George Rebane

In his ‘Passover and the Constitution’,  Professor William Galston writes “The Jewish festival teaches that liberty is only possible with tradition and order.”  These are not the mainstay criteria nor governance objectives of today’s American progressives.  Galston is a political science academic who now resides as a senior fellow at the very liberal Brookings Institution in its Governance Studies program.  His linked article appeared in the 13apr22 WSJ.

In the rabbinical tradition of studying the Talmud and the Torah, Dr Galston does not always present the most understandable prescriptions – there’s always ‘on the other hand’.  Here the point that seeks exposure is that sustainable freedom can only be achieved and exercised in an environment of mutually accepted order.  And mutual acceptance is passed on as an inherited tradition, a social legacy from previous generations.  Jews formalize this tradition in the course of the traditional Seder (order) that is central to the celebration of Passover (freedom).

“This raises a classic issue—the relationship between order and freedom. Some schools of thought view them as antitheses—the more order, the less freedom, and vice versa. Libertarians want to minimize government constraints to maximize liberty. Anarchists carry this thesis to its inevitable, and self-refuting, conclusion. … In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, order makes freedom possible. In the absence of a framework—a law, a text, a tradition—we cannot act freely. Not only are we plunged into debilitating doubt, but our decisions also collide with those of others. The actions of others rarely coordinate harmoniously with our own. And when they don’t, all are prevented from acting as they choose. Without a framework of social order, every individual can seek freedom, but none can achieve it.”  If this sounds like a bit of ‘you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black’, then so be it.

However, a little meditation on the freedom/order dichotomy reveals again that in an enduring communal setting no member can act with total freedom; several times a day our fist inevitably comes to within an inch of others’ noses.  So, all of our communal freedoms are in fact circumscribed.  And respecting where the fences are, by what authority they were so placed, and who abides by them, defines the area in which we and our neighbors can practice our ordered freedoms.

In America, as in most liberally governed countries, our traditions of freedom and order come from the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.  “The Declaration and the Constitution have long served as the framework of order, normative and institutional, within which the drama of America’s quest for freedom was enacted. When flaws in the Constitution become impossible to ignore, Americans have appealed to the Declaration to guide the Constitution’s correction, as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. did, and to public consent as the source of legitimacy for both formal constitutional amendments and for pathbreaking interpretive shifts such as Brown v. Board of Education.”

And herein lie the seeds of our national discontent.  An active segment of our Left strongly believes that our Constitution is deeply flawed and must be at best abandoned or at least reformulated through legislation from the bench to reflect what today’s street protesters (rioters?) demand.  “On the left, the Nation’s Elie Mystal declares that ‘The Constitution is kind of trash. . . . It was written by slavers and colonists, and white people who were willing to make deals with slavers and colonists.’  No doubt many Americans agree with him.”

Unfortunately, Galston and his fellow leftwing intellectuals do not understand the Right’s constitutional literalists and originalists (q.v.), believing instead that pole has contributed to “the erosion of this shared framework (which) has deepened political divisions” by rejecting any connection between the Declaration’s “abstract principles” which “have nothing to do with the Constitution” as a “continuation of the conservative British tradition.”

So now we come down to the political history of the Jews starting with their early embrace of Marxism as a natural extension of their long-practiced communal order which allowed them and their culture to survive in their close-knit shtetls after the Christian princes banished them from most of Europe starting in 1492.  Lenin and Stalin were both irked by the preponderance of Jews manning the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of communism.  This statistic gave Hitler and his Nazis further ammunition to proscribe ‘Jewish communism’ and blame Jews for everything bad that befell the Third Reich.  And that socio-political blaming did not stop at the borders of Germany.  Inter-war antisemitism reached far and wide in Christendom, that included the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Many social scientists have been confounded as to why the Jewish contingents in most countries still gravitate toward collectivism when they have been cruelly rejected by the USSR and Nazi Germany, the two global giants of 20^th century collectivism.  In the US it is almost de rigueur that our media and academe have a preponderance of Judaic practitioners.  Jews overwhelmingly gravitate toward the Democratic Party which uniformly militates against capitalism, entrepreneurship, and minimally regulated markets in which Jews have demonstrated their unquestioned acumen.  Yet they adhere to the party that is also the embodied enemy of tradition and freedom, which seeks to limit liberties by burdening the country with evermore laws and regulations.

Government strictures that reject the past and instead promise a new world in which individual effort and hard work, so prized and portrayed by the Jewish tradition to succeed, will no longer be a factor that enables people to differentiate by merit.  A differentiation determined by the possibilities of every individual’s talent and industry, that give rise to our distribution of wealth, income, skills, and recognition, all of which have made America the hallmark of a benevolent and unique society to which the world continues to seek access.  Why do so many Jews today continue to throw their considerable talents and efforts behind movements that guarantee happiness from the enforced lowest common denominators promised by the Great Leveling?

Postscript: For more on the Great Leveling, I recommend the writings of Fisher-Post (2020), Maier (1977), and Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2020) which explicate “the confluence of factors that facilitated the kinds of neo-corporatist compromise which Piketty and others see as critical in facilitating the ‘Great Leveling’.”  (more here and here)