Purge the Progressives, Return to Unity

Looks like identity politics and antisemitism don't win elections

There’s a lot to say and feel and emote after last night’s popular and Electoral election of Donald Trump in the US — and Netanyahu’s firing of the defense minister during a 7-front war, apparently in part to protect ultra religious Israelis from serving in the army that protects them. It seems like democracy is committing seppuku. (I just finished the Shogun miniseries, ritual sacrifice is on the mind.)

It’s bleak. There’s a lot to process, but the one thought I want to share is about Democratic Party course-correcting, because they’ve driven us headlong into a wall. Twice. I’d like to actually get somewhere next time instead of a smashed forehead.

Here’s the thing where I’m in the minority of the party at large: the combination of identity politics and toxic antisemitism (cloaked as social justice) aren’t a great combination, certainly not if you want to be a moral person and win elections.

Can we have both please?

Let me say it clearly, as a Jew and as a more-or-less liberal, and certainly as an American, I sincerely, deeply, profoundly believe that all people are created equal. In the terms of Jews, we believe that all humans are literally made in the image of God. What we mean by this isn’t anything anthropomorphic. To paraphrase Maimonides: Biblical language that attributes God with human characteristics or features is simply a low level, sub-intellectual method to enable humans to begin to sort of barely approach an understanding of the supreme majesty and transcendence of God. It’s not literal.

What is literal is free will. Humans are enabled with the ability to destroy or to build, to conduct grievous crimes or support someone in need who can never return the favor. Where this theological reasoning gets you to, once Christian European culture caught up to it a few thousand years later, is the Enlightenment, then nationalism and then citizenship. We all are equal. Equal vote, equal rights, equal participation.

The simplicity of this observations is beautiful. It’s tragically not happening anymore in mainstream liberal culture.

There’s a deification in modern progressivism that says, “oh wow, person X is running for office and they’re [insert fetishized group of the moment] and can string a few sentences together, so they have my vote.”

That needs to end. It’s bigoted thinking — person X is more deserving than person Y due to some measurable genetic attribute, be it their melanin content, gender, sexuality, physical ability or whatever else is going on with them since birth. While it’s important and necessary to right the wrongs of slavery, sexism, antisemitism and homophobia — to name a few deep flaws in America — if by righting those wrongs you seek to elevate a person or group at the expense of someone else, you’re just painted yourself into a moral corner. Who says that anyone should have more advantage than anyone else? Sure, proportionately, most black people are poorer, less educated and further from housing and healthcare resources than most white people, but if you attempt to right this wrong by disadvantaging white people, then you’re draining the tub, not raising the tide.

There is a way to improve opportunities for people that doesn’t involve grievance olympics or impossible-to-solve equations of privilege.

On a deeply human level, it’s obviously wrong to say, “you don’t get food if you’re hungry, because someone else who doesn’t look like you is also hungry.”

Let’s feed both.

The Democratic party and essential academic and media institutions have rejected this basic human moral insight for decades. I am as guilty as the next liberal for promulgating them for years and years. I believed in Affirmative Action. I believed in diversity efforts to make a college campus or boardroom be more reflective of our country’s population. I wandered around the West Village of Manhattan in a reverie on the afternoon of November 5th 2016 after having voted for a woman to be president. I so enjoyed that feeling of awe for standing on the precipice of a changed nation that had a two-term black president and soon, a two-term woman in charge.

Those are all good feelings and just outcomes, but many of the methods for achieving these just goals were wrong. Obviously the two women selected by a very small group of Democratic party insiders were the wrong choice. Obviously making young straight men feel they’re on the wrong side of history simply for having been born the way they are isn’t a way to win popular elections.

It gets worse. What’s clear to me is that a racial, gender and sexuality preferential checklist with winners and losers inherently enables antisemitism to flourish. Let me blunt. Genetic favoritism is inherently antisemitic. This is a very, very, very old Jewish observation of society stretching back to Pharaonic times and definitely in ancient Persia. Jews have observed this dynamic in literally every phase of human history. When you punish one group of people based on a condition of their birth — like women in the Book of Esther — then you will soon punish another minority group. It’s a when, not an if.

Jews are the eternal scapegoats. Always and forever. This doesn’t make us special, it just makes us really, really smart about the phenomenon of blame.

We’ve all seen this most manifest after the fall of 2023. Highly educated Ivy League students — and faculty and administrators — are not immune to the virus of antisemitism no matter how much they mask in public or preamble their pronouns. It’s hopefully clear to my readers that this isn’t surprising or a fluke, it’s the logical extension of progressive values that teach their followers that some people are better than others, that people are inherently unequal, and we’ll teach you which ones we like more than others.

Settlers are bad, indigenous are good. Who counts as a settler and who counts as indigenous is… um…. rather vague… so they will helpfully point it out to you. Folks, this is about as scientific phrenology. Which was part and parcel of Nazism.

Seems like I’m overstating my case, doesn’t it? How many times have you hear someone white, male and straight apologize for their perspective? This sheepishness seems so minor, and it is in many ways, but it’s indicative of the larger system of selection privilege. This never goes well for vulnerable minorities, no matter how much money and power you think they have. That can all go away. Money is imaginary and can be erased. Same with power. But the sheer dynamics of population is ineluctable. There are more black people in this country than Jews. If progressives say they value black people more than other people and form coalitions — led by writers like Ta-Nehsi Coates and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez — then Jews by their very numbers are goners.

No, I’m not saying we’re in a race war of blacks vs. Jews — or with any other group. I’m observing the coalition dynamics we’re seeing on college campuses and in election booths. This is how it really goes. Jews small. Others big. Big smash small.

We’ve lost another crushing election to an odious, malignant person who is also an identitarian, but, from a progressive perspective, for the wrong side. His value of identity isn’t the problem, their logic goes, it’s just that he’s the bad guy in our comic book story of the world.

What I’m saying is that there are no sides to identity that level up to prosperity or morality. It’s all garbage thinking, because I can prove to you, for at least 4,000 years of political philosophy as enshrined in Jewish wisdom, that all people are equal under God. And if you don’t believe or feel or wrestle with God, my point still stands. It’s the people and how we treat each other that matters. God doesn’t need us. People need us.

I’m praying that the Democratic party purges the progressive element that has become so twisted by selective preferences that just the other week, Barnard College featured a speaker our State Department calls an antisemite.

Remember, the pro-Palestine movement isn’t not pro-peace, it isn’t pro-human rights, it’s simply for one group to destroy another group. If you’re with the former, great, you win! If you’re with the later, you better fight real hard to keep breathing. What you get is war. If that’s where progressive values ultimately lead to, with antisemitism merely a rung on their ladder to the depths of human grievance, then I’ll take a walk instead.

I want to win the next election. By a lot. Republicans have given us a gift by showing us how. Let’s not squander it.