More Thoughts on Haley

.

I just don't know what to do today. I thought I was exempt from thinking about my country by leaving, yet here I am, with it occupying as much thought as ever. I'm not tempted to go back, even with two bad ankles, but sadness is here too: so much that the sadness of America is half of why I don't want to go back for a while. .

Haley's decision is the kind of iconoclasm I should be celebrating: she took a stand against both Abdul el-Sayed and Tucker Carlson: she showed that hard right and hard left are the same thing: and she showed that when nobody else resists it, someone can resist it. There's a 1% chance she'll be vindicated as a hero who kept to principles when no one else did. And furthermore, if we wanted to minimize the damage done, the reaction today could not have been worse. By the fact that half the country ganged up on Haley to a level almost without precedent, however deserved, will prove to the center that we are as partisan as Republicans allege we are. In the last 24 hours, we probably delivered every undecided voter to Republicans.

But that sort of line in the sand was what James Comey thought, and now we have Donald Trump, and part of Joe Biden's calculation, I'm sure, was that by running again, he was saving us from Bernie Sanders.

Sometimes, there are no good choices: you just do what you can to not rock the boat, you put your head down, and hope like hell that entropy blows all the problems over.

Every moderate to liberal Democrat knows that the DSA is a different species entirely from anything in the Democratic party since perhaps Henry Wallace. Many Republicans stepped through the dimensional doorway since Joseph McCarthy: but the dimensional doorway is not between fascism and socialism: it's between conservatism and socialism. Virtually the entire world but our country agrees that American conservatism flirts with something authoritarian: and that's exactly what right-wingers in other countries seem to like about Republicans.

In a properly functioning democracy, what we call moderation is what should be called conservatism, progressivism is the left, and liberalism is the vital center of discourse. Democracy means the right to have any opinion at all, but the ideological conditions that let democracy flourish are small indeed. You either believe in a conglomeration of liberty and equality with neither subsuming the other, or you don't. You either believe that people's achievements are substantially helped by government services, public roads, regulated industry, public health initiatives, or you don't. If you don't, I'm sorry to say you support the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless no less than any socialist. You either support freedom of speech and press without retribution, you either support people's abilities to withstand massive public pressure to speak their minds or vote whatever they deem to be their conscience, you either believe in the love of family and the pride of self-creation, or you don't. If you don't, you support the tyranny of the winners over the losers no less than any conservative.

The vital center does not mean the middle position in any issue: it means embracing the root solution in any given issue, and that solution may be found all across the political spectrum, including on the right. If all your positions in life are by rote, determined by the group, determined by a sense that what you and friends believe is the inevitable side of good: how are you an individual? You may have enabled certain parts of your identity, but you've surrendered the personality that is uniquely yours. You have literally become your identity, and nothing more: and that goes for right as well as left.

This is the dimensional doorway through which America has now stepped: a doorway through which has stepped a hundred other democracies and republics before us. We are no longer who we are, we are what we believe. We have become our politics, nothing more. All those other things that used to define us: entertainment and art, math and science, sports, they now take back seats to whatever we believe politically.

No country can function like that, no country has ever functioned like that.

Haley supposedly acted in the interests of Jews like the righteous gentile. What did she really do? She brought still more attention on us that we don't need. The one thing hard right and hard left have in common is a searing hatred of Jewish interests. They may not see it as antisemitism, but everything that is in the interests of Jews: Jewish survival, Jewish security, Jewish prosperity and equality and freedom, they revile.

So what did Haley do? She used the Jewish state to help determine an election still more than it already is. Nothing good can come from that: it only increases the attention, pressure and hatred directed towards us.

Haley is neither a hero or a villain: she is human. She always was, she clearly will always be. From some mix of bruised ego from distant people who wish her ill, and coercive pressure from close people who don't wish her well, she made a terrible choice that a lot of misguided Jews are going to laud as an heroically righteous one. Today, my old friend is the most famous person in America, with all the acclaim and vitriol that goes along with that. Many of the conspiracy theories said about Haley have been abhorrent: but I don't know what she expected, and more importantly, what her fiance expected. This is a person who is supposed to protect his spouse, and by all accounts, he pointed her in the direction of the lions.

Haley's actions are ultimately not his responsibility: they're Haley's. But Haley is now a minor chapter in American history, potentially to be mentioned in some high school textbooks, and probably in Jewish history too. She will not be remembered as a straightforward hero. She will be remembered as the deeply conflicted person she is: torn as she always was between immense altruism and warmth, and immense ego and chaos.

Haley, thank you for acting in what you think are the interests of my people: but the history of the Jews is the history of unintended consequences. So many heroes in Jewish history caused more suffering than they liberated us from, and we deal with the consequences of these false heroes in every era.

Whether or not Jews commemorate you as a hero, whether or not your endorsement is ultimately vindicated in the eyes of history, The fact still remains: you have stepped onto the faultlines of history, and your stand may have caused a populace that will blame Jews particularly for whatever chaos follows.

I hope you and your name stay unbesmirched in what follows, but if this is what you strove so hard to achieve, if this is why you left us for Oxford, I still don't know why you did all that. This is not the first time your chaos publicly burned a massive bridge, but now the bridge is on a literal million times the scale, and just like last time, I hope you're considering what you did all that for.