The period allotted for public comment had not yet expired before Oakland’s city council members likely concluded that they were presiding over a meme.

Over 500 residents of the Bay Area city descended on the council this week to register their frustration with Israel’s war of self-defense and the Biden White House’s ostensible support for it. Many of the speakers used their time in the spotlight to humiliate themselves.

“Hamas is not a terrorist organization,” one woman insisted. “Hamas is a resistance organization that is fighting for the liberation of Palestinian people in their land.” This was a common sentiment. “Calling Hamas a terrorist organization is ridiculous, racist, and plays into genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media,” a second speaker declared. “I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance,” said a third through a surgical mask as she read the text of her denunciation on her mobile device. “There have not been beheadings of babies and rapings,” another ill-informed Oaklander claimed. “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.”

The council apparently found this cavalcade of raving crackpots convincing. In a unanimous vote, the council adopted the views expressed by the dissenters who took the meeting hostage and adopted a resolution calling for “an immediate ceasefire” and “the restoration of food, water, electricity, and medical supplies” to Gaza. An amendment that would have condemned Hamas’s actions — the murders, the hostage-taking, the maiming, the torture, the rapes — was voted down.

The self-abasement to which the Oakland City Council committed itself was an avoidable debacle. The vote should have gone another way, of course, but it’s not entirely clear why it occurred at all. What influence does the municipal government of this California city have over the conduct of foreign affairs half a world away? The geopolitics of the Middle East is not within the remit of this or any other American city. Why would its elected officials devote their time and energy to such a waste, only for it to culminate in the fullest expression of their own profound ignorance?

Oakland isn’t alone. City officials in Knoxville, Tenn., were compelled to devote hours of their time to navigating the thorny politics of Israel’s war in Gaza — a meeting that devolved into protest-flavored performance art — because one city-council member demanded a resolution denouncing the “genocidal levels of violence” of which Israel was allegedly guilty. The resolution failed, but not before it paralyzed city government. And for what? To satisfy the ego of one councilwoman who is unhappy with the constraints her office and her constituents imposed on her?

In Virginia, a fraught debate in Richmond’s city government stretched on well into the night before culminating in a 5–1 resolution accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing and collective punishment” even before the ground operations in Gaza had begun. The city’s vice mayor explained to reporters why it was necessary to weigh in on matters well beyond the city’s ambit: “Richmond is not an island,” said the second-in-command of Virginia’s fifth-largest municipality. “Our tax dollars are funding this war in Gaza, and we have a moral obligation to speak out.” By that logic, city officials are obliged to weigh in on every geopolitical development, every domestic crisis, and every federal initiative. There is no limiting principle. And perhaps that’s the point.

In city after city, where the small minority of American progressives opposed to Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas’s murderous designs can organize in real numbers, local officials have thrust themselves into a bitter debate in which they have no place. They have riled up their publics, sometimes to the point of inviting violence, for no other reason other than to salve their addled consciences.

In the process, these city officials demonstrate the truth in Yuval Levin’s diagnosis of what ails American civics. So many aspiring leaders seek to lead only for their own benefit. They seek the platforms they occupy as stages upon which their one-man play will finally unfold. They see the institutions they occupy not as a precious inheritance but as instruments to be wielded. Aging infrastructure, property taxes, budgetary shortfalls, zoning and permitting issues — it’s all too small for their ambitions. They seek — no, they deserve — something grander.

This tiresome and all-too-common spectacle is not a harmless exercise. Beyond the corruption of their institutions and the mistrust their misplaced priorities engender, their actions have the effect of setting their citizens against one another — as these anti-Israel resolutions demonstrated. That disunion may be less an unanticipated consequence of their agitation than a desirable outcome. These bitter debates generate headlines, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity if you’re an unscrupulous publicity hound.

And yet, there is some utility in this campaign of maladministration. If you’re too busy yelling at your neighbor over the conduct of a war in the Levant, you’re not yelling at your council member over that pothole down the street. Too many complications, too many vested interests, and too many moving parts are involved in fixing it. Quite unlike the politics of the Middle East. That’s a simpler matter.