One of my longtime readers objected to a statement a few blogs back where I called the Democrat Party the ‘party of hate.’ I apologized for using such intemperate language, and explained what drove me to it. There is no excuse. My explanation was that it is my reaction to the rising and very dangerous Jew Hate in my beloved country, America. And that Jew Hate has found a comfortable home among Democrats, journalists, academics and other lefties.
I am now in Tokyo, where I see none of the recriminations and political venom that is out of control in America. Maybe I can think about the reasons for this period of terrible anguish at home. Anguish that is tearing families apart.
It is very worthwhile mentioning, as I did in the last blog, that I’m reading Bibi’s autobiography. A brilliant book where the subject is his brother, Joni, who was murdered leading the first great airplane terrorist recovery, Entebbe, and then the subject shifts to his wife Sara. An autobiography in reflection. I might try it myself.
The whole point of bringing up Bibi is that the Israeli press and the Labor Left hate Bibi with the same malice and venom of the American press and the Democrat Party towards decent honest Republicans.
I personally knew Richard Nixon, I knew several cabinet members of Ronald Reagan’s. So I felt personally the endless mindless attacks on them. And now for seven years I’ve watched with absolute horror the outrageous lies, hatred and constitutionally illegal villainy poured on Donald Trump and his family. So where does this daily national bile come from?
While the toxic spleen may have boiled over for Bibi and Trump, it has been with us for half a century. The Left hated Nixon and Senator McCarthy from 1950. It has only grown since then.
Unlike Jew hate, there is no social opprobrium. Lefties feel free to pour out their acrimony with little or no restraint in public. They are even self-righteous on many occasions.
What is it and why has it metastasized?
Two disappearances are central to what has happened.
The Army and the draft that went with it. I was in the Army. We all got along even in peacetime and we accommodated each other despite wild differences in social class, politics and background.
- Civic organizations evaporated. We lost the Odd Fellows, the Lions, the Masonic Order, Kiwanis and a dozen others. These organizations created civility. The Army satisfied the civility role and may have been the reason for their disappearance.
Religions promptly split along political lines in the 1960s. Reform Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Unitarians on the left and Baptists and Evangelicals on the conservative side.
- Unions took over nearly every city as I’ve explained before with the collapse of the hereditary elite and union values of anti-meritocracy triumphed in the public square.
- Prison values took over the fashion world.
- Importantly the long-standing Marxist suzerainty of academia took over the intellectual world and the media.
- Finally the Internet plays a role but not for the popular reason that it gives individuals a public outlet. The Internet gave each participant a place to vent and curate their political views among allies and potential converts.
There you have it.
Six institutional forces that divided America with a venom that we have not seen since the 1850s Democrat-Republican divide.
Japan never got the divisions because it never lost its hereditary elite. Israel got the divisive illness because it had a monstrously powerful labor and socialist overlord.
I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it. I will summarize in the next blog.