By Robert Cherry
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
The liberal press is claiming that Jewish money
brought down two black House members, Cori Bush (D., Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman
(D., N.Y.), who lost their primaries this year. The New York Times front-page
story was titled “In Congresswoman’s Defeat, Israel Lobby Shows
Its Clout.” But such money has at most a minor influence. Far more interesting
is the Left’s inconsistency when it comes to what it gets angry at.
A FiveThirtyEight-sponsored poll of the Democratic
primary race between Bowman and challenger George Latimer, a long-time
Westchester County executive, found that, in late March, Bowman trailed Latimer by 17
percentage points. This was three months before the election and before any
significant amount of money was spent on the race by AIPAC and other Jewish
organizations. And it was the exact margin of Latimer’s eventual victory. As a
result, it is hard to see how the support of Latimer’s candidacy (or opposition
to Bowman) from groups that promote Jewish interests had any material impact on
the result. And the reason should be obvious: Both candidates were well known,
so advertising could not create distorted images of unfamiliar candidates.
Rather than acknowledging the serious weaknesses of their
candidacies, both Bowman and Bush, along with their supporters, seized on
Jewish-interest-group money as the decisive factor in their defeats. Bush and
her followers did this by deploying an antisemitic stereotype: the notion that
money from Jewish sources spent on political advocacy can manipulate politics
to victimize black constituents. Supposedly, advertising paid for by such
sources changed the minds of a significant share of black voters — who already,
according to Cori Bush herself, had a wealth of knowledge about her. “My
community knows who I am,” Bush told CBS News just before the election. “This
district has seen me for the last ten years going from the activist to the
‘politivist,’ which is what I call myself. They know that about me.”
For Bush to believe that her constituents could be so
easily manipulated is to deny the ability of black Americans to make their own
reasoned choices. It is similar to the claim that a very modest adjustment in
Georgia voting rules would affect black voting behavior so negatively as to be
tantamount to “Jim Crow 2.0.” As the social scientist Glenn Loury observed, the notion that black Americans are prevented
from full participation in the American way of life “robs [them] of agency and
self-determination. It is a patronizing lie that betrays a profound lack of
faith in the capacities of black Americans to rise to the challenges, face the
responsibilities, and bear the burdens of freedom.”
Interestingly, a clear case of money’s role in election
results is the funding by billionaire businessman George Soros of more than 20
district-attorney races during the last decade, with $17 million in funding between 2015 and 2019. They were the
classic sort of races where a modest amount of funding can be decisive:
low-turnout elections with candidates little known to the electorate. This is
the opposite of the Bush and Bowman races. Soros’s funding was able to
transform DA offices nationally, electing progressive public prosecutors who
immediately decriminalized supposedly minor, quality-of-life crimes and
dramatically reduced bail requirements even for those accused of felonies.
Progressives have seized on the fact that Soros is Jewish
to stifle questions about the influence his funding exerts on the way the
justice system operates. Typical was a discussion
between NPR host Mary Louise Kelly and writer Emily Tamkin:
Kelly: You mentioned George Soros
is Jewish, which is prompting questions as to whether the attacks on him are
anti-Semitic. How do you understand this?
Tamkin: The idea of a Jewish person
being all-controlling and all-powerful and using that control and power to
denigrate and degrade and corrupt society is a very, very old one. It does not
matter if the word Jewish was not actually said. This is trying to use
anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic tropes in order to stir something up within the
hearts and minds of those hearing it.
Notice the claim of antisemitism is made even if Soros’s
Jewishness is not mentioned by his critics. (One can reasonably speculate that
his critics are not even aware of his background.) It is apparently impossible
for progressives to believe that any criticism of Soros on the grounds of his
actions, having nothing to do with the fact that he happens to be Jewish, is
sound.
What we see is a selective concern about antisemitism
that depends on the Left’s ideological goals. On the one hand, when elections
don’t go their way, progressives are very comfortable overstating the power of
funding from Jewish sources such that it reinforces antisemitic tropes. On the
other hand, they are so uncomfortable with conservatives’ criticism
of Soros’s successful funding of progressive DAs that they baselessly accuse
those critics of antisemitism. The resort to the antisemitic trope of “Jewish
money” is all the more reprehensible when its effect is to reinforce anti-black
stereotypes of powerless, easily manipulated marks.
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