A Brief History Of The Talmud

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Luke Ford

Posted in Talmud | Comments Off on A Brief History Of The Talmud

A History of the Talmud

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2019 book by the librarian at JTS:

* Before the first century of the common era, Judaism was, with variations, biblical Judaism, a Judaism defined by the library of books that had been accepted as canonical not long before. Jews at this time overwhelmingly believed in the one God of Israel, whose will was recorded in the Torah (the five books of Moses, from Genesis to Deuteronomy) and other inspired scriptures, the most public worship of whom took place at the Temple in Jerusalem. Many of the observances and even beliefs of rabbinic Jews who lived just a century or two later would have been unrecognizable to Jews of this period.

But after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, a small group of scholarly men, known as the rabbis, gathered and, based upon received traditions, written and unwritten, began to develop forms of interpretation and practice that would ultimately lead Jews in unforeseen directions. The earliest teachings of these men would come together in the early third century in a document called the Mishnah. Other documents that preserved their unique scriptural readings, called midrashim (singular: midrash), emerged not long thereafter. But at this early stage of affairs, these men were mostly speaking and enjoying influence among themselves. Few other Jews at this time would have given the rabbis any notice.

The Mishnah soon became the focus of study and elaboration among rabbis in Palestine (which many Jews continued to call “the Land of Israel”) and Babylonia. The laws and practices detailed in the Mishnah, joined by other early rabbinic teachings, were evaluated and further developed, in a process that lasted two centuries or more in the former locale and three centuries or more in the latter. During this period, the rabbis, educated as they were, used their skills to gain some influence in both territories, but they had no officially recognized authority, and their law and teachings continued to define the Judaism of relatively few. But this reality would soon change.

By the mid-fifth century in Palestine and before the Muslim conquest in Babylonia, communities of rabbis had formulated documents known as Talmuds (Hebrew: talmudim), perhaps as a product of the creation of new rabbinic institutions, perhaps as an outgrowth of emergent influence and authority. Whatever their source, the Talmuds represented a maturing of the rabbinic estate, making it clear that those who defined their Judaism in relationship to the Talmuds were poised to extend their influence still further.

After the Muslim conquest of the Near East in the early seventh century – and particularly after the capital of Islam moved to Baghdad in the mid-eighth century – both the western (Palestinian) and eastern (Babylonian) rabbinic communities came to be subject to the same power, and in their competition, the Babylonian center had a distinct advantage. During the next several centuries, the rabbinic academies that claimed authority for the Babylonian Talmud – the Bavli – were able to take advantage of the prosperity, power, and possibly official recognition of the authorities in the city in which they found themselves. The rabbis who were located in the backwater that was then Palestine, by contrast, enjoyed primarily the numinous authority of the sacred land with which their Talmud – the so-called Jerusalem Talmud, or Yerushalmi – was associated. Soon, the scholars whose foundation was the Bavli came to be recognized as the authorities of rabbinic Judaism – now the dominant Jewish form – and their Talmud became the Talmud. From this point forward, the Judaism of the vast majority of the world’s Jews would be defined by the deliberations and pronouncements of this document.

Judaism in the Middle Ages was characterized by broad observance of Jewish law – halakhah – and that halakhah, disputed and codified by rabbis in Iraq, North Africa, and finally, Europe, was overwhelmingly derived from and based on the Talmud. Jews broadly accepted rabbis as the arbiters and counselors for how the life of a Jew should be conducted, and they viewed the source of the rabbi’s authority as his expertise in Talmud, a document that was beyond the reach of the common person. At the same time, in Christian Europe, Jews were suspected, and even hated, for their stubborn refusal to accept the truth of Jesus, and, as the
two faiths shared a common pre-Christian biblical tradition, the Talmud was seen to be the reason for and the symbol of the error of the Jews. Leading Jews astray by taking authority away from the Bible itself, and demanding false loyalty in the face of Christian truth, the Talmud was the target of vituperative polemic, resulting, all too often, in confiscation and destruction.

The Renaissance and Reformation opened Christian eyes to a different kind of consideration of the Talmud, while the printing press made possible the study of Talmud by a far broader audience of students. A work that had been studied by hundreds at any given time was now studied by thousands. In this fertile soil grew the yeshivah culture of early modern eastern European Jewry, with its extreme privileging of Talmud study. But according to the way of the world, each action compels a reaction, and Hasidism asserted a more populist, less scholarly approach. At the same time, printed books of halakhah allowed community rabbis to neglect the more demanding study of the Talmud. Both these developments spurred a counter-reaction, leading to the founding, in the early nineteenth century, of the first genuinely modern yeshivah.

In the modern yeshivah, Talmud study was elevated above almost all else, and the scholars of the yeshivah claimed an authority above all others.

* Long before the revolt – that is, by the first century BCE at the latest – there was considerable consensus concerning what was central to Judaism and its life on the land. At the center of Judaism was the one God of all humankind, who, however, had a special relationship with Israel. The earliest and most authoritative expression of God’s will was the Torah, now recognized as the one eternal constitution of the Jews. Finally, as the Torah and related sacred writings made clear, God was to be worshipped at the one home of God’s direct presence on earth, the Temple in Jerusalem. As God could not be seen, the Torah and Temple served as powerful, unexcelled symbols of that God, expressions of the covenant God had made with His chosen people.

* there is one overall message – a system, really – that dominates throughout the biblical books: Humankind in general, and Israel in particular, are subject to a covenant according to which obedience to divine command (good deeds) will be rewarded and sin (disobedience, bad deeds) will be punished. Though the traditions or “authors” behind different biblical books (or parts of biblical books) may be different, they almost all agree on this picture. Thus, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, and Israel is exiled from her land, because of sin. The rain and crops appear at their proper time because of obedience; they fail to appear in their proper time due to disobedience. Priestly texts prescribe sacrifice to erase the stain of such sin, the prophets warn of vast punishment in the event of Israel’s failure to turn away from sin. Yes, there are biblical authors, such as the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes, who recognize that this system doesn’t always work and seek to understand why, but they are the exceptions who prove the rule.

Another way of expressing this biblical ideology is to say that these books make a claim, collectively, for divine justice. But if they make such a claim, they also provoke and seek answers to questions pertaining to that justice: if there is divine justice, why does it so often seem to be absent? If suffering, like exile, is punishment for sin, why do the more sinful so often seem to suffer less? And why is the human impulse to sin – the source of so much suffering – so persistent in the first place? If God created us, shouldn’t that creation have made us good, or at least better? These are obviously not the only questions addressed by biblical books, but they are central. As it turns out, they are also central to the majority of Jewish compositions of the late second Temple period that did not, in the end, become biblical, as are other qualities for which biblical books serve as a model. In fact, the continuity of biblical and extra-biblical, pre-rabbinic compositions – at least those in Hebrew and Aramaic – is quite stunning.

* The rabbis’ own claim for their tradition is that it went back to the revelation at Sinai or before – that it was effectively eternal. The first chapter of Mishnah tractate Avot, for example, offers a chain of tradition that connects the rabbis’ own masters with Sinai, and while the text does not actually apply the term rabbi to teachers who lived before the first century CE (nor even to those who lived before the destruction of the Temple in 70), it is clear that these earlier teachers are represented in rabbinic terms, asking us to believe that they were effectively rabbis. Furthermore, in Talmudic and related literature, Moses is often called “rabbenu” – “our master,” “our rabbi.” In the same literature, even pre-Mosaic biblical figures are assumed to have observed “rabbinic” law (that would be our term, not theirs), thus claiming that halakhah as the rabbis knew it was Jewish law at least from Sinai, and divine law, observed by at least the righteous biblical heroes of old, from the very beginning.

These claims were taken at face value throughout the ages by Jews who had little historical awareness and thus little reason to doubt them, and even early generations of modern historians granted that rabbinic Judaism represented what mainstream Judaism had always been. But more recently historians have come to reject these claims, and a new consensus has emerged.

* there is no direct evidence of any kind regarding the origins of the rabbis that may confidently be dated to the period before the destruction of the Temple, which leads Seth Schwartz to declare unambiguously, “It is overwhelmingly unlikely that anything resembling a rabbinic class existed before the destruction of the Second Temple.” For our purposes, therefore, “before the rabbis” means before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. Any text or teaching or event from the prior centuries is pre-rabbinic.

* So in addition to the Tanakh itself, with the added evidence of the Apocrypha and pseudepigraphical works (many of which appear in Qumran), otherwise unknown writings from Qumran may also be taken as evidence of pre-rabbinic Judaism and its literatures. And despite differences between them (and excluding the few clear exceptions, including the sectarian texts of Qumran and Hellenistic Jewish writings), there are also certain features that unite virtually all the Jewish works written in Palestine during this period. The most powerful of these is also the most important: they were written to be scripture or to supplement it. They were written in biblical Hebrew (or, at least, in the author’s best approximation thereof ), they were attributed to biblical characters, and they supplemented and sometimes sought to supplant biblical texts. In other words, whatever was going on in the world around them, Jewish authors in Palestine were engaged in the writing of religious texts, works that focused on, emerged from, and sought to join already authoritative “biblical” writings.

* Notably, when we turn to the decades much closer to the emergence of rabbinic teachers and their forms, focusing on the earliest Christian writings, we still find that, despite differences, there are considerable continuities with the trends just described. New Testament works, coming to their final form in the mid- to late first century (and hence all before the earliest rabbinic texts), fall into three or four categories. First, there are the histories of Jesus’ life, the Gospels. Then, there is Acts, a history of the early church that is continuous with the gospel of Luke, much as Joshua and Judges (and subsequent books in the Tanakh’s Deuteronomic history) are continuous with the Torah. To varying degrees, and though they were all written in Greek (like all works of the NT), these books are “biblical” in their quality, with an omniscient narrator recounting the sacred history. They often quote or reference Hebrew scripture, claiming “roots” for the events they describe in inherited biblical teachings. And in the case of Matthew, at least, it is easy and natural to translate the narrative into biblical Hebrew, another demonstration of the “biblical” quality and connection of these compositions.

* The next large group of New Testament works are the letters (“epistles”). These works do not follow a model in Hebrew scripture, so their voices are the newest and most distinct in the New Testament corpus.

* Now, all human societies, including those that depend heavily on writing, have (oral) traditions – that is to say, either orally transmitted folk and other traditions, or simply traditional practices that are conveyed and adopted via mimesis, from one generation to the next. In the case of ancient Jewish society, Josephus references unwritten tradition as one of the foci of debate between Pharisees, who respected the inherited unwritten tradition, and Sadducees, who rejected it. The rabbis, too, later claim an unwritten tradition, which they come to call “Oral Torah” (torah she’be’al pe = “torah that is on the mouth”).

* Jewish eating laws and practices are widely attested in post-biblical, pre-rabbinic works, with references in works such as Tobit, Judith, Jubilees, and Philo, along with descriptions of Jewish table practice in the writings of Roman authors. This is by no means a silence. On the contrary, if multiple sources describe Jewish eating practices and none mentions the prohibition of mixing meat and dairy, the likely explanation is that the practice had not yet developed.

The same claim may be made for the relationship of written and unwritten traditions in general from the pre-rabbinic period. As we have already said, while there were certainly pre-rabbinic unwritten traditions of one sort or another, we can know nothing directly about their content. At the same time, there was an abundant written literature produced in the same period, one that includes Apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, histories, and more. This literature is so abundant, in fact, that it is unlikely that there was anything significant in unwritten traditions that wasn’t also attested in the written record.

* The first major rabbinic composition, the Mishnah, which would ultimately form the foundation and shank of both Talmudim, emerged in an age of great upheaval for Jews. Losing two wars with the Romans, seeing their magnificent Temple in Jerusalem rendered rubble, Jews cannot long have held on to the hope that the world they knew only a
few years before would quickly be rebuilt. Facing defeat and ruin, there were questions they must inevitably have asked themselves: Had God abandoned them? If not, then how, in the absence of the Temple, could their relationship with God be maintained? Were its functions to be replaced? How were other Jewish institutions, practices, and holy days, many of which were deeply tied to the Temple, to be shaped for the new world?

Against this background, and in response to the conditions just described, a new cadre of self-fashioned religious experts – the rabbis – began to forge new approaches and new teachings, going a long way toward redefining Judaism for the post-Temple era. Their enterprise cannot be understood without first understanding the world in which
they lived – its political, social, and religious realities; its upheavals and losses…

Jews did not lose bona fide independence as a result of their defeat, even if the autonomy they had enjoyed disappeared. Similarly, except as a product of battle, Jews did not, by and large, lose their homes. Unlike biblical Babylonia, Rome had no policy of exiling defeated populations, so the only Jews who were “exiled” were refugees who fled the violence and prisoners of war, constituting a clear minority of the population as a whole.

* “many Jews responded [to the destruction of the Temple] by loosening their attachment to Judaism and heightening their participation in the Roman system.”

* Our only meaningful record of the rabbis from the period between the two major wars with Rome, and even from the period after the Bar Kokhba war, is the documents produced by the rabbis themselves. Outside of their own production, there is barely a word about the rabbis to be found in any non-rabbinic source. The only reasonable interpretation of this reality is that the rabbis were, in fact, entirely insignificant to anyone beyond themselves.

* The Mishnah’s language is overwhelmingly Hebrew, but, notably, a Hebrew without literary precedent.

* Seth Schwartz judges that Hebrew was a “sociolect” used by rabbis as a language to distinguish themselves from others, and Hayim Lapin adds that the “Rabbis’ Hebrew… may have been incomprehensible to those without rabbinic training.”

* “the framers of the Mishnah expected to be understood by remarkably keen ears and active minds … they manifest confidence that the listener will put many things together and draw the important conclusions for himself… the Mishnah assumes an active intellect, capable of perceiving inferred convention, and vividly participating audience.”

The Mishnah’s assumption, in other words, is that its students will be actively, critically involved in making sense of its teachings and judging its regulations. The student will be highly intelligent and intellectually
ambitious. His capacities will already be evident, as the Mishnah demands a considerable degree of prior accomplishment: mastery not only of scripture but also of other fundamentals of Jewish tradition and practice.

* the Mishnah adapts neither the forms of biblical books nor their language. It is written in an entirely new form of Hebrew (as compared with any scriptural precedent) and its form is similarly unlike any scriptural model. The Mishnah does quote scripture here and there, but with the exception of a few unusual tractates (sections of Sotah and Sanhedrin, for example), such quotation is relatively rare, and it is possible to review chapters of Mishnaic teachings with barely a quotation of the “source” upon which the Mishnaic law may (or may not) be based. (This means that the common popular characterization of the Mishnah as a kind of “commentary on the Torah” is certainly wrong)…

* Neusner writes, “superficially, the Mishnah is totally indifferent to Scripture. That impression, moreover, is reinforced by the traits of the language of the Mishnah… Formally, redactionally, and linguistically the Mishnah
stands in splendid isolation from Scripture.” But this is only true at the superficial level, as Neusner makes clear. At a deeper level, much – though far from all – of the Mishnah elaborates categories, and even details, that
originate in scripture. But this is rarely on scripture’s own terms. On the contrary, as Neusner suggests, “the Mishnah brings to its subject a conception of the law which is unknown to the earlier document.”

How can this be so, given the fact that, for the rabbis, scripture is purportedly the ultimate authority? The solution, again, is suggested by Neusner: “all of Scripture is authoritative. But only some of Scripture is relevant.”

Needless to say, it is the rabbis behind the Mishnah alone who determine what parts of scripture are relevant and what not. It is also they who read and interpret scripture, in their own way and as they see fit. This is hardly “traditional” in the conventional sense of the word. But whatever its actual relationship to scripture, the Mishnah does claim to be rooted in the scriptural tradition, particularly to those – its assumed students – who are familiar with that tradition. Nevertheless, this rhetoric of tradition should be understood as what it truly is – that is, as “mere” rhetoric – for, as Neusner astutely and correctly writes, “The Mishnah’s Scriptural literalism [where it exists] is a response to the opening of an abyss: a bridge to the past… There is nothing traditional in leaping over so long a span of time. So the Mishnah’s self-evident literalism… is an act of reform… anything
but traditional… the trivialization of the past (emphasis added).”

The Mishnah stands in aggressive, even “arrogant” relationship to Israel’s sacred scripture, but it ignores completely the living tradition of Israel that is, historically speaking, the rabbis’ bridge to the past. The Mishnah never quotes any of the many Jewish writings of the late Second Temple period that is not part of the sacred canon. As a result, it quotes no voice that is not, in the understanding of its students, at least four centuries old. Nor does it, on more than isolated occasions, explicitly reference “oral” traditions or practices from the same period, despite the fact that many such traditions surely existed, defining, as they would have, the life of Jews in the centuries before the destruction. Add to this the fact that the Mishnah resembles none of those earlier documents, and the assertion of the Mishnah of its independence – not its traditionalism – will be
unambiguous.

* Neusner: Mishnah is “a sustained philosophical treatise in the guise of an episodic exercise in ad hoc problem solving.

* “The principal message of the Mishnah is that the will of man affects the material reality of the world and governs the working of those forces… which express and effect the sanctification of creation and of Israel alike.” Needless to say, philosophy privileges human reason, while religion traditionally privileges revelation. By empowering human will, therefore, the Mishnah is asserting its philosophical quality.

* most Jews during this [200-350 CE in Palestine] period “were to all intents and purposes standard Greco-Roman pagans.”

After the Bar Kokhba war (132–135), it would have been difficult for the common Jew (as opposed to a rabbi) to maintain his or her confidence that the God of Israel still preferred and protected the Chosen People. Evidence showed, in fact, that the God of Israel had not protected Israel, despite the fact that Jews were no less pious than their enemies, and were overall, at least relatively speaking, far more righteous (where righteousness is measured by adherence to the laws of the Torah). The natural conclusion was one of three choices: either that
God had abandoned Israel, that the God of Israel had been defeated by Roman gods, or that the God of Israel was a fiction all along. Whichever conclusion one preferred (if one was inclined to think theologically at all), the reasons to remain loyal to the Torah of Israel in the latter part of the second and into the third century were weak, and a realignment of loyalties with the ways of one’s non-Jewish Roman neighbors only to be expected.

* far from having been the leaders of the synagogues, the rabbis had little involvement with them until well after the Late Roman period.

* It was only at the beginning of the fifth century that the rabbis became at all notable, that is, noticeable by a broader swathe of Palestinian Jewry, along with others. It is only at this time that they are first mentioned in
inscriptions, and only now that their teachings are referenced by church fathers.

* One of the earliest modern observers of the Yerushalmi, Zechariah Frankel, offered a description of the Yerushalmi that remains valuable. Among Frankel’s observations are these: the Yerushalmi limits objections and deliberations. It prefers simple, straightforward logic and doesn’t always seek solutions to logical difficulties. The Yerushalmi doesn’t always read the Mishnah closely, nor is it troubled by redundancies in Mishnaic teachings. When there is a Tannaitic dispute, the Yerushalmi doesn’t seek to explain that dispute, nor to explore justifications of the differing opinions. On the contrary, where possible, it seeks to show that tannaim who seemingly differ in fact agree. Finally, as a general observation, Frankel remarks that the Yerushalmi seeks to establish halakhah more than it seeks to pursue logical deliberations. To these observations may be added many, including the fact that the Yerushalmi rarely suggests alternative formulations for scripture, and almost never pursues alternative explanations or reasons beyond the barest few. Considered as a whole, then, what is the Talmud Yerushalmi trying to do? In Neusner’s reading, The Yerushalmi’s qualities and characteristics constitute a considered, strategic – one might even say “philosophical” – response to the challenges Jews faced in Palestine in the period during which it came to formation.

The Talmud stresses the themes of certainty, consensus, and authority. These points of insistence also express a general concern to overcome doubt, confusion, diversity, and civil chaos. The Talmud’s paramount points of insistence constitute a point-by-point program in defiance of the age: certainty over doubt, authority over disintegration, salvation over chaos, above all, hope and confidence in age of despair. In the period and circumstance represented by the Talmud of the Land of Israel, people believed that decisions had to come forth, arguments had to reach solution, doubt had to be resolved. In context, we see that this was the Talmud’s response: triumph over despair.

The early fifth century (more or less) was, as we saw, a period in Palestine when Jews would have found themselves in severe doubt, their assumptions profoundly challenged. Theologically rejected subjects in a more and more Christian empire, Jews could only have found comfort and security in clear, definitive answers and the rejection of questions and chaos, whatever their source.

Harmonizing differing opinions, rather than supporting them by justifying each of two sides, yields certainty and avoids dispute. Imagining alternative formulations of scripture makes it easier to avoid questioning scripture, while the avoidance or limitation of alternative explanations allows conclusions to stand with greater confidence. Logic and its play are disruptive, while halakhah is definitive and secure.

The Talmud Yerushalmi, then, is a traditionalist text, one that sought to create a world of relative certainty and stability in the face of a world that for Jews in Palestine (and elsewhere) had to be uncertain and unstable,
perhaps in the extreme. But it did this in an entirely innovative way – for the first time ever, in the way of a Talmud. “Talmud” – characterized by the citation of opinions, the record of disputes, the working out of differences, and engaged interpretation and extension of a received canonical text – was unprecedented, both within the Jewish world and without. It was and remained a uniquely rabbinic form. It was the Yerushalmi that first
gave expression to this form, offering one model of what Talmud could be. The later Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud (the Talmud), would resemble it in significant respects. But the latter would differ from the former in what are, arguably, even more significant respects. Talmud is a genre (with only two instantiations) but not a single form.

* if the Yerushalmi limits objections and deliberations, the Bavli rejoices in them. If the Yerushalmi prefers
simple, straightforward logic, the Bavli thrives on complex, logical operations. If the Yerushalmi reads the Mishnah according to its simple meaning, the Bavli reads it as scripture, demanding that every word have significance.

* Jews in Babylon lived in close proximity to their neighbors, speaking the same language (Aramaic), enjoying mundane interactions in the marketplace and even, possibly, in their homes. The centers of Jewish life included cities such as Mahoza, part of the metropolis that served as the Sassanian winter capital. This was a city with a large and diverse population, and there is no evidence that Jews segregated themselves from the population at large. If the testimony of the Talmud is to be believed (and I know of no reason not to believe the Talmud’s representation of this reality), Jews and their neighbors even occupied homes in the same courtyards. Palestinian rabbinic enactments, the purpose of which was to separate Jews from their neighbors, were relaxed in the Babylonian setting, allowing even pious followers of rabbinic law to intermingle with their neighbors. The consequences of this daily interaction are amply evident even in a particularist document such as the Talmud, suggesting an even
greater impact on Babylonian Jewry more generally.

* By the middle of the fourth century, this attention developed into an ideology, according to which debate and deliberation regarding matters of rabbinic Torah were asserted to have their own worth. Soon, argumentation would be studied for its own sake.

Exemplifying this shift is teachings in which sages justify their own stated opinion, by saying, for example, “on what basis do I say this?” and quoting a Mishnah or related text to back themselves up. Alternatively, their justification might reference the “logic” of the matter, as they declare: “it makes sense according to my opinion!” Sages of this period even engage in what might be called “textual criticism” of the Mishnah. More developed or elaborate examples of these moves, which begin to emerge in the third decade of the fourth century, include cases such as that of Rava at Eruvin b, where he offers justification of both his own opinion and that of his opponent. This “balanced” comment reflects growing interest in the value of argumentation – and its different sides – in general, as comments of these amoraim focusing on argumentation as such become far more common. Examples include both affirming (“the one who objects objects well”) and challenging (“what is Rav Hamnuna objecting to Rav Sheshet?”) observations relating to the argumentation of others.

* there are two types of material in the Bavli – teachings attributed to named sages (amoraim) who can be associated with specific generations and often places, and extensive analytical material in the Aramaic language that is associated with no name or place.

* the Bavli’s anonymous voice is overwhelmingly post-Amoraic.

* The Bavli is a carefully composed, elaborately constructed document. Its pages are evidence of an extended period of deliberate composition in an untroubled atmosphere (persecution or hardship does not allow for the kind of work that is necessary to produce a document such as this).

* as far as the Talmud is concerned, it is better to save all stated opinions even by means of a forced solution than it is to reject one opinion in favor of another.

* One outstanding type of operation, unique to the Bavli and of exceptional importance as a sign of the Bavli’s relationship to scripture, is cases in which the Bavli comments, “if you wish I will say that it is reasoning and if you wish I will say it is scripture.” This formula, which is articulated fourteen times in the Talmud, is typically offered as an explanation of differences of opinion, and particularly in response to the question: “In what do they differ?” The answer, then, is in effect, “I can explain their difference of opinion both logically and with reference to different interpretations of scripture.”

* Before seeking to understand what the Talmud is, it is crucial to say a word about what it is not. The first notion we must reject is the old, uncritical view that the Talmud is somehow a kind of transcript of deliberations that took place in the Babylonian rabbinic academies. Even without the technical problems with this description (were there academies at all? How could such transcriptions have been done?), the notion that our Talmud simply presents us with a record of live rabbinic discussions is indefensible. Oral deliberations are characterized by their spontaneous non-structure; by interruptions, fits and starts, even a degree of chaos. Yet, as we saw in our study of the lengthy deliberation from Baba Batra earlier in this chapter, the Talmud is characterized by careful, considered formulation. Its discussions develop logically (employing rabbinic logic, to be sure). What we find in the Talmud is not the product of some spontaneous argument. Someone “wrote” the Talmud.

* An even more problematic characterization of the Talmud that must be rejected is that it is a kind of discursive halakhic code. …the Talmud is primarily interested in theoretical inquiry, being perfectly comfortable, on many occasions, with offering no decision at all.

* Another characterization we must reject is the proposition, which has recently gained some currency, that the Talmud is a kind of anthology. Even if such an analogy (for that is what it is) works for other rabbinic works (such as the midrashim), it simply doesn’t work for the Bavli. Anthologies are collections in which different, individual authors speak in their own voice or a single author’s writings speak in his or her own voice. An anthology may be organized around a theme or an author or a genre. In the Bavli, by contrast, the voice of the document (briefly quoting earlier voices, to be sure) speaks essentially uniformly through all units, according to the rules of a single genre (Talmud). Unlike editors of anthologies, those who formulated the Bavli were aggressive with the sources they assembled, reshaping, reformulating, and recontextualizing at will. They didn’t merely collect and annotate pre-existing compositions. They created something new.

* If you had been a common Jew living in Palestine or Iraq (Babylonia) in the third through six centuries, you would have known little if anything at all about the developments described in the preceding chapters. This is because, as historians now understand the evidence, the rabbis did not emerge as leaders of a significant portion of the Jewish community until at least the sixth century. In fact, rabbis were barely even noticed, at least by non-Jewish observers, until the fifth century. Their tradition – meaning, in this case, the Mishnah – is mentioned for the first time only in the sixth century. And with respect to significant rabbinic influence among Jews, the first clear (in this case) physical evidence of such a development is a mosaic containing a rabbinic text in the floor of a synagogue at Rehov, dated to the sixth or seventh century. Even in the sixth century, an observer of Jewish affairs would have been hard-pressed to predict that the rabbis would emerge as the leaders of Jewish communities and architects of Jewish practice and belief, let alone that the elite, esoteric document they produced would be the blueprint for all of this.

* Already knowing the Yerushalmi, the rabbis behind the Bavli could account for its rulings, evaluate them, and accept or reject
them as they, in their expertise, saw fit. Accordingly, whenever there was a disagreement between the two, the later was to be preferred.

* And one must be careful before using Maimonides as proof of accepted forms or authorities, for he is notorious for his independence of spirit when it comes to rendering halakhic decisions (and in all other matters!).

* Though a relatively larger portion of the population would have been able to keep simple business records or write their names on documents, the ability to read a literary text, particularly one that was not copied by a professional scribe (as was
sometimes the case with the Talmud), would have been very rare.

* “that first-hand knowledge of the Talmud was confined to a relatively narrow stratum of the rabbinic cultural elite,” and whatever authority it had over the masses, therefore, was channeled through that same elite.

* The first step in this development was the gargantuan project of Rashi in writing the first comprehensive commentary on the Talmud (only small sections are missing or preliminary). Rashi’s commentary is almost always as concise as could be, illuminating virtually all difficulties and essentially taking the place of the teacher for the student struggling to make sense of the Talmudic text.

* Rashi’s comment on the Talmud’s teaching (Pesachim 112a–b) that “one should not cook in a pot in which his fellow [already] cooked.” The Talmud itself explains that this teaching is speaking about “one who married a divorcee in her [former] husband’s lifetime,” or, alternatively, about marrying a widow, for, the text goes on to suggest, “not all fingers are the same” (or
“equal”). What does this mean? Rashi explains that “finger” is a euphemistic way of saying “the sexual organ” = penis, and then adds, “for this sexual intercourse may not be as good for her as the first [meaning, as with the first husband] and she might belittle him.”

* The readings of the Tosafot were, among other things, intended to derive halakhah; Jews did need to know, after all, how to conduct themselves. But many of their comments were also directed (or exclusively directed) toward theoretical, critical explorations of Talmudic dialect, with no immediate concern for halakhic implications. In this, the comments of the Tosafot
often resemble (as already noted) the deliberations of the Talmud itself.

* “Torah scholars who lived in Christian lands tended to expand the contours of rabbinic literature to include the study of tractates beyond the three central orders of the Babylonian Talmud, and to delve into lesser travelled and more esoteric realms of Talmudic and midrashic study and texts. In comparison, Jewish who lived in Muslim lands, from the geonim through the subsequent rabbinic commentators and scholars of Spain and North Africa, took a narrower view.”

* “the single most important factor that limited what Jews could receive from their Christian surroundings is a linguistic one. Ashkenazic Jewry as a whole (12–13th cent.) did not read Latin, the lingua franca of Christian Scholarship and culture.” By contrast, Jews in Muslim-dominated lands (Andalusia, Egypt, etc.) spoke Arabic, which was the language not only of the street but also of the court and the madrasa. This means that the Jewish elite in those lands had access to and were attracted by the lettered culture of their neighbors. This led to a more expansive interest in matters of the mind (philosophy, theology) and heart (poetry). By contrast, without direct access to the writings of their Christian counterparts, Ashkenazi scholars remained more insularly focused on the Talmud.

* [After WWII] A group of rabbis, including survivors, approached the American military governor of occupied Germany to seek publication of a new set of the Talmud, which was then unavailable in the war-ravaged territories… “This edition of the Talmud is dedicated to the United States Army. The Army played a major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation, and their defeat of Hitler bore the major burden of sustaining the DPs of the Jewish faith. This special edition of the Talmud, published in the very land where, but a short time ago, everything Jewish and of Jewish inspiration was anathema, will remain a symbol of the indestructibility of the Torah. The Jewish DPs will never forget the generous impulses and the unprecedented humanitarianism of the American Forces, to whom they owe so much.”

* Revolutionizing the academic study of the Talmud and other rabbinic texts was the work of Jacob Neusner. Neusner challenged historical studies by asking why we should believe the “historical” testimony of rabbinic documents, knowing, as we do, that all traditions make claims that, more than anything else, serve their interests, and they should therefore be read skeptically; why should the Talmud be any different? He also challenged source criticism by pointing to its subjectivity and observing how completely the oral preservation and transmission of rabbinic teachings must have transformed what was ultimately recorded in the Talmud. For Neusner, the only level of the developing tradition we could trust with any degree of confidence was the final document (whatever we mean by “final”). Because of the relative inaccessibility of evidence for conventional histories in rabbinic documents, Neusner read the works of rabbinic Judaism, including the Talmud, as sequential statements of rabbinic religion
(or philosophy).

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Breaking News: Sex, Lies and the Murdoch Succession (2013)

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2013 book:

* one of Rupert’s great attractions is that he rarely thinks hard before opening his mouth.

* Rupert Murdoch is half puritan, half gambler, and that’s the way he has always behaved. His father was from a long line of Presbyterian preachers and moralists; his mother the daughter of a handsome rake who lost a fortune to the bookies.

* Rupert is a prude at heart, with so little sympathy for the sexual antics of his tabloid victims, because the Murdochs come from a long line of churchmen with an abiding sense of sin.

* Rupert’s grandfather Patrick sailed from Aberdeenshire on the far north coast of Scotland to take up a living in East Melbourne in 1884, and went on to become head of the Presbyterian Church in Australia. Though far more liberal than his own fire-and-brimstone-breathing father, who believed in terrifying his flock with visions of hell and damnation, Patrick Murdoch was worried that his children might succumb to sexual temptation, and admonished them thus: “Never do anything with your hands or look at anything with your eyes that you’d be ashamed to tell your mother about. Turn away at once from any picture that you feel to be filthy or indecent…You should get out of bed in the morning and as soon as you are awake, if possible, have a bath.” Taking heed of such warnings, Rupert’s father Keith wrote home from England in his early twenties to express dismay at the moral depravity of London’s streets, where prostitution was rife.

* ‘Part of the Australian character is wanting to take on the world,’ he explained to the New York Times. ‘It’s a hard, huge continent inhabited by a few European descendants with a sense of distance from their roots. They have a great need to prove themselves.’

* ‘Rupert is a power junkie, in the sense that he enjoys the company of people with power. When Rupert first came to New York, he was an Australian of no particular reputation. He bought the New York Post, suddenly he becomes an intimate, so to speak, with mayors, with governors and the president. You can’t ignore a guy who runs a New York newspaper.’

But there were other more practical reasons for Rupert to be picking winners, which was a pastime he would always enjoy. Winners in politics could give him the business breaks he needed, and he was a master at suggesting they owed him their success. As one of his many biographers put it, ‘Politicians live by fragile reputations; they believe that words can propel their careers forward or destroy them. On his visits to their locker rooms, Murdoch does not discourage these beliefs. On the contrary, he fosters the impression that he is able to deliver a kick beyond the professionals’ reach.’

* Rupert is constantly surprised at how he comes across: he has no talent for introspection and has no idea why people hate him. The second is that his editors and executives, and even his family, do exactly what Rupert wants them to do, whether that be attacking his enemies, boosting his friends or keeping radio silence when necessary. Call it fear, charm, charisma, personality or respect, it’s clear he has something that makes people want to do what he asks. Even though almost 90 per cent of the shares in News Corp are held outside the Murdoch family, none of the group’s 51 000 employees or fifteen board directors is in doubt that they work for Rupert, that he’s the boss, and that pleasing him is the way to get on. It’s something that’s worth bearing in mind as a background to the phone hacking scandal, where one of the most tantalising questions is what the Murdochs really knew. You can get an idea of how Rupert runs his empire from any of a dozen books written about him over the years, or from talking to any of a hundred current or former executives. But it’s rarely been better put than by the ex-Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, who was one of Murdoch’s most-trusted executives before he morphed into his most trenchant critic. In his memoir, Full Disclosure, Neil famously likened working for Murdoch to being a courtier of the Sun King, whose light shines to all corners of his kingdom: “All life revolves around the Sun King; all authority comes from him. He is the only one to whom allegiance must be owed and he expects his remit to run everywhere, his word to be final…Normal management structures do not matter…the Sun King is all that matters…The Sun King is everywhere, even when he is nowhere. He rules over great distances through authority, loyalty, example and fear.”

According to Neil and other Murdoch editors and executives, like David Yelland who ran The Sun, Rupert’s courtiers hang on his every word. They wake up wondering what he’s thinking, and how he will react to what they plan to do. Even Rupert reckons they go too far in this. But it’s hardly surprising that it should be so, because he knows his business better than anyone, and he knows their business better than them.

* Murdoch expected his every word to be listened to, but rarely paid the same attention to others. He would ask questions and not wait for the reply, talk over answers, and walk out of meetings in mid-sentence. Executives sharing lunch with him rarely spoke up and got squashed if they did. British MPs who visited him on the Avenue of the Americas in 2009 were struck by the way he banged his hand on the table while making a point. He never shouted; he didn’t need to. His editors and executives knew that the easiest way to advance was to do what he wished. There’s a wonderful moment in the BBC’s excellent 1981 Panorama profile when the nonplussed editor of Sydney’s Daily Mirror, Peter Wiley, is asked whether he follows a line that he knows will please Rupert. He looks left, right, left, right, up, down and up again, then sucks in his breath, purses his lips and eventually agrees that, ‘Yes’, he wouldn’t run anything he thought Rupert might disagree with. Murdoch admitted in the program that he interfered too much with his newspapers when he was around. But it was clear he hardly needed to, because his editors already knew where he stood. He was anti-Communist, anti-abortion, anti-long hair and beards, anti-suede shoes and anti-gay rights. He was pro family and private enterprise, against high taxes, and had no time for poofters.

* At heart, he was also a decent bloke, or at least a part of him was: ‘He was well-raised by Dame Elisabeth, who was a class act,’ says one close aide who worked with him for a decade, but adds that the other half of Rupert was ‘deeply cynical’. Others found him well-mannered and polite, down-to-earth and ‘remarkably ordinary’. Americans in particular were impressed at his very Australian habit of jumping in the front of a taxicab, alongside the driver, and not insisting on a limo.

* And despite all his wealth and fame, he was the same as he’d always been. He had no airs and graces. He’d stop and talk to journalists sent to stake him out, and stand around and chat to reporters at Gretel Packer’s country wedding, while his rival Australian media mogul, Kerry Packer, snarled at the media. He was ‘very normal, very informal, very Australian’, says one of his executives. And so was News Corporation, even as the top levels of the organisation became increasingly American, and the centre of gravity moved more and more to the US. Rupert relied on Australians to run the business because he understood them and trusted them to cut the crap. So he had John Cowley running Wapping; Col Allan in charge at the New York Post; Les Hinton running the British newspapers and then Dow Jones; David Hill in charge of Fox Sports in Los Angeles; Sam Chisholm running BSkyB; Gary Davey in Hong Kong and then at Sky Deutschland; Bruce Dover in China; Tom Mockridge and Jim Rudder at Sky Italia; and Robert Thomson editing The Times, before taking over at the Wall Street Journal and finally ending up in charge of News Corp’s entire publishing division. The members of this expat network could call each other up at any time to have a chat, and tap into a shared mythology. ‘If you were in the loop, it was like a brotherhood. It was loyalty, loyalty, loyalty,’ one of these globetrotting Australians recalls.

* Unlike most tycoons, Rupert Murdoch is no philanderer. He is a puritan, a prude and a serial monogamist. In almost six decades since getting hitched in Adelaide in 1956 he has married three wives, sired six children and enjoyed just a couple of months as a single man.

* Kelvin MacKenzie, the long-serving editor of Rupert Murdoch’s best-selling Sun, was once asked what he thought about tabloid ethics. In a favourite quip he would recycle many times, he famously replied: ‘Ethics? As far as I’m concerned, that’s a place to the east of London where people wear white socks.’ Another lesser-known Murdoch journalist, Greg Miskiw, who was once news editor of the News of the World, and now faces charges of phone hacking, summed up his paper’s culture even more eloquently. ‘This is what we do,’ he explained to a stressed-out reporter. ‘We go out and destroy other people’s lives.’

* Back in the 1980s, when The Sun was running a series of scandalous and unsubstantiated stories on Elton John, he was famously confronted by one of Britain’s popular breakfast TV presenters, Anne Diamond, who asked him, ‘How do you sleep at night, knowing that your papers ruin people’s lives?’ ‘It was just water off a duck’s back,’ Diamond later recalled. ‘He looked at me and said, “I don’t ruin people’s lives. They ruin their lives.” And those were his values…if you somehow get into his newspapers it’s your fault.’

It’s an interesting question whether Rupert Murdoch was aware of this campaign of vilification, or, indeed, responsible for it. His ex-butler, Philip Townsend, told Channel 4 in 2011 that it was the mogul who set his paper onto the TV host by ringing to complain that she had been rude to him. Diamond says she can’t be sure Rupert’s journalists were acting at his behest, but observes, ‘Having asked that one question of Murdoch, I was hounded and vilified on newspaper front pages for many years. The effect upon me and my family truly cannot be overstated…the coverage was persistent, cruel, grossly intrusive and enormously damaging and hurtful. At the time, it did indeed feel as though I was being targeted.’

* His office in Los Angeles was plastered with front pages of The Sun and News of the World, and he loved his tabloids. But he also delighted in telling people about the dirt they had collected on politicians and public figures. ‘We have pictures of him,’ he often boasted to his biographer, Michael Wolff, who found him ‘most entertaining and caustic on the subject of other people’s losses, lapses and screw-ups’. And he loved to trade titbits. ‘There are two currencies in the Murdoch organisation,’ the ex-editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, once observed. ‘One is money, the second is gossip. He loves gossip.’ And, as we know, Rupert didn’t worry too much about who got hurt.

* MacKenzie, who was then Murdoch’s favourite editor, claimed to understand his readers, and believed, like Rupert, that his journalists should write with their prejudices in mind. ‘He’s the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house,’ MacKenzie once famously opined. ‘He’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdoes and drug dealers.’

* Of course, not all the News of the World’s stories were as vicious, unprincipled and mendacious as its evisceration of Mosley. Nor were all The Sun’s exposes as bad as the attack on Elton John. But they illustrated the culture that prevailed at Murdoch’s British tabloids in the years before the hacking scandal exploded: the absence of doubt, mercy or sympathy for victims, and the lack of moderation or apology when stories were found to be wrong.

Rupert characterised this boots’n’all style as giving the public what they wanted, or democracy in action and freedom of the press, but it was more akin to journalism of the lynch mob, with the Murdoch papers finding the victims and whipping up a frenzy for the public to hunt them down. Sure, it was usually only reputations or livelihoods—and not lives—that were lost, but the principle was much the same, as was the enthusiasm with which his tabloids went about the task of seeking out homosexuality, adultery, infidelity, drug use, alcoholism, depression, a gambling habit, or whatever else befell the rich and mildly famous. This approach was not just tolerated by the boss. It undoubtedly came from Rupert himself, who, to his credit, did not sue if journalists did the same to him. And it was manifest in other parts of News Corporation, right around the world. You could see the same arrogance and aggression in The Australian or on Fox News or in the New York Post, even though the targets were more political in nature. It was a culture where they hit their enemies hard, played the man and left no room for doubt; where it was them and us, we’re right, don’t get in our way. Murdoch’s powerful tabloid editors tended to be particularly contemptuous of their critics and convinced they could do as they liked.

* Paul McMullan readily admits he stole pictures from people, ripped off his sources and impersonated a rent boy in the course of his work. Lying, too, was an essential part of the job. ‘You can’t get through the day on a tabloid newspaper if you don’t lie, if you don’t deceive, if you’re not prepared to use forms of blackmail or extortion or lean on people, you know, make people’s lives a misery,’ said Graham Johnson, who was a reporter on the News of the World in the late 1990s when Brooks was deputy editor.

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LAT: A fake congregation and tax schemes — California rabbi’s years of fraud revealed

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

From the Los Angeles Times:

After the shooting, he called for tolerance, love and forgiveness in numerous appearances and speeches. He was invited to the White House, met President Trump, and hosted Vice President Mike Pence at the Poway synagogue.

At the time, however, he was under investigation by the federal government and had agreed to cooperate with a probe into years, perhaps decades, of serial frauds he allegedly had orchestrated. That information became public for the first time Tuesday.

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The Black Pill

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

I notice vast numbers of people on the Dissident Right are black-pilled (pessimistic about the future). This despair seems to be the dominant emotion among the comments I read on Unz.com and on Twitter.

Why? I don’t think this despair reflects reality. I think people see the world as they are more than as it is. Dissidents tend to be anti-social and being anti-social takes a toll on your emotional equilibrium and usually results in depression.

Why be optimistic right now? If you are religious, you should be optimistic because you believe that God controls the world. If you are not religious, you should be optimistic because you know that you can’t predict the future, and that you can’t even fully grasp the present, so why not choose life? There are way too many variables in the world. There’s too much going on in America right now for anyone to have a handle on the news. No one man can know everything. We all have blind spots. We all talk to only a tiny number of people. We all have limited expertise. Therefore, humility and wonder should be the order of the day.

People on the Right right now who are filled with despair are spending way too much time on social media and following the news. This is not productive and it is not conducive to happiness because we can’t control the media and we can’t control the news. Our time is better spent on things we can control, such as our own values and dreams. There may be addictions playing a role in this despair. As HerbK writes, “My mind is powerless to perceive the truth about alcohol — my mind is fundamentally flawed, defective. I experienced ‘no choice’ at a previously unknown core level. I had experienced that ‘strange mental blank spot.’ I needed to fully concede to my innermost self that I had a mental obsession over which I was powerless — even to see the truth when presented.”

Which country do you think is on a better trajectory right now than America? As each year goes by, the United States is on a trajectory to increase its relative power compared to its competitors. Most Chinese, for example, don’t even graduate from high school. Chinese workers are half as productive as Turkish workers. The U.S. economy is the most dynamic and competitive in the world. Americans work harder than any other people. The future is being created now in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. No other city comes close to our influence.

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The Covid Coup

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

Angelo Codevilla writes:

It should be clear that the COVID event in America is only tangentially about health. It is essentially a political campaign based on the pretense of health. Mere perusal of news from abroad is enough to see that this is true as well throughout the Western world. Throughout, the campaign by governments and associated elites has essentially smothered social and economic activity. Not least—and by no means incidentally—it has smothered the overt political opposition which had increasingly beleaguered said governments and elites throughout the Western world.

Through the previous decade, the various failures and inadequacies of these governments and elites, of “Davos Man,” had become the prime subject of public discourse. At the very least, the COVID campaign changed the subject to physical safety and economic survival. Davos Man tightened control by using the state’s coercive power more forcefully than in wartime, covering its class by claiming to speak for “science” in a manner that precludes counterargument.

In America as elsewhere, there was no doubt about which sectors of society were on what side, who were the campaign’s protagonists, winners, and losers. The governments, their bureaucracies, the major legacy political parties, the celebrities and the media, Davos Man, were on one side. On the other were middle class people and their “populist” representatives. As the northern hemisphere’s summertime was banishing the latest respiratory virus, Davos Man strove to make as many restrictions as possible part of a “new normal.”

In Europe as in America, the COVID affair was but the latest round in which the very same protagonists had faced off. There as here, the language and attitudes with which Davos Man denigrated its supposed inferiors in the COVID affair fit seamlessly into previous patterns of the larger, long-term struggle. Had there been any doubt that the COVID-19 virus was more an occasion than a cause, it vanished at the end of May as, on both sides of the Atlantic, Davos Man switched to berating ordinary people and their civilization and ginned up yet another campaign to beat back challenges to its power.

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Say It With Feeling: Megastars, Media Tsars, Trailblazing TV: Memoirs of a Prime Time Warrior

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

Born and raised in the Mid-West, Gerald Stone, whose father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who got his start in America as a bootlegger, moved to Australia in 1962 with his family and began writing for the Sydney Mirror newspaper.

Here are some highlights from this 2011 book:

* Journalists in any country tend to treat various types of newsworthy events in the same way over and over… As a newcomer I brought the precious asset of a fresh pair of eyes, along with the sharpened perception of a stranger eager to make his mark. My writing styles stood out as different from what Australian readers were used to and I made an extra effort to explain things that my colleagues regarded as too commonplace to bother with… At this stage many Australians were still burdened by the reticence of their British heritage, unused to discussing their feelings, and that reluctance to delve too deeply was reflected in the press coverage… As a recently arrived American, I was constantly being made fun of for the stereotypical image of an entire population obsessed with psychoanalyzing itself, but my background did make me more prone to pursue issues most of my Aussie colleagues treated as taboo…

* Australians treated their beaches with the reverence of open-air reverence cathedrals.

* When mates got together, they did so on the basis of absolute equality… Wives and girlfriends immediately introduced an unsettling point of differentiation, in their looks and manner commonly seen as an important measure of a man’s success in life…

* Americans…earnest and idealistic, Aussies more reserved and skeptical… [Aussies are] less burdened by sentimentality and over-eagerness to please, more skeptical and quick on the draw with a deflating remark…

* [In 1964 in Sydney, John] Lennon [asked]: “How’d you get into this country? I thought they had a White Australia Policy.”

* [Picture theater manager Samuel Raymond said:] “If he’s got Abo blood, he’s got only one place and that’s with the other darkies. They all smell, are ignorant, and drink too much. People from the outside just don’t understand what they’re like.”

* The Aussies by comparison [in Vietnam] could only seem like ragamuffins, slogging around camp in mud-stained shorts, boots, floppy hats and singlets. By US military standards, their relationship with their officers bordered on the mutinous.

* Australia in 1967 had been ruled for 18 years by conservative parties by then riddled with faction-fighting and running out of energy and ideas. The Labor opposition had long since been reduced to a snarling rabble fighting for scraps of patronage doled out by entrenched union bosses… Governments at the state level were rife with petty corruption… The media…was largely dominated by four wealthy dynasties with no interest in change… Even the ABC was under the tight control of a clique of well-connected old boys who thought of themselves as career public servants…

* I was entranced by the visual medium’s far greater emotive impact compared to print — how something as simple as a momentary pause or tightening of the lips could alert the public… [Through TV one relates to subjects intuitively rather than intellectually.] In those first few months I often thought back to my UPI days and how keen I had been to make the facts come alive for the reader by injecting my copy with that spine-tingling electric ripple. The visual medium, in contrast, was like working amid the giant dynamos of a veritable power station. My job as an on-air reporter was to put all the elements in place and then know exactly when to get out of the way so as not to stand between the viewer and a high-voltage moment… Seeing is believing…

* The Packers were considered the most right-wing of all the Australian media dynasties.

* Rupert Murdoch was as relaxed and open as Kerry Packer was uptight and guarded. Murdoch had bigger ambitions.

* David Frost was as charming and charismatic in person as he came across on screen, but not for a moment longer than he needed to be. The veins in his temple were as easy to read as a stopwatch — flashing purple to let you know precisely to the second when your time with him was over. Then it was back to business for him, moving on to devote himself to another one of perhaps a dozen other projects… As his producer, I was expected to come up with a format guaranteed to make the maximum use of him doing interviwes and pieces to camera, but within a minimal amount of time.

* David Frost…was a quintessential TV personality, a skilled performer trained to communicate with his viewers at every level: not just through the words he chose but the varying rhythm and pitch of his intonation. More than with voice alone, he spoke with his eyes, the tilt of his head, his every expression and gesture… It was in the [Thai] poppy field, when I experienced my epiphany. Journalists might be highly trained in the art of gathering information, but they weren’t half as effective communicators as David Frost… The facts…didn’t sell themselves. It took someone willing and able to use every trick in the trade to get their message across to the audience — to say it with feeling.

* Shortly after coming to power in 1971 Amin expelled the country’s entire Asian community — merchants, factory owners, doctors, lawyers and civil servants — leaving the economy close to ruin… By the time we arrived, shops were empty of goods, food scarce…

* [TV news reporters at 60 Minutes] needed to become as warm and animated in their delivery as they might at a lively dinner party with close friends. Whatever the story, tell it in a way that made each viewer think you were speaking directly to them — with such feeling that they couldn’t help but listen and care.

* George Negus was the first to emerge as a star…little wonder, given his readiness to throw aside the old conventions demanding journalistic detachment and give vent to his feelings… Ray Martin’s ABC training made it more difficult for him to break free from the self-imposed restraints of a cool and collected newsman.

* TV stardom is the ability to come across as the kind of natural, friendly person anyone could easily relate to.

* Aussies tend to take life less seriously than Americans and are much less prone to hold strong views on personal-choice issues such as sexual morality or religion.

* Journalists in Australia were forever wishing that they could operate under American-style defamation laws…but in a federal system of 50 states, these laws were built on a house of straw.

* Australia and America are about the same size, but Australia’s population is far more homogeneous in their customs and outlook. One could travel from Brisbane to Perth hearing pretty much the same accent, eating the same foods prepared the same way, able to expect a common standard of behavior and common attitudes about the most important things in life. American society…retained strong regional differences not just in accent and dietary preferences but in fundamental values… There was, however, a more sinister side of living in a country where individual communities employed their own police forces and enforced their own standards of law and order, where a stranger travelling through couldn’t be confident of the quality of justice accorded him should he have a car accident or become caught up in a misunderstanding with a local shopkeeper…aka Easy Rider and Deliverance…

* Along with the overdue changes in race relations, I found that the United States had also come a long way in improving welfare payments…though generally nowhere near the levels in Australia. Many Americans, even those in low-wage obs, still retained an almost paranoid suspicion of creeping socialism…

* There was another element of the American dream that most Aussies would have found beyond the pale. Success, as defined by many middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans, was not just based on how much wealth one accrued. Their competitiveness went on to encompass their personal lives at every level: exclusive country club, being recognized as among the biggest donors to their church, ensuring that their wives turned eyes at ever function with their expensive clothes and jewelry, and that their children attended the most prestigious universities… Given this preoccupation with money and status, many Americans pronounced themselves astounded at the way Aussies would “waste” so much of their time on sport and leisure.

* Americans put a lot of time and effort into food. Back in Sydney, if I were holding an urgent production meeting that ran over, I would call for some chicken or ham-and-cheese sandwiches and not expect to hear a murmer of dissent. In New York in a similar situation the entire meeting would grind to a halt as a selection of menus from the nearest fast-food stores was passed around to ponder — one person to order Mexican, another Chinese…

* America is surely the most dynamic society — pulsing with an energy that almost makes you tingle.

* I was also responsible for overseeing a five-day-a-week, half-hour program called A Current Affair. The name was borrowed from the Australian original, but there all similarity ended… The brain child of Peter Brennan, an Aussie brought to New York by Murdoch, it prospered on a heady mix of gossip and sensation… Brennan was able to detect the stifling layers of guilt and repression infused through the society at almost every level. All too many Americans led double lives: holier-than-thou in their public persona, yet fascinated…in the more carnal of human impulses. Nowhere was this pretentiousness more evident than among the journalistic elite working for the national networks. For the most part they insisted on adopting an oh-so-serious front, pushing news stories they thought people should watch rather than the earthier stuff they were really interested in.

* The United States had its own yellow press, but nothing compared to the cutthroat Aussie version, with its utter contempt for scruples…

* ACA could hardly be judged a successful program if it was damaging the best interests of the network that had established it, scaring away major advertisers, causing many big-name celebrities to boycott Fox.

* I found the south-western states — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona — to share more of the characteristics of Australia…more oriented to outdoor lifestyle, less preoccupied with self-examination, rawer in their humor, and not quite as intense and earnest as most of their countrymen…yet even they suffered from tippy-toe syndrome [fear of litigation]… A misjudged word, a joke overheard in a bar, a compliment interpreted as a slur — any one of them could be enough to damage someone’s promising career…

* Each of us carries a certain amount of psychological baggage throughout our life, the burdens we put on ourselves to live up to the expectations of our parents or be seen as successful by our peers or regarded as respectable citizens in the communities we live. Americans, though, seem to carry more guilt per brain cell than almost any other nationality… It was easy to see why they should take such a liking to the Aussies, with their freer and easier manner and absolute refusal to censor themselves for fear of causing offence. They still cracked jokes about nymphos and poofters and gammy-legged cripples and blacks with big swinging dicks… Canadians see both Aussies and Yanks as brash, aggressive, materialistic, and chauvinist…

* The one talent the Americans had that left the Aussies for dead was their unrivaled gift of the gab. If they spent far too much time pondering what they should eat for their lunch, they were positively insatiable in their need to talk things out…

* In my ten years as head of Australia’s most influential television program, I was never once phoned by a friend to ask if I might consider giving a job to one of their grown-up children. As soon as I hit the ground in New York, I started receiving such pleading calls… Personal ambitions, like everything else in Australian life, were usually tempered by the unspoken rule of never allowing yourself to appear too pushy.

* Another unexpected disappointment for me was the [timid] behavior of the middle-level executives.

* Americans tend to view whatever military campaign the nation embarks upon as a God-given mission, not something decided by men alone.

* Many of the Americans who joined Fox in New York would have been wary of how far the Australians were prepared to go in trashing tried and true journalistic traditions. Typically, though, spurred on by that extremist streak that runs through so much of American life, they soon came to embrace the new genre of tabloid television with all the passion of religious converts…

* In Australian culture [fair play] ranked as the most important of all virtues, to Americans much less so, given their heavy dependence on courts of law to determine the boundaries of acceptable conduct… In Australia, a handshake was still widely regarded as a bond of honour.

* I was simply not cut out to serve as a high-level manager within the American corporation, prepared to do whatever was required to advance the company’s interests… That kind of iron-willed executive — the Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap prototype — is virtually non-existent in Australia… “The corporate ethos does not really fit into the Australian culture that emphasizes personal pleasure about all else. This inhibits a full commitment to the firm.”

* I preferred a society where men weren’t just created equal, but remained equal in each other’s eyes…

* Channel Ten was aimed at the youth market. Nine was seen as representing wealth and power… Seven represented suburban families… At Nine, the secretaries in the executive suite tended to be big-breasted blondes clicking loudly along the corridors of power in the highest of high heels… At Seven they were sedate suburban ladies of a certain age named Meryl and Beryl.

* Not until late 1960s, after Sir Frank Packer bought The Bulletin, did his new editor, Donald Horne, order the slogan “Australia for the white man” to be deleted from its masthead.

* Australians willingness to put common cause before self is so different from the ethos of individualism in America.

* I suspect as we move further into the 21st century, issues like nationality and patriotism will start to matter less and less. Even the concept of “homeland” may need to be redefined. We’ll begin to pledge allegiance to worldwide communities of shared interest…

* Book review: “The print media has always been a hybrid business. It is about selling space to advertisers to reach prospective customers. But early on newspaper proprietors realised that those prospective customers were more likely to read the ads if they were surrounded by interesting and entertaining information. News is perennially interesting. Media historian Mitchell Stephens has written that he has not been able to find a society, past or present, that lacked a hunger for news.”

Posted in Australia | Comments Off on Say It With Feeling: Megastars, Media Tsars, Trailblazing TV: Memoirs of a Prime Time Warrior

Things You Learn Along The Way By John Menadue

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

According to Wikipedia: “John Laurence Menadue AO (born 8 February 1935) is an Australian businessman and public commentator, and formerly a senior public servant and diplomat. He is currently a patron of Asylum Seekers Centre, a not-for-profit that provides personal and practical support to people seeking asylum in Australia.”

Here are some highlights from his 1999 autobiography:

* As a country boy from South Australia, I grew up in White Australia. Malayan students at university college unknowingly reflected White Australia back to me. It was an unpleasant experience. They changed my life and triggered my 45-year commitment to promoting Australia’s relations with Asia. Aldous Huxley described this change process: ‘Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with
what happens to him.’
A sceptical university professor unwittingly helped me draw a link between Christian values and social justice.
Gough Whitlam awakened a new world of ideas and opportunities for me. I am ever in his debt.
My first wife’s death in 1984 humbled me. I didn’t have the spiritual and psychological resources to handle the circumstances in which I found myself. It helped me to understand my vulnerability. I learned the hard way that success and status weren’t really important in the end. They were props that made it easier for me to shut out my inner voice. We learn best in hard times.
In the Catholic Church I encountered the same problem as in so many other institutions: the alienation of people from leaders who, despite the rhetoric, do not feel they are accountable. Power is inevitably abused.

* I am the son of a Methodist minister. That probably says more about me than anything else I can say about myself. So much of my life and how experiences affected me is predicated on my first 15 years in a Methodist manse.
Self-improvement and a strong work ethic were a part of daily life. We had to be ‘up and doing’. Idle hands made mischief. My sister and I were told that if we believed in something, the energy and enthusiasm to achieve goals at study or sport would come. Hard work and determination would produce better results than flashy brilliance. We
had a duty to try to make the world a little bit better.
My family were temperate, not given to wild flights of fancy or excess. Alcohol and gambling were taboo. Methodists were earnest. Time and effort should not be wasted on the superfluous.
I have never escaped the imprint of this upbringing. A close friend of mine often told me that I confused earnestness and competence. I think he was right.

* The Methodist Church was at the centre of our lives. An evangelical movement, Methodism grew out of the established Church of England in the mid-18th century. Methodists were dissenters and ‘methodical’ in
their devotions. They found that the Church of England had lost spiritual vitality. Their reform movement finally broke away and pursued its own course with emphasis on the New Testament, a very personal spiritual experience and social concern. The enthusiastic and confident singing of Charles Wesley hymns, set to Welsh tunes, and evangelical preaching are my warm and nostalgic recollections of Methodism. At church, bosomy organists pedalled furiously to get maximum volume out of the organ and led the singing at the top of their voices. Methodism was born in song.

* My father, Laurie, seldom referred to hardships. He was quite laconic. Although intelligent and an avid reader, he went only to fourth grade of primary school and then only for three days a week.

* He got into arguments with fundamentalists who thought he should be preaching more ‘fire and brimstone’. He saw them as very narrowminded and mean people. He knew that life was a lot more complicated than they thought. They hurt him a lot. His temper flared with them, but always passed quickly. He was a member of the Masonic Lodge, but
not very active.

* Sickness was a respite. It was her way of asking for help.

* The first week in all those schools was painful. Even today, I feel alone in a schoolyard. I can still smell the bitumen playground in a February heatwave when we started at the new schools. On the first morning my mother would escort us. The headmaster would try to cheer us up, but didn’t help much. If you feel alone on the inside, outsiders can’t really help. Beth would be with me. She would be lonely too, although she was a better talker than me. But sisters are not much use in the schoolyard. You can’t stand talking to your sister all day. At
lunchtime I would quickly eat my mother’s soggy white sandwiches with tomato sprinkled with sugar, then I would sit close to a group of boys and wait until they started playing with a tennis or cricket ball. Then I would join them uninvited. I knew that I was good at sport and, given half a chance, I would be admitted to the group. Sport was
my way out of loneliness in the schoolyard.

* Those three years in the air force were the greatest years of my father’s life. He often spoke of them: the pleasure of male companionship after female-dominated local churches, travel to new places like Townsville,
new work and status, and without the grind of the circuit and the financial problems and parochialism that went with it.

* We had a highly developed puritan view of right and wrong, with an exaggerated sense of guilt–whether it was about alcohol, gambling or sex. God would love us if we were good and probably not otherwise. I was hard on myself
and hard on others. A good Methodist boy had to live by a strict moral code. There was to be no playing around with girls. Illegitimacy was a common subject of discussion at home or in the schoolyard. The stigma of illegitimacy was terrifying—a fate almost worse than death. What amazed me was that, despite the stigma, people kept doing those things outside marriage. What was the attraction? It takes a while to work that out of one’s system. It probably explains why, in later life, I found my Irish friends so attractive, and harboured a vicarious longing for their
lifestyle. How could you enjoy life, feeling guilty? We didn’t discuss many emotional or psychological issues within the family. There were no therapy sessions in our house. We knew the rules very clearly. Within those boundaries, Beth and I were expected to work things out for ourselves. We knew what had to be done and were
urged to get cracking. We learnt that we were responsible for success or failure. There was no point in blaming parents or the ‘system’.

* I had a stereotyped view about Asians as poor, unskilled workers or hustlers working street stalls in Bombay and
Singapore. A threat! But in Australia in 1953 there was a group of articulate and educated young Asian students. Their presence was reassuring. Not surprisingly the push to abolish White Australia came out of the universities and, particularly, Melbourne University. I recall the pamphlet Control or Colour Bar, published a few years later, which argued the moral case against White Australia but recognised that there had to be some restrictions on numbers or it would frighten the Australian community.

Lincoln College changed so many things for me. That experience, and other ‘foreign’ experiences, whether in Australia or Japan, taught me about Australia and myself. We are not often changed by the intellect but by experiences of the heart and emotions. As a result their influence is long lasting. It is also painful to admit error and then change. No wonder the Israelites murmured against Moses. They preferred the predictable life of slaves in Egypt rather than change and be free and uncertain in the wilderness.

* For those like me leaving university at the end of 1956, there was seldom concern about a job. It was simply a matter of picking and choosing. It was a lucky period for most Australians. There was economic growth and widening prosperity. For Prime Minister Menzies the British Empire still held sway and the countries of our region were becoming more prosperous but no threat strategically or economically. There was largescale white immigration. Aborigines looked like disappearing as a people and a problem. Foreign investment was pouring in. God seemed to be in his heaven and all was going well in our closed white world. The one cloud on the horizon was communism, with conservative governments everywhere thriving on anti-communist rhetoric. The ‘red menace’ was exploited to the limit.

* Re: Gough Whitlam: The tongue that could entertain could also lacerate. A Senate colleague was described as having a ‘conflict of disloyalty’. He retorted to a New Zealand academic in Canberra who irritated him that ‘the
best New Zealand academics make it to Oxford and Cambridge and the second raters make it only to Canberra’. A Liberal Member of Parliament, a former Presbyterian minister and oil exploration executive was referred to as ‘his oiliness’. He said a certain minister owed his promotion not to how he stood in Cabinet, but how he crawled outside
it.

Whitlam usually preferred to throw his barbs from a distance in a letter or speech and then withdraw. There was no hand-to-hand combat. He avoided close confrontation if at all possible. I never saw him in an intense head-to-head argument…

He said that no matter how much he drank, no one would believe that he was drunk—and no matter how little a certain political opponent drank, no one would believe he was sober.

* He was always dignified, a quality which the Australian public greatly admired, particularly after the embarrassment of ‘Silly Billy’ McMahon as prime minister. McMahon had been asked in 1971 by Time Magazine about his
vision for the future. He requested from his press secretary the ‘file on the future’, and on being told there was no such file McMahon replied that he had nothing on the future.

* Opposition is a hard and thankless life. It destroys more Opposition leaders than it makes prime ministers. Whitlam described the problems he faced in his 1957 Chifley Lecture. ‘The way of the reformer is hard in Australia. Our Parliaments work within a constitutional framework which enshrines Liberal policy but bans Labor policy. Labor has to persuade the electorate to take two steps before it can implement its reform, first to elect a Labor Government, then to alter the Constitution.’

* In Los Angeles I met the Black Panthers, whom I had read so much about and admired for their radicalism. They were no ‘Uncle Toms’, pleading for a place in the sun; they confronted white racism head-on and didn’t pull their punches. I made a line for their newsstand to buy their weekly newspaper. An act of solidarity I thought, as I handed my 50 cents to the tall, imposing black man. Once I took the paper I was greeted with, ‘Fifty cents won’t save you, whitey’. So much for brotherhood.

* In 1963 and again in 1967, I was enthralled by Israel’s struggle to maintain democracy and its institutions and practices under unrelenting outside pressure. It was thrilling to see Israel’s modesty after its 1967 victory. We
met Prime Minister Eshkol and Foreign Minister Eban. On return to Canberra I inquired from the Israeli Ambassador whether our children might be able to live and work on a kibbutz with its communalism and socialist inspiration. He was delighted and said he would pursue it with me when the children were ready. In 1971 I visited Israel again. Israeli modesty had turned to arrogance. Solidarity with others had become contempt for the Palestinians they had displaced. The only opinion that seemed to count was their own. The King of Jordan, who had lost territory on the West Bank to the Israelis, was now derided as the ‘Mayor of Amman’. I forgot about the Israeli kibbutz for the children and from that time became increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinians. It seems to me that only more blood and tears lie ahead.

* Aside from poverty, two things struck me about India. The first was how firmly the British parliamentary and legal systems were rooted and how fervently they were admired. They loved things English. Politicians and bureaucrats we met spoke like Peter Sellers. The other thing that struck me was how India had copied some of the worst features of British bureaucracy, particularly its pedantry and pettiness.

* Queensland was the pilot state for Whitlam to publicise his policies and to hone his skills in the electorate. Up and down the state in 1960 and 1961, he recited figures to prove that Queensland was getting a raw deal from the Menzies Government, whether it was on roads, education or health, or whatever unfavourable comparison he could make. Queenslanders, even the most conservative, responded to the antisouthern and particularly the anti-Canberra message. It was very tribal, as if Whitlam was barracking for Queensland in a State of Origin football
match. He laid it on with a trowel. The story fell on very fertile ground in Queensland. Here was a great state, the ‘sleeping giant’ ready to develop but being restrained by unfair treatment from Canberra. Later, BjelkePetersen developed this story into an art form, blaming all his mistakes and problems on Canberra.

* Like most Australians we also had something of a cultural cringe—we were impressed by things British. In policy development we were influenced by the British Labour Party, particularly its National Health Scheme. The Wilson Labour Government had also promised Britain ‘a white-hot scientific revolution’, whereby science could open up new
economic and social benefits for British people. We worked hard on both health and science policy, influenced by the British experience.

* Nothing could illustrate Whitlam’s ‘crash through or crash’ attitude better than his speech to the Victorian Conference of the ALP on the evening of 9 June 1967. It was the most courageous and passionate speech I ever heard him make. He was in the lion’s den, living dangerously that night.

* (1967): I found Murdoch attractive. He was not part of the business or media establishment; he was a nationalist without colonial cringe and he was politically to the left of centre or at least had more of an open mind than
many other businessmen… Working with him for seven years I saw what drove him. It was not making money, as useful as that was, but gaining acceptance by and then influence with people in positions of power… Shy and reserved, he felt slighted by the establishment. He was dismissed as the ‘boy publisher’, the young bloke who had returned
from Oxford in 1953, ‘Rupert the chick’, young and fresh-faced. At Geelong Grammar, which he had attended in the late 1940s, he was ‘Red Rupert’. He wanted recognition and acceptance by senior business and political leaders in the way his father had enjoyed. Menzies and Holt had no time for him.

* The Australian national newspaper: Murdoch saw a market niche for a slightly left of centre newspaper, although he spent a lot of his life tugging it back from the left when he came under pressure from his business friends. He saw a broadsheet newspaper as a means of gaining political acceptance that his tabloids could not provide. He was also committed to national development and saw a national paper as essential to that. He didn’t particularly care for state governments. Throughout his public life and also privately he was a nationalist and a republican. He never took British awards, despite the fact that he could have expected that they would be offered to him. In
the end it was an Australian award that he accepted rather than a British award. Even though he later took American citizenship I always found him aggressively Australian.

It was a very courageous decision to launch the Australian and he lost a great deal of money over many years. When I was there we were losing about $20,000 a week, a lot of money in the late 1960s. On quite a number of occasions during industrial disputes Murdoch mused, ‘What’s the point of continuing; it’s losing so much money’. But to his credit he hung on and the Australian progressively became a financially successful paper.

* When someone fell out with Rupert Murdoch—and it was usually an editor—he would get that person out quickly. I don’t think he ever left anyone in his organisation who was disaffected. He rooted them out, gave them a package and sent them on their way. He created a highly personalised business culture. But every king needs a knave, or a fool, to tell him the truth. There weren’t many knaves or fools at News Limited in those days.

* Murdoch had a very good financial reporting system that Merv Rich, the financial controller, developed. Rich never seemed to show any interest in the content of the newspapers. I thought that amazing. Using Rich’s system, Murdoch could check quickly what was happening around the world in his business units. He was also a great telephoner, ringing any time of the day or night. He had a great telephone technique: long silences. We are usually frightened of silence. Following those long silences Murdoch was told a lot more than was ever intended. We
blundered in.

Cynthia often said to me that I was in danger of losing my identity to other people and confusing myself with the job. I ignored her advice. I was idealising others to make it easier to live with myself. I submerged myself and made personal compromises for the sake of my career and the esteem and recognition that came with that. The role became the man. In Rupert Murdoch, a Business Biography, published in 1976, Simon Regan commented, perhaps with some perception, how I played the game.

The opinion in Holt Street is that John Menadue is the bright boy in the Murdoch camp. Not a lot is heard of him publicly and he seems to be a bit of a loner in Mahogany Row (the nickname for the executive part of the Holt Street building).

He is a first-class and experienced in-fighter. Although he shows the customary loyalty to Murdoch, he is very much in command of his own tactics and claims he only refers to Murdoch on matters of great importance. He is not a typical Murdoch executive to be so high in the hierarchy. He is a new boy without the usual ‘up through the organisation’ background. It was generally felt that the ‘Adelaide Mafia’ were unsure of him.

Before joining Murdoch, John Menadue was in Whitlam’s ‘bright young men team’ and had built a fair reputation in this field. He combines a bit of whiz-kiddery with cool political judgement. He is concise and precise as a business-man and is first class at managerial decision-making. Within the intrigues of Mahogany Row he is a central character.

He is smooth and dapper, soft spoken and a bit of a charmer. He oozes an aroma of executive power and is
extremely sure of himself. He has shining bright teeth and one gets the feeling he cleans them with razor blades. He has extraordinary eyes which have a softness to them around the edges while at the same time a penetrating glint screams out from the pupils.

There is a certain style to top executives which distinguishes them from others. The fact they are well fed and
expensively clothed is not really it. Fat executive faces can have a lean and hungry look. It really is quite undefinable. But, whatever it is. John Menadue has it.

* I had not then appreciated the damage that was to come from the media that Murdoch owned or influenced. I did not foresee how far ‘infotainment’ would go in persistent and unwelcome invitation to voyeurism and ‘dumbing down’. There is no question of good or bad, right or wrong. In the world of market shares, everything is relative. It is
all a matter of personal taste. To the Murdoch media now, talk of quality is snobbery.

The cultural and moral relativism of some modern media today reminds me of those lines of Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘It’s God that’s worrying me. That’s the only thing that’s worrying me. What if he doesn’t exist? Then if he doesn’t exist man is the chief of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is man going to be good without God? That’s the question. Without God all things are lawful. They can do what they like’. I also had not appreciated how the media would become the cause of so much social envy and alienation. The media urge us daily to buy more and consume more. We are encouraged to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. The lifestyles of the wealthy and famous, however vacuous, are flaunted before us. They are held up as our role models. Personal worth is confused
with personal wealth. People who are doing it tough could be forgiven for feeling alienated when they see the good life of the famous and consumerism projected daily in the media.

The visual nature of the media also contributes to frustration and fear in a new way. It often seems that news does not occur unless there is a TV camera to cover it. As a result, the media is highly visual, with a heavy focus on violence and disaster. It provides dramatic pictures. No wonder old people particularly are fearful about crime as they watch commercial television.

* I do think that Murdoch’s powers are overestimated, particularly by politicians. Murdoch’s papers are influential but, more importantly, he can pick public moods and trends and reinforce them. He will back political winners who he thinks can be made kings. Whosoever wins, Murdoch is determined not to be a loser. It didn’t need a king-maker to conclude that Whitlam would win in 1972, Fraser in 1975, Reagan in 1984, Thatcher in 1987 and Blair in 1997. Murdoch’s political power is that politicians think he can make or break them and they are not prepared to chance their careers on a gamble to find out. The perception is enough. Politicians now fall over themselves to advantage or at least not to disadvantage Murdoch. He often does not have to ask for favours; they are offered. With Keating he didn’t even have to pay his respects at the Lodge. Keating called at Murdoch’s Red Hill residence.

* Whitlam was brilliant as Prime Minister but not so much at ease leading a team, something I had learned as his chief of staff in a small office in Opposition. In three years he had three Treasurers and three Deputy Leaders and reshuffled his Cabinet four times. Seldom was political strategy discussed in Cabinet. It was submission after submission, most of them promoted by public servants who, not surprisingly, did not know what the political strategy was. Graham Freudenberg rather tenderly described the reactions of some staffers to the Government’s
problems: ‘we were rather given to tears in the Whitlam Government’.

One thing I learned above everything else working with Whitlam in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was that execution of policy was just as important as, if not more important than policy itself. Wise and effective execution must go hand in hand with good policy. Whitlam was a remarkable policy innovator, but the means to execute policy were often an afterthought.

* Prime Minister Fraser was an inspiration to work with on immigration and multicultural affairs. The contradictions in the man kept multiplying. His commitment to non-discriminatory immigration was deepseated. He buried White Australia as no other prime minister had.

In 1975, population growth due to immigration was the lowest for 30 years and the lowest this century if we exclude the Depression and war years. It was Fraser who was responsible for accepting a large number of Indo-Chinese refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Those refugees, supported by the generous Australian community response, were the decisive turning point in moving Australia away from White Australia.

* Japanese learned well the lesson of Takeda Shingen, a famous Japanese general, that ‘People are the castle, people are the battlements and people are the moat’. I was impressed by the care that Japanese put into people
relationships. I often cringed at how poorly we reciprocated. I am still embarrassed by it; courtesies not being acknowledged let alone reciprocated, being late for appointments and showing little interest in what Japanese guests are saying.

* In a mono-ethnic and consensus-based society like Japan there is not sufficient grit in the system to force change. The dissenter is punished.

* The ghost of White Australia followed me all over Japan. I spoke to scores of chambers of commerce, Rotary clubs and business groups throughout the country. In Japan, ambassadors are always a drawcard regardless of the merits of the individual or what he or she says. It was also a pleasant opportunity to get around and see the country. I told
these community groups about Australia and how relations were improving with Japan. But at question time, and invariably the second or third question, depending on whether they had had a sake or two, was ‘That is all very well, Ambassador, but what about White Australia?’ Coming from a country with a racist past and present, I found that red hot. I pointed out that, despite our history, Australia in the 1970s had the least discriminatory migration policies in the region. But they didn’t believe me.

I was irritated and challenged by the Japanese questions, and determined to do something about it, particularly when I returned to Australia. On reflection, and particularly after the reaction I have encountered following John Howard’s equivocation on Pauline Hanson, I think that I got it partly wrong. Japanese were not so concerned about
our discrimination against Asians and Africans. It was discrimination against Japanese that offended. Some leading Japanese businessmen told me in 1998 that we have admitted too many Chinese!

* I told him that I had been promoting the Working Holiday Scheme but confessed that I was having difficulty in selling it to the Australian bureaucracy. I explained the scheme. He said, ‘Leave it to me. I will see what can be done at the Tokyo end’.

At Prime Minister Ohira’s press conference at the conclusion of his visit, he said that Japan would be delighted if it were possible to negotiate a working holiday agreement between Australia and Japan. He said that Australia had expertise in such schemes and that perhaps an agreement with Australia was possible. Suddenly there was renewed interest. The Japanese had helped me outflank the Canberra bureaucracy.

I returned to Australia at the end of the year, September 1980, as Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. I was able to pick up the proposal and conclude the agreement. There was no real opposition, only caution and lethargy. There were plenty of precedents for such a scheme. All that was required was a little enthusiasm to push it along. Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee, the Minister, were strong supporters.

It was a real breakthrough, considering the racial history of both countries. I regard it as more important than the dramatic growth in Japanese tourism that came later when I was at Qantas. From that scheme, over 70,000 young Japanese have come to Australia on working holidays and about 20,000 young Australians have gone to Japan. It provided a real enrichment of the relationship between the people of our two countries.

* In my first week in the department in September 1980, there was a major immigration advertising campaign in Manchester. I got reports from delighted staff about how 11,000 people queued up to inquire about immigrating to Australia. I didn’t feel the same delight. I told the staff that if we put a similar advertising campaign into Manila or into Singapore we would have had even more in the queue. I sent a senior officer from Canberra immediately to tell the UK Regional Office that things had to change. Special advertising in the UK only was cancelled on the spot. We had to advertise on a non-discriminatory basis and where the most skilled applicants could be found. For the first time we commenced advertising the business migration scheme in the Far Eastern
Economic Review in Hong Kong… Applicants feared that if they looked too black they wouldn’t be admitted.

* We took advantage of government policy to cut expenditure by proposing cuts in programs that reflected the earlier preferential and discriminatory days of ‘Bring out a Briton’. Since 1945, over two million migrants had received assisted passages at a cost of over $500 million. More than 50 per cent of the money went to UK immigrants. We proposed to end all assisted passages immediately. Macphee told me that in Cabinet Deputy Prime Minister Anthony and Treasurer Lynch said that there would be an outcry from the Government’s pro-British
supporters if we did so. Fraser supported Macphee and in April 1981 the Government removed the favoured treatment that UK immigrants were receiving. There was no outcry. Part of the annual savings was used to fund expanded English learning for non-English-speaking migrants.

* Macphee and I were particularly concerned about racial violence in Western Australia against Asian immigrants which, we were advised, was provoked by some immigrants from Southern Rhodesia. Macphee agreed that we should attempt at immigration interviews to assess whether applicants were sympathetic to the non-discriminatory policies of Australia and would settle happily in Australia, or try to carry on their racism in their new country. It was important in terms of suitability for settlement in Australia. It is very difficult to administer such criteria.
Racists are usually smart enough to hold their tongue in interviews. But we made an attempt.

* One issue that did worry me was that treatment of the 50,000 ‘illegal immigrants’ in Australia was not evenhanded. Illegals were people staying in Australia without proper papers. Australians had an erroneous view, and probably still do, that illegals are here because they jumped ship or arrived on refugee boats. That number is miniscule. The largest number of illegals in Australia were British tourists who came legally and then stayed illegally after their entry permit expired. Those who were reported as ‘illegals’ by neighbours, contacts or just busybodies, were invariably non-white and non-English-speaking. The assumption was that if you were white you were probably legal. If you were Asian or from the South Pacific the chances were you might be in Australia illegally.
So the reports we received about possible ‘illegals’, which we had to act on, gave us a very heavy skew against non-whites.

* In the department we were under pressure to develop a population policy for Australia. What was an optimum population? After discussion with Macphee we resisted, for several reasons that I still find compelling.
The primary reason was that ‘population policy’ was really code for ‘stop immigration’. It was coming from the green anti-development groups. It is ironic that almost 20 years later the Greens have been joined by
Pauline Hanson to resist immigration. We also believed that, in contrast to a heavily populated Asia, Australia has space, resources and opportunity. With a small population we have a moral obligation and it is also in our
self-interest to increase our population. We were also certain that immigration had brought great vitality and development to Australia, so why should we turn our back on new, enterprising people in the future? Since my days in Japan I have always favoured a significantly higher population for Australia: nearer 50 rather than 18 million.

* I believed then and still believe that in a referendum on the question, ‘Should we have more Asian immigrants?’, the response would be ‘no’.

* it is loyalty to Australia which binds us together, not blood or ethnicity.

In Australia in the 1980s there was overwhelming support from politicians and all parties for the migration program. There were niggles around the edges from right-wing and anti-development groups but there was strong support. That has been a great feature of migration and multiculturalism in Australia. It has been supported by all the major opinion leaders, whether they were in politics, business, unions or the media. The only significant exception over many years has been John Howard. He first broke bipartisanship in immigration in 1988 when he was Leader of the Opposition and again as Prime Minister in 1996.

* Customer service took a lot of my time. Public enterprises like Qantas had great records in engineering and technology but customers were a bit of a nuisance…. As Australians we often felt that providing and receiving service was a little demeaning—it was something that other nationalities were good at, perhaps the Italians, but not us.

* My other main focus was staff attitudes and loyalties. There were many examples of unacceptable attitudes. Susie and I were on a Qantas aircraft that was forced to make a stop in Darwin because of a minor technical problem. Under provisions of their award, cabin crew could insist on an overnight rest break in Darwin or fly some additional hours and take the plane to Sydney that night. The pilots decided to fly on to Sydney and arrive before curfew. But the cabin crew said they were too tired and voted to stay in Darwin. So all the passengers were off-loaded for a night in a Darwin hotel. Over sandwiches and coffee at the hotel I heard the cabin crew at the next table planning their evening at the casino. I pointed out their selfish behaviour and the damage they were doing to Qantas and in the long term to their own jobs. They complained to their union about my abruptness and wanted an apology. I refused. There was clearly a long way to go.

* When I was travelling, I would usually go and have a chat to cabin crew in the flight kitchen and ask, ‘What are the loads like lately on the flights you have been on?’ It soon became clear that to them a high passenger load was a horror trip with more work.

* The telephone taught me what life would be like after Qantas. Asked, ‘Who’s calling?’, I would reply, ‘John Menadue’. Then I would be asked, ‘What company are you from, sir?’ I was confronted by that. It seemed that unless I belonged to a company or a group, I was a non-person.

Posted in Australia | Comments Off on Things You Learn Along The Way By John Menadue

Black Economist Glen Loury On Race Relations

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

From City Journal:

* I happen to be suspicious about the assertion of authority based upon personal identity, such as being black. Let’s take this example. Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I happen to think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative explanations for his actions that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch.

* It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity?

* These events don’t speak for themselves. Americans disagree about Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is not axiomatic. The group represents a thrust in American politics. We can talk about it. I’m not without sympathy for the struggle for racial justice, but I have disputes with people when it comes to interpreting what’s going on in American cities. The letter doesn’t mention the fact that it’s dangerous on the streets of many inner-city neighborhoods where police have to operate every day, that there are a lot of weapons out there, or that the homicide rate is extraordinarily high and that most of the people committing the homicides in these places are black.

* I object to the soft tyranny of having political postures put forward as self-evident truths to which every decent member of this community should subscribe. I object to that. That’s the last thing that a university should be doing. It’s malpractice. It is administrative malpractice of this precious institution to be swept along by political fad and fancy, and then demand the assent of every administrator, in lockstep, without any dispute among themselves. This is horrible, I thought. I thought the propagation of such groupthink at our university was just horrible.

* People cry, “structural racism.” Is that why the homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher among young black men? They say structural racism. Is that why the SAT test-score gap is as big as it is? They say structural racism. Is that why two in three black American kids are born to women without a husband? Is it all about structural racism? Is everything structural racism? It has become a tautology explaining everything. All racial disparities are due to structural racism, evidently. Covid-19 comes along and there’s a disparity in the health incidence. It’s due to structural racism. They’re naming partners at a New York City law firm and there are few black faces. Structural racism. They’re admitting people to specialized exam schools in New York City and the Asians do better. This has to be structural racism, with a twist—the twist being that this time, the structural racism somehow comes out favoring the Asians.

This is not social science. This is propaganda. It’s religion. People are trying to win arguments by using words as if they were weapons.

* Take structural racism’s narrative of incarceration. It’s supposed to be self-evident that if there’s a racial disparity in the incidence of punishment from law-breaking, then the law is illegitimate. Well, an alternative hypothesis is that, for reasons that we could perhaps spend lots of time pursuing, behaviors are different. Behaviors that bear on lawbreaking are different between races, on average. Violence is one behavior, but it’s not the only one I’m talking about. People have tried to do these studies. They’ve examined whether policing practices can accommodate disparity in arrest rates. They’ve examined whether court dispositions are somehow structurally biased, finding blacks guilty when whites would have been found innocent; whether judges systematically pronounce longer sentences for blacks than for whites. The net finding was no.

* Sam Harris says that if we can’t reason together, then the only alternative for dispute resolution is violence.

* I think Fryer’s studies give us good evidence of the Ferguson Effect’s validity. This most recent paper is only one study, but the numbers are stunning. It looks at Ferguson, Riverside, Chicago, and Baltimore as cities where there were Michael Brown- or Freddie Gray-type viral incidents of police brutality, which caused a big public stir that then drew in a federal investigation of each respective local police department. He compares those to other cities, similar in demography and economic structure, but where there was no viral incident, or there was a viral incident, but it was not followed by an investigation by the federal government of the local department.

Fryer finds that violent crime is significantly higher in those cities that were investigated than it is in comparable cities in the years after the federal investigations. It’s a very comprehensive regression-discontinuity study. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s compelling. They estimate that these investigations caused an additional 900 homicides and an additional 30,000 or so felonies. Why? Because, he says, the amount of policing activity in those places diminished significantly with the onset of the federal inquiry, which he shows by documenting the decrease in stops made by police in those places. So he’s got two findings, really. First: police engagement with citizens seems to be sensitive to the extent to which police are placed in jeopardy by the scrutiny of the federal government. Second: the amount of violent crime in those places depends on the amount of police engagement because violent crime goes up when police engagement goes down. That’s an association, not a demonstration of causality, but it’s a very suggestive association.

* You have two alternatives. You can live with disparities, or you can live in totalitarianism.

* Why would I ever expect that there would be parity across the board between ethnic, racial, cultural, and ancestral population groups in an open society? It’s a contradiction because difference is a very fact of groupness. What do I mean by a group? Well, it’s genes, to some degree; it’s culture; it’s networks of social affiliation, of intermarriage and kinship. I mean the shared narrative, the same hopes, the dreams, the stories. I mean the practices of parenting and filial piety and whatever else there might be.

A group is a group. It has characteristics. Those characteristics matter for whether you play in the NBA. They matter for whether you learn to master the violin or the piano. They matter for whether you pursue technical subjects or choose to become a humanist or a scientist. They matter for the food that you eat. They matter for how many children you raise and how you raise them. They matter as to the age when you first have sex. They matter for all those things, and I think everyone would agree with that.

But now you’re telling me that they don’t matter for who becomes a partner in a law firm? They don’t matter for who becomes a chair in the Philosophy Department somewhere? Groupness implies disparity because groupness, if taken seriously, implies differences in ways of living life. Not everybody wants to play the fiddle. Not everybody wants to dunk a basketball. Not everybody is frightened to death that their parents are going to be disappointed with them if they come home with an A-minus. Not everybody is susceptible to being swayed into a social affiliation that requires them to commit a violent crime in order to prove their bona fides. Groups differ. Groups are not evenly distributed across society. That’s inevitable. If you insist that those be flattened, you’re only going to be able to succeed by imposing a totalitarian regime that monitors everything and jiggers everything, recomputing and refiguring things until we’ve got the same number of blacks in proportion to their population and the same number of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in proportion to their population being admitted to Caltech or the Bronx High School of Science. I don’t want to live in that world.

Posted in Race | Comments Off on Black Economist Glen Loury On Race Relations

David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Luke Ford

From New York Magazine:

* Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes.

* Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves to do things that are strategically dumb.

* a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.

* So working-class white people have an enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that that isn’t true.

* Non-college-educated white people with low levels of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us.

* But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level, was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important fact of the world.

* Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.

* The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.

* Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down.

So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.

Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.

* There’s like 20 percent of the electorate that trusts Democratic elites tremendously. And they will turn their views on a dime if the party tells them to. So this is how you can get Abolish ICE to go from a 10 percent issue to a 30 percent issue. If you’re an ideological activist, that’s a powerful force. If you convince strong partisans to adopt your view, then when the party comes to power, strong partisans will ultimately make up that administration and then you can make policy progress.

The problem is that swing voters don’t trust either party.

* Campaigns just can’t effect those kinds of long-term changes. They can direct information to partisans who trust them, and they can curry favor with marginal voters by signaling agreement with them on issues. But there isn’t much space for changing marginal voters’ minds.

* voters view center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know, center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.

* One thing that Democrats consistently get rated highly on is improving race relations.

* What’s powerful about nonviolent protest — and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a disproportionate response from the police — is that it can shift the conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that benefits Democrats and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality, social justice, fairness — these Democratic-loaded concepts — without the trade-off of crime or public safety. So I think it is really consistent with a pretty broad, cross-sectional body of evidence (a piece of which I obviously tweeted at some point) that nonviolent protest is politically advantageous, both in terms of changing public opinion on discrete issues and electing parties sympathetic to the left’s concerns.

* when violence is happening, people become afraid. They fear for their safety, and then they crave order. And order is a winning issue for conservatives here and everywhere around the world. The basic political argument since the French Revolution has been the left saying, “Let’s make things more fair,” and the right saying, “If we do that, it will lead to chaos and threaten your family.”

* the real inflection point in our polling was the Lafayette Park incident, when Trump used tear gas on innocent people. That’s when support for Biden shot up and it’s been pretty steady since then.

* In the postwar era, college-educated professionals were maybe 4 percent of the electorate. Which meant that basically no voters had remotely cosmopolitan values. But the flip side of this is that this educated 4 percent still ran the world. Both parties at this point were run by this highly educated, cosmopolitan minority that held a bunch of values that undergirded the postwar consensus, around democracy and rule of law, and all these things.

Obviously, these people were more right wing on a bunch of social issues than their contemporary counterparts, but during that era, both parties were run by just about the most cosmopolitan segments of society. And there were also really strong gatekeepers. This small group of highly educated people not only controlled the commanding heights of both the left and the right, but also controlled the media. There were only a small number of TV stations — in other countries, those stations were even run by the government. And both sides knew it wasn’t electorally advantageous to campaign on cosmopolitan values.

So, as a result, campaigns centered around this cosmopolitan elite’s internal disagreements over economic issues. But over the past 60 years, college graduates have gone from being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35. Now, it’s actually possible — for the first time ever in human history — for political parties to openly embrace cosmopolitan values and win elections; certainly primary and municipal elections, maybe even national elections if you don’t push things too far or if you have a recession at your back. And so Democratic elites started campaigning on the things they’d always wanted to, but which had previously been too toxic. And so did center-left parties internationally.

* Education is highly correlated with openness to new experiences; basically, there’s this divide where some people react positively to novel things and others react less positively. And there’s evidence that this relationship is causal. In Europe, when countries raised their mandatory schooling age from 16 to 18, the first generation of students who remained in school longer had substantially more liberal views on immigration than their immediate predecessors. And then, college-educated people are also more willing to try strange foods or travel abroad. So it really seems like education makes people more open to new experiences.

But politically, this manifests on immigration. And it’s ironclad. You can look at polling from the 1940s on whether America should take in Jewish refugees, and college-educated people wanted to and non-college-educated people didn’t. It’s true cross-nationally — like, working-class South Africans oppose taking in refugees from Zimbabwe, while college-educated South Africans support taking them in.

Other research has shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that emphasizes zero-sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated people.

* Black voters trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters. We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too.

* So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons, occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church.

* Democratic politicians, relative to the country, are very left wing. But campaigns really want to win.

* I think a really underrated political consequence of coronavirus has been a large increase in Democrats’ odds of taking the Senate. A year ago, I thought it was possible but a long shot. Now, it’s something that has a very reasonable chance of happening.

And I think that’s partly because a lot of Senate Republicans have put themselves in the position of opposing very popular things. The coronavirus has really increased the salience of health care, which is a Democratic-loaded issue. But it’s also made opposing things like paid leave incredibly toxic.

* It’s not just that every new generation is more Democratic. Something much weirder has happened. People who were 18 years old in 2012 have swung about 12 points toward Democrats, while people who were 65 years old in that year have since swung like eight points toward Republicans. Right now, that’s a bad trade. Old people vote more than young people.

* The reason people aren’t splitting their tickets anymore is probably because the internet exists now and people are better informed than they used to be. There was this broadband rollout study where they looked at the fact that different places got broadband at different times. And what they saw was that when broadband reached a given congressional district, ticket-splitting declined and ideological polarization went up.

if we have a neutral national environment in 2024 (i.e., a 2016-style environment), we’re going to be down to 43 Senate seats. It’s really quite bleak. The Senate was always a really fucked-up anti-majoritarian institution. But it was okay because people in Nebraska used to vote randomly. But now they have the internet, and they know that Democrats are liberal.

* I think one big lesson of 2018 was that Trump’s coalition held up. Obviously, we did better as the party out of power. But if you look at how we did in places like Maine or Wisconsin or Michigan, it looked more like 2016 than 2012. Donald Trump still has a giant structural advantage in the Electoral College.

So, in 2016, we got 51.1 percent of the two-party vote share (of the share of votes that went to Democrats and Republicans). And if we had gotten 51.6 percent of that, we would have had about a 50 percent chance of winning an Electoral College majority. We probably needed to get to 52 percent in order to have a high chance of winning the presidency. For most of the last six months, in public polls, Biden was at 52 or so. Now, we’re at like 54.

Posted in America | Comments Off on David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics