The "Systemic" Cancer

Has the magnitude of Jew-hatred emanating from the Left in the wake of the 10/7 attack seemed as odd to you as to me? The unmasking has been thorough, and I have both pondered and blogged about the fact of it, but I've yet to figure out the "why" beyond speculation as to grievance hierarchies (Muslims rank higher than Jews) and the historical persistence and pervasiveness of antisemitism.

I finally found the answer that satisfies in this Bari Weiss video.

In short, it is the application of the blacks aren't succeeding because of pervasive racism’ to Jews and other successful identity groups, but in reverse. As in, the success that Jews en toto have achieved in modern society is due to pervasive privilege, not merit.

Progressivism or DEI or Woke or whatever you call the modern Left's philosophy centers around a reductive “oppressor-oppressed” model. I've blogged about that many times, in the past, but the connection I didn't fully make until now was how thoroughly this philosophy rejects merit. I've long thought that merit was simply subordinated in favor of making up for past wrongs and “systemic” biases via affirmative action and other preferences, but that doesn't tell the tale. In this worldview, you are only the sum of your "identities," and so your position in life is no longer a function of your own efforts, but rather where those identities put you.

If you’re black and poor, it’s always racism, never anything else. Poor choices, misapplied energies and efforts, failure of the progressive-run schools, the breakdown of the two parent household, or anything else that isn’t about an oppressor class keeping you down never enter the picture. The oppressors - the racists, bigots, and other discriminators - keep you down because that's the only way they can stand above. It’s a zero-sum mindset.

Apply this thinking to the disproportionate success of Jews (and Asians, for that matter). Since the members of that identity group overrepresent their population percentage in the higher ranks of economic success, that must also be due to systemic bias. Any inequality of outcome - negative or positive - is proof of systemic bias. If there are proportionally more wealthy or successful or academically elevated Jews and Asians, then they must have been handed that success the way that blacks have had it kept from them.

In other words, merit is not secondary, it's a myth.

From the vid:

If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation ... suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is actually very, very close to the portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.

I've blogged twice about success, about those who hate it and about why we should respect it, but in neither did I get as far as the revelation that the Left views success as "unearned privilege."

As cancerous as I've deemed woke across my years of considering it, today I find it even more irreconcilable with a free and liberty-based society, or with human dignity itself.

The depersonalization of both the oppressors and the oppressed has proven to be a very useful tool in the woke toolbox. It enables people to ignore the Golden Rule, to dismiss anyone who doesn't see the world as they do, with extreme prejudice, and to justify taking the fruit of others' success.

Its precursors are evident in the "you didn't build that..." mindset of Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, and in this idealistic but woefully naive and unaware bit from an otherwise-excellent essay by whistleblower Jamie Reed on the evils of the pediatric gender industry.

I was raised to believe in the core principles of the Democratic Party, which includes the willingness to sacrifice one’s individual needs for the good of the collective society.

That idealism, straight out of (and debunked by) Animal Farm, is a siren song to the young, and it explains why the ideology of socialism is so persistent. Cynical race-baiters and their ilk have found a way to crank that idealism to eleven by combining it with Critical Race Theory's rejection of the Western ideals born in the Enlightenment. Merit, individuality and individualism, and the rule of law are all looked upon with suspicion and worse, and there aren't many dots to connect to get to the Jew hatred that we now know permeates the Left.

Fifty-odd years ago, Saul Alinsky put forth his Rules For Radicals. The last one reads:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Alinsky's movement petered out. It took less than a decade for Reaganism to remind the country of the better way, and to keep the left-radicals locked up in their academic echo chambers. Today we can see that Alinsky was wrong about personalizing the target. If your goal is to tear others down - and that is absolutely the goal - depersonalizing works better. It's a lot easier to hate someone if you ignore his humanity or value as an individual person, and it's also easier to keep your hatred even as you allow that a particular oppressor you know may not be all bad. Helps with the congnitive dissonance.

This is the evil beauty of claiming biases are “systemic.” Call someone a bigot, and if you’re lucky enough not to get punched in the face, you can expect denials, rebuttals, and refutations. Call the whole system bigoted, and individuals aren’t as able to reject the assertion out of hand, because individuals no longer matter. Follow up by claiming that the only remedy to this everywhere-all-at-once bigotry is active counterbalancing, and you end up with DEI. And, with the concept of merit going right out the window.

Weiss is correct. There is no redeeming DEI. Similarly, there is no fixing woke, and there is no fine-tuning Critical Race Theory, if we want to retain any vestige of respect for the individual. The ideological foundations are at total odds with the core principles of any free society, or of freedom itself. They are malignant cancers, as is the "systemic" aspersion. Nothing good will ever come of them, and they are already amplifying the injustices and bigotries they purport to attack.

If you have been wondering why the Left has sided with Hamas over Israel, you have your answer. It's because Jews are successful, and success has been deemed to be bestowed rather than earned.

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A footnote. Among many excellent nuggets of unsolicited advice I found in a New Year's piece by Rob Henderson was this:

Greed is better than envy. Greed means you want more for yourself. Envy means you want others to have less.

The Left is all about envy, about wanting what others have, and rationalizing justifications for taking it. It projects its envy as other's greed, but any honest person should see through that. Henderson reminds us that greed is a motivator toward success, and envy toward destruction. Which do you think is better for society?

Gordon Gekko, much reviled by the Best-and-Brightest, was right.