By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
January 16, 2023
Antisemitism
is a strange prejudice. As the great liberal economist Ludwig von Mises pointed
out, most common bigotry—for example, anti-black racism in the United States—is
based upon some supposed fault or deficiency in the despised population. Yet
antisemites scorn Jews for “vices” that look a lot like virtues: that they are
intelligent and pursue education, that they are unusually successful in
business and particularly in prestigious businesses such as finance and
entertainment, that they have a strong sense of communal responsibility, that
they are cosmopolitan, etc.
Of
course it is true that, as G. K. Chesterton observed, virtues gone mad can be
more dangerous than vices, and the poison is in the dosage: The cultivation of
the mind can lead to narrow intellectualism, community-mindedness can become
clannishness, the pursuit of success in business can lead to avarice or
dishonesty, and these undesirable traits are attributed to Jews by Jew-haters.
But Jews are an all-purpose villain, fit for any occasion: American antisemites
hated Jews and denounced them as socialists in the 1930s even as European
antisemites hated Jews and denounced them as capitalists. The Lindberghers
hated Jews for being communists, and the Marxists hated Jews for not being
communists. Jew-hatred can present as a progressive psychosis—as we have seen
in the late careers of several figures on the right and left—but it is in its
milder, less feverish expression that it remains astonishingly common.
A recent
survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League and written up in the Washington
Post contains
some very surprising findings—surprising not because antisemitic beliefs
persist but because they are so widespread according to self-reporting. (About
the ADL as an organization I have deep reservations, but I do not see any
reason to doubt the honesty of the survey.) Some 70 percent of Americans
endorsed the belief that Jews “stick together more than other Americans.”
Fifty-three percent said that Jews give other Jews preferential treatment in
hiring, and 39 percent reported a belief that American Jews are more loyal to
Israel than to the United States. A third of Americans affirmed that Jews “do
not share my values,” while 1 in 5 Americans say that Jews have too much power
in the United States and are more willing than members of other groups to use
dishonest means to pursue their ends. A quarter of Americans claimed that Jews
have too much control over Wall Street.
These
are, of course, the “greatest hits” of antisemitism, and you can find such
sentiments being voiced over the years by everybody from right-wing
knuckle-draggers to literary progressives such as Gore
Vidal to every other sophomoric lefty
activist on our college campuses.
Because
we are used to thinking of African Americans as victims of prejudice rather
than as practitioners of it, many American political observers are discomfited
by the prominence of antisemitism among prominent black politicians and
community leaders. What a gift the former Kanye West gave Democrats by linking
his own psychotic (literally medically psychotic, one assumes) antisemitism to
Donald Trump and various minor goblins from the sewer of right-wing trollery.
It is much more difficult for the progressive mind to digest Jesse Jackson’s
derision of “Hymietown” or Barack Obama’s nearness to such figures as Louis
Farrakhan. Ice Cube remains welcome in polite society in spite of his at times vocal
antisemitism. The
former Mr. West even credited Mr. Cube for contributing to his own “antisemite
vibe,” as he put it.
About 3
percent of Americans agreed that all of the antisemitic tropes in the ADL
survey are “mostly or somewhat true,” suggesting that there are millions more
antisemites in the United States than there are Jews. This is not entirely
surprising, given the small size of the Jewish population. As one of the
study’s reviewers reminds the Washington Post: “Kanye has more
followers on Instagram than there are Jewish people in the world.”
Anti-black
racism has of course been the most consequential prejudice in American history,
but antisemitism remains strangely vital. Like its cousin, anti-Catholicism,
antisemitism is more than a prejudice and more than a visceral hatred—it is, in
its most extreme form, a kind of “theory of everything” in politics. Anti-black
racism may exist with or without an attendant conspiracy theory, but
antisemitism is almost without exception rooted in a conspiratorial view of the
world. The fact that antisemitic incidents are on the
rise on college campuses is entirely predictable in that campus culture is as much
conspiracy-driven as talk-radio culture or Fox News culture, with different
villains and a slightly more refined rhetoric: not “Jews” pulling the strings
from the shadows, but “Zionists.”
One
would think that an all-powerful cabal would have managed to, say, install one
of its own in the presidency at least once, but the closest any person of
Jewish background has come to the Oval Office was Barry Goldwater—who did not
come very close. (And was not very Jewish: At the time of his campaign, the
newspaperman Harry Golden cracked, “I always knew that the first Jewish
candidate for president would be an Episcopalian.”) But for the
conspiracy-minded, everything is evidence for the conspiracy—why bother putting
a Jew in the White House when they—they!—can secretly control whatever
figurehead they choose and thereby avoid scrutiny? That is kook-fringe stuff,
though it is worth noting that perfectly respectable progressives make roughly
the same argument about the Vatican and the Supreme Court.
None of
this stands up to any real scrutiny, of course, and none of it makes much sense
if you take five minutes to think about it. But for the psychotic Jew-hater and
the conspiracy nut, the upside of a political discourse dominated by tropes and
memes and social-media exchanges is that nobody does take five minutes to think
about it. I think it is far from coincidental that the golden age of liberal
democracy was also the golden age of newspapers—the age of social media will
produce, and has produced, a different kind of politics, one with more
tribalism, more unmoored passion, and, inevitably, more psychotic Jew-hatred.
Nobody
Follows ‘the Science’
Listening
to NPR (monitoring enemy frequencies) I rolled my eyes so hard that I almost
wrecked my Jeep when The Pulse interviewed UC-Berkeley psychologist Dacher
Keltner about
his new book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday
Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It was approximately the river of goo you
would expect from that particular confluence—psychologist, Berkeley, “transform
your life”—but it stuck in my mind because of the word “science” in the title
and because of NPR’s endless recitation of its commitment to “fact-based
reporting,” which is a problem in that Professor Keltner from the beginning
abandons both fact and science.
Keltner
begins with a very moving account of the death of his brother. He says that as
his brother lay dying, he detected “light that radiated from [his] face, it
pulsated in concentric circles” and that he comprehended the presence of a
force pulling his brother away. The thing is—and I am confident writing this
even though I was not there—that did not happen. That isn’t how
death works—that isn’t how light works. People’s faces do not
emit concentric circles of light when they die, and there was no detectable
force in the room pulling Keltner’s brother away—if Keltner believes himself to
be in possession of sensory equipment that can detect what the most advanced
scientific devices cannot, then this should be put to the test, scientifically,
if we are to take seriously the notion that this is the “science” of anything.
It may very well be that Keltner imagined he saw concentric
circles of light radiating from the face of his brother, but what people
imagine they see during moments of great personal stress (as at the death of a
loved one) is no kind of basis for a scientific conclusion. Usually, people who
voice this kind of nonsense do not believe that they literally saw something
but instead are talking in a poetic way about an emotional experience that they
do not have more direct and accurate language to describe.
Whatever
that is, it is not science—and it is not fact. It is, at best, metaphor.
As part
of the report, NPR played an older story about the “overview effect,” the
emotional sensation one gets when observing a familiar scene from a great
height or a great distance. Apparently, the experience of seeing Earth from
space has had a profound emotional effect on some astronauts, and the NPR
commentator posited—entirely seriously—that we should send world leaders to
conduct their negotiations in space on the theory that this would lead them
toward making better decisions and reaching more harmonious outcomes. This is,
of course, absolute drivel, but drivel that resonates with the proper
sensibility is taken seriously. It is impossible to imagine, say, an
Evangelical Christian’s claims of some direct encounter with God being given
the kind of deference that Keltner’s sentimental hokum receives on “fact-based”
public radio.
This
produces some genuinely bad journalistic results. For example, the health
benefits of dietary fads that accord with suburban lifestyle progressivism
(veganism, for example) are accepted with very little scrutiny, as are claims
of meaningful benefits from such vague practices as “mindfulness.”
These
are testable hypotheses, but the evidence does not matter. We have more than a
century’s worth of evidence documenting that chiropractic care provides no
meaningful medical benefits—which should not surprise us, given that
chiropractic is based in late 19th-century metaphysical horsepucky
about manipulating mystical energies and “innate intelligence” and other
factors that do not actually exist—but we treat chiropractic as
though it were a legitimate branch of medicine and even subsidize its practice
under various government programs. Under the grievously misnamed Affordable
Care Act, we laid the foundations for federal recognition of all sorts of
pseudoscientific nonsense, from acupuncture to “energy work.” This from people who will lecture
us that we must “follow the science.”
I take a
pretty conventional view of climate change and evolution, but I do not want to
hear one word about “follow the science” from the editorial board of any
newspaper that publishes horoscopes. If you cannot apply the same standards of
intellectual rigor to both creationism and yoga, then you are not “following
the science”—you are using “the science” as a Kulturkampf cudgel.
Economics
for English Majors
“Wage Gains Lag Behind Inflation for
Another Year,”
reads the top headline in the Wall Street Journal, whose editors
should know better. If the wage gains were less than inflation, then there
weren’t any wage gains at all—there were wage losses.
A very
useful concept in economics is the real—real wages, real GDP, real
median household income over time, etc. Real simply means
“adjusted for inflation.” If you aren’t adjusting for inflation, you are not in
the realm of the real.
Money,
properly understood, is basically a record-keeping system. Manipulating the
records does not change the real world. If you have 100 apples and they cost
$10 on Tuesday but cost $20 on Wednesday, you are not twice as wealthy in apple
terms as you were the day before—only in dollar terms, and you can’t bake a
dollar pie. For the most part, I don’t care if the increased dollar value of my
stock portfolio reflects some underlying economic reality, although in the long
run it must. We don’t think about that sort of thing too much. But the real
economy is not made up of dollars—it is made up of apples, and wheat, and
labor, and engineering services, and magazine articles, and all the things we
make and do that add up to economic output. A great deal of modern economic
policy is oriented toward trying to monkey with the record-keeping system in
some clever way, but, in the end, what matters is how much wheat you can grow,
how much work you can do, the efficacy of the software you develop, etc. When
the record-keeping system becomes too disconnected from the underlying economic
reality—as when you send a huge pile of money out of the federal fisc at a time
when economic production is in fact stagnant or declining—then you end up with
problem inflation, like we have now.
(Problem
deflation can be a problem, too.)
Shunting
money into the economy does not in and of itself add to the number of acres
under cultivation or increase the available workforce or induce innovation and
creativity. Making money cheaper makes it easier to access credit, which is
beneficial to entrepreneurs and young firms—but another way of looking at that
is that a policy of artificially cheap money is a tax on savers and a subsidy
for debtors. That’s a policy you can follow for a long time, but the
correction, which we are probably only beginning to really experience, can be
painful.
What we
need is an economic policy that is oriented toward the real economy rather than
a policy that is oriented toward trying to goose the economy through government
spending during slow times. (The other half of the crude Keynesian
practice—tamping down the booms with fiscal restraint and
budget-balancing—rarely makes it out of the realm of the merely theoretical in
U.S. policy.) But that is harder to do, because when it comes to things like
fixing the schools, developing an intelligent energy policy, and providing a
stable long-term regulatory and tax regime for investors—it is much easier and
much more politically juicy to run willy-nilly from one thing to the next,
lurching from crisis to crisis and from policy to policy as though the lurching
were not a big part of the problem to begin with.
“Stable money” used to be an important plank in
the conservative platform. But some conservatives seem to have lost all sense
of why that was and what is now necessary.
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