26 December 2006
American Zionism
OJ points us to a fascinating Michael Oren column posted at Opinion Journal setting forth the history of American Zionism, starting in colonial times. Mr. Oren also makes a point that can't be made too often: in this, as in so much else, Jimmy Carter is unlike his predecessors and successors. How such a limited, delusional, hate-filled man became president is beyond me but the fact that we not only survived but thrived (for without President Carter there never could have been a President Reagan) is yet another sign of American exceptionalism.
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7 comments:
No doubt Mr. Carter's book is a compendium of dreadful, addle-pated, argle bargle, the reading of which is to risk irreversible coma.
Nothing new there.
His book, and the column, are both completely beside the point, though.
Regardless of what one thinks of Israel's founding, or how much the Palestinians may have been put upon, Israel is simply an accomplished fact, to which there are no conscionable alternatives.
Your argument for American exceptionalism succeeds only if the circumstances are exceptional. They are not.
Britain experienced the same turn of fortunes when Labor gave way to Thatcher.
I happened to be in the Air Force when Carter was President. It sucked.
I happened to be in the UK when Labor was still in power. It sucked.
Skipper: "Exceptional" is not "unique" and I am not at all reluctant to agree that the English are, in their own way, exceptional. There is absolutely a certain similarity between Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher. I would be the last person to deny it. Although I think that Reagan changed the debate in the US more than Thatcher did in the UK, there is no doubt that both took hold of the pitiless and unavoidable historical decline by the scruff of the neck and proved it to be pitiful and avoidable.
But I still insist that the UK never had to deal with someone as egotistical, overconfident and incompetent as James Earl Carter but that it took someone exactly that bad to allow the election of Ronald Reagan.
David:
"Exceptional" is not "unique" and I am not at all reluctant to agree that the English are, in their own way, exceptional.
That sounds just like what we tell school kids [/sarcasm]
You are correct, exceptional and unique are not the same. However, when the words "American" and "exceptionalism" ride in tandem, for most authors, unique is precisely what they mean.
As well, I will grant Carter was uniquely awful. But worse than decades of choosing between socialism on one hand, and even more on the other?
I think it is, umm, ironic, that one prominent blogger simultaneously trumpets American Exceptionalism while extolling "Third Way" nonsense that differs from "First Way" only in spelling.
While considering how pointless both Carter's book and the WSJ editorial truly are, one only needs follow Carter's reasoning to its unavoidable conclusion: we give the US back to the indigenous Americans, right?
Is it possible that Carter simply blames Israel for the Iranian hostage crisis? If we know nothing else about him, we know he has never, ever forgiven us for not re-electing him. And as surprising as it seems to us now, he would have survived the Phillips curve meltdown of the late '70s. It was the hostage crisis that klled him, and I wasn't paying much attention at the time, but I do remember 'Big Satan, Little Satan', so maybe that 's all there is to it. He is a vengeful little so-and-so.
Speaking of American Exceptionalism, let's assume for the moment such a thing exists.
Which begs the question: "Why?"
Our Judeo-Christian heritage gets a lot of mileage as an answer.
Making it ironic, and, therefore, completely unsurprising, if the real answer is that the exceptionalism is the consequence of an unwitting eugenics experiment.
Skipper: I don't think that American exceptionalism is the same thing as G-d's special providence. "Eugenics," in the sense of "our ancestors are superior to the old world's ancestors because our's left while their's stayed" is actually a pretty common explanation of American exceptionalism. I think that, on genetics grounds, that explanation doesn't hold water. After all, lots of our ancestors were kicked out on the basis that they were genetically inferior.
David:
Unless you have OJ'd me, Blogger dumpstered my first reply, so here is a half-remembered rehash.
I never meant to imply American Exceptionalism is the consequence of G-d's special providence -- based upon the Jew's experience, I would look askance at any notion of becoming G-d's chosen people. Rather, I was commenting on the view that Judeo-Christianity is AE's sine qua non, regardless of whether J-C is objectively true.
I think your conclusion that AE -- which is, approximately, what? -- has nothing to do with eugenics is too facile. If "lots of our ancestors were kicked out on the basis that they were genetically inferior," that is news to me.
What seems irrefutable, though, is that initiative is a quality that is heritable and variable. Further, it begs disbelief to assert that some measure of initiative among those electing to leave their birth countries would be indistinguishable from the remaining population: the "Initiative" mean for emigrant groups would lie to the right of that for the stay behinds. If significant initiative was required to make the move, the difference could easily be one standard deviation. Depending on the distributions' relative sigmas, there might be relatively little overlap between the two populations.
Hence the irony. J-C morality is, rightly, antagonistic towards eugenics. However, self-congratulatory noises obscure the possibly indispensable contribution eugenics played in creating AE.
It isn't as if there isn't precedent for this kind of phenomena. The Middle Passage imposed horrific mortality rates on the transported Africans, largely due to dehydration. Those that survived were more tolerant of dehydration. That's all well and good, but the consequence is much greater susceptibility to hypertension.
African Americans have far higher rates of hyper-tension than other American sub-populations, as well as their source populations. (Source is a Scientifc American article of about 10 years ago).
If hypertension, why not initiative?
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