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A Real Threat to Democracy
I feel as if I’ve just been kicked in the gut by a good friend. He was, for many years, the epitome of intelligence and reason, with a lively sense of humor. We’ve been estranged for a while, mainly because of his political positions. After hearing one too many of his podcasts a few years ago, I pretty much avoided him. After reading one of his latest pieces on the Bari Weiss blog, I’ve decided we’re done. I’m talking about Jonah Goldberg.
This is not really a post about Jonah Goldberg. It’s about my bewilderment about the defaming of Republicans and Conservatives by using the broad-brush of assuming that we are all Donald Trump fanatics, who continually fawn over him and apologize for him. I think this viewpoint about who we are, who I am, is deeply flawed, and I can’t figure out why it persists.
Goldberg and others seem to refuse to accept that a huge number of those who voted for Trump—not even necessarily people whom I would call “Trump supporters”—were desperate to dislodge the DC Swamp. We didn’t really like Donald Trump, but it was clear that he was fearless and prepared to take on just about anyone. Many of us became convinced, particularly after the attacks on Trump after he was elected, that the Washington establishment was determined to protect every ounce of abusive power that they had. And I don’t think there was another Republican who had the guts to do that. That he was rude and crude and held disdain for proper etiquette was not relevant.
So, what am I so upset about? I feel that most Republicans and Conservatives are not sycophants to the person and platform of Trump. Most of us would never riot at the Capitol. Most of us would not dress like crazy Shamans. Most of also would not have the gumption that Trump displayed. But he was willing to do it on our behalf (and probably for his own motives).
Most of us dreaded the Tweets but liked that Trump got things done. Most of us disliked his personal attacks but liked his pushback on Xi. Most of us were annoyed at his bragging but were amazed that he was able to deal with Covid-19 the way he did.
What especially disturbs me about Jonah and the criticisms of others who hate Trump is that they are defaming most of us in the Republican Party and those who are Conservatives.
How does that help the party? How does that contribute productively to the future of this country? How does that help re-establish conservative values?
If some people are misguided, they aren’t the people who support Trump; they are the people who are determined to keep the edifices from crumbling. The rest of us are tired of the status quo and those who malign our institutions and values.
Jonah and his ilk would be better off exerting their energies against our real enemies.
Published in Politics
Yeah, I know. As was I about the medication.
So … the meetings were getting too crowded?
I happily assume Buckley would slap Jonah in the back of his head while Jonah was feverishly typing away at another article denouncing the boogeymen of the right that he’s concocted in his walled-off brain, tell him to get his head out of his behind, and wake up.
I’ve read at least 2 of Jonah’s books, and I still think he’s pretty funny on GLOP, but for penetrating insights into the American psyche, suggestions about how to proceed forward with conservative policy, etc, you will come up dry with him, every time.
Not sure where he flipped to think he’s literally more clever than the average Joe, and has a better sense of what conservatism really means, simply by dint of writing and research. It’s much bigger than that.
He could have something to say. His books were not great but they were pretty darn good. To be a good writer he would have to have a Thomas Sowell moment and speak what is True. Otherwise, everything is useless.
I’ve read a couple of Sowell’s books over the past year. I literally felt more intelligent every time I picked one up and started reading.
He has always been a germaphobe. Like Trump
Goldberg made his bones at NRO with timely pop culture references and snark. He sniggered. He was under thirty.
He’s over fifty now. He’s not so fresh and timely. He still relies on snark and he still sniggers. At his own snarky remarks. He’s over fifty now.
Hey, now. I’m 56 and I think I’m the funniest guy in any room!
(Wait . . . am I really 56? Geez . . .)
Whippersnapper
I agree and this is great analysis. However, I think there’s more to it.
I always look for commonalities and differences.
First, all these pundits came to fore during the Bush years, of which there were many if you include the first Bush President. Before he was Vice President (for 8 years!) he was…. CIA Director. Yeah, I’m going there.
All these people – all journalists and pundits in the DC area – have sources, or just friends in the intelligence community. Boot, Kristol (Dan Quayle’s brain) Rubin and Charen, wrote extensively about national security issues. All of them were huge promoters of the Iraq War and were sympathetic to every expansion of the national security state we live in today. They were, in a way, a PR outlet for the intelligence agencies. Valuable work protecting our national security.
They built their world around this stuff. This was their entire raison de etre. They were all big supporters of the Bush clan, and I think they were all perfectly fine with Jeb Bush as the prospective nominee, although they would also accept certain others. I remember being absolutely flummoxed as to how these seasoned politicos couldn’t see that Jeb would surely lose to Hillary, negating the dynasty issues and really, who can’t see that it just wasn’t Jeb’s time? The country did not want to re-litgate the war, much less have yet another President named Bush from the same immediate family. That’s where I saw through the looking glass.
They had a fallback candidate: Hillary Clinton. For everything they may not have liked about her, she was still a valiant war-hawk and defender of the deep state.
#100 Continued –
The people you mentioned are also known as “Neo-cons”, defined loosely as people who are Democrats at their core and jumped to the GOP at some point because they are supporters of Israel and national security world-police types. I never bought into this, as such, myself. They didn’t seem ideologically Democrat. Now I’m not so sure. But that’s beside the point. The other interesting aspect of the neocon appellation was that neocons were mostly Jewish. There was an implied smear they had dual loyalties. Well, maybe, but a lot of people have certain preferences and ties to cultural roots. America was able to do a lot for other countries. Israel was besieged and needed support. Nothing wrong with that.
But since Susan is the author here I will take this opportunity to ask her about my other theory one that adds a cultural layer.
My experience with Jews is pretty broad. I went to a school that was 90% Jewish for one year. It was Bala-Cynwyd Jr. High, and I’ve no doubt many of my classmates are now fabulously successful. The area was a very wealthy suburb of Philadelphia and Benjamin Netanyahu grew up nearby (don’t think he went to that school). I have several friends who are Jewish and have had many, many acquaintances in my 68 years of living. What I know of the basic culture is the men are never supposed to act anything close to someone like Donald Trump. It’s just supremely cringey for Jews. Trump is not a mensch by any means. He is the model of how not to be as a Jewish man.
That’s probably because the Jewish people have learned to keep their heads down, as it were. They were always a vulnerable minority who were also successful. You don’t want to parade your wealth or your status lest you be singled-out. Makes perfect sense. Anyone steeped in this culture would have a very difficult time even comprehending a person like Trump and could easily assign nefarious motives to him. Certainly this is not exclusive to Jews, although I think it goes doubly for them in general.
So these people begin with a profound aversion to the personality of Trump, on top of that, he said mean things about Jeb, and the war in Iraq (!) and wanted to pull troops from Afghanistan. This group of pundits could have been very easily manipulated by their contacts in the intel community, who we see now might have some nefarious goals and intentions themselves. That Trump was a huge supporter of Israel didn’t seem to help, leading me to believe these pundits weren’t such dual-loyalists as some would fear. Or perhaps it just wasn’t enough and they knew Israel would be okay no matter what – as long as Rand Paul or Bernie Sanders or Pat Buchanan wasn’t in the mix.
What was it demographically the other 2 years that you were in Jr. High School?
My wife is Orthodox Jewish and much, if not most of our social life revolves around the religious Orthodox community. I can tell you without even blinking that in general, very religious Jews think Trump was the greatest President in modern times. My own anecdotal estimate is that 80% of Orthodox women and >90% of Orthodox men voted for Trump, whether they disliked his personality or not. The Jews I’ve seen who are only somewhat religiously observant, begin to show signs of leftism at an alarming rate. If I were to draw a graph of religious practice plotted against political affiliation, it would show a severely lopsided trend, with religious Jews at the conservative end and secular Jews on the liberal end. The middle region would be only sparsely populated.
My own explanation for this is that Jewish religion teaches self-improvement through hard work and diligent study, and caring for others by your own efforts (not through government programs). All this is anathema to leftists.
I went to a Catholic School until 8th grade. Went the one year to Jr. High, then Lower Merion where Kobe Bryant went (later) . The High School also had a large Jewish enrollment but since it drew from a larger area it was less, I don’t really know the full make up. Why do you ask?
I only knew well one Orthodox Jew. I wasn’t thinking of them when I wrote but I do know they supported Trump. But isn’t it much more a closed community, even to other Jews?
Your graph sounds right to me. The more secular, the farther left they tend to be – but that applies to other religions too.
Simple question. Why do you ask?
Depending on specifically which Jewish religious community you are talking about, it can be closed, but probably not as much as you’d think. I think the most insular ones are around the New York City area, especially in Brooklyn. The ones I am familiar with outside of New York, which would be Cleveland, Baltimore, New Jersey, and Detroit, are not strictly closed societies per se. Though their life revolves around the Synagogue and they purposely live in neighborhoods nearby, they mostly all work outside of that community and interact with all their non-Jewish neighbors. Though they live in clusters, I don’t know of a place outside of New York City where there neighborhoods are not diluted by many non-Jews and secular Jews.
There is a marriage directive to marry only other Jews (they don’t necessarily have to be other religious Jews, but it is preferred), in case you are wondering about my case. I am not Jewish, but somehow, my wife and I have been able to congregate with the greater religious community both at home and abroad, albeit with certain restrictions, which is a testament to the tolerance of the greater Jewish community. I have always been welcomed with open arms and broad smiling faces.
The well known association with all religious people tending to be more conservative politically is greatly more true in the Jewish religion than in any other religions I know of except possibly Mormonism. But then there is Mitt Romney. Perhaps Mormons come in second place.
You didn’t answer my question. I’ll ask it another way:
You wrote that you went to a school that was 90% Jewish for one year. Why was it 90% Jewish for only one year?
Oh, I get it! Sloppy writing on my part! I went for a year to a school that was 90% Jewish…
Or it coulda been that a charismatic Christian came and converted about 35% of them to a fringe Christian cult. I forget. It was a long time ago.
BTW, it would help to use a wink, or use the like feature at least so the person would get that it might be a joke. Or somehow wrote it in your best Milton Berle voice.
I wrote two fairly long involved comments and I could not understand why that was the only thing you saw fit to isolate and question. Hard to laugh at this point, but I get it now…
Franco, I think you may have something there, but I think a big part is simply that, after being underdogs (culturally) for centuries, liberal Jews fought for the underdog, and therefore accepted much of the “liturgy” that goes with the Left, sometimes to their own detriment (Look at the anti-Semitism coming from the Left.) That’s also why they were often Communists. I don’t know if the Jews particularly hated Trump more than other groups; it just went along with their support that you described. He was going to destroy the status quo. Plus, Leftist Jews seem to be able to live with the cognitive dissonance they encounter.
This.
Then there is Dennis Prager’s (a Jew himself) theorem. He says that Jews are the most “religious” people in the world. He uses the word metaphorically because Jews have the highest percentage of Atheism than any other ethnic group in America. He says they have a huge need to fill the void of meaningful religion with something else, hence they gravitate easily to social movements and causes. And social movements that call for a change to society are much more exciting and meaningful than stodgy conservatism which simply calls for the status quo of routine ideas that have worked in the past. (The last sentence is my own observation)
Charismatic Christian, that’s good. Say good night, Franco.
I was in elementary school – no older than 4th grade – when my father taught me a riddle I enjoyed then and have enjoyed ever since:
Q: What’s the difference between a lady in church, and a lady in the bathtub?
A: The lady in church has hope in her soul.
Years later, I told that same joke to my engineering school classmates – smart people, generally. A surprisingly high percentage of them didn’t get the joke.
If you got that joke in fourth grade, you were pretty advanced. I needed the bold letters to clue me in. And your father sounds a LOT like mine! LOL
And before Bush was CIA Director he was CIA. I haven’t seen the papers of it, but he was the CIA officer briefed by local law enforcement the day after the JFK assassination. By the way, the JFK docs still haven’t been released yet in their entirety, and it’s been 60 years. What sources and processes could be compromised now from their release?
My mother was raised in a half-Catholic half-Jewish neighborhood. She said there’s not much difference except the cooking.
I think it was a joke about your syntax. “For one year I went to a school that was…” would have been unequivocal, as opposed to “…that was 90% Jewish for one year.”
I think he finally got it….;-)
Spoonerism.