From The Forward (formerly Jewish Daily Forward):
How Republican Jews Utterly Failed To Prevent Rise of ‘Toxic’ Donald Trump
Noam Neusner Mar 1, 2016
Noam Neusner is a principal with the communications firm 30 Point Strategies and is a former White House speechwriter for George W. Bush. Follow him on Twitter @NoamNeusner
There is no sugarcoating it — these are the darkest days for Republican Jews like myself. Donald Trump, the most likely Republican candidate for president, has built within our party the nearest thing America has ever seen to a European nativist working class political movement. Such movements, to put it mildly, have never been good for the Jews or allies of free thought and the free market.
Trump has a commanding lead, which he extended significantly with wins on Super Tuesday. The only way he can be stopped is if blue state Republicans — those living in New York, Maryland, California and other states whose primaries fall after Super Tuesday and contain significant numbers of delegates — side with the conventionally conservative Marco Rubio. It’s possible, though not likely.
Republican Jews are therefore beside themselves, and rightly so. Trump has proven himself anathema on so many levels that it’s hard to identify just one element of his personality or his adopted policy agenda that is particularly toxic.
It’s not just his appeal to nativism, or his crony capitalism, or his crassness, or his expressed desire for “neutrality” between Israel and the Palestinians, or his admiration for Vladimir Putin, or his quotation of Mussolini, or his approval of the crushing of Chinese democracy protesters, or his rejection of permitting any Muslims into the country, or his initial refusal to forswear the endorsement of white supremacists.
It could be any of these things, it could be all of these things, but what perhaps bothers Republican Jews most is this: They think Trump would also abuse the office’s powers. Again, the Jewish experience with overweening, oversensitive wannabe dictator-chieftains is not a good one.
The fact that Trump has a daughter who has, in marriage, embraced the Jewish faith is largely immaterial to Republican Jews. We don’t vote on the basis of personal identity or inherited identity — if we did, we would have supported Gore-Lieberman (we didn’t) and today we would support Bernie Sanders (we don’t).
Let’s assess the opportunity that was lost. At the outset of the campaign there were three or four trusted candidates who enjoyed meaningful Republican Jewish support because of what they were likely to do to repudiate and reverse Barack Obama’s policy gains: Jeb Bush (for whom I worked as a speechwriter), Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and, to a lesser extent, Scott Walker. Today, Republican Jews have coalesced around the last of these men who still stand for office: Rubio and Cruz.
… This is about the entire Republican Party.
Consider the following: Trump is bringing a lot of people into the Republican Party. The results from Republican primaries show the number of votes cast rising by significant amounts — 20% in South Carolina, 15% in New Hampshire and more than 100% in Nevada. These are voters who may or may not have voted for a Republican before, or in any election before. He might well beat Hillary Clinton in states where Republicans haven’t competed in decades.
Were Trump a conventional Republican, his rise would be something Republican Jews would quickly get behind.
The problem with Trump bringing in lots of new voters is that he’s bringing in Americans. That’s just not done. You are supposed to bring in foreign ringers to win elections, not inspire Americans.
But he is neither conventional nor Republican. That’s his appeal, and for those of us who are comfortable with conventional Republicanism, it’s a repudiation of the highest order.
We have to recognize this and decide what to do next.
Let’s wipe away our gauzy myths. We Republican Jews have believed that American families, American workers and American savers and investors form a solid spine in the party of Reagan. But that spine has been shattered by economic stagnation and job loss, opioid addiction, a breakdown in marriage and fatherhood and a sense of cultural surrender. It’s been shattered by a deep sense of resentment among Americans who distrust political power and political institutions. These Americans have concluded that the Republicans of Washington are no different from the Democrats.
The America that we have long admired and championed — a land of open opportunity, where a person could rise to the level that his energy, effort and moxie would take him, a land of justice and fairness, a land that stood proudly alone in the world when necessary, a land where the intrusive powers of the state are held at a distance, a land that was skeptical of the big dreams of faraway leaders — simply doesn’t exist for a great share of Americans. They don’t recognize it, and frankly, they believe Republicans have stopped fighting for it.
So that’s where our future lies. We have previously promised to protect this America and restore it. But we failed. Perhaps if we focused on delivering on our promise, we might also see the rebirth of the party we have called our home. Because the alternative is no political home at all.
An eloquent ending, but Neusner is perhaps too subtle and understated to get his message through to the Adelsons and Singers that it’s time for some self-scrutiny about their role in helping create the public’s dissatisfaction with the Establishment.
COMMENTS:
* I wonder if Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol consider themselves “Republican Jews” and if their various political positions are motivated less by their conservatism and more by their belief that “its good for the Jews”?
* “The fact that Trump has a daughter who has, in marriage, embraced the Jewish faith is largely immaterial to Republican Jews. We don’t vote on the basis of personal identity or inherited identity.”
What an astonishingly deranged falsehood! This whole article is about Jews voting on the basis of their personal inherited identities!
* I’m surprised no-one has yet pointed out that The Donald abstains from alcohol – just like Hitler!
* Trump always wears a neck tie too. Just like Der Fuehrer.
* You can see what really bothers American Jews about Trump: Not that he’ll become “the next Hitler,” but that he has the potential to become a competent Hitler, namely, one who will defend the interests of America’s white population, especially its working class, without Hitler’s bloody-mindedness.
* Beginning with Joseph’s sojourning in Egypt, the story of the Jews has been one of tension between acquiring the status and wealth they love (greed, pride, envy, and lust) and pissing off the indigenous people, which they rightly fear.
The pissing off the indigenous thing leads to enslavement, expulsions from Britain etc., pogroms, Spanish Inquisitions, holocausts, people hating Israel, et cetera. And this Neusner dipshit is a perfect example of the problem. If he was smart, he’d tell Jews to back Trump, because Jews have been fucking this country’s founding stock since before the 1920s (the immigration bill during which was a direct response to Jewish excesses). Since the Jewish elites and Teddy K’s ’65 bill, Jewish elites have been giving it to Americans good and hard. The loss of THAT–the complete supine submission of global Europa–is what Neusner mourns.
* I just see confusion and self-contradiction in his article. When somebody writes something like “those of us who are comfortable with conventional Republicanism” it’s an indication that they’re not really thinking critically about politics as something that is separate from and reacts to conditions in the real world. Neusner’s position is just “I like yesterday, so let’s not change anything in the political system and then tomorrow will be like yesterday too.” Frankly, that’s just not that smart.
* Trump would be good for American Jews because he will prevent hundreds of thousands of virulently antisemitic Arabs from immigrating here. So when The Forward says “good for the Jews,” it doesn’t mean American Jews. It means good for Israeli Jews. The Forward is saying Trump is insufficiently pro-Zionist.
* Jews comprise about 2% of America’s population and generally vote 80% Democratic. That means he speaks for approximately 0.4% of Americans.
* That is essentially what the neoconservatives are saying. They don’t like Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy, which cuts against Israel’s interests, and the fact that they might be losing a seat at the table where the decisions are made.
* Here is a quote from neocon Norman Podhoretz from 1979 which dovetails your comment.
There was, to be sure, one thing that many of even the most passionately committed American Zionists were reluctant to do, and that was to face up to the fact that continued American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs– from which it followed that an American withdrawal into the kind of isolationist mood that prevailed most recently between the two world wars, and that now looked as though it might soon prevail again, represented a direct threat to the security of Israel.
* “What is good for Jews” is only about the current consensus among the rabbinical, intellectual and financial elite of the Jewish people. If some just minding their own business Jewish deli owning family is hacked to bits by some crazed Jihadis, or hundreds of finance MBA cubical jockeys die in 9/11, well then all the better. Their deaths will be exploited to tighten the very consensus which played a role in their deaths in the first place.
And the “Consensus” of “What is good for Jews” can be remolded and rewritten as needed. There is no external and eternal, truth, history, logic or morality. Betrayal, retribution and banishment are inevitable and mere price to be paid if it lays the ground work for a new “consensus” to be reformed based on the selective memories and histories based on victimology.
Hence the obsession of and need for elite Jews to control not just majority culture, media and political system, but to ruthlessly define which Jews are worthy of contributing to the shaping of consensus. Every other Jew who stands opposed to the consensus formation is to be labeled and dismissed as “self hating”. Every Jew of too low status to contribute to “consensus” formation is mere fodder for exploitation as victims as the “consensus” invariably brings on its own havoc and mayhem.
However, history and “facts” can be always rewritten and remolded to form a new “consensus” as needed.
As Kevin MacDonald might say, group evolutionary strategies are not concerned with enhancing the survival on any one individual member, family or even subpopulation within the group. “Sacrifices” are too be expected and even deemed necessary, what matters is that the group’s traditions, customs and most importantly “consensus” survive as much as its genetic legacy.
* The problem with having a media controlled by a handful of open borders billionaires is it cuts the feedback loop between decisions and consequences.
The cheap labor lobby has totally wrecked the lives of scores of millions of their supposedly fellow citizens but all the evidence was suppressed so it couldn’t feed back and so didn’t lead to a change in direction.
That’s the kindling part imo.
Personally I don’t think Trump is the spark; I think Trump is just mad that illegal immigrants are pushing in front of veterans with no legs.
I think the spark has been the percentage of young white kids who have gone through integrated PC schools, especially white-minority ones.
In all-white areas the psychological abuse resulting from PC schooling leads to SJWdom, depression, and various other forms of self-harming behavior but in integrated schools and especially white minority PC schools it leads to racial identity – red in tooth and claw.
