Matthew Yglesias:
There’s something unseemly about seeing fellow Jews turn into rightwingers.
The mind boggles at this kind of statement. How do you even begin to address the universe of idiocy crammed into those 10 words, with infinite density like the pre-Big Bang singularity? After being spanked by National Review‘s Kevin Williamson, Yglesias . . . uh, clarifies:
The problem with being a conservative isn’t that it contradicts Jewish precepts. The problem with being a conservative is that conservative ideology is mistaken and the conservative movement is pernicious. . . . Separately from that, I’m also Jewish. And as a Jew, I’m not immune to a bit of communal pride in the fact that Jews are overwhelmingly progressive and that very few Jews choose to sign up for the wrongheaded and pernicious conservative movement in the United States. But some Jews buck the trend and undermine my effort at communal pride, which I find annoying over-and-above the fact that conservatives are just wrong generally.
Would it be unfair to suggest that subjectivity blinds Yglesias to the true relationship between his Jewishness and his ideology? That is to say, any member of a particular identity group where a certain political orientation prevails will quite normally share the political beliefs of his group, and most American Jews are liberal, a fact examined by the late Norman Podhoretz in his final book. And Yglesias is a graduate of Harvard, where liberalism is a far more prevalent and influential religion than Judaism.
Yglesias undoubtedly considers himself a bold independent thinker, but it is just as plausible to explain him as a mere conformist.
Political Tribalism
Ethnic loyalty is a political phenomenon I’ve contemplated quite often over the years, since it had such a profound influence in my own life. Remember, I was raised as a yellow-dog Democrat. I never even met a Republican until I was in college. I voted for Walter Mondale in 1984 and had a Clinton-Gore bumper sticker on my car in 1992. So it was quite a struggle when, in my mid-30s, I began to disabuse myself of the erroneous ideas that I had absorbed through my lifelong loyalty to the Democratic Party. (Among other things, I spent a lot of time reading de Tocqueville, the Federalists, Burke, Hayek, Mises, and Bill Buckley.)
It was David Horowitz, I believe, who best explained why Jews are often so intensely absorbed with the kind of “progressive” ideology that defined his upbringing as a “Red Diaper baby,” the son of Communist Party members. Rather than attempt to locate and quote the passage in Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son, I will gloss it from an admittedly vague memory and expand on the theme based on other readings (e.g., . Stuart Svonkin’s Jews Against Prejudice.)
In the 19th century, the rabbinic tradition of tikkun olam (“to heal the world”) became secularized and politicized as a pseudo-religious obligation to pursue “reform.” A quite similar historical tendency was evident in the Christian world, where Catholics adopted the “social justice” dogma of Rerum Novarum and Protestants promulgated what was known as the “Social Gospel.”
The identification between American Jews and this conception of a “reform” mission — the root of progressivism — was far more intense, however, primarily because of their experience of anti-Semitic prejudice, but also because of other socio-economic conditions.
Urban Jews and Southern Rednecks
Most Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were recent immigrants to the U.S. and residents of large Northern cities, employed in factory jobs. These urban working-class Jews were active in labor unions, and participated in the kind of coalition politics at which the Democratic Party excelled. This had an enduring legacy. For decades, political demographers generally lumped Jews into the category of “ethnics,” along with the Irish, Poles, Italians and other non-Protestant whites. In 1972, for example, Edmund Muskie believed his Polish ancestry would help him win the Wisconsin Democratic primary. Furthermore, Jewish leaders were instrumental to the success of the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s (until they were purged by Stokely Carmichael and other “Black Power” radicals), and many Jews still believe the Democratic Party propaganda line that the GOP was and is hostile to minority interests.
The allegiance of American Jews to progressive politics and the Democratic Party is no less a product of historical and cultural circumstance than were the similar allegiances of my own parents, who grew up in poverty in rural Alabama. My father remained a loyal Democrat to his dying day, and many of my aunts, uncles and cousins are still Democrats. The facts of Southern political history have been distorted by Democratic “backlash” propaganda claiming that white Southerners began to vote Republican as an expression of racism. Yet the switch of partisan loyalty didn’t occur in the 1960s — i.e., it wasn’t due to Nixon’s “Southern strategy” — but decades later. Democrats were a majority in my native Georgia’s congressional delegation until 1995, the GOP didn’t capture the Georgia legislature until 2002, and the state legislature in my parents’ native Alabama is still controlled by Democrats. In truth, it is only as the old prejudiced white folks have died off that the the South has become more bipartisan, and the GOP’s most solid constituency in the South — as elsewhere — is among small business owners and the college-educated middle class, rather than among illiterate bigots.
Excuse me if that corrective paragraph was a bit longish, but the Democratic propaganda strategy of portraying the GOP as beholden to hateful bigots is intimately connected to the continuing prevalence of “progressivism” among American Jews.
The Anointed Elite
If it were true — as Democrats would have you believe — that every Republican voter is a closet Klansman, then certainly tikkun olam would impose an obligation for Jews to vote Democrat. And when you add in the Democratic propaganda claim that the GOP is “the party of the rich,” controlled by eeeee-vil greedy Corporate Amerikkka, then surely you must admire the courage of Yglesias in opposing “the wrongheaded and pernicious conservative movement.”
Yet the facts do not comport with the Democratic Party’s propaganda claims, as witness the degree to which Goldman Sachs owns the Obama administration. If Yglesias didn’t have a direct professional duty to disseminate the party line — he’s on the payroll of John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, after all — he might pause to examine the facts that contradict his own rhetoric. His viciousness in lashing out at Jonah Golberg and Eric Cantor betrays the extraordinary mental effort required for Yglesia to cope with the cognitive dissonance inherent to his task.
Like other progressives, Yglesias spends most of his day publicizing his own progressive courage — “How bold I am! How perceptive and intelligent I am! Admire me!” — and when conservatives refuse to tug the forelock in obeisance, he quite naturally attributes this either to their ignorance or their malevolence or, quite possibly, both.
Yglesias thinks of himself as independent and unique, but he is in fact a cartoon stereotype of the liberal elitists whose worldview was brilliantly limned by Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
That Yglesias has utterly beclowned himself . . . Well, it’s unseemly.
A shanda fur die goyim, you might say.
