New Article: Looking for Common Ground with the Neo-Con Jews: The Case of Bill Kristol
David Shasha
Looking for Common Ground with the Neo-Con Jews: The Case of Bill Kristol
I have used the Trump Campaign Surrogate Tikvah Tablet notes to attack Alana Newhouse and others in the Zalman Bernstein orbit who have not relented when it comes to supporting Lysolism by constantly repeating its degenerate Talking Points:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/MBv7Kkr0O4A/m/JrmDUBFPAQAJ
Rather than attack Trump for the Alt-Right Anti-Semitism and its residual violence, Newhouse went after Louis Farrakhan with all her might:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/FgSsSevfWAo
I have also been following Neo-Con Jews who claim to be Never-Trumpers, like David Brooks, Bret Stephens, and Bari Weiss; as they continue to do the Murderer-in-Chief dance in spite of it all.
Which we clearly saw in Stephens’ column commemorating the Pittsburgh Synagogue attack, “Anti-Semitism and What Feeds It”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/opinion/antisemitism-tree-of-life-shooting.html
The key point is made towards the end of the article:
All of this should serve as stark reminders that when it comes to anti-Semitism, neither left nor right nor Black nor white has any kind of monopoly. No less important, no side is free of political leanings that are, if not anti-Semitic, then perilously close to it. The Trumpian right’s obsession with border walls, protective tariffs and drastic cuts to legal immigration is a vehicle for a toxic brand of American nationalism that over time cannot bode well for American Jews.
But the left’s fetish with pyramids of privilege and intersections of oppression is just as toxic, if not more, considering the broad success of American Jews in the ladders of educational, economic and cultural attainment. Whenever the success or merit of a minority group turns into a presumption of social guilt — whether it was the Asian community in Idi Amin’s Uganda, the Chinese in Suharto’s Indonesia, or Jews in Weimar Germany — the consequences tend to be catastrophic.
Like Brooks and his former NYT colleague Weiss, Stephens is loath to single out the Trump Alt-Right Fascism without affirming a moral equivalence with the Left.
Because there are bad people on both sides!
Even though the actual threat of racial terrorist violence, as the FBI has clearly stated, comes almost exclusively from the Trump Alt-Right side:
Thankfully, this sort of moral equivalence and pusillanimous equivocation is not shared by all Jewish Neo-Cons.
I just watched an excellent interview with Bill Kristol on Christiane Amanpour’s PBS show that is a heartening case in point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EHvcKfcpg
After many years at the helm of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, one of the central Neo-Con media outlets, Kristol is currently editor of The Bulwark:
https://plus.thebulwark.com/about?sort=people
And leads the Anti-Trump group Defending Democracy Together:
https://www.defendingdemocracytogether.org/about-us/
He is a central part of the heroic band of ex-Republicans dedicated to defeating the New Fascism:
https://time.com/5870475/never-trumpers-2020-election/
Most prominent in this institutional alliance is The Lincoln Project, featuring luminaries like Rick Wilson, George Conway, and Steve Schmidt:
https://lincolnproject.us/team/
If you have never seen their videos, you must:
https://lincolnproject.us/video/
In his Amanpour show interview with fellow Beltway insider Walter Isaacson, Kristol follows the lead of his ally Stuart Stevens and does a fairly good mea culpa of his past and how the Republican Party went wrong:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/IYxby8Iwc5s/m/k_Tt76glBAAJ
It is worth recalling Stevens’ shame which is echoed by Kristol and other Lincoln Project members:
Don’t just blame President Trump. Blame me — and all the other Republicans who aided and abetted and, yes, benefited from protecting a political party that has become dangerous to America. Some of us knew better.
But we built this moment. And then we looked the other way.
Many of us heard a warning sound we chose to ignore, like that rattle in your car you hear but figure will go away. Now we’re broken down, with plenty of time to think about what should have been done.
The failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.
All of these are wrong, of course. But we didn’t get here overnight. It took practice.
Long before Trump, the Republican Party adopted as a key article of faith that more government was bad. We worked overtime to squeeze it and shrink it, to drown it in the bathtub, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist liked to say. But somewhere along the way, it became, “all government is bad.” Now we are in a crisis that can be solved only by massive government intervention. That’s awkward.
It brought to mind American Enterprise Institute macher Yuval Levin and his relentless advocacy on behalf of our normative political institutions in the face of Trumpist nihilism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/fq-D7X4QBRQ/m/PsINH_YRAQAJ
This past May, Levin was interviewed by Kristol as they discussed what is being called “Reform Conservatism”:
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/33/the-reformicons/
It is a movement that preceded Trumpism and its many dangers for traditional Conservative policies, anticipating the current malaise which began at the time of the racist Obama Derangement with the Tea Party extremists:
Now the trumpet summons Republicans again—or so, at least, does a loose, informal confederation of conservative thinkers and legislators devoutly hope. These days, they speak of themselves as leading a “conservative reform project” and often call themselves “reform conservatives.” They are not exactly the Constructive Republicans of old—the absence of liberal Republicans means the intellectual compass of this group points farther right than did the lodestar of those Constructive Republicans two generations ago. But the Reformicons do have ambitions.
Some among them are sharply critical of the Tea Party project. But many keep their criticism implicit, or argue that they are simply trying to fill a policy void on the right created by four and a half years of largely defensive and negative politics directed against President Obama and all his works. Given the power of the farther reaches of the right, most of the conservative reformers don’t want to offend them too much.
Several have used Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign as an object lesson in what Republicans should not do, pointing especially to how his campaign failed to speak to the vast majority of Americans who are employees rather than entrepreneurs. There are conservative reformers who hint at nudging the GOP to the left of where it is now and specifically highlight the importance of shedding radical anti-government rhetoric. Other Reformicons seem more interested in wrapping the same old libertarian small-government view in warm language about reviving “civil society” and relying on local communities to solve problems.
There are reformers, especially the younger ones, who say that the conservative movement must free itself from Reagan nostalgia and acknowledge that the problems of the twenty-first century are quite different from those that engaged the Gipper and the country in the 1980s. Other reformers see the road to the Promised Land as passing through a re-embrace of Reaganism—properly understood, of course. The Reagan they have in mind is the one who created Reagan Democrats because he could speak to working-class voters, a gift Romney didn’t have.
But E.J. Dionne’s 2014 analysis proved too optimistic, as the reformers have been completely beaten back by Trumpism:
The reform conservatives can already claim a significant success: Almost all of God’s conservative children seem to want to take up the reform banner. This might lead to a certain skepticism as to whether there is any there here. The word “reform,” after all, polls very well. It was not surprising to see Karl Rove praise the movement in a March 2014 Wall Street Journal column. It was Rove, after all, who shrewdly rebaptized George W. Bush as “A Reformer with Results” to fend off John McCain’s 2000 challenge in the Republican presidential primaries.
Karl Rove has turned into an opportunistic Trump advisor:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/karl-rove-donald-trump-campaign-adviser.html
Indeed, the lines diving Trumpist Republicans from Never-Trumper Republicans has forced the latter out of what was once their Party:
https://theweek.com/articles/878011/death-rattle-never-trump-republicans
Kristol now sees himself as a man without a Party, as he soldiers on against Trump with the fervor of a true believer.
As I said in my article on Yuval Levin, it is important that Anti-Trump Liberals and Conservatives find common ground as we look to a Trump-less future at some point in our future. We will all have to work to build back the country on the ashes of what Trumpism has burned down, regardless of what separates us.
Watching Kristol’s interview with Isaacson was a hopeful moment which serves to contrast some of the Jewish Neo-Cons from those like the deplorable Newhouse who continue to play with fire by not coming out and declaring their full opposition to Trump and Trumpism.
When all is said and done, it is incumbent on us as loyal Americans and loyal Jews to never forget all those who helped to collaborate with the most dangerous president in American history.
Such people should be firmly branded with the mark of traitor and treated accordingly for time immemorial.
David Shasha