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George Gilder
Farewell, My Dear WASP
Edmund Connelly
February 12, 2010
“Here’s a WASP joke. Question: Why do WASPs not engage in more orgies? Answer:
Too many thank-you notes to write.”
Thus began
a
NYTime’s book review last
fall about the new book
Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor
by
Tad Friend.
I read the review and highlighted a phenomenon I thought was worth commenting on
later. The passage was:
In his teenage years, Tad Friend chose to attend the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr,
Pa., where he first grew aware of the designation “N.O.C.D.” — “not our class,
dear,” an exclusion usually directed at Jews and Catholics. Friend offers a
fitting tirade against WASP anti-Semitism, reminding us that well into the 20th
century, signs on the lawn of the Lake Placid Club read “No Dogs. No Tuberculars.
No Hebrews,” and noting that his paternal grandfather “was hardly alone, among
the WASPs on Squirrel Hill, in fretting” that it was harboring an increasing
number of Jews. In atonement, the author observes that “almost everyone” he’d
hung out with at Harvard was Jewish, as was his first significant other, Melanie
Grayboden. When relating his painful eventual shedding of Melanie, he digresses
divertingly on different forms of ethnic guilt. “If Catholic guilt is ‘I’ve been
bad’ and Jewish guilt is ‘You’ve been bad,’ then WASP guilt is ‘You probably
think I’ve been bad.’
”
This review that I clipped out of the
Sunday Book Review then gathered dust on the big pile of magazines and
papers that invariably grows on my side table. Atop it later came a curiously
related story, this one about a WASP named George Gilder who seems to love Jews
more than many of them love themselves, if that’s possible. By pure chance, I’ve
just happened across the third review of Gilder’s latest book, which I take as a
sign to now write about it.
My first notice of
The Israel Test, Gilder‘s new book, came while
reading Scott McConnell’s review of it in the Dec. 2009 American
Conservative.
Titled
Chosen
People, the review sadly noted the usual mainstream fare:
“For Gilder, the superior men are not Teutonic explorers or generals but Jewish
scientists and financiers.” (Save the guffaws—we’re not supposed to notice that
Madoff, Summers, Rubin, Blankfein et al. are all Tribe.)
We also see that Gilder’s prose includes, “Is one able to admire and embrace
Jewish superiority and creativity, or does one, out of envy, oppose it?” Getting
to the central argument of the book, we find that Gilder’s
thesis is that “all opposition to Israel is rooted in anti-Semitism.” Or this:
“We need Israel today as much as Israel needs us, as much as we needed Jewish
physicists and chemists [for the Manhattan Project].”” Ho boy, the same old
tired arguments trotted out by so many Jews. Fine, Gilder must be a Jew doing
the usual group-shielding, meme-selling job. Or so I thought.
Much to my
surprise, McConnell revealed that Gilder is a WASP raised in an upper-class
world. And McConnell thinks he has found a reason for Gilder’s strange
Judeophilia, an explanation that oddly parallels that of Tad Friend above. It
seems that
an incident
that occurred when [Gilder] was about 17. While trying to impress an older girl,
his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The
young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was
mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the
kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern
are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at
some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a
spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement.
This is
simply bizarre. I cannot relate to a group that would be so easily traumatized
by, as McConnell states, something so trivial. What is going on?
It gets
worse.
The next time
I ran into a review of The Israel Test was in the Nov. 2009 issue of
Commentary, penned by Michael Medved. Gilder is quoted as declaring: “Israel is
hated above all for its virtues.”
This of
course is lunacy. Could Gilder be that clueless about Israel’s actual behavior?
He shouldn’t be. After all, McConnell described him as a “veteran luminary of
the American Right, author of a successful polemic against feminism and a
Reagan-admired ode to the free market, and publisher of a newsletter touting
technology stocks.”
I believe I
understand why many Jews offer explanations for anti-Semitism in which Jews are
blameless. Readers will likely recall what Kevin MacDonald wrote in chapter 7 of
Separation and Its Discontents
about Jewish failure to be realistic about their own often bad or brutal
behavior: “Historians of Judaism have often falsely portrayed the beliefs of
gentiles as irrational fantasies while portraying the behavior of Jews as
irrelevant to anti-Semitism” (p. 220).
But of course
Jewish behavior is overwhelming responsible for occurrences of anti-Semitism:
people react angrily when their culture is relentless attacked, when they are
swindled, and particularly when they are subjected to genocide. This is rational
human behavior. Why does Gilder miss this?
Midway
through his review, even the normally level-headed Medved gets taken in and
becomes party to Gilder’s fantasy about Israel. The Palestinians, Medved and
Gilder agree, are fortunate to have had the Israelis take over Gaza and the West
Bank because this has “decisively raised the living standards of local Arab
populations” [emphasis in original]. Between 1967 and the first intifada in 1987
“per capita income tripled in the West Bank while it rose in Gaza more than
twentyfold—from $80 to $1,706.”
I suppose to
worshippers of mammon, this represents progress, but what about all those
thousands and thousands of Palestinians— including countless women and
children—blown to bits by Israeli offensive weapons? Does a dying youth utter
with his last breath, “All to the best. At least I would have earned more money
. . . had I not died so young”? (See my essay “For Whom the Gaza Bell Tolls”
here and
here .)
The best
review so far of The Israel Test is
a negative one by Robert Sungenis that appeared in the January
issue of E. Michael Jones’s
Culture Wars.
(Subscribe
here.)
Readers should know that Culture Wars and its editor are pariahs among
respectable company, mostly because The Jewish Problem is addressed
forthrightly. I think that’s the whole draw of the magazine. Indeed, Jones and
his writers are “Jew-wise,” as TOQ editor Greg Johnson
likes to
say.
The Israel
Test
is reviewed in Culture Wars by frequent contributor Robert Sungenis,
Ph.D. He begins by noting the same Gilder quotes about Jewish and Israeli
superiority covered above. He then addresses some of the negatives. To be sure,
Sungenis’s critique is that of an arch-conservative Catholic, but his claims are
nonetheless intriguing. For example, he writes that despite Jewish prominence in
capitalism, technology, etc., “there has resulted more atheism, more murder, and
more sexual deviance than at any time in history. If anything, these
technological advances have stunted man’s development, since the tendency is now
to rely on one’s own Tower of Babel to measure human worth to the virtual
exclusion of the development of the inner man.”
He goes on to
charge these smart Jews with “the promoting of homosexuality, divorce, adultery,
gambling, insider trading, cultural revolution, and many other societal ills.”
Mischievously he adds that "Among Israel’s Muslim neighbors these ills are
practically non-existent.”
With respect
to Jews and capitalism, he asks, “How much more economic upheaval, corruption,
greed and scandal do the capitalists need to realize that their system is on a
self-destruct course? How many Savings & Loan debacles, Enrons, WorldCom’s, Ivan
Boeskys, Bernie Madoffs, deceptive collateralized debt obligations and credit
default swaps are needed to see that the capitalist system is a racket of smoke
and mirrors?”
Sungenis goes
on to skewer other categories of Jewish “geniuses.” Psychologists? Well, take
Sigmund Freud. Sungenis’s estimation of the good Doctor Freud is in line with
what Kevin MacDonald wrote in
The Culture of Critique, MacDonald’s culminating
volume in his trilogy on Jews: Freud was a charlatan cult leader who was not
good for gentile society.
Jewish
feminists? Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and their ilk “have
destroyed the traditional role of wife and mother.” Jewish artists and
architects? Fuggedaboutit. (See
here,
here and
here.) Ditto for the eighty percent of American comics who are
Jewish—“the raunchy Sarah Silverman or the sex-crazed Woody Allen and Howard
Stern.” Such humor presents “the abnormal as normal, the neurotic as necessary,
the outsider as the true insider.” Even a prominent rabbi admitted that “Some of
the most notoriously foul-mouthed and obscene-minded entertainers are Jewish and
earn no reproof for their public aggrandizement of filth.”
In summary,
according to Sungenis, “The humanist Jew has poisoned every area of our culture.
Gilder can’t see any of it because he lacks a properly tuned moral compass. The
moral ineptitude of the humanist Jew at large is ignored and only his
‘technological achievements,’ ‘his raw genius,’ his ‘capitalistic
entrepreneurial spirit’ is enshrined as the model which the world is not only to
follow but to bow down to.”
This leaves
me trying to get my head around why such an obviously brilliant WASP like Gilder
would write what he does about Jews and Israel. From what I can tell, he
sincerely believes what he writes, too.
Consider that
this man is the product of the best America has to offer—wealth, Exeter,
Harvard, exposure to top leaders (he was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon), etc.
His long list of books attests to his intelligence and work ethic. Among them
are:
Sexual Suicide (updated as Men and Marriage)
TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World
Microcosm:
The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology
The Spirit of Enterprise (updated as Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise)
The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation
Visible Man:
A True Story of Post-Racist America
In addition
he writes the
Gilder Technology Report.
Clearly, we
have to take such a man seriously. But, again, what could make him believe such
things about superior Jews and an enlightened and moral Israel when the facts
are so starkly otherwise?
Kevin
MacDonald attempted to unravel the effects Jews and WASPs have had on each
other. This came in
his discussion of Eric P. Kaufmann’s
The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. In essence, Kaufmann
argued that WASPs voluntarily relinquished hegemony in America—cultural
“suicide,” in other words.
Writing on
VDARE.com, MacDonald explained why he viewed it as
murder rather than suicide. In short,
as he argued at length in his book
The Culture of Critique,
“the rise of Jews to elite status in the United States and the influence of
particular Jewish intellectual and political movements, especially the push for
mass and indiscriminate immigration, were key contributions—necessary
conditions—to the demise of WASP America.”
Crucially,
MacDonald complained that Kaufmann
never mentions
coercion and the
penalties that are imposed on people who dissent from the
elite cosmopolitan consensus. The fact is, Whites who violate these strictures
are
severely censured
— a phenomenon with which I have considerable
personal experience.
Kaufmann presents the views of elite Whites who are
cooperating in the demise of their own people as nothing more than the
enlightened opinions of an intellectual and moral elite. But it is far more than
that. Since the 1960s, Whites who depart from the consensus of cosmopolitanism
have been penalized in a wide variety of ways — from
lack of access to the mainstream media, to firing from their jobs, to social
opprobrium. Conversely, those who collaborate are rewarded. This revolution is
neither peaceful nor bloodless.
I’m not sure
if this helps understand Gilder. In fact, doesn’t it deepen the mystery,
because, as MacDonald concluded about the Jewish-WASP ethnic war in America,
“For the Anglo-Saxons, it is a defeat of cataclysmic proportions.”
How could
Gilder not recognize this? He’s old enough (b. 1939) to have grown up with older
relatives who represented the apogee of WASP power in America, but his whole
life has witnessed the unbroken decline of his caste — and a concomitant rise of
the Jews. Are we witnessing a form of the
Stockholm Syndrome,
in this case, one where a formerly free man worships the power of his (cultural)
captors? I confess I don’t know.
I almost wish
I could find evidence that Gilder was blackmailed into writing The Israel
Test, or that he did it as a quid pro quo for something else, or that he’s
in love with a Jewish woman. Lacking any evidence of that, however, I’m forced
to grapple with the question of how an otherwise highly intelligent man could be
so misguided about Jews.
Whites in
America have suffered in recent decades because of the migration of power from
WASPs to Jews. To be sure, middle and working class Whites who are not elite
WASPs have done their best to protect their interests. Ford was from a rural
background, Lindbergh was never part of the Eastern elite, and McCarthy,
Coughlin, and Buchanan were or are Catholic.
Where are the
WASPs today? Some have led lives unworthy of their ancestors (think
Paris Hilton), while others have died young after fleeting and
dissolute lives.
The Short Unhappy Life of Casey Johnson
may be fitting:
Lesbian
heiress, socialite, and Hollywood celeb Casey Johnson, 30, was found dead in the
bedroom of her West Hollywood home on January 4, 2010. Jewish gossip website TMZ
reported that Johnson, last heard from on December
29, 2009, had been dead for several days before her body was discovered by a
maid. A coroner’s toxicology report has yet to be issued, but foul play is not
suspected. Johnson suffered from diabetes and had a history of drug abuse.
Casey
Johnson’s death provides a convenient window into the seamy underbelly of the
contemporary WASP “elite.”
Mostly, it seems, American WASPs have simply disappeared. Updike died, while President Bush (41), undeniably a WASP, gave way to his son Dubya (43), who certainly did not look, speak or behave like a WASP. Where can we now find in positions of power those tall, lean men who, whatever their vulnerabilities, once so confidently bestrode the world stage?
Averell Harriman
Where once we had men like Averell Harriman and George Herbert Walker Bush, we now have Alan Dershowitz, Larry David, Woody Allen, and Michael Chertoff.
America, including its White gentile majority, is about to find out what it’s
like to be ruled by a hostile elite. The upper crust WASPs seem to have gone
quietly for the most part, but what of the remaining White masses? As MacDonald
said with respect to the WASPs, “For the Anglo-Saxons, it is a defeat of
cataclysmic proportions.”
The same now goes for all Whites.
Edmund Connelly
(email him)
is a freelance
writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for
The Occidental
Quarterly.
