One of my least favorite parlor tricks of liberals, including neoconservatives and libertarians, is to define “rational” as a very narrow range of individualist philosophical views, based on a few pseudo-scientific axioms of one kind or another, and thereby rendering it nearly impossible for one’s opponents to win an argument before the discussion has begun because their opponents’ concerns, such as the good of a nation or the Glory of God, are defined beforehand as irrational and irrelevant.
There is much of this in Ilya Somin’s recent discussion of the evils of nationalism over at Volokh or in a surprisingly dispassionate defense of disloyalty by David Schraub over at the University of Chicago. This is what Enlightenment Universalism is, of course. It rejects the organic, historical and blood ties of peoples. It rejects the idea that God and revealed truth might have some influence in our political and moral life. It denies that matters that cannot be reduced to philosophical formulae might also be true, such as the idea that men should not marry men, women should first and foremost be mothers, or that people who talk and act funny and have unpronounceable names should be treated differently than our native-born sons.
What I wrote in response to Schraub exposes this little sleight of hand that all-too-often avoids the merits of the issue:
Majorities in fact have real power and a real moral right to preserve themselves as a people. Unless they’re suffering from mass psychosis, they do and should impose certain standards on those who would benefit from the nation and its laws and its protection, not least not to actively aid enemies of the nation.
We sadly ask so little of citizens, particularly newcomers, who often have dual loyalties. We are in fact a remarkably tolerant people, and it’s gone too far, culminating in such ridiculous acts as serving in foreign armies by the President’s Chief of Staff and the mass murder of soldiers after repeated statements of disloyalty by the terrorist, Major Nidal Hasan.
Nations are safer, more secure, and more pleasant when people are loyal and have some sense of allegiance and community. There will always be loyalty of one kind or another, but where disloyalty to the nation is tolerated usually it’s reserved instead for some other nation or group, whether it’s one’s ethnic subgroup, one’s religious community, a foreign nation, or some combination of the three.
There is something very obvious going on here, and part of the answer is in the authors and their backgrounds. They are ethnic and religious minorities, and highly educated transnational cosmopolitans to be exact. They are not typical Americans, but their views are highly influential. Big surprise, “Uzair Kayhani” came to Schraub’s defense. I’m surprised Osama bin Laden himself didn’t pipe in. The views of these people are why the Army tolerated the anti-American rantings of Major Nidal Hassan. They are why we tolerate foreign tongues and weird styles of dress by foreigners in our cities. This is why it’s been drummed into us to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”
The universalist enlightenment liberalism they are promoting is a set of rules that is very useful for minority tribes surrounded by a majority with different values and interests. These views advance the minority by rendering the majority’s dominance on cultural, economic, and political matters less so, such that its older standards of excellence are dismissed as exclusionary and morally suspect. Who cares if you were descended from those on the Mayflower? That’s ethnocentric and elitist. Who cares if your granddad fought in World War II? It doesn’t matter where you were born or what your family ever did, you’re just a citizen no different than an FOB in a Hijab.
Under this viewpoint, the majority’s becomes one voice in a multicultural chorus. Of course, in spite of its pretensions to fairness, it’s obviously a self-interested ideology. When these same minorities are in charge or in the majority–such as Jews in Israel or Chinese in China or Muslims in any Muslim country–they almost always adopt different and sensible rules aimed at the self-preservation of their nation and their religion.
I do not necessarily begrudge them such nationalism at home; within the limits of justice, it is natural and to be expected. But I do begrudge the attempt by alienated minorities of all kinds to redefine and rewrite the rules of the game in my home, where we have a majority, our own folkways, our own traditions, and our own way of life. Those traditions, of course, are and were very flexible. They were flexible enough historically that many minorities felt welcome here and did not, until recently, feel it terribly offensive to have Christmas as a federal holiday or to change their names from Chandrakumar to “Sean.” But this tolerance was not our only value. It was part of a broader tradition, that of a real nation with more than a creed but a real national character–courageous, risk-taking, unpretentious, in love with space and freedom, upwardly mobile, self-reliant, proud, God-fearing, patriotic, inventive, practical–but this character has been deliberately and maliciously erased by the deliberate efforts of a subset of minorities and newcomers, for whom such very minor indignities as Nativity Scenes, the “strong silent” WASPy ideal of masculinity, and the old informal rules of “fair business,” undermined their own rise to power.
Don’t fall for this trick, friends. What appears to be a fair, universalist, philosophical account of the good is often based on controversial and unproven premises; a little looking makes it clear often that the speaker is insincere, his arguments are sophistical, and that his goals are the same tribalism (in the ascent) for which he denounces you, even when you’re merely trying only to defend a known way of life.
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Great post. Let’s just be clear, though, that minorities aren’t to blame for this. It’s the postmodern American Left who pushes these ideas, for the most part.
Yes and no. It’s true, not all minorities do this. Random black or Mexican working class people minding their business do not. Minorities owning small businesses and focusing on their economic advancement do not.
But the vanguard of the new left was largely Jewish, with some black panther fellow travellers. The New Left, in particular, consisted of a subset of Jews from highly leftist parents, so-called Red Diaper babies, typically highly educated, urban, and of modest means, often of Russian extraction as opposed to the older, more moderate Central European Jews of the mid 19th Century wave of immigration. This is not something I’m making up. Howard Zinn, Abbie Hoffman, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, do they not have an ethnic and religious background?
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2062127
So I think they certainly have a distinct view, and this view is not perhaps “caused” by their minority status, but presenting this view in universalist terms when, in fact, it’s pretty obviously aimed at a group interest is the trick. Yuri Slezkine in the Jewish Century discusses this phenomenon at length.
Ronald Radosh (who now posts at PJ Media) now a conservative, or “man of the right,” was one of those red-diaper babies himself who went to Eastern HS in Brooklyn–a school populated almost entirely by the sons and daughters of radical leftists. He writes all about it and the “new-left” 60s generation movement in his book: “Commies.”
Very interesting reading, with insights into the mind-set of the very people who comprised the movement you talk about, Mr. Roach.
Marcuse IIRC was German, and had been involved in Marxist politics in Weimar Germany. But you are correct that the Austrian and German Jews produced fewer radicals than the later Russian Jewish immigrant population. There were radicals of other nationalities (including non-Jewish Germans in the early phase of the anarchist movement and Italians in the later phase) but their radicalism largely died out.
Not entirely sure what “group interest” it served for Jews, though; they had already entered the upper middle class and elite institutions by the time the New Left arose.
Seems to me this “parlor trick” is used by libertarians but not by liberals or neoconservatives. The latter two simply denounce (ethno)national loyalty, when it’s not the right ethnic group or nation, as “racist”; case closed. It’s the libertarians who are into all this “rational” bullshit.
The most salient thing about Somin’s post is how shallow and unoriginal it is. It’s not worth paying attention to.
On the “disloyalty” post, to give credit where due, the speaker being summarized settles on the justification that we all have noncontractual obligations to groups to which we belong, voluntarily or not. That’s about as much as you could expect from a libertarian, maybe even a lot more than you could expect. I might have replied, “An excellent start, but it’s not as you say a `thin account’, because you owe your very existence to your nation, as you do to your family.” Maybe that even gets to the heart of the disagreement.
I liked your John Stuart Mill quote, but a libertarian could quote Lord Acton in response. Acton argued against Mill that multinational states would be more conducive to liberty.
Anyway, I agree with you 100% on a nation’s (or polity’s or whatever) right to preserve and publicly express its way of life. Believe me, you don’t know what you’re missing until you live someplace as a member of a nation where that right is taken for granted.
Patrick asks, “Not entirely sure what “group interest” it served for Jews, though; they had already entered the upper middle class and elite institutions by the time the New Left arose.”
I’m not sure it does. Some Jews, like Lawrence Auster, argue that this leftism is counter-productive and will lead to backlash. I do think it preserves a perceived interest. And that perceived interest is that America is like Europe–1905 Russia to be exact–scary Christians may have a pogrom at any moment, there is discrimination everywhere and any smidgen of ethnic and religious pride by the majority needs to be destroyed, and the older values of physical courage, religion, family, and nation are retrograde, and that globalism is good for the world and for the first transnational globalist people, the Jews.
I have a pet theory about this, and it involves late 19th Century Jewish immigration from America. I think basically they thought this was this great hodge-podge multicultural empire and that the little bits of discrimination they encountered from natives was unbearable after what they endured (or imagined themselves to have endured) in Russia. So they transposed the same categories: rednecks were the thuggish but dull Russian peasants, WASPy elites were the aristocracy, the Catholics and other recent immigrants were like their German ethnic minority competitors in old Russia, etc. I believe this transposition, unjustified in my view, continues to this day among hardcore leftist Jews who are “scared” of Christians and think the old WASP elite was indistinguishable from the often self-induldgent Russian aristocracy.
I think the above comment by Mr. Roach is off the mark. Jewish immigrants a century ago didn’t see America as a multicultural empire and they weren’t over-sensitive to discrimination. They saw America for what it was, an Anglo-Protestant country, and they loved it for its freedom, its openness, and its relative lack of bigotry. I heard stories from my grandparents about how their own immigrant parents and grandparents absolutely loved America and thought that it was about as perfect as any place could be, especially compared to that “awful place” they came from and didn’t even want to talk about. I don’t think this is exceptional. And these people were all left-liberals, which of course is also typical of Jewish Americans.
They might have looked down on “rednecks”, when they thought about them at all, but that was probably mostly a town-country thing. The Jewish-Americans of that generation were working class and petit bourgeois; they didn’t look down that much on the lower classes. There was definitely some transposition going on – my grandfather, who was born in America, wasn’t allowed to join the Boy Scouts because his father wouldn’t allow him to wear a “military” uniform – but I think that kind of transposition died out by, say, the 1930s.
Today it’s different. The transposition you talk about is there, and stronger today than it was in the past, but it’s a new phenomenon, not a continuation of the old. It’s a “Jewish identity” thing, and it’s among typical Jewish left-liberals even more than among the hardcore left, I’d guess. Viewing middle-Americans as threatening European peasants, fearing a future pogrom from the Evangelical Right, all this kind of hysterical nonsense is a newly-invented way to affirm group identity. It’s a generational fad, in my opinion, largely correlated with the “return to Orthodoxy” phenomenon among young American Jews.
But this is all just a minority of American Jews I think. The majority are not against Christians, though they don’t think highly of Christianity at all, and they do look down on the “born-agains”, as do non-Jewish liberals. The majority of American Jews take it for granted that they’re accepted as “real Americans”. They can’t even imagine it being otherwise.
Then why the hardcore leftism and widespread communism of that generation and its children: the Rosenbergs, Greenglasses, Horace Kallens, Emma Goldmans, the Hollywood Ten and all the rest? What of the huge numbers of Jews who tragically returned to the Soviet Union in a fit of idealism in the 1920s?
It’s undoubtedly the case that some of these kids’ parents were smart, knew they and their ids had it very good, and were very pro-American from start to finish. America was long a promised land of sorts for Russian Jews of the turn-of-the-century. But if this were accepted widely, why then the leftism, which is defined largely by hostility to traditional American values and institutions and people?
Center-left idealistic Jewish liberals who felt America needed to rid itself of vestiges of racism and other deviations from its egalitarian ideals are one thing, and such rhetoric is compatible with a certain view of and love of America and also basic justice. But the admixture of hardcore crazies among this population is too prominent to be ignored and deserves some explanation, and I believe they imported their radical ideologies from Russia and simply viewed America through much of the same lens when they realized here, as in Europe, they were a minority that sometimes felt the majority’s culture was overbearing, offensive, and insufficiently sensitive to their non-Christian and other out-of-the-mainstream views and practices. Once again, not everyone of course, but the over-representation in the hardcore left is undeniable.
It’s obvious that the radicals imported their radicalism from Russia or wherever. But I don’t agree that they transposed tsarist Russia onto America. Once Jews adopted socialism and Communism in Russia, for whatever reasons, they didn’t need such a transposition in order to maintain their radicalism in their new country, whether that country was America, Ottoman Palestine, or somewhere else. Ideologies are self-maintaining by default. By the way, how widespread was Communism among Jewish Americans? (You’ve read about this stuff and I haven’t.) I know that an enormously high percentage of Communists were Jews, but what percentage of Jews in America were Communists (or anarchists)?
Also, I think you’re doing some transposing of your own here. You’re transposing the stance of the 1960s New Left and the current multicultural left (“insufficiently sensitive”) back onto the Old Left. Those Jewish socialists of the Old Left didn’t hate RacistSexistHomophobic white gentiles back then, they mostly hated greedy capitalists who were supposedly exploiting them and their white gentile coworkers. The Jewish Marxists didn’t oppose Christmas or even Christians, they opposed all religion, including Judaism. Maybe even especially Judaism. Contrary to what you said above, it wasn’t just center-left Jews who loved America. Yes there were some disloyal Stalinists like the Rosenbergs, but even most Jewish American socialists considered themselves American patriots, as most socialists in general did. I can’t prove any of this with numbers, but if you accept it, then as far as your transposition hypothesis goes, consider that the number of Jews in tsarist Russia who considered themselves patriots was probably about zero.
Obviously, Jewish immigrants, like Italians and others, were against the nativist definition of America as a nordic nation, or (in the Jewish case) as a Christian nation. That’s a natural position for an ethnic or religious minority to take. Jewish immigrants wouldn’t take a position they perceive as contrary to their own ethnic group interests any more than any other group would . Or rather, any other group but one. Anyway, Jews will never define America as you (and I) would define it. They’re never going to vote for Pat Buchanan. But there’s a big gap between that, and transposing the Old Country onto America.
It’s undoubtedly the case that some of these kids’ parents were smart, knew they and their ids had it very good, and were very pro-American from start to finish.
Freudian slip, I presume?
It always comes back to the Jews, doesn’t it? It’s convenient to forget about all the homegrown white Anglo-Saxon Commies like Henry Wallace, isn’t it?
Yes, Jews have been heavily represented among the Left for centuries. That’s usually because the Right tries to kill them. Here in America, the playing field is a bit different: Jews are simultaneously accused of being monopolistic capitalists *and* Communists. Only those clever Jews could pull that off. Jews in the US maybe mostly safe from violence, but they are still blamed by both the Right and the Left for just about everything.
For every Jewish intellectual on the Left, such as the ones you cite, there is also one who has embraced the Right: Horowitz, Hentoff, Kristol, etc. If you are going to credit liberalism as a Jewish plot, pretty soon you will have to do the same with conservatism.
Have you heard of Armand Hammer? How would you explain the fact that the wealthy CEO of Occidental Petroleum was funding the Soviet Union and a major comm-symp? The thread that runs through liberalism, capitalism, and communism is hatred of the organic, the ethnic, the national, in other words, the old order in which ehtnic minorities of all kinds had less power than they do in the internationalist orders of capitalism and communism. I never said and do not think all communists are Jews, but I do think in all nations communism and other world-historical-revolutionary movements appeal more to minorities of all kinds and they are disproportionately represented in the ranks of revolutionaries, this was true in Russia, Poland, and everywhere else.
The so-called conservatives that call themselves neoconservatives are generally not real conservatives, have many holdover liberal attitudes, and are hostile to many traditionalist conservatives. Ask Mel Bradford or Joe Sobran about that some time.
Mr. Roach – Well, I agree with you that minorities, specifically including Jews, have disproportionately supported internationalist or cosmopolitan philosophies. But can you blame them? If your experience with nationalism consists of a national majority continually persecuting and discriminating against you, you’d be an internationalist too.
I can blame them, because nothing makes anyone become a communist, and this extreme over-reaction to the alleged sins of nationalism is uncalled for and unjust and downright evil. And I blame us too, because most societies have sensibly understood that they should recognize the prejudices and nonalignment of interests between the majority and the minority in politics.
We, on the other hand, have allowed the alienated and unpatriotic of all stripes–feminists, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, self-hating whites–to dictate our policies in the name of justice under the banner of liberalism. We should recognize and call out the inherent biases of such people. Because if I can’t blame them–which I can, incidentally–then you can’t blame me either for wanting to preserve my people and its way of life in a coherent form amenable to the interests and flourishing of the majority.
Your argument only has validity if you assume that the interests of the majority and the minority are hoplessly at odds. For me, part of the very foundation of conservatism is the understanding that this is a fallacy. It is the liberals, not conservatives, who wish to permanently pit classes and ethnic groups against each other in order to keep them all weak and dependent on the government. I believe that more minorities can be brought to understand this truth if they are not constantly presented with people claiming to be conservatives who insist on casting them as the eternal enemy.
To say there is a public interest and even a common good, does not mean the interests of each group are perfectly aligned. Indeed, without knowing more, we should assume that the common good is furthered best and the most when the interest of the majority is furthered. But liberalism assumes this is supect and instead seeks to promote the interest of the minority at the expense of hte majority. This is the problem, and this is what is suspect.
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