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"Cringe" is a super useful word, IMO. So is "creep". These words occupy the space that "gay" and "lame" used to occupy before they were cancelled.
The best way to defeat a label, of course, is to own it. You want to call me a Yankee Doodle Dandy? That's cool. I'm the gayest, lamest, Yankee Doodle Dandy you ever saw.
Still, in 2023, no one wants to be cringe or creepy. These words still have power.
You know what was cringe? Alt-right people dressing up in Hawaiian shirts and carrying Tiki torches. You know what's not cringe? Bill Ackman waging a crusade against Harvard wokists.
Wait a second, you say. Who gets to decide what is cringe, and what isn't?
Answer: The Elite. The elite gets to decide who is
lame and gaycringe and creepy and who is not. Control of the narrative is what defines the elite.Do you see where I'm going with this? Richard Hanania does. In one of his less annoying pieces he makes a great point about the possibility of a Jewish realignment.
When you correct for IQ, when you correct for tribalism, Jews are something like 30-50% of the elite population in the US. Look at university presidents, look at cabinet members, look at Nobel Prize winners. You're bound to notice something.
Jews are under attack in the Western World right now. We are seeing the largest outbreak of anti-semitism since WWII. And it's the far left that is responsible. If, and it's a big if, this results in American Jews abandoning the left, it could end with the biggest political realignment since the 1970s. Already we see the the strands of a nascent movement among the cognescenti. Is an intellectual, philo-Semitic conservative movement possible? I think, surprisingly, the answer is yes.
Populists are cringe and creepy. Elite realignments are cool and edgy. The fashion barber pole has made another rotation and the mustaches are slightly less ironic.
A very big if. Look at the favorability by religions, of religions as of 2022: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/03/15/americans-feel-more-positive-than-negative-about-jews-mainline-protestants-catholics/pf_2023-03-15_religion-favorability_00-08/
Everyone seems to like Jews (Muslims are not included in this chart as observers), while Jews hate Evangelicals (their biggest non-Mormon supporters) and prefer atheists to any other religious group. Just look at that staggering +39, -40 gap! Truly a case of unrequited love. I can't stress enough how much normal rules of friend-enemy distinction do not apply here.
What happens once the fighting stops? There was the Second Intifada as well, from 2000-2005. That didn't seriously shake the commitment of US Jews to progressivism, or apparently cause Jews to favour Evangelicals (their staunchest defenders) over Muslims, who were suicide-bombing them. Maybe for a brief time they did but they soon returned to base tendencies. Or consider any of the other (numerous) Arab-Israeli conflicts. This latest Hamas-Israel war is not an unprecedented event. We've seen this many times before.
So what if Mr Altman tweets that he's unhappy and confused about the US left? We can pull up DALLE-3 or GPT-4 and observe how they insert 'ethnically ambiguous' as a search prompt to brown up Swedish bathhouses. Actions speak louder than tweets. He's no conservative.
And finally, what kind of Jewish intellectual conservativism might we hypothetically get, if Hanania is right? An end to mass migration or Neoconservatism 2.0, Back to the Sandbox? The former has much more evidence behind it, that's the kind of thing Jews tended to support in the past.
Hanania values intelligence too highly. I bet David Frum, Richard Perle and so on are really intellectually sophisticated, so what? Their ideas were extremely harmful, they got us into disastrous wars that mainly benefitted their co-ethnics in Israel. Just because someone is high IQ or well-educated, it does not follow that they're going to be helpful to you. IQ is only a measurement of talent, not of benevolence or even correctness. People here love to worship Von Neumann's intellect - he was amongst the strongest voices in favour of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the USSR. If people had listened to him on this single most important issue, way more important than anything else he did, how many megadeaths would it have been? A bloody, unnecessary war with perilous long-term consequences in terms of precedent-setting... Sound familiar? Better a wise, cautious conservative than a clever, aggressive progressive.
Do we expect sponsorship of social conservativism from the people who were pushing the complete opposite for many decades, based on... no evidence at all, just Hanania's hunch that elite Jews might be turning on progressives? This seems very unlikely. Restriction of mass immigration is also very unlikely. Maybe we get some restrictions on Muslim immigration which is better than nothing. But even so, why would that happen now and not before, given the very long history of Arab-Israeli wars? The http address below speaks for itself:
https://hias.org/news/why-a-jewish-organization-is-suing-to-stop-the-muslim-ban/
More freedom? Probably not. For example, Jews tend to favour gun control: https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/september-2022-national-survey-of-jewish-voters/
The Jewish demographic simply is not conservative. Highly urban, highly progressive, nationalist-towards-Israel-before-others (see Pollard and his defenders), wealthy assetholders in a great position to make gains from mass immigration, plus ideologically inclined towards mass migration. At best we get faux-conservatism, RINO conservatism like the Republican party of yore, which is not really desirable IMO. Rubber-stamping social progressivism with a short time lag, lowering taxes for the wealthy, steady movement towards the total state, mass immigration and futile foreign wars is not very conservative.
Jews turning conservative is an inevitability based on demographic trends, but it's unlikely to happen in the near term future, and relevantly a lot of them may not vote conservative- democrats have historically been more than capable of cutting deals with not-progressive groups for support, relevantly including ultra-orthodox Jews, who have, uh, personal reasons in opposing a reduction of the welfare state(although I suppose if there's republican dominance of a place, they're probably capable of picking the strong horse to get the best possible deal- it's just that they mostly live in New York, not Texas).
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