My, how things change. The above assessment, made amidst the Democratic primary in 2004, appeared in the pages of The New Republic, a serious liberal publication that for the last decade has spent half of its time taking bold positions and the other half begging apology for them. The editorial TNR ran endorsing Lieberman for the nomination was likely authored by the magazine's now former editor Peter Beinart, egghead par excellence of liberal interventionism, who believed in the Connecticut senator when the latter was a reliable yellow dog Democrat who happened to be an Orthodox Jew with a streak of moralism running through his social attitudes. But now that the serene party canine has transformed into a disruptive mangy mutt--the spoiler of healthcare reform--it's not a campaign of challenge that Lieberman's erstwhile defenders at the magazine have waged against him but rather a war of vilification, where even the Jewish Question need not be spared. Here is TNR's Jonathan Chait, a writer of some talent, desperately trying to account for what went wrong with Joe:
I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it's not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it's part of a plan. I think he just has no idea what he's talking about and doesn't care to learn. Lieberman thinks about politics in terms of broad ideological labels. He's the heroic centrist voice pushing legislation to the center. No, Lieberman doesn't have any particular sense of what the Medicare buy-in option would do to the national debt. If the liberals like it, then he figures it's big government and he should oppose it. I think it's basically that simple.
"I never liked him anyway"--the refrain of sullen apparatchiks faced with retrospectively excusing their inability to predict future heresy--competes with "He was never a substantial member" for bad faith memoir writing. If this is how the American left chooses to cannibalize itself, it's going to be easy laughs for conservatives all the way into 2010. Yet it hardly speaks well of Chait's own candlepower that he's taken to arguing such a non-kosher plaint against Jewish intelligence and numeracy in a sheet owned and operated by Martin Peretz; also one that features Steven Pinker bearing out some of this "cultural stereotype" with sociobiological research on endogamous genetic groups. But this is shul politics. The broader consideration is what, exactly, Lieberman's Judaism has to do with his take on socialized medicine?
A fashion is now vaguely discernible. Another migratory fowl from the TNR aviary, Lee Siegel, who hitherto has been an incisive critic of the Obama administration, uses the same methods of intra-tribal bullying from his new perch at the Daily Beast. Siegel's beef amounts to this: Lieberman justifies his financially motivated positions (oppose Iran to appease the "Israel lobby," oppose healthcare reform to keep the insurance industry money pouring in) as the outcroppings of Jewish messianism--he's right because he thinks God is on his side. Thus, the Torah portion equivalent of evangelical hubris. Here's Siegel:
Goodness. This barely literate emission is curious for several reasons, the most obvious being the Freudian. Siegel, too, is guilty of venality, arrogance and vindictiveness of an admittedly more ridiculous variety: masquerading as a fan of his own blogged musings on culture at TNR, taunting non-fans, and doing so under the pompous handle "sprezzatura." He was sacked suspended for making a fool of himself. I have no idea if the cringing this episode induced in his fellow Jews was of a piece with rootless cosmopolitan embarrassment or the product of 3,000 year-old tradition, nor do I much care. However, if I wished to appear to be vulgar, I might add that Siegel's farce of self-congratulation had much in common with the kind of perfected liberal Hebraism he seems to prefer, that embodied by Rabbi Michael Lerner, who once wrote pseudonymously to his own magazine Tikkun about how wonderful Rabbi Michael Lerner was. Though really, what would be the purpose of pointing that out?
Portraying Lieberman as the Fagin of Congress might be one way to endear oneself to the "Fast for Gaza" contingent on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One can hardly be counted a left-wing intellectual these days without indicating that one isn't the sort of Jew anti-Semites think of when they make their category indictments or draw up their hook-nosed caricatures. But does Siegel, who moonlights as a literary critic, not quite grasp the reactionary nature of this historical criticism? This is the same language with which Philip Roth was lambasted in the 1960's by the American Reform establishment for the crime of writing comic fiction; the same demented logic that had the Commentary crowd depict Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil as not just incoherent but the culmination of a decadent assimilationist tendency in Central Europe. Semiticist was Dwight Macdonald's withering term for this inquisitorial style, which he associated with the right and yet which has only grown more deranged and exhibitionist as it's become a commodity traded on "progressive" (typically anti-Zionist) exchanges. No, it's not enough to oppose a contrarian legislator or call him out for mercenary motives or moral depravity, clearly the purview of Gentile politicians alone. He must be dismissed as the idiot who disproves the rule about Jewish genius, if not characterized as ripe fruit for Der Sturmer.
Who knew the Medicare buy-in was worthy of such High Holy Day psychosis?
add a comment