Jewish identity politics

Steve Sailer:

Over the years, I've taught myself to be fairly insightful at thinking like gays, lesbians, women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and the other usual identity politics categories. But the most important category for thinking about intellectual life and ideology, and one of the most important for thinking about politics, culture, and foreign policy, is by far the most complicated identity category to comprehend well: Jews.

One reason is because in 21st Century America, you aren't supposed to think about Jews as an identity politics category. You really aren't supposed to think about them at all. So, you don't get much help from the media in understanding this hugely influential group.

Moreover, the complexity of Jewish identity politics is quite boggling. Where does this contradictoriness stem from? The difficulty and relative uniqueness of the Jewish historical predicament combine explosively with the Jewish cultural emphases on intellectual creativity, argumentation as test of manhood, and the supremacy of ideas over practicality to create a vast outpouring of ideologies, all of them fundamentally tied to profound Jewish concerns, but many of them at odds with each other.

The complexity of Jewish identity politics helps create easy rhetorical trump cards for persuading people that there is nothing to think about. Just move along, folks, nothing here to think about. A classic is: "How can Jews be disproportionately both capitalists and Communists? Huh? Huh?" But, of course, historically they have been both, and the interaction between the two has been of world historical importance.

Going back to the 1840s, many of the world's intellectual concerns, and going back to 1917 many of the world's political conflagrations, have been driven by the often contradictory needs and obsessions of Jews.

As Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine pointed out in The Jewish Century, Marxism appealed to educated secular Jews because it promised to dissolve the Jewish problem. Jews were resented for being so good at capitalism, so intellectuals Jews were excited that Communism would destroy capitalism. They were discriminated against because of religion, so Communism would abolish religion. They were discriminated against because they had no national homeland, so Communism would eliminate nationalism. What's not to like? And, indeed, as promised, secular educated Jews flourished under Soviet Communism for the first two or three decades.

Freudianism made little sense outside of the framework of bourgeois Jewish Mitteleuropean family structures (and not much there either), but Jewish intellectuals needed Jewish intellectual heroes, so Freud's silly waste of time was inflicted on the world for a half century.

Boasian cultural anthropology, the Frankfurt School, and numerous other intellectual cults are most profitably analyzed in Jewish terms.

Even a largely beneficial ideological phenomenon like Milton Friedman's Chicago School of free market economics is heavily based on the sensible post-Marxian realization that if Jews are good at capitalism, well, then capitalism is good for the Jews.

Neoconservatism began in the 1960s as a rebellion by Catholic and Jewish social scientists who saw that liberalism was unleashing black crime and rioting on white urban ethnics like themselves and their relatives. Over time, though, Catholic concerns got marginalized, and the hard work of crunching data got dropped. Neoconservatism turned into a front for pushing conservative Jewish foreign policy concerns. Francis Fukuyama finally figured out that he was being used to promote somebody else's agenda, but poor Victor Davis Hanson will likely never quite get it.

The problem is that Jewish intellectuals, for all their energy and ideological creativity, tend to be poor pragmatic decisionmakers about what actually is good for the Jews. They tend to get emotionally attached to the new ideas they've made up, push them too far, and don't understand how their ideas sound to others outside their hothouse.

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