Every group thinks it is supreme. This is not a problem unique to whites. Judaism holds that Jews are God’s chosen people. How is that not supremacist?
Let’s take “white supremacy” out of the realm of insult. It is an ideology, after all, not simply a slur, and it is believed by tens of millions of Americans. It is the proposition that the real (“great”) America is white America, and while the “melting pot” can absorb some blacks, Asians and Latinos, the essential core of what America is remains the Christian, European iteration that prevailed for 200 years. It is English-speaking, Merry-Christmas-wishing, and ruled by “real” American men, not by women or people with the middle name Hussein.
Moreover, white supremacy is not the provenance of the Ku Klux Klan and other easy-to-dismiss villains. It is the very air that we breathe. It is, as Mohammed Ali commented in 1969, the fact that Jesus is white, angels are white, Miss America is (or ought to be) white and Snow White is white.
Similarly, racism is not about individuals having bad thoughts (or not) about other races. Racism is a structural phenomenon, built into the way in which we live — and it is often completely invisible to those of us on the privileged side. (This is why writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates get accused of “playing the race card.” To some white people, talking about race is playing a card; to people of color, it is the entire card game.)
Which brings us back to Trump, and the Jews who support him — Mel Sembler, Elliott Broidy, Sam Fox, Lewis Eisenberg and Ronald Weiser on the fundraising side; Jason Greenblatt and David M. Friedman on Israel, and of course, Sheldon Adelson.
It’s been a commonplace of late that Trump’s appeal rests on two foundations: first, the economic insecurity of working-class whites, who were trained for an economy that no longer exists and have not recovered from 2008, and second, the nativist, racist resentment these whites feel toward anyone who isn’t them. As scholars and critics have dug more deeply into the Trump phenomenon, however, it has turned out that the second motivation is in fact the predominant one.
First, white Republicans in general hold far more negative views of blacks than white Democrats do. In a stunning summary of data from two Vanderbilt University researchers, published in The New York Times on May 11, Thomas Edsall observed that on a scale of racial resentment whites feel toward African Americans, fully 58% of Republican whites were in the “most resentful” quartile, compared with 22% of Democrats and 42% of Independents. Meanwhile, only 4% of Republicans were in the least resentful quartile, compared with 23% of Democrats and 10% of Independents.
The Vanderbilt researchers also amalgamated how whites regard blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and LGBT people relative to themselves. Seventy-three percent of Republicans have unfavorable views of these “others,” with only 16% neutral and 11% favorable. Among Democrats, 41% had unfavorable views, 20% neutral and 38% favorable.
Think about that for a moment. Seventy-three percent of white Republicans think they are better than other groups Fifty-eight percent are strongly resentful of blacks.
Then came the data-crunching over at Vox on June 2, which showed that the best predictor of Trump support was not whether they think the economy is getting worse, but whether they think President Obama is a Muslim. “If they are white and the answer is yes,” Philip Klinkner wrote, “89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.”
There are a whole lot more data points in that piece, but the takeaway is disturbing. It’s not the economy, stupid; it’s the brown people.
Indeed, if you chart Obama’s disapproval rating according to the level of an individual’s racial resentment, as Vox did, it’s practically a straight line. People dislike Obama to the extent they dislike blacks.
In a sense, the whole Trump story is a simple one: black, “Muslim” president leads to nativist backlash, with a consummate salesman-demagogue giving his followers permission to say what had previously been beyond the bounds of polite discourse.
Now, neither Vanderbilt nor the sources cited in Vox included Jews among these “others.” But we all know the shocking levels of anti-Semitism among Trump’s supporters, Trump’s retweets of white supremacists, and the now infamous (((echoes))) among various code words they use to dog-whistle to one another.
Let’s dig one level deeper, though.
Twenty seven years ago, feminist theoretician Peggy McIntosh published an influential essaycalled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” This short article is a must-read, and helps make the invisible visible. “My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture,” she writes. Rather, “I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.”
Yet McIntosh went on to list 26 ways in which her skin color gave her advantages in everyday life, from “I can be pretty sure that my neighbors… will be neutral or pleasant to me” to “I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to ‘the person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race.”
Finally, she observes, “there was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.”
This is the “great” America that Trump’s supporters are mourning: the America of white male hegemony, no Spanish on the phone-tree menus, no political correctness to prohibit hateful speech toward women, and no Kenyan Muslims in the White House. (As Ali pointed out, it is the “White” House, after all.) White Supremacy isn’t about what Trump may or may not believe in his heart; it is about his core message of restoring a more nativist, sexist, white-hegemonic America.
Do we American Jews really think that we have so successfully assimilated that we are not part of the problem according to this white supremacist logic? That the viciously anti-Semitic trolling of Jonathan Weisman, Julia Ioffe and, for this paper, Bethany Mandel (among others) is just happenstance?
Jewish tradition is clear that it is a sin to support a candidate of racial resentment, nationalism, and demagoguery who wishes to oppress the foreigner and who makes generalizations about disfavored groups (see Exodus 22:21-22 or 23:9, Deuteronomy 23:7 or 24:17 or 27:19, Jeremiah 7:6 or 22:3, Psalms 94:6, Zechariah 7:10, Malachi 3:5 and elsewhere). It also flies in the face of our own recent experiences as immigrants to this country, and as objects of religious hatred throughout Western Civilization.
But, beyond that, it is extremely foolish. We Jews are not so white that the logic of white supremacy passes over us like the Angel of Death on Pesach. We, too, are Other. And if it is now acceptable to shower contempt on those who are different, we will not remain untouched.
I agree with much of this column. As John Derbyshire has said, tens of millions of Americans don’t like blacks (and you can now add Muslims) and most of these people vote Republican.
I disagree Jay Michaelson that whites are any more racially supremacist in their views than any other group.
I agree 100% with this:
…the essential core of what America is remains the Christian, European iteration that prevailed for 200 years. It is English-speaking, Merry-Christmas-wishing, and ruled by “real” American men, not by women or people with the middle name Hussein.
Western civilization is overwhelmingly the product of the efforts of white Christians. For Western civilization to flourish, it will depend on whites of Christian origins.
“Moreover, white supremacy is not the provenance of the Ku Klux Klan and other easy-to-dismiss villains. It is the very air that we breathe. It is, as Mohammed Ali commented in 1969 , the fact that Jesus is white, angels are white, Miss America is (or ought to be) white and Snow White is white.”
I agree with that assessment. As soon as white Protestant values were no longer taken for granted in America, the country began declining. Once political parties are identified as “conservative,” the struggle is over. In a healthy country, “conservative” values are taken for granted, like the air you breathe. White Christian values are either taken for granted in the West, or they are already ceding supremacy.
I come from Australia and the average Australian has a dim view of anyone who’s not Australian. I suspect that the average Jap has a negative view of anyone who isn’t Japanese and that the average Jew has a negative view of anyone who isn’t Jewish and that the average Christian and Muslim also has a negative view of out-groups.
Much of political ideology is rooted in genetics. People with conservative tendencies have a much more negative view of diversity than people who identify as liberals.
Goy: “I love it when Jews go on about “white supremacists” who want to run America but think it’s just fine that Israel be a Jewish state.”
COMMENTS AT FORWARD:
* Any Jew who votes for Trump truly merits the label, “self-hater.” This is a candidate who is thoroughly entangled with the anti-semites of America. Case closed.
* Those of us who grew up in the poorer section of Brooklyn know full well the resentments felt by white ethnics at our displacement by a liberal establishment needing to find housing for the black multitudes coming up from the south. Neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish became overwhelmingly black. No compensation was offered to the displaced for loss of property and neighborhood.
* Actually it is the normal evolution of neighborhoods. Jewish neighborhoods arose when white christians’ economic conditions improved and they moved to more upscale areas. When economic conditions improved for the residents of Jewish neighborhoods, they too moved to more upscale areas and people of color moved into the neighborhood. The Philadelphia neighborhoods of Strawberry Mansion and Wynnefield are prime examples.
* Trump unambiguously and quickly expressed full support for Israel (not the psycho pally killers). Case closed. It’s interesting to watch the extent to which domestic big-lie, anti-Israel, mass media insists that I should hate Trump (because the Forward, NYT, etc, are *really* looking out for the Jews!)
* So your criterion for a presidential candidate is “opened” or “closed” exclusively based on that candidate’s stance toward Israel, and the willingness to spend even more American blood and treasure on its behalf (which is illegal under the Symington Amendment)? This is going to do no wonders for the anti-semitic canard that Jews are not loyal patriots of the countries they reside in, but only their own tribe.
* The intellectual movements of (((Marxism))), (((Freudian))) psychoanalysis, the (((Frankfurt school))) of sociology, and ((( Boasian))) anthropology traces the role of Jews in promoting (((multi-culturalism))) and Third World immigration. Throughout Jews have promoted these movements as Jews and in the interests of Jews, though they have often tried to give the impression that they had no distinctive interests of their own.
Therefore the most profound charge against Jews is not ethnocentrism but dishonesty – that while claiming to be working for the good of mankind they have often worked for their own good and to the detriment of others. While attempting to promote the brotherhood of man by dissolving the ethnic identification of non-jews, Jews have maintained precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as
immoral in others.
>>>Did you learn that at Trump U? Resentment for people with small hands 101?
A favorite (((Soviet))) tactic against dissidents: Anyone whose political views were different from theirs was insane. The Frankfurt school never criticized or even described Jewish group identity – only that of gentiles: “behavior that is critical to Judaism as a successful group evolutionary strategy is conceptualized as pathological in gentiles.”
For these Jewish intellectuals, anti-Semitism was also a sign of
mental illness: They concluded that Christian self-denial and especially sexual repression caused hatred of Jews. The Frankfurt school was enthusiastic about psycho-analysis, according to which “Oedipal ambivalence toward the father and anal-sadistic relations in early childhood are the anti-Semite’s irrevocable inheritance.”
In addition to ridiculing patriotism and racial identity, the Frankfurt school glorified promiscuity and Bohemian poverty. “Certainly many of the central attitudes of the largely successful 1960s (((countercultural))) revolution find expression in The Authoritarian Personality, including idealizing rebellion against parents, low-investment sexual relationships, and scorn for upward social mobility, social status, family pride, the Christian religion, and patriotism.”
Of the interest here, however, is the movement’s success in branding ancient loyalties to nation and race as mental illnesses. Although he came later, the French-Jewish “deconstructionist” Jacques Derrida was in the same tradition when he wrote:
“The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of
strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue… The idea is to disarm the bombs… of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants…”
“Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology.”Needless to say, this project has been successful; anyone opposed to the displacement of whites is routinely treated as a mentally unhinged
“hate-monger,” and whenever whites defend their group interests they are described as psychologically inadequate. The irony has not escaped us.
“The ideology that ethnocentrism was a form of psychopathology was promulgated by a group that over its long history had arguably been the most ethnocentric group among all the cultures of the world.”
* A favorite (((white supremist))) tactic, blame a minority for your feelings of inadequacy.
* Jew supremacy or jew supremacism is a racist ideology centered upon the belief, and promotion of the belief, that the ‘chosen people’ are superior in certain characteristics, traits, and attributes to people of other racial backgrounds and that therefore jew people should politically, economically and socially rule non-jew people.
* A remarkable passage from Charles Silberman: “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief – one firmly rooted in history – that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.”
He is saying, in effect, that when Jews make the diversity-is-our-strength argument it is in support of their real goal of diluting a society’s homogeneity so that Jews will feel safe. They are couching a Jewish agenda in terms they think gentiles will accept. Likewise, as the second part of the Silberman quotation suggests, Jews may support deviant movements, not because they think it is good for the country but because it is good for the Jews.
Prof. Silberman also provides an illuminating quote from a Jewish economist who thought that republicans had more sensible economic
policies but who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate anyway. His reason? “I’d rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than those I saw at the Republican convention.” This man apparently distrusts white gentiles and voted for a racially mixed party even if its economic policies were wrong. What is good for Jews appears to come before what is good for the country.
* So what you’re saying is that white people are racist for voting for a party that courts their interests, and that you will not vote for the republican party because it no longer courts your jewish interests.
* I’m saying white people do not have seperate interests and I will not vote for a party that believes they do.
* “The best deceivers are those who deceive themselves.” In other words, many Jews who are actually working for Jewish interests have first convinced themselves otherwise. A Jew who mainly wants America to become less white may also have convinced himself that America benefits from a multitude of cultures. Having convinced himself he can more effectively convince others.
“Surface declarations of a lack of Jewish identity may be highly misleading.” Jewish publications write about the power and influence of American Jews in language Jews would immediately denounce as “anti-Semitic” if used by non-jews. Joseph Sobran, who has said “they want to be Jews among themselves but resent being seen as Jews by non-jews. They want to pursue their own distinct interests while pretending that they have no such interests…”
Success of Jewish-led intellectual movements has been possible only because their Jewish character was hidden. If multi-culturalism or mass immigration or The Authoritarian Personality had been promoted by Orthodox Jews in black coats the Jewish element would have been clear. “The Jewish political agenda was not an aspect of the theory and the theories themselves had no overt Jewish content. Non-jew intellectuals approaching these theories were therefore unlikely to view them as aspects of Jew vs. non-jew cultural competition or as an aspect of a specifically Jewish political agenda.” Jews have often tried to conceal the Jewish character of an intellectual movement by recruiting token gentiles for visible positions as spokesmen. He writes that this tactic was so common in the American Communist Party that gentiles often saw through it and resigned.
* Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, to blame him for the fact that a lunatic fringe of the extreme right supports him is like blaming Tommy Hilfiger for the fact that members of a certain violent underclass prefer to wear his fashion items. What should disturb an ostensibly Jewish publication is the huge mass of highly educated, well heeled and virulently anti-Semitic leftists who endorse Bernie Sanders and who will, likely be affecting the Democratic platform in just a few week. But, of course, this is of little concern to fellow travelers of the anti-Israel camp such as the Forward. If anything the red diaper babies of Forward are probably tacitly, if not overtly,happy that Cornell West and James Zogby will be crafting Democratic policy vis a vis the Jewish State.
* The “white” people who support Trump are the segment of the working class and small-business population that is disadvantaged by export of jobs and import of cheap labor. This doesn’t have much to do with American Jews or Israel, although I suppose sophisticated American Jews understand and appreciate the advantages of International trade. That this segment of the white population, trailer trash, is more likely to have anti-Semitic prejudices is true, but that is linked to their general lack of education and sophistication. Not that Trump is any good; he is essentially a confidence man.
* So the “working class and small-business population” is “trailer trash.” There it is, the transportation of hatred toward gentiles in the Pale of Settlement brought across the Atlantic. How curious that the Kishinev Pogrom and other “scandals” that the international media howled against ended up being frauds when investigators from several countries turned up absolutely nothing. Sverdlov sends Yurovsky to murder the Czar and his family, Trotsky’s forces crush their own supporters in the Kronstadt Rebellion while millions starve and get shot during the Red Terror, Iagoda works millions to death in NKVD gulags building the White Sea Canal, and those Russian serfs are seen as the aggressors against the Jews. A cute story to open borders and markets, a transposition of aggressor and victim, just like in America. These “trailer trash” were minding their own business mining and farming, i.e. actually working, when certain New York speculators crashed the economy in 1893 and were outraged to be identified as Jews. Gompers and Goldman stirred revolution, Celler howled and worked for 41 years to ensure the demographic annihilation of these “trailer trash,” and your conclusion is that these denizens of a country that has done more for Jews in world history than any other country, with zero reciprocity, should be denigrated while their country is stolen by brown hordes with hungry mouths. Classy. Then again, my education is not the “education” you speak of, which is “whites were horrible slavers and Holocausted the six million, so always be tolerant of others and against bigotry, which means that Europeans worldwide uniquely have to become loathed minorities in their own countries.”
* One is painfully reminded of pre-World War One Germany unter Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Kaiser was supported not only by a German petit bourgeois milieu of nationalists so well described in Heinrich Mann’s legendary novel “Der Untertan”, but also by a significant group of super-assimilated German Jewish parvenus, who shared the Kaiser’s nationalist aspirations, but turned a blind eye on the increased anti-semitism of their non-Jewish German compatriots. The Adelsons of that age were personalities like Albert Ballin, the CEO of HAPAG, the biggest logistics supplier between Hamburg and New York, who shot himself in November 1918 when the military (and also moral) defeat of Germany became evident, and Fritz Haber, the Nobel prize winner of Chemistry, who personally supervised the notorious Gas attacks at Ypres during the war, and whose pacifist wife Clara Immerwahr (the first female Ph.D. in chemistry in Germany ever and a close friend of Albert Einstein) shot herself, in utter desperation about her husband’s actions. Only a few people like Einstein on one hand and the still very small number of German Zionists on the other at that time saw the pending disaster. Even after the crushing defeat of Germany triggered a wave of anti-semitism many still didn’t want to see what was going on.
* If Trump’s supporters are reminiscent of German Jews who supported the Kaiser, Bernie’s bring to mind Russian Jewish Bolsheviks who were later purged from the Party. They’re currently being tolerated as long as they check certain parts of their identity at the door (e.g., support of Israel) but that “tolerance” is likely to diminish over time. Consider the liberal Oberlin professor who blamed the world’s ills on the Rothchilds. Neither the left or right has ever had a monopoly on anti-semitism. When it comes from both sides, as is happening today, watch out.
* I’m sure that with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller, Karl Radek, Kurt Eisner, Eugen Levine, and Paul Levi, and other purely coincidental Jews trying to overthrow the country in favor of a Communist dictatorship, Bela Kun
successfully doing so in Hungary, Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Uritsky, Litvinov, Bronshtein, and so many others successfully doing so in the Soviet Union, the “increased anti-semitism of their non-Jewish German compatriots” was pure and random hatred of Jews for no reason whatsoever, as you imply. There was clearly nothing going on whatsoever that might cause a rational resentment, these Communist mass murderers trying to take over the country could have just as easily been Tahitians.
Walter Benjamin from the “Institute for Social Research” in Frankfurt, aka the Frankfurt School, was accused of undermining German morés and being a subversive. When he fled Europe and landed a job at Columbia University thanks to ethnic networking, him and Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse etc. set to work on forming “critical theory” to undermine and destroy the religious, familial, educational, historic, and gender institutions that had theretofore created a stable, successful country, all before having even left New York City. The strategy was in place, whether in Germany or the United States, the “trailer trash” as one person commented above were all the same, whether West Virginian miners or Lithuanian farmers. Benjamin did nothing but confirm all the “anti-semitic canards” of being a “natural nation wrecker,” by doing precisely that. Curiously, no such “Frankfurt School” exists to undermine and destroy Israel, it seems to be a one-sided phenomenon, much like Israelis facilitating refugees as they enter….Europe….while Israel sterilizes and deports Eritreans while not taking in a single “refugee.”
* This is just mindless slander by a progressive racist. Where’s the evidence that there are tens of millions of white supremacists in America? Why would anyone concerned about African Americans vote for a Democrat? Democrats control every major inner city in America 100% and have for 50 to 100 years. Everything that oppresses minorities in these cities – Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago – that policy can affect, Democrats and progressives are responsible for. The best thing that could happen for African Americans in this election would be to bring a two-party system to what are now one-party fiefdoms. And that would mean a vote for Trump.
* When Jewish media personalities dominate both the “liberals” and the “conservatives” it must often get confusing when it comes time to decide if a candidate is “anti-semitic” or “racist”. This leads to the phenomenon of conservative and liberal Jews telling the goyim that the other side are the real racists, while regular Americans just want to preserve their way of life. Those poor low IQ goyim are easily confused.
* Uh, I’m Jewish. I just don’t want to get shoahed again because people like the author have pushed a nation too far.
* “Jewish tradition is clear that it is a sin to support a candidate of racial resentment, nationalism, and demagoguery who wishes to oppress the foreigner and who makes generalizations about disfavored groups (see Exodus 22:21-22 or 23:9, Deuteronomy 23:7 or 24:17 or 27:19, Jeremiah 7:6 or 22:3, Psalms 94:6, Zechariah 7:10, Malachi 3:5 and elsewhere).”
Unless he’s an Israeli politician. In that case, it’s your racial duty to support that candidate.
* How is what Trump wants for the US any different from what Israel already has, which you fervently support?
Trump wants to build a wall? Well Israel has lots of walls, one of which (the one on the Egyptian border) was built to keep illegal immigrants — or as israelis call them, ‘infiltrators — out.
Trump wants to implement an immigration policy that discriminates on the basis of religion. Well, Israel already has that — it’s called the right of return, an immigration policy whereby jews are given preference over non-jews in obtaining Israeli citizenship.
As for ‘whites are core to america’ — does not the notion of a ‘jewish state’ imply that jews are core to Isreal?Why are you Jews allowed to have a state for which a particular people are core, but white people not?
* Weird.
* What a country without ‘diversity’ would look like.
Strong, healthy and working together.
No big disagreements.
* Another snoozer from the anti-Trump crowd that could be summed up in like two words, “That’s racist”.
* @JayMichaelson – aren’t you the magnificent racist.
There is nothing racist about a community being determined to maintain its heritage . . . Jews for example are bidden pass the family story onto the children – v’sheenantah lvarechah – & the Pesch Seder.
By your argument all Jews who take these mitzvot seriously are racists. . . . maybe not . . . your headline was soooo off putting that I didn’t read your article completely.
Congrats!!! the first rule of bulcheviks – malign & defame the opposition. Avoid debating th issues like the plague.