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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.
It’s more like 20% than 30-50% if you include the whole elite. Hollywood is probably the only place where it’s 50%+, and even that’s changing slowly with Netflix, Sony and Comcast/Universal all being run by gentiles. SCOTUS is now 1/9 Jewish. The cabinet is pretty Jewish, in a relatively historically anomalous fashion, but it would be incorrect to overcorrect from that (and ultimately the president and VP are gentile). Of the West’s 8 most important financial institutions (the bulge bracket banks), only one, Goldman Sachs, has a Jewish CEO. True, 5 of the 10 richest Americans are Jewish, but if you zoom out, the 11-20 bracket has just one Jewish person (Michael Dell), so it largely reflects inflated tech valuations for Ellison, Zuck, Larry and Sergei specifically. (The richest Jew, Ellison, is a Republican and Trump supporter.)
Hanania’s post does make a good point, though, which is that a lot of the reason many major political donors are Jewish isn’t that Jews have most of the money - 83% of America’s billionaires are (overwhelmingly white) gentiles. It’s that, whatever their ideology, Jews disproportionately care about politics compared to gentiles. Scrolling through the Forbes billionaire list, the Walton family ($210bn), the Mars family ($80bn) and many others have great wealth that could vastly influence American society, but though each has members that are a little involved in politics, the capital they deploy is a tiny proportion of what they have compared to figures like Soros and Ellison.
This also explains why Jews are eg. overrepresented on the radical right as well as the radical left. As Hanania says, a substantial proportion of very rich Jews, once they pass the point on having enough money to do what they want, think about how to use their wealth to shape their environment, to have agency. This isn’t necessarily in politics, but it often is. By contrast, a much higher proportion of gentile billionaires are content to essentially leave politics to politicians, only intervening in a few categories of narrow interest to them personally (eg the Mars family’s extensive lobbying on estate taxes).
This is probably accurate. Hanania's formulation was something like this:
"Jews have +1 standard deviation IQ and also +1 standard deviation in caring about politics". Therefore, among individuals who are +3 standard deviations in each category, Jews comprise an absolute majority.
His +1 in caring about politics is the squishy piece here. He's grasping for something. There's clearly something going on beyond just IQ. Perhaps we could explain it with clannishness or, framed more positively, "working together".
High IQ isn't enough to explain Jewish dominance of industries like Hollywood (or smaller ones like diamonds). An extreme in group bias is also necessary. This would probably also explain other market dominant minorities such as the Chinese in Malaysia.
I think Hanania's characterization there (the +1 in caring) is definitely pointing at a thing that exists, but I'd phrase it more like "argues about ideas." There has been a longstanding trend in Jewish communities to engage in an especially lively debate about abstractions, and this has been handed down through the generations by (IMO) mutually-reinforcing genetics and culture. Politics is all about picking which ideas get resources, so this is one context where a tendency to ideological combativeness is a natural fit. (This argument extends to the scientific method and Anglo-American jurisprudence, both of which are formed around the core concept of ideas and advocacy in conflict. Jews have also tended to do particularly well in those areas.)
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