Alan Dershowitz Takes The Red Pill

I've followed Alan Dershowitz for much of my life, and I would have to say I've frequently agreed with him, even at times where he's been, in his own characterization, a traditional 1960s-style liberal. More recently, I find myself agreeing with him even more. Over the weekend, he published an op-ed in the UK Daily Mail, ALAN DERSHOWITZ says vile Leftist anti-Israeli hate will turn millions of American Jews from Blue to Red - and he's one.

The Democratic Party now faces a choice.

The Hamas atrocities of October 7th have forever fractured any political alliance between centrist and liberal Jews and woke, anti-Israel progressives.

It's either them or us.

The coalition is at civil war.

This is a point similar to the one I've been making, that the highly successful New Deal alliance of the 1930s and 1940s, which included labor; Catholics, Jews, and other ethnics; northern philanthropic wealth; and southern segregationists, contained contradictions that began to manifest themselves once Kennedy and Johnson co-opted Republicans on the civil rights issue, which had been Republican since Reconstruction. Bringing urban African-Americans into the coalition was inevitably going to cause internal stress, since rightly or wrongly, residents of urban ghettos resented Jews and other ethnics who ran the businesses that served them like pawnbrokers, bail bondsmen, convenience stores, and retailers.

Other contradictions included the original Christian evangelizatioon of African slaves, which stressed the parallel between the Africans and the Jews enslaved in Egypt, while the NAACP was founded with early Jewish support from figures like Henry Moskowitz, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsh, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. The Spingarn brothers served as officers, and Jacob Schiff, Julius Rosenwald, and Herbert Lehman contributed funds.

A second set of tensions arose with the inclusion of the New Left in the coalition later in the 1960s. While many New Left figures were Jews, there was a second faction, probably just as large, of trust-fund WASPs with consciences troubled about their family wealth that in many ways had dominated the earlier New Deal northern philanthropic alliance with southern segregationists. Many of these figures, like Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr, came from post-Civil War high society that was never completely comfortable with admittng Jews.

My own view is that Nancy Pelosi's main task as a latter-day Democrat leader was to maintain the traditional New Deal alliance with the civil rights and New Left additions despite those contradictions, but she was able to do this alomost singlehandedly via her personal charisma. Once she retired as speaker, nobody else could take over that role, least of all Joe Biden. I think this is at the root of Dershowitz's disaffection:

Nine hard-Left Democratic members of Congress voted against a House resolution that condemned Hamas and expressed support of Israel. Another six voted 'present' for the bill that passed overwhelmingly.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz suggested these members who couldn't bring themselves to denounce the slaughter of civilians 'don't have a soul.'

Thank you, Congresswoman. But where, I ask, is the presidential address demanding introspection of the 'soul' of the party?

. . . And just last week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pointedly declined to say if the President had any plans to speak to the explosion of antisemitism among university students.

It's correct that the universities have been loci of this anti-Semitic outbreak, but I don't think Prof Dershowitz should be surprised. In his own book Chutzpah, he discusses the post-SAT strategy of the Ivies to maintain de facto Jewish quotas by limiting applicants from Northeastern suburbs and favoring white applicants from the South, Midwest, and intermountain West in the name of "diversity", a principle that was established as early as the 1940s. Ivy anti-Semitism is baked into the system, something Dershowitz has recognized all along -- I sensed it, and I'm sorry to say I was influenced by it myself as an Ivy undergraduate in the 1960s.

But he sums up the dilemma quite well in the piece:

I have supported the Democratic Party since I first voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, for much like my parents and grandparents, and since the days of Frankin Delano Roosevelt, a vast majority of Jewish-American voters could be reliably counted upon to cast their ballots for Democrats and contribute disproportionately to their campaigns.

This is unlikely to continue.

. . . Of course, some Jews will continue to vote blue, but their allegiance will be weakened to the point of disappearing.

. . . The antisemitic and anti-Israeli attitudes uncovered by these game changing events will not be forgotten.

But we should note that this is part of a wider realignment from the New Deal coalition that's been taking place since the 1960s. Trump got the majority of the Catholic vote in 2016; the Southern states went Republican beginning in the 1970s. Prominent Jews formed the neoconservative movement and allied themselves with Reagan in the 1980s. Prof Dershowitz is a smart guy, it's hard to think he's all that surprised now.