Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news? Sorry, there is only bad news.
Anti-Semitism drives Hamas to kill Jews. Anti-liberalism drives the response.
The fact that anti-Semitism is not at the root of the response is really bad news. The left hates Israel and the Jews because we disprove their notion that success is only possible through oppression. There are only 16 million Jews in the world. Do you really believe all this fuss about Israel is just about Jews? There are a few billion other people in the world who have a stake in the notion that success is a real possibility. Do they want to live in a world without winners? Do you think that if Israel ceases to exist that anybody living in the Middle East will be “free”?
We called this column Unintended Consequences because we knew that we would spend a lot of our time looking at situations where policies would be pursued with the best intentions and the worst outcomes. Those bad outcomes are almost always predictable if one steps back and examines the incentive structures embedded in the policies.
We are going to propose a very simple test for any policy and use a popular Illiberal concept - sustainability. The question is this. If everybody does what your policy encourages them to do, would the community be able to sustain itself?
The foundation for anti-liberalism is the explicit rejection of the Enlightenment notions of individual value and responsibility. It is not an exaggeration to refer to anti-liberal points of view as generally Marxist-influenced. If you think that assessment is off-base, I challenge you to look at the course catalogue for the top 50 Universities in this country and tell me how many times you see the phrases “intersectional”, “critical theory” or “colonial”. Natural Rights are viewed as a construct that was put in place by oppressors and colonialists who did not actually respect those rights. So, the hypocrisy of those oppressors renders their concepts null and void. Meritocracy and objectivity are also rejected on the grounds that they serve the oppressors more than the oppressed. The pie only gets cut up as it is. If one group gets more than others, they must be villains. Nobody deserves to win. Unfortunately, Jews and Israel are in the anti-liberal crosshairs because they have been winning for a long time.
When the anti-liberals come calling, they will be coming after the entire narrative of the past: The definition of a family, the relationship between parents and children, the definition of a man or woman, the legitimacy of the benefits of liberty, free expression, and capitalism. Out with individual agency, in with collective responsibility. Out with individual merit, in with collective benefit. Out with nuance, in with oversimplified structural explanations. There are larger forces at work, so don’t blame the criminal for what he has done.
Progressives have been at the forefront of anti-liberalism for decades. Each perceived injustice has a solution that is inconsistent with liberalism and is totally unsustainable. Here are a few selections from their repertoire:
The solution to discrimination and segregation is more discrimination and segregation.
The solution to public schools failing in the same communities where charter schools succeed is fewer charter schools.
The way to show that Black Lives Matter is to have fewer police in black neighborhoods so that more blacks can be robbed, injured and killed.
The solution to non-US citizens problems is to invite them here and diminish the liberty and property of US citizens in the process.
The solution to the problem that people do not trust an untested vaccine is to prevent people from talking about their concerns, and to suppress scientific inquiry.
The solution to our nation’s having an acute obesity problem is to celebrate obesity as a lifestyle choice.
The solution to the problem that there is a virus afoot that is extremely dangerous to old and obese people is to force young and fit people into lockdown.
The solution to people not being able to afford items at their local CVS is to allow them to steal them.
The solution to some people struggling with student loan debt is to take money from people who didn’t borrow money for their education, whether they are richer or poorer than those in debt.
The solution for students being uncomfortable hearing opposing views is to prevent those views from being uttered.
The solution for Palestinians whose right to self-determination has been taken away by their rulers is to give those rulers more territory to dominate.
All these solutions share three traits: First, they reduce the Natural Rights of one group at the expense of another. Second, they are indiscriminate, eliminating nuance and personal responsibility. Third, they undermine our ability to sustain a civilized society.
These relatively mundane examples are related to our present circumstance in that once people abandon objective reality, personal responsibility, and individual rights, everything is on the table. Everything.
You will see a lot of Jews who are by nature progressive default to anti-Semitism as the explanation for the shocking support for Hamas. Those liberals will be missing the point. Jews have no part, no blame whatsoever for Hamas’ actions, but liberals have played a significant part in spreading the perspective from which it makes sense for so many of the West’s young adults to view Jews as systematically oppressive and thus not deserving of sympathy.
We are all so angry and bewildered. I am finding it so difficult to find productive uses for my negative energy. Here are a few small ideas:
First, we need to work with the Federal government to create transparency about who is funding the protestors, the universities, and the terrorists. Students for Justice in Palestine are not the glee club. They didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. And where the heck did all these Palestinian flags come from?
Second, we need the government to create rules so that we know precisely how the social media companies are influencing what we can see in our feeds and searches. Right now, the worst people on earth are using social media to win the war for hearts and minds, and inexplicably it appears that the US-based megacompanies are helping them do so by suppressing certain facts and points of view.
Third, we need to educate our fellow citizens about the nature of the movement that they have enabled and supported, the one that brought us to this moment. These are truly unintended consequences from the perspective of the enablers, but they need to know that they ARE the enablers.
My favorite economic concept is sunk cost. When examining a situation, do what is best going forward, and ignore any previously expended capital. That money is gone. I know that is a white, colonial, imperialist notion, but it’s a pretty awesome one (insert smiley face emoji). Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel recently said that complaining about a referee’s mistake on a prior play is like “getting mad at thunder.” The obsession with past transgressions is emotional, but illogical, and counterproductive. The progressive left is like a poker player on tilt, or an investor hanging onto a stock as it goes down, hoping it will go back up so they can sell it. The left are twisted into knots obsessing over the perceived transgressions of the past, even if the processes and people that gave rise to those transgressions are long gone. They are mad at thunder.
What we should NOT be doing in our response to recent events:
A. Trying to suppress speech. Free and open speech does not change hearts and minds. There is no marketplace of ideas. Free speech is like a continuous election, a poll in real time, that tells us where we stand. Would you rather not know the extent to which people have been infected with terrible ideas?
B. Playing whack-a-mole with various bad actors, be they academic, media or corporate. While there are nuances that differentiate legitimate efforts to hold people responsible for bad behavior, we do not want to fall into something that looks like the cancel culture that is part of the cancer in our society.
C. Talking about how other people’s speech makes us feel. The rot has accelerated because of the shift from objective to subjective tests. There is a very important difference between “I am being threatened” and “I don’t feel safe”. We should not fall into that trap.
D. Criticizing Universities for the quality of their response to the murders and kidnappings. Instead, we should be criticizing them for being terribly ineffective at teaching students to think critically. If they won’t improve, we should stop funding and start taxing.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition of liberal, adjective: 1. Willing to accept or respect behavior or opinions different from one’s own…2. Relating to or denoting a…philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise.
Nobody is trying to illegally cross the borders of Iran, Iraq, North Korea and China to make their lives there. We can and should be proud of being bound together by “a philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise.”
In December of 2022 we published a piece called The Impasse that detailed the breakdown in our fundamental bargain – that we are all bought into a system based on liberalism and Natural Rights. I suggested that it was time for a new Constitutional Convention, a new conversation about what values should drive our laws and policies. In the US, our 250-year consensus on values has dissolved. The reason leftists can celebrate the murder of a group of people is because they see the GROUP, not the PEOPLE.
The Western outpouring of support for Hamas in the aftermath of an unprecedented slaughter is the canary in the coal mine for our civilization. Let’s not let that canary, and those Israelis, die in vain.
P.S. I wanted to share a few examples of classes I found in a 5-minute perusal of the Cornell website. Lovely stuff!
English 1160: Intersections: race, writing and power. How does race inform the way we understand the world around us? How do writers explore their experiences of race and colonialism to challenge conventional notions of nation, citizenship, knowledge, and self? In this class, we engage materials that complicate our ideas of race in order to imagine new forms of identity, social life, and political possibility.
Biology & Society 4351: Post-colonial Science: Scientific knowledge and practice enacted colonial divisions and served postcolonial struggles. How then might we understand the work of science in the struggles that shape our world today? This class considers science outside Europe and the United States. We take the postcolonial as a dynamic space reworking the dichotomies that structured colonial power and knowledge, including western-indigenous, modern- traditional, global-local, centers-peripheries, and developed-underdeveloped. In the process, students confront the complex histories embodied in institutions, identities, bodies, and landscapes. Through controversies over the environment, medicine, and indigenous knowledge, we investigate the processes through which claims to the universal emerge and the effects of such claims. We attend to the collaborations and alliances through which substance is articulated, and the world in all its multiplicities is (sic) apprehended.
Government 2545: Zionism and Its Discontents:
This course examines the history of Zionism as an idea and as a political movement in all its various forms, currents, and transformations from its origins in mid-nineteenth century Europe to the present. Despite its success in establishing the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism, which also sought to "normalize" Jewish collective life and provide a safe haven from persecution for the Jews, has encountered multiple challenges from within and without. Some continue to think of it as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people while others regard it is a Western inspired colonial project. Originating largely as a radical rejection of both traditional Jewish religious life and the Jews' diaspora in favor of modern nationalism, since 1967 Zionism has witnessed religious-nationalist fervor and a Jewish diaspora increasingly interested in or disinterested with the state of Israel. The course also considers the phenomenon of post-Zionism in Israeli historiography as well as Zionism's difficulty in coming to terms with the idea and reality that two peoples rather than one live in the land west of the Jordan. We'll also consider the Palestinian response framed as "Zionism from the standpoint of its victims."