Antisemitism, 20% Allies, and Colonel Nicholson
An Open Letter to My Right-of-Center Friends
NOTE: Bastiat’s Window usually focuses on economics, health, science, ethics, and culture. After one or two more posts on the Middle East, we’ll return to those topics. Through January 1, 2024, half of all paid subscription revenue will go to the Magen David Adom (Israel’s Red Cross). Since October 25, subscriptions have raised nearly $3,000.
The previous post in this space (“Antisemitism's Sharp Left Turn: An Open Letter to My Left-of-Center Friends”) argued that in 2023, many on the political left are in denial about an incontrovertible fact: that right-wing antisemitism is mostly the realm of marginal kooks, while left-wing antisemitism has become widespread, virulent, and politically powerful. The essay also implied that those on the political left have a moral obligation to clean up the ethical mess that arises naturally from their increasing obsession with racial taxonomies and hierarchies.
Today’s post argues that some on the right are so invested in political animosity that they reflexively dismiss any efforts by those on the left who are, in fact, seeking to crawl out of said ethical mess. This post is a plea for my right-of-center friends to seek out and work with the sincere efforts of those on the left who are, in fact, awake to what has happened.
80/20 Rule and 20/80 Corollary
Ronald Reagan reportedly told his staff what has become known as his “80/20 Rule:” “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20 percent traitor.” The Reagan Ranch tweeted a variation: “My eighty-percent friend is not my twenty-percent enemy.” Perhaps someone has already made the point, but let me carry Reagan’s advice a step further and offer a 20/80 Corollary: “Whenever possible, treat someone who disagrees with you 80 percent of the time as a 20 percent ally—not as an 80 percent enemy.” Without over-romanticizing America’s past, there were times when our country was better at doing this than we are today. In the 1830s, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at Americans’ capacity for finding unlikely commonality via endlessly overlapping associations.
“Antisemitism’s Sharp Left Turn” gently scolded friends on the left for ignoring warnings that their own political agendas were ginning up a dangerous strain of antisemitism. For a brief recap:
Those on the left have long thought of antisemitism as primarily or exclusively a right-wing phenomenon;
They have resisted any suggestions that the left is at least as culpable as the right, if not more so;
After Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the antisemitism that flowed like raw sewage onto the streets of America has largely come from the left;
Antisemitism is a natural outgrowth of the left’s increasing obsession with race, gender, “equity,” “antiracism,” “anticolonialism,” and oppressor/oppressed hierarchies.
It is the responsibility of sane voices on the left to repair the social fabric their ideology has torn asunder.
“Antisemitism’s Sharp Left Turn” was picked up by a number of other websites, and some comments from the readers on the right illustrate the rejectionism that today’s essay decries. Paraphrasing, some of the recurring messages have been:
Antisemitism is always on the left and never on the right;
Having friends on the left is itself a problem;
Antisemitism never took a left turn;
There are no friends at all to be found on the left, so don’t bother looking; and
Antisemitism on the left is constant and unchanging, with no increase in recent years and no chance for abatement in the future.
By exhibiting absolute contempt for anything and anyone left-of-center, such right-of-center voices make it more difficult to snuff out the flames of antisemitism currently raging. Since October 7, the 20% allies are in plain view—and frightened. Welcome their alliance, however narrow and fleeting.
Who are the 20% allies?
As I noted last week, I describe my own politics as “classical liberal” or, in more florid terms, “libertarian-leaning conservative or conservative-leaning libertarian, with a sprinkling of liberal.” In 2014 or 2015, I spoke to a fellowship of conservative and libertarian grad students and Capitol Hill denizens. I had just been awarded the Bastiat Prize for Journalism by the libertarian Reason Foundation, and one of the attendees asked me to describe “the secret of my writing.” My response was, “Easy. Those of you in this room today—you’re the last people on earth for whom I want to write.”
They were puzzled, so I continued. “You already agree with me on most things. So why do I want to waste my time preaching to the choir? I write for people who are inclined to disagree with me, but who just might have open minds on a narrow range of topics.”
“Who might they be?” one attendee asked. I mentioned a progressive congressman whose views were almost always opposite my own. One day, I was surprised when he wrote me out of the blue to say that he liked something I had written on healthcare policy. He invited me to brief his committee staff members, and I happily went to the Capitol and delivered a lecture to 40 or 50 Democratic staffers. Afterward, as the congressman escorted me to the elevator, he said, “I don’t think my staff members bought a single thing you were saying … but I do, so let’s work on them.”
That Congressman, I told the fellowship attendes, is whom I write for—with the hope that he, in turn, can persuade his staff members to reconsider their views on that narrow sliver of commonality that he and I shared. In a 50/50 left/right country, I can have an impact on public policy if and only if I succeed in persuading some block of people who are not my customary allies.
If I’m writing about antisemitism in 2023, then, who are these leftward-leaning types whom I write for? I can think of five categories:
Those relatively close to the political center—the sort who might favor writings from, say, the Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute, Third Way, or Substack’s The Liberal Patriot;
The isolated progressives like Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) who have heroically challenged and even slammed their usual allies;
Old school leftists (usually age 55 and above) who loved the idealism of Israel’s kibbutzim, who cheered for tiny Israel’s victory over the gigantic Arab armies in 1967 and 1973, who were outraged by the murder (by Palestinians) of Robert F. Kennedy and Israel’s Olympic athletes, who were free speech absolutists, and who revered Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind society;
Left-leaning Jews who are just now opening their eyes to the vile thinking of their erstwhile allies (as British Jews did when Jeremy Corbyn’s Jew-haters captured the Labour Party); and
The Colonel Nicholsons of the left.
Let me explain the last of these categories, as they are an especially important target for the 20/80 Corollary.
The Colonel Nicholson Moment Upon Us
In the months since October 7, I’ve had extensive private correspondence with people on the left—some longtime friends and some strangers who read Bastiat’s Window. These are people who are beginning to understand or already fully understand how antisemitism is a natural by-product of leftist orthodoxies they have supported. Like the morally blinded Colonel Nicholson in David Lean’s epic film, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), their eyes are open, and a horrifying moment has forced them to ask, “What have I done?” Those on the right should nurture their 20% allies’ introspection (whether newfound or longstanding) and welcome their camaraderie.
WARNING: 66-YEAR OLD SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Bridge on the River Kwai, depicts the tense interaction between Japanese military authorities and their Allied prisoners in Burma in 1943. The British commander, Lt. Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness), is a ramrod-straight perfectionist, blinded by his distorted sense of military discipline. Japanese officers order Nicholson’s men to build a railway bridge, over which the Japanese military will transport personnel and materiel to use against Allied forces. The enlisted men assembling the bridge purposefully slow-walk and sabotage the effort. Nicholson, on the other hand, wants to give his men a sense of purpose and to demonstrate the high-quality of his troops. He demands that they build the bridge quickly and efficiently and is ferocious in enforcing this order. A British doctor, Major Clipton, warns Nicholson that his actions could constitute treason, but Nicholson waves off his warnings. Allied commanders outside of Burma learn of this problem and engage a team of saboteurs to demolish the bridge.
Nicholson becomes a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, with the bridge as the monster he loves and protects. His actions cost the lives of the allied saboteurs who are working to dynamite the bridge. As the movie ends, he watches a saboteur who hates him killed by Japanese forces. Suddenly shocked into awareness, Nicholson removes his cap, scratches the back of his head, and asks outloud, “What have I done?” Struck by shrapnel, he stumbles over to the plunger and falls lifeless upon its handle, thereby blowing the bridge apart just as a trainload of Japanese dignitaries is crossing the span. Viewers are left to wonder whether Nicholson’s final action was purposeful or accidental. Major Clipton, looking upon the destruction Nicholson has wrought, says, simply, “Madness!!!”
On October 8, after the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, and before Israel took any action whatsoever, forces on the political left were already demanding a ceasefire and accusing Israelis of “genocide.” A Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll showed nearly half of America’s 18-24-year olds favored Hamas over Israel. Soon, the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania went before a Congressional hearing and demonstrated their tin ears and callous indifference to on-campus antisemitism. While the U. Pennsylvania president promptly resigned, the other two did not. At Harvard, hundreds of faculty members and the school’s alumni association voiced support for the stumbling, clueless, antisemite-enabling president, Claudine Gay.
Perhaps most shockingly, the months since October 7 have featured an appalling parade of “LGBTQ Jews for Hamas”—Hamas being a group whose central focus is the murder of Jews and LGBTQ people. As Major Clipton would say, “Madness!!!” But if the past two months have prompted cries of “Madness!!!”, they have also inspired some left-leaning people to ask themselves, as Colonel Nicholson did, “What have I done?”
“Antisemitism’s Sharp Left Turn” included the following passage:
“The most virulent antisemitism today flows directly from contemporary liberalism’s innocuous-sounding but deeply corrosive pieties: the neo-eugenics of critical race/legal/educational theory, intersectionality, ‘antiracism,’ ‘anticolonialism,’ and oppressor/oppressed dichotomies. These, in turn, have spawned a massive industry of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs; boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) demands; and calls for monetary and nonmonetary reparations—all of which require someone in power to taxonomize and judge people on the basis of immutable characteristics, rather than on their individual actions.”
The essay highlighted prominent voices on the left who are sounding the alarms, with the implicit assumption that raging antisemitism derives from these trendy leftist theories, the institutions constructed to actualize those theories, and the rigid groupthink propagated by universities and other institutions. Journalist Bari Weiss recently wrote “End DEI Now: It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.” In it, she says:
“For Jews there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are two percent of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world. … DEI is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power.”
Those on the right ought not miss the opportunity to make some 20% allies for this particular fight. As Weiss’s essay notes, it is not only important for Israel, but also for the very idea of America, itself. The 20/80 Corollary means cooperating with and praising people one normally dislikes or even despises. It means accepting their alliance gracefully, with a minimum of I-told-you-so triumphalism. It demands that those on the right recall that while the left always had an antisemitic contingent, it also had sincere, knowledgeable, principled pro-Israel philosemites within their ranks. It is also helpful if those on the right acknowledge that over the years, some of their allies, too, have at times descended down the dark road of antisemitism.
My November 11 Bastiat’s Window post, “Profiles in Courage from Left of Center,” praised the “backbone and moral clarity” on Hamas and Israel from Hillary Clinton, John Fetterman, Ritchie Torres, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and 20 other House Democrats. In the comments and in correspondence, some friends on the right channeled Major Clipton and wondered whether I had gone mad. I replied simply that it is valuable to give credit where credit is due. A few suggested that those on the left will never reciprocate, and I responded that at times, unilateral disarmament is a powerful weapon. Recalling another Reagan aphorism that I quoted recently, “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.”
Hamas’s brutality, university administrators’ fecklessness, and protestors’ avarice has handed opponents of antisemitism a great gift. My right-of-center friends would be utter fools to waste this opportunity in the interests of stoking the polarization that characterizes our era. “Owning the libs” must take a back seat to combating antisemitism.
LAGNIAPPE
In the Course of Time …
Switching cinematic references, this scene from Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) parallels the thesis of the above essay. In this fictionalized scene, Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) meets with the abrasive abolitionist Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones). A wide gulf separates the two men on a host of issues, and in this scene, Stevens breaks into a peroration on the radical policies he intends to impose on the postwar South. Lincoln grits his teeth, controls his anger, and calmly but firmly reminds him that, “[W]e shall oppose one another in the course of time. Now we're working together.” Historically, that’s precisely what happened, as the two adversaries forged a temporary alliance that enabled Congress to pass the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
Fondly do I hope—fervently do I pray—that my left-of-center and right-of-center friends might seize upon 2023’s rare opportunity to combat antisemitism together.
Best thinking on the subject and best writing on the subject by far.
I’d like this twice if I could.