Ethnic Hegemonies in American History, Part 3

The Rise of Jewish Hegemony

Political and economic power in the Eisenhower years was still tightly held by a Greater New England establishment narrowly located in two places: (1) an axis from Fairfield County, Connecticut to Manhattan and (2) in and around Washington, D.C. But it soon began to be challenged by an increasingly powerful Jewish establishment, which lobbied against programs targeting the long involvement of its kin with communism and other subversive movements.[44]

Jewish influence on American thought had been significant since a virtual Jewish monopoly on motion pictures was established at the start of the twentieth century,[45] but it increased dramatically in the 1950s when television entered most homes and sharply reduced community discourse.[46] Jews were also influential in book publishing and dominant in many other areas that shaped culture from art criticism[47] to Broadway[48] and comics.[49] Most significantly, and facilitating the rest, they controlled the New York Times and the Washington Post, the most influential newspapers in America’s two power centers.[50] Media dominance also facilitated successful efforts of well-connected Jews in the scientific community like Franz Boas, Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg), Richard Lewontin, and Stephen J. Gould to suppress research on human biodiversity.[51]

Since Israel’s 1948 founding, its interests have been the number one cause of America’s organized Jewish community. In 1956 the United States opposed and forced the withdrawal of an Israeli invasion into Egypt. In 1967 it fully supported Israel’s similar invasion and subsequent occupation of Egypt’s Sinai region despite a simultaneous Israeli attack on the United States Navy ship Liberty that killed 34 of its crew. Since then, the United States has given undeviating bipartisan support to Israel, despite increasingly outrageous actions that have provoked nearly unanimous condemnation by world opinion. When presidents like Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and George H. W. Bush, a Republican, made just tentative steps toward foreign policy evenhandedness, they suffered firestorms of media abuse and were limited to single terms.[52] More recently, Israel has even used the United States as a surrogate to attack and destroy Iraq, which was hostile to Israel but never a threat to America.[53]

Another measure of hegemony is economic power. By 1979 Jewish per capita income in the United States was 66 percent greater than that of the nation’s founding British-descended ethnic groups, which had even fallen 26 percent behind descendents of Japanese imported as Gilded Age cheap labor.[54] It is a cliché in academia and the media that America is run by “privileged white males,” disparagingly called WASPS (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants), but this doesn’t withstand scrutiny. In Los Angeles, for example, so-called WASPs are 16 percent behind Jews in median household income.[55] Mike Davis describes Los Angeles’s shift from WASP to Jewish hegemony in detail.[56]

The rise of Jewish hegemony is not like previous shifts of ethnic hegemony in America. Unlike past hegemonic groups, Jews are non-British and claim roots outside Europe despite long residence and significant ancestral origins there. They are also a much smaller group. British groups collectively constitute from 25 to 45 percent of America’s population, depending on the method of enumerating a now highly mixed population. Jews, in contrast, are just 2 percent. Jews are also widely dispersed across the country, unlike previous hegemonic ethnic groups, which were the largest population in regions encompassing multiple states. Jews are a majority in only certain neighborhoods of some metro areas, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles.[57]

Jews and the New Left

Much of the Jewish hegemony’s power came from dominating America’s left, but the normal function of the left everywhere else is equalizing incomes and power between social classes, which would have been highly disadvantageous to Jews once they became America’s richest and most powerful ethnic group. The experience of National Socialism in Germany taught Jews to regard white working people not as a natural constituency to be organized, but as another “peasantry” capable of erupting into pogroms. The experience of Stalinism in the USSR showed Jews that orthodox Marxism was a golem that could escape their control. The solution was to create a New Left that would more reliably secure Jewish power and Jewish interests. The consequence is the seeming paradox of an America that has become ever more oligarchic as it moves further to the left.

The beginning of this shift can be traced to 1943, when the American Jewish Committee hired the Frankfurt School, a group of refugee German Jewish Marxists, as consultants on making America safe for Jews. Germany had long been a relatively safe place for its small but highly prosperous, influential, and assimilated Jewish community. But when National Socialism turned Germans violently against Jews, the Frankfurt School concluded that Jews could be safe only if traditional European culture and values were destroyed everywhere, including the United States. The Frankfurt School saw ethnic homogeneity as a danger to Jews, because they are more apparent as outsiders in homogeneous societies. Conversely, they saw ethnic diversity as good for Jews, because they are less conspicuous in such societies.

Unlike traditional Marxism, the Frankfurt School’s constituency was no longer the proletariat, but the “marginalized,” the “outsiders.” Classical Marxism’s images of heroic white proletarians were replaced by the image of Archie Bunker, “America’s favorite bigot,” who every Sunday delivered moronic tirades against the New Left’s constituencies: Jews and their symbolic and political proxies, namely, non-whites, homosexuals, feminists, and the abnormal and subnormal of all descriptions.

Unlike traditional Marxism, the Frankfurt School did not pursue social equality, but social inclusion, access, and upward mobility for Jews and their proxies. The civil rights movement worked to smash white working class communities and public education. Affirmative action effectively excluded numerous whites from the full range of social institutions their ancestors had created. Feminism and gay rights struck at the heart of cultural and biological relations between men and women, devalued children, and promoted narcissistic consumerism that made the rich richer.

Eventually America’s Central Intelligence Agency and Ford Foundation spread Frankfurt School ideology to its many satellite countries so the entire world would become safe for multi-national consumer capitalism.[58] In short, the New Left provided a remarkably functional ideology for entrenching Jews at the pinnacles of wealth and power and crowding out whites resisting Jewish hegemony or deviating from the Jewish agenda.[59]

Perhaps the New Left’s greatest success was its conversion of America’s greatest demographic cohort into its most effective subverters, namely the baby boomers born between 1946 and 1953 who came of age in the 1960s, the decade the Jewish Establishment’s hegemony was established.[60]

The Rising Tide of Color

The Civil Rights Movement opened doors for some African-Americans, especially those with some European ancestry. Ultimately, however, it probably shut far more. Its initial message of equal opportunity quickly shifted to equal results. Consequently affirmative action programs started in Richard Nixon’s administration forced manufacturers to hire thousands of poorly qualified blacks, [61] which quickly made the United States much less competitive just as international economic competition rose sharply. Its factories continued to pay unionized high wages comparable to those of Europe while making African-quality products even Americans wouldn’t buy.

Productivity growth, a respectable 2.7 percent during the 1960–1967 period before affirmative action, fell to –0.1 percent during the 1973–1979 period after it, a level far below that of other industrial nations and a condition from which America has never fully recovered.[62] A result was deindustrialization and mass factory closures that resulted in manufacturing job losses for blacks 112 percent higher than for other ethnic groups.[63] Cities with large black populations like Detroit were hit hardest and turned into urban wastelands aptly named the Rust Belt.[64] Meanwhile Japanese companies, more insightful about human capital, located their new American auto plants in predominantly Scots-Irish rural areas and had few of the quality control problems endemic to Detroit.[65]

Since Mexicans were also favored by affirmative action, America became an enormous magnet for their legal and illegal immigration, which was encouraged by the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration bill.[66] It ended restrictions on immigration enacted by Progressives in the 1920s and opened the United States to massive Third World immigration.[67] Mexicans worked more productively and for lower wages than blacks, consequently driving them out of most non-governmental jobs. Since opportunities for government jobs were limited, independent black economic institutions had withered after desegregation and affirmative action, and other jobs had increasingly dried up, more blacks than ever before were left, in the words of the emblematic Otis Redding song, “sittin’ on the dock of the bay wastin’ time.”[68] In the process, America quickly gained a second non-white population even larger than that of blacks,[69] a change welcomed by the Jewish Establishment, which contributed significantly to passing the Hart-Celler bill and viewed eliminating America’s white majority as a requirement for its survival.[70]

In the same period, blacks were forced into predominantly white public schools in a busing program that sought to help blacks through exposure to white culture.[71] That was the theory, at least. In practice, cultural influence went mostly the other way.[72] Before long, American public schools, once among the best in the world, were among the worst.[73] Destruction of America’s rural landscapes by urban sprawl has many causes, but one of the most significant and least acknowledged is a desperate search for communities and schools distant from urban centers with large black populations.[74]

In the early 1970s the idea of “multiculturalism” was popularized in Canada as a term for equity between Anglophone and Francophone populations, but in American schools by the 1990s it had come to mean establishment of Frankfurt School ideology as a quasi-religion from kindergarten to college.[75] It claims to promote diversity even while idealizing cultural and biological hybridization, which destroy diversity.[76]

American multicultural education is obsessed with obliterating learning gaps between races, which are among the world’s most stable phenomena since they vary little across vastly different physical, cultural, and economic environments.[77] In every racial hierarchy, so-called yellow Northeast Asians are invariably at the top, white Europeans are slightly lower, followed by a variety of brown groups, with black Africans and Australoids at the bottom.[78] These results from standardized achievement tests are reasonably good measures of future economic success, even though they fail to measure such factors as creativity and imagination. A biological cause for any other phenomenon exhibiting such inter-environmental stability would be immediately acknowledged.[79] American multicultural ideology, however, blames it on “privileged racist whites.”[80]

Part 3 of 4

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[44] Stewart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

[45] Neal Gabler, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988).

[46] George Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (New York: Norton, 1993).

[47] Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1997).

[48] Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon, Broadway: The American Musical (New York: Bulfinch, 2004).

[49] Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

[50] Sachar, A History of the Jews in America.

[51] Degler 1991; Carleton Putnam, Race and Reality: A Search for Solutions (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1967); Tucker 1994

[52] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (Norfolk, Va.: Enigma Editions, 2008).

[53] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).

[54] Reynolds Farley, “The Common Destiny of Blacks and Whites: Observations about the Social and Economic Status of the Races,” in Herbert Hill and James Jones, Jr., eds., Race in America: The Struggle for Equality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

[55] James Allen and Eugene Turner, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California (Northridge, Cal.: The Center for Geographical Studies, 1997).

[56] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990).

[57] J. Allen and E. Turner, We the People: An Atlas of America’s Ethnic Diversity (New York: Macmillan, 1988); S. Lieberson and M. Waters, From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988).

[58] Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989); Paul Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (Colombia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

[59] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998).

[60] Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987).

[61] Hugh Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[62] W. Baumol, S. Blackman, and E. Wolff, Productivity and American Leadership: The Long View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989); William Wolman and Anne Colamosca, The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997).

[63] Norman Glickman and Douglas Woodward, The New Competitors: How Foreign Investors are Changing the US Economy (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

[64] Neal Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom, The Book of America: Inside Fifty States Today (New York: Norton, 1983).

[65] David Gelsanliter, Jump Start: Japan Comes to the Heartland (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990).

[66] David Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Sachar, A History of the Jews in America.

[67] Reimers, Still the Golden Door and David Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn against Immigration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

[68] Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass (New York: Morrow, 1993).

[69] Allen and Turner, The Ethnic Quilt; Graham, The Civil Rights Era; Lynn and Vanhannen, IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality; Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers.

[70] Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: Random House, 1995); Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique.

[71] Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education, the Epochal Supreme Court Decision that Outlawed Segregation, and of Black America’s Century Long Struggle for Equality under the Law (New York: Vintage, 1975).

[72] Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Viking, 1998).

[73] Myron Lieberman, Public Education: An Autopsy (Cambridge: Harvard, 1993); Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare; Harold Stevenson and James Stigler, The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education (New York: Touchstone, 1992); Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

[74] Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton, 2005).

[75] James Banks and C. Banks, eds., Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education (New York: Macmillan, 1995); Nathan Glazer, We are all Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique.

[76] Judith Rhymer and Daniel Simberloff, “Extinction by Hybridization and Introgression,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 27 (1996): 83–109.

[77] Lynn and Vanhanen, IQ and Global Inequality; Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior.

[78] Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior; Lynn and Vanhannen, IQ and Global Inequality.

[79] Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

[80] Banks and Banks, Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education; Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: The Free Press, 1996).