President Joe Biden has been buffeted by a series of open letters critical of Israel’s military response to the October 7 attacks and insisting that he call for an immediate ceasefire. The pleas are signed by staffers and interns from the White House and his re-election campaign.
Well, they’re not exactly signed. They’re anonymously signed. Or, more accurately, not signed at all. Is there a less honorable, less effective means of influencing policy?
Democratic Party elders are, unsurprisingly, unimpressed by this spate of oxymoronic insubordination. James Carville, former campaign strategist for Bill Clinton, vented to Politico, “There’s this whole, ‘You’re not the boss of me’ attitude now. ‘I might work for you, but I have my own views.’ If you said you didn’t like some of President Clinton’s policies, the idea that you would go public with that would be insane. Just wouldn’t do that. It wouldn’t even cross your mind.”
However, Carville’s memory is a little fuzzy. Going public with dissent did more than just cross the minds of some Clinton staffers.
In 1993, during Clinton’s first year as president, three State Department bureaucrats—Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—resigned to publicly protest the commander-in-chief’s unwillingness, at the time, to intervene militarily to oppose Serbia’s ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. In 1996, mere months before Election Day, three high-ranking Health and Human Services Department officials—Peter Edelman, Mary Jo Bane, and Wendell Primus—resigned in opposition to Clinton’s signing the welfare reform bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress.
But there’s a big difference between the dissenters of today and yesterday. The Clinton-era dissenters used their names and quit their jobs. Biden’s in-house critics hide their names and keep their jobs. Before, people risked their careers to uphold a higher principle. Now, people undercut the boss, collecting the boss’s paychecks and hiding behind the cloak of anonymity.
(Two modern-day exceptions are career State Department official Josh Paul and Education Department political appointee Tariq Habash, who resigned over their sharp disagreement with Biden’s Middle East policies.)
Posting a protest letter on social media platforms with anonymous signatories is not just cowardly but the emptiest of empty gestures. Without names, no one knows if “40+ White House & EOP [Executive Office of the President] interns” or “17 Biden for President Staffers” even exist. Another anonymous letter, purportedly with the backing of more than 500 anonymous White House staffers, was sent to Biden directly, according toThe New York Times and NBC News, but does not appear to have been posted on a social media site. Last month, The Washington Post tried to identify the sources of the various letters but couldn’t pin them down. Hiding behind anonymity shields the signatories from defending their arguments in public forums or media appearances or having to risk their coveted perches.
But the banality of what the anonymous protestors are asking for is revealing, too. One letter reads, “We call on President Biden to urgently demand a ceasefire; and to call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians.” That sounds wonderful, but what do the signatories suggest Biden should do if his “call” is ignored and Israel declines to release “arbitrarily detained Palestinians,” or Hamas does not accede to the anonymous staffers demands? How do they propose any ceasefire be monitored to ensure neither party uses the lull in violence to prepare for a fresh attack? The demand for a ceasefire is widespread and surely worthy of the debate. But the courage-free Biden staffers are demanding of the president a gesture as empty as their own. As Michael Schaffer pointed out in Politico, the quiet discussions of dissenting careerists at State and elsewhere are serious ones about how to accomplish the goals of diminishing or eliminating Hamas, helping to secure Israel to prevent another October 7, and diminishing the chances of a wider conflagration.
The signatories should be able to elaborate on these difficult issues and strengthen their case in interviews and personal statements. But no one can press the signatories on their positions because they can’t be found.
These ghost letter-writers also suffer from delusions of grandeur. Underlings disagree with bosses all the time. For differences of opinion to exist among White House staff regarding how to handle the twist in the most divisive, emotional, and protracted conflict on the globe, which has frustrated every president since Israel’s inception, is not shocking news.
When an official quits a plum post over a difference of opinion, that is shocking precisely because it is rare and because it involves sacrifice. It’s an act of courage that is galvanizing because it is courageous. It can have a real effect on a president because it raises the prospect of more departures snowballing into an uncomfortable, if not devastating, exodus. Timidly expressing a contrary view because—as one letter acknowledges—signatories are worried about the “risk of potentially losing our jobs” only betrays the lack of intensity of the expressed views, making them all the easier to dismiss.
While the rise of anonymous protest is new, much about internal White House dissent hasn’t changed.
Like today, Clinton’s struggles with rogue officials sparked debate over the younger generation’s appetite for performative disloyalty. David Hogg, the 23-year-old social-media savvy gun control activist, told Politico this week, “Our media ecosystem has been democratized with the creation of social media over the past decade and a half. That kind of decentralization or democratization of the media ecosystem has created a generational norm of not caring about hierarchy or who’s necessarily above you.” Yes and no. The digitally savvy dissenters don’t care about hierarchy to the extent that they’re willing to claim the mantle of moral superiority. They do care to the degree that they still want the words “White House” in their social media bios.
In 1993, The Washington Post observed, “Rarely has the State Department experienced such open displays of dissent. Even during the tumultuous Vietnam War era, much greater numbers of protest resignations … were handled with relative discretion. Part of the difference apparently is the vast opportunities for publicly voicing dissent in the electronic age[.]” One of the State Department dissenters, then 32-year-old Marshall Freeman Harris, told the Post, “This generation sees that television and the media play a more important role. The administration has hidden behind public opinion, saying no one will support action [against the Serbs]. I hoped my resignation would have some effect.”
But also, like today, the Clinton-era protests didn’t have much effect. The State Department dissidents in 1993 did not force Clinton to intervene. (Clinton did lead NATO bombing campaigns in 1995 and 1999 because of worsening conditions in the Balkans, not because of the resignations.) Clinton did not abandon welfare reform despite losing three key aides, even if Edelman is the husband of Marian Wright Edelman, a longtime friend of the Clintons. Edelman is the founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund. Hillary Clinton was a staff attorney for the advocacy group, a board member, and a board chair. A smattering of voices, even those close to the president, is rarely enough to force a chief executive to change course. Adherence to principle may still compel people to leave administrations, but they should do so knowing that their actions are unlikely to affect policy.
A counterpoint to James Carville’s nostalgia for loyalty in the 1990s is … James Carville’s disgust with the lack of loyalty during the 1990s.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote an essay for The New Yorker in March 1998 titled “The End of Loyalty,” as some in Clinton’s orbit—such as former White House aides George Stephanopoulos and Leon Panetta—were quick to suggest the possibility of impeachment and resignation over the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. (Clinton would not admit to the affair for another five months after the article’s publication.) An incredulous Carville complained that Washington society no longer valued loyalty: “A loyal person is seen as a cross between a sycophant and a fool. Washington has come to the point where it glorifies you if you’re disloyal. A disloyal person is made out to be a shrewd person of integrity.”
Gates appeared to concur with Carville that loyalty had lost luster but stopped short of arguing for unquestioning loyalty: “Often loyalty must give way to ‘principle’—this we know—but aren’t there times, too, when principle must give way to loyalty?”
He doesn’t define any criteria, but I will. Loyalty to the president should take precedence when either the value of vast areas of agreement outweighs that of any disagreements or when the controversial matter at hand is of such a complex nature that no simple binary choice exists between the moral and immoral courses of action. If you can’t know with certainty that the president for whom you serve, who has more access to information and more experience navigating political crises, has a superior policy choice available, then perhaps it’s not the time to second guess either publicly or through the absurdist anonymous petition. The welfare reform and Balkan resignations were all from experts in their fields who knew what was at stake, not from interns. Their expertise gave their public resignations all the more weight. We have no idea if those who signed the anonymous petitions have any expertise.
Of course, no algorithm can perfectly perform loyalty-to-principle ratio calculations. Quitting the Trump administration after the January 6 insurrection seems a straightforward call, even if, with only two weeks left on the calendar, pathetically belated. That one should not be loyal to a president trying to subvert democracy is inarguable. But are more lives saved, and are we closer to a durable peace by publicly pressing Biden to publicly press Israel to cease fire without complementary pressure placed on Hamas? That’s a harder question with which to grapple.
The main reason why public dissent should not be afforded anonymity is because standing on principles requires defending one’s position and showing that the hard questions have been thoughtfully answered. Breaking ranks with the president requires bravery, consideration, and preparation. None of that can be found in the empty gesture of signing something in invisible ink.
