The San Andreas Faultline in the Democrat Party

This is a complicated subject studded with land mines that can only exacerbate the potential for a devastating earthquake. The new and unanticipated war in Israel has exposed a weird schism in Democrat ranks nobody has ever wanted to address in print but me.

There is a Jewish Problem. It’s not the one the evil Woke-Nazis have decided it is. They have a sickness and the name of the sickness is Anti-Semitism. Calling it by other names is mere political costumery, like claiming that the female desire for an unlimited ‘License to Kill’ the babies in their bodies is about being Pro-Choice, not an animal preference for sexual libertinism over the inconvenient but universally human right to life. The same bait-and-switch rhetoric festoons the so-called political position of Pro-Palestinian Anti-Zionism. Nobody cares about the Palestinians.

They’ve never had, never been, a nation. They were just the Arabs nobody else wanted to claim who lived in a patch of land on the Mediterranean controlled mostly neglectfully by the British Empire in the aftermath of WWI’s takedown of the Ottoman Empire. They have no unique culture, no distinct history to speak of as a people, no literary, artistic, architectural, musical, theological, scientific, or medical contributions to the sum of human civilization. Compared to the Jews, they are a nonentity distinguished only by an accident of geography. They are just a name slapped on history’s oldest grudge, the hateful resentment of the boastfully superior Jews. They’ve become the poster child for that hatred because it’s the only thing that defines them as a scattered post-1947 population.

So what’s the real Jewish Problem that threatens to destroy one of the most successful political alliances in modern history? It’s the philosophical odyssey of American Jews in the 20th and now the 21st Century. A thing no one wants to talk about because it’s relatively easy not to and because it’s incredibly dangerous to bring it up. Sadly, the only thing left that seems able to really unite American Jews is the speed at which any criticism of Jews qua Jews will automatically produce screams of ‘Anti-Semitism.’ These are, of course, every bit as disingenuous as the instantaneous ‘liberal’ cry of racism whenever anyone criticizes the new plantation Democrat racialist policies have created in the cities and states they run. The similarity is not coincidental. American Jews have played a significant role in the development and refinement of both political tactics. Because, overwhelmingly, American Jews are Democrats and have a role in party leadership far out of proportion to their percentage of the nation’s population. (I can and will specify this in some detail later on, but it is absolutely true.)

You see, there is another, deeper faultline underneath the one that now threatens to tear the Democrat Party apart. That’s the faultline in American Jewish identity in the post-Holocaust era; that is, roughly 50 years of the decline of Judaism as a religion. What defines American Jews in that era? Prosperity, guilt, and crippling separations from their cultural roots. Yes, there were many Jewish immigrants to this country before the Holocaust, but what causes transformations is an accumulation of incremental changes as well as step-changes in beliefs and behaviors. The Holocaust was a huge step-change that served as a tipping point into spiritual collapse for the ones who sought consolation in government power. 

Recently, I’ve done tedious scrutiny of Pew Research findings about the state of religiosity in the United States. Tedious because the most significant findings are usually buried for not being politically correct. The variable I was looking for, and finally found in some measure at least, was atheism. Which is on the rise in all American faiths but Islam, and it is most pronounced in traditional Christian denominations, including Roman Catholics) and in Judaism. In fact, the highest percentage of atheists within faiths was that of self-reporting Jews: 20 percent, nearly twice that of any traditional Christian Church. I was not surprised. For decades I have believed this was the case and that it represented an unreported shift in Jewish identity from a religious base to an ethnic, historical, cultural, and increasingly political base. Jewishness is no longer a faith; it’s a people. One they themselves often cynically refer to as “the tribe.” (I remember a business partner who made a grand entrance (late) to an offsite meeting of our firm’s principals by showing up in a blue and white striped tracksuit with the announcement to the suited ones, “I come before you in the uniform of my people.”)

Long ago, Jews began to divide themselves, here more than elsewhere, into categories of strictly observant and theologically consistent but less strictly observant. Reform Jews differ from Orthodox Jews in ways analogous to the relationship between American Roman Catholics and Episcopalians (not C of  E but definitely not Catholic either, whatever the Nicene Creed says). The accepted theology differs not a whit, but the observance and emphasis is of the phone-it-in variety. Reform Jews are, or were, more religiously observant and dutiful than the Episcopalians of my childhood, but I had as many Jewish classmates as Episcopalian ones, and I got to compare our religious upbringings. 

My parents didn’t attend church often, but I got a three-year Perfect Attendance pin for Sunday School while I was still in nursery school. My dad used to drop us off at St. Andrews and go home to mow the lawn. He picked us up afterwards smelling wonderfully of fresh-cut grass. Church was a Christmas and Easter obligation. So was Confirmation. I saw the one the year before my own would happen and told my parents I wouldn’t go through with Confirmation if I had to kiss the Bishop’s ring, which I had seen him make some of the kneeling confirmation subjects do. “You won’t have to,” I was told. “That’s only for converted Catholics.” But when I was supposed to be attending Confirmation classes, they didn’t happen. I was confirmed without ever having to learn the catechism mandated by the Book of Common Prayer, of which I received a red leather-bound edition as a Confirmation present. How I caught myself up on the catechism.

That bit of personal history lets me illustrate the difference with my Jewish friends, who were all Reform Jews. They didn’t have Sunday School per sē, but later on they had Hebrew School, which happened on weekends and as far as I could tell their attendance was not perfect. I was also invited to attend one bar mitzvah, which I did, and was impressed by two, no three, things. First it was a much bigger deal than my Episcopal confirmation. My friend had to lead the service, in Hebrew, not passively receive a blessing on a kneeling pad at the altar rail. Everyone in the congregation had to wear the shawl and the yarmulke, including the Gentiles. Second, I could tell he was nervous and bluffing his way through a lot of the words. He knew his catechism better than I had known mine, but I could tell he was repeating sounds he had memorized, not taken fully to heart. Third, the after party made mine look like a family dinner, which it basically was. This one was resplendent with tables full of gifts almost as big as the tables full of food, and great food at that. All in all, though, the religious event I witnessed was a small town religious service a little more dressed up than ours, but the grownup talk wasn’t about Commandments and the Torah and the Talmud and the meaning of it all. It was a lot of pats on the back for a 13-year-old who could now call himself a man. Nobody called me a man after Confirmation. My only real pat on the back was the official permission to have a sip of wine at Communion.

What I didn’t see in elementary school was the phenomenon I would encounter later. At St. John’s Day School the strongest competition my sister and I faced was from Roman Catholics whose parents had the same unwavering emphasis on academic performance as ours did. In secondary school, the fiercest competition came from Jewish students, which I took in stride. We were all there, in our rural boarding school far from home, to get into the best colleges we could. There was no reason to resent anyone for being competitive. What I did mildly resent was that our own Reform Jews got to go home for two religious holidays early in the school year, and it didn’t cost them in the most valuable currency of our school, number of weekends home allowed. Everyone was limited to a single weekend per trimester, one additional for honors grades, and two additional for high honors grades. We didn’t even get to go home for Easter when it didn’t overlap with spring vacation. But we had very showy chapel services celebrating both Easter and, lifelong memorably, Christmas. Truthfully, there was no reason to begrudge Jews the time to observe Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana with their families. I did not myself observe any anti-Semitism at the school. They were a significant part of our population and nobody thought much about it. It wasn’t until we began planning applications to college that the subject came up. In competitions for the choosiest schools, we learned that they faced longer odds than the rest of us. Someone pointed out that if they wanted to, Harvard could fill every freshman class with graduates of Bedford Stuyvesant High School with 800 SAT scores.That was a sobering thought. Even if we suspected it was more apocryphal than factual, it was somehow believable. Affirmative Action was already a reality in our world, and if some students got favorable treatment for ethnic reasons, it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe they could get unfavorable treatment using similar kinds of prejudicial logic. 

My own roommate applied to a more than average number of schools because he was Jewish and knew he was a crapshoot for that and other factors. He got rejected everywhere except for his backup (safety) school and, incredibly, his first choice, Harvard. He was wait-listed at both. (He was finally accepted at Harvard two weeks before matriculation when a Lawrenceville kid decided to take a year off to find himself. Woodstock had already started changing the landscape.)

At Harvard, the anti-Semitism was not visible or verbal. It was rather implicit. I joined the only Harvard Final Club of eight who had a Jewish president. There were few Jewish members of any Final Club. The fact wasn’t discussed. I didn’t give it much thought honestly. The Jews I knew didn’t want anything to do with Final Clubs. They did fine with institutions like the newspaper and academic honor societies. They could certainly get admitted to the Harvard Law School. But I also didn’t see much of their participation in the largest and most famous social institution, the Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770, which was famous for its all-male chorus line in the annual musical extravaganza attended by A-List Hollywood stars. Maybe that’s a club they would have joined if they’d been asked.

All of the above may seem like meaningless preamble to the weighty matters I’ve promised to introduce. But my observations growing up made it clear to me that being Jewish is a fundamentally different category of American life. It was only my social experiences in college that made me look back and realize that for all the time I spent with Jews in my elementary school, that was about my only social contact with them in my childhood. They weren’t members of my parents’ country club (where we were infrequent visitors until I was briefly active in tennis) or in their social circle, which was large thanks to a millionaire neighbor who threw large, frequent, lavish parties that included Jewish guests only on occasion. I noticed, too, that I had never noticed this. In first grade I’d had an inseparable friend who played cowboys and Indians with me and whose parents were Holocaust survivors. I saw the tattoos, and his mother died one weekend that winter. He described seeing her body go “poof” in the cremation. I also had a crush that year on a third grader named Robin, who was beautiful and played the piano like a grownup. Neither of them returned to our school for a second year 

That brings us back, full circle, to where I began, the Holocaust. I did make contact with that boy many years later, by telephone, and his lack of interest in hearing from me made it clear that he had closed the book on that period of his life in some very final way. He wasn’t rude. He just didn’t like hearing from a first grade kid who didn’t exist anymore. It was that impersonal.

How does one deal with the fact of the Holocaust and the knowledge that so many of your intimates are survivors of one sort or another, carrying lists of the family dead they never got to meet, as well as the eccentricities of the living you know who escaped or got rescued from the camps? You can either reach deep into your faith and search out meanings where few have found them or you put the whole subject into a box, duct tape it shut, and hide it in the back of the closet. Even if that box includes your entire religious legacy and the God who failed to save so many.

What is atheism but denial? God is made of words, not facts. Without scripture there is no basis for faith or, more importantly, guilt. There is only a flawed argument that is designed to push you toward self-sacrifice, atonement, fear for the accountability of a soul no one can see under a microscope or prove as any kind of scientific reality. Ironically, Judaism’s emphasis on law, its intellectual foundation in the Talmud, makes it easier to frame the counter-argument to God. The legendary Jewish lawyers of both public esteem and derogation are all midwifed by the Talmud, which teaches, insists on, a trial of every assertion by means of reason, reference to precedent, and the determination to win the argument being debated. The faith becomes a faith in the power of logic and the understanding of its uses as a tool both for and against any offered proposition. It ceases to be purely a matter of spiritual decisions based on shared belief. And when so many of those who used to lend authority to shared belief are no longer alive to nourish and revitalize the historic contract with God, the contract becomes null and void. Case dismissed.

Politics became a channel for American Jews long before the Holocaust. Early immigrants were fleeing pogroms of their own throughout Christian Europe. From the first, they were not welcome. The Warsaw Ghetto of Poland had its own precursors even in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Jews understood and excelled at capitalism, but the root word of that economic system is ‘capital.’ You have to have some, and if others own and control all of it, what are the alternatives? Disdained by the people who populated the Republican Party, who seemed to own most of the capital, American Jews became adherents to the Democratic Party and the trade unionist movement that spoke for the laboring class against the corporate overseers. But if unions could win a living wage, they couldn’t win much more than that. Certainly not capital. Allegiance to the Democratic Party became an ingrained Jewish tradition that survived many setbacks, insults, and exclusions, even from unions, over many decades of American assimilation.

American Jews were more vulnerable than most to the seeming science of Marxism, which had its sights set on acquiring the all-important key to prosperity known as capital. That was something they could sign up for and work for, and excel at. But Marxism is expressly atheist in its philosophical precepts. Was this a problem? Probably not at first. There was most likely a hybrid belief system that lasted for decades. A faithful Jew and servant of God in the spiritual realm and a pragmatic atheist in the political realm.  

Like all political movement toward the left, this duality is merely the first step in a process that once initiated is as inevitable as Communism insists the defeat of Capitalism is. Hybrid political organizations like socialism give way, through (ironically) inevitable failure, to more and more extreme implementations of classical Marxism, which also gives way to pure totalitarianism, which is the crushingly static end state of all governments so idealistically framed at their beginnings.

How does the transformation occur? Through ruthless logic whose darker aspects are smuggled in through evolutions in creative expression, surrender of individual liberties in the name of improved security and equality, increasingly egalitarian behaviors, and finally repudiation of all institutions founded on obsolete appeals to virtue, taste, honor, and fairness. There is in the end, no idea left standing, only the people in charge, who own all the freedom that remains and wield it for the benefit of themselves alone.

It’s built in to the starting point. Atheism ultimately demolishes all limits on human behavior. Why all human civilizations have gods who limit human behavior, whether by moral or amoral means. The existence of gods always leaves open the possibility of rebelling against even the most powerful human being in charge. But if there are no gods, then the human being in charge is God because what he says goes. Except that without the god concept, no one is necessarily exempt from replacing whoever claims to be in charge. Any single person is himself a god in this model, able to do anything, with no external limits on his behavior, entitled to take whatever he wants from anyone else whenever he wants it. The only opposition to this new formulation of autonomy in a mechanical universe is fear. The atheist state is always ruled and kept in power for as long as it lasts by fear and only fear. No right or wrong. No fine sounding words that matter. No law that survives a leader’s death. Only fear matters, survives, remains a tool available to everyone who is skilled at using it.

Why the idealistic atheism of an Ayn Rand is laughable. A tradition of moral consensus dies PDQ as people realize there is no afterlife to be accountable to, afraid of, or thoughtful about. Capitalism is not a philosophy. It’s merely an efficient economic system. In the wrong hands — that is, human hands unconstrained by external limits that transcend old postulates of  “acceptable” behavior — capitalism rapidly degenerates to fascism and thence to the totalitarian rule of, you guessed it, fear imposed and maintained by the elites in charge. Until there is no room for more than one elite person at the tippy top of the pyramid, whose first priority is to exterminate all who have the same capacity to exploit fear as himself. Which differs in no way from the end result of ideally begun Marxist states devoted to the welfare of the masses instead of shareholders.

This is the poisoned apple so many Jews in the Democrat Party have eaten in company with their various useful allies in the ‘equitable’ transformation of the United States and the globalist one-party state being established in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. We are presently very far along the path to a totalitarian state in which the Constitution is meaningless scrap paper. 

Are Jews in Congress shocked, shocked to discover that the party they have done so much to empower and expand through the uses of lawfare, lying propaganda, and moral relativism so relative it’s descended to the level of Kamala word salads is now filled with Jew haters? The universities they have paid and bullied in equal measure to change American history into a racist lie — and learning into a species of expensive purchase programs for glossy degrees with no educational content — have steered in the direction they have been given and produced a generation of unconscious, amoral attention seekers who actually believe all the phony political arguments that have made Palestine into a fashionable cause. Who cares about Jews? Who knows anything about Jews? Holo-what? Only white people lies. Why somebody finally stood up and decapitated their sorry-ass babies on teevee. 

Why this is an important moment. A tipping point. On the left, perhaps only the Jews still have the ability to perceive the evil they have been complicit in promulgating. Because they know what guilt is. Guilt is their grandparents not forgiving themselves for having survived the camps when no one else in the family did. Guilt is highly educated — still — ringleaders in the destruction of the Constitution having to face the hungriest of all chickens coming home to roost. 

All of this could not have been accomplished without the brainy Jews in Congress, the media, the universities, the professions, and the thing a great many of us now know as the Deep State. Obama may have been driving the agenda, but he’s not smart enough to orchestrate all of this. He’s needed Jews running key aspects of the operations side every step of the way. 

I don’t know why or exactly when Jews came to hate Donald Trump. Because he interrupted the great progress toward global oligarchy weaponized by the Obama administration? Or because he just is, one more goyim silver spoon kid who got born on third base and thought he hit a triple?

Time for everyone to stop hating Trump and start loving America again. Without us, Israel has zero chance of surviving the Muslim wave building against them. The Democrats are talking about helping Israel while clandestinely subsidizing the effort to complete the Holocaust Hitler started in the 1930s. It’s imperative that Jews stop helping them do that. If this results in a political earthquake that sunders the Democrat Party past redemption or reconstruction, so be it. The forces in charge now are both godless and evil. That’s a quick ticket to the End Times if there ever was one.

I wrote this post to myself back in July 2020. I haven’t updated it, though I could. I only upgraded it from draft to post just now. It also contains a link to a second, earlier post, which is concerned more with the contribution of Jews to the San Andreas fault line in the Democrat (formerly ‘liberal’) world view. The destruction of faith in American history and culture has been facilitated by generations of writers, artists, and specialists in various institutions and disciplines that are supposed to reinforce basic human values without resorting to cynical destructiveness for its own sake. I called it To Whom It May Concern. I think it concerns a lot of people now.

SEE ALSO. Vintage Instapunk Zionism Posts

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UPDATE NOTE: Just a word of admonition here based on something that happened yesterday. If you read the text of the post to the end and then decided not to take the additional links provided, you have utterly failed to take the point of the piece. Your call, of course, as always.