The Mystery of 1948. By Gershom Gorenberg. Slate, November 7, 2011.
Did Israel actually plan to expel most of its Arabs in 1948? Or not?
Israel’s Old-Time Religion. By Gershom Gorenberg. Slate, November 8, 2011.
How government policies have caused the
surge in ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel—and why it’s an economic disaster.
How to Save Israel. By Gershom Gorenberg. Slate, November 9, 2011.
The three steps that could rescue it from endless conflict and international ostracism.
Gorenberg:
I write
from an Israel with a divided soul. It is not only defined by its
contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them. It is a country with
uncertain borders and a government that ignores its own laws. Its democratic
ideals, much as they have helped shape its history, or on the verge of being
remembered among the false political promises of 20th-century ideologies.
What
will Israel be in five years, or 20? Will it be the Second Israeli Republic, a
thriving democracy within smaller borders? Or a pariah state where one ethnic
group rules over another? Or a territory marked on the map, between the river
and the sea, where the state has been replaced by two warring communities? Will
it be the hub of the Jewish world, or a place that most Jews abroad prefer not
to think about? The answers depend on what Israel does now.
For
Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three
changes. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and
find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the
Mediterranean. Second, it must divorce state and synagogue—freeing the state
from clericalism, and religion from the state. Third and most basically, it
must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which
all citizens enjoy equality.
Proposing
these changes provokes several reflexive objections, inside Israel and beyond.
First, many Israeli Jews translate any call for full equality of all citizens
as a demand that Israel cease to be a Jewish state. The supposed choice is a
false one. Israel can be a liberal democracy and still fulfill the justifiable
desire of Jews, as an ethnic national group, for self-determination.
The
liberal meaning of self-determination begins with the rights of individuals. As Israeli political
thinker Chaim Gans argues, it expresses the justifiable desire of members of an
ethnic group to maintain a basic aspect of their humanity and personal
identity: their culture. To live in their culture and preserve it, they need a
place where that culture shapes the public sphere. The natural and must
justifiable place for that to happen is their homeland, or in part of it.
But in
the real world, in contrast to utopias, individual rights clash. The classic
metaphor for this is the man crying fire in a crowded theater: Dogmatically
preserving his right of expression robs others of their right to stay alive.
Nation-states can be liberal democracies, but each faces the constant challenge
of balancing the right of self-determination and other rights.
Israel
does not have to give up being a Jewish state. It does need to establish a very
different balance of rights. In a country with a significant Jewish majority,
it is reasonable for the usual language of the public sphere to be Hebrew. It
is reasonable for offices to close on Jewish holidays, because most people
would not show up for work on those days anyway. It is also reasonable for the
kitchens in government institutions—such as the army—to be kosher, since this
preserves the right of Jews who observe religious dietary laws to participate
fully in society. It is not acceptable
for the government to favor Jews in allocation of jobs, land, or school
buildings, or for it to prevent Muslim citizens from maintaining a mosque in a
mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood. Nor is it acceptable for the government to
condition the rights of non-Jewish citizens on their swearing fealty to this
particular balance of rights.
A
second objection is that creating two states between the river and the sea is
no longer possible. Settlements are too large, Israel and the occupied
territories too entangled; the tipping point has been passed. All that is
possible now is a one-state solution. Especially outside of Israel, this
practical argument often hides a psychological tendency: even progressives
sometimes fight the last battle, especially if it was a heroic fight for which
they were born too late. One person, one vote was the answer in South Africa,
they say; therefore it is the solution for Israel.
In
fact, a one-state arrangement would solve little and make many things worse.
Imagine that tomorrow Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip were
reconstituted as the Eastern Mediterranean Republic, and elections were held.
With the current population, the parliament would be split almost evenly
between Jews and Palestinians. One of the first issues that the parliament and
judiciary would face is the settlements that Israel built on privately owned
Palestinian property, whether it was requisitioned, stolen, or declared state
land over Palestinian objections. Palestinian claimants would demand return of
their property. The problem of evacuating settlers wouldn’t vanish. Rather, it
would divide the new state on communal lines.
Likewise
for refugees. Palestinian legislators would demand that Israel’s Law of Return
be extended to cover Palestinians returning to their homeland. Jewish
politicians would oppose the move, which would reduce their community to a
threatened minority. Palestinians would demand the return of property lost in
1948 and perhaps the rebuilding of destroyed villages. Except for the drawing of borders, virtually
every question that bedevils Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations would
become a domestic problem, setting the new political entity aflame.
Issues
not at the center of today’s diplomacy would also set the two communities at
odds. Israel has a post-industrial Western economy; The West Bank and Gaza are
underdeveloped. Financing development in majority-Palestinian areas and
bringing Palestinians into Israel’s social-welfare network would require Jews
to pay higher taxes or receive fewer services. But the engine of the Israeli
economy is high-tech, an entirely portable industry. Both individuals and
companies would leave, crippling the new shared economy. Meanwhile, two
nationalities who have desperately sought a political frame for cultural and
social independence would wrestle over control of language, art, street names,
and schools. Psychologically, it would be a country with two resentful
minorities and no majority.
Even in
the best case, the outcome would be the continued existence of separate Jewish
and Palestinian political parties. And even the more liberal-leaning parties of
each community would be hard-pressed to bridge the divide to form stable
coalitions. Israel would become a second Belgium, perpetually incapable of
forming a stable government. In the more likely case, the political tensions
would ignite as violence. The transition to a single state would mark a new
stage in the conflict. For a harsh example of the potential fluctuation between
political stalemate and civil war, Palestinians and Jews need only look
northward to Lebanon.
A
single state could easily be the result of Israel failing to make any choices.
It would not be a solution—even a workable arrangement, which is what politics
normally offers in place of solutions. It would be a nightmare: another of the
places marked on the globe as a country, in which two or more communities do
battle while the most educated or well-connected members of each look for
refuge elsewhere.
A third
objection to a two-state solution, from the Israeli right and its overseas
supporters, is that it requires Israel to sacrifice too much for peace. This
reflects an old habit of thought in which territory is the coin that Israel
reluctantly pays for a peace agreement.
It’s
true that peace is an essential end in itself. But Israel must also give up
land to reestablish itself as a state and a democracy. It needs to put a border
back on the map. Within that border, the government needs to rule by the
consent of the governed. It needs to restore the rule of law and end the ethnic
conflict.
Peace
with the Palestinians is a means for
achieving these goals. It provides the way for Israel to end its grip from
outside on the Gaza Strip and to leave the West Bank safely. “Hold too much,
and you will hold nothing,” the Talmud says. If the state of Israel tries to
continue holding the West Bank, there will be no state.
In Catalonia, a Warning on One-State Solutions. By Gershom Gorenberg. The American Prospect, October 11, 2013.
Nationalism is alive and well in Europe. Expecting Israelis and Palestinians to abandon it is a fantasy.
Gorenberg:
From
the balconies above the narrow stone-paved streets of Girona hung gold-and-red
striped flags. A blue triangle and white star adorned most of them,
transforming the banner of the autonomous region of Catalonia into the standard
of Catalonian independence. Here and there a legend emblazoned a flag: Catalunya, Nou Estat D’Europa—“Catalonia,
A New State in Europe.”
I’d
taken the train north from Barcelona to see Salvador Dali’s personal museum in
Figueres and then explore Girona's medieval old city. I was on vacation from
the Middle East. But a political writer’s time off can so easily become a
busman’s holiday. I looked at the flags and thought of the arguments about how
to solve the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio, about political scientist Ian
Lustick’s very recent New York Times
essay despairing of a two-state outcome, and about the furies that the late
Tony Judt released almost precisely 10 years ago when he came out for a
one-state solution. Nationalism was passé, the great historian of modern Europe
wrote; nation-states had been replaced by “pluralist states which have long
since become multiethnic and multicultural . . . as any visitor to London or
Paris or Geneva will know.”
In
Catalonia, as any visitor to Girona or Barcelona will know, nationalism is
alive and very 21st-century. In mid-September over a million and a half
people—a fifth the region’s population—formed a chain the length of Catalonia
to demand independence from Spain. Since the end of the Franco era, Catalonia
has been on a long march toward ever greater autonomy from the central
government in Madrid. The Franco regime repressed the Catalan language. Today
the regional government works in Catalan, schools teach in it, and a language
law requires businesses to use it. That menu, fair visitor, is in Catalan, not
Spanish. The restaurateur does not get to choose.
Media
reports on demands for independence often stress finances: Better-off Catalonia
is tired of paying more to Madrid than it gets back. Regional President Artur
Mas includes that problem in his case for secession. But let’s not fall into
lazy economic determinism. If giving more to a federal government than you
receive in return was reason enough to demand self-determination, you'd see
million-person rallies for independence in California and New York. The economic argument resonates in Barcelona
because so many Catalans feel that their shared language, culture and history
give them a national identity separate from Spain, and want to express that
identity in their own state. This is nationalism, and it’s the platform of
Catalan parties on both the left and the right.
North
of the Pyrenees, there’s further evidence that post-nationalist pluralism hasn’t
progressed quite as far as Judt claimed. On a Paris street, a young Muslim
woman can choose to wear fashionably color-coordinated pastel pants, blouse,
and hijab. But a 2004 law requires her to take off her headscarf to attend a
public school, or to teach in one. This year’s controversies include an
unpopular court decision that permits a woman wearing a hijab to work in a
private nursery school, and the question of whether a headscarfed mother can accompany
her child’s class trip. Calls to extend the legal ban on the hijab have come
from politicians on the left as well as the right.
In
France, the principle of a state based on shared national identity has worked
in the opposite direction from Catalonia. The state came first, and has engaged
in a two-century project to forge a common national culture, language, and
historical memory. The Third Republic successfully imposed French as the
national tongue, marginalizing other languages. Taking the long perspective,
the headscarf ban is the newest stage in the old process. Formally, the 2004 law that bans headscarves
in public schools prohibits wearing other religious symbols as well, in the
name of shared secularism. But the hijab was the target. France is arguing
about whether a woman who is publicly Muslim is a true Frenchwoman, or merely a
citizen.
It’s
ironic that Malala Yousefzai, the heroic 16-year-old Pakistani advocate of
education for girls, would have to remove her hijab to attend a public school
in France, and that Egyptian human-rights activist Dalia Ziada would have to do
the same to teach a class. But my point is not to defend language laws or
condemn veil laws, or to take a stand on Catalonian secession, or for that
matter whether Scotland should choose independence in next year’s referendum. I
am merely reporting: Working out how a nation-state should function is still a
basic issue in Europe. Nationalism isn’t over in the democratic world. Jews are
not atavistic in wanting their national self-determination, nor are
Palestinians. Judt knew this. His call for a one-state solution expressed his
personal, painful disappointment with the particular way that the Jewish
nation-state had turned out. (I share the disappointment and have other ideas
about the solution, but that’s a separate story.)
Advocates
of the one-state answer today are an odd mix. They include Israeli rightists so
opposed to giving up land that they’d rather annex the West Bank and give
citizenship to its Palestinian residents—but who expect Israel to remain “the
state of the Jewish people, with a large Arab minority.” As individuals,
Palestinians would have full rights; as a nation, none. Some Palestinian
one-staters have a vision that, at best, is a mirror image of this: The state
of Palestine, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, would have Jewish
citizens—defined as a religious rather than national minority, because
Palestinian nationalism has always had a hard time with the idea that Jews
constitute a nationality. Among American proponents of a single state, quite a
few speak only of how it will provide individual civil rights to all. That
position reflects a natural but deceptive inclination to fit foreign events
into American analogies. Civil rights battles are basic to American history;
the ideologies of national rights are largely a foreign language.
The
one-staters with whom it’s easiest to sympathize are those who have lost all
hope for negotiating the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank
and Gaza. Their most common claim is that Israeli settlements are too large to
evacuate, and a Palestinian state is impossible if they stay put. Though
Lustick speaks of “one mixed state” only as a possibility, not a program, he is
an effective spokesman for despondency. The Israel and Palestinian visions of a
two-state agreement are too far apart, he writes. The current
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are “negotiations to nowhere.” They provide
cover for Israel to build settlements and for the Palestinian Authority to
survive on aid from abroad, he says.
Lustick
is right that, so far, the talks appear to be producing nothing—except for talk
in closed rooms. But his alternative to diplomacy—“outcomes [that] develop
organically”—is a very soft euphemism for outcomes that come about violently.
Independent Ireland didn't just “emerge,” as Lustick writes; it was born in
bloodshed. His description of potential partners in creating a single state is
a lovely fantasy. But contrary to what he writes, “Tel Aviv’s . . . non-Jewish
Russian-speaking immigrants” are not post-Zionists. “Global village Israeli
entrepreneurs” are just as Zionist as the other Israelis who served with them
in elite army units. On the other side, Palestinians committed to democracy are
no less committed to their national identity and the hope for independence.
The
challenge to one-staters is to explain how two national groups, Jews and
Palestinians, will peacefully put together a single state, live together in
that state, and prevent it from ripping apart. Expecting that their nationalism
will disappear is even less realistic than expecting the gold, red and blue
flag to vanish from Catalonia.
Men dither while women lead in the world. By Hanna Rosin. CNN, October 11, 2013.
West Bank Reality: Arab, Not Jewish Hate. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 11, 2013.
Tobin:
Palestinian
Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas is planning on using the United Nations to
publicize what he characterizes as violations of Arab rights in Jerusalem and
settler violence in the West Bank. According to Abbas, the chutzpah of some
Jews to demand the right to pray on part of their faith’s holiest site — the
Temple Mount — is intolerable. But aside from his push to declare all of those
parts of the city that were illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967 as
exclusive Palestinian property (a stand that would include the Western Wall as
well as the Temple Mount in the Palestinian state he wants to create), Abbas is
trying to focus the world on what he says is a campaign of outrages by Jews
living in the West Bank against their neighbors. The latest example is an
incident in which a mosque was defaced and cars vandalized in an Arab village
by what appears to have been settlers.
Such
instances are outrageous and should be punished. But those who commit such
crimes are a tiny minority of even the Jewish population in the territories.
The Israeli government, settler groups as well as the overwhelming majority of
the Israeli people condemn these occurrences. But as shameful as they are, to
pretend, as most mainstream media outlets do, that it is Jewish violence that
is the everyday occurrences in the West Bank, let alone the most serious threat
to the peace, is beyond absurd. Evidence for just how wrong this assumption is
can be found throughout the year as the number of instances of violent attacks,
lethal stone throwing and sundry other forms of terrorism that result not just
in damaged windshields but wounded and dead Jewish bodies. Just last night,
infiltrators near his home in the Jordan valley killed an Israeli. Last
weekend, Arab terrorists shot a nine-year-old Israeli girl in a settlement. And
yet you can bet that the U.N. and its sundry agencies dedicated to
delegitimizing Israel will take up Abbas’ complaints rather than investigating
the wave of anti-Jewish violence or ask what role the PA media plays in
inciting these attacks.
The
prevailing narrative of evil settlers attacking innocent Palestinians is
popular precisely because it dovetails with the frame of reference through
which Israel’s critics view the conflict. When they choose to notice the far
more frequent instances of Arab violence against Jews, the victims are reported
as being “settlers” — even when the targets are children — so as to make the
point that they had it coming in some way. The settlers are seen as the
possessors of stolen property, not people whose rights to live in the heart of
the Jewish homeland are actually guaranteed by international law. If the media
were to put settler violence in the context of the siege of attacks with which
they have to live, the relatively small number of such incidents would be
rightly seen as proof of the restraint and law-abiding nature of the vast
majority of Jews living in the territories rather than as evidence of their
incorrigible and hateful character.
More to
the point, were the media to focus as they should on the drumbeat of incitement
of hate against Israel and Jews that comes not from Palestinian outliers but
the government that is the Jewish state’s supposed peace partner — Abbas’s PA —
the notion that an accord merely requires an Israeli territorial retreat would
be seen as a transparent fiction.
Medieval Times: “Vanity Fair” and the New Feudalism. By Matthew Continetti. Washington Free Beacon, October 11, 2013.
California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude. By Joel Kotkin. NJBR, October 7, 2013.
Continetti:
Looking
for a distraction from the government shutdown and debt ceiling debate? I urge
you to read Vanity Fair’s latest
advertisement for “The New Establishment,” a list of “50 Titans Disrupting
Media, Technology, and Culture,” the century-old magazine’s annual mash-note to
the rich and powerful and self-satisfied. These disrupters innovate
technologies, set the trends, define the limits of acceptable conversation in
culture and politics and society, and pour money into the network of liberal
foundations and Democratic campaigns around which our world is increasingly
organized. They are the winners in the cognitive lottery that is the New
Economy, the men and women creating and shaping, by accident and by design, the
“New Feudalism” described so well by Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast. It’s good to know their names.
The
members of Vanity Fair’s new
establishment include Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jack
Dorsey, Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, Cory Booker and Megan Ellison. These
are the bold-faced celebrities you spot on other lists of power players, in the
lush photos of parties and galas and tributes and premieres that appear in the
front of the book of glossy magazines, and on the cover of our national newsweekly. They share a certain demographic profile. They are people of pallor, all but eight of them are men, they are clustered in Manhattan, Los
Angeles, Silicon Valley, and Seattle, they work in technology, media, and
politics, they are fantastically rich, and it is safe to assume that all but
two of them share the attitudes and sensibilities, the mental luggage and
politically correct language, the burnished resumes and can-do attitude of the
caste.
One of
the more remarkable things about this collection of do-gooders, overachievers, and
symbolic analysts is their consistent inability to apply to themselves the
skepticism and criticism they shower so heavily on Republicans and
conservatives, on the rich who make their fortunes from resource extraction,
manufacture, and investment. Not long ago a social critic such as C. Wright
Mills could write pitilessly and accurately about The Power Elite, about the WASP establishment he saw lurking behind
militarism and inequity. Few were exempt from his gaze. Our social critics
today, however, prefer only to focus on a minority of a minority: the wealthy
and influential whose policy and ideological objectives happen to be the very
opposite of their own.
Put a
banker or an industrialist or—dare I say it—a Republican in front of the men
and women who edit Vanity Fair, and
they will approach their subject with the utmost incredulity and commitment to
ferreting out the worst possible facts. But the Hollywood tycoon or Internet
billionaire or green-energy hawker or “engaged” actor whose politics exist in
the temperate zone of bourgeois liberalism, whose public pronouncements are
reliably “down the middle” and “moderate,” whose bold stands on the issues
include such courageous positions as support for abortion-on-demand,
affirmative action, amnesty, gun control, free trade, diversity, globalization,
alternative energy, public transit, and government “investments” in education
and infrastructure—his place in the establishment is not only noted but
celebrated, applauded, held as an example to the people.
The
news that a group associated with Charles and David Koch had contributed to
another group that advocates for shutting down parts of the government to
protest Obamacare has seized the political press and its allies in the
Democratic Party as earth-shattering, revelatory. Meanwhile the imperious
outgoing mayor of New York City can flood Colorado with outside money to
support gun control, can cut a million dollar check to help his Democratic pal
Cory Booker in New Jersey, can announce his intention to spend some $400
million in 2013 to make the world conform to his prejudices, and Time magazine slaps him on its cover,
writes the headline “Bloomberg Unbound,” and writes in bold type: “He’s remade
New York. Next up, the world.”
Does
the world get a vote? Remaking the world into one giant New York City may sound
swell to the editors of Time
magazine, to the editors of Vanity Fair,
and to the wide-eyed, Millennial bookers and producers toiling away in the
Rockefeller and Time Warner centers, but it is not a cost-free proposition. New
York is nice if you can afford it: If you are a wealthy liberal, or a recent
college graduate rooming with three friends, if you are at the top of the world
or setting out in the world, if you are Carrie Bradshaw or doing your best to impersonate
her, the city cannot be beat. But it is hard to raise a family there. It is no
place for the middle class.
The
city has experienced a surge of inequality, of poverty, of dependence.
Sublimated racial tension underwent a process of deposition over the summer, as
activists and journalists challenged Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk crime policy.
All of these trends combined to give the world Bill de Blasio, the surprise
Democratic nominee for mayor, and therefore in all likelihood the next occupant
of Gracie Mansion. His tale of two cities captured the imagination of the
Democratic electorate, his bourgeois liberal supporters not realizing how good
they have it, how easily it all might disappear.
The
feudalism Kotkin describes in his excellent essay has the same contradictory
aspect: liberals lament the inequality and atomization of liberal societies,
only to vote for, well, wealthy liberals. California, where many of the members
of Vanity Fair’s new establishment
reside, is a beautiful place. There are more billionaires in California than
anywhere in the United States. But it is not a healthy polity. “The state
suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country,” Kotkin
writes. “The Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the
country.” The Golden State is “home to roughly one-third of the nation’s
welfare recipients.” “For the first time in decades, the middle class is a
minority.”
For
years California has been a laboratory experiment in liberalism, for illegal
immigration, progressive taxation, generous welfare benefits, union-run public
schools, generous public service pensions, and the most cutting edge
environmental policies. The result? Jerry Brown may have patched up the state’s
fiscal situation for now, but the underlying problems remain: a hollowed-out
economy and politics that satisfies the moral imperatives of rich liberals by
buying off interest groups and the poor, and sends the middle class to Nevada
and Arizona.
“The
state’s digital oligarchy,” Kotkin says, “surely without intention, is
increasingly driving the state’s lurch towards feudalism. Silicon Valley’s
wealth reflects the fortunes of a handful of companies that dominate an
information economy that itself is increasingly oligopolistic. … Through their
embrace of and financial support for the state’s regulatory regime, the
oligarchs have made job creation in non-tech businesses—manufacturing, energy,
agriculture—increasingly difficult through ‘green energy’ initiatives that are
also sure to boost already high utility costs.” I might dispute that part about
the oligarchs acting “surely without intention”—at the moment things seem to be
working precisely according to, say, Tom Steyer’s intention—but I cannot
dispute Kotkin’s empirical findings or the thrust of his analysis.
Neo-feudalism it is.
This
week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a study
that concluded, in the words of the New York Times, that “the skill level of the American labor force is not merely
slipping in comparison to that of its peers around the world, it has fallen
dangerously behind.” Ask yourself which ideas rule in America in the fall of
2013: Who has won the intellectual fights over trade, over immigration, over
the environment, over the family, over entitlements and welfare and affirmative
action. The conservatives? I do not see it.
I see
an America governed by liberal or libertarian principles, an America that has
adopted economic and social policies that benefit the established and the
ascendant, the smart and the wily, while ignoring or bribing the poor and low
skilled. I see an America where a protest movement of the aging white middle
class is mocked and vilified, where criticism of Obamacare or deficits and debt
becomes the mark of a nihilist, a terrorist, a hostage taker, a suicide bomber.
I see a world built to order for Reed Hastings of Netflix, for Ben Silbermann
of Pinterest, for Dan Doctoroff of Bloomberg, for Tyler Perry and for Jennifer
Lawrence, members of an establishment that finds its antitheses in the likes of
de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren, Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann. In this America
our constitutional architecture is an obstacle to progressive ambition, and the
nasty partisan fights we are experiencing are the birth pangs of a new power
elite, a new digital oligarchy, a new caste of liberals here to assert their rule.
Malala is a heroine, but Gandhi she ain’t. By Qanta Ahmed. USA Today, October 11, 2013.
Why We Separate Church and State. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, October 10, 2013.
Are Developing Countries Missing Out on the Blue Model? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, October 11, 2013.
The Perils of Premature Deindustrialization. By Dani Rodrik. Project Syndicate, October 11, 2013.
The Devil and Antonin Scalia. By Jennifer Senior. New York Magazine, October 6, 2013. From the October 14, 2013 issue.
Technology Shabbat. Video. By Tiffany Shlain. The Future Starts Here. AOL.com, October 11, 2013.
Tiffany Shlain website.
Tiffany Shlain videos.
The Tribe. Video. By Tiffany Shlain. Vimeo.
Kemal Ataturk Is Alive and Well and Living In Madison, WI. By Peter Berger. The American Interest, October 9, 2013.
Berger:
Kemal
Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey as a militantly secular state. The
Kemalist elite, while it could not (and, let us charitably assume, did not
intend) to eradicate religion, it certainly made it clear that believers were
second-class citizens. Their animosity was of course mainly directed against
Islam. It did not succeed in making much headway against the majority
population of Muslims, especially in the vast Anatolian hinterland. As Turkey
became more democratic, these allegedly backward people voted—and not
surprisingly they voted their “values”. The result has been the (thus far
moderate) Islamist government.
The
Kemalist policy toward religion has been a kind of disease control: Religion is
basically a danger in a civilized society. It must be tightly controlled,
contained within its tolerated spaces, kept out of the officially legitimated
public sphere. In recent time Kemalism has not fared well in Turkey. It is
unlikely to do better in the United States, the most religious country in the
Western world, unless a currently assertive secularism achieves results in the
federal courts which it could never achieve through the democratic process. The
Freedom from Religion Foundation and, more importantly, the American Civil
Liberties Union are spearhead organizations in the secularist campaign. This is
not the place to speculate about the reasons for their recent activism. But I
think it is useful to understand that their attitude toward public expressions
of religious faith is essentially Kemalist.
Comment by Gary Novak:
Richard
Rodriguez once gave a talk in which he described his visit to a Los Angeles
high school where the lunch tables were voluntarily segregated by ethnicity.
Even the Chicanos and Mexican-Americans sat at separate tables. Like Berger,
Rodriguez thinks an important part of education is broadening one's comfort
zone. So he described the situation as one in which the United States had been
infected with the Canadian virus of multiculturalism.
I
obtained a video of the talk and showed it to my introductory sociology class.
One of my students went to the department head and complained that she was
uncomfortable hearing multiculturalism criticized. It was too late for her to
drop my class and take his, so he proposed that we accommodate her by having
her attend his classes and take his tests, and he would tell me what grade to
assign her at the end of the semester. I refused on the grounds that it might
do her some good to hear multiculturalism criticized by a gay Hispanic. If I
had wronged the student, I should go, not her. And, of course, if the situation
were reversed and an ethnocentric student wanted out because talk of
multiculturalism made him sick, the policy of accommodating the needs of all
our student consumers would come to a screeching halt. “But that’s why you go
to college—to learn you’re a racist!”
I
suspect the department head felt quite virtuous for accommodating ME. “You see—even
though you’re teaching the wrong stuff, my respect for academic freedom knows
no limits. Your student clearly needs to be rescued, but I’ll take no action
against you!” (The text I used—like all sociology texts—was, of course, making
the case for multiculturalism.) Double standards and political correctness
account for much of the increasing awareness that colleges today offer, as
Berger puts it, “an increasingly costly and dubiously useful product.”
Why Republicans Shut Down the Government. By Francis Wilkinson. Bloomberg, October 4, 2013.
Anger Can Be Power. By Thomas B. Edsall. New York Times, October 8, 2013.
Wrong Side of History. By Timothy Egan. New York Times, October 3, 2013.
The Myth That Makes the GOP Suicidal. By Ira Chernus. History News Network, October 9, 2013.
Putting the Spotlight on the Republican Party. By Stan Greenberg. Greenberg Quinlan Rossner Research. Democracy Corps, July 23, 2013. Results of the first national survey of the Republican Party Project. Also here.
Inside the GOP: Report on Focus Groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and Moderate Republicans. By Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert. Republican Party Project. Greenberg Quinlan Rossner Research. Democracy Corps, October 3, 2013. PDF. Also here.
Wilkinson:
For
them [focus group participants], Greenberg notes, Washington looks nothing like the capital many others
see. Gridlock? There is no gridlock. Only a socialist steamroller before which
the Republican Party is feeble and afraid. “Evangelicals who feel most
threatened by trends embrace the Tea Party because they are the ones who are
fighting back,” the report states. Republican base voters “think they face a
victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase
dependency and therefore electoral support.”
This is
the context of the fight against Obamacare. The basic idea – similarly
articulated by some Republican officeholders, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz –
is that Obama has extended a new entitlement to create a class of lazy, poor
voters whose well-being is dependent upon the Democratic Party. Shorthand: more
47 percenters.
“Their
party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand
programs that mainly benefit minorities,” the report states.
The
Republican moderates were staunch fiscal conservatives, but most readily
embraced new gender relations and minority empowerment, including gay rights.
The Tea Partiers and evangelicals spoke as if they were in the midst of War of
the Worlds. As the report characterizes the Tea-Party worldview: “Obama’s
America is an unmitigated evil based on big government, regulations and
dependency.”
It’s a
tough situation to rectify. A lot of Americans were not ready for a mixed-race
president. They weren’t ready for gay marriage. They weren’t ready for the wave
of legal and illegal immigration that redefined American demographics over the
past two or three decades, bringing in lots of nonwhites. They weren’t ready –
who was? – for the brutal effects of globalization on working- and middle-class
Americans or the devastating fallout from the financial crisis.
Their
representatives didn’t stop Obamacare. And their side didn't “take back America”
in 2012 as Fox News and conservative radio personalities led them to believe
they would. They feel the culture is running away from them (and they’re mostly
right). They lack the power to control their own government. But they still
have just enough to shut it down.
A Republican Party no one could control. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, October 10, 2013. Also here.
Tea Party Tactics Lead Straight Back to Secession. By Stephen Mihm. Bloomberg, October 8, 2013.
Obama Just Made a Terrible Mistake on Egypt. By Eric Trager. The New Republic, October 9, 2013.
Netanyahu and the End of Days. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, October 10, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.
Hanson:
So far,
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s peace ruse is still bearing some fruit.
President Obama was eager to talk with him at the United Nations — only to be
reportedly rebuffed, until Obama managed to phone him for the first
conversation between heads of state of the two countries since the Iranian
storming of the U.S. embassy in 1979.
Rouhani
has certainly wowed Western elites with his mellifluous voice, quiet demeanor,
and denials of wanting a bomb. The media, who ignore the circumstances of
Rouhani’s three-decade trajectory to power, gush that he is suddenly a
“moderate” and “Western-educated.”
The
implication is that Rouhani is not quite one of those hard-line Shiite
apocalyptic theocrats like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in the past ranted about
the eventual end to the Zionist entity.
Americans
are sick and tired of losing blood and treasure in the Middle East. We
understandably are desperate for almost any sign of Iranian outreach. Our
pundits assure us that either Iran does not need and thus does not want a bomb,
or that Iran at least could be contained if it got one.
No such
giddy reception was given to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In
comparison with Rouhani, he seemed grating to his U.N. audience in New York. A
crabby Netanyahu is now seen as the party pooper who barks in his raspy voice
that Rouhani is only buying time from the West until Iran can test a nuclear
bomb — that the Iranian leader is a duplicitous “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Why
does the unpleasant Netanyahu sound to us so unyielding, so dismissive of
Rouhani’s efforts at dialogue, so ready to start an unnecessary war? How can
the democracy that wants Iran not to have the bomb sound more trigger-happy
than the theocracy intent on getting it?
In
theory, it could be possible that Rouhani is a genuine pragmatist, eager to
open up Iran’s nuclear facilities for inspection to avoid a preemptory attack
and continuing crippling sanctions. But if the world’s only superpower can
afford to take that slim chance, Netanyahu really cannot. Nearly half the
world’s remaining Jews live in tiny Israel — a fact emphasized by the Iranian
theocrats, who have in the past purportedly characterized it as a “black stain”
upon the world.
After
World War II, the survivors of the Holocaust envisioned Israel as the
last-chance refuge for endangered Jews. Iranian extremists have turned that
idea upside down — when, for example, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani
purportedly said that “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will
destroy everything.”
Netanyahu
accepts that history’s lessons are not nice. The world, both ancient and
modern, is quite capable of snoozing as thousands perish, whether in Rwanda by
edged weapons; in Iraq when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds; or, most recently,
more than 100,000 in Syria.
Centuries
before nuclear weapons, entire peoples have sometimes perished in war without
much of a trace — or much afterthought. After the Third Punic War, Carthage —
its physical place , people, and language — was obliterated by Rome. The vast
Aztec Empire ceased to exist within two years of encountering Hernán Cortés.
Byzantine, Vandal, and Prussian are now mere descriptors; most have no idea
that they refer to defeated peoples and states that vanished.
The
pessimistic Netanyahu also remembers that there was mostly spineless outrage at
Hitler’s systematic harassment of Jews before the outbreak of World War II —
and impotence in the face of their extermination during the war. Within a
decade of the end of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel
throughout the Middle East had become almost a religion.
In the
modern age of thermonuclear weapons, the idea of eliminating an entire people
has never been more achievable. But collective morality does not often follow
the fast track of technological change. Any modern claim of a superior global
ethos, anchored in the United Nations, that might prevent such annihilation is
no more valid now than it was in 1941. Again, ask the Tutsis of Rwanda.
The
disastrous idea of a preemptory war to disarm Iran seems to us apocalyptic. But
then, we are a nation of 313 million, not 8 million; the winner of World War
II, not a people nearly wiped out by it; surrounded by two wide oceans, not 300
million hostile neighbors; and out of Iranian missile range, not well within
it. Reverse those comparisons and Obama might sound as neurotic as Netanyahu
would utopian.
We can
be wrong about Hassan Rouhani without lethal consequences. Netanyahu reviews
history and concludes that he has no such margin of error. That fact alone
allows us to sound high-minded and idealistic — and Israel suspicious and
cranky.
Conservatism Is a Way of Life. By Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh.com, October 10, 2013.
Rush:
Conservatism
is not tax cuts. Conservatism is a way of life that is rooted in values and
traditions that have contributed to the greatness of this country. Conservatism
is the way you live, and that just has to be pointed out to people. To people
growing up today, conservatism . . . God, I shudder to think what it is. What
is conservatism to somebody that's 18 today? Conservatism is a deranged,
lunatic, stupid cowboy, George Bush who wanted to go into Iraq for no reason.
What do
you think it is? The way the media and the Democrat Party have defined
conservatism today is a bastardization of what it is. One of the frustrating
things is, the Republican Party has always been the modern day repository for
conservatism, but you can’t find anybody there who’s willing to stand up and
articulate it ’cause they’re afraid to or they don’t know what it is, or they
don’t believe in it, whatever.
But
Cruz and Mike Lee – and there are a bunch of others, and they are largely from
the Tea Party – are willing to do it. Allen West was one. Ben Carson is
another. There are all kinds of people standing up out there willing to
articulate what it is, and when you listen to ’em, you find out it’s a
lifestyle. It’s a value-based lifestyle that's rooted in personal
responsibility, achievement, freedom, liberty.
Conservatism
is not a bunch of policy wonks sitting around writing position papers. Conservatism
is simply how happy, content-ful, responsible people live their lives. People
who respect others. That’s conservatism, but it’s been so bastardized in the
media – it has been so mischaracterized, demonized, you name it – that young
skulls full of mush maybe as old as 30 or 35, get asked, “What do you think
they think conservatism is?” and there hasn’t been a conservative articulate
spokesman in politics for I don't know how long.
So the
Democrats and the media have been able to define what a conservative is. It’s a
racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, extremist. That’s the furthest thing from the
truth. So Cruz and Lee came along, and, in the process of trying to get what
they wanted, were articulating conservatism for people. I signed on immediately
because, to me, it’s about ideas. But the delay people, I love ’em. I love ’em,
too. Same objective. The point was to stop Obamacare. There were arguments
about how best to do it.
When liberals became scolds. By George F Will. Washington Post, October 9, 2019. Also here.
George Will on the JFK Assassination and the Advent of Punitive Liberalism. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, October 10, 2013.
Will:
“Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship”
—
Washington Post headline, Nov. 1,
1959
(concerning
Lee Harvey Oswald)
“He didn’t even have the satisfaction of
being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little
Communist.”
—
Jacqueline Kennedy, Nov.22, 1963
She
thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly
manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact —
Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the
assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day presidency without mentioning the
assassin.
The
transformation of a murder by a marginal man into a killing by a sick culture
began instantly — before Kennedy was buried. The afternoon of the
assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy’s “martyrdom” to “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the
American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the
right.”
Never
mind that adjacent to Reston’s article was a Times report on Oswald’s Communist convictions and associations. A Soviet spokesman, too, assigned “moral
responsibility” for Kennedy’s death to “Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right.”
Three
days after the assassination, a Times editorial, “Spiral of Hate,” identified
Kennedy’s killer as a “spirit”: The Times deplored “the shame all America must
bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down” Kennedy. The
editorialists were, presumably, immune to this spirit. The new
liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.
Hitherto
a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a
scowling indictment: Kennedy was killed by America’s social climate, whose
sickness required “punitive liberalism.” That phrase is from James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, whose 2007 book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism is a
profound meditation on the reverberations of the rifle shots in Dealey Plaza.
The bullets
of Nov. 22, 1963, altered the nation’s trajectory less by killing a president
than by giving birth to a destructive narrative about America. Fittingly, the
narrative was most injurious to the narrators. Their recasting of the tragedy
in order to validate their curdled conception of the nation marked a ruinous
turn for liberalism, beginning its decline from political dominance.
Punitive
liberalism preached the necessity of national repentance for a history of
crimes and misdeeds that had produced a present so poisonous that it murdered a
president. To be a liberal would mean being a scold. Liberalism would become
the doctrine of grievance groups owed redress for cumulative inherited injuries
inflicted by the nation’s tawdry history, toxic present and ominous future.
Kennedy’s
posthumous reputation — Americans often place him, absurdly, atop the
presidential rankings — reflects regrets about might-have-beens. To reread Robert Frost’s banal poem written for Kennedy’s inauguration (“A golden age of poetry and power of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”) is to wince at
its clunky attempt to conjure an Augustan age from the melding of politics and
celebrity that the Kennedys used to pioneer the presidency-as-entertainment.
Under
Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him
— especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal,
drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act , Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism
became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural
issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.
The
bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that
characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial
culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these
forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense
of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia
bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.
Liberalism’s
disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal
hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s. As Piereson
writes, the retreat of liberalism from a doctrine of American affirmation left
a void that would be filled by Ronald Reagan 17 years after the assassination.
The
moral of liberalism’s explanation of Kennedy’s murder is that there is a human
instinct to reject the fact that large events can have small, squalid causes;
there is an intellectual itch to discern large hidden meanings in events. And
political opportunism is perennial.
Ending the West’s Proxy War Against Israel. By Gunnar Heinsohn. Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2009. Also here.
Stop funding a Palestinian youth bulge,
and the fighting will stop too.
Exploding Population. By Gunnar Heinsohn. New York Times, January 7, 2008.
Youth and war, a deadly duo. By Christopher Caldwell. FT.com, January 6, 2007.
“Youth bulge” violence. By Jonas Attenhofer. Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2007.
A Demographic Theory of War. By Clark Whelton. The Weekly Standard, October 5, 2007. Also here.
