The Jewish Question

George Rebane

In his ‘Passover and the Constitution’,  Professor William Galston writes “The Jewish festival teaches that liberty is only possible with tradition and order.”  These are not the mainstay criteria nor governance objectives of today’s American progressives.  Galston is a political science academic who now resides as a senior fellow at the very liberal Brookings Institution in its Governance Studies program.  His linked article appeared in the 13apr22 WSJ.

In the rabbinical tradition of studying the Talmud and the Torah, Dr Galston does not always present the most understandable prescriptions – there’s always ‘on the other hand’.  Here the point that seeks exposure is that sustainable freedom can only be achieved and exercised in an environment of mutually accepted order.  And mutual acceptance is passed on as an inherited tradition, a social legacy from previous generations.  Jews formalize this tradition in the course of the traditional Seder (order) that is central to the celebration of Passover (freedom).

“This raises a classic issue—the relationship between order and freedom. Some schools of thought view them as antitheses—the more order, the less freedom, and vice versa. Libertarians want to minimize government constraints to maximize liberty. Anarchists carry this thesis to its inevitable, and self-refuting, conclusion. … In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, order makes freedom possible. In the absence of a framework—a law, a text, a tradition—we cannot act freely. Not only are we plunged into debilitating doubt, but our decisions also collide with those of others. The actions of others rarely coordinate harmoniously with our own. And when they don’t, all are prevented from acting as they choose. Without a framework of social order, every individual can seek freedom, but none can achieve it.”  If this sounds like a bit of ‘you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black’, then so be it.

However, a little meditation on the freedom/order dichotomy reveals again that in an enduring communal setting no member can act with total freedom; several times a day our fist inevitably comes to within an inch of others’ noses.  So, all of our communal freedoms are in fact circumscribed.  And respecting where the fences are, by what authority they were so placed, and who abides by them, defines the area in which we and our neighbors can practice our ordered freedoms.

In America, as in most liberally governed countries, our traditions of freedom and order come from the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.  “The Declaration and the Constitution have long served as the framework of order, normative and institutional, within which the drama of America’s quest for freedom was enacted. When flaws in the Constitution become impossible to ignore, Americans have appealed to the Declaration to guide the Constitution’s correction, as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. did, and to public consent as the source of legitimacy for both formal constitutional amendments and for pathbreaking interpretive shifts such as Brown v. Board of Education.”

And herein lie the seeds of our national discontent.  An active segment of our Left strongly believes that our Constitution is deeply flawed and must be at best abandoned or at least reformulated through legislation from the bench to reflect what today’s street protesters (rioters?) demand.  “On the left, the Nation’s Elie Mystal declares that ‘The Constitution is kind of trash. . . . It was written by slavers and colonists, and white people who were willing to make deals with slavers and colonists.’  No doubt many Americans agree with him.”

Unfortunately, Galston and his fellow leftwing intellectuals do not understand the Right’s constitutional literalists and originalists (q.v.), believing instead that pole has contributed to “the erosion of this shared framework (which) has deepened political divisions” by rejecting any connection between the Declaration’s “abstract principles” which “have nothing to do with the Constitution” as a “continuation of the conservative British tradition.”

So now we come down to the political history of the Jews starting with their early embrace of Marxism as a natural extension of their long-practiced communal order which allowed them and their culture to survive in their close-knit shtetls after the Christian princes banished them from most of Europe starting in 1492.  Lenin and Stalin were both irked by the preponderance of Jews manning the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of communism.  This statistic gave Hitler and his Nazis further ammunition to proscribe ‘Jewish communism’ and blame Jews for everything bad that befell the Third Reich.  And that socio-political blaming did not stop at the borders of Germany.  Inter-war antisemitism reached far and wide in Christendom, that included the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Many social scientists have been confounded as to why the Jewish contingents in most countries still gravitate toward collectivism when they have been cruelly rejected by the USSR and Nazi Germany, the two global giants of 20^th century collectivism.  In the US it is almost de rigueur that our media and academe have a preponderance of Judaic practitioners.  Jews overwhelmingly gravitate toward the Democratic Party which uniformly militates against capitalism, entrepreneurship, and minimally regulated markets in which Jews have demonstrated their unquestioned acumen.  Yet they adhere to the party that is also the embodied enemy of tradition and freedom, which seeks to limit liberties by burdening the country with evermore laws and regulations.

Government strictures that reject the past and instead promise a new world in which individual effort and hard work, so prized and portrayed by the Jewish tradition to succeed, will no longer be a factor that enables people to differentiate by merit.  A differentiation determined by the possibilities of every individual’s talent and industry, that give rise to our distribution of wealth, income, skills, and recognition, all of which have made America the hallmark of a benevolent and unique society to which the world continues to seek access.  Why do so many Jews today continue to throw their considerable talents and efforts behind movements that guarantee happiness from the enforced lowest common denominators promised by the Great Leveling?

Postscript: For more on the Great Leveling, I recommend the writings of Fisher-Post (2020), Maier (1977), and Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2020) which explicate “the confluence of factors that facilitated the kinds of neo-corporatist compromise which Piketty and others see as critical in facilitating the ‘Great Leveling’.”  (more here and here)

Comments

[Gregory]

List of Jewish Libertarians
Posted on 16 February 2015

Jewish Libertarians:
Walter Block
Frank Chodorov
Moshe Feiglin
David Friedman
Patri Friedman
Glenn Greenwald
Henry Hazlitt (by mother)
Steve Horwitz
Israel Kirzner
Adam Kokesh
Ilana Mercer
Ludwig von Mises
Tonie Nathan
Murray Rothbard
Murray Sabrin
Irwin Schiff
Peter Schiff
Charlie Shrem
John Stossel
Aaron Swartz

Eugene Volokh

Quasilibertarians:
Milton Friedman (libertarian conservative)
Ayn Rand (objectivist)

https://jewishlibertarians.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/list-of-jewish-libertarians/

[Gregory]

"Lenin and Stalin were both irked by the preponderance of Jews manning the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of communism."

And jews are overrepresented in our academia and judiciary... I'd argue that's because academic pursuits are highly valued in Jewish culture.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 634pm - Correctamundo! which now begs my question.

[Gregory]

No one else jumping in? I'll add a stanza from National Brotherhood Week by Tom Lehrer:

"Oh, the Catholics hate the Protestants,
and the Protestants hate the Catholics.
The Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews..."

Given the status of Jews as a disliked minority throughout Christendom (they killed Jesus, you see) I think the gravitation of Jews to leftist thought should have been expected given its superficial agreement with Jewish teachings and Marxian promise (forever in the future) of a near-paradise devoid of strife.

[Scott O]

Gregory - "And everybody hates the Jews..."
Not everyone.
The question being asked is why so many Jews are on the side of the folks that really do hate them.
I've wondered about this myself. David Cole has offered explanations more than once as he was perplexed about this at one time as well. Here's one:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-dysgenic-duo/

[Gregory]

As a group, they are Othered just about everywhere outside of Israel.

I don't get why you think Marxists or the Left really hate them the most.

[Bill Tozer]

Gregory

“No one else jumping in?” I am reading, not commentating. The Jewish culture is hard for someone on the outside looking in to understand. Thus, I won’t jump in. On this topic, best for me to talk the cotton out of my ears and put it in my mouth. Spain had the Jewish men tie ribbons on their dongs and run down the streets to the entertainment of the crowds.
The history of the hatred of the Jews appears historically long and universal. Yet, despite everything with the scattered tribes across the globe and intermarriage and different cultures spread wide and far, the Hebrew (Jewish) DNA remains intact since the days of Abraham, if not before. Amazing. Mind boggling.

More than one ‘conservative’ Jew has grapplec with why 97% or so of the American Jewish voters vote Democrat, the party that disparages them the most, including some brilliant conservative American and European scholars. Why? I dunno.

Carry on.

[Scott O]

Gregory - "I don't get why you think Marxists or the Left really hate them the most."
Blacks don't like the Jews, Muslims don't like the Jews, NAZIs don't like the Jews. And yes, the NAZIs were leftists.
And as Cole points out, somewhere in the food chain (usually closer to the top) there are an inordinate number of Jews wanting to aid the worst of these folks.
I'm not the only one that notices this. It just seems weird and counter-productive.

[Gregory]

"More than one ‘conservative’ Jew has grapplec with why 97% or so of the American Jewish voters vote Democrat, the party that disparages them the most, including some brilliant conservative American and European scholars."

It's more like 1:4 or 1:3, and they are less than 2% of voters. 97% is fantasyland.

[Bill Tozer]

Thanks, Gregory @ 12:08 pm

I thought Jews are 3% of the population, but that could translate to 2% of the voting population. As far as 97%, perhaps my reading put that number at 90% of Jew support the Democrats,, but those reports are usually from specific districts, regions, cities, and the like. So, it’s 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 nationally now? 25-33%? Have no reason to doubt you.
My error.

It’s akin to saying 97% of the voters in the Castro District voted Democrat or 90-93% of the voters in Nancy’s district vote Democrat Party.

I am quite happy to hear on a national level or closer to the truth level, things do not look so bleak. As Scott mentioned and others, “including some brilliant conservative American and European JEWISH scholars” have grappled with is it all seems ‘counter-productive’ to me….not to hid behind what other Jewish have pondered and wondered why.

[Bill Tozer]

The Left’s Jewish Question. It always pops out, even on non-related issues.

WaPo Peddles Anti-Semitic Trope In Doxxing Attack On ‘Libs Of TikTok’

https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/19/wapo-peddles-anti-semitic-trope-in-doxxing-attack-on-libs-of-tik-tok/