I read the New York magazine profile of Chelsea Clinton hungering for any evidence of something idealistic she believes in. No, she seems insipid, a pale copy of her parents, with a New York lifestyle. She’s on the board of a ballet company, but tThere isn’t a shred of what her mother expressed when she graduated from Wellesley 40 years ago, during Vietnam:
our
prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life, including tragically
the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate,
ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.
People are for Obama because they want a larger sense of meaning to their American lives. And in that sense the Clinton era is over. Hillary talked about it some times, but the Clintons never offered us a "politics of meaning." Bill’s one great accomplishment was economic growth in the 90s. Chelsea’s life seems to have drained into those materialist values. She works for a hedgefund.
Of course I look at it from a Jewish perspective. My people came inside with the Clintons. The most philosemitic administration in history (per Frum, from the next philosemitic administration). The two Supreme Court appointees were Jewish. The big donors to Hillary’s campaign are Jewish and Chelsea’s boyfriend is Jewish (and works at Goldman Sachs), as was her father’s most famous lover. The establishment has been by my estimate half-Jewish. The Camp David negotiating team was almost all Jewish. When John O’Keeffe writes to me that now is the time for Israel to cut a deal he’s right. It seems like this era is already passing, that the Jewish arrival-into-power generation didn’t stand for enough–besides wealth and the Iraq war–and so now it’s going into the dustbin of history. The Vietnam debacle ended a blueblood establishment that went out in the domestic convulsions of the 70s, and the great minds that gave us Iraq will give way, even if he loses, to an Obama-fostered rising class of assimilating intermarrying leftleaning ethnics who don’t play identity politics and want to reinspire our democracy. I can’t wait.
I always use the word meritocracy to describe my generation but it’s not precise. What is the meritocracy? It was a ruling class that melded the burgeoning communications industries with Wall Street and global entrepreneurialism, i.e., hedge funds and the internet. When they were young the meritocrats made the first cut via standardized tests, and these tests gave them the sense that they were the best, chosen democratically; and the meritocracy was pervaded by elitist prestige thinking. Few of them had kids in the Iraq war, and they felt no personal connection with Bush’s war, which their representative almost universally suported. And yes, my people did especially well in the meritocracy. As I reported yesterday, Pew shows that 55 percent of Reform Jewish households make over $100,000 a year, three times the national percent. We brought our entrepreneurialism to the American economy and brought our worldview to the ruling class. When 9/11 happened, the powerful press never said that Osama bin Laden was motivated by anger about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
My father has said to me that when America turns against Jews, it will happen "without fireworks." He’s right. This Jewish-flavored establishment will pass without fireworks. Though I believe Walt and Mearsheimer have played a large subterranean role in this presidential campaign–Newsweek cites them but can’t even mention their work by name in a piece on whether Obama is good for the Jews. Their ideas won’t stay subterranean. All the murmuring from Clinton’s pro-Israel braintrust and the neocons about Obama’s true agenda is going to break out in open accusation, that Obama wants an evenhanded policy in the Middle East. Again, I can’t wait. And as Obama himself has said, all the bleeding of Jews into the Republican party is over Israel. Jews now make up the conservative bulwark of the Democratic Party. We’re like Rockefeller Republicans, in their day, just as status quo oriented. Why change anything, Malcolm Hoenlein said to Haaretz, when he attacked Obama, it’s just inviting mischief…
Why change anything? My own disappointment with the meritocracy stemmed from my awareness that
it was as smug and entitled as the ruling class it replaced. When PBS’s Paul Solman interviewed the Indian Vandana Shiva about her anti-globalist crusade–to stop agriculture companies from patenting ancient indigenous cures– he expressed irritation that she was anti-progress, anti-urban, anti-growth. Is there any soul in his values? When the New York Times offered a piece yesterday on the latest trend in Holocaust education for children, there was scarcely a word about the importance of the Holocaust in identity politics, to the preservation of the state of Israel and Jto the Jewish campaign against intermarriage (at a time when everyone wants to marry us, as they wanted to marry rich gentiles back when). And no mention of the ways that human suffering is unfolding before us now, including in the Occupied Territories. Some day soon these attitudes will seem quaint and ancient.
