An ongoing review of politics and culture

Whose Jews?

The decision by the Court of Appeal in this case was wrong on its face. The student would face no obstacle to admission if her mother had undergone an orthodox rather than a progressive conversion. That’s not discrimination based on ethnicity but on religious practice. The chief executive of Liberal Judaism, Rabbi Danny Rich, admits as much in the article when he says the JFS is “selecting applicants on the basis of religious politics.” That’s not an ethnic criterion. The only question is whether a religious school is allowed to favor one religious denomination over another, which seems pretty clearly to be the case.

Apart from this, however, the British courts are imposing a Christian view of religion on Jews. Christianity is a universal religion that takes no account of ethnicity. In Judaism, however, religion is inseparable from a particular “chosen people,” ethnic Jews. By forcing British Jews to accept a distinction between religion and ethnicity, Britain is unabashedly Christianizing them.

An American court probably would not impose a similar decision. (The fact that this is a state school, let alone that there is even a Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, indicates that Britain lacks the same tradition opposing religious establishments — though of course the Chief Rabbi is no longer exactly the Archpriest of the Jews in England.) The U.S. Constitution requires more deference to religious beliefs and institutions. But an interesting question is to what extent the American government can regulate religious institutions that, directly or indirectly, receive public funds. Regulations like this one, which purports only to require a state-funded institution to follow a secular law, may implicate religious belief — and that might sometimes make public support for religious institutions self-defeating.

An update…

The Banality of "The Banality of 'The Banality of Evil'"

Even more annoying than the people who yammer on about “the banality of evil” are those who obsessively denounce the idea. “Oh, the banality of ‘the banality of evil,'" someone will say, exasperated that he alone holds people accountable while everyone else denies our capacity for moral choice and excuses mass atrocity. However banal the original insight might be, the comeback — that people make choices for which they are morally responsible — far outdoes it. Yet Ron Rosenbaum has been building this case for at least ten years. In 1999, he wrote that the banality cliché is “a sophisticated form of denial … Not denying the crime but denying the full criminality of the perpetrators.” Last week he repeated the charge. But one would think that a decade of cogitation would yield a more compelling argument than this:

Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn’t know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.

Read more…

WASP Guilt

In this silly review of George Gilder’s The Israel Test, Scott McConnell takes Gilder’s explicit arguments to be symptomatic of deeper psychological scars. He suggests that an embarrassing moment during Gilder’s adolescence explains why Gilder would be politically supportive of Israel. Indeed, for McConnell it explains why any WASP would be pro-Israel:

While trying to impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement. It would not be surprising if a similar process helped to shape George W. Bush’s mentality.

What Gilder had said to the girl was a reply to her question about how he liked studying at Exeter. “Echoing sentiments I had heard both at home and at school,” Gilder recalls, “I responded, ‘Exeter’s fine, except that there are too many New York Jews.’” Gilder briefly describes how his embarrassment taught him something about resentment and social grace:

Rather than recognizing my shortcomings and inferiority and resolving to overcome them in the future, I had blamed the people who had outperformed me. I had let envy rush in and usurp understanding and admiration. I had succumbed to the lamest of all the world’s excuses for failure — blame the victor. I would pay by losing the respect of this woman I then cared about more than any other.

Instead of leaving it at this commonplace but worthwhile moral lesson, McConnell thinks the “New York Jew” episode overshadows and “animates” the entire argument of Gilder’s book. According to Gilder, it spurred him to be more open-minded. But McConnell thinks the “incident” filled Gilder with such overwhelming guilt that he became a self-hating shill for the Israel lobby. And that some similar social faux pas probably explains the Bush Doctrine and the invasion of Iraq. Who is it, again, who regards these events as “essentially trivial”?

This seems deeply weird, but it’s not hard to play armchair psychologist with McConnell, too. It is obvious to him why Jews would like Israel, but WASPs? What on earth could possibly lead a self-respecting white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to admire a Jewish state when, in McConnell’s view, ethnonationalism would command otherwise? So McConnell invents a sort of false consciousness, a “WASP guilt,” to explain it. It’s a mean-spirited slur, of course. Critics of Israel have long alleged that Israel’s supporters seek to silence debate by leveling overblown accusations of anti-Semitism at them, but McConnell now insists that non-Jewish supporters of Israel must be self-hating Uncle Toms. “This sequence might be amusing if the real-life consequences were less sinister,” as McConnell puts it. But apart from that, one wonders what seething resentments lurk behind McConnell’s strange worldview. What traumatic event in the boyhood days of Scott McConnell can explain it?

The Nobel "Peace" Prize

So the Nobel Committee doesn’t like George W. Bush. We get it. In 2002 they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter, saying the award “should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken … it’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.” Now they give it to President Obama for “creat[ing] a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.” It’s pretty clear the committee thinks of the Nobel Prize as a tool they use to conduct their own diplomacy, rather than an award for those who have actually achieved some, you know, peace.

In 2007, you might remember, the committee said “By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.” Now they say:

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

It seems the Nobel Committee really thinks the award for promoting world peace should go to itself.

American Conservatism and the Beaconsfield Position

In reviewing Sam Tanenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism, Jackson Lears repeats Tanenhaus’s odd contention that “One puzzling feature of American politics is that the people who call themselves conservatives seldom want to conserve anything.” In the original essay that became the book, Tanenhaus insisted that “movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy — ‘statist’ social programs; ‘socialized medicine’; ‘big labor’; ‘activist’ Supreme Court justices, the ‘media elite’; ‘tenured radicals’ on university faculties; ‘experts’ in and out of government.” While it’s clear what the right has opposed, wrote Tanenhaus, conservatives remain “haunted” by the question of “what exactly has it been for?”

This is all very silly. Each item on Tanenhaus’s list of things conservatives oppose could be restated as something conservatives support: So the conservative movement stands for liberty against statism, free markets and choice against socialized medicine, freedom of contract and the right to work against big labor, originalism and constitutionalism against activist Supreme Court justices, fairness and patriotism against the media elite, and the Great Books and traditional core curricula against tenured radicals. It’s not a particularly puzzling feature of American politics that the conservative movement wants to destroy the things Tanenhaus lists — it’s precisely because conservatives want to protect something else.

But Tanenhaus thinks this isn’t proper conservatism. He believes conservatism reached “its peak period as an intellectual force” in 1965-1975, after which conservatives lost their minds. Tanenhaus lauds Irving Kristol’s Public Interest, for example, for publishing “rigorously nonpartisan policy analysis” during that time, but then accuses Kristol of going delusional in 1975 when he identified a “new class” of liberal social engineers who wanted to ideologize American life. By 1995, Tanenhaus writes, Kristol “spelled out the terms of revanchist strategy” by writing “American conservatism is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Though, inevitably, most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win votes. This movement is issue oriented. It will happily meld with the Republican party if the party is ‘right’ on the issues; if not, it will walk away.”

Tanenhaus thinks this is crazy, but it’s no different from how any other political faction operates. The party might decide not to court the movement’s votes, if it wants to, but the movement — precisely because it believes its agenda is best for the country — will try to urge the party in its direction. Tanenhaus makes a straightforward description of democratic politics seem like a nefarious conspiracy.

Indeed, any argument that traces the fall of modern conservatism to the election of Ronald Reagan is self-evidently ridiculous. Tanenhaus’s view of conservatives as serving “the vital function of clarifying our shared connection to the past and of giving articulate voice to the normative beliefs Americans have striven to maintain even in the worst of times” seems to relegate them to writing literary essays in National Review but not actually affecting public policy. That’s because Tanenhaus doesn’t think their policy prescriptions are worth implementing. He seems to think it’s self-evidently a bad idea — and anti-Burkean! — to want to reduce the size of government or regulatory burdens or taxes or to actually see those traditional normative beliefs reflected in law, but that only means he disagrees with conservatives, not that he’s diagnosed some kind of pervasive intellectual rot.

As an alternative to modern American conservatism, Tanenhaus offers “the Beaconsfield position” of Benjamin Disraeli. At the end of his essay, Tanenhaus quotes Disraeli’s Vindication of the English Constitution :

“Political institutions, founded on abstract rights and principles, are mere nullities,” Disraeli wrote. Europe, too, had its pre-democratic places where “a comparative civilisation had been obtained under the influence of a despotic priesthood. And these are the regions to which it is thought fit suddenly to apply the institutions which regulate the civil life of Yorkshire and of Kent!”

It’s not clear whether Tanenhaus means to endorse Disraeli’s view that other Europeans, “untinctured, even in the slightest degree, by letters, and steeped in the grossest superstition,” are incapable of democratic self-government. “We may celebrate the constitutional coronation of a Bavarian in the Acropolis and surround his free throne with the bayonets of his countrymen,” Disraeli writes immediately after the passage Tanenhaus quotes. “We may hire Poles and Irishmen as a body-guard for the sovereign, who mimics the venerable ceremonies of Westminster as she opens the parliaments of Madrid or Lisbon; but invincible nature will reject the unnatural novelties, and history, instead of celebrating the victory of freedom, will only record the triumph of folly.”

Yet putting aside Tanenhaus’s position on the prospect of achieving democracy in Spain, the simple fact is that the American Constitution, unlike the British, founded America’s political institutions precisely upon those “abstract rights and principles” Disraeli dismissed. In his Vindication, Disraeli denounced a new “political sect” that aimed “to submit the institutions of the country to the test of Utility and to form a new constitution on the abstract principles of theoretic science.” By contrast, in Federalist 9 Alexander Hamilton wrote that the American Constitution owes its form to “great improvement” in “the science of politics,” which led to an understanding of “the efficacy of various principles” such as the separation of powers and a system of checks and balances. “These are wholly new discoveries,” wrote Hamilton of these abstract principles, “or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times.”

The United States and Britain have two different constitutional and political traditions. For all Tanenhaus’s discussion of Burke, he doesn’t seem to understand that precisely because Burke rejected universalist ideology, he would not have the same political prescription for America as for Britain, but would have paid attention to the distinctive features of each society. Britain has an evolutionary, unwritten constitutional tradition while America was born of revolution and adopted a Constitution based upon abstract principles in order to protect abstract rights. It’s no surprise American conservatives are not Beaconsfieldians; they are conserving different things. Tanenhaus’s idea that the conservatism of nineteenth-century England is the ideal form of conservatism for twenty-first-century America and everywhere else is about as far removed from “Burkean conservatism” as one can get.

Tenther Madness

I recently wrote this piece in part because conservatives have been embarrassing themselves by arguing that President Obama’s “czars” offend the constitutional separation of powers. For at least three decades, conservatives have argued that the Constitution requires a unitary executive and now, all of a sudden, they discover that the Constitution requires the president’s advisers to submit to congressional oversight. That’s not a principled position.

There is a temptation, when you lose at the polls, to use the courts for political gain. Thus, we recently learned from Judge Andrew Napolitano that health-care reform is unconstitutional, even though the Constitution authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, because “one goes to a physician not to engage in commercial activity … but to improve one’s health.” As it happens, I visited my physician last week for a regular check-up. When he presented me with a bill, I explained that I had visited his office only to improve my health, not to engage in commercial activity. He wasn’t impressed. Maybe next time I’ll bring a copy of Judge Napolitano’s op-ed.

(By the way, the subheading of Napolitano’s piece, “Why hasn’t the Commerce Clause been read to allow interstate insurance sales?,” makes no sense at all. The Commerce Clause authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce but it doesn’t require Congress to regulate in any particular way. Everyone reads the Commerce Clause “to allow interstate insurance sales.”)

Added to this, the so-called Tenthers think all manner of new legislation is unconstitutional. There is no question that the courts have weakened the constitutional restraints on Congress, and it’s useful to point that out in order to guard against further attrition. But come on. The courts are not going to declare health-care reform unconstitutional. It’s just a fanciful notion that consigns its adherents to the political fringe. Federal regulation is with us, for better or worse, and conservatives should try to make it better rather than worse.

Conservatives have long argued that it’s unhealthy to use courts to decide policy questions because it removes contentious political issues from the realm of democratic deliberation. What’s more, when a political movement focuses its efforts on declaring some policy unconstitutional, it removes itself from the debate over how to craft that policy. Instead of revisiting Supreme Court cases from the 1940s, the Tenthers might want to read up on health policy.

For the same reason, conservatives should be defending the president’s use of informal policy czars. Creating a White House policy apparatus doesn’t undo the growth of the administrative state since the New Deal — that’s not going to happen anytime soon — but it’s a significant counter-measure: it helps shift the balance of power towards unitary executive control of the bureaucracy. And that’s a change we can believe in.