Re-evaluations Since October 6
How did the pogrom change my thinking?
The Klingometer has a 9-point scale. If I give a proposition a 1, that means I do not believe it at all. If I give it a 9, it means that I am very certain about it. A 5 means I think it has about a 50-50 chance of being true.
Here is what has happened to my views since October 6, the day before the Hamas attack on Israel. I describe the changes, if any, in my views.
Middle East
The Middle East is such a nasty place that Jews should just pull up stakes and go live somewhere else. Revised Up, from 2 before the pogrom to 4 afterward. But this is not the time to talk about it.
The world would probably be a better place if the United States tried to use military force to change the regime in Iran. Up, from 2 to 4. Now is the time to talk about it. When our officials say that we will respond to attacks by Iranian proxies “at a time of our choosing,” what does that mean? I worry that it means “We won’t respond.” I would rather respond in the Godfather’s voice, “Nice regime you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
The ultimate solution is a Palestinian state, with its own military, as opposed to Israeli occupation. Unchanged, from 1 to 1.
The United States
We should get the UN out of the U.S. and the U.S. out of the UN. Up, from 5 to 7.
The under-40 generation will ruin America. Up, from 2 to 7.
It is an urgent priority to overhaul higher education and to replace the current crop of radicalized K-12 teachers. Up, from 5 to 9. See the comment above about the under-40 generation.
People who take a neutral position on the Arab-Israeli conflict are showing that they are fair-minded, humanitarian, and holding Israelis to the same standards that they hold others. Down, from 6 to 1. The I Condemn...But crowd will say that Israel cannot win. No need to fall for that pose. What they really mean is that they would hate to see Israel win.
National Conservatism’s distrust of globalization is warranted. Up, from 1 to 3. I still think it is worth trying to make globalization work.
The Republican establishment is under-rated. Up, from 6 to 8. I don’t think that the revanchists are helping the party or the country. And the case for an America that hides under a blanket is looking weaker.
The best choice in the 2024 election for me will be President Biden. Up, but from ? to ? Compared to writing in someone else, it goes from 1 to 6. If I’m going to be forced to pick between Biden and Trump, it goes from 5 to 7. I worry that neither one will be able to execute a policy of forthright support for Israel. The Biden Administration’s heart may not be in it. A Trump Administration could be too erratic and mismanaged.
Of course, who knows what the situation will look like a year from now?
Note: this is another current-thing post, so comments for subscribers only, in the hope that we can maintain order.
On Iran, the bright side is that the increasingly visible hatred of most Iranians for their regime may open non-military paths to weakening it. On the other hand, we simply do not know what the stance of an ayatollah-free, democratic Iranian government toward Israel or the Palestinians would be.
On the students, I would ask:
a. How big a psychological and/or ideological difference do you think there is between those who today chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!" and those who 50 years ago chanted "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong is gonna win!"?
b. How big a percentage of students generally, and of young people generally, do you think the former are compared to the latter?
c. If you think the former's stance will have greater or more lasting impact than the latter, why?
Re: things it may be too early to talk about, without discussing any particular options, I will say my own major update has been to realize more viscerally both the importance of what Golda Meir famously called the Israeli secret weapon-- they have nowhere else to go -- and the importance of the fact that the Palestinians have exactly the same weapon. It is tempting for each side to refuse to understand that the other has that weapon, because it is so inconvenient for any narrative that gives one group exclusive claim to the land. To be clear, this isn't "both sides ism"-- the parties have responded to that temptation in very different ways. But the temptation is still a terrible one, and so too is the predicament of having nowhere else to go, and any real improvement has got to be grounded in full consciousness of the predicament, however you seek to address it. Amos Oz, for one, has been very eloquent on this point over the years.
As for the under-40 evaluation: I think you give schools too much credit - or too little. You make it sound like Sacco and Vanzetti or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg or Foucault himself was tutoring the young'uns. In fact there is a much stronger element of Idiocracy to this whole ridiculous protesting business. Of course they would recycle the Nuremburg rally. It's famous in pictures! All they know how to do is recycle and they have nothing to say and they know nothing. I mean, government-funded entitites practically hand out "How to March and Protest: Content Optional" brochures, which reminds me for some reason of Gertrude Himmelfarb's essay about the ludicrousness of the entry of something like "Notes From the Underground" into the high school curriculum, becoming just another novel to dissect. ["Study Question for the reader: do you think the narrator is disaffected? Do you feeel disaffected? Write about a time when you were disaffected."] She thought it defanged literature; turned out it was essentially a pre-emptive defanging of the people made to read it.
And then they stopped making people read anything at all.
I don't have time to elaborate all the ways these idiot protestors are stupid, I'm fairly certain hardly any of them nor their public school teachers could pick out Israel on a map. And Israel is easy.
And I think this because an 80s campus conservative got to know lots of lefties - mostly lefties (though now they'd seem hopelessly centrist I suppose) - you can hardly limit your acquaintance to conservatives when they consist of: your boyfriend, one Christian dude, a super-bright oddball, a barefoot hippie-ish former GI, and a couple of editorial-co-writing siblings (or were they a couple?) straight out of "The Secret History".
And those lefties seemed smart and pretty fun to talk to. They had read the books. Or maybe I should say, they had at least read books.