried some risk of hurting the party in 2024, Phillips figured, but not as much risk as letting Biden and his campaign sleepwalk into next summer, only to discover in the fall how disengaged and disaffected millions of Democratic voters truly are.

“If it’s not gonna be me, and this is a way to elevate the need to listen to people who are struggling and connect it to people in Washington, that to me is a blessing for the eventual nominee,” Phillips said. “If it’s Joe Biden—if he kicks my tuchus in the opening states—he looks strong, and that makes him stronger.”

It sounds fine in theory, I told Phillips. But that’s not usually how primary campaigns work.

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “I understand why conventional wisdom says that’s threatening,” Phillips said. “But my gosh, if it’s threatening to go out and listen to people and talk publicly about what’s on people’s minds, and that’s something we should be protecting against, we have bigger problems than I ever thought.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Step aside, Joe Biden]

It was two weeks after that meeting in D.C. that Phillips welcomed me to his Virginia farmhouse. He’d been staying there, a 90-minute drive from the Capitol, since far-right rebels deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sparking a furious three-week search for his replacement. The irony, Phillips explained as he showed me around the 38-acre parcel of pastureland, is that he and Schmidt couldn’t possibly have organized a campaign during this season had Congress been doing its job. The GOP’s dysfunctional detour provided an unexpected opportunity, and Phillips determined that it was his destiny to take advantage.

With Congress adjourned for the weekend as Republicans sought a reset in their leadership scramble, Phillips reconvened the kitchen cabinet from his D.C. summit, plus a Tulsa-based film production crew. Content was the chief priority. Phillips would launch his campaign on Friday, October 27—the deadline for making the New Hampshire ballot—at the state capitol in Concord. From there, he would embark on a series of 120 planned town-hall meetings, breaking McCain’s long-standing Granite State record, touring in a massive “DEAN”-stamped bus wrapped with a slogan sure to infuriate the White House: “Make America Affordable Again.”

The strategy, Schmidt explained as we watched his candidate ad-lib for the roving cameras—shooting all manner of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness, turn-up-the-authenticity footage that would dovetail with the campaign’s policy of no polling or focus grouping—was to win New Hampshire outright. The president had made a massive tactical error, Schmidt said, by siding with the Democratic National Committee over New Hampshire in a procedural squabble that will leave the first-in-the-nation primary winner with zero delegates. Biden had declined to file his candidacy there, instead counting on loyal Democratic voters to write him onto the primary ballot. But now Phillips was preparing to spend the next three months blanketing the state, drawing an unflattering juxtaposition with the absentee president and maybe, just maybe, earning enough votes to defeat him. If that happens, Schmidt said, the media narrative will be what matters—not the delegate math. Americans would wake up to the news of two winners in the nation’s first primary elections: Trump on the Republican side, and Dean Phillips—wait, who?—yes, Dean Phillips on the Democratic side. The slingshot of coverage would be forceful enough to make Phillips competitive in South Carolina, then Michigan. By the time the campaign reached Super Tuesday, Schmidt said, Phillips would have worn the incumbent down—and won over the millions of Democrats who’ve been begging for an alternative.

At least, that’s the strategy. Fanciful? Yes. The mechanical hurdles alone, starting with collecting enough signatures to qualify for key primary ballots, could prove insurmountable. (He has already missed the deadline in Nevada.) That said, in an age of asymmetrical political disruption, Phillips might not be the million-to-one candidate some will dismiss him as. He’s seeding the campaign with enough money to build out a legitimate operation, and has influential donors poised to enter the fray on his behalf. (One tech mogul, who spoke with Phillips throughout the week preceding the launch, was readying to endorse him on Friday.) He has high-profile friends—such as the actor Woody Harrelson—whom he’ll enlist to hit the trail with him and help draw a crowd. Perhaps most consequentially, his campaign is being helped by Billy Shaheen, a longtime kingmaker in New Hampshire presidential politics and the husband of the state’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “I think the people here deserve to hear what Dean has to say,” Billy Shaheen told me. If nothing else, with Schmidt at the helm, Phillips’s campaign will be energetic and highly entertaining.

Yet the more time I spent with him at the farm, the less energized Phillips seemed by the idea of dethroning Biden. He insisted that his first ad-making session focus on saluting the president, singing his opponent’s praises into the cameras in ways that defy all known methods of campaigning. He told me, unsolicited, that his “red line” is March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, at which point he will “wrap it up” and “get behind the president in a very big way” if his candidacy fails to gain traction. He repeatedly drifted back to the notion that he might unwittingly assist Trump’s victory next fall.

Whereas he once spoke with absolute certainty on the subject—shrugging off the comparisons to Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Ted Kennedy in 1980—I could sense by the end of our time together that it was weighing on him. Understandably so: During the course of our interviews—perhaps five or six hours spent on the record—Phillips had directly criticized Biden for what he described as a detachment from the country’s economic concerns, his recent in-person visit to Israel (unnecessarily provocative to Arab nations, Phillips said), and his lack of concrete initiatives to help heal the country the way he promised in 2020. Phillips also ripped Hunter Biden’s “appalling” behavior and argued that the president—who was acting “heroically” by showing such devotion to his troubled son—was now perceived by the public to be just as corrupt as Trump.

All this from a few hours of conversation. If you’re running the Biden campaign, it’s fair to worry: What will come of Phillips taking thousands of questions across scores of town-hall meetings in New Hampshire?

At one point, under the dimmed lights at his dinner table, Phillips told me he possessed no fear of undermining the eventual Democratic nominee. Then, seconds later, he told me he was worried about the legacy he’d be leaving for his two daughters.

“Because of pundits attaching that to me—” Phillips suddenly paused. “If, for some circumstance, Trump still won …” he trailed off.

Schmidt had spent the weekend talking about Dean Phillips making history. And yet, in this moment, the gentleman from Minnesota—the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president in 2024—seemed eager to avoid the history books altogether.

“In other words, if you’re remembered for helping Trump get elected—” I began.

He nodded slowly. “There are two paths.”

Phillips knows what path some Democrats think he’s following: that he’s selfish, maybe even insane, recklessly doing something that might result in another Trump presidency. The way Phillips sees it, he’s on exactly the opposite path: He is the last sane man in the Democratic Party, acting selflessly to ensure that Trump cannot reclaim the White House.

“Two paths,” Phillips repeated. “There’s nothing in the middle.”

In the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq, technocrats in Washington deployed their laptops and prepared for war. Their plans for the governing structures that would replace Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship filled bulging white papers, organizational flowcharts that spilled across thick binders, and dense memoranda for managing esoteric ministries.  

Israel is on the brink of testing a far different approach to regime change. Its leaders have announced a desire to dismantle the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Rather than entering battle with a carefully constructed blueprint for what might follow victory, though, they are winging it, improvising in the dazed aftermath of a devastating massacre that left its military and political leadership in a state of shame and confusion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced its war aims before it had fully sketched out how it might effectively realize them.

But the Israeli operation faces the same question that ultimately vexed the American project in Iraq: What comes next? Removing murderous Islamists from power solves one problem, but it creates another. Who will govern Gaza after Hamas?

Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

To understand how Israel might better approach the day after, I spoke with veterans of Israel’s security establishment, including a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington. I asked them to imagine a plausible endgame for Gaza. What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.

There’s a counterfactual history of Gaza that contains a vision for a way forward. In late 2008, at the very end of his time in office, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his plans to leave his post, to head into the political wilderness. At that moment of transition, Hamas, which had only recently won control of Gaza, launched a fusillade of rocket attacks against targets in southern Israel.

Olmert considered his options. His preferred course of action was regime change, a military campaign that would have eliminated Hamas’s leadership once and for all. But his defense minister and the military’s chief of staff rejected the plan, and let the press know of their opposition. “They already started to leak that Olmert wants to carry on the war in order to prolong, to cancel, his formal retirement and carry on,” Olmert told me. Worried that overruling the objections would look self-serving, he backed away from his plans.

Instead of ejecting Hamas from power, the Israelis bombed Gaza for 22 days, what the military referred to as Operation Cast Lead. But in the course of considering regime change in Gaza, Olmert began to discuss what might come next. “I started to talk with the Americans and the Europeans to bring to Gaza, at the end of the military operation of Israel, an international force to be a caretaker for a period of a few months. To clean it up completely, to stabilize it, and to prepare it for the incoming of the Palestinian Authority security forces.”

In some ways, this vision is more plausible today than when Olmert first imagined it in 2008. Israel has spent the past decade deepening its relations with Arab states in the Gulf, which have been unnerved by Iran’s rise and eager to collaborate with Israel’s tech sector. These countries share Israel’s abiding animosity toward the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement of which Hamas is a part, and consider it a profound threat to their own regimes.

Under the aegis of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross, the veteran diplomat, has co-written a proposal to have the U.S. enlist the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan to serve as Gaza’s temporary stewards, bankrolling its reconstruction and providing a security force that supplies a semblance of order. According to Ross, the goal is to turn Gaza “into a place where development and modernization is the aim, not resistance.”

It sounds fanciful, but Brian Katulis, the vice president of the Middle East Institute, who possesses a large network of contacts in governments across the region, described to me a pitch that the Israelis might use to effectively induce their participation: “‘Look, we’re gonna go after these extremists who are a threat to you. But at the end of all of this, there will be some form of a very qualified two-state solution for the Palestinians. We want you to get behind it.’ And you’d paint a vision of the Middle East that wasn’t naive and Pollyannaish, but something that matches up with where they were going already, which is regional integration.”

There are practical reasons for these countries to join. Egypt, for instance, wants its own firms to win massive construction contracts. And Olmert, who has talked with officials from these countries, believes they would be happy to be seen as Gaza’s savior. “The Israeli operation will cause outrage, so that will be an excuse for them to come in, to really start to rehabilitate Gaza,” he told me.

Still, reconstructing Gaza promises to be an enormous, thankless, expensive task, given the likelihood that it will consist of large stretches of rubble and that pockets of armed Hamas fighters will remain. “There’s a risk of terrorists coming back and overthrowing civilians,” Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser during the premierships of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, told me.

The precondition of Arab states’ participation is that it would be time-limited and that it would culminate in handing over Gaza to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank. The Israeli public is justifiably skeptical of the PA, hardly a bastion of effective governance—and lacking in legitimacy. When I mentioned the possibility of the PA playing a constructive role to Hulata, he joked, “Maybe when there’s a new president and reform and God comes down from heaven and there’s a messiah …” But then he conceded that there’s no viable alternative.

Whatever its many faults, the PA has a security force, some 31,000 members strong, trained and funded by the U.S. military. Israel does not fully trust the PA, but at least the country has a relationship with its leadership and some faith in its ability to perform basic functions. This force would need to double in size during Gaza’s period of Arab stewardship to have sufficient manpower to secure Gaza. “It’s a difficult task, but not an impossible one, given that the United States has overseen this type of force in the West Bank now for 15 years,” Michael Kopolow, of the Israeli Policy Forum, told me.

But the viability of a plan like Ross’s depends on the execution of the war. Although Arab countries might be theoretically attracted to playing the part of Gaza’s savior, their willingness to participate might erode during a brutal war that infuriates their own publics.  

And there’s a danger that Israel’s attack on Gaza will destroy the basic infrastructure of governance, complicating any postwar occupation. An Arab coalition could supply money and soldiers, but it would need to rely on Gaza’s technocratic class of civil administrators. This group has been part of the existing Hamas regime, and many are Islamists, but they aren’t gun-touting militants. Qatar, with the assent of the Israelis, has partially paid their salary. They have the competence to distribute aid, pick up trash, and run hospitals—to supply Gaza with a modicum of postwar order. These civil administrators could lend the occupying force some legitimacy in the short term.

This plan isn’t that far removed from what Gallant, the defense minister, has described as the Israeli plan—which has the army leaving Gaza at the end of the war. But Netanyahu would never be able to implement it. His government has long sought to cast aside the PA to appease the settlers and religious zealots in his coalition, who regard it as a primary obstacle to their biblical vision of Greater Israel.

The problem for Netanyahu is that the PA would never want to assume power in Gaza without substantially bolstering its position in the West Bank. It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor. Gidi Grinstein, who runs the Reut Group, a think tank in Tel Aviv, told me that Netanyahu is once again his own worst enemy. “With his policies on the one hand in the West Bank, Netanyahu is destroying policies on the other hand in Gaza.”

Given that Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza—and that its current government would reject its transfer to Palestinians—the question is, does Netanyahu truly want a total victory? In the most plausible (and most familiar) scenario that I heard described, the Netanyahu government prematurely ends its invasion, under pressure from the Biden administration, to restore stability in the region and in the global economy.

Israel could leave Gaza, claiming a partial victory. It could point to evidence that it decimated Hamas leadership, dismantled bunkers, and destroyed its enemy’s arsenal. The Israelis might not achieve their stated goal of regime change, but they will have demonstrated their power and restored a measure of deterrence.

Forced to contend with the continued reality of Hamas, Israel would scramble to erect a raft of pragmatic security measures to further insulate the nation. There’s talk among Israeli officials of surrounding Gaza with a thick buffer of bulldozed territory, perhaps a mile wide. One former official suggested to me that it might be a kill zone, where any Palestinian who set foot would be shot on sight. Such insulation would be accompanied by the implementation of long-standing plans to upgrade security at the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. This would include investment in state-of-the-art technology to screen vehicles headed into Gaza. Israel might demand that international inspectors, preferably Americans, oversee the inspection of incoming traffic.

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

Other Israelis suggested that the campaign to destroy Hamas wouldn’t end with the ground invasion. Israel would continue to kill Hamas leadership with the dedication depicted in the movie Munich. “No matter if they are in Gaza or if they are in Alaska, okay, they have to be eliminated,” Olmert said. Zohar Polti, who ran the Ministry of Defense’s bureau of planning, described how Israeli might keep dispatching special forces into Gaza to act on intelligence to foil attacks on Israel. “That’s very similar to what we’re doing in the cities of the Palestinians, after we see that the Palestinian security services are dealing with, let’s say, a loss of control.”

But Efraim Halevy, a legendary head of Mossad, vented his anxieties about any failure to achieve Israel’s stated aims. Although he abhors the Netanyahu government—and doubts the wisdom of its strategy and the competence of the officials charged with executing it—he told me that failure would likely further demoralize the public, which was severely fractured before Hamas’s invasion. Failure to eradicate Hamas would make it nearly impossible to reassure refugees from the townlets and kibbutzim in the south—200,000 of them, by one count—to return and rebuild. In the recriminations that would inevitably follow the war, the political anger provoked by Netanyahu’s judicial reform might return, only this time stoked by a sense of total despair.

Many Israelis told me that they were haunted by a photo of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, taken after the end of Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021. After 11 days of Israeli bombing, Sinwar emerged into the daylight, sat in a plush armchair surrounded by rubble, and posed for the camera with a defiant smile. “If you fail in this, it could well mean that what you have intended to achieve, you achieve the opposite,” Halevy told me. “You will be the one who ends up with no cohesion and no will to fight.”

In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.  

Two weeks ago, Hamas declared a “Day of Rage”—an invitation for Muslims to rise up worldwide and express their hatred of Israel and its works. “Head to the squares and streets,” one of its leaders, Khaled Meshaal, said from Qatar. Arabs should bum-rush the Israeli border, and Muslims everywhere should wage war. “You know your responsibility,” he said. The time to study jihad was over. “To all who teach and learn, this is a moment for the application.”

These words brought back waves of anti-nostalgia for anyone who watched the rise of the Islamic State almost a decade ago, like hearing an old song that you hate, or smelling a madeleine covered in mold. “Hamas is ISIS,” Israeli and American officials have said repeatedly since October 7. In 2014, the ISIS version of Meshaal’s call came from the organization’s chief terrorist, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani: “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies.” The message was very do-it-yourself: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.” Adnani’s speech kicked off a year of murder and carnage.

ISIS and Hamas differ in at least this way: When Hamas asks random strangers to go spree-killing in its name, few comply. On the Day of Rage, demonstrations filled public squares in various countries, and an Israeli diplomat was stabbed in Beijing. But the Day of Rage was mostly quiet. I spent the Rage afternoon in the Old City of Jerusalem, in case an uprising reached al-Aqsa Mosque. The Old City was quiet as a crypt. In fact, it was quieter than a crypt, and I know that because I spent part of it in a crypt—the Holy Sepulchre of Jesus Christ—and it was louder inside than out. I had a friendly conversation at normal volume with a Franciscan monk from Stuttgart, who remarked that the area had not been so empty since the darkest days of COVID.

[Read: Four misconceptions about the war in Gaza]

I can understand why Hamas and ISIS might look the same to a casual observer. And I understand, too, why the differences might seem picayune and pedantic, when the blood on the floor ultimately drains to the same place. But they are not the same—and the differences between them are likely to matter as this war proceeds.

My colleague Yair Rosenberg ably summarized what Hamas wants: a “struggle against the Jews,” a rejection of all “so-called peaceful solutions,” and mass murder, as a means to those ends. These characteristics are all very ISIS-like. What makes Hamas unlike ISIS are its more normal characteristics: Hamas is an ally of Iran, Qatar, and Syria; it won a plurality of votes in a 2006 election and based its legitimacy on that win; and it believes there is a patch of land called “Palestine” that it, as the leader of the Palestinian people, should rule.

These facts are so distasteful to ISIS that any one of them would be sufficient to declare Hamas’s leaders infidels and call for their slaughter. ISIS wanted to send Hamas to hell, and it said so openly.

ISIS’s monomaniacal focus on theology and creed led it to demonize one group above all others: Shiite Muslims, the sect that dominates Iran, its Lebanese affiliate Hezbollah, and the ruling party of Syria. ISIS’s hatred of the Shia is limitless. The Shia, according to ISIS, elevate saints and members of the Prophet’s household to the state of demigods. Many Sunnis believe this. ISIS just has no sense of humor about it and says that all the Shia, hundreds of millions of people, need to be killed. This view does not lend itself to a close alliance with Syria, Iran, or Hezbollah.

ISIS thought that saint worship gave the saints a share in the indivisible lordship of God. Another way one can, in ISIS’s eyes, split that lordship is to participate in a democratic election. Participation suggests that popular will deserves deference, and not God’s word alone. To run for office—even to vote—would “nullify one’s Islam,” according to ISIS, and send the democrat down a path toward “the religion of democracy.” One ISIS ideologue wrote that democrats followed a “deviant methodology of Hamas and their ruling by man made laws.”

Finally, Hamas wants a Palestinian state. “We are with the consensus of the necessity of establishing a Palestinian state on the June 4 borders,” Khaled Meshaal said in 2007. Hamas has further goals, of course—a global Muslim government, someday—and it happily associates itself with Muslim Brotherhood outfits in other countries. But it confines its immediate ambitions to Palestine, and the creation of a state there, on the model of states elsewhere, with a seat at the United Nations and the Arab League, and other normal stuff.

To ISIS, this concept fails on two counts. First, ISIS made clear that the era of these states had passed. The only Islamic replacement was a caliphate, which should ever enlarge, with no fixed borders. And it should recognize no peers or other authority, such as the UN, or the king of Jordan. Hamas does not deny the Qatari emir’s right to rule (and if it did, the emir would rapidly evict the group’s leaders from their roost in Doha).

Second, ISIS considers Hamas a nationalist movement. To call Hamas nationalist is jarring to the ear, if you are used to contrasting it with the Palestinian Authority, Hamas's straightforwardly nationalist Palestinian rival. But to ISIS, the two Palestinian factions are equally nationalist and equally damned. Hamas’s charter “assures all the nationalist trends operating in the Palestinian arena for the liberation of Palestine, that it is there for their support and assistance.”

The ISIS objection to Hamas on these grounds is deep: merely by acknowledging that there is something called the Palestinian people, and they might live in a Palestinian state owned by Palestinians, rather than by Muslims in general, is enough for ISIS to condemn Hamas’s followers as nationalists and infidels. The first leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, promised that his soldiers’ boots “will trample the idol of nationalism, destroy the idol of democracy, and uncover its deviant nature.”

Cole Bunzel of The Hoover Institution, an authority on jihadist factions, wrote last year that ISIS's leaders have treated the Palestine issue as a distraction from the theological and apocalyptic issues they consider primary. Muslims, one ISIS article claimed, had treated the liberation of Palestine an “idol,” and failed to notice that “the apostate Hamas movement” was a bunch of polytheists. The researcher Tore Refslund Hamming summarized ISIS’s initial reaction to Hamas’s attack, and it remains in line with these views. It scolds Hamas for its alliances with apostates and Shia. It takes exception to Hamas’s respect for borders, insisting that attacks should be global.

One almost wishes Hamas were ISIS. Hamas is pragmatic in a way that ISIS never could be. ISIS, by hereticizing all its neighbors, imposed limits on its ability to form alliances and negotiate. Hamas, by contrast, works with whatever states it finds useful—chiefly Qatar and Iran. Money speaks sweetly to its leaders, and it much more closely resembles a conventional state in the alliances it forms.

Hamas can activate loyalties that ISIS could not. ISIS spent enormous effort educating its followers about the evils of democracy and nationalism—even when those followers were eager to bring their nationalist buddies on board. First, they had to be indoctrinated. For Hamas, nationalist fervor is a useful tool, and it will not hesitate to win over, say, nonreligious Palestinians by downplaying its own extremism and playing up the nationalism that is now slightly more en vogue in the Arab world. If you wave a Palestinian flag and say you love Palestine, Hamas wants you on its team. ISIS wants you dead.

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

Hamas also has a limit that ISIS did not. ISIS, in encouraging extreme intolerance of Shia and others, lost potential allies. But it could also exploit certain allegiances that existed broadly across the Islamic world. Many, many Sunni Muslims had some awareness of the theological tradition from which ISIS drew. All ISIS had to do was refer to it, and suggest that its natural conclusion was to pick up a rock or swerve one’s truck into a crowd. ISIS meant to appeal universally to Sunnis, and Hamas doesn’t have the same universal appeal—which is why Khaled Meshaal can call for an uprising, and the Muslim world rises up very modestly, like a cake without yeast.

Israeli officials have equated ISIS with Hamas partly for propaganda purposes, to attach their enemy’s name to that of the least likable of all groups to infest the planet in recent years. But in calmer moments, they will admit that the comparison is not exact. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces’ spokesperson, said at a press conference on Monday that the IDF uses the equation between Hamas and ISIS because of “the elements of media, cruelty, and manuscripts”—the last of these, I think, is a reference to the tendency of each group to opine verbosely about its own greatness. I  think ISIS actually dominates Hamas in that last department.

But in use of cruelty, and eagerness to document their crimes, the groups are indeed twins. Just don’t overdo the comparison—and be glad, mostly, that it isn’t perfect.

The US’s unwavering support for Israel has exposed both double standards and strategic short-sightedness, observers say.