My work has been embraced by Kevin MacDonald, a UC-Long Beach prof of psychology who has become controversial for his views of Jews. On his blog, MacDonald writes of my recent post on the Jewish presence in the establishment:
Jews won the culture war without a shot being
fired and without the losing side seeming to realize that it was a war with real
winners and real losers — where the losers have not only given up their cultural
preeminence, but have failed to stand up to the ultimate denouement: demographic
displacement from lands they had controlled for centuries. The new elite retains
its outsider feelings toward their new subjects — a hostile elite in the United
States as
it was in the Soviet Union.…Weiss seems to feel a
twinge of guilt about the role of Jews as victors in the culture war — guilt
stemming from his understanding that the new elite has some very glaring
moral failings of its own, including its own brand of ethnocentrism that
seems far deeper than anything imagined by the WASPs.The danger for Jews is that non-Jews will come to
realize the deep wellsprings of Jewish ethnocentrism and see Jewish involvement
in the displacement of European-descended peoples as resulting from ethnic
conflict over the construction of culture. Ultimately, Europeans may come to
realize that the conflict is really about the ethnic displacement of themselves
as a people.Speaking for myself, it would be difficult for me
not to have developed something of a sense of my peoplehood after delving into
the 2000-year history of Jews who were intensely concerned about preserving
their people and their culture. As I’ve come to realize, preserving one’s people
and culture is a virtual human universal.
I find a lot of what MacDonald has said elsewhere bracing and bold. He is alive to important sociological trends that few people are talking about out loud. When he speaks, feelingly, of the displacement of WASPs, he is giving voice to a declension and hurt that I’ve seen even in gentile friends of mine, and that is rarely expressed. He understands how important Jewish history is to this moment in world and U.S. history. He is concerned about Palestinian human rights and the Israel lobby’s astonishing ability to remove Palestinian suffering from the American discourse. Still, in the end I reject the embrace.
What’s troubling about MacDonald is that he’s a racialist. Everything he says always goes back to immutable racial categories. Thus the existence of the Jewish state doesn’t provoke him to look for a more idealistic social model, no it rationalizes for him a WASP ethnocentrism. Everyone in their own ethnic corner. Stay there. All that talk of European-descended peoples in the above passage. The very ethnocentrism I found stifling in my own Jewish cultural milieu and stifling too when I encountered the WASP version at my college. He’s a racialist too in that he seems always to reduce Jewish personality to certain traits. I even agree somewhat about some of these traits. For instance, I read in one of his essays that Jews are "psychologically intense." Well I’m psychologically intense, my brother is psychologically intense. But my sister isn’t. Maybe it’s a real tendency but it feels vague and a little vicious. Then there’s his rap on Jewish ethnocentrism. I agree that Jews tend to be ethnocentric. As an assimilationist Jew, I am intensely aware of this trait. The Jewish law against intermarriage smacks of racism in today’s America (even Jews agree, in opinion surveys; and mad Joe Lieberman lied about these laws when he ran for president 8 years ago). As Norman Mailer observed to the American Conservative, post-Holocaust Jews are fixated on the question, "Is it good for the Jews?" Pure ethnocentrism, and grotesque– when you consider the cultural and political power Jews have achieved in the U.S.
The problem with MacDonald’s formulations, though, is that he seems to hoot (I say "seems" because I’ve just skimmed a few of his statements) at the idea of Jewish suffering, seems to overlook the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on Jewish life. Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, once said that it took seven generations to overcome great historical grievances. I’m sure I’m misremembering his lines. But the trauma of having nearly half your people wiped out–is there any empathy for the effects of that in MacDonald?
MacDonald and I agree that the reality of America today is one where Jews are incredibly empowered. And yes I feel Jewish guilt over this, especially after what the neocons did to Iraq. I am nauseated by a lot of the ways of the meritocratic establishment– as I was nauseated by the gentile one before it. I am nauseated by the materialism that has taken over Jewish American culture, and its dehumanization of Arabs. But why does MacDonald describe America’s as a Jewish establishment? This is crude and likely wrong. It’s a mixed establishment, with Jews in many prominent roles. There’s no precision in his statements.
More important, MacDonald’s racialism removes the possibility that people can change their team, or that teams can change their character. I’m much more hopeful on this score. Cultures and tribes are changing all the time. The WASPs are a lot more attractive now, for instance, than when they were on top. They seem less materialistic, they run environmental groups, etc. I think my people are changing too. If we’re so ethnocentric, then how come 62 percent of Jews under 35 are intermarrying? There’s a universalist strain among young Jews that is getting deeper and wider all the time. Real events shaped the outlook and emotions of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation–including Russian shtetl and Holocaust. And real events–privilege and influence–will shape the outlook of the best of the next generation.
