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Political Realignment

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Now, this is serious. A highly successful, articulate immigrant group that can donate big and that’s over-represented in culture-making institutions. That would be a massive loss for the Democrats.

I’ve been puzzled for years why American Jews are so devoted to the Left that despises everything that matters to them. Still, I don’t think that the posr-October 7 moment would last and there will be a serious political realignment among Jewish voters. It will take much more to peel Jews away from the Left.

29 responses to “Political Realignment”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “why American Jews are so devoted to the Left”

    Is it maybe cynicism? The little bit I know of Jewish culture is not about being open and up front and simple ‘sincerity’…
    Lots of people (not just Jews) just don’t believe a lot of the worst left (and right) wing public talking points.
    I pretty much lost sympathy with the Palestinians when I decided they were telling the truth – they want to kill/expell all Jews in Israel (maybe barely tolerate those who would agree to life under an Islamic state which is what they would create).
    Many on the left have idiotic (no other word comes to mind) fantasies about a ‘secular’ single state (look around… how many of those are there in the region?).
    On the right support for Israel has its problems (like evangelicals who see it as an instrument for brining about the end of the world).
    But when it comes to Israel… the left is definitely worse.

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    1. Avi Avatar
      Avi

      @cliff arroyo
      I am sure you are familiar with the concepts of taqiyya and kitmān, a form of dissimulation and concealment of one’s actual convictions in Islamic culture.
      [Czesław Miłosz wrote a number of essays on this in Zniewolony umysł – The Captive Mind]. I believe that in Arabo-islamic culture many if not most people are incapable of telling the truth and even of distinguishing between fiction and truth. It’s not congenital, it’s a cultural thing: I have long stopped believing in what they say as they are unreliable to an extent that is unimaginable to a Western mind.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “I have long stopped believing in what they say”

        Well listen to what they say*, watch what they do… solve for the difference. I think it’s overwhelmingly clear they’re not close to accepting either a 2 state solution or the idiotic leftist dream of a single secular state.
        It’s also clear that Palestinian ‘culture’ is broken with parents doing everything they can to assure that their children will never know peace and nothing Israel can do (beyond no longer existing) will satisfy them.

        *it was also only clear after the internet that what Palestinians told western diplomats/journalists in English wasn’t at all remotely close to what they were saying to each other in Arabic.

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  2. overgrownhobbit Avatar
    overgrownhobbit

    “see it as an instrument for brining about the end of the world”

    They are mistaken, nonetheless my evangelical friends see it as bringing about the return of Christ. Which is yes, a problem for religious Jews. (Secular Israelis make bank on it).

    As long as the Left continues to offer Christ-free Utopianism (What Dr. Sowell referred to as the unconstrained vision “of the annointed”), the Left remains more attractive, despite being ultimately deadly.

    I suspect that is just the entropy of human nature at work, not anything to do with ethnicity.

    Only a miracle would serve to upturn the laws of thermodynamics. Which we have, should we avail ourselves of it.

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  3. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    “I’ve been puzzled for years why American Jews are so devoted to the Left”

    Secular and secularized Jews in the US – the vast majority of American Jews in fact – seem to have replaced the messianic yearning for the kingdom of justice that is one of the hallmarks of Judaism as a religion, with a system of Leftist beliefs that plays the role that their ancestors’ faith did when they were still practicing it.

    There must also be some sort of guilt trip at work: most people who become successful professionally and/or economically tend to abandon their youthful idealistic beliefs. Not secular Jews, though: in fact, the richer and the more successful, the more leftist their beliefs. Virtue signalling at its very worst: these people really do believe that Hamas terrorists are freedom fighters and that Israel is an intruder and an interloper in the area and that if all the Jews were like them the world would be a much better place.

    The idea that you can be a Jew in a purely ethnic sense, without any religious observance, no knowledge of the language or of the rites, is a very American thing, just like New Jersey “Italians” three or four generations removed from their immigrant ancestors who keep harping on their Italianness just because their surname is Carmine or Giuliani.

    Well, they are in for a big surprise: at this rate of mixed marriages and assimilation, US secular Jews are fast disappearing into the mainstream, to the point that they are becoming an irrelevance, both culturally and politically.

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  4. ed Avatar
    ed

    “That would be a massive loss for the Democrats. ”

    Biden has been very soft handed with Israel and he’s not of the same camp as the academic far leftists.

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  5. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    I think it is too early to say whether such a realignment will happen. Look at blue cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles. Everyone there knows that their quality of life has deteriorated tremendously, that is not a pleasant thing to have shampoo locked behind cabinets, homeless tents everywhere, open drug consumption, human feces on sidewalks, and so on. But come election time, it’ll be back to “orange man bad, fascism on the ballot.”

    People can tolerate a lot of cognitive dissonance in the service of their core beliefs.

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      After all… you can always order shampoo from amazon.

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      1. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        It’s gotten so bad that even CNN did a story on it. While they were filming, they saw this organized shoplifting gangs in action lol. This was in San Francisco, btw. So they asked a store customer what they thought about basic stuff locked behind a cabinet. Would you believe it, he said “this reminds me of a police state, everything locked down like that.”

        This is a person observing the same reality as you and I and all he can come up with is a trite lib talking point, divorced from reason. No, you fucking idiot, this is literally the opposite of a police state! This is when the police stops doing their most essential duty. My heart sank when I saw this response. I guess things need to get a lot worse before they come to their senses, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          The libs love suffering. They feel so guilty for existing that they experience deep pleasure when they get battered. The source of this profound self-hatred, this desire for self-immolation is unclear to me.

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          1. methylethyl Avatar
            methylethyl

            They view suffering as virtuous. Their whole moral/political schtick is to identify with the suffering people of the world. The good people. That means any time they suffer (not that they’re willing to put up with much of it, but you know, a hangnail-level thing), this makes them more like the suffering people they identify with. Moral reinforcement. This also explains why they’re not interested in addressing the *causes* of that suffering or doing anything to alleviate it. The suffering is itself virtuous.

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            1. Stringer Bell Avatar
              Stringer Bell

              Then there’s another kind of liberal, the kind who loves to entertain luxury beliefs, which are ideas and policies that confer status on the upper class, while inflicting tremendous costs on the lower classes.

              Liked by 1 person

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              1. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                Are they even different people? I assumed it was a case of “I can smoke pot and screw around and not suffer any negative material consequences, therefore none of this should be illegal/stigmatized, and if others suffer negative consequences from it, that’s because of discrimination and evil Christian bigots. But I still hate people who judge me for it.” I mean, they identify with the suffering so engendered even more that way, right? They’re all united in being the victims of prudish religious killjoys. And having to live in a world where there are people who don’t wholeheartedly endorse your lifestyle is exactly the same as being financially ruined by your drug habit and court-ordered child support, eh?

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              2. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                The funny thing is that all the high-income people who advocate for childlessness, divorce, drugs and BLM live in very white and Asian gated communities, have very strong marriages and practice extremely traditional forms of parenting. I observe this all the time among fellow feminist professors who denounce “the oppressive heteropatriarchal marriage” and then run home to make dinner for their adored husbands and bake cookies for their four kids. There is so much hypocrisy here. Nobody wants the lifestyle of shiftless loneliness and pot-soaked uselessness for themselves or their kids, yet some people are eager to propagandize it to others.

                Liked by 1 person

              3. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                Well, if you encourage everyone else to make poor life choices that you’d never let your kids make… they’ll never compete with your kids in the job market.

                Liked by 1 person

  6. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    “The source of this profound self-hatred, this desire for self-immolation is unclear to me.”
    It provides them with the much-coveted victim status they so crave even while not suffering any ill as actual victims, which they are not, as they are some of the most successful agents in neo-liberal society, which, in turn, fills them with the guilt feeling that feeds their need for victim status.m
    Very perverse, my friend.

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  7. ed Avatar
    ed

    I just can’t stop thinking about how the attack was allowed to take place. How these terrorists were able to simply mount a frontal assault, commit mass murder, and kidnap so many, and waltz back to Gaza.

    Little bits are starting to emerge about this fiasco, and it’s hard to think of words to express how monumental Israel’s failure to protect their own was:
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/israeli-military-had-warning-of-hamas-training-for-attack-reports-say

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “how the attack was allowed to take place”

      They didn’t have any defense against the oct 7 attacks at least partly because Palestinians have never before shown any ability to mount any kind of effective multi-pronged attack, it’s just pointilistic, often pointless and targetless violence inflicted on anyone they can. That’s their brand.
      And not only have they never been able to mount anything remotely like Oct 7 before, they haven’t since as they’ve retreated to their traditional tactics of not having any tactics for longer than three seconds.
      That’s one reason I suspect outside…. help cough russia coiugh though I now think the Palestinians weren’t disciplined enough to actually carry out the full plan (which would have been far worse so that’s one reprieve).

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        I think it had to be Russia. There are many signs of the Russian trace.

        People think that if America withdraws from world affairs that won’t have consequences. But the result is always that much worse dudes pour into the vacuum.

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      2. ed Avatar
        ed

        Nothing I’ve seen so far points to any extremely sophisticated attack. They literally just rushed and attacked directly with literal bulldozers, paragliders, etc. none of that is advanced weaponry or sophistication.
        Their level of coordination was surprising, but nothing else should have been so surprising as to have taken the entire Israeli military apparatus napping.

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        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          “Their level of coordination was surprising”

          Exactly! When have they ever done coordinated attacks before? I’m leaning toward thinking that the plan was a bit more sophisticated and the goal more disruptive but they got intoxicated about the idea of killing Jews and that’s all that happened (there’s one phone call by one of the attackers to his parents and just shrieks “I’m killing Jews!” over and over).

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  8. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “they’ll never compete with your kids in the job market”

    And we’re back to Marx and class interests….

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      For the record, I don’t think PMC white people who advocate lifestyles for the poor that they would never want for themselves or their kids are consciously doing it to eliminate the competition. But I do think it should be suggested whenever they say that shite out loud, because it’s so cringey. The other option is that they really, truly believe that poor minorities are incapable of achieving the behavioral standards to which they hold themselves. Just can’t control themselves. Which seems pretty dang racist.

      Is there a magic third option that I’m missing?

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        (I don’t know very many of these people IRL, so it’s like studying an alien culture)

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        1. Stringer Bell Avatar
          Stringer Bell

          I think this is one example of a situation where ideology trumps material interests. I graduated from this engineering school in India that’s very, very hard to get into (you take an exam that has a <1% acceptance rate, etc.), and my alumni chat group has tons of super high-achieving individuals. They were all sad when the supreme court decision striking down affirmative action came down. I was like, jesus, even if this ruling was unfair or immoral I would still support it because it gives a slightly better chance for my kids to get into top schools. But no, these people are so consumed by ideology that it has hijacked even their basic biological instincts of wanting a better life for their kids. Insane stuff.

          Imagine supporting a law that makes your kid with perfect test scores ineligible for an admissions spot, in favor of a black/latino kid with a 50 percentile score. That’s what ideology does to you.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            You decided to have kids! That’s the best news.

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      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “I don’t think … are consciously doing ”

        My guess it’s about 50/50…. there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on there… and the last thing I want to do is dive in and try to sort out the strands of that ball of yarn…..

        And… Marx was right about a lot of stuff in descriptive terms (though his recommendations and predicitons were crap).

        Liked by 1 person

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          50/50

          Huh. I have a hard time imagining a world in which anything I advocated for would have enough real-world clout to affect a huge slice of the population, so that seems weird. Is it that different for people who live in the Academics-and-Doctors universe? Or are we talking about pure animal instinct wearing a reasonable-discourse costume, and not a calculated real-world strategy?

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      3. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        It’s not conscious but it’s still very real. The most “anti-racist” people are the biggest stinking racists around, even if they don’t know this about themselves.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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