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Notes -
The strange place of Jewishness in the culture war
I find that Jewishness has a very strange place in the culture war, and I think it merits examination. I welcome people trying to help me make sense of it and figure out exactly where the battle lines lay. Both left and right fancy themselves champions of Jewishness, and paint the other side as antisemitic. It's very strange how it breaks down, and I don't fully understand why and along which lines.
On the left, they're very eager to portray the other side as fascists, holocaust deniers, and old-fashioned anti semites. We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right. I particularly disliked the handling of Marjorie Taylor Greene last year, where she said something (which admittedly did sound stupid and crazy to me) about Rothschild, and immediately, I was hearing about "jewish space lasers" from every jewish acquaintance I know. While I do agree that Greene sounded crazy, I think there was a few steps and a lot of filling in the blanks between what she said and something that's legit antisemitic.
On the right, everyone I know is very eager to say that the left hates Jews. These people are fans of people like Bari Weiss. I'm less clear right now on exactly what delineates the claim that the left hates Jews, maybe because we've had a run over the past month of a number of cases of the left supposedly championing Jews (like in the Kanye situation). I know that one such thing that people on the right take issue with is the left being very anti-Israel. Though really, I think it does make sense that being anti-Israel isn't the same as being antisemitic.
This state of affairs makes it difficult for me to predict how my Jewish acquaintances will react to any culture warring. I've found that sometimes, the very same people are eager to claim that liberal American institutions hate Jews due to their stances on Israel, but then will also turnaround and claim that Trump was about to start shipping Jews out to the camps for the 2nd holocaust. It sort of seems to me that most of them are so eager to see oppression everywhere, they're like a leaf blowing in the wind, following whatever the current is, claiming that anyone and everyone is out to get them. Instead, to me, it seems more like (almost) no one is out to get them, and instead everyone wants to claim that their tribe is the only REAL supporters of the Jews.
So much has been said on this topic over the centuries, it's tedious.
The long and short of it is that Jews truly have «systemic power» that the left accuses White-cishet-male-etc. outgroup of having; perhaps this accusation is better understood as a deflection. They are overrepresented in positions of power, they are substantially coordinated specifically as Jews, including in those positions of power, via a rich and dense network of Jewish organizations focusing on outreach to/bargaining with/pressuring people in power – well, this «they» necessarily excluding those who neglect their ethnic identity or its illegible political terms (e.g. Greenwald), and the fruit of in-group preference that those factors provide, but in terms of total influence this isn't a noteworthy caveat – and their coordinating structures are dedicated to maintaining and furthering this power, first of all by means of promoting the doctrine of Jewish victimhood (to the point of it having become a kneejerk quasi-religious dogma, with Hitler impersonation being about as taboo as Devil worshipping was in the Middle Ages – at least the medievals could have their Festivals!), and secondly by eroding the capacity of other peoples to coordinate, except to again erode the bigger and stronger group's capacity. So we have Civil Rights support and assorted pro-Black activism including BLM, but the moment Blacks begin to build their identity on the Black Hebrew Israelite/Nation of Islam ideology (admittedly a complete schizo clown show), Jews pull the plug and we see those performative lustrations.
This isn't new. I think the difference this time is that Western elites are progressively becoming, well, less Western, and more tolerant of explicit ethnic casteism, especially when powered by genuine differences in capability: for a good illustration, see @BurdensomeCount here. Due to all people nominally having the same rights and obligations, there is no notion of noblesse oblige either, the useful bits of Western egalitarianism being combined with useful bits of Eastern might-makes-right logic.
I think in my lifetime, even with moderately pessimistic estimates (i.e. the next 15 years) I'll see the flip-flop on this topic, a sharp transition to normalization of the belief that Jews, as a politically represented ethnic fraction, are just inherently better and have more rights than Gentiles. Those demands of admitting the advantage, with the promise of recognizing it as valid, are not as clever as people like Roko may imagine.
Sorry to reply to old comment (was browsing the threads after just making an account here). But I had to ask about your bold prediction here:
Really? On what grounds will this belief be justified? Certainly not religious ones in the secular mainstream. You expect HBD beliefs to be normalized as well? You perhaps consciously exaggerate by adding 'and have more rights' though I'm not 100% sure; I have no idea what sort of rights you think would be claimed. Maybe it seems so vastly unlikely to me because I don't think mainstream sentiment tolerates such extreme dissonance as that, the message for several decades being so vigorously against that kind of claim-to-superiority. The majority of non-Jews will not tolerate it and the taboo on HBD is sufficiently severe in terms of normalized public discourse. If anything, I think the attempt to normalize the claim would be dangerous for Jews, a lot of cultural and financial power can be taken from a small minority if they offend their neighbors as what happened in Weimar Germany illustrates.
And I don't think you provided a good illustration of Western elites becoming more tolerant of explicit ethic casteism, a comment here with our idiosyncratic commentariat is not a good illustration of any mainstream elite opinion. I am not aware of any good evidence of Western elites becoming more tolerant of explicit ethnic casteism in the way you have in mind, did you have any better examples in mind?
I would ask to bet on it with terms in your favor given how unlikely I consider the proposition concerning the Jews but probably neither of us would offer enough money to make it worthwhile and give motivation to coordinate over a period as long as the next 15 years. Feel free to give more precise details of how we would determine the outcome of such a bet just for fun if you like, though.
Yes, in the highest-likelihood scenario [without AGI-scale events flipping the board and making it unrelateable to our terms], I assume that HBD beliefs, whether truly informed by science of based on folk notions of essential superiority and inferiority, will become significantly less taboo, probably as a result of popular knowledge about elites who'll begin to break away from the normal population using technologies like embryo selection/editing.
On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised by the general discrediting and collapse of wokeness among the secular population (maybe following some CRT/BLM type debacle) and, on the religious side, mainstreaming of the obsequious Evangelical Christian approach to interfaith relations, as other denominations follow with their slowdown or decline – starting with the election of and good performance by DeSantis. Also, as Israel continues to grow and increasingly assert its strategic independence, there will be even less use for the victim narrative, and organizations currently enforcing it will be divested from. In fact, this may already be happening. Greenblatt speaks like an insane cartoon villain; simply saying «yes we are strong, now stop fucking with us» will be better even in terms of optics.
And needless to say, Jews already belong to a comparatively higher caste «with more rights». Though they're not alone there (except they are alone as the group which can both assert perfect assimilation and lobby for their distant ethnostate) – regular Gentile Whites are the sole ethnic grouping that cannot plead for its interests directly, and that affordance is, in my mind, fair to call a «right», if an informal one. Formalizing or at least admitting this difference, at first coyly, then matter-of-factly, is not unthinkable.
I believe that the status quo of hysterical blank slatism and faux-egalitarianism is artificially maintained; its resistance to refutation is not self-sustaining, its arguments are just too weak and infertile, and there's a generation of people who grew up seeing DESPITE memes, followed by «forbidden» PGS/IQ infographics and pathetic shut-it-down responses. It's a minority to be sure, but one that can easily explode in numbers. This is a metastable, fragile situation.
It's sufficient for this attitude change to import more Western elites and their mores from the subcontinent. It just so happens that the first in line to the presidency of the US right now is a half-Brahmin (married to a Jew) and the most powerful person in the UK is a Punjabi. Call me racist, but I don't believe that Count is highly atypical among his kin, as far as perception of group differences is concerned. What's the proportion of Gentile Whites graduating Ivies now, anyway?
I agree that this is impractical, but we could establish a series of bets in my favor on specific assertions about mutually exclusive scenarios towards the ultimate outcome, most of which I'd necessarily lose.
Then sure, Jews have that right, along with various other ethnic minorities, including even specific Gentile white ethnic groups like Italians and so on (although of course those interest groups became much less vigorous as they integrated into the white mainstream and their ties weakened. But my point is that such interest groups are still around at the local level all over the place in America). The fact that Jews share this right with other minorities makes it very weak evidence for your specific claims about future of Jewish status and its public articulation in America. I grant that they manage to do more with the right than various other minorities, sure.
I also don't think the HBD denial is sustainable in the long run either by the way, but I think the issue will still be sensitive enough that no group is going to be having some kind of literal superiority, in the mainstream, predicated upon HBD details for quite a while if ever in the public sphere. That said the exact timeline on accepting HBD details I'm pretty unsure of. Maybe it will relate to development of bio-technology interacting with genetic details. You read the Jewish scholar Nathan Cofnas's use of HBD details with regard to Jews to argue against various alternative theories of their success, like that of Kevin MacDonald? Is that the sort of use of HBD details you imagine in public discourse with regard to Jews? He was not trying to argue for anything beyond that with it though, let alone legitimate future explicit formal privileges as far as I know.
Your examples of Indian elites in the west are interesting. I agree it would probably be one indicator of increased ethnic caste-ism if a lot more people with Indian cultural background became Western leaders, although I would still want to see the actual evidence and details of them bringing in caste-ist tendencies; the most elite, public-facing could easily be the most culturally integrated. I did hear about Indian executives in American tech bringing Caste-ist discriminatory tendencies with them though (against fellow Indians from lower castes), there were some lawsuits.
How will it relate to the tendency you predict if the American courts strike down affirmative action, barely implicit racial discrimination (like against the Asians at Harvard) in elite universities? I take all the recent hubbub with regard to that as evidence of how uncomfortable Americans remain with explicit racial privileges even for unfortunate groups, let alone already successful groups. I agree without checking the exact statistics that Jews do quite well in American universities for various reasons (some combination of connections, talent, wealth, general success in America, good networking; perhaps their merit advantage has declined in America with Asian immigrants and so on), that is one reason why they definitely wouldn't need or desire to claim any literal formal privileges with associated legitimation through HBD. I don't think they have much incentive at all to radically rock the boat in terms of public claims to privilege.
By the way, is part of your general prediction that American anti discrimination laws will be repealed to allow for the greater privileges you imagine?
And also, unrelated, but hope you are doing well in Turkey or wherever you are now after fleeing Russia, per your previous sharing of personal situation on forum.
Thanks for your concern, I'll probably manage, though I had more confidence in that before crypto crash.
Italians not only don't make as much of a use of their identity, but it is qualitatively a lesser card, they cannot insert themselves into conversations about «marginalized peoples» and being targeted and needing police protection in their houses of worship and so on, they cannot very well collect data and wring their hands about the Holocaust of free admixing or falling birth rates in the Italian community, and of course they have no capacity (nor, frankly, interest) to lobby for the national Italian benefit. Armenians have learned recently, too, that not all diasporas are equal, as their homeland was getting pummeled with Israeli weapons. (To her credit, even the staunch Zionist Pelosi made indignant noises and gestures, unlike us «Orthodox brothers», so I don't hold this war against Americans, Jewish or not).
But you are right that there are Gentile white subgroups with lobbying capacity. It's only the central case of whites, normie cishet WEIRD Americans of Anglo-German stock and those who have politically joined them, who cannot advance their collective interests. Some say they don't have those interests and just aren't «a thing», but all sorts of sociometric proxy data correlated with their identity, and identitarian concerns underlying e.g. Trumpism, suggest the opposite; had they their own think tanks and advocacy groups to coordinate explicitly, I believe they'd have been a thoroughly dominant force.
Not quite. I believe that wokeness justifying affirmative action and founded on the denial of inherent group differences is becoming a toxic asset on its own, both due to the general dilapidation of its supporting rhetoric and due to getting in the way of new, non-White high-performing groups, which are immune to White-targeted guilt-tripping and can organize somewhat. Progressive Jewish organizations (chiefly ADL, of course) which are committed to enforcement of woke views in the public discourse are becoming a liability to the community (which is also changing demographically from something out of a Coen Brothers movie towards something akin to Lakewood, NJ). So Jews with less progressive, more neocon-like and Zionist inclinations, Bari Weiss and her ilk, will feel encouraged to spearman the «revolution» against it, regaining the trust and goodwill of the broader society that's currently being expended, and appropriating the credit of Gentiles like Sailer (who have been speaking against wokeness, and getting silenced, for decades). You can take it as a more or less conspiratorial and bitter spin (e.g. seeing Weiss and Weinstein/IDW and other clowns as trial balloons at seizing the contrarian narrative), but it can be read as a simple, opportunistic response to incentives in real time.
Cofnas isn't a specifically «Jewish scholar», he's more of a good-faith autistic scholar who feels offended on behalf of his people and gets a bit biased; I understand his opposition to MacDonald as something very natural, but ironic given surnames of people who have precluded his own ability to advance in the academia. (On balance, pro-KMac papers in that sequence are stronger, but some parts of the story did get damaged).
I believe he is a true believer in race-blind meritocracy and would have been that way even if his people weren't at the top of HBD totem pole.
Speaking of incentives, I just don't see how Jews can let go of ethnic organizing and its fruit after largely giving up on wokeness and the eternal victim card, so some sort of privilege will emerge and be acknowledged. No positive discrimination, in the form of literal allotments, will be needed. In the end, if your company's board of directors is largely made of one ethnicity because that ethnicity just has higher board-of-directors PGS, and they act in their collective ethnic interests in ways not available to others, and this is not framed as redressing past wrongs, providing support to vulnerable groups and leveling the playing field – what can such a position be called, if not superior?
Jews didn't attain most of their powerful position in society through wokeness and the victim card, they can maintain their position just fine without any need for the kind of explicit discourse shift on the matter you predict. In fact I don't think recent wokeness was even all that beneficial for the Jews, when whites are purposefully disprivileged at high levels that includes the elite Jews that would be competing for those positions; many liberal-left Jews that supported these things are sincerely ideologically universalist and I have not yet seen strong evidence that their positions would be explained primarily in functionalistic terms. I do better understand the prediction when you clarify that you don't have in mind literally formal discriminations, which be would be rather strange.
So I am making the fairly simple to defend prediction of a continuation of the status quo, more or less. I think there is a massive burden of proof on those predicting significant shifts on such sensitive matters. I mentioned Cofnas as that's a good recent example of someone using HBD details to try to refute hostile analyses with other reasons for Jewish success in America; to ask precisely, is that the kind of discourse you imagine being used to legitimate Jewish success alongside the added value judgement that Jews are better and have more rights (by rights you apparently just mean social permission to ethnically organize and inhabit high positions and so on? You say they already do this, so I don't see why the discourse would need to change on it. Acknowledging the existing situation so explicitly just invites hostility).
Also, would you say your position on Jewish power and reasons for it is somewhere between KMac and Cofnas? Should I read KMac if I want the fleshed out details you have in mind with the claims about Jews in power and their doings? Feel free to recommend any other author if there is one with the canonical analysis, presentation of details for you. I'm sure we would disagree on plenty of details, extent but we don't need to go into all of that as I could assume them for sake of argument and still disagree I think on the basic claim about the discourse shift you predict to justify, legitimate, etc Jewish power in next few decades; groups think they are better than the rest all the time but they don't easily get the rest of society to accept such claims in the open and that basic fact plus society's remaining uncomfortability with HBD discourse even if scientific facts are accepted is what makes me fairly confident about your prediction being mistaken; I think you under-estimate how much such claims based on HBD details would be intuitively repugnant to the average American and indeed most liberal-left universalistic Jews regardless of their power and I don't know how I might show that to you.
This state of affairs can hold without any especially significant discourse shift, I also think, which maybe is another reason I am confident:
Also, on this:
I think WASP elites choose not to advance interests on ethnic lines, this is a matter of ideology. I do not believe they are vigorously prevented by other groups, basically. This is however a complex issue where multiple factors may be at play but I incline against explanations where them being prevented by other groups play a major causal role. Their own ideology is more important and this is what I think happened historically with WASP elites in America by the way, in the 20th century. I can cite to you the book "The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America" by Eric Kaufmann, the narrative of which is summarized as such:
It seems to me that understanding this historical sequence properly where the facts are all settled can help us evaluate contemporary claims about these groups, so feel free to dispute this further.
Thanks for your effortful comments but I've lost interest in this chain. There are many nitpicks and objections we could discuss (e.g.: Affirmative Action does not substantially harm Jews who, having very high average scores, make it in regardless, but it reduces the relative representation of White Gentiles in prestigious institutions, and accordingly the political power of this competing demographic; iirc Sailer had addressed this years ago, as well as Jewish opposition to AA, that didn't survive this basic observation). What would come out of it, though?
I basically agree with KMac's lens of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, provided in the Culture of Critique. Religions in general are group evolutionary strategies, though the effect is understudied. I also accept broad strokes of his characterizations. Where we differ is in value judgements. I am not that enamored with Northwestern Europeans and their Church-molded mentality, and not that unsympathetic to Jewish traits, doctrines and approaches. Even pretty silly and biased critiques like The Authoritarian Personality have more truth than strongly identifying Whites like KMac, who only recognize humblebrag-worthy faults like «too altruistic» or «not clannish», are willing to admit; if anything, my people have been illustrating this spectacularly since February, and no doubt many NWEs would have gone down the same path with modest prodding. It's not just a libel.
The quasi-conspiratorial issues, leftism, ingroup preference, whatever, those are anodyne. The most devastating and perhaps the most contentious point of those KMac raises is the trait of self-deception prevalent in Jews both on individual and organizational level, its unusual strength, unironically reminding one of doublethink, and its scarily opportunistic nature; though perhaps we need another term, because other peoples self-deceive too, just not so productively on average. Either one sees it, or one does not. It changes everything about the topic, and precludes the possibility of productive engagement between the two camps. In my mind, it's an undeniable reality that cripples your observations like «many liberal-left Jews that supported these things are sincerely ideologically universalist and I have not yet seen strong evidence that their positions would be explained primarily in functionalistic terms».
A very typical case in point:
And so it goes, into rather absurd places, including the victim card:
Or straight from the horse's mouth, right at the top of the hierarchy of the party preaching universalism:
Stunning and brave. (Can you be at once completely Chinese, pro-PRC and completely American? It seems you can't even work for civilian Chinese semiconductor companies and be American these days. This is the qualitative difference in diasporal lobbying power).
This self-contradictory doublethink, the demand to support your double standard in deed and vociferously deny the existence of double standard in word, comes naturally to those universalists, and it is swallowed without objection by Americans, so I do not believe there will be crippling problems with the transition to a more explicit state of affairs.
Yeah, it's a big topic where's confident opinions come from holistic impressions based on lots of history, contemporary anecdotes and rhetoric, etc so reasonable to end it with that; knowing where you agree with KMac, I can read him if I want lots more details on your perspective. Obviously there are a lot of crank-ish commentators on this topic so good to know what to look into beyond my present indefinite questioning of your perspective here.
I see how the point about self-deception would eliminate the contribution of various observations, and that actually helps me understand your justification for sudden shift in discourse to ethno-centric HBD legitimation quite a bit. So reading KMac would be very helpful for me to see that, yes.
Even harder to analyze than Jewish power is future trajectory of ideological justifications, discourse; seems like intuitions about what is or is not acceptable and pace of change on them are based on one's reception of the vibes. As one needs not just confidence on Jewish double-think but acceptance in rest of society. I do hope the IQ HBD taboo gets eradicated, awfully annoying in dealing with all sorts of mundane policy issues.
My point with the book reference about WASPs was just to point to the extent native American forces contributed to the same left-liberal political dynamics that helped eliminate WASP hegemony, which could undercut some of the more ambitious claims about how non-WASP elite actors contributed to their decline. But we don't need to prosecute such details further, though I do recc the book if you are curious about 20th century WASP decline.
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