Peter Beinart’s Jewish Triumphalism: Jettisoning the White Working Class

Peter Beinart has a Jewish triumphalist article in The Atlantic riffing off an article by Ann Coulter deploring soccer (“Ann Coulter Is Right to Fear the World Cup“). He reads Ann Coulter to be basically saying “Soccer’s alleged collectivism, effeminacy and elitism are simply markers of its foreignness. The core problem with embracing soccer is that in so doing, America would become more like the rest of the world.”

American enthusiasm for soccer becomes a marker of all that is good for Beinart and all that is bad for Coulter:

Which is why Coulter should be very afraid. Because America is embracing soccer. America’s World Cup game against Portugal attracted almost 25 million television viewers in the U.S., eight million more than watched the highest rated World Cup game in 2010, and far more than the average viewership for last year’s World Series or this year’s NBA finals. NBC now broadcasts English soccer. And America’s own league, Major League Soccer, draws as many fans to its stadiums as do the NHL and NBA.

Beinart traces anti-soccer attitudes to anti-immigration sentiment a century ago, “an era when mass immigration was spawning Coulter-like fears that America was losing its special character. … Old-stock Americans … were elevating baseball, football, and basketball into symbols of America’s distinct identity. Immigrants realized that embracing those sports offered a way to claim that identity for themselves. Clinging to soccer, by contrast, was a declaration that you would not melt.”

Steve Sailer interprets this implied swipe at “old-stock Americans” and their sense of national identity as resulting from Beinart’s sense of revenge against those old-stock Americans—”Revenge is a dish best served a century cold.”

The only way this makes sense, of course, is if Beinart, a strongly identified Jew, is interpreted as seeing the decline of old-stock American in Jewish terms. And there can be no doubt that American nationalism and rejection of immigration which were at their high points in the 1920s remains a rallying point for Jewish identity in America:

It seems fair to state that there is a communal Jewish memory about the period of immigration restriction as the high point of American anti-Jewish attitudes. Non-Jews have a difficult time fathoming Jewish communal memory. For strongly identified Jews, [what Stephen Steinlight calls] the ‘vilely discriminatory’ actions of immigration restrictionists are part of the lachrymose history of the Jewish people. Immigration restriction from 1924-1965 is in the same category [in Jewish perceptions] as the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., the marauding Crusaders of the Middle Ages, the horrors of the Inquisition, the evil of the Russian Czar, and the rationally incomprehensible calamity of Nazism. These events are not just images drawn from the dustbin of history. They are deeply felt images and potent motivators of contemporary behavior. (See here, p.v).

So Beinart greets the transformation of America away from its founding people; enthusiasm for soccer represents all that is good in America now. In the bad old days, immigrants assimilated to American cultural norms, but now that the left is committed to a complete transformation of American culture, “the soccer coalition—immigrants, liberals and the young—looks a lot like the Obama coalition.”

We’ll see. Those young Whites will grow up and have families, and when they do their opinions are likely to look quite a bit like older Whites now. In fact, liberals often overestimate the attraction of young Whites for the transformational coalition. In the last election, young Whites aged 18-29 voted for Romney. And I expect that enthusiasm for soccer among Whites will decline dramatically when the World Cup is over. Let’s face it, pretty much the only Americans who really love soccer are immigrants who grew up with it. Americans are far more addicted to football which is a quintessentially American sport.

In fact, Beinart acknowledges that the White working class has not shown much enthusiasm for soccer just as it hasn’t shown any for the Obama’s transformational coalition. The revolution is happening without White working class support. Just as in the UK where the Labour Party has jettisoned the White working class in favor of Third World immigrants,  the transformational coalition centered in the Democratic Party is succeeding without the White working class — “the same demographic changes that have helped Obama win the White House without strong white working class support are helping soccer gain acceptance without it too.”

In this game, it is the sheer numbers of non-White immigrants that is so essential for fulfilling Beinart’s dream of the transformation away from White America. As he notes,

In 1972, McGovern won minorities, well-educated white liberals, and the young, but still lost 49 states. Since then, however, the minority share of the American electorate has risen from 11 percent to 28 percent. Whites without college degrees, by contrast, composed only 36 percent of American voters in 2012, down from 54 percent in 1988. 

This is the familiar calculus of the ascendant non-White majority aligned now with educated White liberals. It’s theme that is constantly harped on also by Ron Brownstein (who also writes for The Atlantic). His current article, “Why Democrats are so confident: Republicans are trending against a growing cultural majority, while Democrats are in tune with it,” has the following photo:

The new citizen from Guatamala probably likes soccer and will be part of what Brownstein calls “the coalition of transformation.” Like Beinart, he also notes that this tsunami is happening without blue-collar Whites, the group that stands to lose the most in the transformation.

The future does indeed look good for the Democrats, but we are certainly seeing ever-increasing racialization of American politics with unknown consequences as Whites necessarily wake up to the realization that it’s really not their country anymore and they can’t elect a president. Whites of all groups, except young White unmarried women, are already voting Republican and are trending Republican at 1.5% each four-year election cycle. I therefore predict that the “coalition of transformation” so beloved by Beinart and Brownstein will have to govern with vanishingly slim support from all classes of White Americans. When you start a race war, you had better be prepared to finish it.

The jettisoning of the  White working  class reminds us making alliances  with elites is far more typical of Jews historically. In traditional societies and  until the Jewish embrace of traditional Marxism and  the  working classes, Jews allied with elites, often against the rest of the population — a major theme of historical anti-Semitism. However, beginning with the Frankfurt School’s recognition that the German working classes had become enthusiastic about Hitler, Jewish intellectuals and the  organized Jewish community have gradually pulled away from the White working classes, allying themselves with liberal business and professional elites as well as non-White immigrants in all Western countries.

First they came for the White working class because they were the least powerful White group, their unions destroyed and their jobs shipped overseas. But I didn’t speak out because I was well-educated and had a good job and certainly didn’t want to identity with White working class culture and interests and their low class connotations — a favorite target of Hollywood for at least 50 years.

Then they came for the White conservatives. Afraid to offend liberal intellectual and media elites by talking explicitly about race because they would be called “racists” and “White supremacists,” they were powerless to resist their dispossession.  Their power decimated by the immigration invasion, they could do nothing as all traditional values were uprooted. From immigration destroying homogeneous White communities, to abortion, to gay marriage, conservatives have lost every social cause in the last 50 years. But I didn’t speak out because liberal values seemed enlightened and, as a liberal, I certainly didn’t feel threatened by these changes.

With their transformative majority in place, they will be free to come after the White liberals who will have no allies remaining. The liberals will be shocked when they realize that human nature is not what they were told over and over again by our intellectual and media elites. They will then realize that it”s really been about ethnic warfare all along and that ethnic warfare has very real winners and losers.

But by then it will be too late.