Down the Rabbit Hole with Jared Kushner and take your 'Required Reading'

 It’s really dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!

 

If 2016 is any yardstick, up to 30 percent of American Jews will vote for Donald Trump in 2020.

Some percentage of these will be ultra-Orthodox non-Zionists (the Williamsburg, Kiryas Joel, and Borough Bark crowd). Their politics is patronage-based. They vote as a bloc following the guidelines of shtadlanim, the medieval-like brokers who handle relations with the non-Jewish outside.

Support will also come from the modern (i.e., less insular) Orthodox (YU and OU worlds) who tend to be socially and politically conservative and take their cues from Israeli rightist influencers.

I am writing here with a third and smallest group in mind. These include family and my former Zionist-leaning comrades who are convinced that by backing Trump they are putting the Jewish state’s wellbeing foremost.

Many profess to approve of his policies across the board; several support him grudgingly and concede he is an odious fellow. All reasonably fret that any Biden-Harris administration would be oriented toward J-Street or worse.

That Trump is pro-Israel is undeniable. Elsewhere I have argued that Trump’s pro-Israelism does not override the mortal threat he poses to the US political system’s stability. That his impulsive, neo-isolationist, and huckster approach to foreign policy puts Israel in peril over the long-term. I will say more about his latest pro-Israel accomplishment below.

For the moment, I appeal to my pro-Israel friends who remain enamored with Donald Trump or feel they're obliged to support him, to read Bob Woodward’s Rage. 

The book is surprisingly fair-minded. 

Woodward, for instance, does not gloss over China’s initial stonewalling over Wuhan. Trump’s right decisions are credited and contextualized. The veteran journalist and president watcher received remarkable White House access for his latest book. 

What makes Rage required reading are a couple of priceless chapters devoted to the inscrutable not-yet-forty-year-old Jared Kushner, senior advisor and son-in-law to the United States president.

If you can read these chapters and stick with Trump you have fallen down your own rabbit hole.

Kushner, according to Woodward, says that if you want to understand how things in Trump World work there is a required reading list. He considers his wife's father to be brilliant and reveals how he enthralls his core supporters.

The roster begins with Peggy Noonan’s March 10, 2018, Wall Street Journal column, “Over Trump, We’re Divided as Ever;” Alice in Wonderland, the 1865 novel by Lewis Carroll; The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, by Chris Whipple, and concludes with Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter by Scott Adams.

I always found Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, insightful and levelheaded, and went back to the column Kushner cited.

Writing three years into the Trump presidency, Noonan wondered why some centrists and moderates refused to get on the Trump bandwagon. She was also curious about whether the president’s working-class supporters were satisfied with his performance thus far.

To gauge the latter, she spoke with her Trump-supporting working-class white Catholic sister and uncle. They reported being contented. She thinks she knows why. For too long, the wealthiest and most powerful Americans had not taken their fiduciary responsibilities seriously toward people like them. They had not even faked “a prudent interest” in the travails of working people.

Noonan concedes that in office, Trump established a “deregulatory spirit that is fair and helpful.” He placed sober conservatives on the federal courts. At the time of her writing, the economy was humming, so no complaints there.

Yet moderates and centrists who mostly agreed with his policies had not warmed to Trump. They felt disquiet about “the worrying nature of Mr. Trump himself. You look at his White House and see what appears to be epic instability, mismanagement and confusion. You see his resentments and unpredictability,” Noonan wrote in 2018.

At first, the moderates and centrists thought maybe they were blind to his genius. Yet the chaos he was creating was not strategic in pursuit of any policy ends, “its purposeless disorder for the fun of it.”

She concluded that Trump is “unhinged” and characterizes his administration as a “screwball tragedy.”

So why would Kushner direct us to Noonan? It is an odd way to laud your father-in-law, Woodward comments.

Probably because Kushner would have wanted us to focus on the following lines from the column: “On some level this is working. And on some level this is crazy. He’s crazy…and it’s kind of working.”

However, Noonan does not leave it there.

“Then you realize… Crazy doesn’t go the distance. Crazy is an unstable element that, when let loose in an unstable environment, explodes.”

She wraps up on a prescient note. “Sooner or later something bad will happen…if the president is the way he is on a good day, what will he be like on a bad day. It all feels so dangerous. Centrist and moderate supporters are seeing what Trump supporters cannot, will not see.”

So, I guess what comforts Kushner – and this is lesson number 1 – is that Trump supporters are in a state of almost metaphysical blindness to his character.

Next on Kushner's list is Alice in Wonderland purportedly a Disney-style madcap children’s adventure story about a girl who sees a white rabbit dressed in a suit and bowtie sporting a pocket watch and, out of curiosity, chases him down a rabbit hole into an alternative reality where she encounters all sorts of anthropomorphic animals.

Never having read the fable as a child, I find the fantasy dark and nasty. The animals Alice encounters are mean and bickering. What happens in Wonderland – or in Kushner’s alternate reality, the White House – is nonsensical. 

Rules are arbitrary. Everyone speaks in non-sequiturs. 

“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked. “There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

Intimidation pervades the environment. The Queen’s constant refrain is, “I’ll have you executed.” 

The Cheshire Cat warns Alice that everyone she will meet will be mad. Indeed, the animals Alice encounters urge her to “come on” but there is no destination:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” 

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. 

“I don’t much care where —” said Alice. 

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. 

“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

Alice knows a lot about history but not what happened or when. Like Donald Trump on his visit to Pearl Harbor.

Lesson number 2: Kushner seems to be saying that Trump has calculatedly created his own topsy turvy, Wonderland.

Next on the Kushner list is Gatekeepers for which Whipple interviewed 17 former White House chiefs of staff to pinpoint what it takes to ensure a West Wing that operates effectively and efficiently.

By recommending this book, Kushner’s counterintuitive lesson number 3 – precisely the opposite of Whipple’s – is that disarray and conflict are excellent; smarty-pants chiefs of staff like Reince Priebus and John Kelly who try to manage the president are tossers.

That brings us to the last item on Kushner’s syllabus, Win Bigly, by Adams. Kushner here seems to endorse Adams’ analysis (and approval) of Donald Trump’s persuasion techniques. Adams is in Kushner’s good graces because the Dilbert cartoon creator predicted Trump would be elected. 

To muddy the waters, Adams unconvincingly asserts that he disapproves of Trump’s policies even if he holds Trump to be the “most persuasive human I have ever observed.”

For Adams, Trump is persuasive because of his performances. People are fundamentally irrational. They stay mentally afloat thanks to cognitive dissonance, which resolves inconsistencies in their thinking. And Trump reaches voters on an irrational level. He tells them "many people are saying” to introduce some new weird idea. He speaks with childlike simplicity “big, beautiful wall”, which, according to Adams, people can easily relate to and easily remember. 

Trump’s muddled syntax is in fact, strategic ambiguity. Trump dazzles his voters with simple solutions to complex problems. Kushner’s lesson number 4, I intuit, from Adams is: Facts are only crucial to the extent that they can be used to manipulate an audience emotionally.

Put the four readings together, and this is what you get: (1) Kushner is gratified with Trump’s Svengali-like hold on his followers. (2) He thinks the administration needs no overarching mission. That being organized gets in the way of (3) a journey that has no destination. Furthermore, (4) facts are useful only insofar as they serve manipulative ends.

My friends in the states who share Kushner’s boundless confidence in Trump, his embrace of the president’s fluidity, his thrill at watching the master bait his enemies, pushing them into irrational gutter behavior will stick with Kushner’s cynical vacuous father-in-law no matter what on November 3.

But I would like to hope that others will come to their senses and reconsider backing Trump notwithstanding the good that Trump has done for Israel

Recognizing the good Hakarat HaTov people have done and showing gratitude is a Jewish tradition.

By crucially facilitating peaceful relations between Israel and Gulf Arab states, Donald Trump and his team have done the Jewish state an immeasurable good.

Yet keep the context in mind.

After processing nearly four years of Trump administration performance, the Gulf Arabs and Egypt came to understand that they cannot rely on the US to side with them militarily against Persian Iran.

The Arabs saw how under George W. Bush, the US overextended itself fighting Islamist forces and did not choose or conduct its battles wisely. They observed Barack Obama’s inclination to disengage militarily from the Middle East with his 2012 decision not to act militarily against the Assad regime after its use of sarin gas.

Trump stumbled and bumbled further along this path in his unscripted call with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Islamist leader of Turkey during which he betrayed America's fighting Kurdish allies. And there was his neo-isolationist declaration that America would no longer “police the world” and was “getting out” of the “blood-stained sand” of the Middle East.

The message the president was sending was that he might act militarily only if he perceives American lives in direct danger. 

None of this detracts from our gratitude.

Israelis are thankful for Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. For moving the US Embassy to our capital. And to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for announcing that the US does not consider Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank or Judea and Samaria inconsistent with international law.

We are grateful that the US has never voted against Israel (or abstained in favor of our enemies) at the UN in the past four years. That Trump is willing to take on Amnesty International and other groups, that wrap themselves in the halo of human rights, for their bias against Israel.

Thanks, too, to the Trump administration for not publicly criticizing IDF operations.

Unfortunately, because Trump is widely disrespected all these appreciated policies are tarnished, tainted, devalued.

Sometimes the president’s motives and timing are painfully transparent. As when on January 29, 2020, while the US Senate was deciding whether he was guilty of the House impeachment articles, Trump announced his long-touted Israeli-Palestinian Deal of the Century. 

It guaranteed the establishment of a Palestinian state, yet the PLO (in Ramallah) and Hamas (in Gaza) rejected the imposed deal. Maybe they figured Trump, Jared Kushner and the team of Jason Greenblatt, David Friedman, and Avi Berkowitz did not have Palestinian interests at heart. 

In August 2020, Kushner also brokered an agreement between the UAE and Israel and between Bahrain and Israel.

And on October 23, the president announced that Sudan and Israel agreed to diplomatic ties.

And if Trump is re-elected, expect Saudi Arabia to follow (since it has backed all these moves privately).

We thank Trump for backing Binyamin Netanyahu's Palestinian workaround -- ties with the Arab world first. 

All these moves provide a huge psychic, political, and diplomatic boost for Israel. 

Each is tainted -- sad to say -- because Trump delivered them. And within Israel by Netanyahu's sagging credibility. 

Still, it would be beyond churlish not to say thank you to both leaders.

Like me, most Israelis do not care if Trump’s heart is in the wrong place. Or if the president is prejudiced (like many of his predecessors). So long as he does the right thing. At any rate, he is undoubtedly no anti-Semite and American Jews should stop saying he is.

Precisely because Trump is transactional -- thinking first about what’s in it for the Trump’s, the Kushner’s, and for America’s military-industrial complex -- that he, and not his arguably better-intentioned more strategic-minded predecessors, spearheaded these game-changing diplomatic gains for Israel.

Since the president is mercurial he could yet turn against Israel in a final term to close a deal with a new Palestinian leadership. Who knows? "We'll see," as the president likes to say.

Back to now. The reason the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Sudan, and Saudi Arabis have reached out to Israel – openly or discreetly – is to hedge their bets against Iran as the United States makes it clear it wants no more foreign military entanglements. Some of the countries will be rewarded with access to the most advanced US weapons. Others will be taken off the State Department's list of countries supporting terrorism. 

Regardless of whether Trump or Joe Biden wins, the US posture will likely continue to diminish globally. Russia and China will be the main outside powers with influence in our region.

With Trump, the US departure will happen as a series of unpredictable and mystifying lurches. With Biden, the withdrawal may be more systematic and coordinated.

Either way, the United States’ diminishing global role – it's pulling inward – represents an immense strategic challenge for Israel in the years ahead.

 

 

 

 

‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in Israeli Politics - Meaningless?

For revolutionary Leon Trotsky, politics was about principles and ideas: permanent revolution, opposition to socialism in one country, internal party democracy. For Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, who sent his NKVD to murder Trotsky with an ice-ax on August 20, 1940, politics was mostly about the quest for personal power. (*)

Mercifully, by 2015 when Binyamin Netanyahu ousted the last of the followers of Ze'ev Jabotinsky from Likud, no ice-ax, God forbid, was involved. 

The Prime Minister needed to solidify control of the party. 

Having principled naysayers piping up about liberalism, tolerance, the rule of law, or setting personal examples of probity was just not on.

The 1949 First Knesset was comprised mostly of ideological parties very much concerned with principles and ideas: Mapai (including Hapo’el Hatza’ir and Ahdut Ha’avoda) led by David Ben-Gurion; Mapam (Soviet-leaning socialist); Religious Bloc (Mizrahi, Hapo’el Ha’Mizrahi, Agudat Yisrael, and Po’alei Agudat Yisrael ); Herut (Jabotinsky-oriented, liberal nationalist, Menachem Begin-led); General Zionists (liberal-capitalist); Progressives (European-style liberal); Sephardic; Communist (pro-Soviet, mixed Arab-Jewish); Arab (Mapai-affiliated Arab list); Fighters’ List (Lehi-affiliated); Women’s International Zionist Organization, and Yemenite Party

I do not much mourn the withering of dogmatic Left-right ideological parties from Israel’s scene. The disappearance of principles and rectitude that had usually gone hand-in-hand with the parties and personalities of yesteryear is what I lament. These have been replaced today by tribal, religious, or ethnic entities sometimes led by parochial, not-yet-indicted leaders (though some were previously convicted or are presently charged with graft).

Nowadays, Israel’s main parties and players are barely distinguishable on issues of principle. Sometimes it is for the good that they mainly agree on the big picture – the Jewish ethos of the state, government intervention in the economy, welfare safety nets, and the intractability of our conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Sometimes the consensus is unhelpful as when they mostly disregard Israel’s income disparity problem.

Instead, the main cleavages are tribal, religious, and cultural. 

These are important issues, don’t get me wrong. The demands by the ultra-Orthodox-leaning national religious (חרד״ל) and the non- or anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox (חֲרֵדִים‎) to turn Israel into a demi-theocratic state could well tear the country asunder. 

However, the problems don’t lend themselves neatly to placement on the standard left-right political spectrum. Some theocrats are dovish on war and peace. Most are proponents of big government and favor a redistribution of income.

In the March 2020 elections, about 48 percent of the combined vote went to rabble-rousing Likud, ultra-Orthodox Shas and UTJ, and Yamina, which would like to see a Knesset majority empowered to overrule Supreme Court decisions. A terrible idea. 

The largely illiberal Arab parties (pro-PLO or Islamist) garnered nearly 13 percent. Roughly six percent went to the small-minded Russian-speakers’ Yisroel Beitenu (led by Netanyahu's former righthand man and now unwavering enemy Avigdor Leiberman), and the mostly secular, mindlessly dovish Labor-Meretz.

That left a mere 27 percent of the electorate to vote for the new (and now probably moribund) centrist Blue & White Party led by Benny Ganz.

Israel’s political system encourages bespoke parties. For example, Degel Hatorah, a component of the aforementioned UJC, claims to look after the interests of “Lithuanian” Ashkenazi Haredim. Aguda, another component of UJC, saves a seat for Hassidim who tuck their trousers into their socks. 

The electoral system offers citizens an incentive to cast ballots for custom-made parties with no mainstream appeal because they can “win.” Just 3.25 percent of the proportional vote can catapult a flash-in-the-pan or narrow interest party into the 120-seat Knesset. In a country where no party in history has won a Knesset majority, even flash-in-the-pan parties hold sway in forming a government.

Broad-based centrist parties that entice politicians to embrace moderation and pull voters from the margins toward a common purpose do indeed come and go. These “third-way” parties (melding left and right and a dose of reform-minded civic responsibility) invariably implode because the system provides little incentive in the long term for them to hold together.

The chances are slight for political reform that would move Israel away from pure proportional representation, disincentivize tribalism, and pump the breaks on our drift in the direction of tyranny-by-majority-rule.

Between that First Knesset in 1949 and our 2020 23^rd Knesset, principle and ideology faded like a masterpiece exposed to the sun. Prime Ministers and their families used to live in modest apartments and make their breakfasts. Golda Meir might guiltily ask friends to bring her a carton of Marlboro’s from abroad. 

Today, despite having a chef on staff, the Netanyahu’s ordered $96,000 worth of catered meals to impress foreign dignitaries. The taxpayers picked up the family’s $2,700-a-year tab for ice cream. The PM received more than $280,000 worth of cigars from Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. And so on and so on.

The fading of principles happened as Ben-Gurion’s Mapai incarnated in today’s Labor Party, which is down to three seats. Mapai in its time was corrupt but in a political sense in order to maintain a monopoly of power.

Ehud Barak, one of modern Labor's former leaders who started off as a kibbutznik, is now worth over $30 million. Having capitulated and joined Netanyahu’s current government, polls suggest Labor, which played a pivotal role in founding the state, may disappear in the next election.

Mapam’s successor party is Meretz (dovish and now social democratic) with three seats. 

The Religious Bloc has morphed and expanded. Its workers’ factions, Hapo’el Hamizrahi and Po’alei Agudat Yisrael, have gone extinct (together with the idea that the really frum should work for a living and that only outstanding Talmudic scholars should be exempt from IDF service). 

Mizrahi, which once represented the knitted kipa politically moderate religious Zionists, is also extinct. 

Agudat Yisrael, though, has thrived as the party of the non-Zionist Hassidic Haredi camp. It runs on a ticket with the non-Zionist Lithuanians under the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) banner and has seven seats.

While the Sephardic and Yemenite parties have disappeared, their successor party is the non-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Shas (most of its Talmudic students do no army service) with nine seats in the current Knesset.

Yemina, which wants to render ineffectual the independent liberal-leaning judiciary, has five seats in the current Knesset. It is an amalgamation of several Orthodox parties and reflects settler-hardel ideology. However, curiously as this may seem, its leaders Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, are malleable on religious issues and adept at rebranding. Their long-term goal is to replace Bennett’s former mentor, now arch-enemy Netanyahu as prime minister using whatever party vehicle is expedient.

Herut’s successor party is Likud; portraits of Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin still hang at party headquarters. However, Netanyahu-led Likud with 36 seats is purged of Jabotinsky/Begin liberals and anyone else who might have been considered an immediate political threat to the leader. 

Likud stands for whatever Netanyahu wants. As the longest-serving prime minister, he defines Likud; and he epitomizes brand Israel to the world for better or worse.

Under multiple indictments for corruption Lord Acton’s line, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” expresses what Bibi has become. 

Alongside his strategic brilliance, diplomatic ingenuity, and intellectual depth, he is duplicitous to the core, both for and against a Palestinian state. For and against caving-in to Hamas demands. For and against a complete COVID-19 lockdown. For and against extending Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. His foremost goal is to buy one day at a time for himself politically.

The metaphorical successors of the 1949 General Zionists and Progressive Party are Blue & White and Yesh Atid led by Benny Ganz and Yair Lapid, respectively.

In the last election, Yesh Atid ran with Blue & White. With 14 seats, Ganz broke his promise to the electorate and joined Netanyahu’s government, Lapid stayed out with his 17 seats. Lapid’s central tenet, beyond steadfastly seeking Netanyahu’s defeat, is opposition to theocracy. His voters tend to be middle class and middle of the road. Beyond that, the former TV talk show host is, like Ganz, politically pliable.

Blue & White serves as an example par excellence of a centrist party that emerged before an election only to disappoint and (if history is a guide) eventually to disappear.  

Like I said, I don’t miss the parties of yesteryear with their unbending allegiance to the Workers, or Greater Israel, or the Comintern. That said, whatever else they are, today’s ideologically promiscuous and principle-compromised parties can’t usefully be slotted into any left-right political continuum.

Left and right don’t mean much in the Israeli political setting.

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See too:

What does it even mean to be a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’?

(*)  See Dmitri Volhogonov's TROTSKY: THE ETERNAL REVOLUTIONARY:

"Trotsky's individuality lay primarily in his obsession with the Idea. For him the Idea was the equivalent of a philosophical temple, in which everything created within it belonged to eternity. For him the greatest spiritual luxury consisted in the ability to think and reflect freely..." (page 488)

To be fair, according to Volhogonov,  Stalin appropriated some of Trotsky's ideas making them his own. And Trotsky along with Lenin set up the system (including the bureaucracy) that Stalin exploited in his genocidal reign. Ideas aside, the men -- both profoundly arrogant -- hated each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Addicted to the News

News seized my attention in elementary school and never let go. The most fun I had in the classroom was when our seventh-grade social studies teacher handed out a weekly magazine called Current Events. How that innocuous periodical breached the ramparts of our insular ultra-Orthodox Yiddish-oriented yeshiva, I do not know.

In contrast to most of my classmates, my mother read a tabloid newspaper regularly, and we had a television.

By the time I was finishing high-school (at a somewhat less inward-looking yeshiva), I had begun picking up the New York Times at the newsstand. That sufficed through college. When I started graduate school, I had discovered kiosks that sold out-of-town newspapers and started getting The Washington Post. At some point, a newspaper home delivery company belatedly began servicing our Lower East Side neighborhood. I “took” the Times, Washington Post, and either the Daily News or the New York Post.

The mailman delivered The Christian Science Monitor (because John K. Cooley, based in Beirut, provided coverage of Palestinian Arab affairs available nowhere else). On Fridays, the weeklies arrived, such as the Village Voice, The New York Jewish Week, The Washington Jewish Week, and the Forward (between 1983-2000 a balanced must-read).

Separately, I’d buy the pricey Economist weekly and the Manchester Guardian (which carried Le Monde), both printed on thin airmail newsprint.

Clipping file 'Hamas' 1996

Through involvement in Zionist politics, I met NR (Ricky) Greenfield, a Wall Street guy who went on to buy the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, who subscribed to a slew of newspapers, magazines, and Jewish periodicals. Ricky would send out a weekly packet of photocopied opinion clippings, and I felt privileged to get on his mailing list. In the pre-Internet age, getting Ricky’s clippings helped me know what pundits were saying.

Still, I had a craving for more. I was taking the JTA Daily News Bulletin (awfully expensive to private subscribers like me but, in those days, a unique fair-minded resource) and Beijing Review, the airmail edition of The Jerusalem Post – and who remembers what else. The Beijing Review weekly because I was researching China’s policy toward the Arab-Israel conflict. Eventually, I built clipping files (anti-Semitism to Zionism) something newspapers and organizations did on a bigger and better scale in the pre-Internet age.

The written word didn’t satiate. So, I tuned into Kol Israel over shortwave and watched (what is today) the PBS Newshour and C-SPAN (which transmitted congressional proceedings). When I could, I also listened to Morning Edition and All Things Considered on NPR. 

The news and views that I was hooked on were explicitly about politics. Fortunately, it was a compulsion I could feed legally without having to mug anyone.

I knew there was no way to maintain my expensive habit once I gave up my job and moved to Israel. I did arrange for the New York Times Book Review and a handful of other subscriptions to be forwarded to me via my Israeli family, knowing I probably would not renew them.

Fortunately, by 1997 the Internet had taken off, and soon I was reading online newspaper websites. I’d still buy the International Herald Tribune (in those days a joint endeavor of the Washington Post and The New York Times), which arrived in Israel from Paris within a day or so of publication. When I started working at The Jerusalem Post, I began to read the news in Hebrew laboriously. The Post used to print several Haredi newspapers, and I began perusing those to get a sense of their jargon and sensibilities.

My obsession with current events was undiminished, but it narrowed parochially to Israel (with an eye on the Old Country and perhaps Britain). Now, I faithfully watched the Hebrew news on television, switching between the channels.

However, my world broadened again when I began working for a US news outlet, and I had to refamiliarize myself with the personalities and players.

As I soaked-up news and views, it dawned on me that people around me not only did not take in much news many conscientiously avoided knowing what was going on. Israelis no longer reflexively stopped in their tracks for the hourly radio news bulletin.

Nowadays, my impression is that Israelis do not routinely watch the nightly news broadcasts on TV or read newspapers or make it a point to tune into radio news broadcasts. Israel’s various tribes, clans, and demographic clusters get views/news tailored to their worldview via provincial newspapers, wall posters, or blinkered social media posts.

Now, instead of being passively uninformed, the masses (Millennials & Gen Z especially) are actively stupefied by news packaged as entertainment, tendentious misinformation, or purposeful disinformation.

Even as the 24/7 news cycle churns, and websites and social media platforms proliferate, fewer and fewer sources of firsthand reliably reported news survive. Media outlets who don’t rightfully subscribe to a news gathering agency such as AP or Reuters might cannibalize information gathered by others and repackage it to fit their worldviews – perhaps burying a hyperlink to the real source of the story.

This watered-down product that passes for news and views today was playing havoc with my habit, as was the intensification of brazen advocacy journalism, particularly at The New York Times.

It was as if high-grade heroin had been cut so often that the only ingredient remaining was the talc filler. I was effectively being weaned off original news/views and consequently going through uncomfortable withdrawal pains. I’d anyway shifted professional gears to book editing and website content writing. After decades of dependency, my news cravings were easing.

These days I can limit my daily intake to several newspapers (which I prefer to read in PDF form) and media outlets — and a few visits to Twitter. I restrict how much time in toto I devote to news/views.

A significant aid to curbing my intake is the availability of newsletters whose editors vet and aggregate the torrent. I don’t feel I may be missing something.

Those that I have come to rely on most are:

The Drudge Report (flagship of aggregators, right-leaning but unpredictable/US focus), News Nosh (left-left-leaning/Israeli focus/ opinionated), JI Daily Kickoff (excellent, balanced, comprehensive/Israel/diaspora), Politico’s Playbook (US politics/liberal), and the Daily Alert (Israel/Middle East/center) and Real Clear Politics (which aggregates opinion and averages polls).

It is even possible to blend these aggregators into one funnel through platforms such as Feedly, which aggregates the aggregators.

It’s been a hard slog, but I’m drinking in less news/views without going off the grid entirely — one day at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What the Pandemic Reveals about Human Nature: Homo Homini Lupus

Public health authorities uniformly agree that if you put distance between yourself and people who don’t live in your household, cover your mouth and nose with a mask when around others, and wash your hands often – COVID-19 would stop spreading.

Thinking about this recalls the Jewish legend that if every Jew were to observe two consecutive Shabbats, the Messiah would come.

But human nature keeps getting in the way.

During ordinary times, the continuum of human nature finds most of us somewhere between self-interested and altruistic. However, during prolonged periods of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic in which we find ourselves people gravitate toward extreme self-interest.

So what our pandemic reveals to me about human nature is, as Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote, paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes that Homo Homini Lupus “man is a wolf to other men.”

Garden variety liberals being optimistic about human nature, would take exception to this glum view. While utopians – be they communists and anarchists on the left or nazis on the right – claim that they know how to alter human nature. The genocide carried out by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge was intended to perfect humanity.

But what does the Corona pandemic show us about human nature? Consider how political systems (Israel, China, or the US, for instance), organizations (such as hospitals, HMOs, and universities), and the private sector (like big technology) have deported themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At best they have mostly failed in their missions.

It is easy to blame a nincompoop president, a distracted prime minister, or a sclerotic public health bureaucracy.

It is right to doubt the decency of clerics, who would wantonly endanger their flock to preserve control and insularity.

However, in the last analysis, isn’t the refusal by so many to take individual responsibility the crux of the problem?

The davka decision not to wear face masks, wear them as bracelets, or with noses protruding spotlights varying degrees of self-centeredness. Individuals or groups who demand to exercise their absolute right to crowd together for rowdy street demonstrations or pack into confined interior spaces to pray or party are being maliciously egocentric. Of course, that’s not how they see it.

In his legendary The Tortoise’s Little Green Book, Robert Ringer offers this maxim about human nature: “The most prudent way­  of dealing with people is to assume that their way of defining things is: Good is what I do; bad is what you do. Right is what I do; wrong is what you do. Ethical is what I do; unethical is what you do.”

The protesters shrieking at police near Israel’s Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem see themselves not as vaporizing virus-laden aerosol but as warriors for justice. Everyone thinks the best of themselves, from youthful party animals and attendees at illicitly large Arab weddings, to Haredim jammed into mega-synagogues and politicians negotiating the contours of a lockdown with politics, not public health their paramount consideration.

Thinking about human nature and what makes people selfish or considerate delivers me to the intersection of philosophy-theology and psychology.

Philosophy

Thucydides tells us that left to their own devices, people will commonly exacerbate chaotic situations instead of pulling together. Aristotle understood that by nature, the Masses are Asses. Whatever else, he believed, Spinoza agreed that people were not inherently well-intentioned.

Likewise, James Madison believed foremost that men were not angels – human nature could go either way. That given the opportunity, individuals would choose to tyrannize their fellows. While no form of government could protect people from each other’s passions, in crafting the US Constitution, Madison, taking human nature into account, designed the US not a popular (majoritarian) democracy but as a republic. The people did not elect the president; they did not elect their senators. The original US Constitution also constrained the ruling elites (through checks and balances and a separation of powers) so that they did not act rashly in the heat of the moment. In Madison’s eyes

…Man is known to be selfish… We all know that conscience is not a sufficient safeguard and besides that conscience itself may be deluded may be misled… into acts which an enlightened conscience would forbid…

Theology

Jewish tradition instructs that individuals have free will. God expects us to choose wisely. By creating us in His image, humans were endowed with reason. For Maimonides, following Aristotle, reason should move a person to behave in a virtuous manner, which means pursuing the Golden Mean. I suppose in Corona terms, that requires acting neither solely self-interestedly nor self-sacrificingly altruistic.

A midrash suggests that God created man because angels were, well too angelic, and animals, perhaps, too bestial. Our assignment is to balance our good and bad inclinations.

Jewish civilization holds that reasonable self-interest is perfectly normal. The sages also figured that a person’s real character is revealed when their guard is down. Nothing takes your guard down more than a pandemic.

Psychology

Sigmund Freud argued that civilization hangs on our ability to sublimate the desire for immediate gratification. The constraints placed on us by political society compete with base instincts. Only the discipline of living in society caps our instincts. “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization,” Freud says in Civilization and its Discontents.

When individuals or groups lose their sense of shame – when shanda disappears – the foundations of civilization are undermined. Guilt is the price we pay to advance civilization, Freud argued. Now that we’ve stopped worrying about “what the goyim will say,” we’ve compromised ourselves.

Perhaps Israelis’ collective ennui has made us angrier. We appear incapable of expressing remorse for acting against the greater good. On the contrary, the dissonance between what we know is right and how we behave leads us to self-justification and finger-pointing.

While the Messiah tarries and COVID-19 spreads we pay pre-Yom Kippur lip-service to introspection and repentance.

Alas, the morbidity and mortality numbers two weeks hence are likely to reveal the truth about our natures.

 

What does it even mean to be a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’?

 During a political argument, when someone calls you a liberal, they probably mean you are a hypocrite. To be tarred a progressive or leftist is to be declared at best naïve, at worst, a bloody communist.

If the slur is you’re a conservative, they mean you’re heartless. To be slugged right-wing means you’re on the reactionary-fascist continuum.

The premise of these political putdowns is that your interlocutor holds your thinking – maybe you too – to be not just disagreeable but bordering on devilish.

Since many of us are locked into this weltanschauung, the prospect that the camp we disagree with will be ascendant is downright terrifying.

Liberalism and conservatism are ideologies.   

Political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died in 2012, defined ideology as “a coherent and consistent set of beliefs about who ought to rule, what principles rulers ought to obey, and what policies rulers ought to pursue.”

Liberalism and conservatism have been defined and redefined over time and place. The Liberal Party of Australia is conservative by the American definition. In Israel, left and right only approximately mean what it does in the US.

In the contemporary American setting, liberalism meant championing liberty in personal matters, free-market capitalism in economics, and gradualist reform in the social sphere. A liberal would favor decriminalizing abortion and homosexuality, support low tariffs on international trade, and favor welfare and health coverage for the indigent.

Conservatism arose in the face of reforms gone too far (specifically, the 1789 French Revolution which overthrew King Louis XVI but led to the Jacobian Reign of Terror). A conservative would be someone who wanted to safeguard enduring values and the traditional way things were done. Change, more often than not, was to be resisted. Conservatives tend to be skeptical of the government’s ability to be efficient and effective.

Liberals were those who favored government intervention to make things better in the economy and the social sphere. They argued it was the government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans had access to a socio-economic safety net. While conservatives were worried that if the government became too interventionist, it would become overbearing and interfere with personal liberties.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a quintessential liberal who instituted Social Security for older Americans. Ronald Reagan was the archetypal conservative who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

In a healthy polity there are few pure liberals and conservatives. Most thinking folks calibrate their positions as they grapple with thorny real-life challenges. For example, a social conservative might in principle oppose abortion but not in the case of rape or incest.

Today, it seems to me, ideologues have moved from Wilson’s description of “coherent and consistent” to calcified and fanatical. We seem to have lost the ability to adjust – to determine the Golden Mean.

A realignment of America’s political spectrum is underway. Liberals and conservatives are embracing increasingly extreme positions. Liberals are becoming less tolerant and open-minded. Trumpian conservatives are interested in radically changing the liberal status quo.

Partisan trench warfare predominates. Ideological nonconformists who stick their heads up to utter something that sounds vaguely nondogmatic are liable to get their brains blown out. There is no place for anti-Trump conservatives in the Republican Party. There is less and less safe space for old school liberals in the Democratic Party.

New Conservatism

These days Trumpian conservatism stands broadly for championing protectionist capitalism, neo-isolationism, nationalism, opposition to gun control, partial re-criminalization of abortion, and robust individual rights against an overprotective and intrusive state.

Trumpian conservatism not only holds that the government can’t competently address climate change, but it also denies global warming is even a problem. According to the president, California’s forests are burning because the state has neglected to clean the leaves from the forests’ floors. Remnant conservatives who care about environmental conservation carefully package their concerns so as not to infuriate the Trumpians.

On the porous margins of Trumpian conservatism are the conspiratorial-minded neo-fascist extremists who run the gamut from nazis and klaners to militiamen and white nationalists.

New Liberalism

Over in the liberal camp nowadays, the push has gone way beyond equal opportunity in race matters, beyond affirmative action quotas in hiring and education. Today’s liberals want the government to guarantee economic and social outcomes, use taxes to profoundly redistribute societal resources, robustly regulate the private sector, and take sweeping steps to repair the despoiled environment. The government’s role is to steer citizens toward healthier more just lives.

That the seam from reform-oriented liberalism to change-oriented progressivism has been crossed is nowhere better reflected then in vanguard media outlets like The New York Times. If liberals in the 1960s sought to protect criminal suspects from self-incrimination and to guarantee legal due process, in the 2020s progressives want suspects arrested for nonviolent felonies (subway turnstile jumping, belligerent panhandling, or vandalism) to be released without having to post bail.

The Trump era seems to have accelerated a shift that has delivered many liberals into the progressive bloc. As progressives they are reoriented to be mortified that whites continue to dominate the United States. Support for the amorphous Black Lives Matter movement, whatever its rolling open-ended demands, is axiomatic irrespective of reactionary, supremacist, or anti-Semitic positions voiced by some BLM figures. Jewish liberals once felt sufficiently secure to challenge the excesses of the Black Lives Matter narrative. Now, making BLM engageable is the order of the day.

Taking a page from Maoism, progressives aim to refurbish human nature with an emphasis on those of European white origin. Prejudice regardless if it is subconscious or dormant must be excised through a process of self-criticism and reeducation. Individuals who fall short should be prepared to be publicly humiliated. At the same time, white progressives must take care to avoid cultural appropriation by, for example, relocating into a historically black neighborhood.

Progressives are trained to acknowledge that whatever good fortune birth bestowed upon them is an illicit privilege. This has led some progressives to defend looting by people of color as legitimate. Male progressives have additional obligations to be “woke” or acutely attuned to political and social transgressions and patriarchal tendencies. Men need to abjure interrupting a woman while she is speaking or mansplaining, which is talking to a woman in a way that could be perceived as condescending. Progressive individuals need to unconditionally support LGBTQ+ culturally and politically, though the highest level of woke might also endorse the idea that the endgame should be the abolition of the family.

On the margins of the progressive camp is the hard-left amalgamation known as Antifa. Anarchist, Antifa follows a utopian philosophy aimed at repairing human nature and opposing all forms of hierarchy, including the state. In other words, they do not want a change in government. They want to collapse the state. Adherents, dressed in black, come together to fight the police and their right-wing adversaries.

To further muddle matters, some anarchists belong on the radical right because their goal beyond the downfall of the United States is the rise of whites-only enclaves.

Whatever the terms “liberal” and “conservative” once meant, their definition continues to evolve and not, it seems to me, in a politically healthy direction.

The Trumpian camp commands the GOP and the conservative brand. I assume his followers will continue to do so even if Donald Trump is no longer president.

While tensions between liberals and progressives are rife within the Democratic Party, these have mainly been put on hold to present a united front against Trump. Should the Biden/Harris liberal ticket be victorious, the Sanders/Warren/ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez progressive wing can be expected to demand their due.

For those Americans who are not at home either among Trumpian conservatives or woke progressives there is – for now at least – only the political wilderness.

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