Like Jennifer, Barry Rubin is trying to answer the vexing question as to why Jews support liberals like Barack Obama. His consternation over the question is in inverse correlation to its difficulty: Simply put, Jews are liberal. Take a voting bloc that's 90% pro-choice, 70% pro-gay marriage, 60% pro-union, and 66% in favor of tax hikes on the rich, (not to mention strong supporters of a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict -- unlike the Republican Party) and yeah -- tough nut for Republicans to crack.
But Rubin eschews the obvious "liberals prefer liberals" analysis in favor of basically saying Jews are a bunch of dupes
Propaganda: As highly educated and literate people, Jews are more heavily impacted by schools, universities, and mass media that are engaged in indoctrination or highly concerted efforts to campaign for Obama and his ideas. By the same token, Jews as a whole tend to give higher credibility to the fairness of media and academia.
Camouflage: The concealment of Obama’s radicalism and that of those supporting his ideology as supposed liberals plays into Jewish reverence for liberalism.
Obama’s persona: While the notion of Obama as a “Jewish president” is absurd, its appeal to some does in fact have a material basis. His image as an apparently highly educated, supposedly intellectual, superficially sophisticated, cosmopolitan personality fits with majority Jewish preferences.
Jews like superficial sophistication and faux-intellectualism (and weirdly are willing to view someone with a Harvard law degree as "highly educated"). But if only we weren't so literate and educated, we'd be less prone to base our opinions on suspect sources like "media" or "academia", instead favoring more credible ones like Barry Rubin, Glenn Beck, or the semi-literate ravings of local talk radio hosts.
You know your argument is in trouble when it basically boils down "the problem is Jews aren't dumb enough to dislike Obama."
(Rubin also talks a bit about Jews' relationship with race and racial issues. It's pretty garbled -- boiling down to "Jews have a compulsion to appear anti-racist" -- and not all that helpful. For a better discussion, read Eric Goldberg's The Price of Whiteness, reviewed by me here).
Man, everybody likes to claim jews are somehow extra brainwashed by the system or whatever when they don't agree. I wonder if Rubin's aware that the far left claims that in regards to the same institutions. Probably not but it's funny in a sad way to think about.
ReplyDelete