I know those whom I respect and with whom I can discuss political matters who nonetheless disagree with my Biden Liberal-centrist perspective. It takes a little more to understand or try to discuss matters with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who most of us dismiss as a kook or a laughing stock, what with her Jewish lasers from space attacking California so as to start forest fires and so make available lands for high speed train travel. Let us compare the differences in the kinds of people who are anti-Biden and we will find that even Greene can be placed within an ideology, which can be defined as a highly articulated set of propositions about politics and society, or else placed, like Greene, as just a not very articulate view even if some intellectuals can fashion thoughts and feelings into an ideology or turn an ideology into sentiments that do not have much thought about them, Biden as well as anyone else subject to the back and forth of feelings and ideas. None of us can escape some broad view of what constitutes the political and social landscape. Even my uneducated father believed that the gentiles were, in general, out to get the Jews, but that the United States was pretty safe for the Jews, and my students, who thought themselves too uninformed to go out and vote, had a sense, living in the Northeast, that there should be racial justice and protections for gays and lesbians as just a matter of common decency.
I knew an American Stalinist who joined the Party after the Twentieth Party Congress, the one that denounced Stalin, and yet he had supported the repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the event that was often the cause of the final break with the Soviet Union. I had a long argument during which he insisted that the Communist Party was the vanguard of progress. When I suggested what were the events it would take for him to break with Communism, he said that he had confidence with the Party itself, that he would lead it wherever it went, whatever local events might require the Party to take to accomplish the eventual good of the Party, which meant, for him, the eventual good of humanity. His view was not a concern with events but having adopted the process that was beyond empirical proof or disproof. That, indeed, was the position of many Communists in the post-Stalin era. Nelson Mandela said, when he was anxious about how he would manage with South Africa now that he was released from prison, said that he could rely on the Party to tell him what the next steps should be. He identified with the collective wisdom rather than his own lights. So too my American acquaintance.
Both Mandela and my acquaintance had been so clearly engaged with their ideology, in this case the Marxist ideas of class exploitation, surplus value and false consciousness, that it was necessary to create a dictatorship that guided the proletariat and the rest of those who would join. They were treating politics as a kind of religion where the party had become holy without wondering whether it or any god deserved that loyalty. Stalinism was a kind of faith in that the theology was subservient to the history of the institution, history revealing in time the true direction of an organization, whether the Catholic Church or a collection of rebbes or imans, rather than because basic principles, once enunciated, would just be tested to facts or otherwise fail. The same thing happened at the time when I had that discussion with my acquaintance when psychoanalysis also was a kind of religion, following one or another school of followers and seeing what would unravel so that one or another school would thrive: the Orthodox Freudians, the ego psychologists, the Jungians, and so on.
Here is a more traditional and currently viable set of ideological factions.There are traditional Conservatives which differ from the current Biden centrist liberals. The Biden people believe in big government, large entitlements, measures to insure minority and women disadvantages, and also believe in climate change. I myself, even staying as a Biden Liberal, am still in disagreement with climate change, and it is questionable as to whether the Biden Liberals do have a wider tent than the psychoanalysts, though the Stalinists had a very narrow tent. These Conservatives have just the opposite views on most all matters and so line up as teams rather than as one or another opposing one or another, which is different from the Stalinists and the psychoanalysis who each party responds only to its own imperatives.. The Conservatives think that the government should do as little as possible because it is inefficient and unproductive and largely corrupt. They should turn entitlements into voluntary contributions to insurance companies or into stocks. They think that current discrimination against minorities is overblown and we have to face up to the shortcomings of black and brown people. They think women complain a lot about the fact that men will inevitably chase women and that both sexes like that arrangement.
Moreover, these particular issues are part of a set of beliefs about the nature of society as compelling as was the case for Marx and Freud. The Conservatives believe that custom and obedience are necessary for the organization of society, as Hobbes and Hume and Durkheim thought, that change in social relations is very slow, and the French Revolution showed, according to Burke, what happens if you try to turn everything on its head very quickly, while Liberals think, to the contrary, that people are driven by reason and the devotion to their liberty, and that what seemed revolutionary is merely the recognition of old ideas that had become antiquated, such as that women and blacks could vote, and that women and blacks could be astronauts, and that women could in a generation overcome the double standard whereby women had to protect their virginity while men did not. Conservatives are skeptical that you cannot overcome human nature while Liberals think human life is much more malleable.
For a long time, the Conservatives and the Liberals had dominated the day. Stalinists and psychoanalysts had fallen to the wayside. Now, I suggest, there is something new, as is well represented by Marjorie Taylor Green. She is not just a kook nor is she a thought out ideologist but she does have a point of view that can be found in a time honored theory. This theory is a compilation of antisemitism with American racism and the conspiracy theorists that, taken together, do add up to an ideological or overall point of view that is supported by a good number of Republicans and the question is whether the Republican Party is at the moment going to remain a Conservative party, which is what was the case until 2016, or will it be a conspiratorial party, as indicated by the number of Republican congresspeople who support the attacks against the Capitol on January 6th, the House Republican leadership having to decide whether to support Liz Chaney, a Conservative, or Marjorie Taylor Green, a Conspiratorialist.
Despicable as it may be to the recent Anglo-American view, anti-Semitism is indeed one of those time honored theories that have explained things for a very long time and it provides vivid and persuasive ways for explanations of how society operates. Anti-Semitism has lasted for two thousand years, as long as Christianity, and far longer than Conservatism and Liberalism, which were the twin fruits of the Seventeenth century, and even that binary longer than the Stalinist and psychoanalytic movements that began in the early Twentieth Century.
There are four standard theories about anti-Semitism that allow appreciating the depths of that belief rather than so as to explain it away. The first is religious anti-Semitism. It is rooted in the rejection of Jesus by the Jews and the theory of history about what to do with Jews that are left over now that the Messiah has come. They are a left over appendage, with no role in history, a religious history that can be satisfactorily refigured as do the American Evangelicals by having Israel as a favored place where the Second Coming will not come before the Jews are restored to Israel in some Final Battle. A second theory is that of cosmopolitanism. It suggests that Jews are not committed to any land or nation and so have allegiances outside their nations, loyal rather to international forces like capitalism or world federation and therefore suspect. A third theory is that Jews are strangers, as Simmel would call them, which means that they find a function for people in a society but are themselves obscure and hidden from natural commerce with people. So the Jews are moneylenders, bartenders, psychiatrists and others who are useful by remaining anonymous and so remain otherwise socially unconnected to the rest of society. A fourth theory is that Jews are notoriously upwardly mobile and so do not have the social polish that goes along with people moving up in society in a more gradual fashion. That, however, is the weakest explanation behind anti-Semitism because it seems to apply largely to just the period of late Nineteenth Century Jewry, when German, British and American people were particularly upset at the Jewish upstarts.
I want to add a fifth explanation, which is that Jews are inherently conspiratorial in that they engage in political and economic subterfuge to undermine the society. That was part of the Nazi view. Germany had only lost the First World War because of the Jewish “stab in the back” of Germany. The Jews were undermining German life rather than confronting Germany because they would not win if the opposition was visible and also because the Jews preferred to act in a devious way. There is even a Biblical precedent. “The Book of Esther'' can be read as a Jewish woman who enveigled himself into being the Queen of Persia and then getting her brother, Mordichai, to be her co conspirator so as to discredit Hamen, a loyal Persian. Bad things happen when the anti-Semites are not alert to what the Jews are up to. It becomes necessary to engage in counter subterfuges to counter these malignant forces. Those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th said that they were forced to do so because the election had been stolen. Any invention will serve as the prior subversive act which justifies current subversive act. I once heard of a tunnel from the Vatican to Jerusalem whereby the two arch enemies collaborated against ordinary people-- which meant the white Protestants. This is Marjorie Taylor Green’s point of view. Any number of subterfuges will show how the bad people, Jews usually among then, are up to no good, whether for school shootings or forest fires.
Now one difference between Marjorie Taylor Green and his co-believers that differ from Liberals and Conservatives as well as from Marxists and Freudians is that those other beliefs can be scrutinized for their intellectual credibility through history and sociologizing. The Greenites and their ilk just get angry and say it is just obvious that everybody knows that Qanon is an accurate portrait of the facts. Tkey show their inarticulate feelings as they did in the Capitol with tee shirts displaying “Camp Auschwitz” and carrying a Confederate flag. What the demonstrators thought was clear even if the organizers of the event (as I think was likely) had given clear instructions not to shoot people so as not to lose sympathy so long as they intimidated the Congress not to continue its procedures. Moreover, Greene now says she does not think that the Parkland and the Newtown shootings were a false flag, whereby liberals killed people or made believe they killed people so as to encourage gun control. As a conspiratorialist, Greene is perfectly free to tell lies about what she once believed, and so there is no way to take purchase on what she says or tie it to evidence or argument. I don’t think there is much to do with her but censure her but the nowadays Republican Party mostly supports Conspiratorialism over Conservatism and so, this afternoon did not do so, Mc Carthy saying only that Greene has to meet higher standards now that she is an elected Congressperson, no elimination of her committee assignments, and Greene has said since then that she has nothing to apologize for. The Republican Party is the conspiratorialist party. What otherwise Republicans will do to reorganize a third party is up to them. As for me, it leaves me to say what a friend said when asked about the tunnel between the Vatican and Jerusalem. He just said that he did not have instructions about whether he could discuss it. He was making a joke that he realized his interlocutor would not get. All he could do was dismiss the conspirator and the conspiratorial mentality. It is up to Mitch McConnell and Kevin Mc Carthy to overcome their shame and fly right.