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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Sixth-generation American secular Jewish academics with a fertility rate of 0.9 who volunteer for 'Jewish Voice for Peace' and whose conception of Judaism is essentially identical to progressive social justice (much as is the Christianity of the average modern Episcopalian/Anglican priest) and hardcore Israeli religious Zionists intent on colonizing the West Bank and having 5+ children, who couldn't give less of a shit about American politics are two very different groups of people. "Isn't it curious that some of group argue for this, while others argue for that" can literally be applied to any large group of people, including Americans, women, software engineers and so on. It isn't that there are no examples of blatant hypocrisy, because there are, but that this is a universal part of the human condition. See all the senior white men in every big corporation who are happy to remain in power and pay themselves large amounts of money, but who kick the ladder away from any young white guys who would replace them by ensuring the junior staff are fully diverse. They're not replacing themselves with a black CEO.

the issue ought to be considered by posing the following questions:

In my opinion, the more salient question is something like this:

Did Jewish overrepresentation in 19th and 20th century intellectual movements substantially alter the trajectory of Western liberalism / progressivism, or merely accelerate it?

Jews did not, after all, invent the enlightenment (ironically some 20th century Jewish chauvinists overstated Spinoza’s importance to try to suggest they did, but this was ahistorical). Hegel, from whom Marx derived his ideas, was not Jewish. Nor were almost all of the early egalitarians and liberals of the Scottish and French enlightenments who established the worldview that would captivate America’s progressive founders, which would write the constitution, which would lead perhaps inexorably to the present day.

The contention of most Jewish reactionaries, including Moldbug and myself, is that while Ashkenazi Jews embraced liberal ideas with great zeal after the Haskalah (lacking the context of the Christian ideas from which they emerged, and to some extent excited about the emancipatory possibilities they offered) for relatively obvious reasons, they did not invent these ideas, they did not invent their popularity, and they probably did not substantially alter their trajectory.

This places these Jewish reactionaries in an older Catholic and occasionally even Protestant reactionary tradition that, though at times antisemitic, did not place Jews at the center of its ‘axis of evil’, seeing Jewish overrepresentation among communists and progressives merely as a consequence, rather than a cause, of wider sociopolitical developments. Churchill, for example, shared this view to some extent. French Catholic reactionaries did and sometimes still do consider Jews as merely a junior coalition partner of secularists, Freemasons, Protestants and others. It’s also very different to the other view on the dissident right, popularized by MacDonald and others, that Jewishness is ‘central’ to the entire development of modernity and that liberalism was basically fine before around 1920 or 1950 or some arbitrary point in the 20th century.

I don’t think it’s “hard”, but it is perhaps harder than it would have been had various late-twentieth-and-early-twenty-first century political movements not occurred.

This reminds me of Halsey English's (Jewish) debate with Nick Fuentes (Catholic) and they argue over this point. Halsey did make the correct observation that Jews were originally excluded from the Protestant banking practices during earlier American history. So as a result, they formed their own, out of which you got the large investment banks like Goldman Sachs. And then people came along later and complained that Goldman Sachs was overwhelmingly Jewish. Well that's why they originally founded Goldman Sachs, because nobody would give them jobs doing anything else.