Reply to Ron Rosenbaum: Hitler, Hayek, and the Totalitarian Concept of ‘Rights’

posted at 3:04 pm on September 9, 2009 by The Other McCain
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The September issue of Commentary features a symposium in which six writers — including Bill Kristol and David Gelernter — discuss Norman Podhoretz’s new book, Why Are Jews Liberals?

Podhoretz’s book addresses a topic that has perplexed students of political demography for four decades. It was Milton Himmelfarb, Bill Kristol’s uncle, who famously quipped that  “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”

Reasonable observers might have expected the phenomenon examined by Podhoretz to have expired in the crucible of the 1960s — the Six-Day War and Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Robert Kennedy — or perhaps after Tom Wolfe chronicled the impossible-to-parody posturings of Radical Chic. Yet despite the decades-long ascent of conservatism aided by such noted Jewish inllectuals as Milton Friedman, and contrary to the conspiracy theories of liberals who employ “neocon” as a sort of perjorative code-word for “Zionist” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), the 2008 exit polls showed that Barack Obama was supported by 78% of Jewish voters.

This inexplicable ideological loyalty elicits a shrug of resignation from Commentary symposiast Bill Kristol:

But my own tentative personal resolution, reached after reading Why Are Jews Liberals?, is this: I’m going to stop worrying about American Jews. They’re not worth the headache. Either they’ll come to their senses or they won’t, and there’s not much I (or anyone else, I suspect) can do about it.

Among the other reactions in the symposium, I was most struck by Michael Medved’s response:

For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of Christianity. This observation may help to explain the otherwise puzzling political preferences of the Jewish community explored in Norman Podhoretz’s book. Jewish voters don’t embrace candidates based on their support for the state of Israel as much as they passionately oppose candidates based on their identification with Christianity — especially the fervent evangelicalism of the dreaded “Christian Right.”

This probably hits closest to the mark, representing a triumph of Democratic Party propagandists, who have managed to depict the “Christian Right” as such a menace that one can scarcely blame the Jewish voter who hears the echo of goosestepping hobnailed boots every time an evangelical leader invokes “traditional values.” Given my lifelong immersion in evangelical culture — raised Southern Baptist, married to a Seventh-Day Adventist, a Christian homeschooling parent – I can only shake my head in dismay at the acceptance of this false perception.

CHRISTIANITY, CONSERVATISM AND PROPAGANDA
However much American Christians may tend toward conservatism (only 54% of Protestants voted GOP in 2008, and Obama actually won a majority of Catholics), there is nothing remotely totalitarian in their faith or politics, and certainly anti-Semitism is alien to their hearts. As I’ve often said, the “full gospel” tradition in which I was raised — studying the Old Testament as the historic and prophetic foundation of Christ’s ministry — led a young Baptist boy to regard the Jewish people as his kindred, to celebrate their ancient heroes as his own. I’ve met Adventist laymen who have studied the law and the prophets in such depth as to be able conduct exegesis of the text with translations of the original Hebrew from memory.

Given the deep basis of their affinity with the Jewish people, evangelical Christians of my acquaintance are mystified and insulted by insinuations of anti-Semitism. Surely the demonization of the “Christian Right,” as Medved says, has something to do with this. One might also implicate the bias against Christianity in Hollywood, which has in recent years cranked out numerous Holocaust-themed films without ever apparently considering a remake of Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place.

Corrie’s father was a Dutch Christian leader who warned against the Nazi menace. During the German occupation, the Ten Boom family was arrested for harboring Jewish refugees, and Corrie and her sister were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Corrie’s sister died there, but not before telling her, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” This amazing story of heroic faith is today nearly unknown outside evangelical Christian circles, perhaps because it does not fit the preferred cultural template of Hollywood, where Christians are routinely stereotyped as moronic bigots and puritanical hypocrites.

Beyond Hollywood, however, the world of liberal academia and journalism reinforces the propaganda message that Christians are inherently suspect as Jew-haters (an insinuation liberals quickly condemn as hatemongering, if made against Muslim) and that America is never more than one Republican victory away from brownshirts goose-stepping down Main Street.

‘JOAN BAEZ MADE ME VOTE DEMOCRAT’
Ron Rosenbaum is the acclaimed author of Explaining Hitler, and a blogger at both Slate and Pajamas Media. After my blog post about the Commentary symposium got boosted into the liberal blogosphere — with  insinuations of anti-Semitism even more idiotic than usual — Rosenbaum was moved to explain his own reasons for being “liberal (but no longer Left).” Rosenbaum’s explanation deserves to be quoted at length:

So I consider myself both a Jew and a liberal and if I had to name one factor that would make it so, it was the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s. . . .
[T]o me as a young kid idealist of the Bob Dylan, Joan Baez folkie leftist persuasion, what I saw were Jews and liberals . . .  supporting the great American movement for social justice that was the Civil Rights movement. . . .
I saw conservatives and Republicans staunchly opposed to anti-segregation legislation and anti-racist movements. I still see conservatives and Republicans still unashamedly profiting electorally from the racism-lite “Southern strategy.” . . .
And so it’s the Jewish tradition of social justice that made me a liberal.

Please read the whole thing, which deserves more thorough scrutiny than I can afford to give it today, when I am due at a reception in downtown D.C. honoring Michelle Malkin, author of the Best. Book. Evah!

Born and bred a Democratic Party loyalist, an Atlanta native who proudly voted for Walter Mondale and Bill Clinton, and who didn’t cast his first Republican vote until 1994, I would dearly love to examine the myths about the Nixon-era “Southern Strategy” that Rosenbaum appears to have swallowed whole. Yet time will not permit, if I’m to get my share of the free buffet downtown.

However, Ron Rosenbaum’s invocation of “social justice” calls to mind another bestseller, Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom. An Austrian economist and student of the great Ludwig von Mises, Hayek had fled the Nazis and arrived in England where he discovered to his dismay that many English intellectuals were promoting the very same erroneous ideas which had helped Hitler rise to power. The Road to Serfdom explains that the falsehoods of socialism were the common root of Russian Bolshevism, Italian fascism and German Nazism.

TOTALITARIANISM BY DEMOCRATIC MEANS
Hitler’s genocidal anti-Semitism has elevated him historically as the singular embodiment of 20th-century totalitarian evil, and liberals have sought to portray Nazism as entirely a phenomenon of “the Right.” Yet this is a dangerous distortion that Hayek — who had a front-row seat to witness the birth and rise of Nazism — sought to correct. Hayek warned that the welfare-state “democratic socialism” embraced by many liberals in the West might easily pave the way to a totalitarian future in the very same nations which were even then engaged in a life-or-death struggle against Hitler’s Axis.

Hayek’s book caused an intellectual sensation and among his many admirers was a young Californian named Ronald Reagan. It was Hayek’s understanding of the nature of totalitarianism — and the inseparable nature of political and economic freedoms — which did so much to inform the worldview of Reagan. Hayek went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics and to write many other books and essays, including “The Intellectuals and Socialism.”

It is one of Hayek’s famous essays which I would like to call to Ron Rosenbaum’s attention. In The Mirage of Social Justice, Hayek dismantled this commonplace concept, demonstrating how the pursuit of “social justice” leads to harmful outcomes contrary to the benevolent intentions of those who subscribe to such doctrines. The entire concept of “social justice” is misbegotten, Hayek said:

There can be no test by which we can discover what is “socially unjust” because there is no subject by which such an injustice can be committed . . .  ["Social justice"] does not belong to the category of error, but to that of nonsense . . .

What Hayek is saying is that “social justice” requires treating people as groups, rather than as individuals –  an error similar to the Jim Crow laws that the civil rights crusade sought to overturn. Indeed, with no intention to invoke Godwin’s Law, we might say that ”social justice” shares with Hitler’s categorical antagonism to the Jews this conception of people in terms of groups and not individuals.

FOLK-SINGING DOWN A FAMILIAR ROAD
The pursuit of “social justice” — accompanied by a rhetoric of “rights” misappropriated to describe what would be more accurately termed entitlements — inexorably leads down that same path that Hayek described as The Road to Serfdom. Only an extremely powerful government can apportion outcomes in the egalitarian manner intended by the phrase “social justice,” superintending the welfare of specially protected groups. As government power expands, individual liberty is eroded.

It doesn’t really matter how we categorize people for the purpose of alloting “social justice.” The Bolsheviks made revolution on behalf of the proletariat and the peasants, and slaughtered many millions of workers and peasants on behalf of their “humanitarian” goals. In America, “social justice” has been invoked not merely on behalf of blacks, but also women, homosexuals, psychiatric patients, prison inmates, drug addicts, HIV sufferers and alleged victims of “predatory lending,” among other categories of liberal victimhood. Every four years, the Democratic National Convention stage becomes a platform for a parade of aggrieved victims, blaming their own group victimhood on malevolent forces (e.g., “Corporate America”) against which the Democratic Party promises to fight in the name of “rights” and “social justice.”

This group conception of “rights” is fundamentally totalitarian, its premises aligned in a syllogism whose conclusion is less individual liberty and more government control. Ron Rosenbaum’s idealistic nostalgia for Dylan and Baez — who doesn’t fondly remember his own youth? — cannot justify the unthinking pursuit of “social justice,” an ideological abstraction that has wrought so much mischief and misery in American political life.

No one is asking Ron Rosenbaum to support policies he considers unjust, nor even to call himself a conservative. But a man of such intelligence and accomplishment owes it to himself to study the brilliant work of Hayek, among whose most famous essays is one entitled, “Why I Am Not A Conservative.”

Jew, Gentile, black, white, Protestant, Catholic, capitalist, labor – why should we be divided by such labels? As far as I’m concerned, we should all be Austrians.

You’ll excuse me, but I’m late for a reception. There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there is such a thing as a free buffet . . .

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