Tablet Magazine Editors: We Told You So

Riffing on the phenomenon of Jews advocating on behalf of deracinated secular civic nationalists

Tablet Magazine is a “Jewish magazine about the world” started in 2009. Historically it has exhibited a Zionist or right-leaning bent and has cautiously, and sometimes positively, engaged with populist/Trump-aligned alternative rightwing ideas.

Recently, Tablet’s editors published a short “we told you so” piece entitled “Stop Being Shocked – Once and for All” in response to the recent “revelation” that leftists - especially campus leftists - don’t like Israel very much and tend to interpret Palestinian violence against Israel as an expression of righteous third world revolt.

The piece lists many of Tablet’s courageous articles to buttress the editors’ claim of sage-like foreknowledge. While most of the articles are aimed at “Jews” in the vague Israeli sense of the term, many non-Jews are no doubt familiar with some of Tablet’s impressive work on, for example, the connection between the Pritzker family and the transgender movement.

Preceding the list of articles are a series of short paragraphs setting forth the editors’ general perspective, which I found interesting enough to riff upon. This piece isn’t a response to the Tablet editors but rather a collection of thoughts stimulated by their short article.

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The first impression is that I’ve noticed that many of the mainstream voices supporting Trump and alternative rightwing thinking are either Jewish conservatives or Israel-supporting Christians. That is, a putative secular American-national movement receives most of its mainstream media support from particularized identities, each of which is to varying degrees invested in the fate of a foreign country, and each of which places certain religious values above the American nation itself (traditionalist Catholics are another group with their own supranational allegiances and goals). This isn’t a new thing, by the way, but that’s a different article.

The Tablet board’s perspective is colored by this distinction, inviting the question of whether there are limitations to relying upon a particularized identity like Zionism to formulate a more general national perspective for Americans. The distinction also raises an interesting question for myself and others like me (to the extent there are any others like me out there), which I’ll discuss below.

The second impression, flowing from my first, is that Tablet’s editors perceive the current situation in terms of a very recent and narrow period during which an intellectual trend took hold that encouraged the use of institutional monopolies to “reeducate Americans in new and better ways of thinking, writing, speaking, and being.” (Tablet’s perspective is somewhat unique here in that it ties in centrist or moderate hysteria about Covid and the disgraceful Trump-Russia hoax, as well as Obama’s policy decisions on Syria and Iran, to the same identitarian fanaticism animating pro-Hamas agitation in the west; I only focus upon the identitarian or “woke” hysteria here).

Although Tablet’s editors concur with the woke goal of creating a better world, they disagree with the woke approach. When they looked closely at the new woke ways of knowing and being, they found flimsy ideas and justifications that didn’t stand up to scrutiny, despite the confidence of the ideas’ proponents. The editors were struck by “how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter,” and noticed that “many people seemed most attached” to power. As journalists, they objected to calls for uniformity of opinion. “As Jews”, they write, “we had concerns, too.” These concerns surround the neutral institutions complemented by America’s moderate civil religion:

“Jews have relied on and sung the praises of stalwart American institutions like the federal government, universities, media organizations, corporations, labor unions, and more. We watched in horror as each of these institutions not only fell prey to the new mania, but also seemed increasingly unable to do the jobs they had historically been tasked with doing.”

They were also alarmed that historic defenders of these civil religious institutions like the Anti-Defamation League and ACLU had succumbed to power. Suddenly, so it seemed to the Tablet editors, think tanks, journalists, and activist organizations were promoting disastrous policies. “We feared we saw an emerging world,” the editors summarize, “in which the broad-minded American civic ideals and institutions that had kept us safe for so long were falling apart, which was bad for the country – and also meant that Jews would once again be seen as enemies to be eliminated.”

For these reasons, Tablet decided to “wade into the culture wars” and publish its series of superb articles.

I don’t see long-term value in taking such a narrow and recent perspective on the present age (there are certainly short-term victories to be won by taking such a narrow perspective, as Christopher Rufo has demonstrated in his war on critical theory), and I think the Tablet editors operate within such a narrow horizon for reasons related to their Jewish identity. What the editors see as an abrupt break from traditional values I see as just another punctuated expression of something internal to the American values they uphold. Thus I favor a more balanced, long-term perspective.

For starters, the recent intellectual genealogy approach to contemporary group fanaticism is too unrigorous to be proved and can always be disputed. There is an ever-expanding list of books purporting to lay out the genealogy of “woke” and identify an origin, making it reasonable to say that genealogies of woke are themselves a sub-grift of the overall woke grift. Recent examples include The Identity Trap, Rufo and Hanania’s books, as well as Christopher Caldwell’s (I’ve been planning a comprehensive review but the list keeps growing).

The purpose of intellectual genealogy in this context is to say that things were going well before these leftist fanatic intellectuals and policy-makers showed up and/or that such and such abstract values we all agree upon are actually being violated by recent policy, with the goal being to catalyze a reaction and return to the status quo that existed anywhere between 10 and 60 years ago, depending upon the author.

These restrictive genealogies entice advocates to ignore human nature and psychology, as well as more simplistic explanations for identitarian fanaticism, leaving open the possibility that the problem won’t adequately be addressed in the long term.

Identifying a genealogy of current politics in a demonstrably incorrect intellectual trend among experts implies that people simply adopt the ideas of authorities and then act on them without recourse to reason, which isn’t always the case. Often, people seek out articulate rationales for more general convictions they already hold, reversing the arrow of genealogy. Further – and critically – by focusing upon rooting out intellectual origins, intellectual genealogists create the impression that things can permanently be fixed simply by disavowing the intellectual origin or repealing a single policy.

Most Americans focus on more generalized and abstract conceptions of goods and justice than the refined forms of “woke” lunacy contrived by America’s experts. When people decide to act in accordance with norms, they usually look to how peers and admired celebrities act in public, which means they look to America’s civil religion and public rituals of civility, i.e., the inclusive civil religion invoked by public figures like retired general Mark Milley or President Obama.

Most Americans, then, strive to embody the public customs of a country that tries to civilize and neutralize group identity while simultaneously embracing and legitimizing group identity. They’ve done this for a long time.

Long ago America gave social and legal affirmative action – special treatment -- to Jews and Blacks. This began with Emancipation, the first civil rights acts, the Liberia experiment, and so forth. It occurred with Jews after WW2 in the conscious transition away from the demand to assimilate, as I documented here, and then again for Blacks and Jews in the 1960s through the civil rights movement and responses to the 6-day war.

The effects of the civil rights movement have extensively been documented. The 6-day war effectively legitimized dual loyalty as socially acceptable for American Jews and created affirmative action in foreign policy through the “special relationship.” We can quibble over why these events occurred (quibble over genealogy), or how I characterize them (e.g., whether the special relationship is a way to control Israel), but the salient point is that these forms of special group treatment are regarded as publicly legitimate.

If we acknowledge that most Americans have for generations believed special treatment for Blacks and Jews like this is legitimate, then we have no need for recent intellectual genealogies to explain the flare-ups of group identity fanaticism. If a person has a group identity and sees other group identities getting things, they will want those things for their group identity. If a person feels oppressed by another group because of their own perceived group membership, they may seek protection by identifying with the most muscular arm of their perceived group. In each case, groups will find ways to rationalize getting those things and adopting such postures. Academics/Experts are especially good at supplying rationalizations, and it’s important to challenge them, but people will continue rationalizing special group treatment in their absence.

What I’m getting at is that you can’t expand an inclusive Judeo-Christian empire -- especially one that conquers through qualified assimilation of group identities -- into the Muslim world and not add -Muslim to that imperial predicate. You also can’t expect Black people not to demand the addition of -Black, Armenians to demand recognition of their own Holocaust, white people to demand a Whitemanistan, etc. Presidents of such an empire will eventually have Black-Iranian advisors with their own identitarian allegiances regardless of what the experts say.

I know that the Tablet editors grasp what I’m trying to say here because they chose to include their piece on Nikole Hannah-Jones, author and editor of the controversial 1619 Project, in their series on “Black Israelism”, which otherwise includes pieces on Blacks who explicitly state that they are Jews, are the real Jews, or hate Jews. Hannah-Jones never claims to be a real Jew, to hate Jews, or to even be inspired by scripture, and advances an entirely secular revision of American history. This suggests to me that, as Jews, the Tablet editors sense a kindred group impulse in Hannah-Jones’s effort to place Blacks at the center of history. Groups are always striving to gain and expand recognition, and America often generously gives such recognition in exchange for obedience.

Unlike conservatives, and certainly unlike Tablet’s editors, I don’t feel as though I’ve only recently been deprived of a secure and halcyon golden age by fashionable movements, particularly ones that emerged during and after the Obama administration. Though it may take more offensive and acute forms in different places and times, I’ve always been aware of the unresolved tension between (and the sense of unfairness created by) America’s secular individualism and its paradoxical tendency to treat some individuals as subcomponents of groups, which receive special treatment.

Further, if an empire expands through group recognition and has a residual population that bought into a decidedly different kind of national perspective, there will be a residual population bereft of representation in the group affirmative action arms race. This is the group with which I identify, mostly because that’s how I was raised and not necessarily because it’s a good thing.

This brings me back to the first impression I derived from the Tablet piece. Nationalist Americans rely upon particularist groups like Zionists and Evangelicals for mainstream advocacy. The express intention of America’s civil religion is that people like Tablet’s Jewish editors can speak for all Americans, provided their speech is properly – civilly – constructed. I think Tablet has performed admirably in that capacity. The Tablet editors are justifiably afraid that an America which civilizes fanatical and particularist identitarians like Zionists and Evangelicals into allies of a neutral, liberal, and inclusive imperial world might not be able to do the same with the latest slate of group fanatics. This is a fear that all American nationalists experience each time a new group is neutralized and civilized.

However, I’m not sure whether, given the trajectory of American identity recognition I sketched above, Tablet or any other group will always want to speak on behalf of American nationalists.

The Tablet editors seek a return to an exceptional, though arbitrary, status quo for Jews, which happens to be comparatively better for nationalist Americans, but is also at odds with how our civil religion is constructed. In an empire that elevates and recognizes group identities, there are positive and negative incentives to be a member of a group and seek recognition, and there are reasons to feel besieged as a legacy group. This is, I suspect, one reason why it feels like we’re moving toward an every-group-for-themselves situation, the nature of which is barely captured by the portentous title of Tom Wolfe’s last novel, Back to Blood. People are indeed returning to blood, while others are turning to abstract identities that aren’t even tethered to natural or external restraints like consanguinity, territory, biological sex, or God.

American nationalists relying upon particularist groups for mainstream representation is a risky gamble, though it makes sense in the short-term to piggyback on the policies of a strong identity. It’s possible that Zionists and Evangelicals are successfully reintegrated into the anti-nationalist Bush-Clinton sphere, in which case Americans like myself will once again be deprived of mainstream representation. It’s also possible that the weird Zionist-orthodox coalition in Israel is defeated, effecting yet another transformation in America’s posture toward Jewish identity, which could increase Jewish and Evangelical hostility toward American nationalists.

The old Zionist bogeyman of “Third Worldism” is making its way back into the American conservative vocabulary. So long as Third Worldism threatens ordinary Americans in the same way that it threatens Zionist Jews (and it certainly does), there will be a salutary alliance. However, in the long term we American nationalists need to come to terms with the fact that pro-Israelism looks like a refined form of Third Worldism itself, with its appeals to persecution, self-determination, irredentism, and so forth. What the Tablet editors describe in their experience of the new “Expert” woke ideas is what every legacy deracinated American eventually feels when they examine the soft underbelly of any identity movement, be it racial, religious, or even class-based.

This means that Zionism could end up being influenced by different incentives. Since secular American nationalists lack a coherent identity and competent leadership, this would leave us without an effective advocacy vehicle, likely compelling a decision on group allegiance: back to blood, God, or something else.