You Don't Mess with the Zohran

 

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No it wasn't a f***ing shock in New York.

People need to breathe. Not just Jews, everybody. People need oxygen at least as much as they need water, and they need the breathing room to believe that their needs are honored, and not just their needs, their wishes, their desires, their hopes.

Here's the thing though, nobody really cares whether their hopes are honored or not, they just care that it feels like they are. They think they do but people notice their feelings long before they notice facts. Fox News is proof enough that if you give people someone to look down on and someone to be mad at, they will turn on their interests as quickly as shit through a goose. Hell, Bernie Sanders is proof too: he's an old school social democrat who didn't advocate for ideals any to the left of FDR's Economic Bill of Rights (publicly, at least). Only once has he ever uttered the word 'intersectionality' in public and that was on the issue of prison incarceration, not once has he ever said "I believe in DEI" either, but because he said 'we need a revolution', because he said 'the business model of Wall Street is fraud,' millions of intersectional socialists flocked to him as though he said 'f*** the police!'

No matter what their political point of view, people want to feel as though their humanity is honored, and they don't really care about the details.

I'm as pro-Dem establishment as anyone gets. Anybody long-time reading here knows that I have no love lost toward any hard Left. I think most people who spend their time thinking about politics don't know much about it. They don't read anything they disagree with, they don't memorize statistics and instinctively dismiss findings millions of people have collated in good faith, they're only interested in the theories of people with whom they agree. However you view politics, whatever rage or rancor or contempt you have, you don't know politics until know their points of view better than you know your own and acknowledge all the places they may have a point.

I dropped the ball on that lately, I'm still mourning my father and most of my time is spent on ChatGPT discussing music and all the books I haven't finished as though I'm an expert. When I looked up and saw that Zohran's entire list won in New York, I was both not surprised at all and very surprised that I hadn't noticed any trend. I've barely read about politics this year. The entire primary election cycle passed me by as though it hadn't happened.

Fortunately, I'm not a person of much influence. I have a facebook page and a blog, a couple friends with some influence, and thanks to my dear father, accumulated a pretty decent knowledge of history over the years. What I've learned in this:

Whenever you cut people out of a coalition, they eventually cut you out. Every faction mutates from generation to generation but the basic human natures remain unchanging. Some people believe the world is better off sharing resources, some people believe the world's better off hoarding them. Nothing to be done about it: you can't convince them reality's more complicated, you can't slake their moral outrage, and if you tell them they're wrong they're so caught up in propaganda's feedback loops that they convince themselves that the arguments against them are in fact arguments for them. They will never concede an inch to you and always have an answer that sounds convincing in isolation, but then you go home, you realize the context of what they say and your jaw drops. It's like Chesterton said:

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Is the hard right or hard left of this country truly crazy? Not quite: they're not Hamas, they're not the IRGC, they don't even move into settlements. But between the hard right and the hard left, one of the two is incredibly powerful, and one of them just won three seats from the Dem establishment.

Three seats.

It's in New York. It's in Manhattan. It's always in the most educated places that radicalism proliferates: again, nothing to be done. Will they take more seats? Of course they will. Who will fall next? Probably places in New England, probably California, probably certain parts of Maryland and New Jersey and Northern VA, and a certain other state I won't mention... Is it the end of the Democratic party? Well, it's the end of the Democratic party as we've ever known it. Is it a harbinger of socialist rule in America? Not particularly, and even if it is, it's only a disaster of we make it a disaster.

We might.

Eventually, every country goes onto the chopping block and learns the hard way what polarization truly means: if you provoke one side, the other side will provoke back.

How do Republicans win? They fall in line. You all know the adage: "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line." The establishment stays the establishment because they know preserving their holdings is more important than any ideal. And it goes both ways. In exchange for falling in line, they make people feel welcome whom they secretly view with contempt. And at this point, we have little to lose: elections are contested cycle after cycle, we might as well try socialists who make promises with a smile rather than center-leftists who remind us that politics is just a boring drudge. Whether or not they lie through their teeth (and they inevitably will, even if they think they won't), promises in politics are always more important than results.

Against all evidence, our party doesn't believe that. We believe in results, and consequently, we usually lose. Whomever the next Presidential nominee is: be it Shapiro, Newsom, Pritzker or AOC, you fall in line and do your best to influence them, even when you know it's 98% futile. That 2% is always where the progress is made.

So is it good for the Jews?

No! Of course not! But what the **** did you expect? You get into bed with a lobby that insists on bipartisan support during an age when one of two parties deliberately blows up bipartisanship, eventually the other party will desert you. AIPAC pretended there was a balance of power when there was clearly no balance. Our organization had disproportionately prosperous supporters, it was easier for us to go along with what the left now calls 'neoliberalism' (which in the sane world basically means 'privatization'), and they used privatization to give an entire generation an education they can't pay for unless they're the children of prosperity. Of course, they'll go for any ideology that tells them that the system is corrupt. And of course the system is corrupt! Every system is corrupt! The only relevant questions are 'how corrupt?' and 'who's more corrupt?'

The biggest lie in human history, the lie everybody falls for, is the idea that we can live a life of ideals: that everyone's humanity is recognized, that you can be free, that you can be secure. Where is the evidence that that's possible?

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a left who hates Zionism so virulently now because Israelis were already provoked into embracing the right-wing by a left-wing that already hated them. It also leaves us with a right-wing who increasingly hates liberal Jews so virulently because they associate the current left-wing turn of the Democratic party with Jews. And it leaves us with a moderate Jewish establishment still clinging to the late twentieth century, and believes that with enough PAC money they can still win elections: but the TV era appealed to the center: when you have central networks you have center political beliefs. The internet appeals to the fringes: on the internet you only get noticed if you're more extreme than the last guy. And if there's anybody extremists are known for having a problem with...

I've been saying for 25 years (ask AU friends) that the Jewish community is going to turn hard right. Where can you go when the left has no room for your self-defense? The tighter the grip of authoritarians, the more we depend on their protection. The more we depend on their protection, the more hated we grow by everybody under them. Zohran is not going to kill us: his co-believers won't kill us, our own delusions will kill us.

I am so tired of saying this, but the oldest story in Jewish history is that Jews rise to the height of prosperity, then they forget what got them there. The success of intelligent Jews proves useful to rulers in a hundred thousand ways, these successful Jews are lorded over the populace as the model minority which shows the world what you can achieve with enough gumption. The Ruach Elohim deserts us, and like idolworshippers in all generations, we worship success over humility. We basically have one or two generations to give back to communities that finally brought us some good fortune: but Jews are humans too, and we like success as much as the next guy. When Jews are conspicuously successful, their grandchildren get exiled, at best.

Are we two generations away? Are we one generation? Probably not, but who really knows? The one thing you can be sure of about Jews is that every Jew you know seems successful until we all disappear overnight.