Can we coin the term Jewish Fragility?
It sounds like his main complaint is simply that identity politics is inconsistent. And his second complaint is that one of the areas it isinconsistent is regarding Jews, his own personal domain where he’s invested. If it’s going to exist, then, it should at least include Jews, right? Because don’t they deserve victim status too?
That seems to be the core of his complaint. And it’s a problem. I don’t think you can do it without watering down the admission tests so much that you end up letting all kinds of undesirables into the victim class. But if you don’t include Jews, then you have to admit that you’re ignoring some really important stuff that matters and not being inconsistent. So what then?
I suppose you could take this problem he posits in several different directions. Can identity politics be made consistent, and is there any scenario where Jews don’t inevitably get left out on the cold? I would guess that the answer to both of those is no, for very strong reasons. And does identity politics even need to be consistent? It’s about particularity, after all, not universality.
Identity politics isn’t an ideology based on some universalizable ethical system or epistemic process. It doesn’t even believe in those things. It’s a system centered around and aimed at restructuring power dynamics. So, no, I don’t think it needs to be consistent. And for all that Jews can claim victimhood, they’re also one of the primary influences on Western civilization, universally resented for their tenacity and success and ability to thrive across a multitude of situations, often more than the local population. They’re smarter, wealthier, well spoken, witty, orderly, tenacious, and have a deep cultural tradition. And as a result they tend to succeed and earn the ire of those around them. In a sea of foes, somehow they rise. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. That’s a kind of privilege, or it will appear in its result as a kind of privilege, since privilege is mostly judged a posteriori, by the positive results, and prejudice, privilege, theft, and manipulation are inferred backward to the people who accrued those results.
The Jews are unusually successful, therefore they must have stolen that result. Because all cultures and truths are equal, and therefore equivalent, therefore all differences result from manipulations of power and structures of oppression, but Jews consistently have unusually positive results, outperforming other groups, therefore Jews must be consistently cheating and stealing and manipulating their way to those results. Therefore they deserve to have them taken from them (and redistributed). That’s the argument, I think.
There is an entirely different worldview that exists that isn’t centered around identity politics but still includes ideas such a injustice, corruption, unfairness, abuse, dishonesty, and theft. But it doesn’t define the world according to systems of privilege or power structures, nor does it subscribe to the doctrine of cultural equivalence. But that system isn’t under discussion here.
I think this fellow hasn’t quite come to terms yet with the problem inherent in identity politics. He seems to see the inconsistency, and maybe he hopes things can be saved, at least as far as Jews go. He would like Jews to be inside the camp of identity privilege (meaning the camp of being victims and objects of power adjustment in their favor). He makes a good case for Jewish victimhood, without quite realizing that there are just as many reasons to count them among oppressors, and maybe they’ve only been victims because they’ve also been oppressors and this is just their Jewish fragility.
Besides, if we start looking past those privileges and those hallmarks of white supremacy that Jews especially personify, then who else might we be prevailed on to pass over and grant clemency to? Might the whole concept of white privilege collapse into some other system of terms and categories, less useful for identifying the wicked and the virtuous? Might we end up having to view people as individuals rather than as representatives of class identity, class privilege, class guilt, and class value?
No, I don’t think the Jews can be saved without sinking the whole system. Should that make you question the system? I think that’s something Jews are going to have to start thinking about. Because any system based around class or racial guilt and identity is likely to find in the Jews a perennial favorite target.
In reply to a comment.
Yes. And the huge risk with doing it that way is that you might be misidentify competence as priviledge, and worse yet, punish it. And if it is competence, or if even just a decent part of it is, you’ll hurt everyone by discouraging it. And if you try to redistribute it you’ll just get frustrated at why it isn’t working or sustaining itself. Because you can’t actually redistribute a creative process, only its results. And since the limit on life’s conditions is production, not distribution, the attempts to correct the perceived flaws in the system won’t work and will keep producing similar results in the king run, or possibly even worse ones. Which will just make you even more upset and confused and make you decide that the entire system must be broken and based on bias and privilege and needs to be burned down.
Making Nobody Happy 