Tablet: “Trump is Turning Me Liberal”

As my last few posts show, I’ve been perusing Tablet, the Jewish magazine, today.

The degree of paranoia throughout this magazine is really quite something.

In “Donald Trump Is Turning Me Liberal”, James Kirchick discusses “the real reasons Jewish conservatives hate Trump”. The article’s title appears to be something of a non-sequitur, given the histrionics of the piece’s first sentences:

Despite being gay and Jewish, I have never identified as a “minority” in America. Call it white privilege or deluded optimism, but the expansiveness of the American creed always convinced me that Bill Clinton was right when he said, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Yet the increasing likelihood that the Republican Party will nominate Donald Trump to be president of the United States—and the enthusiasm his populist, nativist, and jingoistic campaign is eliciting from a shockingly high number of my fellow Americans—has made me question, for the first time in my 32 years as a citizen of the greatest country on earth, whether our society is on the road to violent disintegration.

Not since living in Europe have I felt more aware of my Jewishness than these past few weeks…

So… a gay Jew with a long history of P.C. platitudes about the glories of Diversity™ and the evils of Christianity as a unifying identity, is only now ‘turning liberal’? Precisely what kind of ‘conservative’ was he beforehand? Oh wait… I smell ‘Neocon’.

Some representative paranoia, that in the process acknowledges the disproportionate role Jews have played in shaping the U.S.’s disastrous Multiculturalism model post-1965:

It’s long been said of anti-Semitism that it always starts but never ends with the Jews. With the rise of Donald Trump, I fear we are seeing this phenomenon in reverse. Jews are one of the most popular minorities in the United States and it’s inconceivable to most Americans that “it could happen here,” that the sort of violent anti-Semitism so sadly familiar throughout history and pervasive around the rest of the world might rear its ugly head on our shores. It is inconceivable that a leading presidential candidate could ever get away with saying the things about Jews that Trump currently says about Mexicans or Muslims.

Yet that assumption is not one that we can reassure ourselves with any longer. A staple of anti-Semitic complaint from the Nazis to Donald Trump’s newfound friends in the Klan is that Jews are always and everywhere the devious orchestrators of racial integration. Rootless cosmopolitans, Jews allegedly promote immigration and miscegenation so as to bring about a more diverse society in which they can sublimate their own ethnic difference. Through this “mongrelization,” Jews will precipitate the demise of white, Christian communities, thereby destroying the last vestige of resistance to their assertion of pernicious control.

Unlike other anti-Semitic memes, there is truth in this observation, though not of course for the reasons that Nazis and white supremacists think. Jews have indeed played disproportionate roles in struggles for racial equality, from the movement against South African apartheid to the cause of civil rights in the United States. And while Jews felt called to these movements by faith, universalistic political commitments, or an innate sense of justice, doing so was also in their communal self-interest. A country that is politically pluralistic, open to new ideas and new people, ethnically diverse, and respectful of religious difference, is a country that will naturally be safer for Jews than a country that is none of these things. This, I believe, is why so many Jews, foreign policy hawks or not, innately fear Donald Trump.

These last few weeks, I’ve come to appreciate the Jewish identification with liberalism (both in its classical and modern American political form) more than at any other point in my life, and in a way no history book or sermon by a rabbi could relate. The fate of Jewish life in the West is inextricably bound to democracy, pluralism, religious tolerance and ethnic harmony. If there’s a silver lining to the resistible rise of Donald Trump, it’s that it has forced us to realize this truth.

So, Der Trumpenfuhrer has heightened Kirchick’s sense of Jewish Identity.

That’s nice.

And perhaps Kirchick and Co’s heightened sense of Jewish Identity will, in turn, draw out a contrast to Gentiles, therein heightening the goyim’s sense of White Christian Identity.

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