By Jonathan S. Tobin – U.S. News – Haaretz.com
Reasonable people must stop buying into the lunacy that Americans are living in the moral equivalent of the last days of the Weimar Republic. And that applies to Jews making offensive Holocaust analogies too
Demonstrators protest during the “Keep Families Together” national day of action against the Trump administration’s immigration policy in Los Angeles, California, U.S. June 30, 2018.\ MONICA ALMEIDA/ REUTERS
For many on the American Jewish left, President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court is the last straw. Like his “zero tolerance” immigration policy, the prospect of ensuring a solidly conservative majority on the high court is viewed with horror by many who see this as the beginning of the end of liberal democracy.
Indeed, Trump’s presidency is so abhorrent to those who deplore his policies that they have ceased to view politics as something on which decent people can agree to disagree.
That’s the only explanation for why even normally sensible people like historian Laurel Leff, whose book about the way The New York Times covered up the Holocaust is still essential reading, would essentially defend the public harassment of Trump administration officials on the specious grounds that Jews who opposed the Nazis in the 1930s were also viewed as not being civil to Germans (The Trump Civility Debate Isn’t New. In the 1930s, America Debated Whether It Was Civil to Shun the Nazis.)
U.S. President Donald Trump nominating Brett Kavanaugh as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 9, 2018. Bloomberg
Whatever you may think about the enforcement of existing U.S. immigration laws or about the future of the U.S. Supreme Court, Holocaust analogies to what is happening in the United States are as unhelpful to helping us understand what is going on as they are egregiously wrong.
There is a lot to criticize about Trump but, as the battle over the court reveals, most of what he’s done as president are things that any Republican would have done since, to some surprise, he has largely governed as a conventional conservative.
The left’s apocalyptic rhetoric notwithstanding, after nearly 18 months in office, evidence of tyranny, as opposed to policies Democrats oppose, is scant. Freedom of the press and the right of free assembly continues. If the American people are so outraged about what is going on in Washington, they can vote out Congressional Republicans in November and do the same to Trump two years later.
But that’s not the way it feels to many Americans. Even some mainstream liberals truly appear to believe American liberty is hanging in the balance, and nothing short of active “resistance” is required in order to prevent the country from sliding into fascism.
Part of this can be put down to the fact that Americans no longer read, watch or listen to the same media, a trend that has been worsened by the rise of social media, allowing us to isolate ourselves from all opposing views.
That has fed not merely an inability to listen to the other side but a sense of despair about politics and society and a belief that opponents aren’t just wrong but have bad intentions. That explains both the over-the-top rhetoric as well as the breakdown of civility that allows otherwise decent people to justify insults and harassment of people whose only crime is to hold different political opinions.
But while conservatives may scoff at liberal nightmares, they also ought to sound vaguely familiar.
During the 2016 campaign Michael Anton’s article “The Flight 93 Election,” published in the Claremont Review, caused a sensation. His belief was that for many on the right, the election was a last chance to save the republic.
Just like the passengers on United Flight 93 on 9/11, who were forced to charge the cockpit even though the odds of survival were minimal, many on the right believed Hillary Clinton had to be stopped. For them that justified supporting a candidate like Trump, who didn’t share their values, so long as the liberal transformation of the courts and the nation due to President Barack Obama’s policies, was stalled.
Trump’s conservative judicial appointments and other policies have justified the faith of those voters. The right’s fear that liberals were trying to effectively eradicate religious freedom for conservatives is, at least for the moment, assuaged.
But for liberals, this is their “Flight 93” moment.
The debate about immigration has become one in which all border-security measures – and not just the cruel ones – are demonized to justify some of the apocalyptic rhetoric being employed. And now a conventional ideological battle over control of the Supreme Court is being sold as nothing less than Armageddon, as if preventing the confirmation of a fifth conservative justice is all that stands between America and “The Handmaid’s Tale” becoming reality.
Think what you like about Trump and the Republicans, but it’s time for reasonable people to stop buying into the lunacy that the sky is falling and that Americans are living in the moral equivalent of the last days of the Weimar Republic. For all of the country’s problems, this sort of Flight 93 analogy and the panic it feeds is as dangerous a fantasy for the left as it was for the right.
In particular, Jews need to resist the temptation to invoke the Holocaust in this discussion because it is an offense to history. But more than that, like a lot of Trump’s rhetoric, such talk coarsens and inflames the tone of political debate to the point where all that remains is unreasoning hate and an all-consuming left/right culture war that is the true threat to democracy.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS (the Jewish News Syndicate) and a contributing writer for National Review. Twitter: @jonathans_tobin
@ Jacobite:
It didn’t end with the Jacobins. The directory and even more, Napoleon, freed the Jews. When Napoleon was defeated, it was all reversed.http://www.aish.com/jl/h/h/48945221.html
I have wondered at his apparent failure to take action against his enemies but perhaps he is choosing his battles. Whatever he has been doing, it’s working so far.
adamdalgliesh Said:
I wonder if any polling has been done. I, for one, am a big fan of his insults. I find them witty, well-deserved and cathartic. The Left is just so nasty, I would find civilty irritating.
@ adamdalgliesh:
The French, Russian, and Spanish ‘civil wars’ were all wars against Leftist attempts to destroy existing societies. The Jacobins self-destructed and Spain was saved. The Russian Left won and Russians lost 30 million brothers under murderous Bolshevik rule. The jury’s still out on whether Russian society and culture can ever recover, but the flashing-neon lesson of history is that you never allow the Left to win.
When Ha’aretz has to subdue its impulses and whine crocodile tears about false equivalencies, instead of just the straightforward hate we’re used to, you know they’re getting desperate.
The unhinged, violent American Left, and their Deep State allies who used American intelligence to try and change and then nullify an election, have absolutely 100% validated ever core contention regarding the Flight 93 Election.
The Left is violent, dangerous, and reaching for more power over people and ethnic groups that they clearly hate. We are not obliged to care about their feelings as we stop their murderous schemes from succeeding.
Yes, Edgar, all his enemies on both right and left are meshuggah. It is not his actual policies and decisions that make them hate Trump. but his tendency to bad-mouth people verbally, even though he takes no action to harm them. I do thinkk that his harsh language makes him enemies unnecessarily, and this is made worse by his failure to take actions against his enemies, and his allowing them to take action against him. This is a suicidal combination. Let us suppose that immediately after taking office,he had appointed a special prosector to investigate Clinton, Obama and Co., which he certainly could have done, and blocked the attempt to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate him, which he also could have done without difficulty. The entire political situation now would be completely different, with the Democrats on the run. Their top leadership would have probably have asked for political asylum in Canada and would have ceased to be a factor at all in American politics. Trump would have reigned supreme, and could have got Congress to do whatever he wanted. As it is, though, his policy is “speak loudly, but don’t carry stick.” A little like a citizen living in a crime-ridden, drug-ridden, drug-gang-controlled neighborhood who make loud public statements denouncing the local gang bosses, but refuses to carry a gun or ask for police protection. Not smart.
The usual, he is a good writer, but I couldn’t help noticing the always present mantra, without which even the most conservative writers feel unclothed, that……”There is a lot to criticize about Trump..”……
So far, except from the lunatic left, and traitor GOP, I haven’t heard any specifics which would make him a bad President. On the contrary, his performance in the job is nothing less than extraordinary, indeed, brilliant. He set himself goals, and is reaching them one after the other, unlike any other politician in recent history. Of course he is not a politician at all.
And the writer seems to contradict himself, when he writes, that to stop Clinton, they had to vote for Trump, “who didn’t share their values”. And in the very next sentence, he says, that Trump’s judicial and other appointment of conservatives, have “justified the faith of these voters”…. After he just told us that they voted for Trump even though they had no faith in him……..
I think that not only the Democrats are mashugga over Trump’s win, but staunch Republican are also a bit tzetumult…….
Let’s emulate George Formby and say…”It’s turned out nice again hasn’t it…”
What Tobin says here is very wise and true. The sort of frenzied, hate-filled rhetoric that characterizes the United States today resembles the frenzied rhetoric that preceded the English , French (the “Vendee”), Russian, and Spanish civil wars.A political environment of fighting words, and people who won’t listen to the views on the other side, and assume that those who disagree with them are evil, tends to lead eventually to civil war. A second civil war in the United States would probably destroy it and have terrible consequences for the entire world.