Don't worry, this isn't the first day of the rest of your life. Not everything you believed is no longer true, just a few beliefs to which you'll have to make adjustments, as most generations of progressives do.
We live among the first generation of progressives to not be chastened in a whole century: we saw the state of the world, with Trump and Brexit and economic deregulation and global warming, and it moved us left.
Our parents and grandparents promised we would see the world more conservatively as we got older. That obviously didn't happen. It didn't happen because a world without that moderating urge is just out of living memory.
Living memory now begins with Hitler, when pacifism and communism failed to bring about a better world. When nobody's around to remind us of the circumstances that brought Nazis to power, we fall for all the same temptations that brought us there. Like all opposites in this world, the strength of one strengthens the other. The more you embrace the left, the stronger the right grows.
This does not mean that the correct action is the middle point between every argument. The center of every problem is a dynamic thing: often the solution is quite left of center, occasionally even 'left', because conservatives are usually the establishment that defines the terms of any debate. It does, however, mean that the correct belief can be all over the political map: including sometimes right of center (though, don't worry, it's comparatively rare in Western life, and seldom actually 'right').
But particularly when it comes to military matters, peace without the threat of force is as likely to work as force without the promise of peace.
I don't think you need me to tell you that after you've seen your allies offer the barest hint of sympathy while you're scared out of your wits, you're going to have to make some adjustments to your beliefs: but in the grand scheme, these adjustments are pretty small. What you're perceiving is the realization that most left gentiles will have to come to eventually - the salvageable ones at least: that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is very much a vice.
It's my opinion that there are three basic adjustments you'll have to make.
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The first is you'll have to do away with the idea that a just world is possible. On a case by case basis, the world can rise to justice through hard and smart work, but as a whole, the world is indifferent to what's right, and always remains that way.
The last fifty days proved conclusively that there is no future in which racism and antisemitism will be cast aside: antisemitism is just the first of many times the intersectional world will come upon the oceanic limitations of its hypocrisies. Eventually, there will be vast divisions between those who prioritize class with those who prioritize identity, there already are some, and we saw a small ocean of that difference between the average Bernie Sanders supporter and the furthest left Clintonites. Even on the identity side, there will be vast disagreements between those who prioritize fighting racism and those who prioritize fightin sexism and those who prioritize fighting LGBTQ+phobia: and again, there already are. And within each of those divisions, there will be much finer divisions, even granular ones, that cause generations long enmities.
In the Russian Revolution, the Leninist Communists were just one of many many Marxist sects. They arose through a combination of luck, fanaticism, and a ruthless will to power. 999 of 1000 leftists you know are absolutely incapable of such violent acts, but then there's that thousandth, and if the conservative grip on governments tightens so much that they can't help but fall chaotically, don't think the violent ones wouldn't mount a successful attempt to take over in some countries where we currently think their takeover completely unthinkable.
Whether it's intersectionality or Marxism, it's a religion without God. One of my favorite thinkers, the center-liberal Raymond Aron, said in a great book, The Opium of the Intellectuals, that 'intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme." There are solutions that usually work, but there are ALWAYS many exceptions. Another favorite of mine, the leftist George Steiner, turned that line: 'nostalgia for the absolute' into a whole series of lectures in which he outlines how these movements have progressed many times: a substitute religion embraced by an original generation of believers, followed by a series of schisms between sects who believe only their sect speaks for how the central belief was meant to be interpreted.
There have been so many of these secular substitutes over the decades: Marxism and certain socialisms, Freudian psychoanalysis and a hundred types of critical theory, like intersectionality, these are substitutes for Christianity and Islam (and yes, our religion too), and evolved in just the same way. They promise that the truth of the world is animated by an invisible structure, and when it isn't, the movement breaks into thousands of pieces.
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The second notion in three parts, and paradoxical to the first:
History has very definite lessons, which have to be applied in every era and every country, but they are lessons of "don't"' not "dos."
1. Do not believe progress can't wait, and when progress happens, do not believe the solution is more than temporary. Working for progress can't wait, but the progress itself takes decades, sometimes centuries. The world always resists solutions: it is a stationary force until the moment the proper solution gets applied, and the moment it's applied, the world becomes a dynamic force that grows immune to the solution. Now that history happens so quickly, the world takes less time to grow immune to the solutions we successfully enacted.
2. Do not believe any force in the world can exist without being balanced by its opposite. The more peaceful the world grows, the more progress the world makes, and the more that progress is converted into weaponry, and the more dangerous the world's wars become. The more prosperous a superpower becomes, the more chaotic the world grows when the power falls. Peace is only achieved through the threat of war, and war can only be won when you have a plausible vision of peace.
3. 'History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.' It's usually attributed to Mark Twain, but I doubt anybody knows who really said it, and I'd imagine that, like historical events, whoever said it did so in a slightly different way from how it really happened. On the one hand, history happens randomly. Like rapids on a river, it can flow torrentially, but it never stays in the same place for more than an instant; and yet the topography of a riverbank always stays a riverbank. We study the past because past solutions are usually a key to the future, and past obstacles are a key to what doesn't work: it's not a great key to predict the future with, but it's the only reliable key we have. So FUCKING LEARN HISTORY.
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The third adjustment, and this is the hardest. I'm sorry to say that we're probably going to have to get rid of the notion that we're 'progressives' and go back to being a boring ass 'liberals.' The difference may seem laughably cosmetic, but the liberal tradition and the progressive tradition have one very large difference: the presence of common sense.
Progressivism, from its late-19th century inception, brought us some of the greatest policies we take for granted: universal public education, economic regulation, organized labor and antitrust laws, laws for workplace safety: this is all progressive policy, and it's fair to believe that the Obama Administration was the beginning of a second progressive age that brought us massive public health care, a worldwide climate deal, and gay marriage. But just as the first progressive age was accompanied by world war and the rise of totalitarian dictatorship, so may this age bring something similar. When you take the safeties off a society, you can't be surprised when any terrible thing becomes possible. This month has born out that progressivism has its deep flaws just as past progressivism did. It would be naive for us to anticipate that this age will not have similar catastrophic events.
Liberalism has one major difference: it doesn't believe in itself strongly enough to pursue anything but what should obvious. Back in the 19th century, liberalism was basically what libertarianism is now, but thanks in part to progressivism, it evolved, and rather than the early 20th century stymied progress of TR and Wilson, it became the stable forward progress of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. You know what that entailed, I don't need make a litany. So it's important to have a progressive tradition, it is also important to shed it when it outlives its usefulness.
Conservatives will blow their tops when they read this next sentence, but liberalism's sins are the sins of caution. Liberalism's sins are the sins of believing that in order to achieve victory against worldwide fascism, you have to sometimes stomach dictators as allies, including fascist ones; or the sins of believing that in order to create a better social safety net, you will have to ditch a universal safety net. Yes, they're sins, but they're not quite as mortal sins as the alternatives.
When a public expert tells you that what you see with your eyes is not true, don't believe them. Just as when Republican experts tell you that tax revenues go up when taxes go down, you have to disbelieve progressive experts who tell you that there is an invisible power structure keeping minorities from achieving equally. The power structures keeping them down are extremely visible, and not every white person is complicit in it; and as the most reliably liberal demographic in America, an especial number of Jews aren't complicit.
Don't lie to yourselves, it's possible that the same dark times are coming for us as eventually come for every Jewish era in every country. It may not be yet, it may not be for another few generations, but it's coming, and we'd better be ready.
The writing is on the wall. The Democratic party probably won't be Jewish allies for much longer, and while I can't imagine not voting for them for an infinitely long future, we can no longer expect they will return our loyalty.
Whether center, left, or left-of-center, Jews who bet progress are on our own now. There is only one option left.
Isaiah 42:6 says “I, the LORD, have called you to demonstrate my righteousness. I will take you by the hand and guard you, and I will give you to my people, Israel, as a symbol of my covenant with them. And you will be a light to guide the nations." This is often taken as a testament of Jewish jingoism. I doubt there is much jingoism in the promise that God will guard us, because He so clearly hasn't.
Here's what I choose to believe it means:
That, yet again, we, the Jews, are called to set an example of righteous conduct to a world that doesn't want to see it, if only so we can account for the example we set when it's time to justify ourselves in whatever next world comes.
If other demographics can't let go of their fanaticisms, we have to do it and act with both correct conduct (Derekh Eretz) and help heal the world (Tikkun Olam). It's not jingoism to wonder if Judaism and Liberalism may be the two best ways the world has yet invented to adopt to life's ever changing circumstances, and as always, we are God's lab rats, called as never before to test whether this partnership between two of the world's greatest life philosophies can long endure.
Amen and be well,
Evan
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