Will the explosion of antisemitism here in the US in the aftermath of 10/7 move liberal US Jews out of the Democratic column? Probably not.
I’ve been around a liberal Jew this week and she blames the Hamas atrocity all on Netanyahu and the settlers in the West Bank that were sucking up IDF soldiers to protect them instead of guarding the border.
It’s interesting to listen to her: she is aligned with the Narrative right down the line: Russian collusion in 2016, insurrection on January 6. getting free charging for her EV. And so on.
Now, I have the conceit that all politics is a lie, including “and” and “the.” Everything’s a Narrative. So, even though I support most conservative ideas and GOP politicians, I don’t kid myself that any GOP or conservative idea is anything other than a grift. I suppose that is true for most of us. Maybe it’s because we understand that the US is ruled by the Uniparty and people like you and me don’t really count.
Still, it is a bit jolting to realize how deeply your liberal friends really believe.
Silly me: of course they do, and especially right now when liberals must know deep down that things are going wrong with the liberal project. I mean, Russian collusion? Really? I know: it cannot be, it really cannot be that a yahoo like Donald Trump could be elected President of the United States; there must be a conspiracy! That was the point of all those yard signs after 2016 — liberal women telling themselves and their friends that they still believe, and that all the liberal agenda, from Black Lives Matter to transgenders is the royal road to justice.
That is the way with cults. I wrote about it back at the moment that the Mueller Report came out and said No Collusion. See, there was this UFO cult back in the Fifties that prophesied the end of the world. But, luckily, aliens were coming and would ave them and take them off the Earth. Leon Festinger and his “researchers were investigating end-of-the-world groups when all of a sudden a report of an actual group prophesying the end of the world got reported in the paper.“
What Festinger et al. found was that When Prophecy Fails the believers do not just give up. Instead they intensify their belief; they talk to each other and agree that, despite that fact that the end of the world did not occur on the prophesied day, well, they must have got the numbers wrong, but the end of the world is still nigh. It has to be!
Now, in my view the liberal belief in politics as the royal road to justice is just such a prophetic cult — albeit a very large one. And it’s always telling us that just one more program will do the trick and save the victims. And when it doesn’t, well, it must be because of the racist-sexist-homophobes and their hate. So the answer is to come down heavier on the oppressors and double the number of DEI administrators, and prevent the haters from spreading their hate on social media.
At some point the Narrative doesn’t persuade any more and the cult collapses. Perhaps when the cult runs out of other peoples’ money, or when the cult leader runs off with the cult’s money.
But I would say that our liberal friends are not at that point. Not yet.
And so I doubt that liberal Jews will be voting Republican. Not next year, or the year after that. But maybe when their EVs are bursting into flames and the electricity system is collapsing with frequent black-outs, and the price of electricity is soaring into the stratosphere, and the failure of green energy has resulted in a economic meltdown.
Maybe then.