Norman : As a modest suggestion, let me recommend Saint-Simon as an antidote to Marx and Marxist 'Socialist' tradition. Let me put it this way : As almost any Socialist ( or reformed Socialist ) can tell you, it is a source of unending pride to always have in the back of one's mind the rich heritage of the heroic age of Socialism, the time of Debs and Norman Thomas, or embattled labor unions fighting for elementary rights, of Left-influenced thinkers of many varieties who were pioneers in all kinds of social sciences, not counting literature and the arts. The traditional Right does not get this at all. Indeed, the Right can easily be looked at with utter contempt for its naivete, its anti-intellectualism ( far from universal but still very common ), and for complete lack of understanding of the inner motivation of idealists of the Left. I understand this all too clearly. And it does no-one the least good for leaders on the Right to forever demonize two words, "Liberal" and "Socialist." Doing so may be a sop to the naive Right, and get the troops worked up to attack the Left, but if one's goal is winning over the disaffected Left this is precisely the wrong strategy to use. It is insulting to everything good and noble and inspiring on the Left in its long history. This said, how do we separate people on the Left today from the Left as it has become ? For the current Left is anything but the Left of the heroic past. And for some people, like many Jews, it is dysfunctional for them to remain stalwarts of the Left-as-it-now-is. But do how you win these people over --not only Jews but also populations among intellectuals and professionals, many Black people and Hispanics, and, of course, Asians, when what they see on the Right is pretty much a bad joke ? Yes, there are all kinds of brainy conservatives. But think of the leadership of the Republican Party. I wouldn't call them anti-intellectual but, for the most part they have been and still are people for whom the world of ideas is a foreign country. Just think of such non-brains as George W Bush and Bob Dole. To put it a little differently, maybe I will end up voting for Santorum, given his current rise in the polls, and recently I was supportive of Michele Bachman, to use these examples. But in each case, while their hearts are in the right place, their command of ideas, their knowledge of relevant history, their understanding of social science, their level of cultural sophistication, is dismal. They are basically hopeless in these areas. You simply would not think of them in the same breath as the thinkers you listed in your essay, or among other people we might discuss, E O Wilson, father of sociobiology, say, or Wm Irwin Thompson, or John McWhorter, or Cokie Roberts, or Victor Davis Hansen, et al. Hence, these things considered, my recommendation about Henri Saint-Simon. He was a man of the Left, often credited with inventing Socialism itself ( even if the word was a coinage of Robert Owen ) , yet at the same time the creator of a system that today we would better think of as a hybrid, with a major role, even a dominant role, for high-order Capitalist enterprise. We can call his system Rational Capitalism or maybe Socio-Capitalism. Marx, of course, while paying tribute, nonetheless excoriated Saint-Simon. All the better. Saint-Simon is a Leftist alternative to the Marxist Left. Yet an alternative that allows one to be a good-faith Capitalist. Its just that various laissez faire values, especially the glories of amorality or even immorality, have absolutely no place in any Saint-Simonian system. Instead, the highest court of appeal is to science and to a re-thought and morally grounded new kind of religion. Saint-Simon, while obviously appealing to Christian and other Age-of-Enlightenment intellectuals of his era, also had special relevance to two Jews of prominence in his time, the famed economist Olinde Rodrigues, and Jakob Mayer Rothschild, of the Paris branch of the family. Each, at least for some years, were Saint-Simonians. Very willingly, as a matter of personal advantage, not only for reason of idealism. So, there is a Jewish connection of importance. That is, start over in redefining the Left, regard Marx as a detour, and return to Socialist roots. For those roots can be regarded as not only compatible with modern-day Western politics, but as providing a new beginning for those politics at the same time. Reaffirm one's political heritage but, in effect, do some serious editing of that heritage. Editing that welcomes ideas from conservative thinkers. In a way this is like the strategy of Christina Hoff Sommers, in seeking to return to the roots of feminism in order to discredit gender feminism and create a new kind of family-values-friendly feminism. Of course, it has to be understood that we need a new kind of politics for our era. We may vote moreso for conservatives nowadays than otherwise, but this approach not only allows for but valorizes seeking a new kind of politics, one that, with luck, can re-invent the political system in the future. My modest suggestion for today Billy ============================================== 1/8/2012 [email protected] writes:
The myth persists, and is constantly reinforced and has even hypnotized many American Liberals including Jews, that the “poor wretched Palestinians” are victims and that Israel owes its existence and military superiority to the United States which unlike the Europeans has never followed an "even-handed" policy in the Middle East. Obama, oblivious to the historical truth, endorsed this simplistic and misleading view in his Cairo speech. Most American Jews have little or no fluency in Hebrew and are remote from the achievements of modern Hebrew literature or the patriotic themes of deep and abiding affection expressed in popular Israeli song for the landscape and all that has been achieved by five generations of pioneer effort. Instead of a sense of close comradeship with Israelis that one might expect from American Jews with a distinct ethnic heritage that is shared abroad, there is primarily a lingering nostalgia for the Yiddish culture destroyed in Europe. In the 2008 campaign, the voices of Jewish conservative intellectuals, writers and politicians was shouted down by a chorus of reform rabbis, Hollywood “stars,” academics and establishment organizations who equated any criticism of Obama as a betrayal of what they call the great liberal tradition that has made them politically deaf, dumb and blind since FDR. Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, former White House Press secretary Arie Fleischer, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Joshua Muravchik, columnist and editor of the Weekly Standard Bill Kristol, political analyst and former campaign advisor to President Bill Clinton, Dick Morris, Editor of Frontpage Magazine, David Horowitz, National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg, author of “Liberal Fascism,” Senator Joe Lieberman, author and columnist Dennis Prager, writer Monah Charen, author of “Useful Idiots,” Dianna West, author of “The Death of the Grown-Up,” editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz, author Hillel Halkin who now resides in Israel, journalist and writer Bernie Goldberg, Ronald Radosh, author (Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996. New York: Free Press, 1996), film producer David Zucker and comedian Jackie Mason among many others warned anyone in the Jewish community not to ignore the most critical evidence that all of Obama’s close associates, especially Blacks, among radicals and Arabs or Muslims were overtly hostile to Israel. Among those prominent Jews who argued strongly for Barack Obama in 2008 were former Mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, the country’s most well known (or infamous) trial lawyer Alan Dershowitz, trendy media-star Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, Mortimer Zuckerman, owner and publisher of the New York Daily News and editor of U.S. News & World Report, and many others who have since removed the Obama stickers from their cars and are now pleading ignorance or betrayal. A majority of Jewish voters are either unconcerned with the increasingly low moral image of the Party’s politicians and candidates and party hacks (John Edwards, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Elliot Spitzer, Richard Blumenthal). Collectively these five represent the worst in American politics. The defection of the man many Jews were formerly so proud of, Senator Joe Lieberman (when he was nominated as the Vice-Presidential candidate of the party), has apparently not bothered them or caused them to rethink. Both Lieberman and former Democratic governor/senator of Georgia, Zell Miller_[1]_ (mip://00eef4c8/default.html#_ftn1) told the party faithful the same message when they supported George Bush and John McCain - the Democratic Party is a national party no longer! For many Jews, still in a time warp of the 1930s, the message is only slowly beginning to penetrate. Democrat politician Scott Stringer, the Manhattan Borough President, boasted to Laura Ingraham on the O'Reilly Factor (Aug. 25) that he, a Jew, was elected "overwhelmingly" by Jewish voters and that he fully endorses Mayor Bloomberg's position on the mosque at ground zero. Not being satisfied with that, he then threw out absurd charges of anti-Semitism against Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. This is the ultimate example of how degraded, disgusting and demented some Liberal Jewish politicians are and how far they will go to demean themselves and exploit their naive, supporters to keep the Jewish vote in the pocket of the Democratic Party and ignore the ninth commandment (Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness). It used to be said of scoundrels on the political Right that their last refuge was patriotism. For the Jewish scoundrels of the Liberal Left like Scott Stringer, Democratic Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee (comparing Republican opposition to Obamacare to the Nazis and Goebbels), and TIME editor Joe Klein, their last refuge is the Wolf's cry of 'anti-Semitism from the Right' as they contemplate the impending collapse of the Obama administration and its Jewish apologists Frantic attacks on Glen Beck portraying him as another Father Coughlin from the 1930s, a racist, anti-Semite or mentally ill are an example of unparalleled viciousness and blatant lies. The same has been the fate of Sarah Palin whose use of the term ‘blood libel’ for being attacked as if she bore any responsibility for the mass murder in Tucson, Arizona in January 2011 was illegitimate and reprehensible for Jewish opinion. To his credit, Alan Dershowitz, long identified as one of the most prominent spokesmen for Liberal causes favored by the Democrats spoke out in Sarah Palin’s defense and attacked the hard Left anti-Israeli propaganda of J-Street and the absurd remarks of Congressman Steve Cohen… ”I am one of the few liberal Democrats who, while criticizing her use of crosshairs in indentifying contested congressional seats, found nothing objectionable in her use of “blood libel” as a metaphor to describe what she regarded as a false accusation of complicity in the bloodletting in Tucson. I have heard little from the left regarding Congressman Cohen’s more extreme statements. The irony, of course, is that many of the same people on the left who criticized Palin for insensitively to Jewish suffering, have themselves contributed to Jewish suffering by unfairly demonizing the Jewish state and trivializing the increase in global anti-Semitism. They have also given a pass to those on the hard left who have used Holocaust and Nazi references in mischaracterizing Israeli self defense actions.”_[2]_ (mip://00eef4c8/default.html#_ftn2) More than twenty years ago, Lucy Dawidowicz, one of the most respected and prominent historians of the twentieth century and author of the aptly named “What is the Use of Jewish History?_[3]_ (mip://00eef4c8/default.html#_ftn3) ” lamented the lopsided and continued illogical and self destructive political support of a large majority of American Jews for the Democratic Party. She, of course, was not the first. The old joke that Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans is no longer funny. It is indicative of a malaise that has become a compulsion with the behavior of the Jewish electorate in 2008 in disregarding the blatant anti-Semitic views and rants of the Reverend Wright, apologetics over radical Islam, the institutionalization of quotas (passing as “Diversity” and “Affirmative Action”), and the radical Left politics of close Obama associates. She wrote this on explaining Jewish political behavior in the U.S.….”The answer, it seems to me, has to do with the powerful residual hold of the universalist mind set, a hold so encompassing that it has led to the alienation of the Jews as a political group from their rightful place in the American consensus…..No doubt most Jews who voted Democratic (in the 1984 election) believed they were voting for the age-old liberal agenda, for the extension of civil rights to those still deprived of them. But the current agenda of those who call themselves liberals is less a matter of rights and more a matter of social and economic redistribution…..Quotas threaten America with the fate of the Hapsburg Empire….Whether the democratic United States could survive institutional quotas we do not know, but it certain that, politically Jews, could not.” (pp. 264;267). The result so far of record high Jewish support for 2008 Democratic standard bearer Barack Hussein Obama (the subject of considerable pride and boasting by ultra-Liberal Jews and reform rabbis) is markedly worse racial tension, the most dismal economic situation in the country since the depression, abandonment of Israel to its fate (probably a good thing for Israelis to know once again they must dependent wholly upon themselves), worse relations with our most important European NATO allies and most likely a steep rise in anti-Semitism on the part of those who see the highly visible Jewish advisors who surround Obama (just as the Far Left saw the Jewish “neo-com advisors” to President Bush as responsible for the Iraq war). The ultimate degeneration of the American Jewish Liberal establishment is the unanimous support from their pulpits by non-Orthodox rabbis supporting the public union members who took over the State Capitol Building in Madison, Wisconsin in February-March 2011. While preaching the same tired old homilies about social justice for the poor and compassion for the elderly as if this were 1933, they gave their blessing to turning over our democratic institutions to those militant union members with their clenched fists who would make the United States into a Banana Republic and use death threats, fleeing legislators seeking sanctuary in another state, intimidation and outright violence followed by judicial maneuvering to prevent the will of the people from being executed by elections and parliamentary procedures. (See chapter 24). It bears repeating the final paragraph in Lucy Davidowicz’s book What is the Use of Jewish History?…..”If Jews need to know their own interests as well as the interests of others, they also need to know the art of politics as well as the books of the Torah. They need, in short, to live in this world, not in the world of the politically utopian or the religiously messianic.” Jewish Ideas Daily January 5, 2012 The State of Christianity By _Elliot Jager_ (http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/authors/detail/elliot-jager) ____________________________________ _[1]_ (mip://00eef4c8/default.html#_ftnref1) Miller, Zell A National Party No More, The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat Stround and Hall. 2003 _[2]_ (mip://00eef4c8/default.html#_ftnref2) FrontPage Mag website, Jan. 24, 2011. _[3]_ (mip://00eef4c8/default.html#_ftnref3) What is the Use of Jewish History? Schocken. 1994. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: _http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism_ (http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism) Radical Centrism website and blog: _http://RadicalCentrism.org_ (http://radicalcentrism.org/) -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
