Trumpamania, Turkish Islamists on Gaza, the CHP, talking about Gülenists...

Notebook #9

It’s good to have this elections out of the way. It has taken up far too much of the global bandwidth. This way we all get to go on with our lives.

Here’s this week’s Notebook:

• My two cents on the US elections

• Turkish Islamists on Gaza

• The Turkish opposition at point zero

• How we talk about the Gülenists

And a few more links and things I’ve been reading.

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First, some housekeeping

My wife and I are due to have a baby early next week. It’s our first, so we don’t really know what it’s going to be like in the first few days and weeks. (I mean we know, but we don’t know know.)

So here’s my plan: you won’t hear from me for a week, and then I’ll be back with “Notebook” posts, as well as a few essays I’ve got saved up in the freezer. We might also have some guest posts and podcast episodes while I get back to full strength.

This is the first time that I’m taking a break since starting this blog in April 2022. I hope it’ll be restorative in a way. Not that I expect to get sleep or anything, but it’ll be nice to step away from it all for a little bit.

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On the US elections

Sometimes it’s easier to predict other people’s elections. The sweet spot is when you’re familiar enough with a country to see where it’s headed, but not emotionally involved enough to let it get to you. When the Turkish opposition got excited in 2023, for example, many foreign observers who usually sympathize with them were much more sombre in their outlook. I thought Trump would win this one, and I was right much in the same way.

Nick Danforth

and I talked about it on the podcast this week, and I know that opinions differ, but I think the main takeaway is that “center-left” politics is done. It’s essentially elitist identity politics sustaining the economic status quo, and people don’t vote for that anymore. We saw that on a much smaller scale in Turkey, with Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, and we’re seeing that in the US. It’s also clearly present in Europe. The politics of “normality” is the politics of 20-30 years ago, and it doesn’t appeal to a broad enough base. I don’t think the liberal establishment across the Western world understands that — I don’t think they ever will. But everyone from millennials down does, and that’s something. From now on, if you want to beat the right, you have to run on a message of economic populism. You have to be ready to ruffle some feathers.

As for foreign policy in general, and US-Turkey relations in particular, a lot is obviously going to remain the same, but I think a Trump victory changes things significantly as well. We talked about it a bit in the podcast, and I’m writing a report for FPRI that’ll go into detail a bit more. As I told BBC Türkçe this week, I think relations are going to improve in the short term, but I’m less optimistic about the longer term.