Jews, Politics, and Conformity

Party identification for Jews has changed by 9 percent since 2008, according to Pew Research.

Jews who support or lean Republican jumped from 20% in 2008 to 29% in 2011. And Jews who support or lean Democratic fell from 72% in 2008 to 65% in 2011. The 2011 study has a 6.5% margin of error.

I know what you are thinking.  What took them so long?



What took them so long is that humans are social animals.  They are powerfully drawn to think and act like their kind. Abraham H. Miller:

Most people come to their politics the way they come to their religion. They’ve been socialized into a political belief system. They learn about politics as accepted behavior. They learn what newspapers and magazines to read, what media to watch, and what clichés they can utter among their friends for which they can receive social affirmation.

For years and years, Jewish Americans have been taught to fear the Christians and to hate the WASP establishment.  And left-wing secular intellectual Jews put a heavy stamp on Jewish opinion.  But now American Jews have to accept that the Democratic Party in America is not friendly to Israel and not friendly to Jews.  It's not that Democrats are necessarily anti-Semitic.  But Democrats operate according to an iron law of values.  Democrats privilege certified victims.  Back in the 1930s the certified victims were working stiffs.  Then they were African Americans.  Now they are illegal immigrants.  And, of course, Palestinians.



There was a time when American Jews were victims.  As they struggled off the boat from Russia in the early 20th century they were thought to be stupid.  So stupid that by 1920 they were applying to Harvard in disturbing numbers.  The WASPs of the era put a quota on Jews in the Harvard student body just like liberals play quota games with minorities today.  And they kept Jews out of their neighborhoods and country clubs.  It was a natural for Jews to join the Democratic Party.



But now, of course, Jews are prominent in the conservative movement.  In the 1970s Jewish intellectuals "mugged by reality" became "neo-conservatives" and made a big contribution to the Reagan era.  Today Jews are all over talk radio--Medved, Levin, Prager, Savage--and they aren't neo any more, just conservative.



For Miller, the 9 percent shift in party identification towards the Republican Party is a big deal.

The 9% movement among Jews into the Republican camp means far and away more than what can be assessed by that number. It means the beginning of a critical mass so that liberal Jews will no longer be free to mouth political banalities, leftist clichés, and Democratic talking points without challenge. They will no longer be able to rely on social pressure to both stifle dissent and to promote political conformity among the vast majority of people whose political interests invariably align with what is socially palatable. They will no longer be able to be arrogant in their ignorance, because their ignorance will no longer be socially shared.

 The big problem for the conservative movement today is that "leftist clichés, and Democratic talking points" still get a free ride in education, in media, and in movies.  It would be a big deal if a critical mass of Jews came over to the conservative side and dialed down the volume on the liberal Musak that we all hear as part of the background music of life.



Also, of course, the Democrats are going to run out of other people's money.  The tell-tale indications of this are cropping up all over.  A big one is that the Democrats in Congress aren't interested in passing budget resolutions they are required to pass by law each year.

The Senate last passed a budget 1,106 days ago—that would be almost three years—and now the White House is telling Democrats not to bother this year either. Harry Reid will be pleased, because last week the Majority Leader said he had no plans to do so.

Democrats passed the Budget Act in the 1970s are a way to ride herd on the hated Richard Nixon.  But now they don't want to pass budget resolutions because they show more clearly than they would like to admit that their spending programs are steering the US towards the rocks of debt and default.



No doubt voices will soon be heard on the left complaining that the Jews are leaving the Democratic Party because they are more interested in their money than in justice and compassion.

Is the Future Cognitive?

Everyone agrees that to make it in the modern world you need to work on your cognitive intelligence. Conservative libertarian Charles Murray has developed this message in The Bell Curve, Human Accomplishment, and Coming Apart. Barack Obama agrees.

“You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer, or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers.”

So much for all the other folks in this world, writes John Derbyshire.

So much for mechanics, gardeners, fishermen, glaziers, loggers, athletes, barbers, truckers, cooks, butchers, roofers, miners, crane operators, manicurists, linemen, dancers, cameramen, steel fixers, personal trainers, carpenters, brewers, florists, ranchers, masons, potters . . . The hell with them!

It's natural for all of us chaps in the cognitive elite to privilege our own skills, the ability to muck around in the written world and the math world.  Thus is makes complete sense that "Somehow we have arrived in the 21st century with a class of rulers so bereft of imagination they cannot conceive that anyone would wish to be less educated than themselves."  Of course we have.  We are ruled by the sons of the educated elite of the late 19th century, and an educated elite naturally thinks that the most important thing, the only thing, is education.

This despite the fact that the dominant learning method among humans is learning by doing.

There's no doubt that cognitively intelligent people are an extremely important resource in today's world.  But.

But I suspect that the really important people are those that bring people and things together.  People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and Ronald Reagan.  I'm not sure that people like them excel because of their cognitive brilliance.  I think that their brilliance is more their middle-man skills, getting in the middle of things and getting cognitive people to produce.

Anyway, I think that we really need to stop privileging the cognitive elite and erecting barriers to people with more hands-on skills.  Because if we don't ease up the hands-on people might some day decide that they have had enough of truckling to the cognitive nerds and take things into their own hands.

Dems Ditch Catholics and Blue Collars

Is President Obama serious?  In the last month he has dissed the old Democratic base, the blue-collar workers of the construction industry.  That's the meaning of the decision to postpone the Keystone XL pipeline.



Government is choosing, and when President Obama had to choose between environmentalists and blue-collar workers he chose the environmentalists.



Just when conservatives had finished marveling at this turn away from the iconic center of the New Deal coalition, the working stiff, the Obamis pulled a second shocker.  It was the decision to force the Catholic Church to include contraception and abortifaciants in any health insurance offered to employees of Catholic institutions.



Government is choosing, and when President Obama had to choose between Catholics and his secularist, pro-abortion base, he chose the secularists.



So the Obamis think they can win reelection without the working stiffs and without the Catholics?  That means that they believe they can win with the educated elite and the welfare state beneficiaries.  Maybe they are right.  We'll see in November.



But really, this has been coming on for a generation.  The fact is that the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class.  It is the party of upper class liberals, the trustafarians, the educators, the government managers, the environmentalists, and it is the party of the lifetime government employee and the government benefit recipients.  Given this, the effort to keep the ordinary private-sector working stiff inside the party becomes too much of a stretch.  And given that the Democratic Party has become more and more the secularist party, the party opposed to transcendental religion, the effort to keep the Catholics inside the party has also become too much of an effort.



And really, it's about time.  It's about time that all private sector workers recognize that the Democrats just don't care about people like them.  And it's about time that American Catholics recognize that the Democrats just don't like any Christians.



Used to be that the Republican Party was the Protestant party and the Democrats the Catholic party.  No longer.  Now the Republican Party is the religious party and the Democrats the secularist party.



And here is news for you working stiffs and Catholics who have just been excommunicated from the Democratic Party.  Despite what you have heard, conservatives and Republicans are really nice guys and gals, and will welcome you into our tents.   You will find that conservatives and Republicans will listen to your ideas and start to accommodate your needs.  And you will find that you will start to move towards conservative and Republican ideas.



All in all, it could be the beginning of something great, for workers, for Catholics, and for America.

Aristotle Fiddles the Mean on Courage

It's easy enough to set up a general law or rule.  It's when you have to apply the rule in practice that the fun begins.  So it is with Aristotle's idea of the mean when applied to the virtue of courage.  He defines virtue as a mean between two vices such as "the man of practical wisdom would determine it", for the vices exceed or fall short of "what is right in both passions and actions while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate."  Then, when our man of virtue actually goes forth and acts in the world he acts upon three principles: he must have knowledge, must choose his acts for their own sakes, and must proceed from "a firm and unchanging character."

Very good, that is the theory.  How does it work out in practice when considering the virtue of courage?

In practice Aristotle wants to privilege a certain kind of courage.  It is the courage of the hoplite, the citizen-soldier that stood in line with his fellow citizens  to defend his polis.  You can understand why.  The independence and civic pride of each polis depended upon the courage of its hoplites, the first heavy infantry in history.  Heavy infantry is designed for "shock" battle, and victory depends on soldiers with the courage or the discipline to stay in line, not matter how bad things get.  How about your Aristotelian mean then?

You might think that the professional soldier, experienced and knowledgeable in the "many empty alarms in war" and the contingencies of fighting, would represent the mean.  But the professionals "turn cowards" when things turn against them "while citizen forces die at their posts."  In other words, the professional soldier observes the mean of courage, while the citizen-soldier stands at an excess.  Perhaps the professional soldier, although possessing knowledge, suffers a defect since he does not choose acts for their own sakes, but subordinate to the job of professional soldiering.  Still, he seems to exhibit a firm and unchanging character: he does what is sensible and practical.  Does not then the citizen soldier exceed the mean when he continues to fight shoulder to shoulder with his brothers against all odds?

The "sanguine" also merit the back of Aristotle's hand.  They are "confident in danger" because they are used to success.  But put them in a sudden firefight and they run, unlike the braver man who is "fearless and undisturbed in sudden alarms".  The "ignorant" are just as bad as the sanguine, only worse.  If "deceived about the facts" they often fly from the battle as soon as they are undeceived  And as for courage from "passion", why "wild beasts act under the influence of pain".  Men who fight under the influence of passion, when from anger or pain, are "pugnacious but not brave".  They act not from honor or rule, but from feeling alone.  But Aristotle allows their pugnacity as "something akin to courage."  So here Aristotle keeps with his system: passionate courage is all from feeling, not a balanced application of feeling and reason.

To privilege his citizen-soldier, Aristotle must meddle with his definition of courage, defined back in Book II-2 as the mean between the excess of rashness and the defect of cowardice.  "For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger become rash." (1104a21-23)  Now he wants us to forget that, for his hoplite must not observe the mean but exceed it if his polis is to win the shock battle of heavy infantry.  Now he says that the man who "exceeds in fearlessness has no name".  Really?  I thought he was the rash chap.  Not a bit of it.  The rash man, it turns out, "is thought to be boastful and only a pretender to courage".  Most of the rash men are "a mixture of rashness and cowardice."  It turns out that the coward and the rash man are similar.  They both of them exceed and they both of them fall short.  So Aristotle's new analysis conveniently leaves the courageous man in the middle (rather than at the extreme you'd think he is at since both the rash chap and the cowardly chap fall short in the courage department).

Why all this fol-de-rol? Aristotle could have held with his excess-mean-defect model just by saying that the rash are wild and excessive.  They want to rush out and attack the enemy rather than advance in the right way at the right time with the right intention.  Sounds like he'd had a bad day in the agora and had forgotten his system for a moment.

So what then is the man of courage?  He lives a mean between fear and confidence, but some things he does not fear: "poverty and disease" and "the things that do not proceed from vice".  Certainly he should fear "insult to his wife", but he must "stand his ground against what is awe-inspiring" even unto death and be willing to face the noblest death, to fall in battle.  Thus he fears what he should, and fears not what he should not, for the "brave man feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule directs."  Courage is the bravery of the hoplite soldier, but not the courage of the professional soldier, not the man in a fury of passion or anger, nor the habitual courage of the "sanguine" person used to conquering, not the courage of the ignorant.  Courage is for "facing what is painful", accepting pain for the end aimed at.  In the virtuous man, the virtue of courage is all the more excellent since the more virtuous a man is, the more painful is the thought of death.


The idea of the mean is a great idea.  It's just that, when it comes to courage and the defense of the city-state, the mean between excess and defect just doesn't cut it.  The deeper Aristotle gets into his analysis of the courageous person the more his model of the mean falls apart.  See how he proceeds.  In Book III-6 some things are to be feared; some are not.  But the epitome of courage is courage in battle, courage against death, "the most terrible of all things".  Never mind death at sea or from disease; the courageous man is only concerned with the noblest things: death in battle, which is "honored in city-states and at the courts of monarchs."  But this is not a mean between excess and defect, but a striving towards the utmost.  He is "brave who is fearless in the face of a noble death."  What then becomes of courage as a mean "with regard to feelings of fear and confidence"?  They are all forgotten in the celebration of a good death.

But wait, now we are done with Book III-6.  In Book III-7, the brave man, "dauntless as may be" may now, Aristotle tells us, "fear even the things that are not beyond human strength".  But he will "face them as he ought and as the rule directs".  Now the courageous man is not fearless after all, and so we are back at the mean, and the right action at the right time in the right way.  But he will, of course, do all this facing of fear only for a noble end.

You can go just so far with that.  Then it is best to pull up like Mr. Brooke.  In Book III-8 we gather to dispose of the courage of professional soldiers, the passionate, the sanguine and the ignorant, who are said to be courageous but, according to Aristotle, are not.  We come to praise only the courage of citizen-soldiers who "die at their posts" rather than admit that discretion is the greater part of valor.

Finally, in Book III-9, Aristotle trims his notion that courage is a mean between confidence and fear.  It is really more about fear, the "things that inspire fear", for "facing what is painful" just as the boxer takes the distressing blows for the pleasant aim of winning the "crown and the honors".  Thus it is not necessarily always the case that the exercise of virtue is a pleasant, lifelong journey of eudaimonia.  Getting there is often painful.

It's all very well to talk of virtue as a mean between excess and defect.  But the man of virtue is not in fact living at a delicate balance point between two extremes.  The virtuous person is hacking through a jungle armed only with a machete, he is living an arduous life that is located right out on the edge of the Bell Curve.  The man practicing the virtue of courage is straining to the utmost to practice that virtue in the right way at the right time for the right reason.  He is standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow citizens slowly advancing towards the opposing line of hoplites.  His reward is not to occupy a mean but to cherish the hope that, if he falls in the melée, his awful and painful death will be celebrated as noble and honored by his fellow citizens.

It is telling that the Prussians solved the problem of shock battle with "Prussian discipline" and file closers.  They felt that the fear of combat could only be neutralized by the mindlessness of discipline and the fear of the sergeant.  It was only the in the 20th century that the Germans turned away from compulsion and General von Seeckt called for soldiers "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility."  So for Seeckt courage came more from confidence, not from overcoming fear or a mean between confidence and fear.  Courage is a matter of extremes, as Aristotle accepts, when he shifts his gaze from theory to practice.

How to Judge Actions

If you are a philosopher like Aristotle or maybe a legislator in the business of judging the actions of lesser mortals, you need a template, a measure, by which to rule and hand out honors and punishments.

To do this you probably need to be able to "distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary" action.  Sometimes, of course, you have to do something, such as throw goods overboard in a storm, that you would normally never do voluntarily.  And sometimes you would face death rather than voluntarily do something evil.

But what about things done by reason of ignorance?  Obviously, says Aristotle, everything "done by reason of ignorance is not voluntary".  Now he makes a fine distinction.  Suppose you do something in ignorance that you would presumably not do voluntarily.  If you repent of your action, your action is "involuntary."  If you do not repent, your action is "not voluntary."

So, says Aristotle, if you throw a pointed spear at a friend, thinking that your spear "had a button on it", your action would be involuntary, since you would surely repent of your action.  That is action in ignorance that is involuntary.  It is hard to think of an action in ignorance that is "not voluntary," i.e., not repented.  Suppose you threw a pointed spear at an enemy thinking it had a button on it.  Would you regret the action when the poor chap fell down dead?  If you didn't regret, the action in ignorance would be "not voluntary."  Perhaps a better example would be Candidate Romney saying that he doesn't worry about the "very poor."  Everyone thinks that this is a stunning error, because conservatives do too worry about the poor.  But if the struggling middle--the folks that Romney says he does worry about--were to wake up and say to themselves, "Wow, finally a politician that cares about us and not the bloody poor!" then Romney would not repent of the action in ignorance.  So that would be action in ignorance that is "not voluntary."

But Aristotle is not yet done.  He does not want to admit that actions due to anger or appetite could be involuntary.  The "wicked man is ignorant of what he ought to do" but that does not make his ignorance involuntary.  Actions done in ignorance but where "the moving principle is in the agent himself" are voluntary.  Thus we could say that the liberal welfare state policies that have cratered the working class are voluntary.  Liberals may have been ignorant of the specific consequences of their policies, but they cannot hide from the results.  It is evil to encourage people to exchange their birthright for a mess of pottage.  Period.

No Sex, We're Japanese?

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has two fascinating looks at sex and marriage in Japan.  There's a poll out that says the Japanese are uninterested in sex.

The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had “no interest” in or even “despised” sex. That’s almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.



If that’s not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

Hold on, says an emailer to Glenn.  The real problem is the three lost decades in Japan since the meltdown in the 1990s.

The statistics you link to miss the point. Young Japanese guys are as horny and desperate to get laid as any guys in the world. Probably more so, since only young Arabs get less actual sex. Japanese girls are as eager to find an alpha male boyfriend as any other nationality. Japan still produces the most prolific and extraordinary porn in the world. Someone is watching it.



Unfortunately, three lost economic decades has resulted in a plethora of un- or under-employed young beta men, without real jobs or prospects of success, and young women who look at these prospective suitors and despair.

And, of course, our Japanese friends have been patiently doing Keynesian economics now for three decades in a conventional attempt to get out of their economic doldrums.  They have little to show for it.



This helps put Mitt Romney's bonehead comment about not worrying about the very poor in context.  The Democratic Party is an over-under party, a combination of the top 20 percent in their tenured sinecures and the bottom 20 percent in their lifetime benefits.  The Republican Party is the party for the people in the middle, the people without benefits and without government sinecures.



The Republican Party better pay attention to the tragic situation of ordinary young people in Japan.  Because we must not let that happen here.  So it's good that Mitt Romney is paying attention.

Romney's "Gaffes"

First we learned that Mitt Romney enjoyed firing people.  Yeah, I know the context was that he enjoyed firing insurance companies, but coming from the private equity guy at Bain Capital, it was a bit jarring.

Now "foot-in-mouth" Mitt has dropped another one.  He says he's not worried about the very poor.

"I’m in this race because I care about Americans," Romney said. "I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it."
...
"I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine," he said. "I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95% of Americans who right now are struggling. I’ll continue to take that message across the nation."

Yeah, I know the context, and I agree that the people that are really struggling are the people that want to get a job, pay their taxes, obey the law, and follow the rules.

But we all know that the Democrats are chuckling this morning.  They think they are going to bury Romney with his gaffes.

Only maybe people worry about gaffes too much.  I remember back in the spring of 1980 that a Democratic friend was rubbing his hands with glee over all the gaffes that Ronald Reagan had made over the years.  He reckoned that the Dems would demolish Reagan come the Fall.  Didn't quite work out that way, did it?

What Mitt Romney has to do is turn lemon into lemonade.  Yeah, he enjoys firing people.  Not hardworking Americans but arrogant politicians that bury the nation in debt.  Yeah, he worries about the poor, about how the poor have been culturally nuked by 50 years of Great Society liberalism.  And once he's got the "heart of America" back to work then he'll start to worry about the liberal-created underclass that is going badly wrong.  But the people he really cares about are the folks that are struggling in today's Obama-wrecked economy.

And isn't it convenient that "big book" Charles Murray has just published Coming Apart?