If you’re interested in the wacky world of far-left politics in Britain, you might enjoy “As Soon As This Pub Closes,” a survey of Leninist and Trotskyist parties written from the inside by the late John Sullivan (1932–2003). He was a veteran of revolutionary socialism who somehow kept his sense of humour and absurdity amid the leftist lunacy. This is how he summed up the later career of Tony Cliff, né Yigael Gluckstein (1917–2000), the Israeli-Jewish head of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP): “Once [Cliff] despaired of changing the world he saw little point in trying to understand it.”

Cheap shots and unfunny sneers

That’s a good Marxist in-joke and “As Soon as this Pub Closes,” originally issued as a pamphlet in 1988, is a highly enjoyable read. But an old friend of Sullivan’s made an interesting point in Sullivan’s obituary: “This pamphlet in particular has a unique quality, in that all who read it laugh heartily at what he says about the other organizations, only to become deeply indignant when they come to his descriptions of their own.”

Good satire works like that: the more effective it is, the less amusing it is to its targets. For example, if you’re satirizing SJWs and their absurdities, you don’t want good reviews from the Guardian and New Statesman. Fortunately for the parody poet Titania McGrath, scourge of the modern left, her book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice didn’t get good reviews from those publications. The Guardian said: “Lampooning the language of social justice is a cheap shot.” The New Statesman said: “Titania McGrath’s tired and unfunny ‘joke’ is just the old sneering at the young.”

Titania McGrath, radical intersectionalist poet

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In the 1952 American presidential election, Republican Dwight Eisenhower ran against Democrat Adlai Stevenson.  Eisenhower was a five-star general in the army and Stevenson was the governor of Illinois.   I’m so old I was in grade school back then and my teacher Miss Kelly, who was big for Stevenson—as I think about it, this may not have been altogether appropriate—put me up to standing on a corner in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota handing out Stevenson campaign literature to anybody who would take it.

My dad was a barber in the basement of the Saint Francis Hotel a block away, and I took a break from my political duties to pay him a visit.  After saying hello to Dad in his satiny smock and watching a haircut, I gathered up my pile of Stevenson flyers and went up the stairs to the lobby of the hotel and the front door with the idea of getting back to work.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw a banner saying there was a meeting of the Minnesota Republican Party going on in the Saint Francis.  There were a few cardboard posters propped up with sticks with pictures of what must have been party luminaries.  About twenty men—all men in those years—stood talking to one another; I supposed they were party members between meetings.   Making my way head-down through them on my way to the front door and the street, I stumbled and out spewed, it seemed like ten feet, all my Stevenson flyers with his picture on them.  I was mortified and a bit scared—the barber’s kid, a collage of Stevenson faces on the lobby floor, and the Republicans in their suits looking eight feet tall to me who had stopped what they were doing to take in what had just happened.  As it turned out, they couldn’t have been nicer.  They all smiled and helped me gather up the flyers and wished me well and I went on my way.   I’ve never forgotten that moment.

Maybe I’ve taken too long to get to what I want to say here, but the purpose of recounting this memory was to establish the context for the general observation that I think I’ve lived through a marked downturn in American politics: from Dwight David Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson—grown-ups, serious men, men of real substance, both of them—to Donald Trump and Beto O’Rourke.   Eisenhower and Stevenson had discrete comb overs, but neither of them had what looked like a lemon meringue dessert sitting on his head, and neither of them talked about the size of his member on the campaign trail.  And Beto?  Is he the one with REO Speedwagon on his mixtape?  President Beto?  Really?  Eisenhower had been the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II and president of Columbia University.   What exactly has Beto done that’s so great?

To get to the specific topic of this writing: a story, or I guess it’s a joke, my dad told me perhaps a few too many times when I was growing up.  It had to do with a president from the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge.  Coolidge wasn’t the most outgoing person in the world and he wasn’t known for his loquaciousness.  The way the story/joke Dad told me went, a little boy, nine or so, went up to President Coolidge and said, “My dad bet me a nickel that you wouldn’t say three words to me.”  After a pause, Coolidge looked at the tyke and said, “You lose.”

Calvin Coolidge.  Born in 1872, died in 1933.   Republican.   Elected vice-president in 1920.   Became president in 1923 upon the death of president Warren G. Harding.  Elected president in 1924.  Declined to run for a second full term as president in 1928.¹

Calvin Coolidge

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Kevin B. MacDonald is an American psychologist. A retired professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), he is best known for writings that characterize Jewish behavior as a “group evolutionary strategy.”

 Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to employ the locution “Judeo-Bolsheviks” to designate the 1917’s revolutionaries in Russia. Yet one seldom speaks of “Judeo-Libertarians,” even though the main intellectual leaders of libertarianism (or free-marketism) in the twentieth century were Jews: let one think of Milton Friedman, Israel Kirzner, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, or Ludwig von Mises. How do you explain it?

Kevin B. MacDonald: CofC stands or falls depending on whether I have adequately described certain specific intellectual and political movements as Jewish. In doing so, I focused on movements that were or are influential and provide evidence of their influence. In describing these movements, I focus on the main figures, discuss their Jewish identities and their concern with specific Jewish issues, such as combatting anti-Semitism. I discuss the dynamics of these movements—the authoritarian atmosphere, the guru phenomenon, ethnic networking, and non-Jews who participate in the movement. I am not attempting to discuss all well-known Jewish intellectuals if they are not part of these movements. Thus, I never claim that Marx was part of a specifically Jewish intellectual/political movement, since he died long before the rise of the Jewish left in the twentieth century which is the focus of CofC. Milton Friedman was a well-known Jewish intellectual, but he may not fit into any of the movements I discuss, and I have never investigated the nature of his Jewish identity (or lack of it) or how he sees Jewish interests. He may well be a neoconservative, a Jewish movement whose members were quite critical of communism for entirely Jewish reasons (e.g., anti-Jewish attitudes of the USSR government ; Soviet and now Russian positions on foreign policy regarding the Middle East (see “Neoconservatism as a  Jewish Movement”). Or one could point to a Jewish supporter of the populist positions of President Trump, but the existence of such a person does not make populism a Jewish movement or erase the effective opposition of the New York Intellectuals to American populism in prior decades as discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 of CofC.

1. Individual influential Jews or a separate influential Jewish intellectual movement may be critical of a specific Jewish intellectual movement that I discuss, as Friedman was critical of communism — a movement that attracted many Jews, especially after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, as discussed in Chapter 3 of CofC and in my reviews of Slezkine and Weingarten. Another example is the split beginning in the 1930s between the Stalinist left, which is the topic of Chapter 3, and the Trotskyist left which is a topic of Chapter 6 and “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,” comes to mind. It is possible that opposition to the Israel Lobby may also be reasonably analyzed as a Jewish movement. I have not attempted this, although I have noted in several places that criticism of Israel is increasing among Jews and non-Jews. But in order to establish that critics of Israel constitute a Jewish movement, one would have to pursue the program presented in CofC: discuss whether participants have a Jewish identity and whether they see their activities as furthering Jewish interests as well as explore the dynamics of these movements—whether there is any evidence for an authoritarian atmosphere, the guru phenomenon, ethnic networking, and the status of non-Jews who participate in the movement.

This project would thus go well beyond the “default hypothesis” of Jewish IQ as explaining Jewish involvement in intellectual movements. Such situations may be analogized to arguments between different factions in the Knesset—both dominated by Jews but with different perceptions of Jewish interests.

1. I am therefore not attempting to develop a general theory of Jewish viewpoint diversity. I am studying certain specific intellectual and political movements that I attempt to establish as influential. I am not trying to develop a theory of why each Jew or most Jews believe what they do—a much more ambitious project. Thus, for example, I have no interest in describing or explaining the diversity of Jewish attitudes on affirmative action— an interesting question, but not relevant to the thesis of CofC which is that certain specific Jewish movements have the features I describe and that they have been influential. Nevertheless, as discussed below, at particular times and places, there is often substantial consensus within the Jewish community on particular issues, e.g., immigration and refugee policy, Israel, and church-state relations.
2. My writing in CofC is restricted to the movements discussed therein— movements that I have argued have been influential in the twentieth century and whose influence often extends into the present. In addition to these movements, it may well be the case that I have left out individual influential Jews, such as Milton Friedman whose attitudes would seem to be typical of Jewish neoconservatives.

This response is based on my Second Reply to Nathan Cofnas, posted in 2018. Read more