RUTHFULLY YOURS

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“Those who would give up essential liberty, to obtain a little safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

“There is nothing which I dread so much as the division of the Republic into two great parties,each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This,in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” John Adams (1735-1826)

If one were to draw a spectrum of our politics, it would have, on the far right, Libertarians who believe in minimal government and, on the far left, a Social Welfare State comprised of those who believe that government’s primary responsibility is to care for all the needs of all its people. Most of us reside somewhere between those two poles. If we go beyond both extremes, the spectrum becomes circular, as both end in autocracies.

The natural tendency for any organism is to grow, which it does until it stops and dies. That is true for elephants, sparrows, snails, man and Maple trees. It is also true for businesses, non-profits, partnerships and, unfortunately, governments. Growth in government should be tethered to increases in population and reasonable services, without letting it expand to the point it destroys the society it was created to serve. For a government bureaucrat running a department, aspiration is natural. They request new funds, find new things to do and hire new people. They are not held to the profit and loss demands of for-profit businesses. Compounding the problem has been the expansion of the “deep state,” which is defined as networks of power within the bureaucracies and agencies of government, people not accountable to voters. There are an estimated three million federal non-elected, non-military, civil service workers in the U.S. It is not in the career interests of department managers to eliminate or even reduce their number of employees. And government salaries are among the nation’s strongest, so that the three richest counties in the U.S. – Loudon (VA), Howard (MD) and Fairfax (VA) – are Washington suburbs. The trick is how do we get government to reduce costs and slow its growth, while keeping alive its promise of liberty and prosperity?  

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/is

Like most places, America has always had potent strains of anti-Semitism — crude and polished, K.K.K. and country club. But unlike many places, we have always had important strains of philo-Semitism as well; there is a long American tradition, with both Protestant and Enlightenment roots, of really liking Judaism and the Jews.

And so the story of the Jews in post-World War II America is the story, not just of anti-Semitism’s marginalization, but of philo-Semitism’s triumph. Jewish Americans weren’t just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn’t just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case. The outsize success of Jewish intellectuals and scientists and artists and businessmen and activists was an especially good thing, a unique proof of American exceptionalism — because ours was the one country where a people so long persecuted could not only survive but triumph. And attacks on Jewish success and influence, like attacks on the state of Israel, were treated as particularly dangerous, particularly un-American, because they threatened to undo this great achievement, and return the Jews to their historic state of constant threat and peril.

This history supplies one way to understand the stakes in the controversy over Ilhan Omar, the Muslim congresswoman who keeps using anti-Semitic clichés in her criticisms of the American-Israeli relationship. The part of the American left that’s defending her, or at least mitigating her offense and accusing her conservative critics of bad faith, doesn’t see itself as defending Jew-hatred, and since many of those defenders are Jewish — including the arguable front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders — it’s reasonable to take them at their word.